They will certainly have to adopt the open source business model and make money by selling low margin services without any moat or competitive advantage, instead of selling highly demanded software programs on which they have a monopoly with obscene operatring margins.
If they do it right, one day they will make as much money as Red Hat!
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=RHT&annual
Hey, wait, they ARE making as much money in one day as red hat makes (in a year)!
Actually, the timer function is apparently not working in IE with Vista (which counts as IE over NT). I get the same results if I wait a minute as if I get the answers immediately (which are pretty easy, though just in case I checked my answers were right with reliable sources).
That would explain low Windows NT scores. I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy.
Speaking of patents and IP as good or evil is missing the point. The point in any such policy must be the good of humanity. If we build laws that protect IP but deterr the advancement of science, we fail. And if we don't protect IP in any way and that ends up making research unprofitable, we fail again.
The current system does fail at this, as it grants protection for ideas without necessarily promoting research. The "patents are bad" philosophy is equally destructuve: it is not worth researching anything, and only spontaneous ideas (which are a dime a dozen already) come up. Even if you are a government, it is more efficient not to do research and leave other countries to spend the money for you to reap the benefits.
So we need a system that promotes directed research, and elliminates the protection for stuff that doesn't need such research.
There's an even better alternative to time limits or to the current system: require the intent to productize to be there before filing. Impossible? Not so.
But do ideas, just random ideas, need to be protected? Why does the first person to come up with an idea deserve protection and someone that, without access to the first creation, has the same idea a day later does not? Why on earth would you deserve protection for just having an idea first? Answer: you don't.
What needs to be protected is the result of our physical and intellectual effort, so as to promote spending energy on creating, researching and inventing.
The easiest way to do that is to require filing a patent application for the intention of creating a specific invention. You will get the protection for your research only if after a year of having filed for the intention, you have an invention that passes the traditional criteria, wether you productize it or not.
During that year you get NO protection, even if you had to openly file what you were going to research about. So if you intend to develop ways to cure cancer by using gummy bears, you have to file for that one year in advance. Maybe you have the solution already because of prior research, maybe you have to do lots of research. If the idea is original and required effort to develop, no one should be able to match your idea within the grace period and you get the protection you requested for N years. If your solution to the problem is obvious and does not require directed research, then someone will come up with it and challenge your patent before the period expires.
Such a system would be the best for all: it would promote directed research (and thus creating value for the society) and it would filter out obvious ideas automatically. It would also promote competition in research, as it forces reseacers to make public what areas they are working on, even before solving a problem.
Nope, it doesnt work without a reboot, the comment just means that the machine doesn't need to be disassembled, and that since it is a standardized process, it can be used by the police on site without damaging evidence. The tool is just an easy to use front end for techniques that have been available for decades for Windows and other OSs. it doesn't work for encrypted data, though, so I suspect any serious criminals are safe from the police.
I have a 64MB Dual Pentium 66 (slightly asymmetric, one Pentium P54C and one P54CT or something like that) with a Seagate Barracuda MPRL 2GB disk and a #9 GXE 64 pro video card I built on 1993 (with a Plextor 4Plex CAV CD Rom and some other niceties, though the CD Rom is no longer working) that's still running Windows 2000 (the specs on Windows 2000 seem to require a 133MHz CPU, but that doesn't seem to matter to the installer). It runs just fine, and is pretty useable for Word and Excel. And that's a 15 year old machine using a currently supported "bloated" OS and office suite from Microsoft.
I could still upgrade the memory to 128MB and probably install XP on it (though some trickery might be involved).
Don't ask me how much I paid it though.
> they didn't measure squat, they just did their best.
I don't agree with that, and there's an obvious process that demonstrates my point. Beta.
Microsoft could have released each product a year earlier, or a year later. Do it a year later and you have a more polished product, but users clamoring for an update in the mean time. Do it earlier and you have crap.
At many times Microsoft had product in long betas and people were asking for a release, but Microsoft knew that releasing at that point would damage sales. THe only time they caved in to pressure (Vista) they got a huge headache.
They build extremely complex products and have teams of thousands of developers and testers working in them. Do you think they manage that at random? No, they have quality bars. Do you think they set them arbitrarily? That they say "this product will shine, that other one will suck"? No, they set those quality bars according to their estimates of what the market wants (quality as a tradeoff of when and for how much). Apple has a different strategy: they do not need to attract 100% of the users, with catching 5% they are already growing, so they need to set the bar much higher, and do not care much at wether the majority needs that produc now or in ten years. A small minority will accept the tradeoffs (price, compatibility, flexibility) and that's business sense for them. But they have set quality bar based on a rational process as well. Just that their situation is different, and so is their strategy.
