Actually, no. The reason they are willing to continue to provide the updates to some entities is because of the purchase and support contracts they entered into as part of a bulk purchase agreement. So they offer it not because they want more $$$, but because they are contractually obligated to do so. They'd just as soon give all these companies free updates to Windows 7 (or whatever) to get released from these contracts, which is the reason they are unwilling to extend support, for any amount of $$$, to other people caught in the same situation, but without benefit of contracts adding additional clauses on top of the clauses present in the public licenses themselves.

That's not true. Microsoft will happily sell you Windows to run on anything capable of running it, and Apple went out of their way to support ACPI and SMP tables that are acceptable to Microsoft OS's, even though it required adding some substantial EFI modules, as well as providing driver support for Windows for Apple proprietary hardware.

Apple will certainly not provide Mac OS X for non-Apple hardware; however, this has been upheld multiple times in court cases as being acceptable because Apple does not wield monopolistic power in the desktop computer marketplace. Courts have led exactly the opposite in findings of fact when it comes to Microsoft.

In this instance, we define "market" as "market for desktop computer operating systems".

Agreed; however, the IRS amortization schedule on computer hardware is 5 years - and unlike Windows on PC hardware, Apple desktop computers consist of both the hardware and the software, not just the software running on white-box/grey-box machines. You could make the argument on the basis of hardware only for hardware sold with Windows installed, if it was considered part of the hardware. But again, we have court precedent forcing companies such as Dell and HP to offer white-box/grey-box hardware without the so-called "Windows tax", This means that the software is not subject to the same accelerated depreciation.

Specifically, IRS Publication 544, Chapter 2, under "depreciable business assets".

This is very much a red herring; while Open Source OS vendors and advocates, such as FreeBSD and Linux would dearly love for this to be the case, the problem is actually not with the platform, but with the capitol investment as a lump sum business asset, in software components, such as Microsoft Office and other components which can be assembled together with glue code to implement vertical market solutions.

Microsoft explicitly does not support Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Microsoft Access, or other software on non-Windows Platforms for the use model of implementing vertical market solutions (i.e. neither Linux nor FreeBSD nor Mac OS X have such support).

Further, the software packages of this type from Microsoft are tied to a specific version of the Windows Operating system; that is, you can not take a version of Office intended for use on Windows XP, and run it on Windows 7 or later versions of the Microsoft OS platform. This explicit and intentional tying is monopolistic in nature. Further, the glue code for the vertical market systems previously mentions, *also* will not run on non-XP platforms.

Effectively, this means that Microsoft is leveraging their monopoly position in operating systems - specifically, with regard to the discontinuation of support for XP - into additional sales of non-OS Microsoft products, and to sales of middleware components and development tools. As a necessary side effect, they create a market for third parties to port code they've already written to the new middleware and applications components running on the new platform, without actually providing additional value for the intentional binary incompatibility of the user space code.

So there's more or is a good argument, in terms of what the paper is suggestion, for a third party market for the equivalent of "Autozone" replacement parts/repairs being made to Windows XP systems.

Forced "upgrades" which aren't actually "upgrades", since they don't provide fixes without damaging binary compatibility, are almost always a bad idea.

Not that Apple is completely innocent of this tactic with regard to new iOS versions; they've recently disabled the ability to turn off sync and update downloads happening over the cellular data connection, even though there are usage caps and extra costs to the user if this is left on, and they consistently pop up complaint dialogs when they can't fit the update into the storage on a 16G iPhone, and suggest you delete stuff to make room.

I fully expect for them to get a ration of shit in the courts for this at some point in the near future, particularly on things like older iPhone 4G's, where the over the cell network syncs and downloads have to occur before the phone lets you do anything else - like answer a phone call.

Maybe the new fashion designer VP they hired will do the right thing, and throw some phones against the wall, like Steve would have, until the issue is fixed.

In any case, the Windows XP end of life has been handled very, very badly, and the papers author has some great points, from a legal perspective, given the findings of fact on the monopolistic power by the courts in the Netscape case.

I might agree, if the versions of IE eligible for that treatment also included greater than or equal to 10...

A potentially more interesting example is replacement auto parts, which automobile manufacturers are required by law to stock for 10 years after the last date of manufacture so that owners of the vehicles can repair them or have them repaired by a third party. Since the last ship date for Windows XP was the last contractual date that Microsoft allowed vendors to bundle it with new computers, that would give them about an 8 year support requirement for "replacement parts". Note that the automobile example would apply to the GM ignition switch, which had an engineering change to correct a design defect - and any security flaw is technically a design defect.

