the Conservative Party can be seen as conservative Democrat
Not even close. Despite the fear mongering about the Conservative party of Canada (oh noes! Hidden agenda!), in actual practice, which is all that matters, the party is far left of even the Democratic party of the US.
Separate spin and talk from reality. Newspapers like the Toronto Star, so smitten with the Liberal party and desperate to return (and keep) them in power, will cast every angry rant of a fringe Conservative member as official party policy, while casually ignoring or declaring as an exception the same of Liberal members. The same-sex marriage thing, for instance, has been mentioned regarding the Conservatives several dozen times in this discussion, yet in actuality all the party wanted was a frank, open discussion and free vote on the subject (which they knew would lead to same-sex marriage being allowed). So in return they're cast as controlling people's genitals...yet there are many Liberal members who are very strongly against same sex marriage.
Politics in Canada, like so many countries, is just so broken. So many voters are so grossly ignorant on the issues, which is how the Liberal party squeaked by for so long amidst a platform of corruption and do-nothingness (only losing the last election because of vote-splitting by the NDP, and a migration away from the BQ in Quebec, coupled with a distaste for the Liberals there over the sponsorship scandal). Soon enough we'll be back to a Liberal government, and everyone can cheer the drug liberalization (that will never happen), universal daycare (that will never happen), shortened wait times (that will never happen), and so on. The Liberals know that talk is all that matters to the Canadian voting public.
Nope, "people go to Google to search for stuff like" "shows". For Viacom's shows, Google is one way, the easy way, to find them. Without Google there would still be a way, the good old harder way, to find them.
You mean using one of the countless other search engines?
Google's biggest asset is the quality of their search. If Google compromised that (e.g. paid placements in results, or removing a set of results just to penalize someone), people would stop using Google, and would instead use one of the many other search engines (many of which are neck and neck with Google results wise).
Google has next to no search-engine-ranking muscle to flex. Given that most are fervently against paid search placement, it's astounding that so many are so quick to support what is in essence "conform-for-placement" just because it serves their agenda.
Google, please drop all Viacom sites from google.com. After all, they hate all the free publicity and promotion you give them.
"Free" publicity?
More accurately, people go to Google to search for stuff like Viacom shows. If Google were ever dumb enough (they aren't) to start self-censoring to penalize foes in other areas of their business, people wouldn't use Google. Google would be shooting themselves in the face to spite a pimple.
And it isn't like this is unexpected. When YouTube was being woo'd, Mark Cuban was widely quoted for saying "Only a moron would buy YouTube" (because of the huge potential lawsuit liability). Maybe a better statement would be "only a non-moron that has the cash to pay off the inevitable lawsuits", of which there are only a few companies, Google being one of them.
1536 Kbps.. isn't that 1.5 MB a second? Times 60, that's 90 MB a minute, not 10.986 GB.. I think he must have used new math or something. It's even worse -- A T1 is 1.544megabits per second, or 193 kilobytes per second (ignoring overhead).
So it's actually only 11.6MB / second.
I'm a little scared for Slashdot that it got moderated up so highly.
Apart from the fact that a T1 is 1.544Mb(it) per second, everything else in the above post is grossly incorrect, to orders of magnitudes.
Even a T3 (30x faster than a T1) couldn't push through 1/30th of the numbers linked above. And that's assuming in this bizarro world that you don't have to share bandwidth (which all technologies do), and don't have to accommodate spiking when everyone goes online at common times.
The reason is simple - they've upgraded their network with a lot of fiber so that they can stream hi-def tv to the home.
The cost is seldom for the last mile network -- instead it's for the cost from them to their peers. Peerage is not free, and imagine the sort of pipes a cable provider has to pay for.
In Canada, Bell's High Speed DSL has unlimited bandwidth.
In December 2006, Bell introduced 30GB/45GB limits (feel free to search -- there's lots of resources) on their normal/ultra DSL packages.
