Given the original basis of Star Wars in the works of the Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa, as well as the similarities between the Jedi and depictions of the Samurai, I would say that it's far more likely that "The Force" is based on a generic blend of Eastern Philosophy (including Zen, Taoism, and Buddhism specifically), rather than the works of Emerson.
Any particular similarities between Transcendentalism and The Force are probably general similarities between philisophical systems, and may even reflect some amount of knowledge by Emerson in those Eastern Philosophies.
ELF - Decentralized Anonymous Filesharing
I'm a developer/DBA at a 100 person telemarketing finance company, and unfortunately, most of our users have trouble figuring out how to successfully login some days. They do not experiment, they do not customize, hell, they don't even use most of the stuff we give them.
This system sounds damned fine for those sorts of users, since it would VASTLY reduce wiring costs, as well as keep us from lugging the damned boxes all over the building.
Sure, I love having my own customizable system under my desk, but most of our users don't even know what box is the CPU ("Hey, why isn't this powering on?... Um, that's the monitor, dumbass"). If this was to be a reasonable price, we'd probably buy them in a heartbeat.
I've been working on a software program for about a year now called ELF that provides a means of anonymous filesharing and archival. It can be found at www.projectelf.com and is in mid-beta right now (it works, but it has some bugs).
An explanation of it's features (taken from the website) follow:
In Brief
ELF is a software program that can be used to share and receive files across a network anonymously in order to allow the storage and sharing of information without fear of reprisal.
Key Features
Anonymity
All packets, including search and file transfers are routed through multiple clients with no traces to allow tracking of users
File Autheniciation
Files are identified by using the MD5 hash of the file to ensure that the file received is the file that was requested, and was not corrupted during download.
Downloading from Multiple Sources
Files are requested using their MD5 hash, and are simultaneously downloaded from all responding clients, in order to increase speed and reduce bandwidth use on individual file sources. Additionally, file downloads may be resumed later at the position the download was halted
Real-time searches
Searches are sent through the network of connected clients, who respond immediately with any results that apply. Additionally, search results are cached at each client for 5 minutes, which reduces the network load for common searches
Bandwidth Limits
Clients may be configured with bandwidth limitsthat control the data-throughput, so as not to fill the network pipe or cause flooding in other machines.
Data Encryption
Use of a seeded random number progression XOR encryption scheme greatly increases the difficulty of deciphering data using a packet sniffer. Additionally, an HTTP request header is used to mask the traffic as a webpage request.
The Technical Details
ELF is a real-time, peer to peer file-sharing client uses a decentralized client network (known as ELFnet) to allow searching and retrieving of shared files. It bears some resemblance, both in concept and form design, to GNUtella, although the protocol layout and software design is actually quite different.
Commands are relayed between clients as an ELF packet, which is formatted data written onto a TCP/IP packet. The term "Packet"
as used hereafter, will refer to ELF packets, NOT TCP/IP packets unless otherwise noted. Each packet is given a 6 byte unique id and
an expiration time. The current expiration time is 5 minutes, but may be shortened or made user-configurable based on observed network behavior in future releases. The unique packet id is used to ensure that duplicate packets received from different sources are dropped. These ids are also used in reply packets to route them back to the sender, along the path of the packet that requested the response. Routing information at any given client only tells which connection sent the packet and where it went, NOT who the ultimate source or destination was.
Packets types are as follows:
Ping- Ping packets are broadcast packets used to request a Pong reply from all receiving clients on the network, in order to gather addresses of available hosts.
Pong- Pong packets are routed packets, following the path of the ping, that relay the IP address, number of files shared, and bytes shared from the responding node. They do NOT reveal the names or types of files shared by the node, nor any information that could link them with any given search result or downloaded file. Additionally, the packet IDs of Pong packets are NOT cached, so they cannot be return-path-traced
Search- Search packets are broadcast packets used to search for available files matching a search string. If a receiving client matches the search string with one or more shared files, they reply with a Search Result packet
Search Results- Search Results are routed packets that contain information on files available for download that match a particular search. That information includes the exact file name, its length in bytes, and a MD5 value. This information is used to request a file.
Broadcast File Request- Broadcast File Requests are broadcast packets that request a file to be sent by it's MD5. When client received a Broadcast File Request, it checks to see if it is sharing that file; if it is, it sends a File Acknowledgement, otherwise it broadcasts the request to all of it's connections. A file request packet contains only the MD5 of the file; it does NOT contain the name of the file.
File Acknowledgement- A File Acknowledgment is a routed packet that follows the path of a Broadcast File Request. It contains only the filesize of the file requested (to insure that the responder actually has the same file).
File Request- File Requests are routed packets that follow the path of a File Acknowledgement packet and request a 5000K peice of the file to be sent. A file request packet contains only the MD5 of the file and the byte position that it should start at. It does NOT contain the name of the file.
File Transmission- File Transmission packets are routed packets that follow the path of a File Request packet and contain data from the file that has been requested. They are currently 5000 bytes long with respect to file data sent and also do NOT contain the name of the file.
All packet information is transmitted as binary in an attempt to both reduce packet sizes and obfuscate the packet data against real-time monitoring by packet sniffers. Additionally, transmitted data is also xor encrypted using a seeded random number generator to increase the security against monitoring. This is done so as to make it less obvious that the client is running ELF, NOT to guarantee that the sent data won't be decrypted if enough time and effort are spent. It doesn't matter either way, since the decrypted data doesn't contain information that would be useful in tracing who sent or received files.
This is really cool, even if I think that the title of the article is slightly misleading.
Think about it for a second. If you had a VR helmet or some equivalent (visors, etc), and this, you would be able to have full immersion in the graphical environment.
Now, yes it would certainly make for a kick-ass game of quake. But what I want this for is to be able to extend my desktop from one screen to a full 360 wraparound. Maybe even an virtual globe centering on me.
Wouldn't that be great for programming? My personal experience has been that the more information you can have readily available, the better you do (How many of us have bought 21" monitors, just so we can fit more windows on the screen). I can just picture having my main development environment in front of me, a second window for code I'm re-using to my left, my web browser at about 45 degrees up, etc. Only problem I see is getting the mouse to work well under those circumstances, since it would have much farther to travel, relatively speaking.
Anyway, once someone writes the drivers to make my computer do what I just described, I'm getting one of these for home and probably another for work
I was driving home last night after renting a few videos from my local anime video store (jealous, CmdrTaco?), when I heard one of the radio ads for the Business Software Alliance.
This ad was one of the most disgusting things I have heard in a long time. The gist of the ad was "Do you want revenge on your employer? Phone us and report them as software pirates."
