Microsoft unleashes piracy police: Are you safe?
It seems we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but rather one ruled by lawyers. No, it's not the presidential race -- or should I say cases -- that makes me say this. It's something that happened in Virginia Beach, Va., and may be happening today in your hometown.
Do you remember a basic principle of law that says we are presumed innocent until proven guilty? As George W. Maschke pointed out in a brief essay on the subject (see Resources for a link), the heart of that phrase is not about presumption, but the burden that presumption implies. In other words, the burden of proof rests with the plaintiff, not the accused. But even that underlying principle is not written in stone. It appears that you can sign away that protection of law, and of due process, merely by signing a contract with Microsoft.
The story of what happened in Virginia Beach is sure to strike fear and dread into many organizations. Fear and dread are happy partners with Microsoft's global "anti-piracy" campaign; the campaign is orchestrated by Redmond, but mainly conducted by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which acts as Microsoft's private police force.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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Priceless! The 25 Funniest Vintage Tech Ads
My oh my, how things have changed. These 25 vintage tech ads are guaranteed to take you back -- and, in most cases, remind you how truly terrible our tastes once were. Click ahead, and enjoy the shame-free trip down memory lane.
AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.
In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.
On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.
