U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.
- The question is, why would telecommunications/backbone providers and ISP's not keep the networks upgraded to keep pace with consumer demand. Could it be because there is not enough competition to give them an incentive to do so? You can bet that if competition was healthy, AT&T would not be saying any such thing, since U.S. network capacity would have been updated to cutting-edge speeds long ago.
Ideally, the 700Mhz wireless auction would have ended with the promise of new competitors, but most of that bandwidth went to incumbents as well, which means in places like my neighborhood in well-populated Los Angeles, citizens will most likely still have only 2 companies to choose from for broadband when 700 Mhz services go live: Verizon (who has a well-earned reputation for having the worst call center customer service) and Time Warner Cable(FWIW, Verizon has announced no plans to even bring FIOS to my neighborhood in West Los Angeles.)
I'm not normally a big fan of litigation, but I do think that class-action lawsuits on behalf of consumers would serve everyone well here, since the FCC and FTC have not been looking out for consumer interests as well as they should have been, on policy decisions affecting the broadband industry over the past several years.
Yes, it's true that some individual people do benefit from business process and software patents, but they do nothing to encourage innovation. In fact, they end up stifling innovation. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it.
There's really not much reason for these major networks to go through iTunes. All of them, including NBC, have offerered significant amounts of streaming content on their own websites for quite a while now, in decent, very-tolerable quality, (usually comparable to that of SDTV or VHS), even if it's not HD. It's obvious that the major networks are not incompetent when it comes to new forms of media distribution. The major challenge for them is protecting their revenue, seeing as how ads make up nearly all of the major network revenue. Although I do agree that DRM is often fundamentally unfair to the consumer (in cases of music and movies, etc. where you already paid for your stuff), I do think that it is approriate for the sole purpose of discouraging average consumers from easily disabling or blocking ads that are used to generate revenue for *free* content.
Google is always getting singled out in these sorts of things, just because they are the popular media darling of the moment. This is really about corporate America, period.
"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."
--- Essentially, the music industry has been operating as a monopolistic cartel for so long, and now they are (relatively suddenly) forced to survice in an environment with real, healthy competition. Columbia is on the right track by using Rick Rubin the way they are, but they (and the other major labels) need to do a whole lot more to save themselves.
I apologize for sounding like a whiner, but apparently the NY Times requires you to input payment information for their "Times Select" feature in order to read Op-Ed articles like this one.
While we're at it, we might as well socialize the whole entire banking industry, so that all citizens have no choice but to use a government account for their banking services! BRILLIANT!!! //End Sarcasm
I do believe they meant post "m-o-d-e-m", since most pages on the "2.0" Internets now require enough bandwidth to make those stubborn "I'll never leave leave my beloved dial-up!" (Most of us know someone like this) users switch to Cable or DSL! Oh, and before you argue - there is no such thing as a "cable modem" or "DSL modem" - those are really bridges or routers.
You've read into that sentence too way deeply. I was referencing the question posed in the title of the original Slashdot posting, "A Working Economy Without DRM?". DRM was created by these major companies with the intent of controlling distribution of their media - part of an overall agenda to control distribution *as well as* the traditional marketing channels, two things which these very few huge media companies have obviously enjoyed a nice grip on for decades. Without these control-tactics exhibited by the media companies, "getting discovered" (e.g. scoring a contract - a lot like winning the lottery, not highly correlated to talent) would be irrelevant, as it should be, in turn creating a more level playing field for the artists.
"I think it would be great if we could support more musicians with decent incomes, instead of the smaller number with insane incomes. Heck, even if there aren't more of them, maybe they'll live longer and make more great music if we don't give them heroin and Ferraris."
This is an excellent point about the music industry. The traditional business model is very inequitable to the average artist. The major record labels say that people are "hurting" these artists by downloading their music. But one can make a very strong, valid argument that by forcefully marketing a select few musicians to the massess, and creating huge barriers to entry to these marketing channels for thousands of other artists who may can be just as good or better, that they have have caused the general population to miss out on all of these other artists out there. This hurts all of these other artists by effectively denying them mindshare.
