Taiwan Forces MS To Cut Prices, Unbundle Software 477
bev_tech_rob writes "This article from ZDNet reports how Microsoft has agreed to cut prices on their software after a backlash from the country's effort to crack down on piracy. Seems the citizens were forced to obtain pirated copies due to the high cost and having to buy software they did not need to get the parts they DID need."
Seems like someone got it right (Score:4, Insightful)
What? (Score:2, Insightful)
yeah, right (Score:2, Insightful)
That'll surely show 'em!1!!
Not just Taiwan (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a problem most people under 24 seem to have...
Re:Taiwan - famous for...paying for software? (Score:3, Insightful)
Taiwan is famous for more than just piracy, and your comment was rude and unnecessary. Most mass-produced toys are made in Taiwan because they perfected advanced assembly line techniques and could do it cheaper than the U.S.
Join The (1337) Clan If You Have What It Takes! [slashdot.org]
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
(I fully expect to be modded down for this, but what the hell. I have karma to burn)
Re:Visual Studio .NET (Score:5, Insightful)
I would look somewhere other than programming to spend your education dollars.
.
Re:Visual Studio .NET (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, with the release of
VS.NET is a convenience tool and nothing more, and as such MS does deserve to be paid for it without a doubt. Go compare other professional IDE's at the street price, you'll realize that even then VS.NET is a great deal. You should be happy as a student that there IS a cheaper version provided for something that is just a tool.
Re:WAR3Z (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it. 50 million lines of code. If you were to read 1 line per second, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, year-round, it would take you 5-1/2 years just to read it all!
Then you'd have to understand it.
By then it would be obsolete, anyway, because it would be 1 or 2 generations behind.
If you've ever gone through even a 5,000 page program, you know that just getting yourself oriented to that you know where to look takes TIME.
Back in the '80s Microsoft was in the habit of screwing up/obfuscating the symbol tables on the software they released - until the courts made them stop that practice.
Re:'bout time someone started fighting back (Score:4, Insightful)
Why doesn't Taiwan just say no? (Score:2, Insightful)
Better solution I believe!
The US doesn't have to (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WAR3Z (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so - there is the Shared Source initiative from Microsoft. Obuscation of the code would be unprofessional at best.
Then it would be nigh on impossible to understand how windows works.
With all of the code profilers and debuggers out there, obuscation would only be a temporary set back. (*Avoids cheap shot about the average Windows user*)
I don't say this because i think they're evil, but it's common sense for them if what you suggest might happen did happen. Their source code is a close secret, and I dont think they would even want a government of any country to see it.
I also don't think that MS is "evil", but I disagree with the rest of your statement. Along with your Shared Source agreement comes an NDA. In that NDA (AFAIK), you state that you won't use the source to make your own version of Windows, nor will you help the competition in any way, which does make perect sense from a business perspective.
However, seeing that Linux and a lot of other OSS is in direct competition with Microsoft, they've basically removed you from developing OSS. Why wouldn't they want a government to be legally bound to not develop OSS? That's part of the strategic fall out from Shared Source - stealing mindshare through NDAs.
Using a WAR3Zed copy of the Windows source code to "help" an OSS project would be even worse, since you would have used illegally obtained IP and polluted the code, giving Microsoft both legal and moral ground to kill the project you contributed to.
Please, stay away from Windows source code, unless you have no desire or need to contribute to OSS.
Soko
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
(I fully expect to be modded down for this, but what the hell. I have karma to burn)
Kalidasa's first law of slashdot: any poster who mentions that he expects to be modded down will invariably be modded +5 insightful.
Probably a quid pro quo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Refund, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:1, Insightful)
Abiword reads it better, faster, and w/a smaller footprint.
Please remove the GWB tag. You don't graduate from Yale if you are stupid.
Re:FRANCE SUCKS (Score:1, Insightful)
Its not really as funny as "In Soviet Russia..."
If you think your going to be the creator of something as funny as "In Soviet Russia..." your sorely misktaken. "YOU FAIL IT" won't take off.
Saying that of your attemt to be funny and creative, and hoping to put your mark on slashdot... well YOU FAIL IT!
p.s. the french are floofies too
Re:Why doesn't Taiwan just say no? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you know what these features are that they need?
Openoffice/Koffice/et al are fine products, but don't run around saying that they're automatically the solution. That's bad karma.
Forced (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, and I was forced to steal cable TV and uncap my cable modem and copy videos I rented all because they're more than I can afford to pay.
