This week, Judge Brady ordered the state to shell out some $92,000 to the organizations in compensation for wasted time.
"Within the ruling, Judge Brady also said he was "dumbfounded" that the state was in the position of having to shell out taxpayer money over this, noting that the law had to pass through legal review at every step...."
So, what the judge is saying is that he thinks it is bad that the taxpayers have had to pay for this fiasco, so let's fine the state $92,000 so the taxpayers have to pay even more?
Sad irony that what he is doing is correct (paying the injured parties) yet contradicts the ridiculousness of the fact that this shouldnt have happened and the taxpayers shouldnt have had to lay out the initial sum, much less the added $92k.
Well, can this be considered for private financial gain (through a large stretch of the imagination perhaps) since the "infringer" is not spending the money they "should have" to get the copyrighted recording? That is a financial gain, if only of a few bucks...
I'm not disagreeing with your interpretation, but that section (section 1) doesnt seem to have a dollar amount attached to the private financial gain aspect, nor does it seem to spell out what is considered private financial gain in that section, though it does for distribution. Just wondering if that would be a valid tactic to use to lump in any downloading without purchase as for "private financial gain".
Well, in light of the RIAA's lobbying efforts to get laws passed to exclude them from following the same laws as everyone else, I guess it is sadly kinda funny... regardless of whether this should be a learning experience for the RIAA or not. I guess it will all be a matter of how the other cases they look like they are going to lose proceed, combined with whether or not their lobbying efforts come to fruition. Time will tell.
With hope, this will be the beginning of a trend, especially if this case can be used as precedent against the RIAA on other cases. The RIAA will hopefully realize that it is time to stop bringing frivilous lawsuits with shoddy evidence against the public. One can hope anyway...
Ah, thank you! Someone who understands my point! Times ahead are going to require MS to actually innovate, to actually come up with their own products, to actually come up with their own ideas... or slowly crumble...
How does Microsoft decide to acquire rather than build internally? This is the toughest question in any acquisition discussion. Microsoft has thousands of very talented software engineers that can build just about anything. How can you justify paying hundreds of millions or even billions for something a team of 30 engineers could build in a year or two. That translates to about $12M of development cost versus a huge acquisition cost.
How does MS decide? Easy. They never BUILT anything internally (well, Edlin maybe). They acquired it and kept modifying it.
Yes, but there is a big difference between MS' activities and others'. IBM has acquired TONS of companies, but IBM has a software portfolio that they have actually written the core of - even if many of them have been extended with other's technologies... the core is theirs on a lot of their software. MS has not written the core to anything they currently sell. That is the big difference. Google has, Yahoo has, many others have. MS has NOT.
That little microcosm pretty much defines the limits of the industries that evolved around the commercial computer-on-a-chip.
Thirty years experience in programming for the micro computer.
Thirty years experience in buying, stealing, licensing or otherwise acquiring other companies' programs and adding hack after hack to it to "increase" features and "fix" bugs.
That is probably how it should read. MS didnt write anything they currently sell. They acquired it and revised it and added stuff to it. There is a very very long list of all of MS' acquisitions someplace online listing them all - including every part of Office, the entire graphics engine (including DirectX), IE, the Windows GUI, The WinXP theme changes, DOS, Win16, IIS, Exchange, and on and on. Acquired and added to by MS.
Yeah, maybe that qualifies as programming... but to me, the programmer is the person who wrote the apps to begin with... the work MS did is called modifying - which is done by programmers as well... but the way you have it worded makes it sound like MS actually programmed the stuff they sell.
Well, the Linux world of servers I do not have that much experience in. But, AIX and OS/2 I do (measured in over a decade each) and have seen servers of both varieties on stable hardware (RS/6000s and Netfinitys respectively) go years without any intervention or maintenance. The numerous years old (ie: 5 to 12 years) RS/6000s where I work never have any *needed* human interaction - the company though, chose to do both off-site automated backup and on-site tape backup. The only human interaction with the machine is hitting the eject button, pulling out the current tape and pushing in a new tape - only so we have onsite redundancy, and only because the machines are rather old and the company wont invest the money in a larger, more automated solution (larger tape backup, disk backup to a storage array, etc). The stores dont maintain those machines, our corporate office does, and they havent been called to look at one of them in years. The OS/2 servers we manage are also as low maintenance. We "dust" them inside and out every 6 months (I know we can eliminate that "maintenance", but we have to make at least that appearance; our clients, former Win2003 Server users cant understand why we arent there every month installing (or testing the auto installed) latest hotfix, update, etc, or removing whatever virus has slipped past the AV program).
