One: Money. Macs (until very recently) are a cost prohibitive proposition.
Two: Ease of use. Linux was (until very recently) too hard for the average user to maintain and install.
Three: We *like* a monopoly. Flame away kids, bu its true. We like being able to share files. We like being able to share software (illegally, but nevertheless). We like speaking a common tongue. And yes, Linux could be that. But right now, its not.
But the legal system has protected (rightly so) civil liberties and rights to privacy above all else, leaving the RIAA with no other room to move.
The reality on the ground is that millions of dollars are being stolen every day. (Whether or not you agree that a song downloaded actually represents a sale lost not withstanding).
There *is* a legal transgression that is taking place daily and it is impacting the industry in an enormous way. The courts have sided almost exclusively with the consumer (thankfully we haven't started to lose that many civil rights yet), and the RIAA has only one course of action left open to it: lawsuits.
As I understand it though, the RIAA has constructed a "repent" clause in to all of their suits which gives you a get-out-of-jail free card in return for a signed promise of non-recidivism.
So your point about requiring innocent people to spend money on lawyers (unless I'm wrong, and its been a while since I looked into this) seems like only part of the story.
Yeah, "if it wasn't for the record labels all musicians would be making a really great living". Blah blah... You sound like every other whiner living in Brooklyn struggling with a band that sucks and blaming it on the "industry, man".
Quit your juevenile uneducated whining.
Who are the 'real' artists? The ones *you* like I guess?
In every century before this one, musicians were broke. And so were artists.
Its the media companies that *made* this a business. Removing them from the picture doesn't create a more equitable distribution of entertainment dollars, it removes the dollars altogether.
God sometimes Slashdot is so full of whiners it kills me.
Next youre going to tell me that if Nike and Adidas would go away, we could go to stores and buy 'real' shoes from 'real' cobblers.
Mmmm...Yeah... I hear you Mr. Stalin. Mistakes of "this magnitude" (huh?!) should absolutely as you say, result in one losing one's constitutional rights legal action and representation.
<whisper>
Psst...Between you and me I think we should kill the people involved. And we should send their families someplace cold and miserable. Are you with me?
I love this effort to discredit all file-sharing suits by pointing out the few that are off-target.
"Look, see how dumb and evil the RIAA is? They're suing dead old women?"
Please. The same errors occur with IRS tax suits, electricity bills, lottery winnings, and anything else that involves identity and is executed by a large beaurocracy. What's the point of this idiotic story? If you haven't figured it out its an effort to discredit and vilify the the big evil RIAA (who has an extraordinarily legitimate case).
Remember kids: Capitalism bad. Socialist free information good. No one needs to get paid. Money = evil. Free entertainment is our birthright! Yar!
With all *what* hype? Given that Microsoft is one of the biggest, richest companies in the world, I'd have to say the launch of Microsoft Search was sort of pathetic.
Ask Excite, or Lycos for that matter -- if you want to make a splash in a tightly consolidated industry like Search, you're going to need to spend serious cash. In my opinion Microsoft underestimated. I'll put money on the fact that Microsoft Search wins over a pathetically small number of users.
I'd also put money on the fact that it won't ultimately matter, because Microsoft will win (like it always does) through bundling and leveraging their monopoly.
But as far as "Hype" surrounding the launch, I'd say it went off with a sputter.
The fact is 'Search Engine Optimization' through link-farms or what have you is an extremely easy practice to put an end to.
If Yahoo! or Google really cared about abuse they would spot-check for abusive practices. Abusers would be penalized by having their listings completely removed for 6 months to a year, or fixed to a deep ranking-level for a period of time.
Furthermore, Yahoo! or Google could crossreference all sites appearing on linkfarms and reduce page rankings for all of them.
The reality is that Yahoo! and Google do little in the way of deterring these practices. Their algorithms don't change all that frequently and pratices that distorted rankings over a year ago are still working well today.
One question I have theough is how cost effective are SEO rates with the known-quantity of keyword buys on AdWords and Overture?
Microsoft Desktop Search and MSN Search are seamlessly combined and are available on the taskbar at all times.
Prediction 2: The Google lawsuit against bundling and for inclusion of Google Desktop Search / Web Search with Longhorn is already in the works. (Same will apply for GMail vs. Longhorn bundled Desktop-Hotmail access).
The media-player lawsuit was nothing compared to this one...
Google has a proven track record and there's no reason to think that its not going to remain successful.
Wow. I can't think of a platform on shakier ground. You think Google has a proven track record and has no reason NOT to be successful??!??
