I agree that Sony will probably just write a check to a bunch of lawyers and maybe fire some guys, but why can't people go to jail for these kinds of things?
It always strikes me as odd that you can fuck up thousands of people's lives (in this case, their computers), knowingly and deliberately, and the only outcome is that some lawyers get rich and a few overpaid *might* have to use their golden parachutes.
Why isn't this thousands of counts of unauthorized use of a computer? I know that "throw 'em in jail" really isn't a large-scale social solution, but there needs to be a way for our corporate leaders to understand that not only can they not steal and get away with it (cf various corporate thefts), if they abuse their corporate power and mess with people lives, you know what, you might go to jail, too.
I'm sure they do, but you've broken the analogy a little.
I frequently buy the "store" brand or the "off" brand if there's little or no effective difference between the two and the store/off brand is cheaper. Why *would* I pay 50 cents more per pound of butter? It doesn't taste any better on bread or make for better cookies or anything. I can't convince my wife, though, to buy "NaturaTaste" generic aspartame vs. Equal-brand aspartame.
The same goes for almost any other item that can be reduced to a commodity status -- why do you need to buy the brand to go with the product? If an x86 whitebox running OS X can get the same job done in a functionally equivilent manner as a more expensive Apple-branded OS X machine, why buy the Apple machine?
The usual assumption is that Apple can't sell OS X x86 for generic x86 because they're a hardware company, and nobody will buy their hardware if they can buy x86.
I can think of several possible solutions. Right now Apple is making OS X x86 locked to their hardware. What if Apple was to license this locking technology to hardware vendors, allowing them to sell at a premium, a machine that could run X or Windows. This would allow them to collect part of the price.
The licensing agreement could also require that the licensing chip was only available to hi-tier machines priced at similar price points as Apple machines, as well as requiring certain hardware elements (ie, built-in BT, Firewire 800, USB2, display adapters, etc).
This would allow people interested in OS X but unwilling to buy an Apple machine to get into OS X, but still retain revenue from hardware sales and maintain the quality level associated with Apple hardware. Even if there were no restrictions on price points, the hardware licensing should make up for lost margin on Apple hardware.
Lexus makes a great car, with a ton of room for third party add-ons and third party service. But their smooth engine and user friendly console won't fit in a Hyundai. Are Hyundai drivers mad?
The engines won't fit in a Hyundai, but they fit in Toyotas and are often found (with trivial modifications) in Toyotas at much lower price points. Another example are Hondas and Accuras. My neighbor owns a 2000 3.2TL Sedan and I have an Accord V6 sedan of the same year. The car is almost identical, with a few more bells and whistles on the Accura. The big difference is the nameplate, not the car.
What I love more than anything else are the geeks that fall on their sword when you insult their chosen princess. Have you ever met her personally, or does she just inhabit your fantasies? Or are you just defending your own princess who can "talk shop" with you but happens to be pulling a good-sized caboose?
What experience do I have if I buy an Apple tower system, tuck it into a cabinet and connect it to my third-party USB keybaord, mouse, DVD burner, and display?
Am I getting less of an Apple experience than someone who uses the stock mouse/display/keyboard and puts their system in plain site?
If not, why wouldn't I still be getting the Apple experience on a whitebox x86 OS X system?
They asked (and probably with some tough-sounding legalese) and he complied. What makes it seem kind of slimy, or at least intellectually dishonest, is that they plan to use the name for their own product, implying that that they told him to stop using it not because it necessarily infringed on their "Windows" trademark, but because they wanted the complete name for their own.
The front-page blurb doesn't mention if the guy contacted an attorney and said "Hey, can they do this?", he just went along with it. Which makes him a decent, cooperative fellow, but also either manipulated or a rube, depending on your perspective.
He should have contacted an IP attorney and at least gotten an opinion, even if the opinion was "They're Microsoft, and they *might* win on merits but will *probably* win because they're the 800 lb gorilla." Even then, he could have had enough ground to stand on that he might have negotiated some kind of settlement where they agreed to pay him money to stop.
I wonder sometimes if Microsoft is aware of the incremental harm to their image every time they act like an 800 lb gorilla, particularly to a developer providing products which improve in the Windows experience. I'm sure you don't want to pay off every guy, but what if they had instead said "Hey, we think you're infringing on our name and we think can probably take it away, but we also realize you have some investment in this and we appreciate the work you've done helping windows users, so we're willing to offer you $10,000 to stop using that name."
