I disagree, but you knew that, right?:) Yes, the global economy is a very complicated thing...Let me ask you this-- how many business meetings have you been in that spend a great deal of time talking about the big picture economy? They don't do that unless you're actually an economist/quant/etc and specifically paid to do so. I have been a party to such since I used to develop for quants, but that hasn't really my general experience in the industries I've worked for...Heck, when I was working in power, some of the tools I was creating for engineers really were pretty game-like.
Most problems in business/are/ relatively simple, with the devil in the details. "How do we market to this target demo", as an example, involves creative thinking, an understanding of that demographic, etc, but overall, your strategic choices are going to be limited to the point that the 'game' model is pretty good. Simple economies, not complex ones.
Look, I'm not saying that there are not much more complicated systems in the world, but I think my point remains when you're talking about high level analysis, which is what most stakeholders do in business. That economist/quant/etc is going to produce a report that's consumed by decision makers who abstract away the details.
Like many providers, your experience with different vendors is going to vary by locality. Here, Comcast is totally disfunctional as a conseqeunce of multiple ownership changes to the local cable franchise...It's been, over the course of the last 10 years, Comcast, Cox, AT&T, and now Comcast again. The surrounding counties followed a similar, but disparate pattern. As a consequence, their systems aren't even integrated properly from a customer service perspective, and the maintenance of the infrastructure is not what it should be.
All this leads to Verizon being a better choice here than it might be in some areas. Also, and again, this may be a local thing, but the FIOS service division is totally distinct from the 'normal' Verizon service structure you usually encounter. Different techs, at any rate-- they're much better trained, and reports are that the service is extremely reliable. It's only just become available in my neighborhood, though, so I can't speak firsthand...Although it's being installed tomorrow, so we'll see.
I dunno, neither Comcast nor Verizon has its hands clean as far as most of the 'evil' sorts of issues the Slashdot "we" care about. Comcast throttles services, Verizon complies with the gov't on domestic wiretaps...You're pretty much boned either way.
That depends entirely on the game in question, don't you think? Most strategy games involve some degree of risk analysis, even RTSs. Turn-based games require constant revision of both short term and long term strategies to react to opponent's moves. The systems involved are generally far more complicated than most business problems.
Yep! I have to admit that I specifically targeted sci-fi/big budget sfx since, you know...This is Slashdot, and there were such obvious NBC Universal affiliated examples. The same things apply to a show like Law and Order(large scale production efforts, bit-player actors coming in and out whose quality is critical to the show's success, etc) and Friends(high dollar contracts involved keeping the cast together).
It's not that it couldn't happen, but right now, the guiding hand of the media producers is necessary to the process/bringing some of these more complicated efforts together. Actually, as long as we're running with the tangent, one thing that really is becoming marginalized for the networks is reality television. So much of this is terribly cheap to produce, and the quality is relatively poor anyway...It's relatively easy to envision YouTube utterly destroying this kind of programming. Since it's been such a moneymaker for networks(particularly Fox), you really have to wonder if the networks will be forced to drive back towards drama/sci-fi/etc even more than they already have.
As time marches on, you are correct-- but even producing a show like Chuck(yeah, I'm sticking with NBC Universal properties here) would be very difficult for an amateur right now.
You don't get support from Microsoft, but that's not their business model-- theoretically, the support comes from the OEM that builds your machine, not the OS producer. Apple, on the other hand, is a service provider-- it's part of their value-- and the way they make the whole thing maintainable for themselves is by reducing the number of possible machine configurations. Even if they theoretically don't support your configuration, instability may well reflect on their brand, reducing their competative advantage.
Moreover, once you take this step, there's no going back-- OEMs will introduce their own OSX machines, subject to their own sometimes dodgy support structures....Honestly, how many instabilities perceived as being "Windows" issues are actually caused by OEM hardware? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to tweak for friends that were overheating/throwing up because of bad system design. OSX would suffer the same issues were that door opened.
Apple's all about control of experience, for good or ill. I'm not going to say you'll never have a non-Apple-branded machine running OSX in a sanctioned manner, but it'd be a huge paradigm shift.
The problem is that the console-like approach is/why/ OSX is so much more stable than Windows. They have limited hardware configurations they support. Even if people are theoretically accepting that they don't have support, do you really suppose that a bunch of bluescreening Macs are going to be helpful to their efforts to chip away at the Windows user base?