Regarding dropped calls: we do have dropped calls because we have some thing called radio bandwidth, and people moving from one area to another. No matter how much spare room you have, at some point some users will saturate a cell, and some calls will get dropped.
And I don't get 99.999% uptime in my ground line either. It is just a perception since when you pick up the phone and it doesn't work you just assume that it has been working all the time even when you weren't using it. 99.999% uptime would implythat you would have to attempt to make a hundred thousand calls and on one single opportunity find the line dead. And that's not even nearly the case. I would say that out of a thousand calls (that is probably a year of usage) I find the line dead a few times. That means lower than 99.9%.
99.999% is extremly expensive, wether you are talking of phones, Internet, cellular, banking or airplanes. Very, very few businesses offer even four nines to their customers. And telcos, in any of their forms, are not among them.
I'm reading and rereading the article to find where Microsoft told him that the box wouldn't get cleaned, the artwork wouldn't get erased or that "everything would be OK". He called to ask if the box would be replaced or he would get his original box. Microsoft, according to the kid, promised to return the same box. That's it. And they did that.
So where is it that Microsoft lied?
Yes, the dork that cleaned the box with solvents (which is something that's done at the beginning of a repair process on any large repair facility) should have noticed that this was a special case, but after you cleaned a hundred machines one day, when you receive the 101 you just don't stop to read the print, you just apply the solvent soaked cloth to it without even looking.
And this is assuming this is not an automated cleaning process. Microsoft repairs (rough calculation based on the number of units out there) about one XBox every ten seconds. It is even possible there's an "assembly line" like process where the machines are placed on a belt that cleans, opens and maybe runs quick diagnosis on the consoles.
But it is easier to say that the "borg" has enough time and money to look at individual ways to screw customers one at a time.
Whqat a horrible post. It terrifies me that someone thinks that way.
So what you say is that if I'm making "enough" (by your definition) I and suddenly I learn something new that makes me more productive, I should work less?
So what if I like to work a lot? So what if I'm a freaking genius and I can earn in a day what you make in a year? So what if I like expensive art, sophisticated vehicles, traveling, knowing the world... You say it would be BAD if I worked enough to be able to afford that?
Horrible, horrible thinking. It reminds me of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" and of Ayn Rand's world.
And as I live in a country where that's becoming the common thinking (very close to become policy) and I'm seeing the country sink due to that, I know what I'm sayng when I tell you that way of thinking is highly destructuve to society.
You should read Atlas Shrugged.
No. A release candidate is not what you say. Yes, that would be what most people would read out of the name, but that's not how the name is used in the large product releases.
On a single day during product release, in a product like Windows, a few hundred bugs are solved, a few hundred more (hopefully less) are identified.
If you have a product you think might be worth releasing, by the time you made the decision you fixed a few thousand bugs.
So an RC is a product that's feature complete, deployment ready and fully functional, even if it has plenty of bugs. The idea is that it is something testers can use as the real thing without expecting big changes in the functionality. It is used to identify subtler bugs that are not easy to detect in a lab. The difference with a Beta is that a beta might not be feature complete, and changes other than bug fixes are still being done.
So RC1 should be stable enough to be used daily, but it is NOT something that's being evaluated for release as it is. Same thing for RC2.
From RC1 to RTM only two months passed, not one year. And the product RTMd about two weeks after he left.
Based on previosu products, RC1 should have been very close to production ready, relatively stable, useable and fast (it was the case with Windows 2000 and XP, at least). With Vista, RC1 apparently barely compiled. It was completely unuseable. RC2 was much better, but still very difficult to use. RTM was what I would have expected for an RC2.
I think the article is right, BV pushed Vista to a) be free to move earlier and b) not have another delay in his resumee.
Because any business where you rely on selling IP is vulnerable to some company building products identical to yours and giving them away for free. Sun used to do that.
The reason Sun failed is because they didn't have enough resources to build product that were completely competitive, and even if you have a free option, a paid product makes sense if it gives you what you need that the free product does not, or even if it saves you enough time.