Good lord man... its market cap is higher than GM. Its P/E ratio is hilariously bad. Its got no secret formula... in fact its got nothing but brand and capital. And now its just announced that its going to reward internal promising (dot com) projects to the tune of millions.
If you're an investor I wish you luck.
Just tell me one thing. Why is Google going to be more successful than Yahoo!.
Yahoo doesn't shirk from more profitable revenue streams of image advertising and shopping. Google has a zero-revenue ("froogle") shopping site, a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot advertising strategy and nothing but a fast search. (If you think it can't be toppled you're flat wrong).
The only smart move Google could make right now is to hedge its technology earned capital against real world assets.
This isn't a troll. Google is a dot-com era company. Its earnings in no way justify its pricetag. What's amazing is that people are being fooled again...
The bubble taught us all a couple things: Internet companies are not inherently more profitable. They are certainly not a "new paradigm".
Got cash in the bank? Ok, sure make acquisitions. But don't become a dot-bomb rollup. Buy brick and mortar companies too.
Rewarding internal (essentially "dot-com") projects, is a bit like valuing dot com companies in an even *more* dangerous way: without the input of the marketplace.
Seems a little scary.
Lets hope they reward *profitable* internal projects. Not ones with "potential".
Is this anything new? At this point in time haven't most multi-billion dollar companies devised employee-incentive and bonus systems? Typically these systems are more downplayed though. It seems as if Google is doing a lot more waving of the carrot.
This confuses me a little. Why wave the carrot more?
Is the message that Google is prepared to pay *more* handsomely? Is employee retention difficult for Google? (Are they losing their good people to start-ups?) Is the message that Google is on the warpath for new ideas in the wake of Microsoft Search and therefore needs to wave the carrot more?
Or could it be that there's a little post-IPO depression setting in over there? (Maybe the vibe is that the party is over and the payoffs that were going to happen, already did).
Agreed 100%... all the more reason that space exploration *must* be wrested away from government beaurocracy. Government (any government) is horribly bad at technology and bad at speed. To allow government to maintain a monopoly on a field requiring both those things is to doom our progress.
Unfortunately corporate America is bad at anything where there's no profit motive. So the question is -- what's the profit motive for space exploration?
With all the incredible science, video games, nanotech, astrophysics, ip, genomics, sci-fi, communications and other geek culture issues we could be talking about... why on earth is Apple featured so heavily on/.
The only way to save TiVO is to go to the one dark place that the Cable and Sattelite company DVR's won't go. What does every consumer want? Simple: They want "TiVo-meets-Kazaa". In other words they want to be able to search *other people's* TiVO's for the shows they didn't record, or didn't have access to.
But there are two problems TiVO faces if it wants to give consumers what they really want:
1) NBC is a major shareholder of TiVO. (this is the minor of the two problems)
2) (big problem:) Its a legal quagmire. Unlike typical filesharing applications which argue that there are "legitimate uses" of their networks, a P2P add-on for TiVO would have very few legitimate uses since 99.9999% of the content recorded is protected by copyright.
So how does TiVO, whose hands are tied by investor loyalty and potential legal pitfalls -- turn itself into the "killer app" of the DVR world? Easy...You Opensource it. Guess which hack everyone's going to add-on to their TiVO's first?
But respected as journalism? Please. They're the FOX News of the Middle East. What's sad is that they *think* they're really "free press" because everything else in the region is "less free".
Al Jazeera is as biased as they come. I went to see "Control Room" with some friends of mine, and we laughed the whole way through it. Unbelievable propaganda. (They even put a girl on the poster! Hah! Unbelievable).
Look at the size of the original orbital capsules. Excape capsules could be created that take up 1/2 the space, could survive re-entry, and easily fit within the cargo area. Wouldn't that be much cheaper than a sister shuttle at the ready?
The culprit here is the USPTO. The ease of getting a patent approved by the USPTO is shockingly easy. (I'm sure that comment will get me flamed by all the patent-lawyers reading this). But patents should be above all things: extremely rare.
Innovation occurs in parallel. Period.
Its almost time for a class action suit against the USPTO.
Open message to Sony, Nintendo and Xbox: Stop telling us what the chipset is capable of, and start telling us what you're going to do to encourage high-quality development for your platforms.
The Xbox was ultimately a poor investment for anyone who bought it. Sure Halo's 1&2 are system sellers. But then what? There were scant few good titles for Xbox.
Now Xbox and PS2 will be featuring variations of IBM's "Cell-based" computing chipset. Has *anyone* mentioned what its going to take to code for these things? No. Why? Because its going to be like drinking sand. Everythings about polygons per second, antialiasing, etc. Its what investors want to hear. But gamers want to hear about titles -- and that's it.