Limits are simply a given, and any company that hasn't created them has either been lucky that the "UNLIMIT3D!!!!" abusers haven't used their service too much, or they have other ways of limiting your bandwidth, such as throttling your speed down as your bandwidth grows -- people want a high speed for occasional usage, but it isn't tenable that a 600KB/second (that's my speed) cable user can use that for 24 hours a day.
Shaw employee i'd guess? Because if you've used both, you'd realize who has the higher enforced limit
He's a Shaw employee because he posted the publicly available bandwidth numbers for both companies to demonstrate that they are honest about their packages?
Give me a break.
Whatever your perverse need to fly into a flurry of defense for Telus, they are the numbers they post, so they have the right to enforce them at their discretion, so it'd be pretty naive to just say "they don't enforce them". If they didn't care, they wouldn't post them, would they?
I know I'm not the only one as I have seen this advice from a number of top professionals that I know and respect.
Indeed, it has become a bit of a unqualified, blanket meme: "Don't put database servers on virtual machines!" we hear. I heard it just yesterday from an outsourced hardware rep for crying out loud (they were trying to display that they "get" virtualization).
Ultimately, however, it's one of those easy bits of "wisdom" that people parrot because it's cheap advice, and it buys some easy credibility.
Unqualified, however, the statement is complete and utter nonsense. It is absolutely meaningless (just because something can superficially get called a "database" says absolutely nothing about what usage it sees, its disk access patterns, CPU and network needs, what it is bound by, etc).
An accurate rule would be "a machine that saturates one of the resources of a given piece of hardware is not a good candidate to be virtualized on that same piece of hardware" (e.g. your aforementioned database server). That really isn't rocket science, and I think it's obvious to everyone. It also doesn't rely upon some meaningless simplification of application roles.
Note that all of the above is speaking more towards the industry generalization, and not towards you. Indeed, you clarified it more specifically later on.
Exchange, Database, and busy AD controllers (all forms of database) are the worst candidates for current VM solutions due to the heavy I/O penalty.
The I/O penalty isn't necessarily "heavy", and sometimes could best be called marginal. Furthermore, when you aggregate servers, people often find that their budget supports buying more beefy back-end hardware, perhaps getting a much more performant SAN -- itself a virtualization layer in the storage subsystem -- rather than a marginal disk array for each machine.
This is ignoring that the overwhelming majority of machines in small, medium, and large shops across the land sit at close to 0% 24 hours a day.
Spikes happen, but if my VM database server spikes on the 4-way dual-core machine backed by an extreme performance SAN that it sits on -- usually only during batch processing at night when the other user-facing virtual servers are doing nothing -- it has far more resources to draw from than if I had partitioned each box out into its own little physical island.
Sounds like a serious upfront data validation issue.
However, those two fields should be of a different types and the insert should fail.
We have no idea where in the process this field-swap observation was made. It could very well have been in a middleware service, perhaps doing some transformations on some XML, and might have been discovered because the validation was failing.
Some shit when awry with a giant system, and some spokesperson gave some general answer that's probably percolated up, in a completely changed form, sourced from some developer desperately trying to cover his error.
It's hardly the first time this has happened, and I doubt it'll be the last.
Yes, because you are parroting a canard carefully concocted by an anti-Gore attack group without bothering to check the facts
Which facts do you think I haven't checked?
Seriously, simply pretending that the source invalidates the facts doesn't convince anybody (except the already convinced). Are you actually refuting that Gore is a gluttonous power pig, living a lifestyle completely incongruous with what he advocates other people follow?
Obviously the only one motivated to bother researching Gore's hypocrisy will be the "right", but if they produce uncontested facts, then I'm going to consider them. If the "left" found serious violations of the constitution by Bush, I would equally consider it (I wouldn't just wave my hands around hysterically making vague, unsubstantiated claims that it's all a smear job by those dirty commies).