How do they plan on making that easy on an OS that needs regular attention? This isnt a Linux, OS/2, Sparc, AIX, BSD machine that you can dump in a closet (or container) for months at a time...
That's quite a heavy qualification when ordinary users buying a brand new computer will expect the OS that comes with it to run at least as quickly as their previous computer did running Microsoft Windows XP. (emphasis mine) By all the standards thrown in the face of free software activists (all the while ignoring software freedom), Vista simply isn't worth it. These users won't know or care what "well supported hardware" is, they'll make the logical assumption that whatever they were sold should be "well supported".
I agree with you - but you are understating what most users expect. Most users would expect their new Vista machine to be faster than the old one they are replacing. For two reasons (1) the hardware is a lot faster than their old one and (2) Vista is advertised by MS as being faster than XP.
I don't think this is true actually - in a lot of ways Vista is quicker. For instance when I turned on my Vista machine today it was ready to go in literally seconds.
You didnt TURN ON your Vista machine today - not in the normal sense... you had it resume from something akin to hibernation (S3/S4, hibernate, etc). A feature (that's old) that has problems on various systems, while oddly working flawlessly on others. Next time, select "Turn Off" from the menu and then restart... it is excruciatingly slow on every machine I have tried it on.
Low priority I/O makes it so a lot of tasks like backup, indexing and optimizing the disk can be done in the background with little to no impact to foreground apps.
And as has been posted on/. before, slows down disk I/O to a crawl.
As far as application performance, you can dumb down vista's ui, but even with Aero on I really honestly don't notice any performance difference between Vista and XP.
Depends on the app and the hardware. I've seen it range from "a lot slower" to "barely slower"
Keep in mind that like previous releases of Windows, MS spent a lot of time on making Vista appear to be faster... It is a lot like the WinXP "faster" start times... the GUI comes up faster, but the machine is still starting things making the system virtually unusable for quite some time after the GUI looks like it is ready. Vista is no different in this respect, just different in it's implementation of apparent speed "increase" through tricks like that.
Yes, that constitutes pretty much nothing. Nothing that couldnt be gotten by adding (IMHO better) third party solutions to WinXP. Note the numerous points that were taken out of the list (which were features that actually did constitute something but were dropped during the betas).
Unfortunately, it has no merit... the retailers were provided new "Vista Capable" stickers that were supposed to be put on all products. Those stickers had an area where the retailers were supposed to indicate (by checking a box) if the machine was Vista Basic, Premium, or Ultra-Bloated Capable. The retailers were also provided with the "Vista Ready Tool" or whatever the thing is called, which was supposed to be used on the machines, and/or made available to use on customer's machines. Suing the retailers perhaps might be a better idea in this case.
Unfortunately, you are correct. There was nothing in their promotions that indicated "Capable" at a certain productivity or usability level. If the machine says "Vista Capable" and it runs any version of Vista - then it's Vista Capable. MS is just taking advantage of consumers' inability to interpret what is stated... just like someone complaining about a store sale that says up to 50% off - "Why is this only 10% off?" - "Because it says UP TO 50%".
6 - Statistics and studies only show you what they want you to see
MS is counting the Vista Upgrade coupons into those numbers (the 20 million). NOT the used coupons... the total coupons "given out" (ie: 12 million PCs sold during the qualifying period, 12 million coupons... and 8 million machines with Vista or copies purchased to upgrade - figures for example purposes only).
What are the actual figures? Who knows? MS isnt telling. And to count the "coupons" would require the OEMs and retailers to produce their numbers alongside MS's - which hasnt happened either.