I promise that I'm not kidding or exaggerating here. The commercial actually states several times how much trouble you, the disgruntled employee, can get your boss in if they don't have good records of their software licenses.
Now, I believe that businesses should legitimately purchase software and track their licenses, but it's often difficult to know where ALL such things are at any given point in time. This clearly is intended as a scare tactic aimed at executives, since we all know that if you look hard enough, you can probably find something that some employee brought in from home on a company computer.
This sort of pissed me off that the article rewrote the nullsoft quote in such a way that changed what I perceive it meant.
Article's Quote:
According to the credo posted in blood-red lettering on Nullsoft's Web site, they consider themselves ``legitimate nihilistic media terrorists'' whom history will ``no doubt canonize''.
The REAL Quote:
we didn't get into this 'space' cuz we're internet gold seeking cockos.
We're legitimate nihilistic media terrorists as history will no doubt canonize us.
-Rob Lord, June 9, 2000
Somehow, I think that the meaning changes a bit here, don't you? The article seems to want to portray them as hackers who are glory hounds, whereas, I think their real quote reveals that they KNOW they will have their public image assassinated at every chance no matter what happens (as this example blatantly shows)
Saitoh. Now there's a guy I'd vote for, just for the entertainment value of it.
Just imagine a president who got impeached, not for screwing an intern, but for slaughtering half of Congress for being hypocritical, lying bastards.
Anyone who doesn't know who I'm talking about, needs to watch "Ruronin Kenshin" (anime). Saitoh isn't really a good guy or a bad guy, but he is the type who doesn't leave very many enemies
... you've just designed a new script kiddie attack system.
Actually, you have a very good idea that would work well in a normal network. However, since a good weight of the gnutella network is based on
anonymity, the idea of shared spam blackhole lists is one that is dubious at best. All it would really take is a small number of malicious users to start sending fake blacklist packets, and you would have a trust war with different machines reporting other machines as untrusted.
Gnutella is a wonderful idea, and some of the clients, especially gnotella are getting really good at filtering, but I think that filtering on an anonymous network MUST be done at the client level. If you get spam, drop the packets. But anything that requires trust between nodes CANNOT work with anonymity.
Disregard. Meant as reply to a thread.
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 1
... you've just designed a new script kiddie attack system.
Actually, you have a very good idea that would work well in a normal network. However, since a good weight of the gnutella network is based on anonymity, the idea of shared spam blackhole lists is one that is dubious at best. All it would really take is a small number of malicious users to start sending fake blacklist packets, and you would have a trust war with different machines reporting other machines as untrusted.
Gnutella is a wonderful idea, and some of the clients, especially gnotella are getting really good at filtering, but I think that filtering on an anonymous network MUST be done at the client level. If you get spam, drop the packets. But anything that requires trust between nodes CANNOT work with anonymity.
Permanent markers are actually not very permanent. I got my degree in Chemistry before I went into the IT Field, and we would always use permanent markers in the lab. I assure you that any number of non-polar solvents (like mineral oil, hexanes, acetone, etc.) would do a wonderful job at removing all traces of the markers.
In actuality, there is very little in the way of ink that cannot be erased if you have access to the right chemicals.
I run a very large fanfic searchable fan fiction archive (FFML Mini-Archive) that contains just shy of 15,000 anime-related stories in plain text format. The popularity of this site (~50,000 pageviews/month) has led me to thinking about what would be useful in order to succeed in selling original stories on a similar site.
To start with, it would help to get a large group of authors together for a single site. I have the advantage that my site archives a fiction-writing mailing list, so I have new content most days and a ready audience of the readers of the mailing list. An original site would probably need some sort of advertising and enough content to keep people coming back.
Large sections of the text should be made freely viewable. Nobody wants to pay money for a book that they know nothing about. The amount that is free depends on your subject matter: if you are writing programming guides, your chapters are fairly self-contained, so you might want to offer the table of contents and maybe 1/3 of the book for free; if you are writing fiction, you can offer 1/2 to 3/4 of the book for free, since if you get the reader hooked, they will pay a larger amount to find out what happens:)
Keep you prices down. They won't have a nicely bound hardback, so don't charge them those sorts of prices. I would be hard-pressed to justify more than $2 per download, and would recommend $1 as a more reasonable price.
Have a convenient method of payment. This was the bane of shareware; nobody will ever send you money if you only provide a mailing address and require a check or money order. You need to either accept credit card payment or some equivalent instant payment option (PayPal.com has had some good press; I've never checked them out, so I have no idea)
Don't quit your day job. You won't make money at this very quickly, and unless you're very good, you won't make much money at all. Even authors who get published and are available at every bookstore in the country don't tend to get rich, and you won't have the advantage of shelf space or beautiful cover art. Your readership will only increase with your reputation as an author and that sort of thing happens slowly.
After all that, if anyone is still interested, let me know and I'll put a writeup of their site/book on my website for free. Due to the nature of my subject (anime fanfiction), I am not allowed to profit from my site, but I would love to help someone else profit from their works. I get about 1,500 unique visitors a day who are looking for reading material, and quite a few would also be interested in publishing their original works somewhere that they could get paid from.
Yes, I've posted this before. It continues to be relevant, and hopefully if I can get enough people to read and understand it, the ideas might get through. If not, then at least I tried.
Introduction With the advent of the internet, many of the current media providers have found themselves on the defensive. Newspapers and magazines feel threatened by the web; movies, television, radio, and music distributors are lashing out against filesharing of their content; software companies are complaining about rampant piracy of their products.
This situation is deteriorating with the addition of new legislation and new lawsuits to the scene. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the makers of DeCSS (a tool that allows DVDs to be read to a file for viewing or copying), the Recording Industry in general seems to be suing Napster, MP3.com, and anyone else that they see using the MP3 music codec, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has basically criminalized "fair use" for anything that uses encryption to prevent copying.