That's the thing-- Mac thrives because things 'just work'-- it doesn't break much, it's pretty secure, and your mom can use one without much training. If that changes too dramatically, their competative advantage is gone.
The "Web 2.0"(could we pimp calling it NextWeb or something catchy at least? meh) is mostly a threat to developers who are really serving as content managers-- i.e. the Web Master of.COM boom. The thing is, that title's been all but dead for some time, partly because businesses have realized that the learning curve for html isn't exactly that steep. A lot of that power can be put in the hands of BAs, etc...Wikis etc just lower the bar even further. Most businesses, however, have needs beyond the capabilities of content management sytems.
The cost of replication is certainly nearly zero, but the cost of producing most non-reality, non-sitcom TV shows is far higher than that...So, while I'm in agreement that the anti-competative practices(I'm not sure I'd say monopolistic, since we have multiple major networks in actual competition at this point) can be removed from the equation, without NBC Universal, who's going to make the next Battlestar Galactica/insert other random special-effects-laden show here?
In the movie industry and the television industry, the content providers actually are presenting something that the average amateur does not have-- massive gobs of money to try expensive projects. This is not really true of the music industry, where the artist is reliant on the major labels primarily for distribution and advertising,/not/ for production costs. So, consequentially, something has to replace this investment/production function of the networks before they're totally irrelevant.
Thanks, I'll do that-- re: the 10 ft pole, I know that factually speaking my company is going to have 2008 servers in the next year or so, so they're on my radar.
I'm with you about Linux-as-ideal-shell-server, but Windows Power Shell is actually pretty interesting(object oriented,.net framework integration). Your observation about speed is actually why I would've liked to see those features reviewed in depth...It's just more efficient to manage servers via the command line, and here we have a Windows Server solution which provides that command line interface w/ no stated limitations.
Obviously, you're joking, but actually Aero/is/ available as an optional install for Server 2008, according to TFA. Of course, so is a shell-only server, which I would've liked to have seen broken down a bit more. How're the command line management tools? Etc.
About 3 weeks between wireup and availability here, though I don't know if this is representative since this neighborhood has aerial service lines to the houses...Their installs here don't involve buried cable to the house. Still, the curb(well, alley) side aspect of it is essentially the same, so I expect that turn-around is typical.
IMO, yes, but differently so. Apple's strategy involves tight software/hardware integration. They're selling an 'experience'. Their machines 'just work', partly because they have such limited hardware configurations that are of concern to them. As much as everyone hates Microsoft, I suspect that an Apple-dominated marketplace would be even less inviting to competition, since both the platform and the OS would be produced by the same company. Part of the genius of Apple, however, is that people don't seem to recognize just how control-oriented their strategy is. Competition is always a good thing, but having Apple "win" is only desireable to fanboys.
All this is going to sound like I'm strongly anti-Apple...That's not the case. Some of what they produce is really impressive. Moreover, to counter the point made by the article you link, they're producing an API for development on the iPhone. While it remains to be seen just how restrictive their signing system is, this potentially eliminates the need to hack the phone(or iPod Touch) to host a bevy of native, 3rd party apps.
Generally, I am a free market capitalist. I think that the problem here is that the news isn't necessarily best governed by either governments or markets. Where either has full sway, the useful purpose of the news-- conveyance of meaningful facts to the public-- is lost. If the government regulates news agencies, censorship is likely to occur. Where the market dictates what is newsworthy, things skew strongly towards sensationalism. Where news monopolies appear due to consolidation, biases become increasingly exaggerated.
All in all, I think you just have to watch the nightly news on any major network and compare it to a tape of the same from, say, 15 years ago to see where monetizing news programs too extremely gets you. Fear sells; depth does not. This used to not be so problematic, as networks actually used news as a sort of 'badge of honor', seemingly not particularly concerned about direct capital returns.
Honestly? I have to wonder how much CNN's emergence is responsible for this shift...By presenting news literally 24-7 with a clearly ad-driven model, suddenly the 'competition' angle wasn't sufficient to drive network news. In essence, stockholders knew what they were missing. Fox News, particularly, takes this whole idea to an extreme, since they for years managed to make the majority concerns feel like a minority by contrasting with the "liberal bias" of the rest of the media. My own feelings about the network aside, it was brilliant marketing strategy-- establish a clear market by openly defining your own bias, presenting that as a good that 'corrected' an imbalance...Just such wonderfully effective playing to a particular crowd.
