Except for the fact that it's a business, and in a capitalist system, needs to make money to survive.
So try this math: A movie costs 200 million to produce, say another 100 million to promote.
To make the money they need to make on movies, say, in the modest 200 million range, over 700 million people must see it for one dollar each. That means 1 out of every 8 people IN THE WORLD will have to download that movie for it to be a success.
And that means that only the MOST absolutely successful movies can be made. That will only narrow our (already slim) choices down to pure drivel that must appeal to even MORE people.
It's like the five stages of grief:
1. Denial -- New formats! They will protect everything!
2. Anger -- RIAA! Arrest all the students!
3. Bargaining -- Hulu? Please?
4. Depression -- You are here.
5. Acceptance.
Me thinks he's at stage 4, right now.
BUT just because his entire business is evaporating out from under him because everyone wants his products yet does not want to pay for them doesn't necessarily make him "out of touch."
It's challenging. And at the end of the day someone has to foot the bill. Or, the products need to go away. Unlike an album, movies cost millions and millions to make. As such, the costs just don't lend themselves to being covered with "internet" strategies like micro-payments and such. It's a crazy state of affairs.
And don't get me wrong: I hate all of this RIAA shit too. It's kinda like the stages of grieving.
...when the closest analogue is Mac OSX? I understand that Windows has all of the market share and all of that, but they have, other than some trivial GUI stuff, NOTHING in common. At least OSX and Linux share similarities, like BSD (OSX's base) and Linux.
Look, here's the thing: you can make perfectly fine cables with some cable and a pair of crimpers. I've probably made and tested thousands of cables over the course of my career... I've wired offices, closets, data centers, cages, and of course, my bedroom. I think I've maybe had a small handful of cables failed in that time and it was from the cable being pulled on really hard. Other than that...
That said: If your boss wants to spend money, don't try to disabuse him of his notion. Buy the sweetest cables you can. And make sure to test those too.
Oh, I know I'll get flamed for this but: slick as OSX or even, gasp, Windows, I think not.
I haven't run Linux on a desktop (use it religiously on the server) in years so I downloaded an ISO to see what all of the fuss is about. Install it, it boots. So far so good. Log in, see the desktop and am immediately kicked out to the black loading screen, and back into the login prompt.
Now, I have the skills to fix something like that. A crashing X server or whatever ails it. Does Joe Sixpack? No. From a release engineering standpoint it is pretty pitiful that the desktop is not even usable as I cannot get to it. I've used Macs for years and NEVER had anything like that happen to me. Even the same for windows. After it installs it will at least let you log in and use it. Overstatement of the year. Maybe they should spend less time on making it shiny and concentrate on making it work. That'd be a good enough start.
And look, I get it. It's hard to develop an OS that works on so many different platforms with all kinds of crazy hardware. I get it. Just maybe it shouldn't be billed as "so easy to use." In reality, a problem like this is FAR beyond the skills of average users.
I have to agree here. People always knock on how "pretty" OSX is. Whatever. The OS is actually remarkably free of the superfluous eye-candy I've seen on the Linux desktop. Apple focuses on CLEAN, USABLE design. Every button, every menu seems to always be in the right place and everything does exactly what I expect it to. So there's a gradient on something? So what? Almost EVERY design element of the interface exists for a reason. It's really quite amazing.
I mean, who among us thinks this is actually going to turn out okay? You have the database manufacturer MOST hurt by MySQL now turning around and *BUYING* it. I give it 6-8 months before they come out with a "MySQL Lite" kinda like Oracle Express Edition, which is free, but only works on one CPU and supports like 10 connections at a time.
This is seriously bad news.
And don't tell me about the "fork." There's the thing about forks: a fork is like a militia. It sounds like a good idea, but in the end we all know it won't work. It's more of a last resort kinda thing. A fork only works in the end if one of the forks becomes the standard. If that doesn't happen, well, goodbye to supporting MySQL. Seriously, this is going to be a mess.
Congrats, FBI. As if it weren't hard enough for a small business to make a living, surely losing all of your customer's servers will be a great way grow business.
Seriously. I'm sure Core IP (and all associated C*Os) are shitting in their collective pants about now.
