Microsoft recently announced Windows Vista and Longhorn will be equipped with new version of software protection 'technologies'. Quoting from the article:
In the fight against software piracy, Microsoft today introduced an innovative set of technologies that will be included in Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn.” The technologies are aimed at helping prevent piracy and protect customers from software tampering while making licensing easier to manage.
The article gives me an impression as if Microsoft had devised a genuine good technology that will benefit the entire human race.
On the other hand, most often I am amazed by some politicians/businessmen who calculate revenue loss like "See, given there are roughly 1 million of pirated product X in the market, with unit price of $10, we are having a lost revenue of $10 million per year!!". Well, what is missing in the picture is the simple supply-demand curve in elementary economics.
Time to download a Linux distro and reformat my HD. Tata
3 comments:
Linux will remain a fringe OS for geeks... for a long time.
Because, as one biologist puts it,"there is a considerable overlap of intelligence between the dumbest human and the smartest slug".
Linux will remain 'too complex' for some Windows people to learn.
It's like philosophy, after thousands of years since Plato, people learning philosophy is still limited to the few! :P
Linux isn't that much more difficult compared to Windows, me thinks. It has improved by leaps and bounds since the late 90s.
Just that people are lazy and don't want to learn something new.
Engineering and CS students shouldn't have any excuses not to give it a go, though. Good way to learn about kernels and other stuff. You even have the compiler, debuggers and most other tools you need included in the distro.
Indeed Linux offers a relatively self-contained development environment for users with decent toolchains, IDEs, etc. However the quality among the tools varies. Some tools can rival the commercial products (gcc comes to mind), on the other extreme of the spectrum are software that never get past the alpha releases.
On the other hand, it seems Malaysian universities don't use *nix much in the curriculum even for CS/Sw Engr majors. I keep wondering how they study OS courses back in school, 100% theories? Hmm....
Watch out for Mac OS X, it is sexy, integrated, and backed by the solid Unix kernel.
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