when i worked for a certain big corporation that has been empoying heavily in india, china and russia, there was widespread training up of these new employees to do the exact same job in several areas. No one had been made redundant at that time, but the long term play was pretty obvious.
That company recently announced over 5000 job cuts. You can bet they weren't in India, China or Russia.
If you read the license for almost any piece of (commercial) software you will find that the company behind it is not liable for any problems with that software.
You will find that Microsoft only offers bug fixes to maintain general problems in glaring issues with their software. Defects just happen. if they didn't fix them people would get pissed
However you will find that companies will listen to requests for bug fixes if you have a support contract. This indemnification costs the customer money. This is a way software companies make money.
FOSS has equal deniability to commercial software. However you have the option of paying the support contract on the FOSS software to get your issue sorted, or if you so choose, fix it yourself, and the community benefits. Of course you have the option to add features etc. at will.
It's a dumb suggestion because there is already a solution to this problem. And a lot of people make money out of it. Its how a lot of FOSS based companies do their business.
And they still are terrible. Compared to the other similar PCs they use cheap crappy components.
But i recently attacked my 9 year old one with a hammer because i needed the cd drive for another computer.
It's dead now. And whilst it was crap. And whilst it was a rip off. And the warrenty my parents paid for cost more than the computer, it really didn't ever break down.
Centuries of War, millions of deaths; all in the name of freedom, free speech, individual personal freedom and moral right.
Doesn't matter any more. Psychopathic Corporate entities will use the money and power they have attained through the liberalisation and centralisation of national resources to coerce government into becoming a commerce enabling gateway stripping individuals of their apparently inconsequential right to all the above freedoms.
Freedoms are a commercially incompatible route to free choice.
If you ask One Million Customers what they think of DRM, assuming they know the full story, not one will tell you it is a positive or worthwhile or wanted product.
The customer is dead, the commercial human entity has now been born. A machine made to consume. Long live the robots.
It is a hazy issue when the crime commited is somewhat abstract. But this only means that prosecuters can paint any kind of picture they want. Which of course means he is screwed.
However having seen his interview, he didn't talk like he had a clue. especially when descibing his methods; in fact it sounded like he was using VNC or something similar on a dial up connection (and by his own admission in 4bit colour depth). As for the whole alien thing, that sounds like a desperate attempt to publicise his plight outside the IT community to get public sympathy, which is prob a smart move. And if he was smart enough and was on their systems for that number of years, he would undoubtedly have collected and stored documents and images of interest. I'm not so sure he saw anything.
As for the US government, they would have been better saying "we were hacked because of insecurities in a commercial piece of software we were using as an OS. This software is being phased out and replace with a more secure environment. Gary who??"
As I recall there is a very long path before a law becomes a bill. It's a rough ride and poor old bill might get a bit hurt on the way.
Should we all have a whip around, get some cash to lobby/bribe some of the body politic? I mean the free man doesn't really have an input into the political system these, days what with all the major corporations and their politcal representatives.
They should invent something to deal with that. I suggest something to do with "common people" and "rule, strength", leveraging something called voting. Maybe democracy? Worth a shot.
I guess this big loss of revenue is having a major effect on their profits.....
oh wait no, they are making more money year on year. They should have done what software companies did for years about piracy.... pretend it doesn't exist. Going after it this aggressivley is tantamount to publicising the fact that it is possible.
I don't see what's stopping M$ from implementing this apart from the fact that it would be an acknowlegement that there is other software in the marketplace. And to do so would be to admit that their carefully constructed monopoly has a hole. A lot of people [low level users] are of the opinion that outside MS Word there is no other worthwhile piece of software.
The more institutions that move to StarOffice/OOo the better. Microsoft win by contagious monopoly... people come home from work and think the MS Word is all they can use. A knock on effect is that, literally, no one i know who owns MS Office Pro legally aquired it. This is crime by ubiquity, thus making criminals out of millions around the world. I think the seemless compatability between all the products mentioned should be made more of.
Slashdot Mirror
That company recently announced over 5000 job cuts. You can bet they weren't in India, China or Russia.