The $10k is peanuts to MS (they could pay out $10k/day and it'd never show on their balance sheet), they would eliminate stories that make MS seem like corporate goons and probably buy a lot of loyalty. Sure, they might pay off people they wouldn't have to and they certainly would increase the number of people looking to leech money off them, but I would think that the payoff in reduced bad PR and increased good PR would be worth it.
That's just it. What makes iTunes work is that the DRM isn't so grossly inflexible you can't work with it.
I'd consider downloading movies for $8-10 a pop, but only if the movies were provided in a ISO-type format that provided content identical to the store-bought copy (extras, menus, digital sound, etc). This also means dual-layer sized movies, which I know might be a download limitation. No heavy-handed DRM. I should be able to burn the movie to a DVD and watch it in any DVD player or on another computer. No special media requirements, no expiring files.
Since a DVD-9 sized download might be unrealistic, it might be a reasonable compromise to put the movie into an MPEG-4 format and have an iTunes-type application that would interface to DRM and allow burning of a DVD.
I'm afraid what we'll actually be offered, though, is a downloadable "rental" which only plays on computers, is deeply compromised in terms of PQ, and can't be burned to DVD or kept long-term.
I still miss why running cabling under the floor is worse than running it in overhead trays. Either the trays are too high to get at without a ladder (thus making them at least as inconvenient as floor tiles), or they're too low and you bash things into them.
Overhead tray systems also suffer from a fairly rigid room layout, and I have yet to see a data center being used the way it was originally layed out after a few years. Raised flooring allows for a lot of flexibility for power runs, cabling runs and so on without having to install an overhead tray grid.
Raised flooring also offers some slight protection against water leaks. We had our last raised floor system installed with all the power and data runs enclosed in liquidtight conduit due to the tenant's unfortunate run-ins with the buildings drain system and plumbing in the past.
I guess overhead tray makes sense if all you want to do is fill 10,000 sq ft with rack cabinets, but it's not really that flexible or even attractive, IMHO.
Bob "voted out of office" Barr fits neatly into the "Republican shill for big business" category and Pat "Crocodile Tears" Schroeder fits neatly into the "Democratic shill for Hollywood interests" category.
This is nothing more than two people stumping for their natural constituencies and using the "opposite side of the aisle" ruse to make it seem that agreeing on an issue must somehow represent some kind of transcendent truth.
Her face isn't all that pretty, her figure is simply OK and I've seen better hair on Kansas farm girls. There's two girls that work at the freakin' Microcenter that look better than her, and the Microcenter seems to make ugly a hiring criteria.
Is it just that she isn't one of the usual obese, dumpy, homely hangers-on at the weekend D&D session, like the blonde woman in the background of the photo?
There was a big article in the New Yorker about Gates' foundation's attack on malaria.
I kept wondering, though, what happens when the population spikes in many desperately poor and often politically dysfunctional (of not openly anarchic) nations when a leading cause of death is eliminated?
Are we trading one problem -- malaria -- for another problem, like overpopulation, that will only make the civil strife and poverty problems plaguing these countries worse, not better?
It just strikes me that this has the potential to do as much damage long term as it does good in the short term. Which isn't to say we shouldn't solve the problem of malaria, but it struck me when reading the NY article that the entire problem of overpopulation, poverty, civil strife, etc in poor countires would just magically disappear when malaria was cured by western technology, much as Africa was "saved" by the green revolution in agriculture.
I seem to recall this being linked to a series of homocides committed by Special Forces guys recently returned from Afghanistan, circa 2002 or so. Maybe they quarantine them longer now to ensure that the side effects aren't likely to turn loose a highly trained killer on a drug-induced spree.
What I find unusual about this is the types of a side effects that the medical community considers acceptable vary widely. It's hard to get narcotics for pain relief because the side effects are often considered "bad" (eg, euphoria, typically distant possibility of dependence), yet the side effects of other drugs, like this anti-malarial, are considered totally acceptable.
I think you can better measure altruism by the risks taken in pursuit of their actions and the amount of reward receivd.
