How to acquire French cuisine in four simple steps:
1. Go to France.
2. Find blind man eating a sandwich.
3. Hit blind man with hammer.
4. Enjoy sandwich.
No need for violence. Replace Step #3 with: Say to him - "I am German."
This won't work, and I am speaking from experience. Remember that you are in France and that the English language will not help you at all (especially not with a heavy American accent). You should either try "Je suis Allemand!!!" or "Ich bin Deutscher!!!" maybe followed up with a proud "Sieg Heil!!!". The latter might get you arrested though, and quite rightly so I might add. But then you can enjoy french cuisine for free for some time.
..., then you'd be better served with a more hand holding OS like Debian.
This is the very first time that I have seen someone call Debian a handholding OS.
I tried the new installer yesterday (and Debian for the first time) and was everything but impressed. It very much reminded me of the days I spent with the text base install from RH6.1. The console keyboard settings were wrong (especially annoying with vi) and after installing XFree I had to configure stuff I hadn't touched in years (being a long time RH and now FC user).
Getting Debian on my system was like reliving long lost memories, but not necessarily good ones. Fedora installs so nicely on all of the hardware I tried it so far and I hear that SuSE works like a charm too.
Don't get me wrong though, there are reasons for why I tried Debian and I would very much like the distro to strive and get a modern hardware detection and installation system. Knoppix so far holds the crown in the former IMHO. And before I forget, a stable release with more recent software would also be quite nice;-).
Applications are going to be targeted at RedHat, Suse or whatever other commercial distro.
This is going to change the nature of linux, and I fear it is going to result in forking and incompatible code bases.
Why do you think this is going to change the nature of Linux? Assuming that you can still get Oracle for, say RedHat Enterprise Server. Where do forking and incompatible code bases come into play? The price for an Oracle installation is so high and maintenance quite expensive, that price for the OS is neglible compared to the overall system cost. You don't want to shell out to Oracle and then install it on an unsupported distro, like Fedora (which should still work, assuming that FC is then still the development platform for RH.
A SOHO user is unlikely to run Oracle, but rather MySQL or PostgreSQL (let's not start a feature discussion). He can use FC after some testing and has all of his software for free (as in beer) if he wants. For him it doesn't matter whether Oracle supports Fedora.
While all this is happening, the Linux kernel will still be developed the way it always has been. Forking, or rather different patch paths will be pursued by the different distro maintainers like it is already being done.
What I do believe is changing, is that fewer users (as a percentage of total users) are going to worry about the kernel at all. I started recompiling the kernel from day one when I started using RH, while nowadays I mainly use distro kernels. I only recompile the 2.6.x Fedora development kernels because they still don't have NTFS support enabled by default and there aren't any NTFS-module RPMs available yet either. Which is a PITA.
From where do you get the idea that you _must_ upgrade a kernel on a desktop system? Desktop users shouldn't upgrade the kernel ever, the packaged default distro kernel (and its updates), delivered through your distro's package management (up2date, urpmi, apt, yum or gen-whatever) should work for all normal desktop users.
Granny should never ever touch the system itself, unless she's also a knowledgable admin, but then she would know that she doesn't have to recompile the kernel or update it to the next minor version until her distro vendor does it for her.
For example, the new threading libraries break all sorts of applications until you recompile the apps against the new library. This is particularly painful with commercial applications or for companies that need to provide support.
That's why you only run distros for which "all sorts of applications" (whatever you are talking about) are certified for, upgrading them only with packages released specifically for these distros.
I don't recall the migration from 2.2 to 2.4 being that much of a pain, but I do agree that moving to 2.6.x was really easy (on FC1). Problem is that too many newbies venture into compiling their own kernels for no apparent reason whatsoever, even switching to 2.6 without understanding what they are doing. At least that's the impression I get from newsgroups. Naturally these people complain a lot and that's what many people read when they google, hence the impression that upgrading is difficult.
The only people that Like Linux either hate MS or think it is a fun hobby.[...]but the idea of replacing windows with it for a desktop is a pipe dream. I get sick of reading about all the misinformation about Linux simply because the person writing it has some political agenda against Microsoft. Linux has strong points (server) yes, but lets not make it out to be more than it is just becasue you don't like Microsoft.
Not at all, dear clueless. Linux is also liked by business people who want to take business decisions based upon their own interests and not some proprietary software vendor's. Microsoft, their products and licensing strategies are most often talked about because they are most visible and often spearhead the industry.