But Google in a few years might have enough money to spend a few billion dollars in building a real Word alternative and give it away for free, hurting Microsoft a lot. Of course, MS can do the same on Google's turf as well. But it is enough for one of the companies to show intentions on hurting the other company in its core areas, for the other company being forced to do the same thing. It doesn't have a lot to do with patents.
Can you expand on this? Can you cite an example? I see absolutely no indication of MS attempting to "sell" their customer base in any way, I can think of not a single such deal or operation, and still you claim it as the undeniable truth (and even a universally accepted truth). Can you support this statement in any way?
No, in Server the indexer (and the vast majority of services enabled by default in Vista) are disabled by default.
As to the behavior described in the post it's not in Server. Or in Vista for that matter.
> the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers
But the vast majority of customers are NOT signing the petition.
So you are asking for Microsoft to base a vital business decision based exclusively on a request by.01% of their users?
At the same price, and with the same availability, Vista is outselling XP by a wide margin. So I think they ARE listening to their customers.
Anyway, you probably said the same thing six years ago. At least you are consistent.
Competition. That's the key. But between states.
When a business decides to raise prices unjustifiably, what do you do? You go and buy from someone else.
When a state decides to charge taxes that are above what's reasonable, what do you do? You normally have only one recourse: move your operations to some other state.
If the states complain that companies can move around their operations, it's because it is the loophole in their abusive scheme. It is the only safvety valve in the system and they would like to see it closed.
But as it is it is a valid option. Microsoft is doing what anyone would do when charged too much for something. Don't "buy" there, buy somewhere else.
And before you complain that Microsoft isn't "moving" because it is leaving their employees in WA, those are the employees that develop the products, not the ones that make the deals. Nothing prevents them from splitting both parts of the business. And demanding that they move all their employees in order to find greener pastures is exactly the sort of loophole seal the states would want.
I left last year (thank you Dawkins for giving me the strenght).
I'm happier now, do not live in fear of eternal damnation for thinking "impure" things and have lots of spare time (I used to pray, sometimes for hours a day).
And I feel better about myself. For the first time in my life I feel honest to myself. All that "do not question, do not doubt" stuff might be acceptable at a conscious level, but my subconscious was obviously not that convinced.
This pope is a pussy. Until he reinstates wife beating, Sunday worker stoning and human sacrifices (all of them promoted by the bible), I'm not going back to church. This pope does not respect the Holy Scriptures. At least they are reinstating pedophilia.
If it weren't for this "method" the boy wouldn't exist. Are you going to tell my nephew that the catholic church would rather see him not existing? I'm glad my brother is not raising him as catholic (despite his mother being a practicing catholic, the fact that the church officially considers her son undesirable is a very good argument for the father).
I've seen plenty of such BSA actions around businesses I work with. In most cases where steep fines were applied the companies were basically above 90% pirate. It's not about lack of dedication to counting licenses, but about either complete disregard for IP and law, or absolute carelesness.
In the cases where there was a low percentage of piracy, either no fines were applied (strong notes and recommendations to legalize were received though) or small fines ammounting to somewhat more than the missed licenses were received.
I see no parallel with RIAA actions. RIAA has not only been way more abusive and disproportionate in the legal actions, but also having not offered a legal alternative to illegal music downloads for almost a decade, lost the moral ground to such actions.
Absolutely right. And what's more, if your protection against malware is shutting down computers at night you have a very big problem already.
Security must be managed by rigurous analysis, not by impulses. Shutting down computers at night, even if feasible, will not change the propagation of viruses (since those propagate very quickly once initiated, and are normally initiated by some users avtivity during the day) and if a machne is already infected then your protection is to clean or reinstall that machine, not to shut down the machine for a few hours.
Shutting down computers at night will also reduce lifetime of many computer components (such as the power supplies) since the thermal expansion and contraction of some parts caused by switching between on state and off state often causes much more damage than continuous usage.
OK, so what's wrong with Hybernation? It takes about 5 seconds to recover (after POST) on a desktop, about 15 on a laptop (with 2 gigs of RAM). It uses zero energy in wait state. And you get to be exactly where you were before going to hybernate (which you can even automate to happen automatically after a few minutes).
There's ZERO need for this product. But of course, when it fails, people will blame Microsoft. Which, come to think of it, would be fair, as it was Microsoft that made it unnecessary.