The Problem
Most traditional content providers make their money by charging consumers for their products based on the media that they buy. Book publishers sell printed book, newspaper companies sell newspapers, record companies sell CD, tapes, or records. For most of our lives, this has been the only way to do it. If I want the latest Terry Pratchett novel, I have to go to the bookstore and buy it. They even make additional money by releasing hardbacks first, so that the devoted fans will have to pay 2-3 times more than the paperbacks will cost if they want the books in the first few months after release. The internet challenges this entire revenue model by offering an alternative distribution system. Traditional media is based on the sale of the physical medium. Since most types of content can now be digitally encoded as files, the physical medium is not a limiting factor. 100,000 recordings of a song can be copied with no degradation, no media cost, infinitesimal distribution costs, and no additional sales commissions attached. This sounds great, doesn't it? Economics 101 says that demand will always exceed supply, and drive the price up. Well, the supply curve just went through the roof, so shouldn't this mean that the price should go down? The problem is that the sale of items cannot be mandated for copying to take place. Simply put, there is no way to physically make someone pay for items that they have copied from another person. Legal requirements against copying protected materials will be about as enforcable as the 55 mph speed limit has been on metropolitan interstates in the long run.:)
What's At Stake Here
Many computer users may feel that this is fine. "The music will always be free" proclaimed one in a recent article. That very well may be true, but musicians will continue to have to pay rent and buy groceries. Therefore, some method needs to be found to allow them to make money from their efforts.
On the other hand, groups like Metallica and Dr. Dre can only lose by their lawsuits and intimidation tactics. The word Boycott doesn't hold the threat that it once did, but their fans will remember their actions for quite some time. Many people are simply tired of the inflated prices for movies, CDs, software, and other items that are now media-independent, and are taking things into their own hands. They know that they're not stealing, since the "injured" party has not lost anything; they simply haven't gained anything either. The net outcome to the artist is the same as if they had simply not bought the album at all.
While each of these viewpoints are correct, a solution must still be found for each. If prices aren't drastically lowered for media-independent content, many computer users will simply stop buying movies, CDs, and other items they can "pirate" for free. But if revenues diminish for the artists, the content will suffer (as many would argue it already has for television).
Fortunately, there is a solution. I'm not the first person to have thought of it. I doubt that I'm even in the first thousand to have thought of it. I just haven't seen it in print anywhere yet in it's entirety.
The Solution
Lower the price for file-based media content. Drastically.
Yes, I know that this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but it's well overdue. How much does an album really need to cost, once you remove the cost of the media, the shipping, the warehousing, and the retail markup? How much would you earn in additional sales?
The key to defeating piracy is simple. Reduce the price and it will go away. Downloading a CD from the internet on a slow connection might take up to two hours, depending on your speed and if you get disconnected from your (often unreliable) source. Software often takes 4-6 hours and movies could take days. This assumes that you can even find what you're looking for, which can be a hit-or-miss process for many items. Even a straight CD-to-CD copy will often take an hour if you have a CD Burner and may not always work.
If companies were to reduce their prices and make their content available for paid download online from high-speed, reliable servers, they would not only stop the vast majority of piracy, but they would increase their own revenues fairly substantially. Copy would still be possible, but the effort required to do so would not be worth it.
The model I think would work best is along the line of "Everything for a buck". Why that amount? Because one dollar represents a psychological cut-off point in most people's minds. It is throw-away cash that can be spent with no guilt. How many people do you think would have paid $1 to download WinAmp? How many would have downloaded the Matrix Soundtrack for $1? I'll bet that it would have amounted to more money than was earned.
I sincerely doubt this would affect the current market for conventional media either. People will continue to buy CDs, DVDs, and books if they have no computer, have no internet connection, or simply don't wish to be chained to their computer to enjoy these items. In fact, people who download these items onto their computers will often buy the media afterwards for the convenience, if they enjoy it that much. In the case of television, this may inject some life back in the media, if broadcast companies would allow download of old shows and episodes (and we mean complete series, not just snippets).
Specifics
CDs - Allow download of complete CDs for $1 ideally ($2 if necessary), or $0.25 per song. Royalty is paid to artist, company pockets the rest. Could also profit from banner ads on download page.
Movies - Allow partial download of movie (first half) for free to get people hooked. Require payment of $1 for download of entire movie. Link to sale of physical DVD or VCR tape. Make money on banner ads.
Television - Allow download of TV shows at $0.25 per 30 mins. This includes shows that are off the air, as well as previous episodes of currently showing series. Include commercials, which can be fast forwarded (but often aren't; people have gotten used to seeing them and often forget when they can fastforward). Make money on banner ads.
Books - Allow download of first half to 3/4 of book for free (many publishers already do this.) Allow text, HTML, or word doc download of entire book for $1. Link to sale of physical book. Make money on banner ads.
Software - Allow download of popular software (games, common apps, OS's, other "must-have" software) for $1. Sell printed manuals separately (this is commonplace). Have easy on-line registration. Make money on banner ads.
Critical to this is the ease of payment. All payment should be through credit card or some equivalent secured online payment. Note that this will make the credit card companies very happy and would make for excellent partnerships with them.
Don't worry about encryption or copy protection . Encryption cannot succeed, since the final product must be decrypted to be used. Even a movie that was kept encrypted all the way from the DVD to the TV could be defeated by a viewer with a video camera and a digitizer who simply pointed it at the screen. Same idea with audio. Even if you can break the encryption, all you have to do is identify the point where the signal is decrypted and intercept it after that point. Besides, if you sell your products at a reasonable price, most people will have no problem with paying that price. Some unauthorized copying will still take place; simply point out the ultra-low cost of legitimately purchasing the product to flagrant abusers.
...Or Else
What I have suggested above is one of the better ways to go. I would urge media executives to consider this and implement it. A few final points should be made, however.
If companies continue to try to enforce their inflated prices by lawsuits against companies like Napster, MP3.com, and individual users, they will rapidly find themselves running out of targets without solving the problem. New technologies are being developed specifically to mask the identities of users and decentralize the location of the files. Who will you sue when the program has no controlling company? Who will you finger when the users and file sharing are anonymous and encrypted? How will you block their access if the software can jump ports or sit on port 80 (requiring Web Access to be blocked in order to block the program)?
The business of media content is changing. The dike is leaking and the industry is running out of fingers to plug the holes. The rewards for adapting to this new reality could be enormous; if you lower your prices by 90%, but have sales increase by ten fold, you can come out ahead. But if you don't change, you may find that you don't have a industry anymore.
Mike Dickinson meridun@templeton.gt.ed.net
Notice: This article may be retransmitted freely, but only in it's entirety and with credit for authorship given.
Unfortunately, you are on the mark here. There was a reason that I put the subject line of my original post in all caps, and the reason was not that my caps lock key was broken.
It really has gotten to the point that people read headlines and not articles. If you don't have their attention in the first sentence, you probably won't be read.
Alas, the "study" served it's purpose, not matter how blatantly biased it was.
I completely agree with the sentiment that the study is complete FUD. Following the link to Reciprocal.com shows their blatant conflict of interest.
However...
