1) I wonder why RIM would take one of the things people like about their platform and give it away free to competing platforms? It's not like BBM is a wasteland with no existing users.
2) If only Apple would open up iMessage, then this would be a real story. I can only dream of the day when I can iMessage from a PC using Pidgin.
As you said, they saved all that money ages ago when they got rid of the people doing the manual crunching. That's what I'd call "sunk savings", I.E. the opposite of a sunk cost. In other words, all that money they saved was so long ago that the costs they're operating with now are the new normal. You can't just go back and reference how it used to be a long time ago because that would throw all your finances out of whack with the rest of the market, which is operating in the here and now.
Any software that works is better than upgrading, unless 1) you're fairly certain you aren't going to have some sort of catastrophe, and 2) there's a compelling business case for doing the upgrade.
The same way you get businesses to do anything else. Write down everything you want to accomplish and format that list as bullet points. For each item on the list, make a business case that shows why it should be done, what benefits will be realized by doing it, what risks come with not doing it and any other info you feel is pertinent. Then take that list and show it to the person that has the authority to implement the changes.
Unfortunately, many times, people will resist change if they feel it will hurt someone's feelings. This is especially true among small teams. If that's the case, then you just have to weigh the risk of not doing something against the turmoil it would create and figure out which is the lesser of two evils.
As someone who is responsible for purchasing software and maintaining license compliance for my organization, I love the subscription model. Sure you can say it takes away from the experience by never allowing you to "own" the software, but in most businesses you only use it until the next version comes out and everyone wants to upgrade.
But the biggest advantage here, bar none, is that everyone will always have the same version. Previously with Photoshop, we had our creative group which consists of about 10 folks and they always buy the latest version as soon as it comes out, then we have 10 or so random "power users" in the organization that also have photoshop but don't buy the new versions, so then we end up supporting multiple different versions and interoperability is a nightmare.
This causes significant budget challenges because when a new version is announced in May and released in July, and you didn't have any idea it was coming back in November of the previous year when you created your budget, now you have to figure out where to find money to buy it. The subscription model gives you an easily predictable cost, and users can always have the latest version. Additionally, you don't have to deal with folks installing rogue, unlicensed versions of the software so it greatly simplifies compliance.
We made the jump to Office 365 last year and in terms of licensing, you do pay a bit more for the subscription when you compare it to the cost of buying the newest version every 2-3 years, but the cost is steady and easy to predict and that prevents us from having to go and "sell" new versions to management and keeps us from ending up in a position where we're using an out of date version of Office for a few years.
The mistake Adobe is making here is restricting subscriptions with a 1yr minimum term. Microsoft did it right by allowing you to move your license count up or down on a monthly basis. Around this time of the year when my company brings in 10-15 summer interns, this is great. We can scale our license count up and only pay for those licenses when we need them.
DRM will stop the casual sharing of music. For example, high school kids...back when I was in high school and MP3s were just coming out, we would regularly trade music with our friends because we couldn't afford to buy all the music we wanted and it was easy to do so. Kids nowadays are probably either using something like BitTorrent or iTunes to acquire their music. If they're using iTunes, it's not so easy for them to share that music because iTunes somewhat locks it to their account. So, it may generate some additional revenue for the artist by way of additional sales because DRM prevents the music from being shares by the casual listener.
OTOH, it probably does more harm to the artist by preventing all those other people that would have heard their music for free illegaly, become =fans, paid for concert tickets, etc. Artists really need to get rid of their hard on for DRM and realize that it's doing them more harm than good. They should focus on making money off the scarce goods like concert tickets, merchandise, fan exclusive deals, etc. Use music or art to get people to like you, then you can sell them other things.
DRM is trying to artificially create scarcity and it works to an extent, but see above, it's doing more harm than good.
Right, I was speaking to the more general discussion in the thread where folks were commenting on Futurama and Arrested Development and whether or not they should be cancelled. In that sense, when you're talking about cable or especially network TV, they've only got so many timeslots to work with so they have to keep their number of shows trimmed down and consequently they want to make sure they only keep the solid performers. I totally agree with you that online distribution changes the whole game because it allows you to have an infinite number of shows and folks can pick what they want to watch. Now more shows can be produced because you've eliminated the constraint of only having XX number of timeslots in which to run shows. Shows still have to produce enough revenue for them to be profitable, but the bar for a show making the cut has been lowered.