At some point MS software might fit your specific needs, but will it still in the future? Who knows. What if it does not? What if you are locked into idiotic upgrade cycles and repressive licensing terms? You might suddenly find that your business is to a large part depended on one single supplier (this goes for other software packages as well). Strategy 101 at your local business school will tell you that you made a very crucial mistake. In my book, buying Microsoft products, while viable alternatives are available, will get you sacked. Oh, and remember that a business desktop regularly doesn't need uber-fancy graphics, user software installation capabilities, WMP, a dangerously buggy browser that can't easily be uninstalled and a mail program that either let's you execute arbitrary code or not see any attachments.
If XP SP2 is more stable than Fedora or Mandrake for you (what are you doing with your box anyway?) and fits your personal computing needs, keep it, but don't make ridiculous statements about stuff that you don't have the slightest clue about, please.
Good for you, but to the others who can't easily get a new job (not implying that it was easy for you) I suggest reading a bit about negotiation. "Getting To Yes" and "Getting Past No", despite their corny titles, are highly recommended readings on this topic. If you are unable to successfully communicate that management is making decisions that will hurt the company's image and in turn its bottom line, than you are definitely not the right person for the job.
I think that developers who issue statements that management is always doing the wrong thing, should remember that they too manage, a software development project for example.
You are both right, although I would suggest distributing the blame more equally. If management is making ridiculous decisions and the developers know about it, it's their duty to inform management about it. Managers can be managed you know.
The person asking for the umpteenth time to help him with the extremely outdated and never patched system to fix everything, or the person who feels being used and has a slightly different idea about spending his spare time?
Believe me when I tell you that many people actually do deserve the trouble they have with their systems (including myself from time to time;-).
(2) What's so special about CDs ? Clothing also has a ``low production cost'', yet I do not hear the any whining about clothing being ``too expensive''. There are examples of other goods that could reasonably be considered ``too expensive'' by the same reasoning, and yet no outrage about it. I believe the reason is that these complaints that the goods are ``too expensive'' are largely motivated by the need to rationalise ones own piracy, or perhaps defend that of others.
There is outrage although rarely discussed on Slashdot. See below:
I think the clothing analogy is actually pretty good here -- the people who really badly want their fix of music that just happens to be on a big 5 heavily marketted RIAA label are not unlike those who insist on wearing designer clothing (that's made in China) even though they could get cheap clothing at a fraction of the cost. To some extent, it is the marketting that produces the value in the eyes of these consumers, so it's not reasonable to turn around and argue one doesn't want all that marketting.
The clothing analogy is both good and bad, since this is an industry were quite a lot of piracy, or rather label counterfeiting occurs. People do buy these but rarely brag about it (How often do you hear people reminding you that they bought a Rolex for 50$?), but they nevertheless engage in it, though just on the consumer side. It's different with digital media, since here the consumer often also is a supplier by either making the conscious decision to upload stuff, or unconsciously by leaving downloaded stuff in their shared directory. The industry is not exactly differentiating between people downloading a couple of songs for their personal use, mass-uploaders or professional copyright pirates, making a livving off it. It's the same with governments saying that marijuana is as bad as crack or heroin. Many people stop believing them.
Marketing does play a very important role here, but not necessarily in the way you described. Why do large labels not cry about counterfeiting with the same enthusiasm the RIAA is? You could argue that they could easily run a couple of adds showing kids working in a sweatshop in South-East Asia for a label counterfeiter, thereby making the public aware of the damage consumers are doing to these kids. They are aren't, because they probably still have that ring in their ears from the time when they were producing under the exact same conditions (think Nike).
Marketing is in fact a very powerful tool, and I am not arguing that I don't want it. I would like to see effective marketing (and distribution, which is actually part of it) that describes the added value of the big labels' products. Currently, I can get a lot of their products online for free (whether _I_ need or want them is at this point irrelevant; I'd rather listen to Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way" on a good vinyl pressing than on either 128KB/s MP3 or CD, which a consumer of chart pop music might be happy with), and a good marketing effort will offer and explain to me an alternative that is superior to the one currently available.
Many industry players still insist that their current offerings are exactly what the market wants. Maybe that is so, maybe not. Maybe the majority of consumers actually do like the product but not the current pricing and delivery model (both part of textbook marketing definition). So their marketing is bad, especially when adding their current behaviour to the equation.