I think one of the gold standard examples is the family that hid Anne Frank and her family. Enormous, life-threatening risk with the only plausable external reward being keeping them hidden until an Allied victory, something that might have appeared impossible in occupied Holland.
The retired woman who volunteers at the food shelf is doing good, but since there's no risk and obvious rewards from being a volunteer (social rewards, and often material rewards through banquets or thank-you gifts), the only real sacrifice is time, and even then if there are other people working there from a similar background, you could argue that the socialization pays for the time and that the act itself IS actually selfish and that its only coincidence that the end product (eg, food shelf) is a community good.
It's hard to see RIM shuttering completely -- that's a pyrrhic victory for NTP who wants money, not the business shut down.
I can see RIM filing for some kind of bankruptcy protection and the judge recognizing the installed base as a special class and ongoing operations being important, and fixing the situation financially such that NTP gets some of the money they're looking for and RIM continuing as an ongoing entity.
Worse for NTP could be a judge saying "OK, you win the company instead" and they're forced to sell it off to reclaim their holdings. Any potential buyer would know that NTP doesn't want to own or run RIM and that they should not only expect fire sale prices but also deep discounts on IP licensing in return for taking this off their hands.
*Somebody* would want to own RIM, it fits to nicely into someone's communications/wireless/email portfolio, it's just getting NTP satisfied that's the tricky part.
Only in the worst case scenerio for everyone (but Good and MS) does RIM flame out and become a non-entity.
Payment services involving the {apparent, assumed, etc} anonymity of the internet do have a lot of downside risk in terms of problems.
But, what's the financial services industry got going for it as a whole in terms of customer service, dispute resolution, etc? Paypal has a long history of abuses, both internally & externally originated. For a long time (still? I'm not a user) they used the "not a bank" dodge to avoid a lot of regulation that many other financial services companies had. And even "normal" financial services companies can suck pretty hard. Tried to resolve a dispute with your bank or credit card company lately? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
The good news for Google is that they don't have to work very hard to meet average and the presence of another player in the market will certainly force Paypal to work to improve their services and overcome some of the historical antipathy towards them.
They may even innovate, and provide not just an average product but a superior product.
Forget your toolbar crap, get an entire browser based on the things that you want to do on the web.
Are we going full circle and just reinventing AOL or other online services applications? We're coming back to the "online service application" -- the one program used for email, viewing information, "everything" you can do online....
I'm not entirely sure how practical this is to do, but it would be kind of nice if there was a way to "profile" or "smart link" an application-specific VM image such that the profiled version didn't have all the OS junk that wasn't necessary to run whatever the intended application was. Sort of like a statically linked binary, I guess.
The upside to the player is that you don't need a fullblown VMware install to use it, the downside is that in many cases you need a whole OS image to run a single app. I know this doesn't apply for some OSS applications, but even with them it can be decidedly non-trivial to whittle down to some minimal OS install.
Of course it was only a matter of time before MS did its usual stunt and began eroding a better product by "integrating" or giving away a lesser product, don't we eventually want virtualization built into Windows much as it is in grown up computer systems?
I guess what I'm hoping for is a more dynamic way to create virtual machines -- on a per application basis or something, where I don't have to create a wholly unique OS environment for one-off systems and some of the clunky, albeit flexible, stuff you have to do to handle networking, not to mention the memory gobbling.
Workstation 5 makes some of this easier with linked clones, but from what I've used of this feature there's no way I've found (disclaimer: I haven't tried that hard) to unlink a clone to make it standalone, and the memory hogging is kind of awful; it'd be nice to have some kind of unified memory space that would allow high memory allocations on simultaneous VMs without the attendant need for gigs of physical RAM. I was unimpressed with ESXs limited ability to do this.
Regardless, VMWare is a highly valuable tool. I wish I could get our salesdrones to push it harder when selling applications like BES or Good or even Exchange that are picky about installed application environments.
There is no ethics in business, I'm not sure if there ever was, but at least until fairly recently there were ethical men IN business.
I'd wager that post-WWII many businesses were staffed by people with war experience who WOULD blanche at the idea that they were getting rich by supporting the enemies of freedom they might have personally fought and lost loved ones to.
I think they were also much more likely to have secondary motivations (doing good work for the organization, etc) in addition to "increased sales" or other material motivations.
