Don't assume that everyone will be downloading a Corp edition. There are plent of people out there that realize their hardware is sub-par, or that the bugs in Vista 1.0 are too likely, or that the anti-piracy measures are still unknown, or many other reasons.
Certainly there will be those that do get a copy that way, but I think that it is going to be a while before Microsoft can claim that even 10% of their users are using Vista (read second half of '07). Why mess up your computer upgrading to something that could be more problems than solutions.
Then there are those of us that know that it is just wrong to use Microsoft products because it depletes the ozone layer, pollutes the water supply, and is contributing to the Green House Effect, so we will use something else (and there are plenty of good choices).
If they say they will pull out, it is more that they are going to put pressure on the Chinese (and other governments) to crack down on piracy. If the governments think that they will be unable to easily get what they want from Microsoft, maybe they will crack down on the pirates.
Personally I hope it backfires and China ends up with 100,000,000 computers running Linux. I wonder how that would affect the perceived "market share" held by Microsoft. And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux. Sweet!
In many cases you are completely wrong. Market share is the percentage of people using a product. Even if they have no paid for it, the market share of users is extremely valuable. Otherwise Linux would have virtually no market share whatsoever. Nor would any other open source product, which is completely wrong.
And another point, dollars spent is a completely bogus way to look at market share as well. Ferrari and Lambourgini would have much larger market shares if dollars spent affected the market share.
If you want to get really picky here, I would put forth the idea that total time played is an very good indication of the popularity (or market share) of a game. This is not something that a board room group would really care about. But I find it much more interesting than the number of units sold per retail outlet between Nov 1 and Dec 31.
I'd like to also put forth the idea that it would probably be a great idea for a company to give a game away for free (perhaps their own pirated copy even) that was extremely popular to get people to buy their console. Once you get people buying your console, they will likely buy more games. As the original poster claims, get them hooked before you start turning the screws. Of course this would work better for a company like Nintendo that actually makes money on the sale of their console, instead of loosing money on each one, and trying to make up for that loss with game royalties, like Microsoft does.
You're right, you don't know. The two things are not the same.
The software product that is pirated doesn't cost Microsoft anything. A hard good that is shop lifted does cost the store.
It's more like seeing someone dance the polka, and then you dance the polka, too. It didn't cost the originator of the polka anything for you to polka. If most of these people that dance the polka had to pay to polka, they'd probably do a waltz instead. They may look funny, because everyone else is doing the polka, but they would probably do the waltz.
Now if you are talking about the "pirated copies" of Windows that are being "sold" as real, that is a different story. There is obviously someone profiting from that and it isn't MS. You can't get blood from a turnip, but MS thinks that by making these changes they are going to earn more. Not true. The anti-piracy groups claim that there are billions of dollars of lost income because of piracy, but in reality those billions are probably less than 5% of the crap they spout. They just have to justify their existence. Kind of like the movie critic. If they loved every movie, no one would listen to them. If they anti-pirates didn't have tons of rhetoric to throw around, no one would listen to them either.
I think that the solution to the "problem" of piracy is just a corporate executives wet dream. Stopping it will not increase corporate profits by any measurable amount.
What is irritating to consumers is when they are forced to repurchase something just because some ****head corporate monkey says that the company can make more money if they make people buy their product over and over again. "Oh, you purchased our tires, but you can only use them on the car that they were originally installed on. You will have to purchase new tires for your new vehicle, even though your wrecked your last one and this one uses the same tires." This kind of corporate bullying has produced the problem in the first place.
And then there are the large margins on the products. Who isn't mad at the Oil Company's record profits from last summer's $3.00 per gallon prices? Bill Gates isn't the richest man because he is charging a fair price for Windows. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
For the record, I only use Linux and purchased copies of windows (when I have to use windows). I will never buy Vista, unless it comes on a computer that I buy and there is no way to not purchase it without Vista. I will not willingly give Microsoft a dime of my money, but I will give them a piece of my mind.
Application/device integration, installation, selection all make a big difference. The interface level of the system through Gnome or KDE is similar for most distros. But, take it a step further to make the use of the applications easier and you have the winning combination. If you make it so that the average person can set up their system because the device support is really there and works without having to install special drivers, then you make the initial experience better. I recently installed Ubuntu on several systems, some new hardware and some old. It handled (almost) everything in all the boxes. I have loaded the live Knoppix 5 as well as the live Ubuntu 6 on the same hardware. The Ubuntu beat in terms of hardware support, including better SCSI and SATA RAID support. The only thing that I found lacking in the Ubuntu release was the ability to easily write to an NTFS partition from the live CD. Otherwise the everything from the installation to the hardware support to the application support, everything, was better on Ubuntu. My 12 year old daughter loves Ubuntu more then Windows (I gave her the choice, and guess which one she picked?).