You can set out to cook a dinner with the finest ingredients available and you can either a) make a delicious meal or b) make a steaming pile of crap.
I think that's essentially the deal. Breaking down the hardware is pointless because clearly a Mac and a PC aren't the same thing---though they may share components.
The difference is that many PC designs are ill-conceived, and work, once the components are together, only so so. In laptops, for example, PCs have long plagued me with things as simple as the mechanism for closing the laptop is awful. With a Mac, those things are more thought out and it all just sort of works better together.
As for hardware---who cares. You're not paying for the hardware.
I agree with this. If someone is willing to do your job for less than you are, or is able to do a better job at the same rate, then they should get the job over you.
So what you're saying is that you're anti-union, huh?:)
You know, one thing that no one ever bothered to mention is that they might be leaving BECAUSE they can't find good jobs here. A lot of the kids at the university I went to had to go back to their own countries after graduation, not because they wanted to, they love America. They can't find an employer willing to put up with all the BS that uncle sam requires so they can become citizens.
Barriers to entry never help anybody. Uncle Sam, tear down this wall.
I guess you feel like the 4 or 6 years they spent in the university were too much trouble then, too? Or should we just hand out degrees to anyone who wants them? Of course not. It's the same deal with citizenship. The US doesn't just "hand it over" because it MEANS something. Just like it takes time and energy to get a degree, I think it's reasonable to expect something from those who want to be a part of the most powerful nation in the world.
The thing is, most Mac users I've seen are rabidly loyal to Apple. I don't think Apple will lose much in the way of hardware sales (and might gain some from the people who won't switch now due to some perceived inconvenience, but will also not switch to a clone due to the potential of an inferior product).
Which is right? Only time and seeing the alternative will tell.
...That is until they have to choose between a Mac that is equally powerful (if not as beautiful) as the official Mac for half the price...
Seriously, that's what you have to ask yourself. As a business owner myself, I would never offer "stock" unless it was worthless. The value of the stock is ultimately determined by how the company is set up. Is it an LLC? A Corp? That's what you really have to look at.
Whoever said that stock wasn't worth anything until you get acquired doesn't know what they are talking about. At the end of the day "stock" should entitle you to some sort of revenue sharing. Find out what past distributions to investors have been and then figure out what class investor you will be. And read the find print. A 35% share sounds great until you find out you are a class C investor and get paid after a great many other people do.
Bottom Line: If the stock doesn't pay out on a annual or yearly basis for a significant amount then ask for cash. If they don't pay, walk.
Seriously. If it's been that long and you've had the same hard drive it came with, it's likely time for a swap out. You can get a brand new super fast SATA drive or better yet, maybe even create a RAID subsystem. If you don't care about redundancy, you can't beat the speed of RAID 0. I used to use it on a development workstation and it just made the entire system snappier.
That said, it's probably a physical IO issue, such as the hard drive. I just had a laptop that slowed to a crawl and replacing the hard drive seemed to fix it quite nicely.
One other thought -- I once had to work on a computer that, no matter what I did to it continued to run slowly. We replaced RAM, hard drives, countless benchmarks and reinstalls later the problem persisted. In the end it turned out to be a faulty cable. So yeah, it can be that simple.
Reading some of the posts in here, you get the impression that people think that advertising is the most subversive thing in their lives, next to maybe imaginary mind control from the government...
Look, I used to feel this way about advertising. I did. I thought it was evil, perverse, and damn near solely responsible for the decline of civilization... Until... I started my own business. And guess what? I think about advertising in a *whole* new way. It's not evil. It's a necessity of modern life.
Also, I see a lot of this "advertisers are telling you what to think," "planting answers in your head," etc etc etc. Don't give them too much credit. In working with various largeish ad agencies I've learned that they don't know a hellva lot more about all this than we do. They are flakey communication majors who like to get knackered on long island ice teas after work... They don't have the slightest clue how to achieve these "sinister" ambitions. What they do understand is how to communicate the message of a product or company to people that might be receptive to it. That's about it.
Pandora is a wonderful service and I respect their right to want to support themselves and their company with their efforts.
Uhhhh... Look. I understand this is Slashdot and we like to promote underdog technologies. I get it. Really, I do. But what are you talking about? I've used Opera Mini on two generations of Blackberry phones and it was awful.