Clearly this has passed. Business is staffed by technocrats and empty, greedy people obsessed with only their own enrichment. That corporate America struggles to prevent its leaders from lying and cheating their own investors (Enron, Worldcom, etc), is anyone surprised by the fact that they will functionally sell out the very democratic, free-market values that they have?
Numerous analogies have also been drawn between the authoritarian power structures of business environments (dictatorial leadership & decisionmaking, no due process) and authoritarian governments. The parallels are obvious.
I think that in recent years they have been abetted by colleges with business departments/schools divorced from the larger academy and business students disdainful of liberal arts classes due to the wildly left-biased teachers and curriculum.
These students then enter business leadership with little or no grasp on the relationships between freedom, democracy, property, etc, and they then only see parallels between the elites of dictatorial governments and their own business elite status.
I think that to some extent business favors authoritarianism -- no messy labor problems or consumer groups to deal with.
What's the deal with GPS on cell phones?
on
Wireless Positioning
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· Score: 4, Insightful
OK, this is kind of off-topic, and I realize the idea is that cell phone companies want to charge you for everything, but...what's the deal with the GPS/location thing on my phone?
Why can't they tell me where I am on that thing using the same info they'd send to 911? I'm not even sure the "Get it Now" payware applications can access it.
It just seems like such an obvious extension of the cell phone, especially since they've already added the location technology.
A virtual file server would be an extremely cool thing. I could have sworn somebody had something that would allow you to take N bytes of disk from a workgroup of workstations and coalesce it into a virtual disk sharable with the workgroup.
Just extend the idea to include replication of the virtual storage. You could either allow splitting of the data as above, or require each replicated segment to be 100% complete (ie, any one workstation has the whole server's storage), or some mixture of all of the above.
I think the downside comes from keeping it all in sync. Probably viable on a high speed LAN, but will fall apart exponentially as you get onto WAN networks.
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I agree that Sony will probably just write a check to a bunch of lawyers and maybe fire some guys, but why can't people go to jail for these kinds of things?
It always strikes me as odd that you can fuck up thousands of people's lives (in this case, their computers), knowingly and deliberately, and the only outcome is that some lawyers get rich and a few overpaid *might* have to use their golden parachutes.
Why isn't this thousands of counts of unauthorized use of a computer? I know that "throw 'em in jail" really isn't a large-scale social solution, but there needs to be a way for our corporate leaders to understand that not only can they not steal and get away with it (cf various corporate thefts), if they abuse their corporate power and mess with people lives, you know what, you might go to jail, too.
I'm sure they do, but you've broken the analogy a little.
I frequently buy the "store" brand or the "off" brand if there's little or no effective difference between the two and the store/off brand is cheaper. Why *would* I pay 50 cents more per pound of butter? It doesn't taste any better on bread or make for better cookies or anything. I can't convince my wife, though, to buy "NaturaTaste" generic aspartame vs. Equal-brand aspartame.
The same goes for almost any other item that can be reduced to a commodity status -- why do you need to buy the brand to go with the product? If an x86 whitebox running OS X can get the same job done in a functionally equivilent manner as a more expensive Apple-branded OS X machine, why buy the Apple machine?
Is there middle ground in this?
The usual assumption is that Apple can't sell OS X x86 for generic x86 because they're a hardware company, and nobody will buy their hardware if they can buy x86.
I can think of several possible solutions. Right now Apple is making OS X x86 locked to their hardware. What if Apple was to license this locking technology to hardware vendors, allowing them to sell at a premium, a machine that could run X or Windows. This would allow them to collect part of the price.
The licensing agreement could also require that the licensing chip was only available to hi-tier machines priced at similar price points as Apple machines, as well as requiring certain hardware elements (ie, built-in BT, Firewire 800, USB2, display adapters, etc).
This would allow people interested in OS X but unwilling to buy an Apple machine to get into OS X, but still retain revenue from hardware sales and maintain the quality level associated with Apple hardware. Even if there were no restrictions on price points, the hardware licensing should make up for lost margin on Apple hardware.
Lexus makes a great car, with a ton of room for third party add-ons and third party service. But their smooth engine and user friendly console won't fit in a Hyundai. Are Hyundai drivers mad?