It'd be useful if the article mentioned WHY a netflix spokesperson went this e-mail to slashdot. If they did it out of the blue, then you're right. If slashdot for some reason reached out to them for comment, then yeah it's still unpaid advertising, but it's unpaid advertising because slashdot decided for some reason that this was newsworthy.
Most American TV viewers watch Idol and Dancing with the stars, so we can ignore their judgement as a baseline for what is good.
Not to blatantly contradict your logic too harshly...but you said it yourself. Most American TV viewers watch Idol and Dancing with the stars
So, yeah, I'd agree with you that most Americans wouldn't know good TV if it walked up and punched them in the face, but as long as networks base the continuation of a series on ratings, if people continue to watch Idol over something else, there's a good chance that something else is going to get the axe.
Steam has come to Linux because Valve has become very openly dissatisfied with Windows 8 and the direction DirectX is taking. I suspect that the SteamBox project played a large part in the decision to make a linux port, and I further suspect that that decision wasn't about enabling folks running linux to run steam nearly as much as it was about making sure linux was supported so when the SteamBoxes start rolling off the assembly line they can actually run Steam.
Right, exactly. Hit the nail on the head. Linux support matters HERE. Not out in the rest of the world where it's about making money from a product instead of embracing open standards. I stand by my original statement. If it were financially advantageous for Amazon to invest the effort in creating a linux solution for their video platform, they would.
Sure, they could probably make some money from folks running linux than would subscribe to Prime for the videos, but in the grand scheme of things, projects get prioritized in the order in which they impact the company's bottom line, and I don't see this being a huge revenue generator for them, especially when there are already the workarounds I listed in my original post that linux users can make use of.
Amazon isn't exactly a company that is against Linux, I mean they built their own Linux distro for AWS. It's just that there's no compelling business case for them to bring linux support to VOD. It makes no sense to complain and think that they'll somehow prioritize this when there's no reason for them to do so.
$50k on a single server? Ok, sure...you could, but for a small business with "some files and a website"? WTF are you buying that costs $50k? Buy yourself a decent Dell server with a couple 8 core Xeons, 64GB of RAM and some storage and you're looking at $20k MAYBE. Probably more like $12-15k. I just bought a couple PowerEdge servers to run vmware for a small business. They were all 8 core with 256GB of RAM, 10GbE and dual port 8Gb FC and they were well under $10k each and that's WAY more than the average mom and pop shop needs.
Until linux has something resembling a decent marketshare on the desktop, stop expecting publishers to care about or support it. It's simply not worth their time to devote the time of their engineering teams to support Linux when they're not likely to see a huge return on that investment.
Most folks running Linux are smart enough to run a Windows VM if they want to watch Amazon videos, and if they don't want to because of pride or some other "belief", then that's THEIR decision.
Also, I don't have any statistics, but I've got to believe that a large portion of Amazon clients are STBs, not computers.
So, buy a STB that supports Amazon, or buy an OEM Windows license and spin up a VM.
Now, if only Amazon would release an iOS app. That's a huge market segment that they're alienating by not having their content available. I want to be able to watch Amazon video on my phone just like I can watch Netflix and Hulu on my phone.
That's a great and technically accurate description of what the DMZ feature is on most routers and why you shouldn't expect it to work like an actual DMZ does. Kudos to you.
By hiring males (where the largest pool of IT talent is), your logic says I'm perpetuating a "broken environment"? You say it's this broken environment that causes the problems. Can you define the "problems" for me? I have a perfectly capable team that gets work done and meshes well, so I wouldn't call that a problem.
For most positions, I'd have to specifically recruit for a female to get one application from one. And let's be practical here...whether or not a woman can shred the rest of the team is sort of contrary to the point. Do I really want to hire someone when that's what you think they'd be inclined to do? What kind of work life is that going to be for her? Is she really going to want to go to a job where she dreads her coworkers? The answer, sure...for about 6 months. Then she'll realize she would be happier somewhere else and she'll leave, at which point we've come full circle back to my initial reason for typically not hiring someone into that type of situation.