Getting marketed by a major record label is simple a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and really is not correlated at all to the quality of the artist's work. The same of course, goes for the movie industry where quality does not necessarily equal production costs and or marketing clout. And again, the traditional setup of the movie industry ends up denying access to marketing channels for many smaller independent film producers, making it harder to get the word about their works out to the masses. In short, the RIAA-associated and MPAA-associated marketing powerhouses have fostered an anti-competitive environment at the artist level. DRM-Free media will not ruin the "working economy", but it will create a level playing field for the actual artists who produce content.
Even more seriously though, the problem with this argument is that you are making assumptions based on incomplete information. You mention their salary "compared with" their cost-of-living, although no information about their cost-of-living was given in the article. And also you stated, "I suspect, unreasonably little in terms of possessions"... but what exactly is "unreasonably little"? Keep in mind that some cultures are a lot less materialistic than others, so the perception of lacking "possessions" can vary widely. It's impossible to draw the conclusion that these people have it so bad, based on the incomplete information in the article.
Who says they're not being paid a "living wage"? The term "living wage" is pointless and useles unless you are able to cite numbers stating what exactly a "living wage" would be in a specific region. The difference in scales between global economies and socioeconomic situations varies vastly.
The norms in the U.S., Britain and other places DO NOT necessarily equal the norms elsewhere in the world. They always seem to leave out the fact that the cost of living is extremely low in these places because the consumers are not subject to getting gouged on everything that they buy the way we are here in the Western countries.
Being an "editorial factory" is the whole point of this discussion-based site. The whole point is to discuss and opinionate on the articles, not just restate them objectively. If discussion and opinionating wasn't the point, they would probably just link to the articles and not provide any opportunity to post replies.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe medical residents are typically on their feet moving around a lot. While on the other hand, a (un)healthy percentage of IT workers are relatively stationary, and not making any real attempt to eat healthy.
Video games DO help you react better, I.E. hand-eye coordination. This can be applied to many careers. Although the teamwork and attack skills would not apply, since quality teamwork skills usually come with participation in complex projects, and surviving attacks involves a greater degree of mobility that extends beyond the hands.
$99 a year is a HUGE privilege compared to the ridiculous barrier to entry that has been in place for console game development for so long. I mean, look how much it costs for a PlayStation 2 development kit! (Of course, Sony stays mum about it, not mentioning it on their websites, but according to unofficial sources on the web, it costs approx. $19,000.00(US)!!!). I'm guessing PS3 development has a similar barrier to entry. But seriously, it is about time that they "democratize" game development - especially with news of declining game sales, and people being less satisfied with the overall quality/fun-factor of new releases. Another reason this makes sense is due to the fact that we are seeing an inevitable convergence bewtween the console and the PC (In both technology and price, when you consider the PS3 price-tag!). This convergence makes it less feasible to reserve developer access to an exclusive few. (That last link mentions how the 10,000 Playstation 3 dev kits that were publicized went to only 208 companies!) Of course a company like Sony would argue about the amount of junk that will be produced when accessibility to Platform development is lowered like this, but there will inevitably be some gems produced that otherwise would not have made it to market, making it vastly worth-it. This could potentially give the Xbox 360 a huge advantage over the Playstation 3 in overall marketshare (that's all these companies really care about, no matter what they tell us) AND actually even benefit gamers at the same time.
I believe this is logical and to-be-expected when you look at the fact that a lot of these companies have built their multi-billion dollar businesses around the majority of these operating systems, and companies at that level generally do not like to take risks. One thing that defines "usability" of software is how easily people are able to pick it up without a learning curve. Keeping things the same ( a "tried & true" formula) is one way to ensure that the mass market of non-power users (the ones who usually provide the bulk of revenue $$$) will be comfortable with the software on their dektops. It's human nature to be comfortable with things that they are "used to", and to reject things that they are not comfortable with, even if the new "awkward feature" or "awkward interface" has proven to be a vast improvement over what it replaced.
Slashdot Mirror
U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.
- The question is, why would telecommunications/backbone providers and ISP's not keep the networks upgraded to keep pace with consumer demand. Could it be because there is not enough competition to give them an incentive to do so? You can bet that if competition was healthy, AT&T would not be saying any such thing, since U.S. network capacity would have been updated to cutting-edge speeds long ago.
