I believe this was in the software context, back in the days of ProLock floppies and the like.
They compared the software delivery market to early transatlantic shipping. In those days (not sure exactly when, but I suspect we're talking 1600s-1800s) there were two competing shipping models - the galleon and the clipper. The galleon said you send your goods to/from the new world in a heavily armed and escorted ship so it can defend itself from pirates. The clipper model said you send you goods to/from the new world in a ship so fast it could a: outrun most pirates, since they were heavily armed, and b: didn't spend as much time at sea, where they might get attacked.
In the end, of course the steamship won. But in the sailing technology race the clipper won, because it was simply more efficient at getting cargo from point A to point B. All of the armament of a galleon was a distraction from the primary task - shipping.
Unless of course the people running the galleons have an in with the legislature, and craft laws effectively outlawing clippers.
After all, if a tax is being paid to make up for lost revenue, then does it legimize the act?
Doesn't the same apply here in the US? Wasn't there a story a while back about how there's a surcharge on CDRs to cover lost revenue to the record companies? Since I'm paying a 'tax' doesn't that either imply that I'm now paying for the content and have permission to download and burn. Or does it imply that I've been declared guilty without a trial and am being punished for an act I've never committed?
But when he mentioned DRM and the guy who couldn't put his own digital audio onto a digital tape, he claimed it wasn't DRM, rather some other law. But taken as a whole, DRM, the other law, and so forth are all part of the RIAA/MPAA attempt to legally channel technology to protect their business model.
He goes on to say that certain functions like home digital recording will be lost, and other exercises of fair use will either become very inconvenient or expensive. But apparently InHisOpinion this is a fair price to pay to protect RIAA/MPAA business models. (The latter part is my paraphrase.) IMHO, it isn't, because it prevents new business models from emerging. It uses copyright law to grant RIAA/MPAA monopoly on artists works, and the spectrum of DRM and related laws to grant them a monopoly on recording technology suitable for widescale quality and distribution. No competition will be able to emerge.
What if it could be shown that there is an industry that takes a product worth $0.25 in physical cost and packaging, maybe $2.50 in IP value, and then sells the product for $15.00? Then you find that while there are several large makers of this product who would ordinarily be in competition driving prices down, they apparently "agree" on the $15 price, since because of the IP issues they don't really compete directly. Oh, they funnel a goodly share of the profit into "advertising", making sure that their products are the ones that get air time.
Naaah, too unlikely that such a thing could ever happen.
This article gets a positive spin on Slashdot simply because he believes that file sharing isn't really hurting CD sales.
But reading the article further, he merely looks at the numbers, with apparently no attempt to find out what's behind them. Aside from blaming the 5% drop on the recession, he doesn't really dig deeper, looking into the possiblity that maybe filesharing is acting as a try-before-buy, as is often advocated here.
The real corker though, is that this guy comes down squarely, firmly, and uncompromisingly on the side of DRM. Fair use on text? You can always retype a paragraph. Music or video? you can always get fair use by paying some money. Can't privately produce digital content? Blame some other supposedly non-DRM law, without realizing the obvious - that these laws are all part of a Web of Paranoia on the part of the entertainment media industries.
When my kids were younger, the best thing I could give my wife for Mother's Day was to not be a mother for a day. So ahead of time, I planned a day trip with the kids, frequently out of state or far away in-state. In addition, I had a sitter arranged for that evening, and tried to have the house reasonably clean the night before.
So my wife got to see us get up and out first thing, then had the day to herself around a fairly clean house. Late afternoon we'd get back. She'd "bounce the kids on her knees" (do the fun mommy stuff) for a few minutes, and then the sitter would arrive and we were gone for dinner and movie or play.
She did the same type of thing for me several times. As the kids got older there was less need for this type of relief.
My kids went through a Redwall phase, and I read a few for Dad-value. A first one is pretty decent, but shortly after that they seem to lack variety. After a while, you get sick of virtuous mice and their friends who eat heartily, and evil rats and their cronies who - are evil.