I'm all for workforce diversity, but it's not my job to accomplish it when it's going to impact my team in a negative way. What do you suppose the ratio of male to female auto mechanics is? Or Nascar drivers? Would you say that a woman is inherently any less qualified to fix a car or drive a car? Of course not. In general women don't enter those fields for the same reasons they don't enter the IT field. It's dominated by males and, again, in general, women aren't a good cultural fit.
So, again, while I'm all for diversity, it's not my job, or an auto shop owner's job, or a race team owner's job to hire women when they think they won't be a good team fit and will probably cause disruption to the team environment.
In my team, when the office door's closed and HR isn't around, you can feel free to talk about whatever you want, and that's part of what makes working in IT special. By bringing someone who isn't used to that culture in, you disrupt it.
The whole deal of picking the most qualified person for the job is a load of crap. When I hire someone, I look at how well they are suited to the position, but I also look at how well they would mesh with the team they would become a part of. If the existing team is a bunch of 20-something guys that talk about guns and cars all day, a 40-something woman who's starting her second career in the tech field probably isn't going to be the best fit. If I have her up against a guy that is a better cultural fit but slightly less technically qualified, the guy is probably going to get the job. Sure it might not fit with HR policies, but here in the real world, I don't like having to rehire in 6 months when she quits because she doesn't like the work environment.
If you're talking about virtualizing, then yes it's less expensive to purchase your own equipment and run your own VMs on it than it is to pay for instances in EC2. If you're just talking about purchasing a physical server to run a single application, then it's cheaper to rent from AWS than it is to purchase.
Even for companies that have relatively static compute needs, one area where AWS still really shines is storage. Take Glacier for instance...unlimited storage for a cent per GB per month. $120 a year to store a terabyte of data is pretty darn cheap. Sure you could buy some cheap SATA hard drives, but then you have the overhead of replacing them when they fail, powering them, keeping them cool, etc.
Another area where AWS is really handy is if you're doing a migration or upgrade and you temporarily want to spin up a complete replica of your production environment for test purposes. You can do that in AWS very easily and all you're paying for is the compute resources you're using. Most shops would find that very difficult if not impossible to do on their own hardware in their own datacenter.
It seems like you're operating under the assumption that digital inheritance of goods you've purchased a license to will pass to an heir the same way a physical item would. I'd be willing to bet Apple, Amazon and the content owners have a different view on that. If I'm not mistaken, when you purchase a movie from a service such as iTunes, you're not actually purchasing it, you're paying for a non-transferable license for personal use. Before you start asking questions about how to make sure the transfer of ownership takes place, I would first start with the more basic question of do you even have the option of transferring ownership upon your death.
Customer signs up for service and selects an iPhone 5 or other expensive phone, so Tmo "finances" it for them. Customer then cancels their service and stops paying for the phone. How do they get the balance of what the customer owes them for the phone? It sounds like they're just getting creative about what they call their contracts and subsidies. If you can still get an iPhone without paying the full $650 up front, I'd say that's still a contract you're signing, just perhaps a contract shorter than 24 months.
How many users is each service supporting? I'd be willing to bet AWS is supporting 20x the user count GCE has, so if GCE is only 4x faster on some things, put an AWS-equivalent load on them and watch how quickly they fall over.
It is illegal to unlock cell phones you purchased at a subsidized price from a carrier if you have not completed the term of the contract you signed up for.
There's a big difference there. If I sell you a phone for $200 and that phone cost me $600, I've put myself $400 in debt. I don't want you to break that phone or be able to use that phone with any other carrier until I recoup that $400 from you (because in both instances, I've lost my primary motivating factor to get you to continue paying me). Once I recoup the full cost of the phone from you, you can do whatever you want with it.
It's just like renting a computer from one of those appliance rental places. You pay $15/week until you've paid it off. Until you pay it off, it doesn't belong to you so you can't sell it or modify it. Once it's paid off, you can do whatever you want to it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Phone companies could solve this problem overnight by changing their contracts to say that they retain full ownership of all phones they sell you at a contract subsidized price until the contract is satisfied.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I wonder why RIM would take one of the things people like about their platform and give it away free to competing platforms? It's not like BBM is a wasteland with no existing users.
2) If only Apple would open up iMessage, then this would be a real story. I can only dream of the day when I can iMessage from a PC using Pidgin.
