Those are fair points. I'd say that each of the languages you mention represent some kind of innovation. I personally think that the.net framework API is a bit cleaner than Java's, but that's a personal preference. The languages themselves are nearly identical syntactically.
Hey, it's a great balance of c-style syntax, elegance, and clear and unambiguous meaning. I realize there are tradeoffs associated with each of those, but I think C# represents an evolutionary improvement because it finds a good balance that works for a large number of programmers.
Ok. I'm sure I missed a lot of other soft innovations that MS has made. But consider the following points:
A novice can write a fairly sophisticated windows app in VB in a few hours, and can easily do all kinds of office automation, etc. Think of how many rapid prototypes were written (even by experienced coders) in VB and how much innovation was facilitated by that.
C# may not be the most elegant language, but you must admit that it represents more than an incremental improvement over Java. It's essentially what would have happened if Sun could have broken reverse compatibility after 5 years of Java and done a complete rewrite. For business reasons, Sun couldn't innovate, so Microsoft stepped in.
The beauty of the speech SDK is that it makes it very simple to do stuff that is very complicated with other engines. I chose that as an example because it shows one of MS's major strengths: Taking complicated technology and making it straightforward enough for a novice developer to use, and powerful enough that an intermediate developer can get some serious mileage out of it, and an advanced developer can hugely cut her development time.
No... I never mentioned any user interface changes, did I? I'm talking about putting the small details into the technologies that take them to the next level. Things like creating a programming IDE with autcomplete or a programming language that has libraries that make it useful for mainstream business apps that also supports functional programming and lambda expressions. I'm talking about a language (VB) that lets total novices build a functional GUI app in a few hours. Imagine how many rapid prototypes were built in VB and how much innovation was fueled by that alone.
A lot of people fail to understand what real innovation is. Sure every now and then there is an invention that abruptly changes the world. Some people consider the Segway scooter an example of such a thing. I do not.
Microsoft has made a lot of very small innovations (often called "soft innovations"). Whether it's the ease of use of VB or the elegance of C# or the xml grammars used in the speech SDK. They are not huge, "big bang" style innovations, but they are not insignificant.
Microsoft slowly advances the state of the art and we're all better off as a result. Sure it's not flasy like the industrial design of an iPod or the first space walk or the Polio vaccine, but added up they are a huge force of progress.
The fact that you're even considering the switch means that the extra money you're earning doesn't mean all that much to you.
You only live once, if you learned anything in your management role you may quickly rise through the ranks at the new company and be better off than before. Don't play it safe.
ich don't think so. There may be a historical legal distinction to be made, but property is about control, so in my book if you can control it it's essentially property. To illustrate, if you give me $1M to control as I see fit I'll be just as happy as if you gave it to me as my own property.
Good point. But I did think of that. I haven't done a controlled timing of the battery life on an overnight charge, but it's not supposed to take all night to charge. I don't really fiddle with it much, only to adjust the volume occasionally or to skip a song. The thing is supposed to get 14 hours of battery life and it certainly doesn't. I have a Shuffle which far exceeds the 11 hours it's supposed to get.
Interesting. I am going to return it just in case. No, the backlight is on a 5 second timer... I have a shuffle (my first iPod) that I love, and one of the reasons i bought the Nano was due to the fact that the shuffle does far exceed its expected battery life. I routinely get 20 hours from it. The Nano struggles to get 6 hours.
I have had mine for over a week and carry it in my pocket along with a cell phone in the same pocket. No significant wear and tear so far, but the battery life is disappointingly inferior to what was advertised. I'd estimate it gets about 60% of the advertised battery life at best.
On the contrary, I sold a 4 year old laptop (worth $300 tops) for $650 on eBay. Studies have shown that people overpay on eBay but think they're getting a good deal. Why do you think car dealerships sell some of their used inventory on eBay? The psychology of the auction causes people to overpay, and the structure of eBay's bidding exploits the psychology perfectly. It waits a few minutes then sends you "you've been outbid"; this can go back and forth numerous times without the seller ever lifting a finger.
Some prices should be higher and some lower. An auction based model with DRM-enforced royalties would allow record labels to do all kinds of neat things:
Release a limited number of a hot song to generate buzz -- people would have to distribute analog copies of the hot new song or else pay $10 per copy, potentially.
Allow the label to make money on peoples' desire to rotate their music collection on a constant basis w/o having to have a marketing budget.