Geez, just because you can't afford something doesn't give you the right to steal it (or infringe on the copyright as the case may be). There are affordable alternatives out there to most expensive things.
the hypocrisy of this claim (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people really NEED MS Office applications? Literally nobody. You can't claim on the one hand that Office applications suck and the alternatives are better and on the other that people can't stop using them. You can't claim on the one hand that nobody uses anything more than the simplest features and on the other that the file formats are a big problem, since the file formats for basic Office docs are well understood.
The truth here is that people used pirated copies because they didn't want to pay the price Microsoft asked. They're thieves.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually they get the job done, at least for me last quarter. As a small social experiment I decided to use only open source and non-MS apps for school. I study CS at an all-Microsoft campus so it's a bit more of challenge than it probably sounds.
Open Office took care of my "office" needs just fine. The doc format didn't crap out on me often and the app itself isn't bad. It could really use some nice 16-bit cutesy icons though.
Mozilla and other gecko-based browsers took care of all my web stuff. My school is heavily into making use of the web (for better or worse) and I didn't have any problems using Moz even though the sites had huge disclaimers about using non-IE web browsers. Other than pointing out the fact that they weren't sending proper MIME types I got along just fine.
The stuff works, it may not be as pretty or arguably "user-friendly" (whatever that means when you consider MS's own learning curve), but it will do the job.
You're right, open source is not the swiss army knife of software, but it is a workable and viable alternative. The biggest problem I see is that there's so little effort evangelizing open source Windows apps compared to Linux.
I'd be a lot more comfortable if I heard something like "Oh, Open Office runs on Linux too?" more often. Or ever.
Re:the hypocrisy of this claim (Score:3, Insightful)
everybody who would couldn't get a job/contract unless they had them.
Re:"forced" to pirate software? (Score:3, Insightful)
Starbucks does not conspire to, nor is it unwillingly subject to, any forces that would create artificial need for it's product. Starbucks is also not a confirmed abusive monopolist that specifically manipulates such forces.
Buying from Joe's Java Shack doesn't affect your ability to interact with Starbuck's customers, nor does it prevent you from gaining use of other similar products in the marketplace.
IOW, software is not a physical commodity. Armchair moralists should not argue as if it were.
Don't like stealing? Then try some honesty.
Re:It has a draw back .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft would issue an Asian version even if they knew they would never make a profit on it -PERIOD-.
Why?
Because Microsoft would hate to see competition evolve anywhere in the world. Imagine if China/Taiwan/Wherever HAD to go over to a new operating system because MS refused to support the region. All those people writing software for another OS would cut into the monopoly hold they have over the desktop. MS would NEVER RISK it. PERIOD. When countries start talking about alternative OS's, Microsoft starts discounting and giving away software.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
It may not be fair to the monopoly to require them to adhere to extra regulations but it is less fair to punish everyone else with a stagnation in competition.
Re:Forced (Score:4, Insightful)
now suppose you can't get a job unless you have cable.
sounds like you would be forced to get cable, or starve.
So these people need to have Windows for survival? I see your point, but I don't think it's valid. It would have to be a very strange set of circumstances for one to say "I had to pirate Windows or I would die," wouldn't it?
Suppose for a job that a person has chosen, that person has to have Windows. What's stopping that person from looking for a different job that doesn't require them to pirate software?
Say you have a guy who grew up in the inner city and for whatever reason dropped out of high school. He's broke and can't find a job. Maybe this person should become a drug dealer. It's not ethical, and it's definitely not legal, but the guy can't seem to find a job anywhere else. Does that make it alright to sell crack to kids? No!
It's not that much different. These circumstances are no excuse for pirating software.
I never thought it was okay to pirate, but (Score:3, Insightful)
2) My dad bought MS's Streets & Maps (yeah, I know -- dad, did you ever heard of Mapquest?) and put it on his XP machine. Then he tried to install it on my mom's XP laptop. Which it choked because it already had gotten hooked into his machine, I guess contacting the M(other) S(hip) to tell them what he was doing. I don't think my dad should have to buy TWO versions of Streets & Maps for one household.
But, these kinds of things backfire on a corporation. People eventually get sick of it, like they did in Taiwan. What goes around comes around, I guess it's Karma.
It's funny because it's true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to put the CD in the CD drive, press a button a couple of times, reboot, and get what you want is VERY IMPORTANT. NOT THINKING is VERY IMPORTANT.
Users want things that work like coffee machines. You plug it in and it works. If you want a different coffee machine, you get a different coffee machine and plug it in and it works. Windows makes computers a lot more like coffee machines than Linux does. Having to turn your computer on an off to get a new feature is much less of a problem than having to know what to type to get a new feature. Linux wants you to figure stuff out. Microsoft wants your money.
