Well guess what. For certain purposes how an email looks is very important - at least as important as what it says.
Could you possibly clarify that a bit? Because I really can't think of any circumstances, period, where I would consider the appearance of the message to be as important or possibly even more important than the content of the message.
Sales are down since January, hmmm? Gee, I wonder what happens in January... Could that be the month that huge numbers of people who received iPods for Christmas try out the iTunes store for the first time? How about waiting a month and comparing January to January figures before drawing conclusions about a "collapse"?
For reasons earlier posters have done an excellent job of outlining, I'm skeptical about the article and its methodology, but even if they're correct is the situation really a grave concern for Apple? The (barely profitable) iTunes Music Store exists to sell (highly profitable) iPods, not the other way around. As long as iPod sales are healthy (and apparently they're very healthy) the effects of "collapsing" sales at iTMS would be secondary or tertiary concerns for Apple's digital music player business. Apple's big wins from the iTunes Music Store come through FairPlay DRM lock-in and influence in the music industry, neither of which is yet affected by these supposedly "collapsing" sales figures.
You're talking about spending $233,000,000 in federeal funds to build a bridge to serve a community of 7,500 people. That's roughly $30,000 per resident.
I've got good news and bad news on your numbers. The good news is that the bridge will serve almost twice as many people as your number suggests. The bad news is that the estimated cost of the bridge, according to the article today in the Ketchikan Daily News, is now $328,000,000.
How do you justify that, especially when there's a perfectly serviceable ferry that's been in operation for ages?
Beats me. I live here in the community where it's going to be built and I think it's a shameful example of the worst kind of government waste.
The money ought to come from Alaska's state budget. I hope that's obvious. But it's a lot harder to find $223 million in a state's budget than in the fed's. Pretty much the only way Alaska could come up with that money is to increase taxes. There's no way that Alaskan taxpayers would approve a tax increase for such a stupid cause.
You're perfectly right that Alaskans would never consider paying for this "vital" project themselves. Heck, I live in the community where the famous "bridge to nowhere" is supposedly going to be built and I'm sure you couldn't get voters here to tax themselves to pay for 5% of the bridge construction costs. What does that mean when you don't want to pay for something even when 95% of the cost will be paid for by someone else?
Oh, by the way, know what the top story on the front page of the Ketchikan Daily News was today? Apparently the $230,000,000 estimate for building the bridge was off by a bit and they're now saying it will take $328,000,000 to build the bridge they plan on building. Meanwhile about half of the money allocated for the bridge last year is now gone, used to pay for other transportation projects in Alaska after the earmarks were removed from the funding about a month after the first package passed. I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time it's done, we wind up calling it the Billion Dollar Bridge.
Re:Who are they hiding the features from?
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
Who are they hiding the features from? It's certainly not from the competitors - since it's still an open source project..
From the users. They don't want announcement of their new product to kill sales of their existing version until they can clear all that inventory off the shelves.. Never mind that in this case we're talking about an intangible product that's given away for free.. Yeah, I don't get it either.
Actually, I have another theory -- maybe they're intentionally being Jobsian (Jobs-like? Jobsish?) Apparently nothing builds buzz like an attempt (even a half-assed one) to keep something secret. Send a few bloggers cease-and-desist letters, leak a few screenshots, announce a keynote address for a month from now, and buy everyone on the team black turtlenecks and they could really have a hit on their hands, capturing maybe as much as 5-7% of the market!
I've fallen away from the computer gaming world, but while travelling last week I paid a visit to an old college roommate who showed me "Geometry Wars", a $5 download for the XBox 360 that clearly so vividly captured the spirit of the great arcade games of my youth that when I returned to the home of the relatives I was visiting I downloaded it and spent half the weekend playing round after round with my equally-captivated nephew.
Perhaps Kotick is correct that the games which his company are producing are not yet suited for download, but that doesn't mean that nobody's games are suited for download.
Here's the key quote from the article, in my opinion:
However, because costs of development on next-gen platforms are going to hit $10 - $15 million or more, Kotick also sees the industry focusing on games with hit potential (those that could sell a million or more copies) rather than pumping out many more titles that may not perform as well commercially. He's previously spoken about how Activision specifically will focus on proven franchises.
This is exactly the strategy which has, at times, nearly destroyed the music and film industries -- focus only on copying the last big thing and don't spend any effort at all looking for the next big thing. I truly hope a bunch of net-aware $5-per-game upstarts eat their $50-per-megatitle business for lunch. It'd be the best thing to happen to gaming since I don't know when..