There may be something interesting about touching on religious themes, and having all sorts of religious trappings, yet not have any religion or faith.
We took the kids to the local bookstore to see Brian Jaques (and buy a book) when he came to town. He's quite a talker.
Sounds reminiscent of muon-catalyzed fusion. The muon has the same charge as an electron, but is many times more massive. Substitute a muon for an electron, and the "orbit" around the nucleus is much smaller. Enough smaller that it's not tough to get "muonized" hydrogen to fuse.
Unfortunately, muons decay rather quickly, and it take more energy to make them than you get from the fusion.
But if Intel was going to supercede a messy architecture like X86, I wish they'd done something better than IA64. While the jury is still out on the merits of IA64, it has some of the marks of Internal Politics on it. It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel sold some management on a renamed version of the basic approach, and the project gathered Corporate Inertia.
At the same time, it doesn't sound as if all of the VLIW problems have been solved on the compiler side, so it's not clear that IA64 is doing any more than a clean, modern architecture cable of OOO execution could have done.
Out of the Hammer series, I'm reminded/hoping for the phenomenon described in "Soul of a New Machine", where they managed to clean and extend the old architecture at the same time. By the time they were done, the old architecture was an ugly wart on the side of a new clean one. The fear was the new being an uglier wart on the side of an already ugly one, and they avoided it.
I don't know enough about Hammer to know what the case is. I have the documents, but haven't made time to read them. I've also heard some rumblings that some of the performance improvements to IA64 involve de-purifying it's VLIW to pick up OOO techniques. I've heard that VLIW was an attempt to sidestep OOO because those prolems were feared, but in the meantime the industry has learned how to do OOO pretty well.
The crew quarters had astronomical and such pictures on the walls. I'd *love* to ship out on the Enterprise, but I expect I'd have nature scenes on my walls. If I wanted to see astronomy, I'd look out a window/porthole or viewscreen.
I suspect everyone wants a view of what they can't easily have.
Trying to assert gatekeeper control over the technology industry that gives them they tools they us to do their jobs. I know MPAA and RIAA are crying "tough times", but I don't see them bleeding employees the way the tech sector is. (I suspect they're bleeding artists, but I also suspect that they don't consider most artists to be people, let alone employees.)
certainly more applicable to the concept of fixing security holes in Microsoft software.
FYI: Whack-a-Mole is an old arcade game where you hold a padded mallet facing a slightly inclined surface with a half-dozen or so holes. Periodically a little mole pops up from a hole, and you try to whack him before he goes back down on his own. A little bit like playing XBill, only in the Real World.
But since the system is administered and controlled by IBM (or any other company), they become liable for problems. Therefore they're going to be on the ball about controlling access, etc, and limiting their liklihood of getting sued.
If I weren't busy being political and trying to deprive the RIAA of my money, I'd likely be back into music more. It isn't that I've out-grown or out-aged music. It's that at the moment, I have elected not to re-engage with its corporate side.
What I really think indie music is missing is a good way to find it, and to find some that I'd like. A *good* radio DJ/station is good, in that you will get some stuff you like, some stuff you might like, and take along with it some stuff you probably won't like. Learning to like something new is well worth hearing a few things you don't like. Right now my main source of this is NPR music reviews.
I'd like to find the same type of thing for indie, to steer my way toward new things with a decent chance of liking it.
But I refuse to. Nor do I "steal" through Napster or the like.
The fruits of the type of work I do go into things like cell phones, where decorative plastic covers sell for more than the electronics. Years back I saw the defective DRAM chips I'd designed selling for more as jewelry than good chips did as memory.
Yet the music industry takes a product that costs $0.10 to make, pays the artist peanuts for royalties, and then sells it for $15 a pop.A significant portion of that profit goes toward promoting "stars" of marginal talent, and trying to shape public taste.
