Basically the only thing you can do is host your program as a cloud service, with dongles. That doesn't mean you should host users files (depends on what exactly the software does and for whom) necessarily, but core parts of your software should be online only.

Sell or give a away a free 'thin' client, that should always let users open files, convert them to another format, that sort of thing. But any actual functionality should require authenticating with your service.

If you're in the 10k/copy space you can set up the licence keys such that you directly track who has them, and where they're from, and if someone tries to access the software from out of a valid range you can simply block them.

There are a couple of ways you could do it, one is to have the client send data to your server to execute, the other is to dynamically pull down modules of the program as needed, and then clean them up once they finish executing. Keeping the data on your servers is the most secure from your perspective, but the least desirable from your customers perspective. Downloading program modules in real time shouldn't be too hard, but someone really determined could probably grab all of the modules and then disable the web check or redirect it, that's a fairly significant pain in the arse though, especially if you're a legitimate business then you're very clearly working hard to pirate the software, and that could land you in trouble, and anyone illegitimate well, they weren't customers anyway.

They wouldn't be allowed. They very nearly lost the farm trying to spin off globalfoundaries because they have a licence from intel for the x86 instruction set. They don't even make their own CPUs any more, GlobalFoundaries does.

Besides, what evidence is there that the 'open' community of CPU developers would design better CPU's than they already make? There aren't exactly a lot of people out there making CPU's on the side for the fun of it, (whereas there are with software). Designing a modern CPU is a really serious engineering challenge, and anyone with the knowledge and experience to make a CPU probably works for AMD or a competitor already.

Deliberate mild inflation is preferable to deflation, or to pegging a currency to an item which can have wild swings in value based on what other countries do to fuck with its value.

And yes, when I said mild inflation the usually targets of 1-3% counts. The US economic growth just in general is 2-3% if you're not doing horribly, add to that 1-3% inflation and in not too many years debt becomes less of an issue.

Inflation is actually good for a lot of people, so long as it is mild. Anyone with a mortgage at a fixed rate (and for a fixed value) benefits from inflation. Before I was born, when inflation spiked up into the 13, 14% range a lot of people my parents age got exceptionally lucky and bought houses etc. at 6% interest fixed rate. With 13% inflation the relative value of their debt was dropping by 7% a year. Now, banking on that to happen in general is dangerous, and 14% inflation just in general can be nasty.

Not everyones wages decrease with inflation, not even necessarily minimum wage. That's why the minimum wage is revisited regularly. Where I lived it was just recently bumped up to around 10 dollars an hour for adults (Ontario Canada), which puts it back in step with inflation for the last however many years. Anywhere I've ever worked that wasn't on minimum wage you always negotiated your salary increases to be more than inflation or at least equal to it.

The rich aren't hurt by inflation if they own stuff. Especially property. Because they can always just increase the rent. The poor *can* be hurt by inflation, but aren't necessarily.

Precious metals make very bad stores of wealth. That's why we don't do it any more. Pegging your currency to a metal that might be mined somewhere else, or that might suddenly have an increase or decrease in demand screws you.

A flat tax would outright screw the poor, and should be avoided. That's what we did in canada essentially by adding a 7% sales tax to all goods and services (the so called GST). Which helped pad government coffers, and simply served to reduce the standard of living of the poor and increase their debt loads. We suddenly started to look a lot more like the US, and a lot less like a civilized country, and then the price of oil shot up and the whole economy changed.

Depends what you define as a social network I suppose, and in general the question applies to any online service. Do you want to count skype as a social network?

And I suppose the same applies to any online service you need to sign up for as part of your employment. You use your employee information as the basis for it, and you make sure your employer clearly understands they are the ones liable since this is part of your work duties and anything that happens to you, your account, or anything done on the account is their responsibility, excluding the regular limits of what is expressly your responsibility.

Apple running x86 made all the difference. It's like a gas engine on a battery powered car. When you absolutely need something to work in windows you have windows but for everything else you have something else. The 'compatibility' anxiety was gone.

I don't see many students using the unix/bsd stuff on their macs. I'm sure they know it's there. But it's pretty and it's not windows and they bought into that. And then when it comes down to trying to accomplish useful things we give them a windows image with what we want on it anyway.

Bill Gates pushed for tablet technology, and they invested in it. Someone else pushed for netbook technology first and MS invested in it, it wasn't a fear of linux, it was a market they could figured they could make money on, and because customers wanted it. That's how everything works. The thing is, they kept making tablet versions even though it was a pitifully small segment of the market, because they figured it might take off. Oh, and you take notes into a program called "One Note" in office on a tablet. I can't remember if it was around in early versions of tablets, but it definitely was by 2005.