I must confess to a certain amount of admiration for the bit of anti-Gore propaganda to emerge from the right wing attack machine. As dishonest as it is, it is beautifully constructed.
Absolutely remarkable.
After you claim that it's "dishonest", without providing a single counter fact (this is the standard "left wing" counter-attack meme, with the same bloody "talking points" appearing verbatim), you then setup a nice strawman to beat down.
If you want to see what's wrong with politics in the United States, look in the mirror. Seriously, you and your ilk are how the United States ended up in the FUD-flinging polarized state that it's in today.
Here I am, perhaps mildly conservative by politics (hey I'm in my 30s -- I went from the far left to slightly right of center as I aged, as many do), yet I'm disgusted by the US Republican Party, think Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US, and still think Clinton was a great president....but because I'm disgusted that Gore has such a schism between the cart that he's hooked himself up to, and his actual actions (ever hear that actions speak louder than words? Well there's a reason, because any asshat can talk about how great they are), I'm a part of the right-wing attack machine.
No matter how "clean burning" they are, cars still emit carbon dioxide. the equation is pretty simple: HC + O = H2O + CO2 plus some other garbage like NOx.
Isn't that pretty much what I said in my post? Cars emit CO2 (which isn't pollution) along with some other pollutants, but years ago they were much, much worse. Now that all the kids have been Gored, only CO2 is getting any attention while everything else gets a free ride.
More info? I find that a bit hard to believe. Where does it go?
Do a search on PremAir and VAAC -- both are Volvo technologies that filter the air around the car. In the case of VAAC, it removes the hydrocarbon emissions of three other cars.
Actually, as Gore pays higher electrical rates to get clean power, those coal plants aren't doing anything on his behalf.
Um, yes, they are. Gore bought the "maximum amount possible" of "green" energy from Tennessee (which doesn't even include nuclear), still only a very tiny part of his bill. When he turned the pool heat up, a couple of shovels of coal went into the burner.
Oh, and according to the power company, the one-man think tank who issued your talking point is full of shit.
Funny that you deride my comment as a "talking point", yet the only one regurgitating talking points is you.
Why don't you point to a single source on the planet that claims the bills are inaccurate? Because, you know, Tennessee Power actually released the bills officially, and you know what: They were the same. The fact that some people try to wave their hands and claim that the source is tainted, and thus the bills are suspect against all other evidence, is remarkable.
I don't care if this one-man think tank stole them from Gore's garbage. Once they were out it became fact, barring Gore's camp denying them (which they haven't).
I am more worried about carcinogenic crap in the ground, in the water and in the air than global warming. Under the guise of "global warming isn't real".. the global cancer rate is going to go up.
You bring up a very good point, which is that a lot of people have completely taken their eye off of the ball of general pollution, focusing only on CO2. See the defense many Gore fanatics brought forth to defend his gluttony: Sure the coal plants in Tennessee are going overtime to power his mansion, but his investment group invested in some nebulous scheme that might possibly reduce CO2 somewhere.
We need clean nuclear power ASAP charging our electric cars, not driving around cancer fumers.
Cars seem to get a lot of the blame (a story yesterday claimed that they were the primary cause of CO2, when they, coupled with all other methods of transportation, are less than 1/4), yet modern cars are very clean burning. A couple of Volvos actually empirically leave the air cleaner than before.
Instead the major problems are industrial pollution, coal power plants (there's still a shitload of those), and even the pollutions and toxins that invade our food and water.
While Hummers and pickup trucks a convenient easy target, electric power generation is by far the #1 culprit (especially coal burning, however even nuclear power plants have a tremendous carbon cost). And while transportation is getting much better, electricity consumption has only been getting worse.
Because we don't give a shit? I paid for Windows, and part of the deal is that it sends a few tiny packets of information occasionally to check it's legit. It doesn't cost me anything, so why should I care?
So you don't own the right to use the software -- you've rented it for a period of time to be determined by Microsoft.
Doesn't that bother you?