For most people, giving up money is easier.
Re:the hypocrisy of this claim (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's funny because it's true. (Score:4, Insightful)
> important. Optimum configuration is not important. Control is not
> important. Not having to power toggle is not important.
> Being able to put the CD in the CD drive, press a button a couple
> of times, reboot,
> and get what you want is VERY IMPORTANT. NOT THINKING is
> VERY IMPORTANT.
> Users want things that work like coffee machines. You plug it in
> and it works. If you want a different coffee machine, you get
> a different coffee machine and plug it in and it works. Windows
> makes computers a lot more like coffee machines than Linux does.
> Having to turn your computer on an off to get a new feature is much
> less of a problem than having to know what to type to get a new
> feature. Linux wants you to figure stuff out. Microsoft wants
> your money.
I'm not sure that I can entirely agree with you. I don't think that Windows is inherently easier to deal with. I think that the fact that Windows is by far the dominant operating system means that all hardware and nearly all software developers pay specific attention to how their products work with Windows. This isn't due to any particular feature of the operating system. It's simply because they have to make it easy on the popular platform.
For most applications, installations go like this:
* In Windows 2000, I'd open up my web browser of choice. Then I'd go to one of the download sites or perhaps to google.com, and I'd search for an application online. I'd download the application (usually going through a few screens of ad-laden BS and choosing various mirror that are closest to me. I'd go to the location of the file (either through Start->Run or using a file manager like PowerDesk or simply by using Opera's excellent download manager). Then I'd double-click on the file. A "wizard" application opens and asks me a series of successive questions about where it wants me to install the program, whether I agree to a fifty-page application-specific legal document, where in the Start Menu I want this thing to go, and whether I want shortcuts placed in various locations. Then the program (sometimes) tells me that it needs to reboot, and I hit "OK". It reboots, occasionally does some further installation, and then I'm set. I would do all this every time for each program.
* In Mandrake Linux 9.0, I go to the package managing program (By clicking on "K->Configuration->Packaging->Install Software", or by hitting ALT-F2, typing "rpmdrake" and hitting ENTER). I change the little radio button group from "Mandrake choices" to "All Packages". I type a program name into the Search bar and hit the Search button (or I'd just look through the efficiently categorized list of programs). I check the checkboxes of any and all programs that I want to install, and I hit the Install button. Then I sit back as the installer automatically downloads, installs and configures all the applications I selected, grabbing any prerequisite programs from the servers automatically. In the time it took to search for, download and begin the installation of a program in Windows, I've finished installing the Linux app. Before I've finished mucking with the Next->Next->Next->Finish screen of that installation, another Linux app has finished installing (without me needing to click on anything more). By the time my computer has rebooted into Windows 2000 from that one install, the Mandrake Linux package manager has installed six or seven different apps (and I only had to click the "Install" button once). And you know what? Everything is installed into logical, well thought-out places. Instead of going into "Programs" and having to scroll down a clumsy list of company names to find the app you've installed (difficult especially if you've forgotten the company name!) like I see on Windows 2000, the Mandrake installer puts everything into intuitive, user-friendly subcategories. Stuff that uses the network is in "Networking". All my email programs are in "Networking->Mail". My news (usenet) readers (Pan for binary downloading, Mozilla Messenger for general reading) are in "Networking->News". Card games are specifically in "Amusement->Cards". Know what I have to do to find all my card games in Windows? I have to look in "Programs->Accessories->Games" and figure out which ones are card games. Then I have to look in every subgroup in Programs (the aforementioned company names) to check and see which ones have card games. I have to *memorize* this stuff in Windows. In Linux, I just go to "Amusement->Cards". Holy crap, you can't get any more obvious than that! Oh, I need to watch TV? "Multimedia->Video". I have to put this 800MB SVCD onto my 700MB CD without data loss? "Applications->Archiving->Cd Burning". I want my kid to learn stuff? "Applications->Edutainment". I'll never accidentally click on the "Hot Boobies" interactive porno game when I intended to show my female colleague my PG-rated "Hard Bodies" fitness management program. It just won't happen, because one of them would be in "Amusement->Sex" while the other would be found in