I used to enjoy music, but the sickness of the industry has largely turned me off to it. (Granted it was helped by the "quest for silence" of early parenthood, and the general busy-ness of later parenthood.)
I'm protesting by taking my dollars elsewhere. That's my right.
Bad: The free market squanders resources into scarcity.
Essentially, the free market works on supply and demand. If the perceived supply is larger than the perceived demand, the price is low. If it's the other way around, the price is high. But there seems to be an underlying assumption that the market can correct supply/demand balance issues. This is where "perceived" comes in. Sometimes we all tend to ignore problems as long as possible. Then when we notice we panic. In free market lingo, this means a price spike.
For some price spikes, adjusting manufacturing output can fix things, and this is the way the free market is supposed to run. For some things like teachers and nurses, there is a necessary lag while the 'teacher and nurse factories' ramp up. For some things, like natural resources, the only recovery path is to shift to another resource, requiring innovation and retooling, probably taking longer than training a teacher or nurse. Reality isn't as flexible as money and manufactured goods.
The other side is that insiders can manipulate the free market, to some extent. IMHO, the oversupply of financial advisors and lawyers certainly hasn't caused a corresponding drop in prices.
> Yeah, so the small radio stations sold to the big guys, and clear channel has a monopoly. If they abuse the monopoly, the could be facing trouble > down the road.
Unless of course they can buy enough influence in Congress to get the right legislation. After all, the strategy is working so far for the RIAA, MPAA, and isn't doing too badly by Microsoft, either.
Thank you for looking past my stupid Mac-ignorant/-mistake and answering the question.
My main point was that a Mac OS X (everybody happy, now?) will not have junk creeping into the system itself. Even if WinNT and descendents *can* be immune to this, I've seen too many setups where the user's id is set as admin.
Was this commentary done with OS/X, or earlier versions? I would expect OS/X to be considerably more resistant, given a true multi-user base, where the default userid is not 'admin'.
I suspect that there were really two factors at work in the short DDR-I lifetime.
First, Intel muddied the waters with the big exclusive Rambus push. While there was DDR work going on prior to the Rambus push, there was some very real contention in carrying both programs through development. This doesn't even mention quite a bit of "wait and back the winner," at many levels of the industry.I suspect that the success of the Athlon competing with PIII had almost as much to do with DDR success as Rambus prices.
Second, there were very real signal integrity issues that had been skirted for quite some time, and really came to the fore with DDR. That took some time, but more thought has been applied forward to DDR-II, so it shouldn't be as painful.
Sorry about that. I HATE when people throw acronyms at me with no explanation.
Linux Standard Base
An attempt to fix fragmentation problems so that ISVs don't have to choose a distribution to support. Considered by many to be a prerequisite for Linux to really take off, commercially.
Something needs to be done, because the Linux community is allowing itself to get slipped into the Microsoft mindset. With the LSB in place, there should be none of this business of "targetting a distribution" or other Microsoft-like lock-in nonsense.
1: The LSB needs to be in place. 2: All major distributions need to adhere to it, and the minor ones should too, for that matter. 3: Education is key, that LSB-compliance is the real crux of the matter, not some specific distribution. 4: Packaged software should state its requirements relative to the LSB. LSB+foolib+barlib, etc. Some distributions may choose to distinguish themselves by including foolib and/or barlib out of the box. The ISV should also have copies/pointers for foolib and barlib on their web site. 5: Distributions are good. More are better, as long as LSB can solve the interoperability and installation problems.
I'm disappointed to see LSB mentioned only once as of my writing this post.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this was in the software context, back in the days of ProLock floppies and the like.
/. post in favor of the clipper!