No, you would be wrong, because it hasn't. I recall cassette tapes selling for about $10-11 (standard price) or about $8- at discount and CDs sold for a few more dollars. That was in 1990. Nowadays, the CD prices have increased no more than about 50%. How much has the cost of living increased in that period ?
No I wasn't wrong;-). You are assuming that consumers are rationally acting indiviuals that gather all the information available to reach a decision that benefits them best, ie. the economic man or homo oeco
I disagree. Again, you're ignoring why he's giving the stuff away in the first place. It's preview material now, remember ? So it's no longer in his best interests to present the CD as a complete product, because it's not "the real deal". "The real deal" is the live act. As long as the CD is effective in promoting the live act, it's actually in the artists interests to make sure that the CD incomplete.
Now we are getting somewhere, the CD can but not has to be pure promotional material. I am not arguing that all artists have to go the same route. Everybody can do whatever they want, including staying with a major or sueing a large subset of the market. What I am asking for, is some creativity on behalf of the artists as well as the business people involved. If they don't try to view the new technology, and changing consumer behaviour, as an opportunity to create innovative solutions to their current problems, they deserve to fail on the business side.
My position is that they should go after uploaders and hit them hard. They shouldn't bother hitting the leeches -- it's a better strategy to make it unprofitable to leech, and that should be a multi-pronged strategy which includes going after uploaders. I don't think DRM is worth the ill will it causes.
I agree, unfortunately that is not going to happen unless they realise that this will eventually yield them bad press again, thus making marketing a lot harder. I think that they shouldn't worry about them either, since they have dropped this ball long ago. Instead give complaing consumers (some of them downloaders) more value for money either by adding features (DVD audio and video) or simply by making it easier to use their system instead of the illegal alternatives (eg. integration into home entertainment system with a USB port for my portable devices). Again, these are just examples.
(For example, the claim that "CDs are too expensive" is often made, but never supported with a factual argument)
You are asking for the impossible IMHO. "CDs are too expensive" is a perfectly valid statement I can make, which is irrefutable. If I say that CDs are too expensive for me, especially considering their low production cost (compared to vinyls for example), you can argue that in fact production costs are higher because I failed to consider disproportionate growing marketing and studio costs. I would still be right, because to me the price of the CD has risen in proportion to my available household income. It's an opinion on which I act, even if I have incomplete information and badly calculated (eg. forgot to account for inflation or the better health insurance which decreases my available household income) and may factually be wrong. I could also argue that the quality of published music has gone down and therefore justifies my belief that the "CDs are too expensive" to ME. My statement can not be disproven, but is on the other hand probably not reflecticing everybody's thinking. Most people, including myself, tend to forget the "for me"-part.
Why would the artist want to make the effort to do all that ?
If he doesn't, someone else will, leaving the artist out of the value chain. Simply ignoring changes in technology and the market don't help at all.
Remember, they are trying to provide a preview to promote their primary revenue source, they are NOT trying to provide a free service to slashdot freeloaders.
I don't understand this. What are you referring to?
I think they were too slow to create a legitimate distribution channel for digital music. However, I think fighting piracy is entirely legitimate.
I absolutely agree. However, it all depends on HOW you intend to fight piracy. First, as you state, the industry doesn't recognise the potential of digital distribution over the Internet, completely missing the chance to be the first to offer conveniently downloadable music. Remember that the music industry is no small player and that they could have gotten access to specialised hardware, integrating the system into a normal home entertainment system. Instead hobbyists created a protocol and the applications to distribute the same product (music) to computer users. The interface was quirky (and often still is), downloads interrupted and sometimes were never resumed, or the quality wasn't what the downloader expected. How did the recording industry react? They sued, instead of finally delivering. They complained (and still do) that CD sales have gone down, never even admitting publicly that this might have something to do with a slowdown in the world economy, that the price for a CD never changed and stayed above the price for a vinyl LP even though production cost is substantially lower or the fact that not everybody needs or wants a whole CD, but just one song (ie. the packaging was wrong).
Then, after years some companies are finally offering downloads at reasonable prices, which many people are happy about, and other companies that introduce copy protection mechanisms that don't let you use the product in a way that he wants to (listening on your PC, in your car etc.). I don't use the original CDs in my car because CDs have been stolen before, hence I only use copies of CDs I legitimatly own.