As you said, they saved all that money ages ago when they got rid of the people doing the manual crunching. That's what I'd call "sunk savings", I.E. the opposite of a sunk cost. In other words, all that money they saved was so long ago that the costs they're operating with now are the new normal. You can't just go back and reference how it used to be a long time ago because that would throw all your finances out of whack with the rest of the market, which is operating in the here and now.
Any software that works is better than upgrading, unless 1) you're fairly certain you aren't going to have some sort of catastrophe, and 2) there's a compelling business case for doing the upgrade.
I can't whistle, but even if I could, I'd much rather say, "Computer, lights!"
The same way you get businesses to do anything else. Write down everything you want to accomplish and format that list as bullet points. For each item on the list, make a business case that shows why it should be done, what benefits will be realized by doing it, what risks come with not doing it and any other info you feel is pertinent. Then take that list and show it to the person that has the authority to implement the changes.
Unfortunately, many times, people will resist change if they feel it will hurt someone's feelings. This is especially true among small teams. If that's the case, then you just have to weigh the risk of not doing something against the turmoil it would create and figure out which is the lesser of two evils.
As someone who is responsible for purchasing software and maintaining license compliance for my organization, I love the subscription model. Sure you can say it takes away from the experience by never allowing you to "own" the software, but in most businesses you only use it until the next version comes out and everyone wants to upgrade.
But the biggest advantage here, bar none, is that everyone will always have the same version. Previously with Photoshop, we had our creative group which consists of about 10 folks and they always buy the latest version as soon as it comes out, then we have 10 or so random "power users" in the organization that also have photoshop but don't buy the new versions, so then we end up supporting multiple different versions and interoperability is a nightmare.
This causes significant budget challenges because when a new version is announced in May and released in July, and you didn't have any idea it was coming back in November of the previous year when you created your budget, now you have to figure out where to find money to buy it. The subscription model gives you an easily predictable cost, and users can always have the latest version. Additionally, you don't have to deal with folks installing rogue, unlicensed versions of the software so it greatly simplifies compliance.
We made the jump to Office 365 last year and in terms of licensing, you do pay a bit more for the subscription when you compare it to the cost of buying the newest version every 2-3 years, but the cost is steady and easy to predict and that prevents us from having to go and "sell" new versions to management and keeps us from ending up in a position where we're using an out of date version of Office for a few years.
The mistake Adobe is making here is restricting subscriptions with a 1yr minimum term. Microsoft did it right by allowing you to move your license count up or down on a monthly basis. Around this time of the year when my company brings in 10-15 summer interns, this is great. We can scale our license count up and only pay for those licenses when we need them.
It would help to know who this Vidich is without having to click through to the article. Editing fail.
DRM will stop the casual sharing of music. For example, high school kids...back when I was in high school and MP3s were just coming out, we would regularly trade music with our friends because we couldn't afford to buy all the music we wanted and it was easy to do so. Kids nowadays are probably either using something like BitTorrent or iTunes to acquire their music. If they're using iTunes, it's not so easy for them to share that music because iTunes somewhat locks it to their account. So, it may generate some additional revenue for the artist by way of additional sales because DRM prevents the music from being shares by the casual listener.
OTOH, it probably does more harm to the artist by preventing all those other people that would have heard their music for free illegaly, become =fans, paid for concert tickets, etc. Artists really need to get rid of their hard on for DRM and realize that it's doing them more harm than good. They should focus on making money off the scarce goods like concert tickets, merchandise, fan exclusive deals, etc. Use music or art to get people to like you, then you can sell them other things.
DRM is trying to artificially create scarcity and it works to an extent, but see above, it's doing more harm than good.
Right, I was speaking to the more general discussion in the thread where folks were commenting on Futurama and Arrested Development and whether or not they should be cancelled. In that sense, when you're talking about cable or especially network TV, they've only got so many timeslots to work with so they have to keep their number of shows trimmed down and consequently they want to make sure they only keep the solid performers. I totally agree with you that online distribution changes the whole game because it allows you to have an infinite number of shows and folks can pick what they want to watch. Now more shows can be produced because you've eliminated the constraint of only having XX number of timeslots in which to run shows. Shows still have to produce enough revenue for them to be profitable, but the bar for a show making the cut has been lowered.