The "facts" in MS's claims are thus irrelevant. Oh, and who cares? Vista will be the de-facto standard on PCs soon enough. And yes, there are vendors selling XP machines (usually XP Pro for businesses), but I am expecting that will phase out as well. An expectation that Vista would drive the market is retarded... some retailers though, counted on MS' promise that it would (a promise I heard them give to CompUSA - who sold 1/10th the machines and Vista upgrades they had projected to do). Therein lies the problem... MS created ridiculous expectations, and upper management in many companies (retailers and OEMs alike) listened and believed, while us grunts in the field couldnt believe anyone would be counting on such a ridiculous expectation. If you had any clue as to the $$$$ some of the retailers expected to make on the Vista launch, you'd be wondering what their management was smoking...
Because something is a *web app* does not mean it is a "works on any browser" app. MS hardly conforms to any standards when it comes to web anything... html, css, javascript... you name it. I know... I write web apps, and it is usually an "If IE5 then, If IE6 then, If IE7 then... otherwise (assume a browser that comes a lot closer to standards) do..." Which brings up my second point, standards support - or even MS's proprietary calls/parsing/whatever, change between versions, fixes and updates.
Sometimes it is more a matter of using the wrong tool for the job. I used to do DTP/layout/"typesetting" and the firm that subcontracted me had strict rules about font size, kerning, font face, etc. For a company like that (which applies to many large companies who have a specific look that MUST be maintained), creating your next newsletter on OO or Word should not be the method of choice. We used Quark Xpress because we could control everything right down past the decimal point for any attribute and it would print as expected and as rendered. Ease of use (eg: Word & Write) have led many companies to complain about such differences/lack of capabilities from apps that are not true typesetting/DTP apps... they are word processing apps, and there is a big difference when such "anal retentive" needs are required...
I would say DRM based models would take the lead at least for now, since there havent been many non-DRM based models, much less ones with the marketing power of some of the DRM based models such as MS's Zune, and iTunes. This point in the "research" is currently irrelevant until choices (DRM and non) are available with similar market penetration, and enough of a time period passes to recompare the two.
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I think you missed the point of my post, which was that it (the judge's actions and statements) was an interesting irony.
This week, Judge Brady ordered the state to shell out some $92,000 to the organizations in compensation for wasted time.
"Within the ruling, Judge Brady also said he was "dumbfounded" that the state was in the position of having to shell out taxpayer money over this, noting that the law had to pass through legal review at every step...."
So, what the judge is saying is that he thinks it is bad that the taxpayers have had to pay for this fiasco, so let's fine the state $92,000 so the taxpayers have to pay even more?
Sad irony that what he is doing is correct (paying the injured parties) yet contradicts the ridiculousness of the fact that this shouldnt have happened and the taxpayers shouldnt have had to lay out the initial sum, much less the added $92k.
:-(
Well, can this be considered for private financial gain (through a large stretch of the imagination perhaps) since the "infringer" is not spending the money they "should have" to get the copyrighted recording? That is a financial gain, if only of a few bucks...
I'm not disagreeing with your interpretation, but that section (section 1) doesnt seem to have a dollar amount attached to the private financial gain aspect, nor does it seem to spell out what is considered private financial gain in that section, though it does for distribution. Just wondering if that would be a valid tactic to use to lump in any downloading without purchase as for "private financial gain".
Well, in light of the RIAA's lobbying efforts to get laws passed to exclude them from following the same laws as everyone else, I guess it is sadly kinda funny... regardless of whether this should be a learning experience for the RIAA or not. I guess it will all be a matter of how the other cases they look like they are going to lose proceed, combined with whether or not their lobbying efforts come to fruition. Time will tell.
With hope, this will be the beginning of a trend, especially if this case can be used as precedent against the RIAA on other cases. The RIAA will hopefully realize that it is time to stop bringing frivilous lawsuits with shoddy evidence against the public. One can hope anyway...
Ah, thank you! Someone who understands my point! Times ahead are going to require MS to actually innovate, to actually come up with their own products, to actually come up with their own ideas... or slowly crumble...
I agree with everything in your post - except how they can survive in the current (changing) landscape.
How does Microsoft decide to acquire rather than build internally? This is the toughest question in any acquisition discussion. Microsoft has thousands of very talented software engineers that can build just about anything. How can you justify paying hundreds of millions or even billions for something a team of 30 engineers could build in a year or two. That translates to about $12M of development cost versus a huge acquisition cost.