Now, the law entitles the music industry to engage in legal battles with their customers. How long do you think will consumers view these industry players as partners in trade? Remember that it's not only "slashdot freeloaders" downloading music nowadays, but "normal" people as well who don't think that they are breaking the law at all. It's all about perception: If I perceive a product to be of value at the offered price, I'll buy it. If not, I don't, but I might accept the perceived minimal risk and download it instead. The industry might be able to lobby successfully for tougher laws, but how well does prohibition work?
"The RIAA" is not a homogeneous entity.[...]It's funny how the slashdot herd tends to...
Priceless! The RIAA is not homogeneous, but the "slashdot herd" is?
When discussing in whatever setting (even on Slashdot) you might want to avoid sounding like a troll ("freeloading slashdot herd"). Remember that you also belong to said herd.;-)
If that's really the model, then they should only release a very small number of their songs, and most should never be recorded, right ? But that's not the model you're thinking of, because the model you're thinking of is one that serves the interests of the freeloaders. I wonder why ? Oh, I see, we're on slashdot. Never mind.
Of course you could read my rant like this. Take it from an artist's point of view: He will record his music, he will distribute it on standard CD, via a commercial MP3, OGG or whatever the consumer wants, download or P2P site, realising that his music will appear on (currently) illegal channels anyway, because it is reproducable infinitly. He has to go on tour and perform well to deliver a unique non-reproducable (ie. scarce) event to the customer. He can sell high-quality audio material there as well. Many professional jazz, soul and blues musicians create a sizeable amount of their income (besides being studio musicians for hire) this way. These musicians are not pop stars, their audience are not millions and they don't (or rarely) appear on stage in a football stadium and still they make a very decent living.
But this is only one possible solution to the problem, there might be other (business) models here as well.
If the RIAA can come up with a decent business model that satisfies consumer demands (which may not be "music for free" but rather "quality for money") then I am all for it. Ignoring shifts in consumer behaviour, technology and more generally, reality, fighting their very own customers is not exactly what I would call a viable business model in the long-term.
Or rather economics. Nowhere in the article is a very important, but often overlooked issue to be found: Economics.
Our whole economic system is based on one simple assumption: The scarcity of goods. As long as a good is scarce, ie. not abundant, it has a value for which the market creates a price. Clean air is (still) abundant so we don't have to pay for it. Cars are scarce (hmmm...) and so a price can derived from the mechanics of demand and supply.
Music, films, software, basically everything digital lacks scarcity, because as soon as a medium, a product or information enters the digital realm it is accessible through digital technology, mostly without loss of quality and/or features. It becomes abundant in the digital world and we will have trouble fixing a price for a good that is as available as breathable air (still is).
How do you fix this? You can't. You could create artificial scarcity through DRM features, which would not work because DRM-less alternatives will most probably be readily available. And even if they weren't, people will have a problem accepting a price that they view as too high, given the fact that they once had the good for free with more features (copyable, modifiable, transportable, usable etc.).
How do artist make money if their goods are so easily accessible? Create scarcity again, but avoiding DRM: The distributable good (a CD, DVD, what have you) would still be offered to the market at low or no price at all, becoming a teaser for the real product: live events. These are not so easily reproduceable without loss of quality (I consider bootleg recordings not to be of the same quality and if you have listened to one, you will probably agree that, while being interesting, it is not the Real Thing) and will most likely be different from venue to venue (one of the reasons many fans travelled with Frank Zappa or the Grateful Dead when they were on tour).
There are catches though: Bands and artists would have to be able to perform life on stage and no one would need the RIAA. So we should all expect more of the same. Round tables and talks will not yield any useful outcomes, the best they can achieve is more public awareness of the problem and maybe speed up the downfall of an industry destined to die (as long as they don't come up with a new and decent business model), albeit slowly and still with enough turnover and profit to make our lives and Slashdot discussions interesting.;-)
And how many viruses have successfully exploited the WSH? How many viruses have successfully exploited shell scripting on Unix?
Yes, it is a permissions problem on Windows that nobody at Microsoft seems to care about. So, many admins simply remove WSH and the power of the scripting environment is gone. Oh, and BTW, how portable are WSH scripts? You can run bash scripts on many Unix flavours and thanks to Cygwin you can run them on Windows too.
I know what you mean. The problem I always had with Windows (especially W98SE) was that I could never quite reach the stage where it was predictably broken (apart from security: ActiveX and so on). When things started to get mushy it would go on and on. Yes, I would know how I could trigger a crash or lockup with say Word or IE, but eventually my system reached a point of unstability that was unacceptable, ie. where I would have to concentrate more on circumventing the possible crashes than on doing any actual work.