Oh goody, a corporate-manufactured "cultural backslash" to a corporate-manufactured "cultural movement". I vaguely remember the days when culture had something to do with people, not just competing marketing departments...
I think you or your lawyers would be well advised to immeadiately contact the ABA (American Bar Association) and talk to them about your situation. The simple fact they cannot produce a client-attorney agreement when a lawsuit has been filed in your name is pretty damning. More then that, their behaviour after the fact is plain out wrong and the ABA may be able to help redress that.
Not a terrible idea but.. the American Bar Association is largely a legal-profession advocacy group and doesn't have much of anything to do with licensing or with punishing unethical behavior. For that you'd want to contact the appropriate department of the state bar association for the state in which the case was filed.
I can have *months* go by without ever being in view of a security camera.
Possibly. I don't know where and how you live. I live in a place which is not particularly a part of the surveillance society and I probably know people in my town who can truly make that claim, though they do it by spending weeks or months at a time in a lumber camp or out at sea among the fishing fleet.
But as your lifestyle apparently includes reading and posting on Slashdot it seems far more likely to me that you simply don't recognize the ubiquity of video surveillance and that you could not expect to live up to such a claim unless you never shop for groceries or gasoline, never stop at a bank or ATM machine for cash to spend, never visit a post office to buy stamps or send a package, never eat fast food, in fact never buy practically anything at all in a retail establishment or visit a government or private office in person for services of nearly any sort.
Dvorak has apparently forgotten all the work that Microsoft put into stuffing Internet Explorer and its components into every unlikely corner of the Windows operating systems. You can't just easily rip that out and replace it with a new browser..
I'm psyched about this. Microsoft and MTV are two of the high-profile music-industry players that I have the least interest in doing business with. If they can partner with Sony and its DRM suppliers and hire a few RIAA execs I can have all the big players I want to avoid in one place for convenient one-stop non-shopping.. Obviously they've hired one of more of the naming & branding consultants whose work I despise, that's a nice bonus..
Seriously, though, it's very nostalgic to see MTV get back into the music business. I just hope they remember how it works, it's been, what, fifteen years now since they gave it up to make low-budget drama programs and reality television?
Personally, I think ISPs are to blame for the lack of security out there. They are the ones hooking DSL and Cable modems out there directly to machines. They should offer cheap routers to their customers.
I work for an ISP, and while I'd love to put 95% of our users behind NAT for their own protection (which wouldn't even require additional boxes, actually, as many of the DSL modems on the market have that functionality built in if the ISP decides to use it) our tech support would never, ever, ever survive the burden from customers who wanted to open an outgoing port on their computer but couldn't because we were doing NAT at their DSL modem.
Philosophically, too, I'm opposed to putting my own judgment above that of my customers (even knowing full well that some of my customers are idiots and many more of them are simply uninformed.) It's not, and it shouldn't be, my place to tell them which IP traffic I think they should receive and which I think they should not. Once you start making those decisions on their behalf it's a very short trip to "I don't think they should be using all this bandwidth for file sharing" or "I don't care if they run Linux, nobody needs to run HTTP service out of their home and blocking 80 will cut down on those IIS exploits" or any of the other BS decisions that some of the obnoxious control-freak ISPs out their force on their customers.
"No country is immune from cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy, said Valerie McNiven, who advises the U.S. Treasury on cybercrime."
So "child porn" and "piracy" makes more money than the drug trade? I don't think so...
Sure they do. Let's use the numbers favored by the RIAA and MPAA, the foremost industry advocacy groups dealing with this scourge of "cybercrime."
50,000,000 American teenagers * $1,000,000 in economic damage per pirated MP3 file made available through P2P filesharing = $50,000,000,000,000, or approximately $10,000,000,000,000 more than estimated 2004 world GDP. Clearly it's a serious problem!
Seriously, though, get used to the idea that sensationalist studies like this often use inflated and unverifiable claims and add them up into highly dubious totals..
The real issue is, how much bandwidth are they actually going to feed you? It's not like they're going to have enough bandwidth to let all subscribers use the full line at the same time...
That's certainly true. But there are other things you can do when you can deliver that much bandwidth to the home.
For instance, I live on an island in SE Alaska, and work for a city-owned telephone company and ISP. We're deploying ADSL2+ even though a handful of customers provisioned at 15Mbps could overwhelm our single 45Mbps link to the rest of the world. We obviously can't let our customers use all the bandwidth we can deliver for data traffic but with the lines in place we can do IPTV (we've got this working and it's pretty nice actually), video-on-demand, VoIP phone services, and other communications services.