I always had issues with the Fedora releases. There was always something that was broken that made me mad. It isn't production quality, it is their "test bed" platform, so things will be broken. I'd rather have Ubuntu that is stable and easy than Fedora that is buggy and has only slightly better application support (read this as "more commercial-type applications," not more applications in general).
I used to use SUSE though version 10, but I had hardware issues. The newer releases may be better, but I am totally satisfied with the hardware support of Ubuntu. I have some obscure "windows" hardware that now even works with Ubuntu Dapper.
At work I have a windows system as my desktop. But, to make me feel more at home I have Ubuntu Dapper running in VMware player. I'd still rather use a Linux distro than windows any day.
Yes, they keep their alliances with DRM, but they are all about DRM. They tie up their software with DRM. I would say that they are not just complying with the partners wishes to keep things tightened with DRM, but I believe they are encouraging their partners to tighten the DRM that they are using.
Why you ask? The more you are used to DRM in all aspects, the less you feel that Microsoft is the big DRM baddie. If everyone is doing it, then Microsoft really isn't so bad after all. I'm sure Apple has the same plans. DRM is bad for everyone.
This is big business having a politician bought and paid for. This is exactly the reason that campaign reform is needed. Business should not be able to contribute to any politician. Our political system is being destroyed by big business. The government is not here for businesses, it is here for the people. You can argue that they can be one in the same, but they aren't. I don't want to live in the United States of Microsoft or the United States of Walmart. But, that is what our government is becoming.
In order to serve you better, updates to your Windows OS require that you have this DRM patch installed on your system. In fact we're going to turn off your system soon if you don't update it with this patch. And if you find a way around this patch, we'll come back and serve you with a law suit, courtesy of the RIAA.
Advertising is the reason that the studios want to have DRM-and-no-commercial-skip viewers for their on-line-available content. I'm not opposed to having the commercials in the downloaded versions. I think that if they were smart, they'd have 5 second commercials (not long enough to skip, but short enough to not be bothersome) or "really good commercials" that people want to watch. It's the obnoxious commercials that we all hate. If there were 24 5-second commercials sprinkled throughout an hour and 2 really great commercials that were worth watching, they could probably sell the time for much more, because people would probably see them, instead of channel surfing for a few minutes, or getting up and going to the frig or potty. Four extra minutes in a 45 minute show would be fine. Everyone would win. The advertisers would have their commercials seen. The studios would get their advertising money. The people would get their programming. If they charged people $1.00 for an early download of the show (before the free version is made available, like two days before - If you just have to see what happens on Lost before the rest of the office), that would supplement things a little more, and people would not have to shell out $3.99 for a show, and they wouldn't have to use a DRMed, crappy, viewer. And they could use Windows, MacOS, Linux, iPod, PSP, whatever...
Can't people use a little common sense to come up with alternatives for the current tv model that isn't working for everyone? Give everyone what they want, but do it so that no one is feeling the pain. Common Sense!!!
Gimp runs on windows, too. If you want to try it there, go ahead. I use Ubuntu, so I think it is a great environment. But, in case you don't like Gimp, just try it where you are now.
They want people to be able to use a product that adds value to their product making it more likely for consumers to buy their product. Once they find products that fit into their product that people find most useful, they add those features into the next update of their product. It's like they get free product research and development. Who's not support that?
MS does not support anything which is truely cross-platform, and has the potential to make them loose a single penny (or user) to another product.
Now show me a single open source thing that MS supports that isn't in this type of model, and I'll capitulate.
Clear back in the 90's I worked for BSDI. We had customers using out BSD/OS with uptimes of more than 3 years. Back then you couldn't get a Windows box to stay up more then 40 days (remember the bug?), but it took MS years to find that problem because no one could keep one of the damn things up for long enough to find out that it would crap out at 40 days.
So back then it was 40 days vs. 1100+ days. MS has come a long way, but I'd still put my money on some of the competition.
I believe that corporations should not have as much power as they do. They influence politicians all the time, but they have absolutely no vote, so why should they have influence. If you don't have a vote, then you should not be able to contribute to a politician. So, since corporations don't have ideas, why should they be able to own patents? (I know... you can't patent ideas, it's the concept, okay?) If the patent is supposed to benefit the inventor, then benefit the inventor, not the corporation.
Elimination of corporate ownership of patents will do the single most important thing for patents, reward those who actually have the ideas. Corporations may license (and even license exclusive rights), but they would not be allowed to own the patents.