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They will certainly have to adopt the open source business model and make money by selling low margin services without any moat or competitive advantage, instead of selling highly demanded software programs on which they have a monopoly with obscene operatring margins. If they do it right, one day they will make as much money as Red Hat! http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=RHT&annual Hey, wait, they ARE making as much money in one day as red hat makes (in a year)!
Actually, the timer function is apparently not working in IE with Vista (which counts as IE over NT). I get the same results if I wait a minute as if I get the answers immediately (which are pretty easy, though just in case I checked my answers were right with reliable sources). That would explain low Windows NT scores. I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy.
Speaking of patents and IP as good or evil is missing the point. The point in any such policy must be the good of humanity. If we build laws that protect IP but deterr the advancement of science, we fail. And if we don't protect IP in any way and that ends up making research unprofitable, we fail again. The current system does fail at this, as it grants protection for ideas without necessarily promoting research. The "patents are bad" philosophy is equally destructuve: it is not worth researching anything, and only spontaneous ideas (which are a dime a dozen already) come up. Even if you are a government, it is more efficient not to do research and leave other countries to spend the money for you to reap the benefits. So we need a system that promotes directed research, and elliminates the protection for stuff that doesn't need such research. There's an even better alternative to time limits or to the current system: require the intent to productize to be there before filing. Impossible? Not so. But do ideas, just random ideas, need to be protected? Why does the first person to come up with an idea deserve protection and someone that, without access to the first creation, has the same idea a day later does not? Why on earth would you deserve protection for just having an idea first? Answer: you don't. What needs to be protected is the result of our physical and intellectual effort, so as to promote spending energy on creating, researching and inventing. The easiest way to do that is to require filing a patent application for the intention of creating a specific invention. You will get the protection for your research only if after a year of having filed for the intention, you have an invention that passes the traditional criteria, wether you productize it or not. During that year you get NO protection, even if you had to openly file what you were going to research about. So if you intend to develop ways to cure cancer by using gummy bears, you have to file for that one year in advance. Maybe you have the solution already because of prior research, maybe you have to do lots of research. If the idea is original and required effort to develop, no one should be able to match your idea within the grace period and you get the protection you requested for N years. If your solution to the problem is obvious and does not require directed research, then someone will come up with it and challenge your patent before the period expires. Such a system would be the best for all: it would promote directed research (and thus creating value for the society) and it would filter out obvious ideas automatically. It would also promote competition in research, as it forces reseacers to make public what areas they are working on, even before solving a problem.
Indeed. Also, do you know anyone that bought XP that was not bundled with a PC? It's exactly the same situation as five years ago.
Nope, it doesnt work without a reboot, the comment just means that the machine doesn't need to be disassembled, and that since it is a standardized process, it can be used by the police on site without damaging evidence. The tool is just an easy to use front end for techniques that have been available for decades for Windows and other OSs. it doesn't work for encrypted data, though, so I suspect any serious criminals are safe from the police.
And all those sites (well, 95% anyway) are financed by Google, another monopoly.
I have a 64MB Dual Pentium 66 (slightly asymmetric, one Pentium P54C and one P54CT or something like that) with a Seagate Barracuda MPRL 2GB disk and a #9 GXE 64 pro video card I built on 1993 (with a Plextor 4Plex CAV CD Rom and some other niceties, though the CD Rom is no longer working) that's still running Windows 2000 (the specs on Windows 2000 seem to require a 133MHz CPU, but that doesn't seem to matter to the installer). It runs just fine, and is pretty useable for Word and Excel. And that's a 15 year old machine using a currently supported "bloated" OS and office suite from Microsoft. I could still upgrade the memory to 128MB and probably install XP on it (though some trickery might be involved). Don't ask me how much I paid it though.