It's the "if you build it, they will come" theory of network services -- provide a fat enough pipe and people will find ways to make use of it. Sending IP traffic to the internet certainly isn't the only use people might have for a fast link to the home.
Please don't listen to people like this -- they are completely wrong. Advancement, growth, respect and other quality-of-life factors have a larger bearing on employee satisfaction and retention than sheer dollar value. This is particularly true for older, more experienced staff.
Money isn't, and should never be, the only motivator, but unwillingness to commit money to improve things for a work group is the surest sign that management doesn't give a damn.
And "say it with money" doesn't have to mean only increased wages. Many (most?) of the things you propose companies use instead of money to show their appreciation require money be devoted to improving the lot of the employees -- additional vacation (time is money!), comfortable work environment (chairs, desks, etc. cost money..), training and professional development (money, and oh, yeah, more money..)
So maybe my original summation was a little too terse, but I think my point is still fundamentally correct -- fancy titles and motivational trinkets are hollow rewards and any employee worth having will see through them; many will even feel insulted. I think what employees want most, frankly, is fairness and respect, and that means if you reward your management team with money, comfortable furnishings, or special perks, then you should reward the people who get the job done with some of those things as well. Almost nothing is as destructive to employee morale in the long run than the conviction that they are second class citizens and that leadership doesn't see them as deserving of the same incentives that the management tier enjoy.
I hate to sound mercenary, but if you want your employees to feel valued and appreciated, say it with money. Other gestures can be very nice, but in the end most people come to realize that money is the only metric by which businesses measure value. If the IT department is as important to the revenue of the company as you say it is (which I find a little hard to believe, but let's assume you're right..) then the employees should share in the company's success.
So.. Their business model is predicated upon my willingness to send my original DVD off to be handled by total strangers? Lotsa luck, guys!
Have they ever looked at the bottom of a Blockbuster rental DVD? Sure, most of us on Slashdot rent movies so we can watch them on our television or computer monitors but I can tell you there's apparently a surprisingly large portion of the population that choose instead to, well, I don't know -- use them in their rotary sander or play shuffleboard with them in gravel parking lots or something..
So I might (big if, actually) choose to share some of the crappiest don't-care-if-I-ever-see-them-again, bottom-of-the-barrel, why-on-earth-did-I-buy-that DVDs through a scheme like this but anything that's an enjoyable movie that I can't replace for less than ten bucks? No way! And if that's the only sort of movie many people are going to be likely to share, well how good is this service likely to be?
Some users may decide to upgrade to Vista but I'm not sure what compelling features this has that OS X doesn't..
Do you mean what compelling features besides backwards compatibility with (nearly?) all of their existing software?
There are plenty of reasons to switch to OS X but customers are going to have to choose between a lot of little reasons and perhaps a few moderately important reasons to switch and one big huge whopper of a reason not to.. Such is the power of monopoly lock-in.. I know we all know that at some level but it's such a fundamental assumption that it becomes easy to lose track of the fact that it's not just a law of nature.
And if this is as far as the/. crowd gets to exploring human nature in culture, thats sad. Try some Tolstoy, he had the heights and depths plumbed and gutted out in its honest form before Whedon's grandparent were born.
Who (besides you?) says that's as far as "the/. crowd" goes?
I've read quite a bit of Tolstoy, including War and Peace, purely for pleasure and not because it was required. Except for Tolstoy's heavy-handed exposition of his historical theories in the epilogue, I think War and Peace is a wonderful novel and have recommended it to several friends.
But you know what? I also enjoy Buffy and am secure enough in my tastes to do so without fear of contradiction. I can also enjoy the mathematically precise compositions of J.S. Bach and the insanely cutesy bubblegum pop of the Japanese girl-band Shonen Knife. Learn to deal with it, or better yet, learn not to care at all about what other people like and just live a little..
If you want to talk sad, let's talk about people who are either so uptight or so intimidated by intellectual authority that they're unwilling to praise anything that lacks the imprimatur of the generally accepted canon. There's a big wide world of culture out there and you don't have to limit yourself to just the bits and pieces of it that other people tell you are good. Every single person on Slashdot (except for the people who post the Yakov Smirnov jokes) has a mind, and most of them seem comfortable enough making that mind up for themselves about what they do or don't like. Why bring "should" and "shouldn't" into it?
Slashdot Mirror
Could you possibly clarify that a bit? Because I really can't think of any circumstances, period, where I would consider the appearance of the message to be as important or possibly even more important than the content of the message.