I know that people are going to say that the corporations fund the work done to do the invention. Fine, they then pay for their license to the patent through their funding. But they then don't have the power to squash other innovation with stupid litigation.
Of course, the greedy corporations will think of ways to get around everything. If they can't sue because they don't own the patent, then they will just give money to the patent holder to do the suit. Well, there are no perfect solutions to any problem, so what do you do?
informationString = "This code was stolen from SCO, so replace it before it goes to production";
Re:Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
I sent a suggestion to SciFi that they try to provide an alternative to Flash 8 even if they continue to use it on their site. I have not heard from them about it. I suggested a similar thing to Yahoo (their movie previews can be a problem), and they were very interested in asking about the problem, but only gave the company line that they require Windows + whateve-else-is-required. Then they kept asking me to rate their customer support (they sent 6 emails asking me to rate their customer support after I replied with rating their customer support). At least Yahoo responded. SciFi just seemed to ignore me completely. I was very diplomatic and nice, with just a suggestion to provide an alternative to their current method of delivery, so I don't think anyone got offended. They just didn't seem to care.
If both Google and Yahoo did this, there would be massive web development work going on, and there would be a number of advertisers on both sites that would start to pull there advertising dollars away. I think that it would be very good to just mark sites initially and notify all their advertisers that they are "going to start to lower the search position of any non-compliant site as of *some-date-here*". This would strengthen their position to be able to do it, and not piss of their paying customers.
If Hatch is involved in something like this, then I believe he is set to gain something monetarily. I'm from Utah, and I used to vote for him, back when he wasn't a BAD politician (which politicians are bad to begin with, so you can see where he sits in my spectrum). He has sold out to too many corporate causes, so I am now voting for anyone but Hatch. He's been in politics too long.
You cannot be in politics and be completely honest, anyway. By definition, a politician has to lie to someone at sometime in order to get elected. Over time they get so used to lying that they can't tell the difference between a lie and the truth, they only see varying levels of personal benefit.
Microsoft does not innovate in technology. They innovate in the way they take down other companies, in the way they exploit other people's work, and in the way they screw their customers.
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Don't assume that everyone will be downloading a Corp edition. There are plent of people out there that realize their hardware is sub-par, or that the bugs in Vista 1.0 are too likely, or that the anti-piracy measures are still unknown, or many other reasons.
Certainly there will be those that do get a copy that way, but I think that it is going to be a while before Microsoft can claim that even 10% of their users are using Vista (read second half of '07). Why mess up your computer upgrading to something that could be more problems than solutions.
Then there are those of us that know that it is just wrong to use Microsoft products because it depletes the ozone layer, pollutes the water supply, and is contributing to the Green House Effect, so we will use something else (and there are plenty of good choices).
Give a hoot! Don't pollute!
If they say they will pull out, it is more that they are going to put pressure on the Chinese (and other governments) to crack down on piracy. If the governments think that they will be unable to easily get what they want from Microsoft, maybe they will crack down on the pirates.
Personally I hope it backfires and China ends up with 100,000,000 computers running Linux. I wonder how that would affect the perceived "market share" held by Microsoft. And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux. Sweet!
In many cases you are completely wrong. Market share is the percentage of people using a product. Even if they have no paid for it, the market share of users is extremely valuable. Otherwise Linux would have virtually no market share whatsoever. Nor would any other open source product, which is completely wrong.
And another point, dollars spent is a completely bogus way to look at market share as well. Ferrari and Lambourgini would have much larger market shares if dollars spent affected the market share.
If you want to get really picky here, I would put forth the idea that total time played is an very good indication of the popularity (or market share) of a game. This is not something that a board room group would really care about. But I find it much more interesting than the number of units sold per retail outlet between Nov 1 and Dec 31.
I'd like to also put forth the idea that it would probably be a great idea for a company to give a game away for free (perhaps their own pirated copy even) that was extremely popular to get people to buy their console. Once you get people buying your console, they will likely buy more games. As the original poster claims, get them hooked before you start turning the screws. Of course this would work better for a company like Nintendo that actually makes money on the sale of their console, instead of loosing money on each one, and trying to make up for that loss with game royalties, like Microsoft does.
Definitions can be very subjective things.
You're right, you don't know. The two things are not the same.
The software product that is pirated doesn't cost Microsoft anything. A hard good that is shop lifted does cost the store.
It's more like seeing someone dance the polka, and then you dance the polka, too. It didn't cost the originator of the polka anything for you to polka. If most of these people that dance the polka had to pay to polka, they'd probably do a waltz instead. They may look funny, because everyone else is doing the polka, but they would probably do the waltz.