Failing the fact that it totally sucks for navigating a page it is also totally impossible to use on any site that uses Ajax or any sort of moderately complex javascript. That might not sound like a big deal until I can't even log into my banking website on it.
Not to be rude, but: have you *seen* Safari the iPhone? I think you are talking about something else.
Don't get me wrong: Opera makes a great desktop browser, but having suffered with Opera Mini on several different smartphones, I am not eagerly awaiting its arrival on the iPhone.
Safari was probably 80% of the reason I *GOT* an iPhone. Finally, a web browser that shows me pages like they *should* look---not horribly degraded pages that are nearly impossible to navigate.
Granted, it's a little silly to not allow the browser, but if I were Apple I'd reject it on the grounds of being a substandard alternative to a great product.
That way, when it fails, you can switch to the paid accounts. Which, BTW --- $2,000? Where the fsck are you hosting? For that price I can get 6 quad dual core servers in the cloud with 8 GB of RAM each. That's A LOT of free accounts.
Maybe if you presented a cost-effective alternative your boss would jump for it?
And PS, Psystar's computers aren't cheap. Sure, they offer a stripped down C-ron processor for 299, with 1GB of memory---is that a deal? I think not.
The only machines they offer that are even comparable to an even an iMac are about the price of an iMac---and that's without a monitor.
http://www.wordhustler.com/ is definitely a singleton... if not because it's a totally useful/unique site for writers, but I think one of the founders is named "Singleton.":p
My point was that you took a quote out of context and presented it to mean something else. Your interpretation of the quote is just plain wrong and I was merely pointing out that your conclusion was illogical, given the circumstances and time period in which it was given.
I said nothing about Socialism, which I don't particularly care for, either.
This idea of "governments competing for taxpayers" is absurd. Life isn't eBay. In real life you, "ask not what your country can do for you" but rather "ask what you can do for your country." And that includes caring enough to help mold things to your liking. And in terms of the Facebook issue, running offshore is hardly something to that end.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying you didn't see Star Trek, or any of the Star Wars movies eh?
Except for the fact that it's a business, and in a capitalist system, needs to make money to survive.
So try this math: A movie costs 200 million to produce, say another 100 million to promote.
To make the money they need to make on movies, say, in the modest 200 million range, over 700 million people must see it for one dollar each. That means 1 out of every 8 people IN THE WORLD will have to download that movie for it to be a success.
And that means that only the MOST absolutely successful movies can be made. That will only narrow our (already slim) choices down to pure drivel that must appeal to even MORE people.
Yeah, just want I want. More homogenous movies.
It's like the five stages of grief:
1. Denial -- New formats! They will protect everything!
2. Anger -- RIAA! Arrest all the students!
3. Bargaining -- Hulu? Please?
4. Depression -- You are here.
5. Acceptance.
Me thinks he's at stage 4, right now.
BUT just because his entire business is evaporating out from under him because everyone wants his products yet does not want to pay for them doesn't necessarily make him "out of touch."
It's challenging. And at the end of the day someone has to foot the bill. Or, the products need to go away. Unlike an album, movies cost millions and millions to make. As such, the costs just don't lend themselves to being covered with "internet" strategies like micro-payments and such. It's a crazy state of affairs.
And don't get me wrong: I hate all of this RIAA shit too. It's kinda like the stages of grieving.
here's the correct one: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/
...when the closest analogue is Mac OSX? I understand that Windows has all of the market share and all of that, but they have, other than some trivial GUI stuff, NOTHING in common. At least OSX and Linux share similarities, like BSD (OSX's base) and Linux.
Look, here's the thing: you can make perfectly fine cables with some cable and a pair of crimpers. I've probably made and tested thousands of cables over the course of my career... I've wired offices, closets, data centers, cages, and of course, my bedroom. I think I've maybe had a small handful of cables failed in that time and it was from the cable being pulled on really hard. Other than that...
That said: If your boss wants to spend money, don't try to disabuse him of his notion. Buy the sweetest cables you can. And make sure to test those too.
As this article is TALKING about Ubuntu 9.04, yes, that's what it was.
Oh, I know I'll get flamed for this but: slick as OSX or even, gasp, Windows, I think not.