They compared the software delivery market to early transatlantic shipping. In those days (not sure exactly when, but I suspect we're talking 1600s-1800s) there were two competing shipping models - the galleon and the clipper. The galleon said you send your goods to/from the new world in a heavily armed and escorted ship so it can defend itself from pirates. The clipper model said you send you goods to/from the new world in a ship so fast it could a: outrun most pirates, since they were heavily armed, and b: didn't spend as much time at sea, where they might get attacked.
In the end, of course the steamship won. But in the sailing technology race the clipper won, because it was simply more efficient at getting cargo from point A to point B. All of the armament of a galleon was a distraction from the primary task - shipping.
Unless of course the people running the galleons have an in with the legislature, and craft laws effectively outlawing clippers.
How's that, a
After all, if a tax is being paid to make up for lost revenue, then does it legimize the act?
Doesn't the same apply here in the US? Wasn't there a story a while back about how there's a surcharge on CDRs to cover lost revenue to the record companies? Since I'm paying a 'tax' doesn't that either imply that I'm now paying for the content and have permission to download and burn. Or does it imply that I've been declared guilty without a trial and am being punished for an act I've never committed?
But when he mentioned DRM and the guy who couldn't put his own digital audio onto a digital tape, he claimed it wasn't DRM, rather some other law. But taken as a whole, DRM, the other law, and so forth are all part of the RIAA/MPAA attempt to legally channel technology to protect their business model.
He goes on to say that certain functions like home digital recording will be lost, and other exercises of fair use will either become very inconvenient or expensive. But apparently InHisOpinion this is a fair price to pay to protect RIAA/MPAA business models. (The latter part is my paraphrase.) IMHO, it isn't, because it prevents new business models from emerging. It uses copyright law to grant RIAA/MPAA monopoly on artists works, and the spectrum of DRM and related laws to grant them a monopoly on recording technology suitable for widescale quality and distribution. No competition will be able to emerge.
That's the real loss.
What if it could be shown that there is an industry that takes a product worth $0.25 in physical cost and packaging, maybe $2.50 in IP value, and then sells the product for $15.00? Then you find that while there are several large makers of this product who would ordinarily be in competition driving prices down, they apparently "agree" on the $15 price, since because of the IP issues they don't really compete directly. Oh, they funnel a goodly share of the profit into "advertising", making sure that their products are the ones that get air time.
Naaah, too unlikely that such a thing could ever happen.
It's clear that lawyer-life has gotten a good hold on planet Earth, so clearly we fail that intelligence test
In support of the Pseudo-Libertarian label...
This article gets a positive spin on Slashdot simply because he believes that file sharing isn't really hurting CD sales.
But reading the article further, he merely looks at the numbers, with apparently no attempt to find out what's behind them. Aside from blaming the 5% drop on the recession, he doesn't really dig deeper, looking into the possiblity that maybe filesharing is acting as a try-before-buy, as is often advocated here.
The real corker though, is that this guy comes down squarely, firmly, and uncompromisingly on the side of DRM. Fair use on text? You can always retype a paragraph. Music or video? you can always get fair use by paying some money. Can't privately produce digital content? Blame some other supposedly non-DRM law, without realizing the obvious - that these laws are all part of a Web of Paranoia on the part of the entertainment media industries.
On a related topic, Mother's Day...
When my kids were younger, the best thing I could give my wife for Mother's Day was to not be a mother for a day. So ahead of time, I planned a day trip with the kids, frequently out of state or far away in-state. In addition, I had a sitter arranged for that evening, and tried to have the house reasonably clean the night before.
So my wife got to see us get up and out first thing, then had the day to herself around a fairly clean house. Late afternoon we'd get back. She'd "bounce the kids on her knees" (do the fun mommy stuff) for a few minutes, and then the sitter would arrive and we were gone for dinner and movie or play.
She did the same type of thing for me several times. As the kids got older there was less need for this type of relief.
My kids went through a Redwall phase, and I read a few for Dad-value. A first one is pretty decent, but shortly after that they seem to lack variety. After a while, you get sick of virtuous mice and their friends who eat heartily, and evil rats and their cronies who - are evil.