I digress. The point is, the media ideally serves as a check to government/and/ corporate interests. A free press allows the people to hold each accountable. A marginalized, commercialized press fails at this most basic function and is, in essence, useless. It has become about entertainment. That's a huge problem that needs a solution.
I believe that NPR does have something of a liberal bias but, in terms of coverage, they seem to work extremely hard to describe both sides of the equation. There are fewer talking heads and more on-site reporting/interviews with people.
This is more akin to old-school reporting, where biases are secondary to substantive programming. I can't speak to your local station's programming, obviously, but this seems to be true of the national programs such as "All Things Considered", where I'd challenge you to find someone actually portraying any figure anywhere as "evil". Fox News, by contrast, penetrates every story with subjective statements, and applies a much more obvious filter in terms of what they actually bother to report. I'm not basing that on NPR(hopefully obviously), I'm basing it on observations derived from my own consumption patterns, which involve media from many sources, some of which are international.
I agree with many of your points, although I'd suggest there're other ways to 'make it happen' beyond government control-- consider NPR as an example. NPR has a combination of grants, listener, and corporate contributions that make it viable...That said, it's not clearly beholden to anybody in particular, so you get an interesting mix of perspectives and coverage of events that most of our other media outlets ignore.
On the downside, NPR tends to be extremely esoteric, and thus mostly captures the attention of a subset of our culture that/desires/ depth in media. I don't think it's hard to make a case that that's not the majority right now. Now, he news is all about making money. That wasn't always the case...There was definitely a time where the TV news in particular was sort of like an art competition between outlets-- who could do the 'best' news, relative to the competition. There seemed to be a sort of honor in the whole thing that kept it going...That's long gone now, I'm afraid(and has been for most of my lifetime).
Right-- and the real concern here is what was stated by the Consumers Union representative...That a few companies could rapidly gain total ownership of all media outlets in a given area, driving out both competition and differing opinions in the local press. Your region might have a single 'voice' in the media, which is not a positive thing.
All that said, the relevance of radio and newspapers has diminished greatly over time. There're few truly independent radio stations in most cities, and most independent newspapers are struggling financially...This is not necessarily due to monopolistic practices, but rather the viability of their business models since so much of their potential consumer base is absorbed by television and internet media sources. While I am not in favor of abolishing the rule on general principle, I am not sure if this would be the same sort of catastrophe that it would have been 25 years ago.
According to the article, it's actually unclear whether or not the provisions involving the FISA court are or are not present in the Senate version of the bill. All that is clear is that the TelCos will be granted immunity for their actions to date. That doesn't actually imply that such actions in the future will be condoned. IMO, we need all the details here. As much as my heart would love for the TelCos to get blasted for their involvement, the other points are far more weighty in terms of our constitutional freedoms going forward...Not that blanket warrents are a huge step forward, but even so.
I'm glad somebody else remembers this-- there was definitely a time when the EA logo was associated with quality, not endless sports titles. I used to actually actively look for that flat box packaging they used to have, because I was reasonably sure I'd find something interesting within.
Tangent: Mail Order Monsters...There was a fun, odd game. I can't think of any other game that satisfies my urge to pit giant squid against giant wasps in epic desert(weird for squid) deathmatches.
I suspect that, if this/is/ a valid patent(big if really), we're more likely to see increases in HD costs as fallout rather than an overall ban. I'd imagine the government would probably stay the order immediately. Business as usual should continue.
I too am excited by the idea of a shift towards bigger, better SSDs, but I think that that's an unlikely outcome unless things go in a really wacky direction. I am not an engineer, but I'd imagine that the infrastructure necessary to produce SS drives would be quite a lot different than that required to create magnetic drives-- an abrupt shift of direction would seem to be prohibitively costly to the hard drive manufacturers.
Riiight, but she bought it for her daughter due to the pretty widgets...Was productivity the motivator here?
Anyway, my point was that the article was pretty weak-- there's no content here other than the basic idea that she's a mother(and apparently, her daughter's opinion doesn't count because she's 13, which makes me rather glad this person isn't/my/ mother)...And she had some undefined bad experience with Vista, so she installed XP.
I'm not saying Vista's wonderful, I'm saying this would be interesting if, perhaps, we'd seen Ballmer's reaction to some of her actual concerns. As it is, it's hardly compelling. Part of my issue here is that I actually suspect that those points may have been raised, but TFA focused on the "pithy" part of the dialog.