I haven't run Linux on a desktop (use it religiously on the server) in years so I downloaded an ISO to see what all of the fuss is about. Install it, it boots. So far so good. Log in, see the desktop and am immediately kicked out to the black loading screen, and back into the login prompt.
Now, I have the skills to fix something like that. A crashing X server or whatever ails it. Does Joe Sixpack? No. From a release engineering standpoint it is pretty pitiful that the desktop is not even usable as I cannot get to it. I've used Macs for years and NEVER had anything like that happen to me. Even the same for windows. After it installs it will at least let you log in and use it. Overstatement of the year. Maybe they should spend less time on making it shiny and concentrate on making it work. That'd be a good enough start.
And look, I get it. It's hard to develop an OS that works on so many different platforms with all kinds of crazy hardware. I get it. Just maybe it shouldn't be billed as "so easy to use." In reality, a problem like this is FAR beyond the skills of average users.
I have to agree here. People always knock on how "pretty" OSX is. Whatever. The OS is actually remarkably free of the superfluous eye-candy I've seen on the Linux desktop. Apple focuses on CLEAN, USABLE design. Every button, every menu seems to always be in the right place and everything does exactly what I expect it to. So there's a gradient on something? So what? Almost EVERY design element of the interface exists for a reason. It's really quite amazing.
I mean, who among us thinks this is actually going to turn out okay? You have the database manufacturer MOST hurt by MySQL now turning around and *BUYING* it. I give it 6-8 months before they come out with a "MySQL Lite" kinda like Oracle Express Edition, which is free, but only works on one CPU and supports like 10 connections at a time.
This is seriously bad news.
And don't tell me about the "fork." There's the thing about forks: a fork is like a militia. It sounds like a good idea, but in the end we all know it won't work. It's more of a last resort kinda thing. A fork only works in the end if one of the forks becomes the standard. If that doesn't happen, well, goodbye to supporting MySQL. Seriously, this is going to be a mess.
Congrats, FBI. As if it weren't hard enough for a small business to make a living, surely losing all of your customer's servers will be a great way grow business.
Seriously. I'm sure Core IP (and all associated C*Os) are shitting in their collective pants about now.
You can set out to cook a dinner with the finest ingredients available and you can either a) make a delicious meal or b) make a steaming pile of crap.
I think that's essentially the deal. Breaking down the hardware is pointless because clearly a Mac and a PC aren't the same thing---though they may share components.
The difference is that many PC designs are ill-conceived, and work, once the components are together, only so so. In laptops, for example, PCs have long plagued me with things as simple as the mechanism for closing the laptop is awful. With a Mac, those things are more thought out and it all just sort of works better together.
As for hardware---who cares. You're not paying for the hardware.
I agree with this. If someone is willing to do your job for less than you are, or is able to do a better job at the same rate, then they should get the job over you.
So what you're saying is that you're anti-union, huh? :)
You know, one thing that no one ever bothered to mention is that they might be leaving BECAUSE they can't find good jobs here. A lot of the kids at the university I went to had to go back to their own countries after graduation, not because they wanted to, they love America. They can't find an employer willing to put up with all the BS that uncle sam requires so they can become citizens. Barriers to entry never help anybody. Uncle Sam, tear down this wall.
I guess you feel like the 4 or 6 years they spent in the university were too much trouble then, too? Or should we just hand out degrees to anyone who wants them? Of course not. It's the same deal with citizenship. The US doesn't just "hand it over" because it MEANS something. Just like it takes time and energy to get a degree, I think it's reasonable to expect something from those who want to be a part of the most powerful nation in the world.
The thing is, most Mac users I've seen are rabidly loyal to Apple. I don't think Apple will lose much in the way of hardware sales (and might gain some from the people who won't switch now due to some perceived inconvenience, but will also not switch to a clone due to the potential of an inferior product).
Which is right? Only time and seeing the alternative will tell.
...That is until they have to choose between a Mac that is equally powerful (if not as beautiful) as the official Mac for half the price...
They must know my demographic!
Seriously, that's what you have to ask yourself. As a business owner myself, I would never offer "stock" unless it was worthless. The value of the stock is ultimately determined by how the company is set up. Is it an LLC? A Corp? That's what you really have to look at.