How does MS decide? Easy. They never BUILT anything internally (well, Edlin maybe). They acquired it and kept modifying it.
Yes, but there is a big difference between MS' activities and others'. IBM has acquired TONS of companies, but IBM has a software portfolio that they have actually written the core of - even if many of them have been extended with other's technologies... the core is theirs on a lot of their software. MS has not written the core to anything they currently sell. That is the big difference. Google has, Yahoo has, many others have. MS has NOT.
That little microcosm pretty much defines the limits of the industries that evolved around the commercial computer-on-a-chip.
Thirty years experience in programming for the micro computer.
Thirty years experience in buying, stealing, licensing or otherwise acquiring other companies' programs and adding hack after hack to it to "increase" features and "fix" bugs.
That is probably how it should read. MS didnt write anything they currently sell. They acquired it and revised it and added stuff to it. There is a very very long list of all of MS' acquisitions someplace online listing them all - including every part of Office, the entire graphics engine (including DirectX), IE, the Windows GUI, The WinXP theme changes, DOS, Win16, IIS, Exchange, and on and on. Acquired and added to by MS.
Yeah, maybe that qualifies as programming... but to me, the programmer is the person who wrote the apps to begin with... the work MS did is called modifying - which is done by programmers as well... but the way you have it worded makes it sound like MS actually programmed the stuff they sell.
Well, the Linux world of servers I do not have that much experience in. But, AIX and OS/2 I do (measured in over a decade each) and have seen servers of both varieties on stable hardware (RS/6000s and Netfinitys respectively) go years without any intervention or maintenance. The numerous years old (ie: 5 to 12 years) RS/6000s where I work never have any *needed* human interaction - the company though, chose to do both off-site automated backup and on-site tape backup. The only human interaction with the machine is hitting the eject button, pulling out the current tape and pushing in a new tape - only so we have onsite redundancy, and only because the machines are rather old and the company wont invest the money in a larger, more automated solution (larger tape backup, disk backup to a storage array, etc). The stores dont maintain those machines, our corporate office does, and they havent been called to look at one of them in years. The OS/2 servers we manage are also as low maintenance. We "dust" them inside and out every 6 months (I know we can eliminate that "maintenance", but we have to make at least that appearance; our clients, former Win2003 Server users cant understand why we arent there every month installing (or testing the auto installed) latest hotfix, update, etc, or removing whatever virus has slipped past the AV program).
How do they plan on making that easy on an OS that needs regular attention? This isnt a Linux, OS/2, Sparc, AIX, BSD machine that you can dump in a closet (or container) for months at a time...
It will be really sad when this idea comes crashing down... ;-)
That's quite a heavy qualification when ordinary users buying a brand new computer will expect the OS that comes with it to run at least as quickly as their previous computer did running Microsoft Windows XP. (emphasis mine) By all the standards thrown in the face of free software activists (all the while ignoring software freedom), Vista simply isn't worth it. These users won't know or care what "well supported hardware" is, they'll make the logical assumption that whatever they were sold should be "well supported". I agree with you - but you are understating what most users expect. Most users would expect their new Vista machine to be faster than the old one they are replacing. For two reasons (1) the hardware is a lot faster than their old one and (2) Vista is advertised by MS as being faster than XP.
You mean than the version of XP that only supports one core? Of course it is - since Vista in any incarnation supports dual core.
I don't think this is true actually - in a lot of ways Vista is quicker. For instance when I turned on my Vista machine today it was ready to go in literally seconds.
You didnt TURN ON your Vista machine today - not in the normal sense... you had it resume from something akin to hibernation (S3/S4, hibernate, etc). A feature (that's old) that has problems on various systems, while oddly working flawlessly on others. Next time, select "Turn Off" from the menu and then restart... it is excruciatingly slow on every machine I have tried it on.
Low priority I/O makes it so a lot of tasks like backup, indexing and optimizing the disk can be done in the background with little to no impact to foreground apps.
And as has been posted on /. before, slows down disk I/O to a crawl.
As far as application performance, you can dumb down vista's ui, but even with Aero on I really honestly don't notice any performance difference between Vista and XP.