That was when I switched to W2K and eventually Linux. W2K was simple enough to adopt to it quickly, but Linux back then required quite a learning curve (around RH6.1). Now I feel more productive then ever (not saying I am;-) ) and don't have to worry about crashes other than hardware induced, which is nice. Installation and configuration has become quite painless with recent distros (using FC1 with 2.6 on my main machine at the moment); IMHO even more painless than W2K or XP.
I was recently trying to get an old SCSI scanner to work under a friend's W2K system. Since it was a really old scanner there were no driver updates, the stuff recommended in newsgroups brought down a fresh W2K install, the SCSI subsystem was completely hosed and I couldn't boot the machine with the adapter plugged in. While this is predictable behaviour it is absolutely unacceptable, especially since Linux (Knoppix and FC1) was able to configure the drivers and scan with minimum hassle (modprobe the driver).
Having said that, I feel the pain of people still having to rely on W98SE, because they need to run some custom app, if I had to I would try and run it in VMWare, at least you won't lose everything you were working on.
Why haven't I upgraded? Because it's good enough. I don't want to give MS any more of my money, where I trade a working OS with bugs I'm now fairly familiar with for a new OS that's going to cost me more money and give me little benefit.
If it ain't broke...
And I always thought that we had agreed long ago that it is in fact severely broken.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Go to France. 2. Find blind man eating a sandwich. 3. Hit blind man with hammer. 4. Enjoy sandwich.
No need for violence. Replace Step #3 with: Say to him - "I am German."
This won't work, and I am speaking from experience. Remember that you are in France and that the English language will not help you at all (especially not with a heavy American accent). You should either try "Je suis Allemand!!!" or "Ich bin Deutscher!!!" maybe followed up with a proud "Sieg Heil!!!". The latter might get you arrested though, and quite rightly so I might add. But then you can enjoy french cuisine for free for some time.
I'll have a Frutti Di Mare then with extra garlic and cheese, please....;-)
And yes, I know I suffer from selective perception, but does it have to be a bad thing?
This is the very first time that I have seen someone call Debian a handholding OS.
I tried the new installer yesterday (and Debian for the first time) and was everything but impressed. It very much reminded me of the days I spent with the text base install from RH6.1. The console keyboard settings were wrong (especially annoying with vi) and after installing XFree I had to configure stuff I hadn't touched in years (being a long time RH and now FC user).
Getting Debian on my system was like reliving long lost memories, but not necessarily good ones. Fedora installs so nicely on all of the hardware I tried it so far and I hear that SuSE works like a charm too.
Don't get me wrong though, there are reasons for why I tried Debian and I would very much like the distro to strive and get a modern hardware detection and installation system. Knoppix so far holds the crown in the former IMHO. And before I forget, a stable release with more recent software would also be quite nice ;-).
Why do you think this is going to change the nature of Linux? Assuming that you can still get Oracle for, say RedHat Enterprise Server. Where do forking and incompatible code bases come into play? The price for an Oracle installation is so high and maintenance quite expensive, that price for the OS is neglible compared to the overall system cost. You don't want to shell out to Oracle and then install it on an unsupported distro, like Fedora (which should still work, assuming that FC is then still the development platform for RH.
A SOHO user is unlikely to run Oracle, but rather MySQL or PostgreSQL (let's not start a feature discussion). He can use FC after some testing and has all of his software for free (as in beer) if he wants. For him it doesn't matter whether Oracle supports Fedora.
While all this is happening, the Linux kernel will still be developed the way it always has been. Forking, or rather different patch paths will be pursued by the different distro maintainers like it is already being done.
What I do believe is changing, is that fewer users (as a percentage of total users) are going to worry about the kernel at all. I started recompiling the kernel from day one when I started using RH, while nowadays I mainly use distro kernels. I only recompile the 2.6.x Fedora development kernels because they still don't have NTFS support enabled by default and there aren't any NTFS-module RPMs available yet either. Which is a PITA.
Granny should never ever touch the system itself, unless she's also a knowledgable admin, but then she would know that she doesn't have to recompile the kernel or update it to the next minor version until her distro vendor does it for her.
That's why you only run distros for which "all sorts of applications" (whatever you are talking about) are certified for, upgrading them only with packages released specifically for these distros.