The biggest change would be on the marketing side, since right now most albums sell very poorly and there is huge risk associated with generating the initial hype. With the model i describe, a studio could give away the first 10,000 copies of a song, but as demand increased the original owners could resel them and the studio would make money. By the time the price reached, say, $2 per song, the studio could keep adding supply to keep the song hot but not out of reach for consumers, all the while making money on every resale of the song.
The incentive for consumers would be to arbitrage the market to find hot songs that were underpriced. A customer's collection would have intrinsic resale value, so the notion of property would be enhanced by the system, and instead of push marketing we'd find the industry dedicating itself ot actually creating quality songs for which the price would be bid up and profits would increase.
Of course, the CEO didn't mention the scheme I outlined, but uniform pricing creates some great deals and some lousy deals, and generally makes consumers look elsewhere (such as piracy) for the many songs that are overpriced. The fact that the market price would be lower for some songs is simply a corrolary of what he said.
Wrong. If software is not property, what right do you have to control its distribution with some kind of license agreement like the GPL? It's not property so it's not your property to control! You can't have your cake and eat it. If it's property, the creator can control the terms of its use and distribution; if it's not property, nobody can.
Well, it could work the way you describe, or else the studio (or filesharing exchange) would get a piece of all future sales. This would give an incentive to the studio to release limited quantities of new music to create buzz, and would also give them an incentive not to try to make all of their profit from the first sale.
Legal doctrines aside, it would simply be an alternative licensing model that I think would be quite successful. iMixes are the best thing about iTunes becuase the music is packaged by someone whose only interest is that he loves it.
The exec is exactly right. Used CD stores are proof that the market demands a lower-cost place to purchase certain songs.
I'd like to see a DRM technology that allowed music buyers to resell the music on eBay... By allowing the owner to set the price, you allow reselling and variable pricing... the studio (original owner) could get a piece of every transaction...
Of course ESR doesn't think the GPL is necessary. I'm surprised he ever thought it was necessary, since it is a contract defining the terms of use of property, a concept he doesn't believe ought to apply to software. ESR's stance is anti-property, and what good is a contract about property when that code you just wrote doesn't belong to you?
I have no problem with OSS licensing. I use open source software and love it.
I don't like the idea (from the FSF) that all software should just be ocnsidered non-property. THe mental leap to considering existing software in that light is a kind of theft, if one then acts on it and steals the software against the licensing temrs it was purchased/downloaded under.
The OSS community would be wise to distance itself from the FSF. OSS is compatible with business and commerce, while the FSF is not.
Copyright term is a more subtle issue, and I address it in my other post.
There are lots of tradeoffs associated with copyright terms, and I don't know if our current laws are ideal in that sense.
However lobbyists are not responsible, politicians are. Politicians want you to blame lobbyists so that you don't blame them! Every politician cast his/her vote of his/her own free will and so what if a lobbyist showed a powerpoint presentation or bought a fancy dinner. We need to expect more from our elected officials.
This isn't 'business trickery'. Some businesses want weaker environmntal regulations, some want stronger; some want stronger copyright laws, some want weaker. Businesses will always have their own unique interests that would help the business and possibly not be in the greater best interest.
That is why lawmakers have to weigh business interests against other factors.
It is a bad day when companies battle it out trying to get laws made to benefit them or harm their competition rather than creating better products and services, but the politicians are at fault for letting it happen.
Your remark about the rich and powerful not wanting information to be distributed is completely absurd. Copyright law does not prevent anyone from making their own content available for free. All it does is allow them to have ownership of it and control its distribution so that they might make money on it and be able to create it full time, rather than needing to have a separate "day job" to pay their bills.
The public benefits from copyright law, since the public has access to much more information thanks to copyright law.
Have you ever noticed the little blurb at the bottom of a book just inside the cover that says "this material may not be reproduced without express written permission... " etc.? Well, it could just as easily be replaced with "This material may be freely reproduced without permission of the author or publishers".
Why doesn't it say that? Because whoever created the content wanted to make money from it. He/she expected to make money from it before sitting down to create it, and likely would not have created it if not for the certainty that it could be sold and protected as property!
Copyright terms are a much subtler issue, and I suggest you read the book entitled "The Lever of Riches". There are tradeoffs to being too strict and also tradeoffs to being too liberal.
Exactly. That's how it should be. The point is that if someone chooses a clsoed source license it should be respected, and if someone chooses an open source license it should be respected. Neither should be stolen.
The home fixing example is a great one actually. You used the word contract. All copyright law says is that the buyer must respect whatever terms the seller released the content under. This is the same as a software EULA or the GPL. The law allows those terms to be enforced.