Sales are down since January, hmmm? Gee, I wonder what happens in January... Could that be the month that huge numbers of people who received iPods for Christmas try out the iTunes store for the first time? How about waiting a month and comparing January to January figures before drawing conclusions about a "collapse"?
For reasons earlier posters have done an excellent job of outlining, I'm skeptical about the article and its methodology, but even if they're correct is the situation really a grave concern for Apple? The (barely profitable) iTunes Music Store exists to sell (highly profitable) iPods, not the other way around. As long as iPod sales are healthy (and apparently they're very healthy) the effects of "collapsing" sales at iTMS would be secondary or tertiary concerns for Apple's digital music player business. Apple's big wins from the iTunes Music Store come through FairPlay DRM lock-in and influence in the music industry, neither of which is yet affected by these supposedly "collapsing" sales figures.
Beats me. I live here in the community where it's going to be built and I think it's a shameful example of the worst kind of government waste.
Oh, by the way, know what the top story on the front page of the Ketchikan Daily News was today? Apparently the $230,000,000 estimate for building the bridge was off by a bit and they're now saying it will take $328,000,000 to build the bridge they plan on building. Meanwhile about half of the money allocated for the bridge last year is now gone, used to pay for other transportation projects in Alaska after the earmarks were removed from the funding about a month after the first package passed. I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time it's done, we wind up calling it the Billion Dollar Bridge.
Actually, I have another theory -- maybe they're intentionally being Jobsian (Jobs-like? Jobsish?) Apparently nothing builds buzz like an attempt (even a half-assed one) to keep something secret. Send a few bloggers cease-and-desist letters, leak a few screenshots, announce a keynote address for a month from now, and buy everyone on the team black turtlenecks and they could really have a hit on their hands, capturing maybe as much as 5-7% of the market!
Although any connection with Real makes me feel slightly soiled, I think it's important to resolve some ambiguity in the story write-up.
As I understand it this deal means that you will get Firefox when you download RealPlayer, etc.
It does not appear to mean that you will get RealPlayer when you download Firefox.
The former is slightly scummy. The second would seriously taint Firefox in many people's eyes.
Perhaps Kotick is correct that the games which his company are producing are not yet suited for download, but that doesn't mean that nobody's games are suited for download.
Here's the key quote from the article, in my opinion:
This is exactly the strategy which has, at times, nearly destroyed the music and film industries -- focus only on copying the last big thing and don't spend any effort at all looking for the next big thing. I truly hope a bunch of net-aware $5-per-game upstarts eat their $50-per-megatitle business for lunch. It'd be the best thing to happen to gaming since I don't know when..
But as your lifestyle apparently includes reading and posting on Slashdot it seems far more likely to me that you simply don't recognize the ubiquity of video surveillance and that you could not expect to live up to such a claim unless you never shop for groceries or gasoline, never stop at a bank or ATM machine for cash to spend, never visit a post office to buy stamps or send a package, never eat fast food, in fact never buy practically anything at all in a retail establishment or visit a government or private office in person for services of nearly any sort.
Dvorak has apparently forgotten all the work that Microsoft put into stuffing Internet Explorer and its components into every unlikely corner of the Windows operating systems. You can't just easily rip that out and replace it with a new browser..
I'm psyched about this. Microsoft and MTV are two of the high-profile music-industry players that I have the least interest in doing business with. If they can partner with Sony and its DRM suppliers and hire a few RIAA execs I can have all the big players I want to avoid in one place for convenient one-stop non-shopping.. Obviously they've hired one of more of the naming & branding consultants whose work I despise, that's a nice bonus..
Seriously, though, it's very nostalgic to see MTV get back into the music business. I just hope they remember how it works, it's been, what, fifteen years now since they gave it up to make low-budget drama programs and reality television?
Philosophically, too, I'm opposed to putting my own judgment above that of my customers (even knowing full well that some of my customers are idiots and many more of them are simply uninformed.) It's not, and it shouldn't be, my place to tell them which IP traffic I think they should receive and which I think they should not. Once you start making those decisions on their behalf it's a very short trip to "I don't think they should be using all this bandwidth for file sharing" or "I don't care if they run Linux, nobody needs to run HTTP service out of their home and blocking 80 will cut down on those IIS exploits" or any of the other BS decisions that some of the obnoxious control-freak ISPs out their force on their customers.