I hate schemes like that purely because it adds one additional risk factor: If I've bought your software, I don't want company-wide bullshit at some indetermined time because some kid random-generates numbers, or a Microsoft services has a fault, etc.
Can someone explain what "democrat" means when used as an adjective? I've heard a similar term "democratic" used as an adjective. Maybe the adjective "democrat" means "the person saying this should get their head out of the punch bowl and stop drinking the kool aid."
Interesting you should mention this particular point. While I do wish I put liberal, to more aptly fit with the grandparent, I happened to be thinking of Gore at the moment which led me to Democrat.
I apologize. While I might be classically conservative, I most certainly am not a Republican, or a supporter of Bush or any Evangelical crusade, or mixing of church and state.
Nonetheless, conservatives (conserve-atives) in no way correlate with the observation of the OP, so the OP probably should have used republican given that it was clearly their real target.
Having said that, I do find it humorous that some act so injured by the term "Democrat", given that it is a word that has been in use to refer to members or supporters of the Democratic party for decades. In fact, why don't you take a look at the URL for The Democratic Party. Yeah, it's the pluralization of democrat given any normal use of the English language.
In fact, what do you know, the dictionary definition includes the definition "Democrat - A member of the Democratic Party.".
So my intended use was exactly right, though you've shown that you've regurgitated one of the standard talking points, apparently drinking a little too much of the kool-aid.
OMG! The world is coming to an end! If we don't change our behavior now, the whole planet is done. Aghhhhh!!!!
--runs like a chicken with his head cut off--
--out of the crowd's site, he calms down and starts evaluating if that earning the necessary personal karma for the next power grab--
"Dear, could you turn the Olympic sized pool to 115F? Our hot-tub is just far too small.
Do you think we add a couple more floors on this empty nester monstrosity? As it is, I don't think we're absolutely dwarfing the common family to the degree that we fully should."
Now because of increasing amounts of piracy companies like Microsoft who make most of their money from the OS itself have to do it for their software.
Increasing amounts of piracy?
I don't buy it.
Here's an academic exercise: Calculate Microsoft's marketshare over the past 15 years, and the relative size of the market each year. Compare that with Microsoft's operating system gross revenue. I haven't actually done this myself, but I'm very confident in the result of such an analysis.
What you're going to find is that the gross revenue has been grossly outpacing actual deployed copies.
Piracy isn't increasing at all — in fact I'd say the opposite, and point out that 10 years ago everyone and their brother ran a pirate version of Windows &| DOS, and among small businesses the license compliance was atrocious. Now I don't know a single person who didn't pay the Microsoft tax when they bought a PC, and almost no-one actually buys retail or does upgrades. Among small businesses, paranoia about the jackboot-squadrons has made casual piracy a huge no no — however the demand for Microsoft to pump up the revenue in a period when customers have largely lost interest is making them monetize a previously unexploited market.
Look the other way, with limited or no protections
Gain massive marketshare because few actually paid hundreds for Windows 3.11 et all
Wait, while emitting involuntary evil cackling
Start enabling WGA, Activation, and legal threats to monetize marketshare.
Even bigger profit, or at least something to make up the difference when other channels start declining
Slashdot Mirror
Not even close. Despite the fear mongering about the Conservative party of Canada (oh noes! Hidden agenda!), in actual practice, which is all that matters, the party is far left of even the Democratic party of the US.
Separate spin and talk from reality. Newspapers like the Toronto Star, so smitten with the Liberal party and desperate to return (and keep) them in power, will cast every angry rant of a fringe Conservative member as official party policy, while casually ignoring or declaring as an exception the same of Liberal members. The same-sex marriage thing, for instance, has been mentioned regarding the Conservatives several dozen times in this discussion, yet in actuality all the party wanted was a frank, open discussion and free vote on the subject (which they knew would lead to same-sex marriage being allowed). So in return they're cast as controlling people's genitals...yet there are many Liberal members who are very strongly against same sex marriage.