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Those are fair points. I'd say that each of the languages you mention represent some kind of innovation. I personally think that the .net framework API is a bit cleaner than Java's, but that's a personal preference. The languages themselves are nearly identical syntactically.
Hey, it's a great balance of c-style syntax, elegance, and clear and unambiguous meaning. I realize there are tradeoffs associated with each of those, but I think C# represents an evolutionary improvement because it finds a good balance that works for a large number of programmers.
A novice can write a fairly sophisticated windows app in VB in a few hours, and can easily do all kinds of office automation, etc. Think of how many rapid prototypes were written (even by experienced coders) in VB and how much innovation was facilitated by that.
C# may not be the most elegant language, but you must admit that it represents more than an incremental improvement over Java. It's essentially what would have happened if Sun could have broken reverse compatibility after 5 years of Java and done a complete rewrite. For business reasons, Sun couldn't innovate, so Microsoft stepped in.
The beauty of the speech SDK is that it makes it very simple to do stuff that is very complicated with other engines. I chose that as an example because it shows one of MS's major strengths: Taking complicated technology and making it straightforward enough for a novice developer to use, and powerful enough that an intermediate developer can get some serious mileage out of it, and an advanced developer can hugely cut her development time.
No... I never mentioned any user interface changes, did I? I'm talking about putting the small details into the technologies that take them to the next level. Things like creating a programming IDE with autcomplete or a programming language that has libraries that make it useful for mainstream business apps that also supports functional programming and lambda expressions. I'm talking about a language (VB) that lets total novices build a functional GUI app in a few hours. Imagine how many rapid prototypes were built in VB and how much innovation was fueled by that alone.
A lot of people fail to understand what real innovation is. Sure every now and then there is an invention that abruptly changes the world. Some people consider the Segway scooter an example of such a thing. I do not.
Microsoft has made a lot of very small innovations (often called "soft innovations"). Whether it's the ease of use of VB or the elegance of C# or the xml grammars used in the speech SDK. They are not huge, "big bang" style innovations, but they are not insignificant.
Microsoft slowly advances the state of the art and we're all better off as a result. Sure it's not flasy like the industrial design of an iPod or the first space walk or the Polio vaccine, but added up they are a huge force of progress.
The fact that you're even considering the switch means that the extra money you're earning doesn't mean all that much to you.
You only live once, if you learned anything in your management role you may quickly rise through the ranks at the new company and be better off than before. Don't play it safe.
This whole idea smells like RMS is trying to exploit what is known in business as lock-in. People will resent it.
ich don't think so. There may be a historical legal distinction to be made, but property is about control, so in my book if you can control it it's essentially property. To illustrate, if you give me $1M to control as I see fit I'll be just as happy as if you gave it to me as my own property.
Good point. But I did think of that. I haven't done a controlled timing of the battery life on an overnight charge, but it's not supposed to take all night to charge. I don't really fiddle with it much, only to adjust the volume occasionally or to skip a song. The thing is supposed to get 14 hours of battery life and it certainly doesn't. I have a Shuffle which far exceeds the 11 hours it's supposed to get.
Interesting. I am going to return it just in case. No, the backlight is on a 5 second timer... I have a shuffle (my first iPod) that I love, and one of the reasons i bought the Nano was due to the fact that the shuffle does far exceed its expected battery life. I routinely get 20 hours from it. The Nano struggles to get 6 hours.
I have had mine for over a week and carry it in my pocket along with a cell phone in the same pocket. No significant wear and tear so far, but the battery life is disappointingly inferior to what was advertised. I'd estimate it gets about 60% of the advertised battery life at best.
Yeah, I think I did..
On the contrary, I sold a 4 year old laptop (worth $300 tops) for $650 on eBay. Studies have shown that people overpay on eBay but think they're getting a good deal. Why do you think car dealerships sell some of their used inventory on eBay? The psychology of the auction causes people to overpay, and the structure of eBay's bidding exploits the psychology perfectly. It waits a few minutes then sends you "you've been outbid"; this can go back and forth numerous times without the seller ever lifting a finger.
Release a limited number of a hot song to generate buzz -- people would have to distribute analog copies of the hot new song or else pay $10 per copy, potentially.
Allow the label to make money on peoples' desire to rotate their music collection on a constant basis w/o having to have a marketing budget.
The biggest change would be on the marketing side, since right now most albums sell very poorly and there is huge risk associated with generating the initial hype. With the model i describe, a studio could give away the first 10,000 copies of a song, but as demand increased the original owners could resel them and the studio would make money. By the time the price reached, say, $2 per song, the studio could keep adding supply to keep the song hot but not out of reach for consumers, all the while making money on every resale of the song.