> they didn't measure squat, they just did their best. I don't agree with that, and there's an obvious process that demonstrates my point. Beta. Microsoft could have released each product a year earlier, or a year later. Do it a year later and you have a more polished product, but users clamoring for an update in the mean time. Do it earlier and you have crap. At many times Microsoft had product in long betas and people were asking for a release, but Microsoft knew that releasing at that point would damage sales. THe only time they caved in to pressure (Vista) they got a huge headache. They build extremely complex products and have teams of thousands of developers and testers working in them. Do you think they manage that at random? No, they have quality bars. Do you think they set them arbitrarily? That they say "this product will shine, that other one will suck"? No, they set those quality bars according to their estimates of what the market wants (quality as a tradeoff of when and for how much). Apple has a different strategy: they do not need to attract 100% of the users, with catching 5% they are already growing, so they need to set the bar much higher, and do not care much at wether the majority needs that produc now or in ten years. A small minority will accept the tradeoffs (price, compatibility, flexibility) and that's business sense for them. But they have set quality bar based on a rational process as well. Just that their situation is different, and so is their strategy. Regarding dropped calls: we do have dropped calls because we have some thing called radio bandwidth, and people moving from one area to another. No matter how much spare room you have, at some point some users will saturate a cell, and some calls will get dropped. And I don't get 99.999% uptime in my ground line either. It is just a perception since when you pick up the phone and it doesn't work you just assume that it has been working all the time even when you weren't using it. 99.999% uptime would implythat you would have to attempt to make a hundred thousand calls and on one single opportunity find the line dead. And that's not even nearly the case. I would say that out of a thousand calls (that is probably a year of usage) I find the line dead a few times. That means lower than 99.9%. 99.999% is extremly expensive, wether you are talking of phones, Internet, cellular, banking or airplanes. Very, very few businesses offer even four nines to their customers. And telcos, in any of their forms, are not among them.
I'm reading and rereading the article to find where Microsoft told him that the box wouldn't get cleaned, the artwork wouldn't get erased or that "everything would be OK". He called to ask if the box would be replaced or he would get his original box. Microsoft, according to the kid, promised to return the same box. That's it. And they did that. So where is it that Microsoft lied? Yes, the dork that cleaned the box with solvents (which is something that's done at the beginning of a repair process on any large repair facility) should have noticed that this was a special case, but after you cleaned a hundred machines one day, when you receive the 101 you just don't stop to read the print, you just apply the solvent soaked cloth to it without even looking. And this is assuming this is not an automated cleaning process. Microsoft repairs (rough calculation based on the number of units out there) about one XBox every ten seconds. It is even possible there's an "assembly line" like process where the machines are placed on a belt that cleans, opens and maybe runs quick diagnosis on the consoles. But it is easier to say that the "borg" has enough time and money to look at individual ways to screw customers one at a time.
That was a good one!
Whqat a horrible post. It terrifies me that someone thinks that way. So what you say is that if I'm making "enough" (by your definition) I and suddenly I learn something new that makes me more productive, I should work less? So what if I like to work a lot? So what if I'm a freaking genius and I can earn in a day what you make in a year? So what if I like expensive art, sophisticated vehicles, traveling, knowing the world... You say it would be BAD if I worked enough to be able to afford that? Horrible, horrible thinking. It reminds me of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" and of Ayn Rand's world. And as I live in a country where that's becoming the common thinking (very close to become policy) and I'm seeing the country sink due to that, I know what I'm sayng when I tell you that way of thinking is highly destructuve to society. You should read Atlas Shrugged.
No. A release candidate is not what you say. Yes, that would be what most people would read out of the name, but that's not how the name is used in the large product releases. On a single day during product release, in a product like Windows, a few hundred bugs are solved, a few hundred more (hopefully less) are identified. If you have a product you think might be worth releasing, by the time you made the decision you fixed a few thousand bugs. So an RC is a product that's feature complete, deployment ready and fully functional, even if it has plenty of bugs. The idea is that it is something testers can use as the real thing without expecting big changes in the functionality. It is used to identify subtler bugs that are not easy to detect in a lab. The difference with a Beta is that a beta might not be feature complete, and changes other than bug fixes are still being done. So RC1 should be stable enough to be used daily, but it is NOT something that's being evaluated for release as it is. Same thing for RC2.
From RC1 to RTM only two months passed, not one year. And the product RTMd about two weeks after he left. Based on previosu products, RC1 should have been very close to production ready, relatively stable, useable and fast (it was the case with Windows 2000 and XP, at least). With Vista, RC1 apparently barely compiled. It was completely unuseable. RC2 was much better, but still very difficult to use. RTM was what I would have expected for an RC2. I think the article is right, BV pushed Vista to a) be free to move earlier and b) not have another delay in his resumee.
Because any business where you rely on selling IP is vulnerable to some company building products identical to yours and giving them away for free. Sun used to do that. The reason Sun failed is because they didn't have enough resources to build product that were completely competitive, and even if you have a free option, a paid product makes sense if it gives you what you need that the free product does not, or even if it saves you enough time. But Google in a few years might have enough money to spend a few billion dollars in building a real Word alternative and give it away for free, hurting Microsoft a lot. Of course, MS can do the same on Google's turf as well. But it is enough for one of the companies to show intentions on hurting the other company in its core areas, for the other company being forced to do the same thing. It doesn't have a lot to do with patents.