There may be something interesting about touching on religious themes, and having all sorts of religious trappings, yet not have any religion or faith.
We took the kids to the local bookstore to see Brian Jaques (and buy a book) when he came to town. He's quite a talker.
Neither did Elmer Fudd.
(Presuming the parent was a reference to one of the best Bugs cartoons ever.)
Sounds reminiscent of muon-catalyzed fusion. The muon has the same charge as an electron, but is many times more massive. Substitute a muon for an electron, and the "orbit" around the nucleus is much smaller. Enough smaller that it's not tough to get "muonized" hydrogen to fuse.
Unfortunately, muons decay rather quickly, and it take more energy to make them than you get from the fusion.
But the hydrino idea still reminds me of it.
Not to take either side...
But if Intel was going to supercede a messy architecture like X86, I wish they'd done something better than IA64. While the jury is still out on the merits of IA64, it has some of the marks of Internal Politics on it. It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel sold some management on a renamed version of the basic approach, and the project gathered Corporate Inertia.
At the same time, it doesn't sound as if all of the VLIW problems have been solved on the compiler side, so it's not clear that IA64 is doing any more than a clean, modern architecture cable of OOO execution could have done.
Out of the Hammer series, I'm reminded/hoping for the phenomenon described in "Soul of a New Machine", where they managed to clean and extend the old architecture at the same time. By the time they were done, the old architecture was an ugly wart on the side of a new clean one. The fear was the new being an uglier wart on the side of an already ugly one, and they avoided it.
I don't know enough about Hammer to know what the case is. I have the documents, but haven't made time to read them. I've also heard some rumblings that some of the performance improvements to IA64 involve de-purifying it's VLIW to pick up OOO techniques. I've heard that VLIW was an attempt to sidestep OOO because those prolems were feared, but in the meantime the industry has learned how to do OOO pretty well.
The crew quarters had astronomical and such pictures on the walls. I'd *love* to ship out on the Enterprise, but I expect I'd have nature scenes on my walls. If I wanted to see astronomy, I'd look out a window/porthole or viewscreen.
I suspect everyone wants a view of what they can't easily have.
Trying to assert gatekeeper control over the technology industry that gives them they tools they us to do their jobs. I know MPAA and RIAA are crying "tough times", but I don't see them bleeding employees the way the tech sector is. (I suspect they're bleeding artists, but I also suspect that they don't consider most artists to be people, let alone employees.)
certainly more applicable to the concept of fixing security holes in Microsoft software.
FYI: Whack-a-Mole is an old arcade game where you hold a padded mallet facing a slightly inclined surface with a half-dozen or so holes. Periodically a little mole pops up from a hole, and you try to whack him before he goes back down on his own. A little bit like playing XBill, only in the Real World.
They should ask for their money back on that study that claimed that Open Source would open us up to terrorists.
But since the system is administered and controlled by IBM (or any other company), they become liable for problems. Therefore they're going to be on the ball about controlling access, etc, and limiting their liklihood of getting sued.
Young is largely a matter of attitude.
If I weren't busy being political and trying to deprive the RIAA of my money, I'd likely be back into music more. It isn't that I've out-grown or out-aged music. It's that at the moment, I have elected not to re-engage with its corporate side.
What I really think indie music is missing is a good way to find it, and to find some that I'd like. A *good* radio DJ/station is good, in that you will get some stuff you like, some stuff you might like, and take along with it some stuff you probably won't like. Learning to like something new is well worth hearing a few things you don't like. Right now my main source of this is NPR music reviews.
I'd like to find the same type of thing for indie, to steer my way toward new things with a decent chance of liking it.
I can afford the music at $15 or $20 a pop.
But I refuse to. Nor do I "steal" through Napster or the like.
The fruits of the type of work I do go into things like cell phones, where decorative plastic covers sell for more than the electronics. Years back I saw the defective DRAM chips I'd designed selling for more as jewelry than good chips did as memory.