The incentive for consumers would be to arbitrage the market to find hot songs that were underpriced. A customer's collection would have intrinsic resale value, so the notion of property would be enhanced by the system, and instead of push marketing we'd find the industry dedicating itself ot actually creating quality songs for which the price would be bid up and profits would increase.
Of course, the CEO didn't mention the scheme I outlined, but uniform pricing creates some great deals and some lousy deals, and generally makes consumers look elsewhere (such as piracy) for the many songs that are overpriced. The fact that the market price would be lower for some songs is simply a corrolary of what he said.
Wrong. If software is not property, what right do you have to control its distribution with some kind of license agreement like the GPL? It's not property so it's not your property to control! You can't have your cake and eat it. If it's property, the creator can control the terms of its use and distribution; if it's not property, nobody can.
You're right about the problems. That is where the DRM would come in...
Well, it could work the way you describe, or else the studio (or filesharing exchange) would get a piece of all future sales. This would give an incentive to the studio to release limited quantities of new music to create buzz, and would also give them an incentive not to try to make all of their profit from the first sale.
Legal doctrines aside, it would simply be an alternative licensing model that I think would be quite successful. iMixes are the best thing about iTunes becuase the music is packaged by someone whose only interest is that he loves it.
The exec is exactly right. Used CD stores are proof that the market demands a lower-cost place to purchase certain songs.
I'd like to see a DRM technology that allowed music buyers to resell the music on eBay... By allowing the owner to set the price, you allow reselling and variable pricing... the studio (original owner) could get a piece of every transaction...
Of course ESR doesn't think the GPL is necessary. I'm surprised he ever thought it was necessary, since it is a contract defining the terms of use of property, a concept he doesn't believe ought to apply to software. ESR's stance is anti-property, and what good is a contract about property when that code you just wrote doesn't belong to you?
I have no problem with OSS licensing. I use open source software and love it.
I don't like the idea (from the FSF) that all software should just be ocnsidered non-property. THe mental leap to considering existing software in that light is a kind of theft, if one then acts on it and steals the software against the licensing temrs it was purchased/downloaded under.
The OSS community would be wise to distance itself from the FSF. OSS is compatible with business and commerce, while the FSF is not.
Copyright term is a more subtle issue, and I address it in my other post.
There are lots of tradeoffs associated with copyright terms, and I don't know if our current laws are ideal in that sense.
However lobbyists are not responsible, politicians are. Politicians want you to blame lobbyists so that you don't blame them! Every politician cast his/her vote of his/her own free will and so what if a lobbyist showed a powerpoint presentation or bought a fancy dinner. We need to expect more from our elected officials.
This isn't 'business trickery'. Some businesses want weaker environmntal regulations, some want stronger; some want stronger copyright laws, some want weaker. Businesses will always have their own unique interests that would help the business and possibly not be in the greater best interest.
That is why lawmakers have to weigh business interests against other factors.
It is a bad day when companies battle it out trying to get laws made to benefit them or harm their competition rather than creating better products and services, but the politicians are at fault for letting it happen.
Your remark about the rich and powerful not wanting information to be distributed is completely absurd. Copyright law does not prevent anyone from making their own content available for free. All it does is allow them to have ownership of it and control its distribution so that they might make money on it and be able to create it full time, rather than needing to have a separate "day job" to pay their bills.
The public benefits from copyright law, since the public has access to much more information thanks to copyright law.
Have you ever noticed the little blurb at the bottom of a book just inside the cover that says "this material may not be reproduced without express written permission... " etc.? Well, it could just as easily be replaced with "This material may be freely reproduced without permission of the author or publishers".
Why doesn't it say that? Because whoever created the content wanted to make money from it. He/she expected to make money from it before sitting down to create it, and likely would not have created it if not for the certainty that it could be sold and protected as property!
Copyright terms are a much subtler issue, and I suggest you read the book entitled "The Lever of Riches". There are tradeoffs to being too strict and also tradeoffs to being too liberal.
The GPL is great. My first post was a bit ambiguous. The FSF mentality is not great.
Exactly. That's how it should be. The point is that if someone chooses a clsoed source license it should be respected, and if someone chooses an open source license it should be respected. Neither should be stolen.
The home fixing example is a great one actually. You used the word contract. All copyright law says is that the buyer must respect whatever terms the seller released the content under. This is the same as a software EULA or the GPL. The law allows those terms to be enforced.