Can you expand on this? Can you cite an example? I see absolutely no indication of MS attempting to "sell" their customer base in any way, I can think of not a single such deal or operation, and still you claim it as the undeniable truth (and even a universally accepted truth). Can you support this statement in any way?
No, in Server the indexer (and the vast majority of services enabled by default in Vista) are disabled by default. As to the behavior described in the post it's not in Server. Or in Vista for that matter.
> the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers But the vast majority of customers are NOT signing the petition. So you are asking for Microsoft to base a vital business decision based exclusively on a request by .01% of their users?
At the same price, and with the same availability, Vista is outselling XP by a wide margin. So I think they ARE listening to their customers.
Anyway, you probably said the same thing six years ago. At least you are consistent.
Competition. That's the key. But between states. When a business decides to raise prices unjustifiably, what do you do? You go and buy from someone else. When a state decides to charge taxes that are above what's reasonable, what do you do? You normally have only one recourse: move your operations to some other state. If the states complain that companies can move around their operations, it's because it is the loophole in their abusive scheme. It is the only safvety valve in the system and they would like to see it closed. But as it is it is a valid option. Microsoft is doing what anyone would do when charged too much for something. Don't "buy" there, buy somewhere else. And before you complain that Microsoft isn't "moving" because it is leaving their employees in WA, those are the employees that develop the products, not the ones that make the deals. Nothing prevents them from splitting both parts of the business. And demanding that they move all their employees in order to find greener pastures is exactly the sort of loophole seal the states would want.
Exactly. And that's why we do not consider science to be our moral guide. Science is just a wonderful tool. So is religion (but for other uses).
I left last year (thank you Dawkins for giving me the strenght). I'm happier now, do not live in fear of eternal damnation for thinking "impure" things and have lots of spare time (I used to pray, sometimes for hours a day). And I feel better about myself. For the first time in my life I feel honest to myself. All that "do not question, do not doubt" stuff might be acceptable at a conscious level, but my subconscious was obviously not that convinced.
This pope is a pussy. Until he reinstates wife beating, Sunday worker stoning and human sacrifices (all of them promoted by the bible), I'm not going back to church. This pope does not respect the Holy Scriptures. At least they are reinstating pedophilia.
If it weren't for this "method" the boy wouldn't exist. Are you going to tell my nephew that the catholic church would rather see him not existing? I'm glad my brother is not raising him as catholic (despite his mother being a practicing catholic, the fact that the church officially considers her son undesirable is a very good argument for the father).
I've seen plenty of such BSA actions around businesses I work with. In most cases where steep fines were applied the companies were basically above 90% pirate. It's not about lack of dedication to counting licenses, but about either complete disregard for IP and law, or absolute carelesness. In the cases where there was a low percentage of piracy, either no fines were applied (strong notes and recommendations to legalize were received though) or small fines ammounting to somewhat more than the missed licenses were received. I see no parallel with RIAA actions. RIAA has not only been way more abusive and disproportionate in the legal actions, but also having not offered a legal alternative to illegal music downloads for almost a decade, lost the moral ground to such actions.
Absolutely right. And what's more, if your protection against malware is shutting down computers at night you have a very big problem already. Security must be managed by rigurous analysis, not by impulses. Shutting down computers at night, even if feasible, will not change the propagation of viruses (since those propagate very quickly once initiated, and are normally initiated by some users avtivity during the day) and if a machne is already infected then your protection is to clean or reinstall that machine, not to shut down the machine for a few hours. Shutting down computers at night will also reduce lifetime of many computer components (such as the power supplies) since the thermal expansion and contraction of some parts caused by switching between on state and off state often causes much more damage than continuous usage.
OK, so what's wrong with Hybernation? It takes about 5 seconds to recover (after POST) on a desktop, about 15 on a laptop (with 2 gigs of RAM). It uses zero energy in wait state. And you get to be exactly where you were before going to hybernate (which you can even automate to happen automatically after a few minutes). There's ZERO need for this product. But of course, when it fails, people will blame Microsoft. Which, come to think of it, would be fair, as it was Microsoft that made it unnecessary.