It'd be useful if the article mentioned WHY a netflix spokesperson went this e-mail to slashdot. If they did it out of the blue, then you're right. If slashdot for some reason reached out to them for comment, then yeah it's still unpaid advertising, but it's unpaid advertising because slashdot decided for some reason that this was newsworthy.
Most American TV viewers watch Idol and Dancing with the stars, so we can ignore their judgement as a baseline for what is good.
Not to blatantly contradict your logic too harshly...but you said it yourself. Most American TV viewers watch Idol and Dancing with the stars
So, yeah, I'd agree with you that most Americans wouldn't know good TV if it walked up and punched them in the face, but as long as networks base the continuation of a series on ratings, if people continue to watch Idol over something else, there's a good chance that something else is going to get the axe.
Steam has come to Linux because Valve has become very openly dissatisfied with Windows 8 and the direction DirectX is taking. I suspect that the SteamBox project played a large part in the decision to make a linux port, and I further suspect that that decision wasn't about enabling folks running linux to run steam nearly as much as it was about making sure linux was supported so when the SteamBoxes start rolling off the assembly line they can actually run Steam.
Linux support always matters here.
Right, exactly. Hit the nail on the head. Linux support matters HERE. Not out in the rest of the world where it's about making money from a product instead of embracing open standards. I stand by my original statement. If it were financially advantageous for Amazon to invest the effort in creating a linux solution for their video platform, they would.
Sure, they could probably make some money from folks running linux than would subscribe to Prime for the videos, but in the grand scheme of things, projects get prioritized in the order in which they impact the company's bottom line, and I don't see this being a huge revenue generator for them, especially when there are already the workarounds I listed in my original post that linux users can make use of.
Amazon isn't exactly a company that is against Linux, I mean they built their own Linux distro for AWS. It's just that there's no compelling business case for them to bring linux support to VOD. It makes no sense to complain and think that they'll somehow prioritize this when there's no reason for them to do so.
$50k on a single server? Ok, sure...you could, but for a small business with "some files and a website"? WTF are you buying that costs $50k? Buy yourself a decent Dell server with a couple 8 core Xeons, 64GB of RAM and some storage and you're looking at $20k MAYBE. Probably more like $12-15k. I just bought a couple PowerEdge servers to run vmware for a small business. They were all 8 core with 256GB of RAM, 10GbE and dual port 8Gb FC and they were well under $10k each and that's WAY more than the average mom and pop shop needs.
Or it could work for the medical industry too by reducing the cost of circumcisions!
It looks like with only minor modifications you could turn these robots into automated wank machines.
Until linux has something resembling a decent marketshare on the desktop, stop expecting publishers to care about or support it. It's simply not worth their time to devote the time of their engineering teams to support Linux when they're not likely to see a huge return on that investment.
Most folks running Linux are smart enough to run a Windows VM if they want to watch Amazon videos, and if they don't want to because of pride or some other "belief", then that's THEIR decision.
Also, I don't have any statistics, but I've got to believe that a large portion of Amazon clients are STBs, not computers.
So, buy a STB that supports Amazon, or buy an OEM Windows license and spin up a VM.
Now, if only Amazon would release an iOS app. That's a huge market segment that they're alienating by not having their content available. I want to be able to watch Amazon video on my phone just like I can watch Netflix and Hulu on my phone.
That's a great and technically accurate description of what the DMZ feature is on most routers and why you shouldn't expect it to work like an actual DMZ does. Kudos to you.
That's cool. You didn't respond to any of my points and resorted to calling me names, so I'm guessing that's your way of admitting defeat. Thanks!
By hiring males (where the largest pool of IT talent is), your logic says I'm perpetuating a "broken environment"? You say it's this broken environment that causes the problems. Can you define the "problems" for me? I have a perfectly capable team that gets work done and meshes well, so I wouldn't call that a problem.
For most positions, I'd have to specifically recruit for a female to get one application from one. And let's be practical here...whether or not a woman can shred the rest of the team is sort of contrary to the point. Do I really want to hire someone when that's what you think they'd be inclined to do? What kind of work life is that going to be for her? Is she really going to want to go to a job where she dreads her coworkers? The answer, sure...for about 6 months. Then she'll realize she would be happier somewhere else and she'll leave, at which point we've come full circle back to my initial reason for typically not hiring someone into that type of situation.
