I hate to say it but NASA did not spend any money on the space pen, both American and Russian space programs used grease pencils until the 'space pen' was produced.
A chap called Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co. invested about 1million USD to develop the ball point with presurised ink at no cost to the USA / NASA.
Approx 400 pens were sold to NASA at 6USD each for the Apollo program, and they were also sold to the Russians fo r the Soyuz program.
Interestingly this was exactly the case in the UK, Coca Cola assisted small shops in the purchasing of drinks fridges and then specified which drinks were to be allowed in the chiller. Oddly enough these turned out to be Coca Cola products Coke, fanta etc.
This was ruled to be monopolistic due to the fact that the retailers were in small premises and therefore would not have the space for more than one chiller unit. Coca Cola had to allow other products in the chillers.
There was a very similar case with Walls ice cream and their freezers (which were supplied / purchase assisted to small shops), this in tern restricted the products which could be kept in the freezer. This was also ruled as monopolistic, now they are not allowed to restrict what products are allowed to be included.
Another case is to do with car dealer fore courts, manufacturer sponsored dealerships were restricted from selling other vehicles, this is now not allowed and if they wish to do so they are free to do so with no penalty.
What I am getting to is that there is a great deal of precedence in this kind of case, it is not necessarily the bundling of MediaPlayer et al, that is the problem it is the restrictions imposed by the OEM agreements whereby PC suppliers get software products cheaply in bulk for supply with new units. If these agreements restrict what the OEM is able to do to the software (e.g. installed media player and put their own favourite one on) then there are monopoly implications.
It is unfortunate that the fines are so small, not so with the EU, but if OEM restrictions are altered then it would be worth it.
They have all their online tax systems running on JBOSS, they are running around 4000 Linux servers.
The savings are the yearly saving which they are making compared to the cost of running the old proprietary systems. These savings are not the savings on licences from MS alone as these applications would not have originally run on MS.
The Desktop roll out for OO is next.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say it but NASA did not spend any money on the space pen, both American and Russian space programs used grease pencils until the 'space pen' was produced.
A chap called Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co. invested about 1million USD to develop the ball point with presurised ink at no cost to the USA / NASA.
Approx 400 pens were sold to NASA at 6USD each for the Apollo program, and they were also sold to the Russians fo r the Soyuz program.
The Fisher Pen Co. still makes and sells them.
Interestingly this was exactly the case in the UK, Coca Cola assisted small shops in the purchasing of drinks fridges and then specified which drinks were to be allowed in the chiller. Oddly enough these turned out to be Coca Cola products Coke, fanta etc.
This was ruled to be monopolistic due to the fact that the retailers were in small premises and therefore would not have the space for more than one chiller unit. Coca Cola had to allow other products in the chillers.
There was a very similar case with Walls ice cream and their freezers (which were supplied / purchase assisted to small shops), this in tern restricted the products which could be kept in the freezer. This was also ruled as monopolistic, now they are not allowed to restrict what products are allowed to be included.
Another case is to do with car dealer fore courts, manufacturer sponsored dealerships were restricted from selling other vehicles, this is now not allowed and if they wish to do so they are free to do so with no penalty.
What I am getting to is that there is a great deal of precedence in this kind of case, it is not necessarily the bundling of MediaPlayer et al, that is the problem it is the restrictions imposed by the OEM agreements whereby PC suppliers get software products cheaply in bulk for supply with new units. If these agreements restrict what the OEM is able to do to the software (e.g. installed media player and put their own favourite one on) then there are monopoly implications.
It is unfortunate that the fines are so small, not so with the EU, but if OEM restrictions are altered then it would be worth it.
They have all their online tax systems running on JBOSS, they are running around 4000 Linux servers. The savings are the yearly saving which they are making compared to the cost of running the old proprietary systems. These savings are not the savings on licences from MS alone as these applications would not have originally run on MS. The Desktop roll out for OO is next.