The engines won't fit in a Hyundai, but they fit in Toyotas and are often found (with trivial modifications) in Toyotas at much lower price points. Another example are Hondas and Accuras. My neighbor owns a 2000 3.2TL Sedan and I have an Accord V6 sedan of the same year. The car is almost identical, with a few more bells and whistles on the Accura. The big difference is the nameplate, not the car.
What I love more than anything else are the geeks that fall on their sword when you insult their chosen princess. Have you ever met her personally, or does she just inhabit your fantasies? Or are you just defending your own princess who can "talk shop" with you but happens to be pulling a good-sized caboose?
What experience do I have if I buy an Apple tower system, tuck it into a cabinet and connect it to my third-party USB keybaord, mouse, DVD burner, and display?
Am I getting less of an Apple experience than someone who uses the stock mouse/display/keyboard and puts their system in plain site?
If not, why wouldn't I still be getting the Apple experience on a whitebox x86 OS X system?
They asked (and probably with some tough-sounding legalese) and he complied. What makes it seem kind of slimy, or at least intellectually dishonest, is that they plan to use the name for their own product, implying that that they told him to stop using it not because it necessarily infringed on their "Windows" trademark, but because they wanted the complete name for their own.
The front-page blurb doesn't mention if the guy contacted an attorney and said "Hey, can they do this?", he just went along with it. Which makes him a decent, cooperative fellow, but also either manipulated or a rube, depending on your perspective.
He should have contacted an IP attorney and at least gotten an opinion, even if the opinion was "They're Microsoft, and they *might* win on merits but will *probably* win because they're the 800 lb gorilla." Even then, he could have had enough ground to stand on that he might have negotiated some kind of settlement where they agreed to pay him money to stop.
I wonder sometimes if Microsoft is aware of the incremental harm to their image every time they act like an 800 lb gorilla, particularly to a developer providing products which improve in the Windows experience. I'm sure you don't want to pay off every guy, but what if they had instead said "Hey, we think you're infringing on our name and we think can probably take it away, but we also realize you have some investment in this and we appreciate the work you've done helping windows users, so we're willing to offer you $10,000 to stop using that name."
The $10k is peanuts to MS (they could pay out $10k/day and it'd never show on their balance sheet), they would eliminate stories that make MS seem like corporate goons and probably buy a lot of loyalty. Sure, they might pay off people they wouldn't have to and they certainly would increase the number of people looking to leech money off them, but I would think that the payoff in reduced bad PR and increased good PR would be worth it.
That's just it. What makes iTunes work is that the DRM isn't so grossly inflexible you can't work with it.
I'd consider downloading movies for $8-10 a pop, but only if the movies were provided in a ISO-type format that provided content identical to the store-bought copy (extras, menus, digital sound, etc). This also means dual-layer sized movies, which I know might be a download limitation. No heavy-handed DRM. I should be able to burn the movie to a DVD and watch it in any DVD player or on another computer. No special media requirements, no expiring files.
Since a DVD-9 sized download might be unrealistic, it might be a reasonable compromise to put the movie into an MPEG-4 format and have an iTunes-type application that would interface to DRM and allow burning of a DVD.
I'm afraid what we'll actually be offered, though, is a downloadable "rental" which only plays on computers, is deeply compromised in terms of PQ, and can't be burned to DVD or kept long-term.
I still miss why running cabling under the floor is worse than running it in overhead trays. Either the trays are too high to get at without a ladder (thus making them at least as inconvenient as floor tiles), or they're too low and you bash things into them.
Overhead tray systems also suffer from a fairly rigid room layout, and I have yet to see a data center being used the way it was originally layed out after a few years. Raised flooring allows for a lot of flexibility for power runs, cabling runs and so on without having to install an overhead tray grid.
Raised flooring also offers some slight protection against water leaks. We had our last raised floor system installed with all the power and data runs enclosed in liquidtight conduit due to the tenant's unfortunate run-ins with the buildings drain system and plumbing in the past.
I guess overhead tray makes sense if all you want to do is fill 10,000 sq ft with rack cabinets, but it's not really that flexible or even attractive, IMHO.
There's a difference between false shortages and real ones.
Cars that are short in supply ARE more expensive because people who want that car will pay for it.
Conversely, if you want a deal on a car, buy from the dealer stock of cars they have. The more stock they have the greater the price competition.
