Ars is running a story on a new report by IDC (that was funded by Microsoft) that states/shows that $1 of piracy = $5.50 in “lost opportunities”. Cheng argues that just because “every single dollar that…has been ‘lost’ to copyright infringement [can’t] be turned around into a dollar worth of sales” that we should “take this report with about $5.50 of salt.” Should it really matter if each dollar of piracy would actually be a dollar of sales though?

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I don’t know how many of you caught this but yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows 3.11 reached its end-of life. The first comment I saw about it said this “I never heard of a trojan or virus affecting 3.11.  Heck even DOS today would be fine by me.” Was the grass really greener back then though?

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Soapbox is a regular feature where I sound off on various tech topics/products that I’m interested in (or hate). This is just my $.02, so consider yourself warned. This week’s subjects are World of Warcraft, Netflix and Microsoft, and Apple’s marketing are all on the hot seat. Read more

A recent post of mine about Firefox and my general view of corporations and organizations caused a bit of a stir. It even caught the attention of Asa Dotzler, a prominent Mozilla employee. In Mr. Dotzler’s rebuff of my post he said something that has really bothered me. He said “It’s really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they’re actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight.” But are they really subverting it? Where exactly is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the web?

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The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user, and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to see what they are made of. The hits and misses after the jump.

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