Politics in Canada, like so many countries, is just so broken. So many voters are so grossly ignorant on the issues, which is how the Liberal party squeaked by for so long amidst a platform of corruption and do-nothingness (only losing the last election because of vote-splitting by the NDP, and a migration away from the BQ in Quebec, coupled with a distaste for the Liberals there over the sponsorship scandal). Soon enough we'll be back to a Liberal government, and everyone can cheer the drug liberalization (that will never happen), universal daycare (that will never happen), shortened wait times (that will never happen), and so on. The Liberals know that talk is all that matters to the Canadian voting public.
You mean using one of the countless other search engines?
Google's biggest asset is the quality of their search. If Google compromised that (e.g. paid placements in results, or removing a set of results just to penalize someone), people would stop using Google, and would instead use one of the many other search engines (many of which are neck and neck with Google results wise).
Google has next to no search-engine-ranking muscle to flex. Given that most are fervently against paid search placement, it's astounding that so many are so quick to support what is in essence "conform-for-placement" just because it serves their agenda.
"Free" publicity?
More accurately, people go to Google to search for stuff like Viacom shows. If Google were ever dumb enough (they aren't) to start self-censoring to penalize foes in other areas of their business, people wouldn't use Google. Google would be shooting themselves in the face to spite a pimple.
And it isn't like this is unexpected. When YouTube was being woo'd, Mark Cuban was widely quoted for saying "Only a moron would buy YouTube" (because of the huge potential lawsuit liability). Maybe a better statement would be "only a non-moron that has the cash to pay off the inevitable lawsuits", of which there are only a few companies, Google being one of them.
So it's actually only 11.6MB / second.
Ugh...obviously I meant minute there.
1536 Kbps.. isn't that 1.5 MB a second? Times 60, that's 90 MB a minute, not 10.986 GB..
I think he must have used new math or something. It's even worse -- A T1 is 1.544megabits per second, or 193 kilobytes per second (ignoring overhead).
So it's actually only 11.6MB / second.
I'm a little scared for Slashdot that it got moderated up so highly.
Apart from the fact that a T1 is 1.544Mb(it) per second, everything else in the above post is grossly incorrect, to orders of magnitudes.
Even a T3 (30x faster than a T1) couldn't push through 1/30th of the numbers linked above. And that's assuming in this bizarro world that you don't have to share bandwidth (which all technologies do), and don't have to accommodate spiking when everyone goes online at common times.
The cost is seldom for the last mile network -- instead it's for the cost from them to their peers. Peerage is not free, and imagine the sort of pipes a cable provider has to pay for.
In December 2006, Bell introduced 30GB/45GB limits (feel free to search -- there's lots of resources) on their normal/ultra DSL packages.
Limits are simply a given, and any company that hasn't created them has either been lucky that the "UNLIMIT3D!!!!" abusers haven't used their service too much, or they have other ways of limiting your bandwidth, such as throttling your speed down as your bandwidth grows -- people want a high speed for occasional usage, but it isn't tenable that a 600KB/second (that's my speed) cable user can use that for 24 hours a day.
He's a Shaw employee because he posted the publicly available bandwidth numbers for both companies to demonstrate that they are honest about their packages?
Give me a break.
Whatever your perverse need to fly into a flurry of defense for Telus, they are the numbers they post, so they have the right to enforce them at their discretion, so it'd be pretty naive to just say "they don't enforce them". If they didn't care, they wouldn't post them, would they?
Indeed, it has become a bit of a unqualified, blanket meme: "Don't put database servers on virtual machines!" we hear. I heard it just yesterday from an outsourced hardware rep for crying out loud (they were trying to display that they "get" virtualization).
Ultimately, however, it's one of those easy bits of "wisdom" that people parrot because it's cheap advice, and it buys some easy credibility.
Unqualified, however, the statement is complete and utter nonsense. It is absolutely meaningless (just because something can superficially get called a "database" says absolutely nothing about what usage it sees, its disk access patterns, CPU and network needs, what it is bound by, etc).