Yet the music industry takes a product that costs $0.10 to make, pays the artist peanuts for royalties, and then sells it for $15 a pop.A significant portion of that profit goes toward promoting "stars" of marginal talent, and trying to shape public taste.
I used to enjoy music, but the sickness of the industry has largely turned me off to it. (Granted it was helped by the "quest for silence" of early parenthood, and the general busy-ness of later parenthood.)
I'm protesting by taking my dollars elsewhere. That's my right.
Bad: The free market squanders resources into scarcity.
Essentially, the free market works on supply and demand. If the perceived supply is larger than the perceived demand, the price is low. If it's the other way around, the price is high. But there seems to be an underlying assumption that the market can correct supply/demand balance issues. This is where "perceived" comes in. Sometimes we all tend to ignore problems as long as possible. Then when we notice we panic. In free market lingo, this means a price spike.
For some price spikes, adjusting manufacturing output can fix things, and this is the way the free market is supposed to run. For some things like teachers and nurses, there is a necessary lag while the 'teacher and nurse factories' ramp up. For some things, like natural resources, the only recovery path is to shift to another resource, requiring innovation and retooling, probably taking longer than training a teacher or nurse. Reality isn't as flexible as money and manufactured goods.
The other side is that insiders can manipulate the free market, to some extent. IMHO, the oversupply of financial advisors and lawyers certainly hasn't caused a corresponding drop in prices.
Good side: Many, name your favorites.
> Yeah, so the small radio stations sold to the big guys, and clear channel has a monopoly. If they abuse the monopoly, the could be facing trouble
> down the road.
Unless of course they can buy enough influence in Congress to get the right legislation. After all, the strategy is working so far for the RIAA, MPAA, and isn't doing too badly by Microsoft, either.
Thank you for looking past my stupid Mac-ignorant /-mistake and answering the question.
My main point was that a Mac OS X (everybody happy, now?) will not have junk creeping into the system itself. Even if WinNT and descendents *can* be immune to this, I've seen too many setups where the user's id is set as admin.
Was this commentary done with OS/X, or earlier versions? I would expect OS/X to be considerably more resistant, given a true multi-user base, where the default userid is not 'admin'.
I suspect that there were really two factors at work in the short DDR-I lifetime.
First, Intel muddied the waters with the big exclusive Rambus push. While there was DDR work going on prior to the Rambus push, there was some very real contention in carrying both programs through development. This doesn't even mention quite a bit of "wait and back the winner," at many levels of the industry.I suspect that the success of the Athlon competing with PIII had almost as much to do with DDR success as Rambus prices.
Second, there were very real signal integrity issues that had been skirted for quite some time, and really came to the fore with DDR. That took some time, but more thought has been applied forward to DDR-II, so it shouldn't be as painful.
Sorry about that. I HATE when people throw acronyms at me with no explanation.
Linux Standard Base
An attempt to fix fragmentation problems so that ISVs don't have to choose a distribution to support. Considered by many to be a prerequisite for Linux to really take off, commercially.
Something needs to be done, because the Linux community is allowing itself to get slipped into the Microsoft mindset. With the LSB in place, there should be none of this business of "targetting a distribution" or other Microsoft-like lock-in nonsense.
1: The LSB needs to be in place.
2: All major distributions need to adhere to it, and the minor ones should too, for that matter.
3: Education is key, that LSB-compliance is the real crux of the matter, not some specific distribution.
4: Packaged software should state its requirements relative to the LSB. LSB+foolib+barlib, etc. Some distributions may choose to distinguish themselves by including foolib and/or barlib out of the box. The ISV should also have copies/pointers for foolib and barlib on their web site.
5: Distributions are good. More are better, as long as LSB can solve the interoperability and installation problems.
I'm disappointed to see LSB mentioned only once as of my writing this post.