The actual Yahoo! article does a very good job itself of making the study sound stupid. I particularly enjoyed listening to their interviews with record stores near universities, where the owners and employees said that the combination of online sales and exhorbitant prices by the record producers were responsible for any decline they had suffered. Additionally, the article went on to state that the larger decline in the last 2 years occurred in 1998, BEFORE NAPSTER WAS AROUND.
Don't take my word for it; go back and read the article for yourselves. It was well-written and does a better job putting the study in the right perspective than many of the Slashdot posts have.
With the advent of the internet, many of the current media providers have found themselves on the defensive. Newspapers and magazines feel threatened by the web; movies, television, radio, and music distributors are lashing out against filesharing of their content; software companies are complaining about rampant piracy of their products.
This situation is deteriorating with the addition of new legislation and new lawsuits to the scene. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the makers of DeCSS (a tool that allows DVDs to be read to a file for viewing or copying), the Recording Industry in general seems to be suing Napster, MP3.com, and anyone else that they see using the MP3 music codec, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has basically criminalized "fair use" for anything that uses encryption to prevent copying.
The Problem
Most traditional content providers make their money by charging consumers for their products based on the media that they buy. Book publishers sell printed book, newspaper companies sell newspapers, record companies sell CD, tapes, or records. For most of our lives, this has been the only way to do it. If I want the latest Terry Pratchett novel, I have to go to the bookstore and buy it. They even make additional money by releasing hardbacks first, so that the devoted fans will have to pay 2-3 times more than the paperbacks will cost if they want the books in the first few months after release. The internet challenges this entire revenue model by offering an alternative distribution system. Traditional media is based on the sale of the physical medium. Since most types of content can now be digitally encoded as files, the physical medium is not a limiting factor. 100,000 recordings of a song can be copied with no degradation, no media cost, infinitesimal distribution costs, and no additional sales commissions attached. This sounds great, doesn't it? Economics 101 says that demand will always exceed supply, and drive the price up. Well, the supply curve just went through the roof, so shouldn't this mean that the price should go down? The problem is that the sale of items cannot be mandated for copying to take place. Simply put, there is no way to physically make someone pay for items that they have copied from another person. Legal requirements against copying protected materials will be about as enforcable as the 55 mph speed limit has been on metropolitan interstates in the long run.:)
What's At Stake Here
Many computer users may feel that this is fine. "The music will always be free" proclaimed one in a recent article. That very well may be true, but musicians will continue to have to pay rent and buy groceries. Therefore, some method needs to be found to allow them to make money from their efforts.
On the other hand, groups like Metallica and Dr. Dre can only lose by their lawsuits and intimidation tactics. The word "Boycott" may not hold the threat that it once did, but their fans will remember their actions for quite some time. Many people are simply tired of the inflated prices for movies, CDs, software, and other items that are now media-independent, and are taking things into their own hands. They know that they're not stealing, since the "injured" party has not lost anything; they simply haven't gained anything either. The net outcome to the artist is the same as if they had simply not bought the album at all.
While each of these viewpoints are correct, a solution must still be found for each. If prices aren't drastically lowered for media-independent content, many computer users will simply stop buying movies, CDs, and other items they can "pirate" for free. But if revenues diminish for the artists, the content will suffer (as many would argue it already has for television).
Fortunately, there is a solution. I'm not the first person to have thought of it. I doubt that I'm even in the first thousand to have thought of it. I just haven't seen it in print anywhere yet in it's entirety.
The Solution
Lower the price for file-based media content. Drastically.
Yes, I know that this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but it's well overdue. How much does an album really need to cost, once you remove the cost of the media, the shipping, the warehousing, and the retail markup? How much would you earn in additional sales?
The key to defeating piracy is simple. Reduce the price and piracy goes away. Downloading a CD from the internet on a slow connection might take up to two hours, depending on your speed and if you get disconnected from your (often unreliable) source. Software often takes 4-6 hours and movies could take days. This assumes that you can even find what you're looking for, which can be a hit-or-miss process for many items. Even a straight CD-to-CD copy will often take an hour if you have a CD Burner and may not always work.
If companies were to reduce their prices and make their content available for paid download online from high-speed, reliable servers, they would not only stop the vast majority of piracy, but they would increase their own revenues fairly substantially. Copying would still be possible, but the effort required to do so would not be worth it.
The model I think would work best is along the line of "Everything for a buck". Why that amount? Because one dollar represents a psychological cut-off point in most people's minds. It is throw-away cash that can be spent with no guilt. How many people do you think would have paid $1 to download WinAmp? How many would have downloaded the Matrix Soundtrack for $1? I'll bet that it would have amounted to more money than was earned.
I sincerely doubt this would affect the current market for conventional media either. People will continue to buy CDs, DVDs, and books if they have no computer, have no internet connection, or simply don't wish to be chained to their computer to enjoy these items. In fact, people who download these items onto their computers will often buy the media afterwards for the convenience, if they enjoy it that much. In the case of television, this may inject some life back in the media, if broadcast companies would allow download of old shows and episodes (and we mean complete series, not just snippets).
Specifics
CDs - Allow download of complete CDs for $1 ideally ($2 if necessary), or $0.25 per song. Royalty is paid to artist, company pockets the rest. Could also profit from banner ads on download page.
Movies - Allow partial download of movie (first half) for free to get people hooked. Require payment of $1 for download of entire movie. Link to sale of physical DVD or VCR tape. Make money on banner ads.
Television - Allow download of TV shows at $0.25 per 30 mins. This includes shows that are off the air, as well as previous episodes of currently showing series. Include commercials, which can be fast forwarded (but often aren't; people have gotten used to seeing them and often forget when they can fastforward). Make money on banner ads.
Books - Allow download of first half to 3/4 of book for free (many publishers already do this.) Allow text, HTML, or word doc download of entire book for $1. Link to sale of physical book. Make money on banner ads.
Software - Allow download of popular software (games, common apps, OS's, other "must-have" software) for $1. Sell printed manuals separately (this is commonplace). Have easy on-line registration. Make money on banner ads.
Critical to this is the ease of payment. All payment should be through credit card or some equivalent secured online payment. Note that this will make the credit card companies very happy and would make for excellent partnerships with them.
Don't worry about encryption or copy protection. Encryption cannot succeed, since the final product must be decrypted to be used. DVDs could have unbreakable encryption, but all that a viewer needs to do is set up a video camera, point it at the TV screen, and digitize their recording. Same with audio. If you sell your products at a reasonable price, most people will have no problem with paying that price. Some unauthorized copying will still take place; simply point out the ultra-low cost of legitimately purchasing the product to flagrant abusers.