At the end of the day, what I really want as a consumer is the platform with the "most best" games. Developers want something different though: they are going to choose their platforms based on market size and a time & risk based assessment for building products. (And market size will be determined by quality titles which goes back to time & risk). The potential for Eye-candy will be a secondary factor.
I'm hoping we see the evangelizing begin at e3 -- not to consumers, not to the press, but to developers. Only that will ultimately decide the winning platform.
How Ironic that 25 years later I find myself once again thinking: "God its really incredible that Battlestar Galactica might have a more compelling storyline than Star Wars, and they spent a fraction of the pricetag."
Actually, it wasn't really true back then. Star Wars ultimately proved to have a far more enduring and compelling storyline. This time around however -- things have changed. There's no comparison. BG's storyline is infinitely superior to episodes 4-6.
Just goes to show you George, all the special effects in the world can't top a well written script.
Why Why WHY!?! Why are you writing "political drama"?
Why is that good?
I can't help reading the clearly written, simple crawlers from the 4-6 trilogy and wondering how on earth the same person could have written the confused, uninteresting plots of the 1-3 trilogy.
Considering I spent decades of my life being a Star Wars freak... I'm hilariously uninterested in seeing this drivel.
Slashdot (in this posting) links to the offending website. And since Slashdot *knows* full well that this kid is linking to copyrighted works -- what then is Slashdot's liability?
Or let's take this better example: Last week the Wall Street Journal Online ran a story on Russian MP3 sites that charge.05 per track. The story's intent was to highlight the problems faced by iTunes, Real and other legitimate online saleschannels for copyrighted audio files. In effect what the story did though, was tell me where to find cheap high-quality music.
What is the liability for the Wall Street Journal under this Norwegian law? Effectively the WSJ *also* linked to illegal music (thousands of files in this case).
I think its just a "star". The reason we're talking about it is because it was a "small moon" 20 years ago, so its growth has been stunning.
But now its another company. Its earnings are good, but not wonderful. Its products are good, but not wonderful. Its growth is good, but not wonderful. (So the black-hole / supernova thing probably doesn't apply). What it does have insane amounts of is cash. So its also not a star that's going to run out of fuel any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
One: Money. Macs (until very recently) are a cost prohibitive proposition.
Two: Ease of use. Linux was (until very recently) too hard for the average user to maintain and install.
Three: We *like* a monopoly. Flame away kids, bu its true. We like being able to share files. We like being able to share software (illegally, but nevertheless). We like speaking a common tongue. And yes, Linux could be that. But right now, its not.
I hear you. That's a valid point.
But the legal system has protected (rightly so) civil liberties and rights to privacy above all else, leaving the RIAA with no other room to move.
The reality on the ground is that millions of dollars are being stolen every day. (Whether or not you agree that a song downloaded actually represents a sale lost not withstanding).
There *is* a legal transgression that is taking place daily and it is impacting the industry in an enormous way. The courts have sided almost exclusively with the consumer (thankfully we haven't started to lose that many civil rights yet), and the RIAA has only one course of action left open to it: lawsuits.
As I understand it though, the RIAA has constructed a "repent" clause in to all of their suits which gives you a get-out-of-jail free card in return for a signed promise of non-recidivism.
So your point about requiring innocent people to spend money on lawyers (unless I'm wrong, and its been a while since I looked into this) seems like only part of the story.
Yeah, "if it wasn't for the record labels all musicians would be making a really great living". Blah blah... You sound like every other whiner living in Brooklyn struggling with a band that sucks and blaming it on the "industry, man".
Quit your juevenile uneducated whining.
Who are the 'real' artists? The ones *you* like I guess?
In every century before this one, musicians were broke. And so were artists.
Its the media companies that *made* this a business. Removing them from the picture doesn't create a more equitable distribution of entertainment dollars, it removes the dollars altogether.
God sometimes Slashdot is so full of whiners it kills me.
Next youre going to tell me that if Nike and Adidas would go away, we could go to stores and buy 'real' shoes from 'real' cobblers.
How old are you?
I love this effort to discredit all file-sharing suits by pointing out the few that are off-target.
"Look, see how dumb and evil the RIAA is? They're suing dead old women?"
Please. The same errors occur with IRS tax suits, electricity bills, lottery winnings, and anything else that involves identity and is executed by a large beaurocracy. What's the point of this idiotic story? If you haven't figured it out its an effort to discredit and vilify the the big evil RIAA (who has an extraordinarily legitimate case).