But I stand by my assertion MS doesn't care about linux on the desktop. Servers, mobile phones, sure. But on the desktop the only competition MS has is Mac, and even that's hard to call competition. Lots of places got the brilliant idea to change to Linux desktops, realized users have no f'n clue how to accomplish anything, and changed back (see german foreign office for example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems gives, for 2011, the linux desktop as no more than 2.9%, and that is a single data point, the rest being under 1.57. Microsoft's biggest competitor for the last decade has been their own previous version, with their own mindshare on that version, not Linux. Arguably mac, as apple has, since 2006 when they transitioned to Intel been on the upswing (and it was pretty obvious I think even then that they were ripe for an upswing), and MS took notice of that. But the 1-2% of the market taken up by linux is for people who really care about linux, and they aren't lost windows customers.

I'm in a CS programme outside of the US. And students bring their own laptops, and it's about 50% Apple macbooks now. Most of them actually using OSX.

They made windows XP (and windows 7) for netbooks because it was a form factor to make an OS for. Why did they make a tablet version of XP when they sold almost none of them? Because it was there, and because people wanted windows on a netbook. The moment there was windows on a netbook how many more linux ones sold? Right. Because 1% of the market want Linux home user anything. Netbooks when they started out where (like all new tech) a geeky thing, so geeks were happy with linux netbooks. But the market in general isn't.

You mean Mac and Firefox were credible threats. Linux is in no way a meaningful threat to Windows in the home market (one could argue mac isn't either but it's about 10x the size of Linux).

When you walk into a classroom and half the students have macs, and the other half windows you realize it's exactly what you say: mindshare. Apple has a critical mass of people who will want Apple in the office (assuming these people can ever get jobs). Ballmers microsoft has been poor to innovate, and has done a very bad job PR wise of convincing people of the (correct) fact that Windows 7, and even XP are infinitely better than the BSOD messes that pre windows XP machines were. In a business that iterates as rapidly as IT does you would think consumers wouldn't have these bizarre notions about windows needing a format and reinstall regularly like it did 15 years ago, but they still think like that. MS is slowly starting to realize they should be thinking about the entire experience, and not just the 'windows' part as well. Apple has always done that (not alway for the better, but they try). If you want to improve your computing experience buy a solid state drive. Intel figured that out, AMD didn't. Microsoft understands it, but doesn't do anything about it.

And definitely not when they're making that better performance per dollar by not making any money.

If you want to buy 5000 computers every year how many companies can you buy from?

If you want to buy one computer a year you can build your own for all it matters. If you want 1 computer every 5 years you probably don't have the desire or skills to build your own, nor is saving that small amount of money worth it for a lot of people.

When apply either of those two constraints Dell IBM and HP were the big dogs for a long time, and they were basically in bed with intel. People who don't have the skills to build their own want to buy from someone with a name brand who will stay in business long enough to honour a warranty, and people who want to buy 5000 computers this year are only going to buy from a big outfit, for basically the same reasons, and because there aren't a lot of places that can supply you will 1000 computers by the end of the week. If you're a really big outfit you're looking at buying something like 20-100k computers a year, and when you start talking numbers like that even your acer, asus and toshiba guys will have trouble keeping up.

AMD has the same problem in two different sectors. They had one really good product, and then someone released a better one. In the GPU business AMD will have the best parts for a couple of month then nvidia will come along and take the crown, and neither of them are competing in the high volume business desktop market that intel has (and has gone so far as to put it into the CPU package). For the CPU business Intel has been toying with them for at least 6 years. How do you know that? Because you can overclock an i7 (or a core 2 series) by 30% on air easily. Everytime AMD gets close to matching the performance/watt, performance/dollar or whatever, intel just ups the clocks a bit and boom, they're back in first place. They're basically a full process (die size) ahead of AMD, and they always have been, which gives them a huge advantage. In the GPU business AMD is doing as well as they can, if you look at the steam numbers they're up around 40% of the market. The problem is that the gaming market, which is where the money is on a per unit basis, isn't all that big. nVidia has a revenue of about 3.7 Billion USD, AMD 6.4, and Intel 54. The money is in volume, and AMD can't get volume because their price per unit, per performance, per watt are all just not up to match Intel, yes, Intel was anti-competitive for a while, but they only need to do that for about 4 years to get themselves back out into the lead by a wide margin.

The US federal debt is only 15 trillion dollars. 6 trillion would make a big difference. Of course these are government bonds, so the US government would be obliged to pay them back, er.. something, there's no one to pay if the government has them, but that's beside the point.

With 6 trillion dollars or even half of that, you could get rid of basically all foreign debt the US has. Then your debt would be borrowed entirely from yourselves (which is mostly is now, but not completely). The reason Japan hasn't imploded, despite having 200+% of GDP in debt (compared to the US ~100%), and they've been like that for a decade, is they owe that money to themselves.

Government debt is odd. Especially because it's in a currency you control. Mild inflation, with economic growth and a close to balanced budget deficit makes even big debts like the US has go away very quickly. That won't work for japan because their population is shrinking, and aging, but it will for the US because the population is at least flat, if not growing. But 6 trillion dollars could do a lot of interesting things for the US. Including just cover the deficit for the next 8 or 9 years. (900 billion this year, and progressively less after that, theoretically).