Ideally, the 700Mhz wireless auction would have ended with the promise of new competitors, but most of that bandwidth went to incumbents as well, which means in places like my neighborhood in well-populated Los Angeles, citizens will most likely still have only 2 companies to choose from for broadband when 700 Mhz services go live: Verizon (who has a well-earned reputation for having the worst call center customer service) and Time Warner Cable(FWIW, Verizon has announced no plans to even bring FIOS to my neighborhood in West Los Angeles.)
I'm not normally a big fan of litigation, but I do think that class-action lawsuits on behalf of consumers would serve everyone well here, since the FCC and FTC have not been looking out for consumer interests as well as they should have been, on policy decisions affecting the broadband industry over the past several years.
Yes, it's true that some individual people do benefit from business process and software patents, but they do nothing to encourage innovation. In fact, they end up stifling innovation. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it.
They are helping the environment by being unproductive at home, rather than going into the office to be unproductive.
There's really not much reason for these major networks to go through iTunes. All of them, including NBC, have offerered significant amounts of streaming content on their own websites for quite a while now, in decent, very-tolerable quality, (usually comparable to that of SDTV or VHS), even if it's not HD. It's obvious that the major networks are not incompetent when it comes to new forms of media distribution. The major challenge for them is protecting their revenue, seeing as how ads make up nearly all of the major network revenue. Although I do agree that DRM is often fundamentally unfair to the consumer (in cases of music and movies, etc. where you already paid for your stuff), I do think that it is approriate for the sole purpose of discouraging average consumers from easily disabling or blocking ads that are used to generate revenue for *free* content.
All Global Corporations is what I actually meant, since not all the huge corporations are based in the US.
Google is always getting singled out in these sorts of things, just because they are the popular media darling of the moment. This is really about corporate America, period.
"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."
--- Essentially, the music industry has been operating as a monopolistic cartel for so long, and now they are (relatively suddenly) forced to survice in an environment with real, healthy competition. Columbia is on the right track by using Rick Rubin the way they are, but they (and the other major labels) need to do a whole lot more to save themselves.
Freedom is a THREAT to national security! //end sarcasm
I apologize for sounding like a whiner, but apparently the NY Times requires you to input payment information for their "Times Select" feature in order to read Op-Ed articles like this one.
While we're at it, we might as well socialize the whole entire banking industry, so that all citizens have no choice but to use a government account for their banking services! BRILLIANT!!!
//End Sarcasm
Hilarious.
I do believe they meant post "m-o-d-e-m", since most pages on the "2.0" Internets now require enough bandwidth to make those stubborn "I'll never leave leave my beloved dial-up!" (Most of us know someone like this) users switch to Cable or DSL! Oh, and before you argue - there is no such thing as a "cable modem" or "DSL modem" - those are really bridges or routers.
Even though they are referring to "gaming" rather than gambling, I for one am still surprised that they found 100.
You've read into that sentence too way deeply. I was referencing the question posed in the title of the original Slashdot posting, "A Working Economy Without DRM?". DRM was created by these major companies with the intent of controlling distribution of their media - part of an overall agenda to control distribution *as well as* the traditional marketing channels, two things which these very few huge media companies have obviously enjoyed a nice grip on for decades. Without these control-tactics exhibited by the media companies, "getting discovered" (e.g. scoring a contract - a lot like winning the lottery, not highly correlated to talent) would be irrelevant, as it should be, in turn creating a more level playing field for the artists.
"I think it would be great if we could support more musicians with decent incomes, instead of the smaller number with insane incomes. Heck, even if there aren't more of them, maybe they'll live longer and make more great music if we don't give them heroin and Ferraris."
This is an excellent point about the music industry. The traditional business model is very inequitable to the average artist. The major record labels say that people are "hurting" these artists by downloading their music. But one can make a very strong, valid argument that by forcefully marketing a select few musicians to the massess, and creating huge barriers to entry to these marketing channels for thousands of other artists who may can be just as good or better, that they have have caused the general population to miss out on all of these other artists out there. This hurts all of these other artists by effectively denying them mindshare.