50,000,000 American teenagers * $1,000,000 in economic damage per pirated MP3 file made available through P2P filesharing = $50,000,000,000,000, or approximately $10,000,000,000,000 more than estimated 2004 world GDP. Clearly it's a serious problem!
Seriously, though, get used to the idea that sensationalist studies like this often use inflated and unverifiable claims and add them up into highly dubious totals..
Nah.. In use for tftp. However, practically right next door in
For instance, I live on an island in SE Alaska, and work for a city-owned telephone company and ISP. We're deploying ADSL2+ even though a handful of customers provisioned at 15Mbps could overwhelm our single 45Mbps link to the rest of the world. We obviously can't let our customers use all the bandwidth we can deliver for data traffic but with the lines in place we can do IPTV (we've got this working and it's pretty nice actually), video-on-demand, VoIP phone services, and other communications services.
It's the "if you build it, they will come" theory of network services -- provide a fat enough pipe and people will find ways to make use of it. Sending IP traffic to the internet certainly isn't the only use people might have for a fast link to the home.
What kind of EEs are you turning out at that university, anyway?
Money isn't, and should never be, the only motivator, but unwillingness to commit money to improve things for a work group is the surest sign that management doesn't give a damn.
And "say it with money" doesn't have to mean only increased wages. Many (most?) of the things you propose companies use instead of money to show their appreciation require money be devoted to improving the lot of the employees -- additional vacation (time is money!), comfortable work environment (chairs, desks, etc. cost money..), training and professional development (money, and oh, yeah, more money..)
So maybe my original summation was a little too terse, but I think my point is still fundamentally correct -- fancy titles and motivational trinkets are hollow rewards and any employee worth having will see through them; many will even feel insulted. I think what employees want most, frankly, is fairness and respect, and that means if you reward your management team with money, comfortable furnishings, or special perks, then you should reward the people who get the job done with some of those things as well. Almost nothing is as destructive to employee morale in the long run than the conviction that they are second class citizens and that leadership doesn't see them as deserving of the same incentives that the management tier enjoy.
I hate to sound mercenary, but if you want your employees to feel valued and appreciated, say it with money. Other gestures can be very nice, but in the end most people come to realize that money is the only metric by which businesses measure value. If the IT department is as important to the revenue of the company as you say it is (which I find a little hard to believe, but let's assume you're right..) then the employees should share in the company's success.
So.. Their business model is predicated upon my willingness to send my original DVD off to be handled by total strangers? Lotsa luck, guys!
Have they ever looked at the bottom of a Blockbuster rental DVD? Sure, most of us on Slashdot rent movies so we can watch them on our television or computer monitors but I can tell you there's apparently a surprisingly large portion of the population that choose instead to, well, I don't know -- use them in their rotary sander or play shuffleboard with them in gravel parking lots or something..
So I might (big if, actually) choose to share some of the crappiest don't-care-if-I-ever-see-them-again, bottom-of-the-barrel, why-on-earth-did-I-buy-that DVDs through a scheme like this but anything that's an enjoyable movie that I can't replace for less than ten bucks? No way! And if that's the only sort of movie many people are going to be likely to share, well how good is this service likely to be?
There are plenty of reasons to switch to OS X but customers are going to have to choose between a lot of little reasons and perhaps a few moderately important reasons to switch and one big huge whopper of a reason not to.. Such is the power of monopoly lock-in.. I know we all know that at some level but it's such a fundamental assumption that it becomes easy to lose track of the fact that it's not just a law of nature.
I've read quite a bit of Tolstoy, including War and Peace, purely for pleasure and not because it was required. Except for Tolstoy's heavy-handed exposition of his historical theories in the epilogue, I think War and Peace is a wonderful novel and have recommended it to several friends.
But you know what? I also enjoy Buffy and am secure enough in my tastes to do so without fear of contradiction. I can also enjoy the mathematically precise compositions of J.S. Bach and the insanely cutesy bubblegum pop of the Japanese girl-band Shonen Knife. Learn to deal with it, or better yet, learn not to care at all about what other people like and just live a little..
If you want to talk sad, let's talk about people who are either so uptight or so intimidated by intellectual authority that they're unwilling to praise anything that lacks the imprimatur of the generally accepted canon. There's a big wide world of culture out there and you don't have to limit yourself to just the bits and pieces of it that other people tell you are good. Every single person on Slashdot (except for the people who post the Yakov Smirnov jokes) has a mind, and most of them seem comfortable enough making that mind up for themselves about what they do or don't like. Why bring "should" and "shouldn't" into it?
OK, enough troll-feeding for one day..