Slashdot Mirror
Most problems in business /are/ relatively simple, with the devil in the details. "How do we market to this target demo", as an example, involves creative thinking, an understanding of that demographic, etc, but overall, your strategic choices are going to be limited to the point that the 'game' model is pretty good. Simple economies, not complex ones.
Look, I'm not saying that there are not much more complicated systems in the world, but I think my point remains when you're talking about high level analysis, which is what most stakeholders do in business. That economist/quant/etc is going to produce a report that's consumed by decision makers who abstract away the details.
All this leads to Verizon being a better choice here than it might be in some areas. Also, and again, this may be a local thing, but the FIOS service division is totally distinct from the 'normal' Verizon service structure you usually encounter. Different techs, at any rate-- they're much better trained, and reports are that the service is extremely reliable. It's only just become available in my neighborhood, though, so I can't speak firsthand...Although it's being installed tomorrow, so we'll see.
I dunno, neither Comcast nor Verizon has its hands clean as far as most of the 'evil' sorts of issues the Slashdot "we" care about. Comcast throttles services, Verizon complies with the gov't on domestic wiretaps...You're pretty much boned either way.
That depends entirely on the game in question, don't you think? Most strategy games involve some degree of risk analysis, even RTSs. Turn-based games require constant revision of both short term and long term strategies to react to opponent's moves. The systems involved are generally far more complicated than most business problems.
5% > 4%. If their service stunk, would that number remain as large as it is?
It's not that it couldn't happen, but right now, the guiding hand of the media producers is necessary to the process/bringing some of these more complicated efforts together. Actually, as long as we're running with the tangent, one thing that really is becoming marginalized for the networks is reality television. So much of this is terribly cheap to produce, and the quality is relatively poor anyway...It's relatively easy to envision YouTube utterly destroying this kind of programming. Since it's been such a moneymaker for networks(particularly Fox), you really have to wonder if the networks will be forced to drive back towards drama/sci-fi/etc even more than they already have.
As time marches on, you are correct-- but even producing a show like Chuck(yeah, I'm sticking with NBC Universal properties here) would be very difficult for an amateur right now.
Moreover, once you take this step, there's no going back-- OEMs will introduce their own OSX machines, subject to their own sometimes dodgy support structures....Honestly, how many instabilities perceived as being "Windows" issues are actually caused by OEM hardware? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to tweak for friends that were overheating/throwing up because of bad system design. OSX would suffer the same issues were that door opened.
Apple's all about control of experience, for good or ill. I'm not going to say you'll never have a non-Apple-branded machine running OSX in a sanctioned manner, but it'd be a huge paradigm shift.
That's the thing-- Mac thrives because things 'just work'-- it doesn't break much, it's pretty secure, and your mom can use one without much training. If that changes too dramatically, their competative advantage is gone.
The "Web 2.0"(could we pimp calling it NextWeb or something catchy at least? meh) is mostly a threat to developers who are really serving as content managers-- i.e. the Web Master of .COM boom. The thing is, that title's been all but dead for some time, partly because businesses have realized that the learning curve for html isn't exactly that steep. A lot of that power can be put in the hands of BAs, etc...Wikis etc just lower the bar even further. Most businesses, however, have needs beyond the capabilities of content management sytems.
In the movie industry and the television industry, the content providers actually are presenting something that the average amateur does not have-- massive gobs of money to try expensive projects. This is not really true of the music industry, where the artist is reliant on the major labels primarily for distribution and advertising, /not/ for production costs. So, consequentially, something has to replace this investment/production function of the networks before they're totally irrelevant.
Steak? Deal or No Deal feels far more like spam to me.
Thanks, I'll do that-- re: the 10 ft pole, I know that factually speaking my company is going to have 2008 servers in the next year or so, so they're on my radar.
I'm with you about Linux-as-ideal-shell-server, but Windows Power Shell is actually pretty interesting(object oriented, .net framework integration). Your observation about speed is actually why I would've liked to see those features reviewed in depth...It's just more efficient to manage servers via the command line, and here we have a Windows Server solution which provides that command line interface w/ no stated limitations.
Obviously, you're joking, but actually Aero /is/ available as an optional install for Server 2008, according to TFA. Of course, so is a shell-only server, which I would've liked to have seen broken down a bit more. How're the command line management tools? Etc.
Absolutely true, but the numbers will drop.
About 3 weeks between wireup and availability here, though I don't know if this is representative since this neighborhood has aerial service lines to the houses...Their installs here don't involve buried cable to the house. Still, the curb(well, alley) side aspect of it is essentially the same, so I expect that turn-around is typical.