I think that the more companies attempt to treat intellectual property as real property, the more that the negative aspects of real property law should be applied to their products.

E.g. if I use your patent, and you don't stop me using it, then I've engaged in adverse possession, and have "established an interest" in the intellectual property which you must therefore allow me to continue to use, just as if my driveway had been over the property line for 10 years, and you didn't do anything about it, or if I'd been parking my car at your curb, and it didn't bother you until I started parking my RV there and blocking your view.

The paper's argument seems to be along similar lines of thinking.

The paper (if you read it) claims that the requirement should be enforced based on the Microsoft having monopolistic power in the marketplace. Apple doesn't wield monopolistic power in the marketplace for desktop operating systems.

If only it were possible to do challenge/response! Using a pre-arranged CERT, so that the drone sends a challenge for each command that has to be encrypted with the shared secret before the drone would accept it!

Oh... wait... it's completely possible.

Clearly, as an app developer, my intended audience is people with the willingness to part with money for my application, which is generally not the people who buy on the basis of price sensitivity.

But even foregoing that, if I develop for iOS, I basically have to tarket 7 platforms, while if I develop for android, I have to target many hundreds of devices instead.

Unless I'm Roxio, and my strategy is to own an app category on all devices, and I can afford it, due to an existing iPhone success, my ROI on developing for android is very low.

Can you identify a single market segment, other than "poor people who have no money to spend on apps" who would be interested in me developing my app for android instead of iOS?

You pick a platform based on market size.

PC's historically have had a lot more software available for them than Macs because you have a larger target market. If you target one platform, you target PC's, unless the market for your application is graphic artists, musicians, etc., then you target Macs. If you target two markets, you target PC's and Macs, and you don't target Linux.

If I target iOS because I have a product that will work on a tablet/mobile platform, then I have the largest possible market. I'm guaranteed a practically forced upgrade to the most recent version of the OS the platform can run, and I'm guaranteed that the device is going to have the same set of sensors and input methods as every other device.

I'm guaranteed that, even though it's not in AT&T's best interests, given their contract model, to not have the carrot of me not being able to run the latest OS unless I re-up my contract, I'm going to get the latest OS anyway, and screw what AT&T wants, and screw their business model, because that's what Apple wants.

For Android, I have to target a lot of versions of the OS; I practically have to target whatever the version was at the time they did the repo code freeze on the android sources, and started the platform port. I have to target different screen resolutions. I have to target different input methods. I have to target different camera capabilities, resolutions, directionality, and so on.

Practically speaking, each android device is an island. Some have a lager market share. If I wanted to target 6 platforms, 2 of them would be iOS, 1 of them would be iOS on iPhone 5 (different aspect ratio), and the other 3 would probably be Samsung Galaxy products (2 phones and a tablet, based on market share).

If you could resolve the android version difference problem, that'd go a hell of a long way toward making android competitive. It would require changing the android development model, and some of the partnership agreements.

Instead, Google is concentrating on forcing branding onto the boot screen, and forcing apps onto the device by default. The apps are a good thing, in general, since they tend to rationalize the user experience, but not the same way the VGA standard rationalized the user experience on PC's: minimally, there should be resolution and aspect ratio requirements for android - they matter a hell of a lot more to establishing an applications base than putting up a logo at boot time.

The walls on Google's walled garden are also rather porous. They are more "We won't let you play with the toys we have" rather than "we will keep the bad guys out". And it shows. It shows that other people can run android app stores, that they do, and that there's a huge amount of malware out there in those place. They show in the balkanization of the market by OEM vendor stores, and by carrier stores.

It's crap that I can buy an iOS device, and get "The Apple Experience" - a uniform thing across all the devices - but that I can't buy an android device and get "The Android Experience" - unless you call a balkanized chaos "The Experience".

So yeah, as a developer, I don't target android unless I'm Roxio and have more money than God to spend on programmers for platforms where I'm going to end up selling 50 copies of the game that everyone has, and then sell follow-on modules on a monthly basis until the cows come home, in order to monetize that investment over a long (I don't care how long; I'm not living hand to mouth, I'm Roxio!) period of time.