I don't recall the migration from 2.2 to 2.4 being that much of a pain, but I do agree that moving to 2.6.x was really easy (on FC1). Problem is that too many newbies venture into compiling their own kernels for no apparent reason whatsoever, even switching to 2.6 without understanding what they are doing. At least that's the impression I get from newsgroups. Naturally these people complain a lot and that's what many people read when they google, hence the impression that upgrading is difficult.
Not at all, dear clueless. Linux is also liked by business people who want to take business decisions based upon their own interests and not some proprietary software vendor's. Microsoft, their products and licensing strategies are most often talked about because they are most visible and often spearhead the industry.
At some point MS software might fit your specific needs, but will it still in the future? Who knows. What if it does not? What if you are locked into idiotic upgrade cycles and repressive licensing terms? You might suddenly find that your business is to a large part depended on one single supplier (this goes for other software packages as well). Strategy 101 at your local business school will tell you that you made a very crucial mistake. In my book, buying Microsoft products, while viable alternatives are available, will get you sacked. Oh, and remember that a business desktop regularly doesn't need uber-fancy graphics, user software installation capabilities, WMP, a dangerously buggy browser that can't easily be uninstalled and a mail program that either let's you execute arbitrary code or not see any attachments.
If XP SP2 is more stable than Fedora or Mandrake for you (what are you doing with your box anyway?) and fits your personal computing needs, keep it, but don't make ridiculous statements about stuff that you don't have the slightest clue about, please.
Ah yes, and how many people actually buy Debian?
I think that developers who issue statements that management is always doing the wrong thing, should remember that they too manage, a software development project for example.
You are both right, although I would suggest distributing the blame more equally. If management is making ridiculous decisions and the developers know about it, it's their duty to inform management about it. Managers can be managed you know.
You mean like Windows?
Unless of course you use mozex.
Believe me when I tell you that many people actually do deserve the trouble they have with their systems (including myself from time to time ;-).
There is outrage although rarely discussed on Slashdot. See below:
I think the clothing analogy is actually pretty good here -- the people who really badly want their fix of music that just happens to be on a big 5 heavily marketted RIAA label are not unlike those who insist on wearing designer clothing (that's made in China) even though they could get cheap clothing at a fraction of the cost. To some extent, it is the marketting that produces the value in the eyes of these consumers, so it's not reasonable to turn around and argue one doesn't want all that marketting.
The clothing analogy is both good and bad, since this is an industry were quite a lot of piracy, or rather label counterfeiting occurs. People do buy these but rarely brag about it (How often do you hear people reminding you that they bought a Rolex for 50$?), but they nevertheless engage in it, though just on the consumer side. It's different with digital media, since here the consumer often also is a supplier by either making the conscious decision to upload stuff, or unconsciously by leaving downloaded stuff in their shared directory. The industry is not exactly differentiating between people downloading a couple of songs for their personal use, mass-uploaders or professional copyright pirates, making a livving off it. It's the same with governments saying that marijuana is as bad as crack or heroin. Many people stop believing them.
Marketing does play a very important role here, but not necessarily in the way you described. Why do large labels not cry about counterfeiting with the same enthusiasm the RIAA is? You could argue that they could easily run a couple of adds showing kids working in a sweatshop in South-East Asia for a label counterfeiter, thereby making the public aware of the damage consumers are doing to these kids. They are aren't, because they probably still have that ring in their ears from the time when they were producing under the exact same conditions (think Nike).
Marketing is in fact a very powerful tool, and I am not arguing that I don't want it. I would like to see effective marketing (and distribution, which is actually part of it) that describes the added value of the big labels' products. Currently, I can get a lot of their products online for free (whether _I_ need or want them is at this point irrelevant; I'd rather listen to Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way" on a good vinyl pressing than on either 128KB/s MP3 or CD, which a consumer of chart pop music might be happy with), and a good marketing effort will offer and explain to me an alternative that is superior to the one currently available.
Many industry players still insist that their current offerings are exactly what the market wants. Maybe that is so, maybe not. Maybe the majority of consumers actually do like the product but not the current pricing and delivery model (both part of textbook marketing definition). So their marketing is bad, especially when adding their current behaviour to the equation.
No, you would be wrong, because it hasn't. I recall cassette tapes selling for about $10-11 (standard price) or about $8- at discount and CDs sold for a few more dollars. That was in 1990. Nowadays, the CD prices have increased no more than about 50%. How much has the cost of living increased in that period ?