...Or Else
What I have suggested above is one of the better ways to go. I would urge media executives to consider this and implement it. A few final points should be made, however.
If companies continue to try to enforce their inflated prices by lawsuits against companies like Napster, MP3.com, and individual users, they will rapidly find themselves running out of targets without solving the problem. New technologies are being developed specifically to mask the identities of users and decentralize the location of the files. Who will you sue when the program has no controlling company? Who will you finger when the users and file sharing are anonymous and encrypted? How will you block their access if the software can jump ports or sit on port 80 (requiring Web Access to be blocked in order to block the program)?
The business of media content is changing. The dike is leaking and the industry is running out of fingers to plug the holes. The rewards for adapting to this new reality could be enormous; if you lower your prices by 90%, but have sales increase by ten fold, you can come out ahead. But if you don't change, you may find that you don't have a industry anymore.
Mike Dickinson meridun@templeton.gt.ed.net
Notice: This article may be retransmitted freely, but only in it's entirety and with credit for authorship given.
I may be completely wrong, but there seems to be two different types of wrist pain in my experience.
1) Wrist pain from not having enough experience with large amount of typing, mousing, and other similar types of activity.
2) Wrist pain from typing, etc AFTER you have built up the wrist and finger muscles over month or years.
If you have the first problem, from starting a computer-related job after never really doing large amounts of typing before, you can normally just continue with intermittent breaks and will find the pain to diminish as your hands toughen up. Otherwise, if you type 5+ hours a day (like a secretary or heavy programmer) and start experiencing recurring pain, you probably need to see a doctor and think about ergonomic improvements.
As someone who has tried to implement SMS at work (since remote unattended installs WOULD be nice with 140 workstations), I would have to say that it's far worse than BO2K in terms of potential damage to the system. In fact, right now we have it turned off, after it hosed the profiles of several execs and has caused erratic behavior of a good many employees. All of this from a simple install with no additional features running.
As soon as we can get a good Linux system with the necessary applications to do our database and telephony interfacing, we're going to dump NT and all the crap that's written for it.
My favorite comment was when Redhill got ahead of himself and asked "...I mean, would you name your own baby?". He retracted that thoughtless statement immediately, but I think we can all see the fundamentally flawed thought process here from this statement:
Yes, I would name my own baby; No, I would not pay $1M for that name. Any company who would is being wasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
Any particular similarities between Transcendentalism and The Force are probably general similarities between philisophical systems, and may even reflect some amount of knowledge by Emerson in those Eastern Philosophies. ELF - Decentralized Anonymous Filesharing
I'm a developer/DBA at a 100 person telemarketing finance company, and unfortunately, most of our users have trouble figuring out how to successfully login some days. They do not experiment, they do not customize, hell, they don't even use most of the stuff we give them.
This system sounds damned fine for those sorts of users, since it would VASTLY reduce wiring costs, as well as keep us from lugging the damned boxes all over the building.
Sure, I love having my own customizable system under my desk, but most of our users don't even know what box is the CPU ("Hey, why isn't this powering on? ... Um, that's the monitor, dumbass"). If this was to be a reasonable price, we'd probably buy them in a heartbeat.
An explanation of it's features (taken from the website) follow:
ELF is a software program that can be used to share and receive files across a network anonymously in order to allow the storage and sharing of information without fear of reprisal.
Key Features
All packets, including search and file transfers are routed through multiple clients with no traces to allow tracking of users
Files are identified by using the MD5 hash of the file to ensure that the file received is the file that was requested, and was not corrupted during download.
Files are requested using their MD5 hash, and are simultaneously downloaded from all responding clients, in order to increase speed and reduce bandwidth use on individual file sources. Additionally, file downloads may be resumed later at the position the download was halted
Searches are sent through the network of connected clients, who respond immediately with any results that apply. Additionally, search results are cached at each client for 5 minutes, which reduces the network load for common searches
Clients may be configured with bandwidth limitsthat control the data-throughput, so as not to fill the network pipe or cause flooding in other machines.
Use of a seeded random number progression XOR encryption scheme greatly increases the difficulty of deciphering data using a packet sniffer. Additionally, an HTTP request header is used to mask the traffic as a webpage request.
ELF is a real-time, peer to peer file-sharing client uses a decentralized client network (known as ELFnet) to allow searching and retrieving of shared files. It bears some resemblance, both in concept and form design, to GNUtella, although the protocol layout and software design is actually quite different.
Commands are relayed between clients as an ELF packet, which is formatted data written onto a TCP/IP packet. The term "Packet" as used hereafter, will refer to ELF packets, NOT TCP/IP packets unless otherwise noted. Each packet is given a 6 byte unique id and an expiration time. The current expiration time is 5 minutes, but may be shortened or made user-configurable based on observed network behavior in future releases. The unique packet id is used to ensure that duplicate packets received from different sources are dropped. These ids are also used in reply packets to route them back to the sender, along the path of the packet that requested the response. Routing information at any given client only tells which connection sent the packet and where it went, NOT who the ultimate source or destination was.
Packets types are as follows:
All packet information is transmitted as binary in an attempt to both reduce packet sizes and obfuscate the packet data against real-time monitoring by packet sniffers. Additionally, transmitted data is also xor encrypted using a seeded random number generator to increase the security against monitoring. This is done so as to make it less obvious that the client is running ELF, NOT to guarantee that the sent data won't be decrypted if enough time and effort are spent. It doesn't matter either way, since the decrypted data doesn't contain information that would be useful in tracing who sent or received files.
Think about it for a second. If you had a VR helmet or some equivalent (visors, etc), and this, you would be able to have full immersion in the graphical environment.
Now, yes it would certainly make for a kick-ass game of quake. But what I want this for is to be able to extend my desktop from one screen to a full 360 wraparound. Maybe even an virtual globe centering on me.
Wouldn't that be great for programming? My personal experience has been that the more information you can have readily available, the better you do (How many of us have bought 21" monitors, just so we can fit more windows on the screen). I can just picture having my main development environment in front of me, a second window for code I'm re-using to my left, my web browser at about 45 degrees up, etc. Only problem I see is getting the mouse to work well under those circumstances, since it would have much farther to travel, relatively speaking.
Anyway, once someone writes the drivers to make my computer do what I just described, I'm getting one of these for home and probably another for work
This ad was one of the most disgusting things I have heard in a long time. The gist of the ad was "Do you want revenge on your employer? Phone us and report them as software pirates."
I promise that I'm not kidding or exaggerating here. The commercial actually states several times how much trouble you, the disgruntled employee, can get your boss in if they don't have good records of their software licenses.