Getting marketed by a major record label is simple a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and really is not correlated at all to the quality of the artist's work. The same of course, goes for the movie industry where quality does not necessarily equal production costs and or marketing clout. And again, the traditional setup of the movie industry ends up denying access to marketing channels for many smaller independent film producers, making it harder to get the word about their works out to the masses. In short, the RIAA-associated and MPAA-associated marketing powerhouses have fostered an anti-competitive environment at the artist level. DRM-Free media will not ruin the "working economy", but it will create a level playing field for the actual artists who produce content.
Who says that users will not be able to put the music on their portable media players or burn the tracks to CD?
Even more seriously though, the problem with this argument is that you are making assumptions based on incomplete information. You mention their salary "compared with" their cost-of-living, although no information about their cost-of-living was given in the article. And also you stated, "I suspect, unreasonably little in terms of possessions"... but what exactly is "unreasonably little"? Keep in mind that some cultures are a lot less materialistic than others, so the perception of lacking "possessions" can vary widely. It's impossible to draw the conclusion that these people have it so bad, based on the incomplete information in the article.
Who says they're not being paid a "living wage"? The term "living wage" is pointless and useles unless you are able to cite numbers stating what exactly a "living wage" would be in a specific region. The difference in scales between global economies and socioeconomic situations varies vastly.
The norms in the U.S., Britain and other places DO NOT necessarily equal the norms elsewhere in the world. They always seem to leave out the fact that the cost of living is extremely low in these places because the consumers are not subject to getting gouged on everything that they buy the way we are here in the Western countries.
Being an "editorial factory" is the whole point of this discussion-based site. The whole point is to discuss and opinionate on the articles, not just restate them objectively. If discussion and opinionating wasn't the point, they would probably just link to the articles and not provide any opportunity to post replies.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe medical residents are typically on their feet moving around a lot. While on the other hand, a (un)healthy percentage of IT workers are relatively stationary, and not making any real attempt to eat healthy.
Video games DO help you react better, I.E. hand-eye coordination. This can be applied to many careers. Although the teamwork and attack skills would not apply, since quality teamwork skills usually come with participation in complex projects, and surviving attacks involves a greater degree of mobility that extends beyond the hands.
Good point about the other targets, that's what makes me wonder whether the whole "airport-security-beef-up" is more for show than anything else.
$99 a year is a HUGE privilege compared to the ridiculous barrier to entry that has been in place for console game development for so long.
I mean, look how much it costs for a PlayStation 2 development kit! (Of course, Sony stays mum about it, not mentioning it on their websites, but according to unofficial sources on the web, it costs approx. $19,000.00(US)!!!). I'm guessing PS3 development has a similar barrier to entry.
But seriously, it is about time that they "democratize" game development - especially with news of declining game sales, and people being less satisfied with the overall quality/fun-factor of new releases. Another reason this makes sense is due to the fact that we are seeing an inevitable convergence bewtween the console and the PC (In both technology and price, when you consider the PS3 price-tag!). This convergence makes it less feasible to reserve developer access to an exclusive few. (That last link mentions how the 10,000 Playstation 3 dev kits that were publicized went to only 208 companies!) Of course a company like Sony would argue about the amount of junk that will be produced when accessibility to Platform development is lowered like this, but there will inevitably be some gems produced that otherwise would not have made it to market, making it vastly worth-it. This could potentially give the Xbox 360 a huge advantage over the Playstation 3 in overall marketshare (that's all these companies really care about, no matter what they tell us) AND actually even benefit gamers at the same time.
I believe this is logical and to-be-expected when you look at the fact that a lot of these companies have built their multi-billion dollar businesses around the majority of these operating systems, and companies at that level generally do not like to take risks. One thing that defines "usability" of software is how easily people are able to pick it up without a learning curve. Keeping things the same ( a "tried & true" formula) is one way to ensure that the mass market of non-power users (the ones who usually provide the bulk of revenue $$$) will be comfortable with the software on their dektops. It's human nature to be comfortable with things that they are "used to", and to reject things that they are not comfortable with, even if the new "awkward feature" or "awkward interface" has proven to be a vast improvement over what it replaced.