It's better than that. If I want to be lazy in windows, I can set up links on the taskbar, Office Bar (if I spend the untold hundreds for their Office product) or desktop to the programs. I could also (with a non-native third-party extension program) map programs to a Win-key combination. Currently, in Windows, I use Win-O to open Opera, Win-M to open my Mail program (Eudora), Win-X to open eXcel, Win-W to open Word, and so forth. Mandrake natively supports key combinations to open programs, and I believe you can differentiate between the two Win keys if you had the desire (LeftWin+W goes to OpenOffice Writer, RightWin+W goes to KWord, for example). I don't use it much, for the following reasons: Mandrake (and, by the way, I'm using KDE to manage my gui, so ymmv if you use other programs) allows me to put links to programs on the desktop. It also allows me to put links to programs on my taskbar. But it lets me configure these links in interesting ways (and we're not talking about difficult configuration; we're talking about Right-click-on-panel->Size->Large and similarly easy means). I can have (and I do) two levels of bars with these links. I have a big taskbar with my extra-lazy application links. These are full-sized icons, so they're easy to click on when I'm too slothful to competently use the mouse. On the bar right above it, I have (among other things) medium-sized icons for a whole bunch of programs that I tend to frequently use, like my text editor and my web browser. Incidentally, that bar also has a dictionary bar, an ascii character picker (I could paste odd characters into any program instead of having to rely on some arcane, application specific "Insert->Character" features that don't work universally), a web news scroller, an advanced clipboard manager (you know how more recent versions of Microsoft Office allow for multiple clipboard levels? Well, KDE's Klipper application does this for *every app*) and quick shortcuts to lock the computer or to logout. But I don't every really use those icons very often. Why not? Well, I have session management turned on. Whenever I turn on my computer, the system reloads active programs so that I can continue from where I left off. And most of my programs (Opera, Konsole, Konqueror, Kate, Pan) have their own internal session management, so I don't have to click on bookmarks or whatever to get to where I was before. The other thing that makes it easy to not have to move my mouse to hit those "shortcut" icons is the nature of linux pathing. Remember when I installed those programs above? Well, the executables are automatically put into a place that's in the system path. Most of the programs have pretty short filenames for the binaries. Most of the time, if I want to run the program and happen to remember the program's executable name, I hit F2, type in the program name and hit ENTER. F2,pan,ENTER. F2,mozilla,ENTER. F2,kate,ENTER. Heck, even those programs that I installed through other means than the Mandrake Package Manager (sometimes, you can install the very latest versions of programs before they get packaged) will work with this. F2,gmplayer,ENTER runs the GUI version of MPlayer, the only multimedia program that can play just about every format out there, from mpeg to avi to asf to quicktime to rm to ogg to DVDs and Mode 2 SVCDs (which I *almost* have working in windows, with some occasional bizarre inconsistencies). I have to have three or four different players installed on Windows 2000 to get that sort of compatibility, and that's ignoring the easier interface and hotkeys in MPlayer.
The hardware side is sometimes easier in Windows, though my experience doesn't exactly completely agree with that. I have a somewhat generic 5.1 sound card with no discernable markings on it. It took me *forever* to find the drivers for Windows 2000, and it was actually Linux (and its "harddrake" hardware manager) that gave me enough clues about the main chips on this soundcard to find out that it was from some C-Media company or something like that. Some time after, I found the Windows drivers and everything went swimmingly. Know how much I had to look for the Linux drivers? They were already there. They. Were. Already. There. When I installed Mandrake 9.0, the sound card was autodetected and autoconfigured. I'll give you that an earlier version of Mandrake (8.1 or 8.2) didn't properly detect the card when I first installed it, but the drivers for it were in there and it was comparatively trivial to tell the computer this (I put the name of the sound card driver module, something like cmpci.so, into some configuration startup text file) compared to the herculean effort to get it running in Win2k.
My TV card used to be an outdated Hauppauge that didn't support scaling past 640x480. I had to guess which drivers it used from Hauppauge.com, and I was eventually successful in Windows 2000. The scaling thing was annoying, but it worked, except that the video capture seemed problematic. A few months later, Win2k went crappy on me, and I had to reinstall it. For the life of me, I could not remember which drivers and in which order I needed to install, and I couldn't get the TV program to work, no matter how hard I tried. So I did it in Linux. The Mandrake 8.x install autodetected, autoinstalled, autoconfigured. And it installed a whole wad of different TV programs that could use the TV card. One of them (xawtv) could inexplicably scale the TV screen to whatever dimension I wanted. I still use that program.
Heck, this past Christmas, my parents bought me an All-in-Wonder RADEON 8500. The installs worked fine on both systems. Unfortunately, I only have a choice of one TV program on Windows, and that program makes the system crash after I try to shut it down. I still have the exact same vareity of TV programs on Linux, and if I wanted to use my brain, I could probably pretty easily figure out how to broadcast the TV image onto my local network.