All this is going to sound like I'm strongly anti-Apple...That's not the case. Some of what they produce is really impressive. Moreover, to counter the point made by the article you link, they're producing an API for development on the iPhone. While it remains to be seen just how restrictive their signing system is, this potentially eliminates the need to hack the phone(or iPod Touch) to host a bevy of native, 3rd party apps.
All in all, I think you just have to watch the nightly news on any major network and compare it to a tape of the same from, say, 15 years ago to see where monetizing news programs too extremely gets you. Fear sells; depth does not. This used to not be so problematic, as networks actually used news as a sort of 'badge of honor', seemingly not particularly concerned about direct capital returns.
Honestly? I have to wonder how much CNN's emergence is responsible for this shift...By presenting news literally 24-7 with a clearly ad-driven model, suddenly the 'competition' angle wasn't sufficient to drive network news. In essence, stockholders knew what they were missing. Fox News, particularly, takes this whole idea to an extreme, since they for years managed to make the majority concerns feel like a minority by contrasting with the "liberal bias" of the rest of the media. My own feelings about the network aside, it was brilliant marketing strategy-- establish a clear market by openly defining your own bias, presenting that as a good that 'corrected' an imbalance...Just such wonderfully effective playing to a particular crowd.
I digress. The point is, the media ideally serves as a check to government /and/ corporate interests. A free press allows the people to hold each accountable. A marginalized, commercialized press fails at this most basic function and is, in essence, useless. It has become about entertainment. That's a huge problem that needs a solution.
This is more akin to old-school reporting, where biases are secondary to substantive programming. I can't speak to your local station's programming, obviously, but this seems to be true of the national programs such as "All Things Considered", where I'd challenge you to find someone actually portraying any figure anywhere as "evil". Fox News, by contrast, penetrates every story with subjective statements, and applies a much more obvious filter in terms of what they actually bother to report. I'm not basing that on NPR(hopefully obviously), I'm basing it on observations derived from my own consumption patterns, which involve media from many sources, some of which are international.
On the downside, NPR tends to be extremely esoteric, and thus mostly captures the attention of a subset of our culture that /desires/ depth in media. I don't think it's hard to make a case that that's not the majority right now. Now, he news is all about making money. That wasn't always the case...There was definitely a time where the TV news in particular was sort of like an art competition between outlets-- who could do the 'best' news, relative to the competition. There seemed to be a sort of honor in the whole thing that kept it going...That's long gone now, I'm afraid(and has been for most of my lifetime).
All that said, the relevance of radio and newspapers has diminished greatly over time. There're few truly independent radio stations in most cities, and most independent newspapers are struggling financially...This is not necessarily due to monopolistic practices, but rather the viability of their business models since so much of their potential consumer base is absorbed by television and internet media sources. While I am not in favor of abolishing the rule on general principle, I am not sure if this would be the same sort of catastrophe that it would have been 25 years ago.
According to the article, it's actually unclear whether or not the provisions involving the FISA court are or are not present in the Senate version of the bill. All that is clear is that the TelCos will be granted immunity for their actions to date. That doesn't actually imply that such actions in the future will be condoned. IMO, we need all the details here. As much as my heart would love for the TelCos to get blasted for their involvement, the other points are far more weighty in terms of our constitutional freedoms going forward...Not that blanket warrents are a huge step forward, but even so.
Tangent: Mail Order Monsters...There was a fun, odd game. I can't think of any other game that satisfies my urge to pit giant squid against giant wasps in epic desert(weird for squid) deathmatches.
I too am excited by the idea of a shift towards bigger, better SSDs, but I think that that's an unlikely outcome unless things go in a really wacky direction. I am not an engineer, but I'd imagine that the infrastructure necessary to produce SS drives would be quite a lot different than that required to create magnetic drives-- an abrupt shift of direction would seem to be prohibitively costly to the hard drive manufacturers.
Anyway, my point was that the article was pretty weak-- there's no content here other than the basic idea that she's a mother(and apparently, her daughter's opinion doesn't count because she's 13, which makes me rather glad this person isn't /my/ mother)...And she had some undefined bad experience with Vista, so she installed XP.
I'm not saying Vista's wonderful, I'm saying this would be interesting if, perhaps, we'd seen Ballmer's reaction to some of her actual concerns. As it is, it's hardly compelling. Part of my issue here is that I actually suspect that those points may have been raised, but TFA focused on the "pithy" part of the dialog.