So yeah, android has shit apps. Make it a uniform platform, instead of me trying to develop for the Mac and the Apple IIe and the Ohio Scientific, and the Orange Micro, and the TI-99/4A, and the Timex Sinclair Z-8000, and the Tandy CoCo, and the Wang word processing station, and the ... or keep your balkanized mosaic of "Choice, man! Yeah! Choice!" and write your own damn software.

I'm somewhat confused. Yes, it's a success story; how is that a problem? How is it an example of the OP's thesis? How is it in any way applicable to the OP's thesis, given that his thesis involves college students, and these students were, at the time of their success, 2-3 years away from making a decision in that regard?

$30 an hour is actually fantastic for these kids.

They're not good programmers, they're high school sophomores, one is barely old enough to get a restricted drivers license, they don't have enough formal education that they wouldn't be lost in a team meeting where "big-O" notation or "trie" were mentioned, and they wouldn't be able to communicate with their peers effectively, even if it was just over email to avoid the whole ageism thing.

That's $62,400 per year, and even if we split that between two of them, that's $31,200 each, which is 25% more than the college interns with three years of college toward a CS degree were making.

And even divided, it's higher than the starting salary of a public school teacher with a masters in education (because it's required to get the job and the teachers union membership) in the San Francisco Unified School district.

$30,000 / 1000 = $30 an hour. Just saying.

Well, the obvious answer is "move to California"; California courts have invalidated out of state non-competes former employers in other states have attempted to enforce against workers in California.

Practically speaking, unless there's an arbitration clause or a venue clause in the non-compete that sticks it to Massachusetts, there's really very little the employer can do. The recent Atlantic Marine decision on the venu clause strengthens somewhat the requirement that it be part of the signed agreement at the time.

France doesn't have a use for the plutonium because they do not run a sufficient ratio of Pu reactors or breeders to produce the Pu to fuel those reactors.

This was France's answer to the "nonproliferation problem" which Jimmy Carter dealt with by disallowing reprocesseing in the U.S. altogether; this ban has been lifted, reinstated, and lifted again, but in general, it's not worth building something over the period of a decade if it will potentially end up banned again. So we have a plant, we only have a couple DOE operated breeder facilities for weapons grade materials, and the commercial reprocessing plant that was recently just mothballed.

Most of the problems at this point are political, and most of the costs are either protest-driven or redesign-the-plant-while-building-it-driven rather than actually technical.

You're quite wrong. Having worked on secret projects at both Apple and Google, the only thing you get to sign extra above and beyond your original employment agreement, which is primarily a non-disclosure agreement, is layered non-disclosure agreements.

It's actually quite funny, since they bring you an agreement with a project codename on it that you aren't allowed to discuss under your original agreement, and then after that NDA, you are now allowed to learn the codeword for the project you're going to be working on, and you sign an NDA for that project, too.

Very, very rarely you will be asked to sign a vendor or partner NDA, but if you're asked to do that, you are generally compensated for the signing, because it means not working in that area for another company for a couple of years, and the compensation is to pay you for foregoing the opportunity.

FYI, everyone below management director level, including line managers, are "at will", at least in Apple and Google in California, and it's likely the case elsewhere, since some of the work is considered by the Franchise Tax Board to take place in California, if you are managed from California, so California gets to collect income tax on it. The two "Distinguished Engineers" I know at Apple I've discussed it with are also "at will", rather than contract employees.

I'm not sure about the people at director level or above at Apple, or above directory level at Google, since, frankly, the topic has never come up in casual conversation, and generally people tend not to talk about their compensation anyway, unless you are a very close friend or family member.

Generally, both companies rely on options maturation (or RSU - Google calls them GSUs and ties them to performance) vesting schedules to act as "golden handcuffs", rather than contracts. You're generally not a high level contract employee without a parachute (silver or golden).

In case you are wondering, non-competes are also not legal in California, unless the competition occurs as side work during your employment at the company, and generally are not considered legally enforceable in the U.S., unless they continue to pay your salary (plus scaled increases based on past increases, if any were performance related) during the lockout period. You can thank my cousin for this, as he took his non-compete to the supreme court (and yes, they payed him to take the year off at his regular salary to prevent him from going to a competitor).

Cyberspace, William Gibson Style...

It's not actually cyberspace, unless you can torture someone to death there, and as a result, they die in real life.