I think there's generally too much price competition in cars for dealers to get away with holding back supply to create false shortages.
Bob "voted out of office" Barr fits neatly into the "Republican shill for big business" category and Pat "Crocodile Tears" Schroeder fits neatly into the "Democratic shill for Hollywood interests" category.
This is nothing more than two people stumping for their natural constituencies and using the "opposite side of the aisle" ruse to make it seem that agreeing on an issue must somehow represent some kind of transcendent truth.
Her face isn't all that pretty, her figure is simply OK and I've seen better hair on Kansas farm girls. There's two girls that work at the freakin' Microcenter that look better than her, and the Microcenter seems to make ugly a hiring criteria.
Is it just that she isn't one of the usual obese, dumpy, homely hangers-on at the weekend D&D session, like the blonde woman in the background of the photo?
There was a big article in the New Yorker about Gates' foundation's attack on malaria.
I kept wondering, though, what happens when the population spikes in many desperately poor and often politically dysfunctional (of not openly anarchic) nations when a leading cause of death is eliminated?
Are we trading one problem -- malaria -- for another problem, like overpopulation, that will only make the civil strife and poverty problems plaguing these countries worse, not better?
It just strikes me that this has the potential to do as much damage long term as it does good in the short term. Which isn't to say we shouldn't solve the problem of malaria, but it struck me when reading the NY article that the entire problem of overpopulation, poverty, civil strife, etc in poor countires would just magically disappear when malaria was cured by western technology, much as Africa was "saved" by the green revolution in agriculture.
I seem to recall this being linked to a series of homocides committed by Special Forces guys recently returned from Afghanistan, circa 2002 or so. Maybe they quarantine them longer now to ensure that the side effects aren't likely to turn loose a highly trained killer on a drug-induced spree.
What I find unusual about this is the types of a side effects that the medical community considers acceptable vary widely. It's hard to get narcotics for pain relief because the side effects are often considered "bad" (eg, euphoria, typically distant possibility of dependence), yet the side effects of other drugs, like this anti-malarial, are considered totally acceptable.
I think you can better measure altruism by the risks taken in pursuit of their actions and the amount of reward receivd.
I think one of the gold standard examples is the family that hid Anne Frank and her family. Enormous, life-threatening risk with the only plausable external reward being keeping them hidden until an Allied victory, something that might have appeared impossible in occupied Holland.
The retired woman who volunteers at the food shelf is doing good, but since there's no risk and obvious rewards from being a volunteer (social rewards, and often material rewards through banquets or thank-you gifts), the only real sacrifice is time, and even then if there are other people working there from a similar background, you could argue that the socialization pays for the time and that the act itself IS actually selfish and that its only coincidence that the end product (eg, food shelf) is a community good.
If RIM has 1.2 billion in cash, expect them to just pay the fucking licensing fees and be done with it.
I but I don't think NTP really wants to run RIM, even if they could, and they surely don't want to own RIM short of milking the cash out of it.
Which is maybe an option -- suck out the cash and then let it collapse.
It's hard to see RIM shuttering completely -- that's a pyrrhic victory for NTP who wants money, not the business shut down.
I can see RIM filing for some kind of bankruptcy protection and the judge recognizing the installed base as a special class and ongoing operations being important, and fixing the situation financially such that NTP gets some of the money they're looking for and RIM continuing as an ongoing entity.
Worse for NTP could be a judge saying "OK, you win the company instead" and they're forced to sell it off to reclaim their holdings. Any potential buyer would know that NTP doesn't want to own or run RIM and that they should not only expect fire sale prices but also deep discounts on IP licensing in return for taking this off their hands.
*Somebody* would want to own RIM, it fits to nicely into someone's communications/wireless/email portfolio, it's just getting NTP satisfied that's the tricky part.
Only in the worst case scenerio for everyone (but Good and MS) does RIM flame out and become a non-entity.
Payment services involving the {apparent, assumed, etc} anonymity of the internet do have a lot of downside risk in terms of problems.
But, what's the financial services industry got going for it as a whole in terms of customer service, dispute resolution, etc? Paypal has a long history of abuses, both internally & externally originated. For a long time (still? I'm not a user) they used the "not a bank" dodge to avoid a lot of regulation that many other financial services companies had. And even "normal" financial services companies can suck pretty hard. Tried to resolve a dispute with your bank or credit card company lately? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
The good news for Google is that they don't have to work very hard to meet average and the presence of another player in the market will certainly force Paypal to work to improve their services and overcome some of the historical antipathy towards them.