Now if you are talking about the "pirated copies" of Windows that are being "sold" as real, that is a different story. There is obviously someone profiting from that and it isn't MS. You can't get blood from a turnip, but MS thinks that by making these changes they are going to earn more. Not true. The anti-piracy groups claim that there are billions of dollars of lost income because of piracy, but in reality those billions are probably less than 5% of the crap they spout. They just have to justify their existence. Kind of like the movie critic. If they loved every movie, no one would listen to them. If they anti-pirates didn't have tons of rhetoric to throw around, no one would listen to them either.
I think that the solution to the "problem" of piracy is just a corporate executives wet dream. Stopping it will not increase corporate profits by any measurable amount.
What is irritating to consumers is when they are forced to repurchase something just because some ****head corporate monkey says that the company can make more money if they make people buy their product over and over again. "Oh, you purchased our tires, but you can only use them on the car that they were originally installed on. You will have to purchase new tires for your new vehicle, even though your wrecked your last one and this one uses the same tires." This kind of corporate bullying has produced the problem in the first place.
And then there are the large margins on the products. Who isn't mad at the Oil Company's record profits from last summer's $3.00 per gallon prices? Bill Gates isn't the richest man because he is charging a fair price for Windows. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
For the record, I only use Linux and purchased copies of windows (when I have to use windows). I will never buy Vista, unless it comes on a computer that I buy and there is no way to not purchase it without Vista. I will not willingly give Microsoft a dime of my money, but I will give them a piece of my mind.
That would have made my year! I don't know that I would have survived the episode, though.
Marketing slogan: Install Vista today, and tomorrow, and the next day...
I suspect there will be something almost as disastrous for them that will make it into the release. We can only hope....
Solution to the problem:
When all the dust settles, the US can be energy self-sufficient much faster and much less dependent on political ties to OPEC countries.
(Yes, I've simplified things tremendously, but as a simple overview it makes sense.)
Application/device integration, installation, selection all make a big difference. The interface level of the system through Gnome or KDE is similar for most distros. But, take it a step further to make the use of the applications easier and you have the winning combination. If you make it so that the average person can set up their system because the device support is really there and works without having to install special drivers, then you make the initial experience better. I recently installed Ubuntu on several systems, some new hardware and some old. It handled (almost) everything in all the boxes. I have loaded the live Knoppix 5 as well as the live Ubuntu 6 on the same hardware. The Ubuntu beat in terms of hardware support, including better SCSI and SATA RAID support. The only thing that I found lacking in the Ubuntu release was the ability to easily write to an NTFS partition from the live CD. Otherwise the everything from the installation to the hardware support to the application support, everything, was better on Ubuntu. My 12 year old daughter loves Ubuntu more then Windows (I gave her the choice, and guess which one she picked?).
I always had issues with the Fedora releases. There was always something that was broken that made me mad. It isn't production quality, it is their "test bed" platform, so things will be broken. I'd rather have Ubuntu that is stable and easy than Fedora that is buggy and has only slightly better application support (read this as "more commercial-type applications," not more applications in general).
I used to use SUSE though version 10, but I had hardware issues. The newer releases may be better, but I am totally satisfied with the hardware support of Ubuntu. I have some obscure "windows" hardware that now even works with Ubuntu Dapper.
At work I have a windows system as my desktop. But, to make me feel more at home I have Ubuntu Dapper running in VMware player. I'd still rather use a Linux distro than windows any day.
Yes, they keep their alliances with DRM, but they are all about DRM. They tie up their software with DRM. I would say that they are not just complying with the partners wishes to keep things tightened with DRM, but I believe they are encouraging their partners to tighten the DRM that they are using.
Why you ask? The more you are used to DRM in all aspects, the less you feel that Microsoft is the big DRM baddie. If everyone is doing it, then Microsoft really isn't so bad after all. I'm sure Apple has the same plans. DRM is bad for everyone.
Fight DRM!!
This is big business having a politician bought and paid for. This is exactly the reason that campaign reform is needed. Business should not be able to contribute to any politician. Our political system is being destroyed by big business. The government is not here for businesses, it is here for the people. You can argue that they can be one in the same, but they aren't. I don't want to live in the United States of Microsoft or the United States of Walmart. But, that is what our government is becoming.
You can never make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
Some parents should be shot!