I'm all for workforce diversity, but it's not my job to accomplish it when it's going to impact my team in a negative way. What do you suppose the ratio of male to female auto mechanics is? Or Nascar drivers? Would you say that a woman is inherently any less qualified to fix a car or drive a car? Of course not. In general women don't enter those fields for the same reasons they don't enter the IT field. It's dominated by males and, again, in general, women aren't a good cultural fit.
So, again, while I'm all for diversity, it's not my job, or an auto shop owner's job, or a race team owner's job to hire women when they think they won't be a good team fit and will probably cause disruption to the team environment.
In my team, when the office door's closed and HR isn't around, you can feel free to talk about whatever you want, and that's part of what makes working in IT special. By bringing someone who isn't used to that culture in, you disrupt it.
The whole deal of picking the most qualified person for the job is a load of crap. When I hire someone, I look at how well they are suited to the position, but I also look at how well they would mesh with the team they would become a part of. If the existing team is a bunch of 20-something guys that talk about guns and cars all day, a 40-something woman who's starting her second career in the tech field probably isn't going to be the best fit. If I have her up against a guy that is a better cultural fit but slightly less technically qualified, the guy is probably going to get the job. Sure it might not fit with HR policies, but here in the real world, I don't like having to rehire in 6 months when she quits because she doesn't like the work environment.
If you're talking about virtualizing, then yes it's less expensive to purchase your own equipment and run your own VMs on it than it is to pay for instances in EC2. If you're just talking about purchasing a physical server to run a single application, then it's cheaper to rent from AWS than it is to purchase.
Even for companies that have relatively static compute needs, one area where AWS still really shines is storage. Take Glacier for instance...unlimited storage for a cent per GB per month. $120 a year to store a terabyte of data is pretty darn cheap. Sure you could buy some cheap SATA hard drives, but then you have the overhead of replacing them when they fail, powering them, keeping them cool, etc.
Another area where AWS is really handy is if you're doing a migration or upgrade and you temporarily want to spin up a complete replica of your production environment for test purposes. You can do that in AWS very easily and all you're paying for is the compute resources you're using. Most shops would find that very difficult if not impossible to do on their own hardware in their own datacenter.
It seems like you're operating under the assumption that digital inheritance of goods you've purchased a license to will pass to an heir the same way a physical item would. I'd be willing to bet Apple, Amazon and the content owners have a different view on that. If I'm not mistaken, when you purchase a movie from a service such as iTunes, you're not actually purchasing it, you're paying for a non-transferable license for personal use. Before you start asking questions about how to make sure the transfer of ownership takes place, I would first start with the more basic question of do you even have the option of transferring ownership upon your death.
Customer signs up for service and selects an iPhone 5 or other expensive phone, so Tmo "finances" it for them. Customer then cancels their service and stops paying for the phone. How do they get the balance of what the customer owes them for the phone? It sounds like they're just getting creative about what they call their contracts and subsidies. If you can still get an iPhone without paying the full $650 up front, I'd say that's still a contract you're signing, just perhaps a contract shorter than 24 months.
How many users is each service supporting? I'd be willing to bet AWS is supporting 20x the user count GCE has, so if GCE is only 4x faster on some things, put an AWS-equivalent load on them and watch how quickly they fall over.
It is not illegal to unlock cell phones.
It is illegal to unlock cell phones you purchased at a subsidized price from a carrier if you have not completed the term of the contract you signed up for.
There's a big difference there. If I sell you a phone for $200 and that phone cost me $600, I've put myself $400 in debt. I don't want you to break that phone or be able to use that phone with any other carrier until I recoup that $400 from you (because in both instances, I've lost my primary motivating factor to get you to continue paying me). Once I recoup the full cost of the phone from you, you can do whatever you want with it.
It's just like renting a computer from one of those appliance rental places. You pay $15/week until you've paid it off. Until you pay it off, it doesn't belong to you so you can't sell it or modify it. Once it's paid off, you can do whatever you want to it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Phone companies could solve this problem overnight by changing their contracts to say that they retain full ownership of all phones they sell you at a contract subsidized price until the contract is satisfied.