No I wasn't wrong ;-). You are assuming that consumers are rationally acting indiviuals that gather all the information available to reach a decision that benefits them best, ie. the economic man or homo oeco
Now we are getting somewhere, the CD can but not has to be pure promotional material. I am not arguing that all artists have to go the same route. Everybody can do whatever they want, including staying with a major or sueing a large subset of the market. What I am asking for, is some creativity on behalf of the artists as well as the business people involved. If they don't try to view the new technology, and changing consumer behaviour, as an opportunity to create innovative solutions to their current problems, they deserve to fail on the business side.
My position is that they should go after uploaders and hit them hard. They shouldn't bother hitting the leeches -- it's a better strategy to make it unprofitable to leech, and that should be a multi-pronged strategy which includes going after uploaders. I don't think DRM is worth the ill will it causes.
I agree, unfortunately that is not going to happen unless they realise that this will eventually yield them bad press again, thus making marketing a lot harder. I think that they shouldn't worry about them either, since they have dropped this ball long ago. Instead give complaing consumers (some of them downloaders) more value for money either by adding features (DVD audio and video) or simply by making it easier to use their system instead of the illegal alternatives (eg. integration into home entertainment system with a USB port for my portable devices). Again, these are just examples.
(For example, the claim that "CDs are too expensive" is often made, but never supported with a factual argument)
You are asking for the impossible IMHO. "CDs are too expensive" is a perfectly valid statement I can make, which is irrefutable. If I say that CDs are too expensive for me, especially considering their low production cost (compared to vinyls for example), you can argue that in fact production costs are higher because I failed to consider disproportionate growing marketing and studio costs. I would still be right, because to me the price of the CD has risen in proportion to my available household income. It's an opinion on which I act, even if I have incomplete information and badly calculated (eg. forgot to account for inflation or the better health insurance which decreases my available household income) and may factually be wrong. I could also argue that the quality of published music has gone down and therefore justifies my belief that the "CDs are too expensive" to ME. My statement can not be disproven, but is on the other hand probably not reflecticing everybody's thinking. Most people, including myself, tend to forget the "for me"-part.
If he doesn't, someone else will, leaving the artist out of the value chain. Simply ignoring changes in technology and the market don't help at all.
Remember, they are trying to provide a preview to promote their primary revenue source, they are NOT trying to provide a free service to slashdot freeloaders.
I don't understand this. What are you referring to?
I think they were too slow to create a legitimate distribution channel for digital music. However, I think fighting piracy is entirely legitimate.
I absolutely agree. However, it all depends on HOW you intend to fight piracy. First, as you state, the industry doesn't recognise the potential of digital distribution over the Internet, completely missing the chance to be the first to offer conveniently downloadable music. Remember that the music industry is no small player and that they could have gotten access to specialised hardware, integrating the system into a normal home entertainment system. Instead hobbyists created a protocol and the applications to distribute the same product (music) to computer users. The interface was quirky (and often still is), downloads interrupted and sometimes were never resumed, or the quality wasn't what the downloader expected. How did the recording industry react? They sued, instead of finally delivering. They complained (and still do) that CD sales have gone down, never even admitting publicly that this might have something to do with a slowdown in the world economy, that the price for a CD never changed and stayed above the price for a vinyl LP even though production cost is substantially lower or the fact that not everybody needs or wants a whole CD, but just one song (ie. the packaging was wrong).
Then, after years some companies are finally offering downloads at reasonable prices, which many people are happy about, and other companies that introduce copy protection mechanisms that don't let you use the product in a way that he wants to (listening on your PC, in your car etc.). I don't use the original CDs in my car because CDs have been stolen before, hence I only use copies of CDs I legitimatly own.
Now, the law entitles the music industry to engage in legal battles with their customers. How long do you think will consumers view these industry players as partners in trade? Remember that it's not only "slashdot freeloaders" downloading music nowadays, but "normal" people as well who don't think that they are breaking the law at all. It's all about perception: If I perceive a product to be of value at the offered price, I'll buy it. If not, I don't, but I might accept the perceived minimal risk and download it instead. The industry might be able to lobby successfully for tougher laws, but how well does prohibition work?
"The RIAA" is not a homogeneous entity.[...]It's funny how the slashdot herd tends to...
Priceless! The RIAA is not homogeneous, but the "slashdot herd" is?