I can just see it now -
Advertising is the reason that the studios want to have DRM-and-no-commercial-skip viewers for their on-line-available content. I'm not opposed to having the commercials in the downloaded versions. I think that if they were smart, they'd have 5 second commercials (not long enough to skip, but short enough to not be bothersome) or "really good commercials" that people want to watch. It's the obnoxious commercials that we all hate. If there were 24 5-second commercials sprinkled throughout an hour and 2 really great commercials that were worth watching, they could probably sell the time for much more, because people would probably see them, instead of channel surfing for a few minutes, or getting up and going to the frig or potty. Four extra minutes in a 45 minute show would be fine. Everyone would win. The advertisers would have their commercials seen. The studios would get their advertising money. The people would get their programming. If they charged people $1.00 for an early download of the show (before the free version is made available, like two days before - If you just have to see what happens on Lost before the rest of the office), that would supplement things a little more, and people would not have to shell out $3.99 for a show, and they wouldn't have to use a DRMed, crappy, viewer. And they could use Windows, MacOS, Linux, iPod, PSP, whatever...
Can't people use a little common sense to come up with alternatives for the current tv model that isn't working for everyone? Give everyone what they want, but do it so that no one is feeling the pain. Common Sense!!!
Gimp runs on windows, too. If you want to try it there, go ahead. I use Ubuntu, so I think it is a great environment. But, in case you don't like Gimp, just try it where you are now.
Let's look at why MS would do as you suggest.
They want people to be able to use a product that adds value to their product making it more likely for consumers to buy their product. Once they find products that fit into their product that people find most useful, they add those features into the next update of their product. It's like they get free product research and development. Who's not support that?
MS does not support anything which is truely cross-platform, and has the potential to make them loose a single penny (or user) to another product.
Now show me a single open source thing that MS supports that isn't in this type of model, and I'll capitulate.
Clear back in the 90's I worked for BSDI. We had customers using out BSD/OS with uptimes of more than 3 years. Back then you couldn't get a Windows box to stay up more then 40 days (remember the bug?), but it took MS years to find that problem because no one could keep one of the damn things up for long enough to find out that it would crap out at 40 days.
So back then it was 40 days vs. 1100+ days. MS has come a long way, but I'd still put my money on some of the competition.
I believe that corporations should not have as much power as they do. They influence politicians all the time, but they have absolutely no vote, so why should they have influence. If you don't have a vote, then you should not be able to contribute to a politician. So, since corporations don't have ideas, why should they be able to own patents? (I know... you can't patent ideas, it's the concept, okay?) If the patent is supposed to benefit the inventor, then benefit the inventor, not the corporation.
Elimination of corporate ownership of patents will do the single most important thing for patents, reward those who actually have the ideas. Corporations may license (and even license exclusive rights), but they would not be allowed to own the patents.
I know that people are going to say that the corporations fund the work done to do the invention. Fine, they then pay for their license to the patent through their funding. But they then don't have the power to squash other innovation with stupid litigation.
Of course, the greedy corporations will think of ways to get around everything. If they can't sue because they don't own the patent, then they will just give money to the patent holder to do the suit. Well, there are no perfect solutions to any problem, so what do you do?
To completely misquote a great movie, "The needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many."
Wasn't there some show that did a spoof like that? Took the guy for.....ever to say only a couple of words.
Equipment to gather the energy - $5000 installation + $300/month subscription fee
It depends on the code. For example:
informationString = "This code was stolen from SCO, so replace it before it goes to production";
I sent a suggestion to SciFi that they try to provide an alternative to Flash 8 even if they continue to use it on their site. I have not heard from them about it. I suggested a similar thing to Yahoo (their movie previews can be a problem), and they were very interested in asking about the problem, but only gave the company line that they require Windows + whateve-else-is-required. Then they kept asking me to rate their customer support (they sent 6 emails asking me to rate their customer support after I replied with rating their customer support). At least Yahoo responded. SciFi just seemed to ignore me completely. I was very diplomatic and nice, with just a suggestion to provide an alternative to their current method of delivery, so I don't think anyone got offended. They just didn't seem to care.
If both Google and Yahoo did this, there would be massive web development work going on, and there would be a number of advertisers on both sites that would start to pull there advertising dollars away. I think that it would be very good to just mark sites initially and notify all their advertisers that they are "going to start to lower the search position of any non-compliant site as of *some-date-here*". This would strengthen their position to be able to do it, and not piss of their paying customers.
You cannot be in politics and be completely honest, anyway. By definition, a politician has to lie to someone at sometime in order to get elected. Over time they get so used to lying that they can't tell the difference between a lie and the truth, they only see varying levels of personal benefit.
Microsoft does not innovate in technology. They innovate in the way they take down other companies, in the way they exploit other people's work, and in the way they screw their customers.