Now, I believe that businesses should legitimately purchase software and track their licenses, but it's often difficult to know where ALL such things are at any given point in time. This clearly is intended as a scare tactic aimed at executives, since we all know that if you look hard enough, you can probably find something that some employee brought in from home on a company computer.
Article's Quote:
The REAL Quote:Somehow, I think that the meaning changes a bit here, don't you? The article seems to want to portray them as hackers who are glory hounds, whereas, I think their real quote reveals that they KNOW they will have their public image assassinated at every chance no matter what happens (as this example blatantly shows)
Just imagine a president who got impeached, not for screwing an intern, but for slaughtering half of Congress for being hypocritical, lying bastards.
Anyone who doesn't know who I'm talking about, needs to watch "Ruronin Kenshin" (anime). Saitoh isn't really a good guy or a bad guy, but he is the type who doesn't leave very many enemies
Actually, you have a very good idea that would work well in a normal network. However, since a good weight of the gnutella network is based on anonymity, the idea of shared spam blackhole lists is one that is dubious at best. All it would really take is a small number of malicious users to start sending fake blacklist packets, and you would have a trust war with different machines reporting other machines as untrusted.
Gnutella is a wonderful idea, and some of the clients, especially gnotella are getting really good at filtering, but I think that filtering on an anonymous network MUST be done at the client level. If you get spam, drop the packets. But anything that requires trust between nodes CANNOT work with anonymity.
Disregard. Meant as reply to a thread.
Actually, you have a very good idea that would work well in a normal network. However, since a good weight of the gnutella network is based on anonymity, the idea of shared spam blackhole lists is one that is dubious at best. All it would really take is a small number of malicious users to start sending fake blacklist packets, and you would have a trust war with different machines reporting other machines as untrusted.
Gnutella is a wonderful idea, and some of the clients, especially gnotella are getting really good at filtering, but I think that filtering on an anonymous network MUST be done at the client level. If you get spam, drop the packets. But anything that requires trust between nodes CANNOT work with anonymity.
In actuality, there is very little in the way of ink that cannot be erased if you have access to the right chemicals.
Of course, the real lesson from all of this is that Byte Offset was the way God intended Memory Referencing to work. :)
To start with, it would help to get a large group of authors together for a single site. I have the advantage that my site archives a fiction-writing mailing list, so I have new content most days and a ready audience of the readers of the mailing list. An original site would probably need some sort of advertising and enough content to keep people coming back.
Large sections of the text should be made freely viewable. Nobody wants to pay money for a book that they know nothing about. The amount that is free depends on your subject matter: if you are writing programming guides, your chapters are fairly self-contained, so you might want to offer the table of contents and maybe 1/3 of the book for free; if you are writing fiction, you can offer 1/2 to 3/4 of the book for free, since if you get the reader hooked, they will pay a larger amount to find out what happens :)
Keep you prices down. They won't have a nicely bound hardback, so don't charge them those sorts of prices. I would be hard-pressed to justify more than $2 per download, and would recommend $1 as a more reasonable price.
Have a convenient method of payment. This was the bane of shareware; nobody will ever send you money if you only provide a mailing address and require a check or money order. You need to either accept credit card payment or some equivalent instant payment option (PayPal.com has had some good press; I've never checked them out, so I have no idea)
Don't quit your day job. You won't make money at this very quickly, and unless you're very good, you won't make much money at all. Even authors who get published and are available at every bookstore in the country don't tend to get rich, and you won't have the advantage of shelf space or beautiful cover art. Your readership will only increase with your reputation as an author and that sort of thing happens slowly.
After all that, if anyone is still interested, let me know and I'll put a writeup of their site/book on my website for free. Due to the nature of my subject (anime fanfiction), I am not allowed to profit from my site, but I would love to help someone else profit from their works. I get about 1,500 unique visitors a day who are looking for reading material, and quite a few would also be interested in publishing their original works somewhere that they could get paid from.
Introduction
With the advent of the internet, many of the current media providers have found themselves on the defensive. Newspapers and magazines feel threatened by the web; movies, television, radio, and music distributors are lashing out against filesharing of their content; software companies are complaining about rampant piracy of their products.
This situation is deteriorating with the addition of new legislation and new lawsuits to the scene. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the makers of DeCSS (a tool that allows DVDs to be read to a file for viewing or copying), the Recording Industry in general seems to be suing Napster, MP3.com, and anyone else that they see using the MP3 music codec, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has basically criminalized "fair use" for anything that uses encryption to prevent copying.
The Problem
Most traditional content providers make their money by charging consumers for their products based on the media that they buy. Book publishers sell printed book, newspaper companies sell newspapers, record companies sell CD, tapes, or records. For most of our lives, this has been the only way to do it. If I want the latest Terry Pratchett novel, I have to go to the bookstore and buy it. They even make additional money by releasing hardbacks first, so that the devoted fans will have to pay 2-3 times more than the paperbacks will cost if they want the books in the first few months after release. The internet challenges this entire revenue model by offering an alternative distribution system. Traditional media is based on the sale of the physical medium. Since most types of content can now be digitally encoded as files, the physical medium is not a limiting factor. 100,000 recordings of a song can be copied with no degradation, no media cost, infinitesimal distribution costs, and no additional sales commissions attached. This sounds great, doesn't it? Economics 101 says that demand will always exceed supply, and drive the price up. Well, the supply curve just went through the roof, so shouldn't this mean that the price should go down? The problem is that the sale of items cannot be mandated for copying to take place. Simply put, there is no way to physically make someone pay for items that they have copied from another person. Legal requirements against copying protected materials will be about as enforcable as the 55 mph speed limit has been on metropolitan interstates in the long run. :)
What's At Stake Here
Many computer users may feel that this is fine. "The music will always be free" proclaimed one in a recent article. That very well may be true, but musicians will continue to have to pay rent and buy groceries. Therefore, some method needs to be found to allow them to make money from their efforts.
On the other hand, groups like Metallica and Dr. Dre can only lose by their lawsuits and intimidation tactics. The word Boycott doesn't hold the threat that it once did, but their fans will remember their actions for quite some time. Many people are simply tired of the inflated prices for movies, CDs, software, and other items that are now media-independent, and are taking things into their own hands. They know that they're not stealing, since the "injured" party has not lost anything; they simply haven't gained anything either. The net outcome to the artist is the same as if they had simply not bought the album at all.
While each of these viewpoints are correct, a solution must still be found for each. If prices aren't drastically lowered for media-independent content, many computer users will simply stop buying movies, CDs, and other items they can "pirate" for free. But if revenues diminish for the artists, the content will suffer (as many would argue it already has for television).