An accurate rule would be "a machine that saturates one of the resources of a given piece of hardware is not a good candidate to be virtualized on that same piece of hardware" (e.g. your aforementioned database server). That really isn't rocket science, and I think it's obvious to everyone. It also doesn't rely upon some meaningless simplification of application roles.
Note that all of the above is speaking more towards the industry generalization, and not towards you. Indeed, you clarified it more specifically later on.
The I/O penalty isn't necessarily "heavy", and sometimes could best be called marginal. Furthermore, when you aggregate servers, people often find that their budget supports buying more beefy back-end hardware, perhaps getting a much more performant SAN -- itself a virtualization layer in the storage subsystem -- rather than a marginal disk array for each machine.
This is ignoring that the overwhelming majority of machines in small, medium, and large shops across the land sit at close to 0% 24 hours a day.
Spikes happen, but if my VM database server spikes on the 4-way dual-core machine backed by an extreme performance SAN that it sits on -- usually only during batch processing at night when the other user-facing virtual servers are doing nothing -- it has far more resources to draw from than if I had partitioned each box out into its own little physical island.
We have no idea where in the process this field-swap observation was made. It could very well have been in a middleware service, perhaps doing some transformations on some XML, and might have been discovered because the validation was failing.
Some shit when awry with a giant system, and some spokesperson gave some general answer that's probably percolated up, in a completely changed form, sourced from some developer desperately trying to cover his error.
It's hardly the first time this has happened, and I doubt it'll be the last.
Which facts do you think I haven't checked?
Seriously, simply pretending that the source invalidates the facts doesn't convince anybody (except the already convinced). Are you actually refuting that Gore is a gluttonous power pig, living a lifestyle completely incongruous with what he advocates other people follow?
Obviously the only one motivated to bother researching Gore's hypocrisy will be the "right", but if they produce uncontested facts, then I'm going to consider them. If the "left" found serious violations of the constitution by Bush, I would equally consider it (I wouldn't just wave my hands around hysterically making vague, unsubstantiated claims that it's all a smear job by those dirty commies).
XP/Windows 2003 supports S3 as well, it just often misidentifies whether the PC is S3 capable, however you can override that.
Absolutely remarkable.
After you claim that it's "dishonest", without providing a single counter fact (this is the standard "left wing" counter-attack meme, with the same bloody "talking points" appearing verbatim), you then setup a nice strawman to beat down.
If you want to see what's wrong with politics in the United States, look in the mirror. Seriously, you and your ilk are how the United States ended up in the FUD-flinging polarized state that it's in today.
Here I am, perhaps mildly conservative by politics (hey I'm in my 30s -- I went from the far left to slightly right of center as I aged, as many do), yet I'm disgusted by the US Republican Party, think Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US, and still think Clinton was a great president.
Remarkable.
Isn't that pretty much what I said in my post? Cars emit CO2 (which isn't pollution) along with some other pollutants, but years ago they were much, much worse. Now that all the kids have been Gored, only CO2 is getting any attention while everything else gets a free ride.
Do a search on PremAir and VAAC -- both are Volvo technologies that filter the air around the car. In the case of VAAC, it removes the hydrocarbon emissions of three other cars.
Um, yes, they are. Gore bought the "maximum amount possible" of "green" energy from Tennessee (which doesn't even include nuclear), still only a very tiny part of his bill. When he turned the pool heat up, a couple of shovels of coal went into the burner.
Funny that you deride my comment as a "talking point", yet the only one regurgitating talking points is you.
Why don't you point to a single source on the planet that claims the bills are inaccurate? Because, you know, Tennessee Power actually released the bills officially, and you know what: They were the same. The fact that some people try to wave their hands and claim that the source is tainted, and thus the bills are suspect against all other evidence, is remarkable.