You will find that Microsoft only offers bug fixes to maintain general problems in glaring issues with their software. Defects just happen. if they didn't fix them people would get pissed
However you will find that companies will listen to requests for bug fixes if you have a support contract. This indemnification costs the customer money. This is a way software companies make money.
FOSS has equal deniability to commercial software. However you have the option of paying the support contract on the FOSS software to get your issue sorted, or if you so choose, fix it yourself, and the community benefits. Of course you have the option to add features etc. at will.
It's a dumb suggestion because there is already a solution to this problem. And a lot of people make money out of it. Its how a lot of FOSS based companies do their business.
But i recently attacked my 9 year old one with a hammer because i needed the cd drive for another computer.
It's dead now. And whilst it was crap. And whilst it was a rip off. And the warrenty my parents paid for cost more than the computer, it really didn't ever break down.
Reliable piece of shit.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=200 3-12-12-020-26-OS-CD-CY-0003/
"If you still insist on flaming me, you should know that I have powerful friends in Washington, Beijing and Moscow."
Said Mr Wallace. Scary! Why would someone who Sues against the GPL be a member of the FSF? What a complete, total, utter MORON!
On another gmane post http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.licenses.open- source.general/2073/match=/ he describes himself:
It would explain a lot of things:Just because it's porn doesn't mean that it aint ideologically correct
In fact the only way that won't happen is if a cold (nuclear threatening) war breaks the flow of current world events.
Nothing like a Cold War to make the poor screwed guy with all the nukes look strong and might once again and to distrac attention from the real facts
...of things to come. This is the Microsoft Windows Vista teaser trailer :p
Doesn't matter any more. Psychopathic Corporate entities will use the money and power they have attained through the liberalisation and centralisation of national resources to coerce government into becoming a commerce enabling gateway stripping individuals of their apparently inconsequential right to all the above freedoms.
Freedoms are a commercially incompatible route to free choice.
If you ask One Million Customers what they think of DRM, assuming they know the full story, not one will tell you it is a positive or worthwhile or wanted product.
The customer is dead, the commercial human entity has now been born. A machine made to consume. Long live the robots.
It is a hazy issue when the crime commited is somewhat abstract. But this only means that prosecuters can paint any kind of picture they want. Which of course means he is screwed. However having seen his interview, he didn't talk like he had a clue. especially when descibing his methods; in fact it sounded like he was using VNC or something similar on a dial up connection (and by his own admission in 4bit colour depth). As for the whole alien thing, that sounds like a desperate attempt to publicise his plight outside the IT community to get public sympathy, which is prob a smart move. And if he was smart enough and was on their systems for that number of years, he would undoubtedly have collected and stored documents and images of interest. I'm not so sure he saw anything. As for the US government, they would have been better saying "we were hacked because of insecurities in a commercial piece of software we were using as an OS. This software is being phased out and replace with a more secure environment. Gary who??"
As I recall there is a very long path before a law becomes a bill. It's a rough ride and poor old bill might get a bit hurt on the way.
Should we all have a whip around, get some cash to lobby/bribe some of the body politic? I mean the free man doesn't really have an input into the political system these, days what with all the major corporations and their politcal representatives.
They should invent something to deal with that. I suggest something to do with "common people" and "rule, strength", leveraging something called voting. Maybe democracy? Worth a shot.
I guess this big loss of revenue is having a major effect on their profits.....
oh wait no, they are making more money year on year. They should have done what software companies did for years about piracy.... pretend it doesn't exist. Going after it this aggressivley is tantamount to publicising the fact that it is possible.
I don't see what's stopping M$ from implementing this apart from the fact that it would be an acknowlegement that there is other software in the marketplace. And to do so would be to admit that their carefully constructed monopoly has a hole. A lot of people [low level users] are of the opinion that outside MS Word there is no other worthwhile piece of software. The more institutions that move to StarOffice/OOo the better. Microsoft win by contagious monopoly... people come home from work and think the MS Word is all they can use. A knock on effect is that, literally, no one i know who owns MS Office Pro legally aquired it. This is crime by ubiquity, thus making criminals out of millions around the world. I think the seemless compatability between all the products mentioned should be made more of.