Fortunately, there is a solution. I'm not the first person to have thought of it. I doubt that I'm even in the first thousand to have thought of it. I just haven't seen it in print anywhere yet in it's entirety.
The Solution
Lower the price for file-based media content. Drastically.
Yes, I know that this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but it's well overdue. How much does an album really need to cost, once you remove the cost of the media, the shipping, the warehousing, and the retail markup? How much would you earn in additional sales?
The key to defeating piracy is simple. Reduce the price and it will go away. Downloading a CD from the internet on a slow connection might take up to two hours, depending on your speed and if you get disconnected from your (often unreliable) source. Software often takes 4-6 hours and movies could take days. This assumes that you can even find what you're looking for, which can be a hit-or-miss process for many items. Even a straight CD-to-CD copy will often take an hour if you have a CD Burner and may not always work.
If companies were to reduce their prices and make their content available for paid download online from high-speed, reliable servers, they would not only stop the vast majority of piracy, but they would increase their own revenues fairly substantially. Copy would still be possible, but the effort required to do so would not be worth it.
The model I think would work best is along the line of "Everything for a buck". Why that amount? Because one dollar represents a psychological cut-off point in most people's minds. It is throw-away cash that can be spent with no guilt. How many people do you think would have paid $1 to download WinAmp? How many would have downloaded the Matrix Soundtrack for $1? I'll bet that it would have amounted to more money than was earned.
I sincerely doubt this would affect the current market for conventional media either. People will continue to buy CDs, DVDs, and books if they have no computer, have no internet connection, or simply don't wish to be chained to their computer to enjoy these items. In fact, people who download these items onto their computers will often buy the media afterwards for the convenience, if they enjoy it that much. In the case of television, this may inject some life back in the media, if broadcast companies would allow download of old shows and episodes (and we mean complete series, not just snippets).
Specifics
CDs - Allow download of complete CDs for $1 ideally ($2 if necessary), or $0.25 per song. Royalty is paid to artist, company pockets the rest. Could also profit from banner ads on download page.
Movies - Allow partial download of movie (first half) for free to get people hooked. Require payment of $1 for download of entire movie. Link to sale of physical DVD or VCR tape. Make money on banner ads.
Television - Allow download of TV shows at $0.25 per 30 mins. This includes shows that are off the air, as well as previous episodes of currently showing series. Include commercials, which can be fast forwarded (but often aren't; people have gotten used to seeing them and often forget when they can fastforward). Make money on banner ads.
Books - Allow download of first half to 3/4 of book for free (many publishers already do this.) Allow text, HTML, or word doc download of entire book for $1. Link to sale of physical book. Make money on banner ads.
Software - Allow download of popular software (games, common apps, OS's, other "must-have" software) for $1. Sell printed manuals separately (this is commonplace). Have easy on-line registration. Make money on banner ads.
Critical to this is the ease of payment. All payment should be through credit card or some equivalent secured online payment. Note that this will make the credit card companies very happy and would make for excellent partnerships with them.
Don't worry about encryption or copy protection
. Encryption cannot succeed, since the final product must be decrypted to be used. Even a movie that was kept encrypted all the way from the DVD to the TV could be defeated by a viewer with a video camera and a digitizer who simply pointed it at the screen. Same idea with audio. Even if you can break the encryption, all you have to do is identify the point where the signal is decrypted and intercept it after that point. Besides, if you sell your products at a reasonable price, most people will have no problem with paying that price. Some unauthorized copying will still take place; simply point out the ultra-low cost of legitimately purchasing the product to flagrant abusers.
What I have suggested above is one of the better ways to go. I would urge media executives to consider this and implement it. A few final points should be made, however.
If companies continue to try to enforce their inflated prices by lawsuits against companies like Napster, MP3.com, and individual users, they will rapidly find themselves running out of targets without solving the problem. New technologies are being developed specifically to mask the identities of users and decentralize the location of the files. Who will you sue when the program has no controlling company? Who will you finger when the users and file sharing are anonymous and encrypted? How will you block their access if the software can jump ports or sit on port 80 (requiring Web Access to be blocked in order to block the program)?
The business of media content is changing. The dike is leaking and the industry is running out of fingers to plug the holes. The rewards for adapting to this new reality could be enormous; if you lower your prices by 90%, but have sales increase by ten fold, you can come out ahead. But if you don't change, you may find that you don't have a industry anymore.
Mike Dickinson
meridun@templeton.gt.ed.net
Notice: This article may be retransmitted freely, but only in it's entirety and with credit for authorship given.
It really has gotten to the point that people read headlines and not articles. If you don't have their attention in the first sentence, you probably won't be read.
Alas, the "study" served it's purpose, not matter how blatantly biased it was.
However...
The actual Yahoo! article does a very good job itself of making the study sound stupid. I particularly enjoyed listening to their interviews with record stores near universities, where the owners and employees said that the combination of online sales and exhorbitant prices by the record producers were responsible for any decline they had suffered. Additionally, the article went on to state that the larger decline in the last 2 years occurred in 1998, BEFORE NAPSTER WAS AROUND.
Don't take my word for it; go back and read the article for yourselves. It was well-written and does a better job putting the study in the right perspective than many of the Slashdot posts have.
With the advent of the internet, many of the current media providers have found themselves on the defensive. Newspapers and magazines feel threatened by the web; movies, television, radio, and music distributors are lashing out against filesharing of their content; software companies are complaining about rampant piracy of their products.
This situation is deteriorating with the addition of new legislation and new lawsuits to the scene. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the makers of DeCSS (a tool that allows DVDs to be read to a file for viewing or copying), the Recording Industry in general seems to be suing Napster, MP3.com, and anyone else that they see using the MP3 music codec, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has basically criminalized "fair use" for anything that uses encryption to prevent copying.