Remember kids: Capitalism bad. Socialist free information good. No one needs to get paid. Money = evil. Free entertainment is our birthright! Yar!
Hey.. why are there nothing but reruns on?
I would question the question.
With all *what* hype? Given that Microsoft is one of the biggest, richest companies in the world, I'd have to say the launch of Microsoft Search was sort of pathetic.
Ask Excite, or Lycos for that matter -- if you want to make a splash in a tightly consolidated industry like Search, you're going to need to spend serious cash. In my opinion Microsoft underestimated. I'll put money on the fact that Microsoft Search wins over a pathetically small number of users.
I'd also put money on the fact that it won't ultimately matter, because Microsoft will win (like it always does) through bundling and leveraging their monopoly.
But as far as "Hype" surrounding the launch, I'd say it went off with a sputter.
My two cents.
Can we all agree that "Force Feedback" is a way better name?
I'm pretty sure "Haptic Joysticks" are never going to sound cool.
The fact is 'Search Engine Optimization' through link-farms or what have you is an extremely easy practice to put an end to.
If Yahoo! or Google really cared about abuse they would spot-check for abusive practices. Abusers would be penalized by having their listings completely removed for 6 months to a year, or fixed to a deep ranking-level for a period of time.
Furthermore, Yahoo! or Google could crossreference all sites appearing on linkfarms and reduce page rankings for all of them.
The reality is that Yahoo! and Google do little in the way of deterring these practices. Their algorithms don't change all that frequently and pratices that distorted rankings over a year ago are still working well today.
One question I have theough is how cost effective are SEO rates with the known-quantity of keyword buys on AdWords and Overture?
Prediction 1:
Microsoft Desktop Search and MSN Search are seamlessly combined and are available on the taskbar at all times.
Prediction 2:
The Google lawsuit against bundling and for inclusion of Google Desktop Search / Web Search with Longhorn is already in the works. (Same will apply for GMail vs. Longhorn bundled Desktop-Hotmail access).
The media-player lawsuit was nothing compared to this one...
Google has a proven track record and there's no reason to think that its not going to remain successful.
Wow. I can't think of a platform on shakier ground. You think Google has a proven track record and has no reason NOT to be successful??!??
Good lord man
If you're an investor I wish you luck.
Just tell me one thing. Why is Google going to be more successful than Yahoo!.
Yahoo doesn't shirk from more profitable revenue streams of image advertising and shopping. Google has a zero-revenue ("froogle") shopping site, a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot advertising strategy and nothing but a fast search. (If you think it can't be toppled you're flat wrong).
The only smart move Google could make right now is to hedge its technology earned capital against real world assets.
This isn't a troll. Google is a dot-com era company. Its earnings in no way justify its pricetag. What's amazing is that people are being fooled again...
Google should learn from the past.
The bubble taught us all a couple things: Internet companies are not inherently more profitable. They are certainly not a "new paradigm".
Got cash in the bank? Ok, sure make acquisitions. But don't become a dot-bomb rollup. Buy brick and mortar companies too.
Rewarding internal (essentially "dot-com") projects, is a bit like valuing dot com companies in an even *more* dangerous way: without the input of the marketplace.
Seems a little scary.
Lets hope they reward *profitable* internal projects. Not ones with "potential".
Is this anything new? At this point in time haven't most multi-billion dollar companies devised employee-incentive and bonus systems? Typically these systems are more downplayed though. It seems as if Google is doing a lot more waving of the carrot.
This confuses me a little. Why wave the carrot more?
Is the message that Google is prepared to pay *more* handsomely? Is employee retention difficult for Google? (Are they losing their good people to start-ups?) Is the message that Google is on the warpath for new ideas in the wake of Microsoft Search and therefore needs to wave the carrot more?
Or could it be that there's a little post-IPO depression setting in over there? (Maybe the vibe is that the party is over and the payoffs that were going to happen, already did).
Anyone?
Why can't you drag the beam-producing sattelite with you?
Its heating, not applying force.
Agreed 100%... all the more reason that space exploration *must* be wrested away from government beaurocracy. Government (any government) is horribly bad at technology and bad at speed. To allow government to maintain a monopoly on a field requiring both those things is to doom our progress.
Unfortunately corporate America is bad at anything where there's no profit motive. So the question is -- what's the profit motive for space exploration?
Its all you read about on /. these days.
/.
Yawn.
With all the incredible science, video games, nanotech, astrophysics, ip, genomics, sci-fi, communications and other geek culture issues we could be talking about... why on earth is Apple featured so heavily on
(I smell a publicist)
This is all about one thing: Filesharing.