I don't care if this one-man think tank stole them from Gore's garbage. Once they were out it became fact, barring Gore's camp denying them (which they haven't).
You bring up a very good point, which is that a lot of people have completely taken their eye off of the ball of general pollution, focusing only on CO2. See the defense many Gore fanatics brought forth to defend his gluttony: Sure the coal plants in Tennessee are going overtime to power his mansion, but his investment group invested in some nebulous scheme that might possibly reduce CO2 somewhere.
Cars seem to get a lot of the blame (a story yesterday claimed that they were the primary cause of CO2, when they, coupled with all other methods of transportation, are less than 1/4), yet modern cars are very clean burning. A couple of Volvos actually empirically leave the air cleaner than before.
Instead the major problems are industrial pollution, coal power plants (there's still a shitload of those), and even the pollutions and toxins that invade our food and water.
Cars and trucks account for less than 1/4 of CO2 emissions, or "slightly" less than "greatly to blame".
While Hummers and pickup trucks a convenient easy target, electric power generation is by far the #1 culprit (especially coal burning, however even nuclear power plants have a tremendous carbon cost). And while transportation is getting much better, electricity consumption has only been getting worse.
So you don't own the right to use the software -- you've rented it for a period of time to be determined by Microsoft.
Doesn't that bother you?
I hate schemes like that purely because it adds one additional risk factor: If I've bought your software, I don't want company-wide bullshit at some indetermined time because some kid random-generates numbers, or a Microsoft services has a fault, etc.
Interesting you should mention this particular point. While I do wish I put liberal, to more aptly fit with the grandparent, I happened to be thinking of Gore at the moment which led me to Democrat.
I apologize. While I might be classically conservative, I most certainly am not a Republican, or a supporter of Bush or any Evangelical crusade, or mixing of church and state.
Nonetheless, conservatives (conserve-atives) in no way correlate with the observation of the OP, so the OP probably should have used republican given that it was clearly their real target.
Having said that, I do find it humorous that some act so injured by the term "Democrat", given that it is a word that has been in use to refer to members or supporters of the Democratic party for decades. In fact, why don't you take a look at the URL for The Democratic Party. Yeah, it's the pluralization of democrat given any normal use of the English language.
In fact, what do you know, the dictionary definition includes the definition "Democrat - A member of the Democratic Party.".
So my intended use was exactly right, though you've shown that you've regurgitated one of the standard talking points, apparently drinking a little too much of the kool-aid.
{democrat seagull}
OMG! The world is coming to an end! If we don't change our behavior now, the whole planet is done. Aghhhhh!!!!
--runs like a chicken with his head cut off--
--out of the crowd's site, he calms down and starts evaluating if that earning the necessary personal karma for the next power grab--
"Dear, could you turn the Olympic sized pool to 115F? Our hot-tub is just far too small.
Do you think we add a couple more floors on this empty nester monstrosity? As it is, I don't think we're absolutely dwarfing the common family to the degree that we fully should."
{/democrat seagull}
Increasing amounts of piracy?
I don't buy it.
Here's an academic exercise: Calculate Microsoft's marketshare over the past 15 years, and the relative size of the market each year. Compare that with Microsoft's operating system gross revenue. I haven't actually done this myself, but I'm very confident in the result of such an analysis.
What you're going to find is that the gross revenue has been grossly outpacing actual deployed copies.
Piracy isn't increasing at all — in fact I'd say the opposite, and point out that 10 years ago everyone and their brother ran a pirate version of Windows &| DOS, and among small businesses the license compliance was atrocious. Now I don't know a single person who didn't pay the Microsoft tax when they bought a PC, and almost no-one actually buys retail or does upgrades. Among small businesses, paranoia about the jackboot-squadrons has made casual piracy a huge no no — however the demand for Microsoft to pump up the revenue in a period when customers have largely lost interest is making them monetize a previously unexploited market.
Once Vista sets the activated flag, does it actually check for revocation of activation at some prescribed interval?