When discussing in whatever setting (even on Slashdot) you might want to avoid sounding like a troll ("freeloading slashdot herd"). Remember that you also belong to said herd. ;-)
Of course you could read my rant like this. Take it from an artist's point of view: He will record his music, he will distribute it on standard CD, via a commercial MP3, OGG or whatever the consumer wants, download or P2P site, realising that his music will appear on (currently) illegal channels anyway, because it is reproducable infinitly. He has to go on tour and perform well to deliver a unique non-reproducable (ie. scarce) event to the customer. He can sell high-quality audio material there as well. Many professional jazz, soul and blues musicians create a sizeable amount of their income (besides being studio musicians for hire) this way. These musicians are not pop stars, their audience are not millions and they don't (or rarely) appear on stage in a football stadium and still they make a very decent living.
But this is only one possible solution to the problem, there might be other (business) models here as well.
If the RIAA can come up with a decent business model that satisfies consumer demands (which may not be "music for free" but rather "quality for money") then I am all for it. Ignoring shifts in consumer behaviour, technology and more generally, reality, fighting their very own customers is not exactly what I would call a viable business model in the long-term.
Or rather economics. Nowhere in the article is a very important, but often overlooked issue to be found: Economics.
;-)
Our whole economic system is based on one simple assumption: The scarcity of goods. As long as a good is scarce, ie. not abundant, it has a value for which the market creates a price. Clean air is (still) abundant so we don't have to pay for it. Cars are scarce (hmmm...) and so a price can derived from the mechanics of demand and supply.
Music, films, software, basically everything digital lacks scarcity, because as soon as a medium, a product or information enters the digital realm it is accessible through digital technology, mostly without loss of quality and/or features. It becomes abundant in the digital world and we will have trouble fixing a price for a good that is as available as breathable air (still is).
How do you fix this? You can't. You could create artificial scarcity through DRM features, which would not work because DRM-less alternatives will most probably be readily available. And even if they weren't, people will have a problem accepting a price that they view as too high, given the fact that they once had the good for free with more features (copyable, modifiable, transportable, usable etc.).
How do artist make money if their goods are so easily accessible? Create scarcity again, but avoiding DRM: The distributable good (a CD, DVD, what have you) would still be offered to the market at low or no price at all, becoming a teaser for the real product: live events. These are not so easily reproduceable without loss of quality (I consider bootleg recordings not to be of the same quality and if you have listened to one, you will probably agree that, while being interesting, it is not the Real Thing) and will most likely be different from venue to venue (one of the reasons many fans travelled with Frank Zappa or the Grateful Dead when they were on tour).
There are catches though: Bands and artists would have to be able to perform life on stage and no one would need the RIAA. So we should all expect more of the same. Round tables and talks will not yield any useful outcomes, the best they can achieve is more public awareness of the problem and maybe speed up the downfall of an industry destined to die (as long as they don't come up with a new and decent business model), albeit slowly and still with enough turnover and profit to make our lives and Slashdot discussions interesting.
Just my 2 Cents (and that's all they'll get)
You mean they can WIPO they arses now?
And how many viruses have successfully exploited the WSH? How many viruses have successfully exploited shell scripting on Unix?
Yes, it is a permissions problem on Windows that nobody at Microsoft seems to care about. So, many admins simply remove WSH and the power of the scripting environment is gone. Oh, and BTW, how portable are WSH scripts? You can run bash scripts on many Unix flavours and thanks to Cygwin you can run them on Windows too.
That was when I switched to W2K and eventually Linux. W2K was simple enough to adopt to it quickly, but Linux back then required quite a learning curve (around RH6.1). Now I feel more productive then ever (not saying I am ;-) ) and don't have to worry about crashes other than hardware induced, which is nice. Installation and configuration has become quite painless with recent distros (using FC1 with 2.6 on my main machine at the moment); IMHO even more painless than W2K or XP.
I was recently trying to get an old SCSI scanner to work under a friend's W2K system. Since it was a really old scanner there were no driver updates, the stuff recommended in newsgroups brought down a fresh W2K install, the SCSI subsystem was completely hosed and I couldn't boot the machine with the adapter plugged in. While this is predictable behaviour it is absolutely unacceptable, especially since Linux (Knoppix and FC1) was able to configure the drivers and scan with minimum hassle (modprobe the driver).
Having said that, I feel the pain of people still having to rely on W98SE, because they need to run some custom app, if I had to I would try and run it in VMWare, at least you won't lose everything you were working on.
If it ain't broke...
And I always thought that we had agreed long ago that it is in fact severely broken.
I am confused now....
Mainly game theory, which played and still plays an important role in risk management theory.
I always thought that Emacs was a desktop environment....