Whoever said that stock wasn't worth anything until you get acquired doesn't know what they are talking about. At the end of the day "stock" should entitle you to some sort of revenue sharing. Find out what past distributions to investors have been and then figure out what class investor you will be. And read the find print. A 35% share sounds great until you find out you are a class C investor and get paid after a great many other people do.
Bottom Line: If the stock doesn't pay out on a annual or yearly basis for a significant amount then ask for cash. If they don't pay, walk.
Seriously. If it's been that long and you've had the same hard drive it came with, it's likely time for a swap out. You can get a brand new super fast SATA drive or better yet, maybe even create a RAID subsystem. If you don't care about redundancy, you can't beat the speed of RAID 0. I used to use it on a development workstation and it just made the entire system snappier.
That said, it's probably a physical IO issue, such as the hard drive. I just had a laptop that slowed to a crawl and replacing the hard drive seemed to fix it quite nicely.
One other thought -- I once had to work on a computer that, no matter what I did to it continued to run slowly. We replaced RAM, hard drives, countless benchmarks and reinstalls later the problem persisted. In the end it turned out to be a faulty cable. So yeah, it can be that simple.
Reading some of the posts in here, you get the impression that people think that advertising is the most subversive thing in their lives, next to maybe imaginary mind control from the government...
Look, I used to feel this way about advertising. I did. I thought it was evil, perverse, and damn near solely responsible for the decline of civilization... Until... I started my own business. And guess what? I think about advertising in a *whole* new way. It's not evil. It's a necessity of modern life.
Also, I see a lot of this "advertisers are telling you what to think," "planting answers in your head," etc etc etc. Don't give them too much credit. In working with various largeish ad agencies I've learned that they don't know a hellva lot more about all this than we do. They are flakey communication majors who like to get knackered on long island ice teas after work... They don't have the slightest clue how to achieve these "sinister" ambitions. What they do understand is how to communicate the message of a product or company to people that might be receptive to it. That's about it.
Pandora is a wonderful service and I respect their right to want to support themselves and their company with their efforts.
Uhhhh... Look. I understand this is Slashdot and we like to promote underdog technologies. I get it. Really, I do. But what are you talking about? I've used Opera Mini on two generations of Blackberry phones and it was awful.
Failing the fact that it totally sucks for navigating a page it is also totally impossible to use on any site that uses Ajax or any sort of moderately complex javascript. That might not sound like a big deal until I can't even log into my banking website on it.
Not to be rude, but: have you *seen* Safari the iPhone? I think you are talking about something else.
Don't get me wrong: Opera makes a great desktop browser, but having suffered with Opera Mini on several different smartphones, I am not eagerly awaiting its arrival on the iPhone.
Safari was probably 80% of the reason I *GOT* an iPhone. Finally, a web browser that shows me pages like they *should* look---not horribly degraded pages that are nearly impossible to navigate.
Granted, it's a little silly to not allow the browser, but if I were Apple I'd reject it on the grounds of being a substandard alternative to a great product.
That way, when it fails, you can switch to the paid accounts. Which, BTW --- $2,000? Where the fsck are you hosting? For that price I can get 6 quad dual core servers in the cloud with 8 GB of RAM each. That's A LOT of free accounts.
Maybe if you presented a cost-effective alternative your boss would jump for it?
And PS, Psystar's computers aren't cheap. Sure, they offer a stripped down C-ron processor for 299, with 1GB of memory---is that a deal? I think not. The only machines they offer that are even comparable to an even an iMac are about the price of an iMac---and that's without a monitor.
http://www.wordhustler.com/ is definitely a singleton... if not because it's a totally useful/unique site for writers, but I think one of the founders is named "Singleton." :p
My point was that you took a quote out of context and presented it to mean something else. Your interpretation of the quote is just plain wrong and I was merely pointing out that your conclusion was illogical, given the circumstances and time period in which it was given.
I said nothing about Socialism, which I don't particularly care for, either.
This idea of "governments competing for taxpayers" is absurd. Life isn't eBay. In real life you, "ask not what your country can do for you" but rather "ask what you can do for your country." And that includes caring enough to help mold things to your liking. And in terms of the Facebook issue, running offshore is hardly something to that end.