The only way to save TiVO is to go to the one dark place that the Cable and Sattelite company DVR's won't go. What does every consumer want? Simple: They want "TiVo-meets-Kazaa". In other words they want to be able to search *other people's* TiVO's for the shows they didn't record, or didn't have access to.
But there are two problems TiVO faces if it wants to give consumers what they really want:
1) NBC is a major shareholder of TiVO. (this is the minor of the two problems)
2) (big problem:) Its a legal quagmire. Unlike typical filesharing applications which argue that there are "legitimate uses" of their networks, a P2P add-on for TiVO would have very few legitimate uses since 99.9999% of the content recorded is protected by copyright.
So how does TiVO, whose hands are tied by investor loyalty and potential legal pitfalls -- turn itself into the "killer app" of the DVR world? Easy...You Opensource it. Guess which hack everyone's going to add-on to their TiVO's first?
This is all about filesharing.
Respected as a brand, yes.
But respected as journalism? Please. They're the FOX News of the Middle East. What's sad is that they *think* they're really "free press" because everything else in the region is "less free".
Al Jazeera is as biased as they come. I went to see "Control Room" with some friends of mine, and we laughed the whole way through it. Unbelievable propaganda. (They even put a girl on the poster! Hah! Unbelievable).
Look at the size of the original orbital capsules. Excape capsules could be created that take up 1/2 the space, could survive re-entry, and easily fit within the cargo area. Wouldn't that be much cheaper than a sister shuttle at the ready?
The culprit here is the USPTO. The ease of getting a patent approved by the USPTO is shockingly easy. (I'm sure that comment will get me flamed by all the patent-lawyers reading this). But patents should be above all things: extremely rare.
Innovation occurs in parallel. Period.
Its almost time for a class action suit against the USPTO.
Ho HO! Indeed! And what a rollicking good time being human as well! Its a smashing good time up here at the top of the food-chain!
Open message to Sony, Nintendo and Xbox: Stop telling us what the chipset is capable of, and start telling us what you're going to do to encourage high-quality development for your platforms.
The Xbox was ultimately a poor investment for anyone who bought it. Sure Halo's 1&2 are system sellers. But then what? There were scant few good titles for Xbox.
Now Xbox and PS2 will be featuring variations of IBM's "Cell-based" computing chipset. Has *anyone* mentioned what its going to take to code for these things? No. Why? Because its going to be like drinking sand. Everythings about polygons per second, antialiasing, etc. Its what investors want to hear. But gamers want to hear about titles -- and that's it.
At the end of the day, what I really want as a consumer is the platform with the "most best" games. Developers want something different though: they are going to choose their platforms based on market size and a time & risk based assessment for building products. (And market size will be determined by quality titles which goes back to time & risk). The potential for Eye-candy will be a secondary factor.
I'm hoping we see the evangelizing begin at e3 -- not to consumers, not to the press, but to developers. Only that will ultimately decide the winning platform.
How Ironic that 25 years later I find myself once again thinking: "God its really incredible that Battlestar Galactica might have a more compelling storyline than Star Wars, and they spent a fraction of the pricetag."
Actually, it wasn't really true back then. Star Wars ultimately proved to have a far more enduring and compelling storyline. This time around however -- things have changed. There's no comparison. BG's storyline is infinitely superior to episodes 4-6.
Just goes to show you George, all the special effects in the world can't top a well written script.
It already sucks.
Why Why WHY!?! Why are you writing "political drama"?
Why is that good?
I can't help reading the clearly written, simple crawlers from the 4-6 trilogy and wondering how on earth the same person could have written the confused, uninteresting plots of the 1-3 trilogy.
Considering I spent decades of my life being a Star Wars freak
Slashdot (in this posting) links to the offending website. And since Slashdot *knows* full well that this kid is linking to copyrighted works -- what then is Slashdot's liability?
.05 per track. The story's intent was to highlight the problems faced by iTunes, Real and other legitimate online saleschannels for copyrighted audio files. In effect what the story did though, was tell me where to find cheap high-quality music.
Or let's take this better example: Last week the Wall Street Journal Online ran a story on Russian MP3 sites that charge
What is the liability for the Wall Street Journal under this Norwegian law? Effectively the WSJ *also* linked to illegal music (thousands of files in this case).
I think its just a "star". The reason we're talking about it is because it was a "small moon" 20 years ago, so its growth has been stunning.
But now its another company. Its earnings are good, but not wonderful. Its products are good, but not wonderful. Its growth is good, but not wonderful. (So the black-hole / supernova thing probably doesn't apply). What it does have insane amounts of is cash. So its also not a star that's going to run out of fuel any time soon.