The USB CD burner that I recently gave up was fun. When I installed it in Windows, the Windows Media Player tried to autoinstall a "CD Burning Plugin" which caused all my CD drives (even the CD-ROM) to disappear (until I got all technical and figured out how to remove the stupid plugin). Mandrake 9 (and 8.2, I think) just installed it. No fuss. It worked on installation.
I think that my newly installed ATAPI burner is easier to install in Windows, but that's because (as I mentioned above) Windows gets the third-party support. I did have to change two or three text files (though I didn't need any installation program) to get this burner working in Linux. I haven't really tested the burner in Win2k, primarily because process management in 2k is sloppy. If I wanted to burn at the maximum speed, I'd have to close *everything* to avoid buffer underruns in Windows. In Linux, I'm simultaneously downloading from usenet, unRARing 800MB mpegs, viewing SVCDs from my CD-ROM drive and browsing the internet. It gives me a little trouble if I -- on top of all that -- run a particularly intensive parity checking program, but I think that this is on the whole better than having to avoid *breathing* lest Windows get cranky and reduce my CD-R media to useless silvery powder.
Granted, linux does have some usability drawbacks. Moving drives around is a big no-no unless you're a learned user. My system forgot where that ATAPI burner went when I recently rearranged some devices. I fixed that in under ten minutes, but it felt like the end of the world before I figured out what was going on. I can't get my Gyration gyroscopic mouse working properly in Linux (I've gotten it to the point that it takes *some* input from this device, but said input is completely incoherent and unmouselike). That one is due to the third-party effect, but it's still tremendously annoying. Games aren't as developed, of course, but that's not really a usability issue.
Damnit, doing things that I *need* to do, system-wise, is totally trivial in Linux. My Millennium II and Marvel G200 half a decade ago could zoom in with a hotkey in Windows, but I haven't been able to do that for years now since that feature is driver-dependent in Windows. Linux does this no matter what video card you have. This is set up intuitively in Mandrake's "please select the screen sizes you want available" install. These aren't things that you should have to reconfigure every time you get a new piece of hardware.
Aaargh, I'm sorry. This has turned into just a straight rant. I know that different people have different habits, but my own personal experience is that Linux is *easier* and requires *less thinking* unless you *want* to be an advanced user, in which case it seems happy to give you the power to be advanced. I can finally do things that maximize my personal productivity. In most cases, hardware and software just works, instead of just works until the blue screen appears. That may be overly mean to Microsoft, and I readily admit that several of their programs are top notch (I've loved products from them going all the way back to Decathlon, a game that Microsoft made for non-Microsoft operating systems!). Excel is great. Access seems strong. I'm told that the "Ages of..." series is phenomenal. MS-DOS Edit was a fantastic MDI editor (and boy was I disappointed when they downgraded to Notepad and Wordpad!). Media Player (well, using the Classic skin since the more recent interfaces have been very clunky) is usually fantastic. But it's still my opinion that Windows isn't inherently easier. The thing that is easier for users is the fact that nearly every company in the universe tailors their hardware and software to work best with Windows. I mean, wouldn't Dodge look unbelievably superior if 95% of body shops only did work on Dodge vehicles?
Eh, I'm done complaining. I may have made it sound like Linux is infinitely superior to Windows, but I was mostly overreacting to what I consider an equally extremist (but opposite) viewpoint. Windows 2000 is "good enough" for me. If there were no Linux, I could probably be comfortable using Windows 2000 for the rest of my life. Unlike the nightmare that was Windows 98, I can usually get Win2k to listen to me in a reasonably reliable manner. I use Linux largely because it prevents the need for me, a poor guy, to steal computer programs from P2P networks. I use free (and Free) software on Linux, and the very knowledge that people do these things to benefit others and not just to win a buck both makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside and compels me to be similarly generous with my gradually expanding coding knowledge.
BTW, there is one area where I will be stubborn: Qt beats any OS-specific class/widget programming package ever. I love, love, LOVE being able to develop and compile applications for Windows, Linux, OS/X, various unix variants and a couple PDAs using OS-native widget sets on a single codebase. So pbbbbllllt!
Note: Hey, neat, I just discovered that I can drag
copied text to my desktop background and it'll
automatically paste it into a new text file. That's rather useful.
-JC
Re:Robbin Hood (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait long enough and I'm sure a script kiddie will do it for you.