The Problem
Most traditional content providers make their money by charging consumers for their products based on the media that they buy. Book publishers sell printed book, newspaper companies sell newspapers, record companies sell CD, tapes, or records. For most of our lives, this has been the only way to do it. If I want the latest Terry Pratchett novel, I have to go to the bookstore and buy it. They even make additional money by releasing hardbacks first, so that the devoted fans will have to pay 2-3 times more than the paperbacks will cost if they want the books in the first few months after release. The internet challenges this entire revenue model by offering an alternative distribution system. Traditional media is based on the sale of the physical medium. Since most types of content can now be digitally encoded as files, the physical medium is not a limiting factor. 100,000 recordings of a song can be copied with no degradation, no media cost, infinitesimal distribution costs, and no additional sales commissions attached. This sounds great, doesn't it? Economics 101 says that demand will always exceed supply, and drive the price up. Well, the supply curve just went through the roof, so shouldn't this mean that the price should go down? The problem is that the sale of items cannot be mandated for copying to take place. Simply put, there is no way to physically make someone pay for items that they have copied from another person. Legal requirements against copying protected materials will be about as enforcable as the 55 mph speed limit has been on metropolitan interstates in the long run. :)
What's At Stake Here
Many computer users may feel that this is fine. "The music will always be free" proclaimed one in a recent article. That very well may be true, but musicians will continue to have to pay rent and buy groceries. Therefore, some method needs to be found to allow them to make money from their efforts.
On the other hand, groups like Metallica and Dr. Dre can only lose by their lawsuits and intimidation tactics. The word "Boycott" may not hold the threat that it once did, but their fans will remember their actions for quite some time. Many people are simply tired of the inflated prices for movies, CDs, software, and other items that are now media-independent, and are taking things into their own hands. They know that they're not stealing, since the "injured" party has not lost anything; they simply haven't gained anything either. The net outcome to the artist is the same as if they had simply not bought the album at all.
While each of these viewpoints are correct, a solution must still be found for each. If prices aren't drastically lowered for media-independent content, many computer users will simply stop buying movies, CDs, and other items they can "pirate" for free. But if revenues diminish for the artists, the content will suffer (as many would argue it already has for television).
Fortunately, there is a solution. I'm not the first person to have thought of it. I doubt that I'm even in the first thousand to have thought of it. I just haven't seen it in print anywhere yet in it's entirety.
The Solution
Lower the price for file-based media content. Drastically.
Yes, I know that this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but it's well overdue. How much does an album really need to cost, once you remove the cost of the media, the shipping, the warehousing, and the retail markup? How much would you earn in additional sales?
The key to defeating piracy is simple. Reduce the price and piracy goes away. Downloading a CD from the internet on a slow connection might take up to two hours, depending on your speed and if you get disconnected from your (often unreliable) source. Software often takes 4-6 hours and movies could take days. This assumes that you can even find what you're looking for, which can be a hit-or-miss process for many items. Even a straight CD-to-CD copy will often take an hour if you have a CD Burner and may not always work.
If companies were to reduce their prices and make their content available for paid download online from high-speed, reliable servers, they would not only stop the vast majority of piracy, but they would increase their own revenues fairly substantially. Copying would still be possible, but the effort required to do so would not be worth it.
The model I think would work best is along the line of "Everything for a buck". Why that amount? Because one dollar represents a psychological cut-off point in most people's minds. It is throw-away cash that can be spent with no guilt. How many people do you think would have paid $1 to download WinAmp? How many would have downloaded the Matrix Soundtrack for $1? I'll bet that it would have amounted to more money than was earned.
I sincerely doubt this would affect the current market for conventional media either. People will continue to buy CDs, DVDs, and books if they have no computer, have no internet connection, or simply don't wish to be chained to their computer to enjoy these items. In fact, people who download these items onto their computers will often buy the media afterwards for the convenience, if they enjoy it that much. In the case of television, this may inject some life back in the media, if broadcast companies would allow download of old shows and episodes (and we mean complete series, not just snippets).
Specifics
CDs - Allow download of complete CDs for $1 ideally ($2 if necessary), or $0.25 per song. Royalty is paid to artist, company pockets the rest. Could also profit from banner ads on download page.
Movies - Allow partial download of movie (first half) for free to get people hooked. Require payment of $1 for download of entire movie. Link to sale of physical DVD or VCR tape. Make money on banner ads.
Television - Allow download of TV shows at $0.25 per 30 mins. This includes shows that are off the air, as well as previous episodes of currently showing series. Include commercials, which can be fast forwarded (but often aren't; people have gotten used to seeing them and often forget when they can fastforward). Make money on banner ads.
Books - Allow download of first half to 3/4 of book for free (many publishers already do this.) Allow text, HTML, or word doc download of entire book for $1. Link to sale of physical book. Make money on banner ads.
Software - Allow download of popular software (games, common apps, OS's, other "must-have" software) for $1. Sell printed manuals separately (this is commonplace). Have easy on-line registration. Make money on banner ads.
Critical to this is the ease of payment. All payment should be through credit card or some equivalent secured online payment. Note that this will make the credit card companies very happy and would make for excellent partnerships with them.
Don't worry about encryption or copy protection. Encryption cannot succeed, since the final product must be decrypted to be used. DVDs could have unbreakable encryption, but all that a viewer needs to do is set up a video camera, point it at the TV screen, and digitize their recording. Same with audio. If you sell your products at a reasonable price, most people will have no problem with paying that price. Some unauthorized copying will still take place; simply point out the ultra-low cost of legitimately purchasing the product to flagrant abusers.
What I have suggested above is one of the better ways to go. I would urge media executives to consider this and implement it. A few final points should be made, however.
If companies continue to try to enforce their inflated prices by lawsuits against companies like Napster, MP3.com, and individual users, they will rapidly find themselves running out of targets without solving the problem. New technologies are being developed specifically to mask the identities of users and decentralize the location of the files. Who will you sue when the program has no controlling company? Who will you finger when the users and file sharing are anonymous and encrypted? How will you block their access if the software can jump ports or sit on port 80 (requiring Web Access to be blocked in order to block the program)?
The business of media content is changing. The dike is leaking and the industry is running out of fingers to plug the holes. The rewards for adapting to this new reality could be enormous; if you lower your prices by 90%, but have sales increase by ten fold, you can come out ahead. But if you don't change, you may find that you don't have a industry anymore.
Mike Dickinson
meridun@templeton.gt.ed.net
Notice: This article may be retransmitted freely, but only in it's entirety and with credit for authorship given.
1) Wrist pain from not having enough experience with large amount of typing, mousing, and other similar types of activity.
2) Wrist pain from typing, etc AFTER you have built up the wrist and finger muscles over month or years.
If you have the first problem, from starting a computer-related job after never really doing large amounts of typing before, you can normally just continue with intermittent breaks and will find the pain to diminish as your hands toughen up. Otherwise, if you type 5+ hours a day (like a secretary or heavy programmer) and start experiencing recurring pain, you probably need to see a doctor and think about ergonomic improvements.
As soon as we can get a good Linux system with the necessary applications to do our database and telephony interfacing, we're going to dump NT and all the crap that's written for it.
Yes, I would name my own baby; No, I would not pay $1M for that name. Any company who would is being wasteful.