They may even innovate, and provide not just an average product but a superior product.
I guess this is the result of competition between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray -- competition to win Hollywood means who has the biggest DRM.
Forget your toolbar crap, get an entire browser based on the things that you want to do on the web.
Are we going full circle and just reinventing AOL or other online services applications? We're coming back to the "online service application" -- the one program used for email, viewing information, "everything" you can do online....
I'm not entirely sure how practical this is to do, but it would be kind of nice if there was a way to "profile" or "smart link" an application-specific VM image such that the profiled version didn't have all the OS junk that wasn't necessary to run whatever the intended application was. Sort of like a statically linked binary, I guess.
The upside to the player is that you don't need a fullblown VMware install to use it, the downside is that in many cases you need a whole OS image to run a single app. I know this doesn't apply for some OSS applications, but even with them it can be decidedly non-trivial to whittle down to some minimal OS install.
Of course it was only a matter of time before MS did its usual stunt and began eroding a better product by "integrating" or giving away a lesser product, don't we eventually want virtualization built into Windows much as it is in grown up computer systems?
I guess what I'm hoping for is a more dynamic way to create virtual machines -- on a per application basis or something, where I don't have to create a wholly unique OS environment for one-off systems and some of the clunky, albeit flexible, stuff you have to do to handle networking, not to mention the memory gobbling.
Workstation 5 makes some of this easier with linked clones, but from what I've used of this feature there's no way I've found (disclaimer: I haven't tried that hard) to unlink a clone to make it standalone, and the memory hogging is kind of awful; it'd be nice to have some kind of unified memory space that would allow high memory allocations on simultaneous VMs without the attendant need for gigs of physical RAM. I was unimpressed with ESXs limited ability to do this.
Regardless, VMWare is a highly valuable tool. I wish I could get our salesdrones to push it harder when selling applications like BES or Good or even Exchange that are picky about installed application environments.
There is no ethics in business, I'm not sure if there ever was, but at least until fairly recently there were
ethical men IN business.
I'd wager that post-WWII many businesses were staffed by people with war experience who WOULD blanche at the idea that they were getting rich by supporting the enemies of freedom they might have personally fought and lost loved ones to.
I think they were also much more likely to have secondary motivations (doing good work for the organization, etc) in addition to "increased sales" or other material motivations.
Clearly this has passed. Business is staffed by technocrats and empty, greedy people obsessed with only their own enrichment. That corporate America struggles to prevent its leaders from lying and cheating their own investors (Enron, Worldcom, etc), is anyone surprised by the fact that they will functionally sell out the very democratic, free-market values that they have?
Numerous analogies have also been drawn between the authoritarian power structures of business environments (dictatorial leadership & decisionmaking, no due process) and authoritarian governments. The parallels are obvious.
I think that in recent years they have been abetted by colleges with business departments/schools divorced from the larger academy and business students disdainful of liberal arts classes due to the wildly left-biased teachers and curriculum.
These students then enter business leadership with little or no grasp on the relationships between freedom, democracy, property, etc, and they then only see parallels between the elites of dictatorial governments and their own business elite status.
I think that to some extent business favors authoritarianism -- no messy labor problems or consumer groups to deal with.
OK, this is kind of off-topic, and I realize the idea is that cell phone companies want to charge you for everything, but...what's the deal with the GPS/location thing on my phone?
Why can't they tell me where I am on that thing using the same info they'd send to 911? I'm not even sure the "Get it Now" payware applications can access it.
It just seems like such an obvious extension of the cell phone, especially since they've already added the location technology.
A virtual file server would be an extremely cool thing. I could have sworn somebody had something that would allow you to take N bytes of disk from a workgroup of workstations and coalesce it into a virtual disk sharable with the workgroup.
Just extend the idea to include replication of the virtual storage. You could either allow splitting of the data as above, or require each replicated segment to be 100% complete (ie, any one workstation has the whole server's storage), or some mixture of all of the above.
I think the downside comes from keeping it all in sync. Probably viable on a high speed LAN, but will fall apart exponentially as you get onto WAN networks.