Depends on the app and the hardware. I've seen it range from "a lot slower" to "barely slower"
Keep in mind that like previous releases of Windows, MS spent a lot of time on making Vista appear to be faster... It is a lot like the WinXP "faster" start times... the GUI comes up faster, but the machine is still starting things making the system virtually unusable for quite some time after the GUI looks like it is ready. Vista is no different in this respect, just different in it's implementation of apparent speed "increase" through tricks like that.
"and reduce memory loss to nothing more than a computer glitch"
What type of computer running what interface would our brains mimic? Can I get an MS Bob style implant? Or how about a WinME one?
Yes, that constitutes pretty much nothing. Nothing that couldnt be gotten by adding (IMHO better) third party solutions to WinXP. Note the numerous points that were taken out of the list (which were features that actually did constitute something but were dropped during the betas).
Unfortunately, it has no merit... the retailers were provided new "Vista Capable" stickers that were supposed to be put on all products. Those stickers had an area where the retailers were supposed to indicate (by checking a box) if the machine was Vista Basic, Premium, or Ultra-Bloated Capable. The retailers were also provided with the "Vista Ready Tool" or whatever the thing is called, which was supposed to be used on the machines, and/or made available to use on customer's machines. Suing the retailers perhaps might be a better idea in this case.
Unfortunately, you are correct. There was nothing in their promotions that indicated "Capable" at a certain productivity or usability level. If the machine says "Vista Capable" and it runs any version of Vista - then it's Vista Capable. MS is just taking advantage of consumers' inability to interpret what is stated... just like someone complaining about a store sale that says up to 50% off - "Why is this only 10% off?" - "Because it says UP TO 50%".
Funnily, IBM actually owns the patent to tabbed browsing...
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6049812&id= cA0EAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&dq=tabbed+br owsing
6 - Statistics and studies only show you what they want you to see
MS is counting the Vista Upgrade coupons into those numbers (the 20 million). NOT the used coupons... the total coupons "given out" (ie: 12 million PCs sold during the qualifying period, 12 million coupons... and 8 million machines with Vista or copies purchased to upgrade - figures for example purposes only).
What are the actual figures? Who knows? MS isnt telling. And to count the "coupons" would require the OEMs and retailers to produce their numbers alongside MS's - which hasnt happened either.
The "facts" in MS's claims are thus irrelevant. Oh, and who cares? Vista will be the de-facto standard on PCs soon enough. And yes, there are vendors selling XP machines (usually XP Pro for businesses), but I am expecting that will phase out as well. An expectation that Vista would drive the market is retarded... some retailers though, counted on MS' promise that it would (a promise I heard them give to CompUSA - who sold 1/10th the machines and Vista upgrades they had projected to do). Therein lies the problem... MS created ridiculous expectations, and upper management in many companies (retailers and OEMs alike) listened and believed, while us grunts in the field couldnt believe anyone would be counting on such a ridiculous expectation. If you had any clue as to the $$$$ some of the retailers expected to make on the Vista launch, you'd be wondering what their management was smoking...
Because something is a *web app* does not mean it is a "works on any browser" app. MS hardly conforms to any standards when it comes to web anything... html, css, javascript... you name it. I know... I write web apps, and it is usually an "If IE5 then, If IE6 then, If IE7 then... otherwise (assume a browser that comes a lot closer to standards) do..." Which brings up my second point, standards support - or even MS's proprietary calls/parsing/whatever, change between versions, fixes and updates.
Sometimes it is more a matter of using the wrong tool for the job. I used to do DTP/layout/"typesetting" and the firm that subcontracted me had strict rules about font size, kerning, font face, etc. For a company like that (which applies to many large companies who have a specific look that MUST be maintained), creating your next newsletter on OO or Word should not be the method of choice. We used Quark Xpress because we could control everything right down past the decimal point for any attribute and it would print as expected and as rendered. Ease of use (eg: Word & Write) have led many companies to complain about such differences/lack of capabilities from apps that are not true typesetting/DTP apps... they are word processing apps, and there is a big difference when such "anal retentive" needs are required...
I would say DRM based models would take the lead at least for now, since there havent been many non-DRM based models, much less ones with the marketing power of some of the DRM based models such as MS's Zune, and iTunes. This point in the "research" is currently irrelevant until choices (DRM and non) are available with similar market penetration, and enough of a time period passes to recompare the two.