I don't have the old TOS here (it's on a hard drive at home), but I'll find it and follow up with the diffs. Truth is, it's the principle of the matter that offends me far more than the changes themselves -- they're artificially coupling the 911 notification with a TOS change.
In terms of finding someone price competitive with Vonage, I'm switching to iConnectHere (http://www.iconnecthere.com/). They're the consumer arm of DeltaThree, who has been doing VoIP since 1996.
The way Vonage is going about this is slimy at best.
They send out email saying, "go to this web page and acknowledge this FCC required notice, or we'll cut off your service."
When you get to the web page, it has the notice and a link to a new terms of service agreement. A side-by-side comparison of the new TOS reveals that every change made is worse for the subscriber and better for Vonage. No way am I agreeing to this thing.
At the bottom of the web page, there are two checkboxes. One says, "I acknowledge that I read and understand the above 911 Dialing notice." The other says, "I accept the new Terms of Service Agreement."
If you check the 911 box but leave the TOS box blank, it won't let you continue.
So, Vonage is taking advantage of these FCC regulations to cram a new, worse TOS down its subscribers' throats, and pretending that it's the FCC's fault.
I'm canceling on Monday, as soon as my unlocked ATA shows up. There are much better services out there who aren't trying to screw their customers at every turn.
I think this is probably the crux of the matter: music isn't widgets. Music is licensing. The widgets are merely a relic. The real product in question here -- the music -- has a fixed overhead. Once the music exists, it exists. The music companies then need to make enough money licensing this music to recoup these fixed costs and compensate the artists. Beyond that, the incremental cost of a single music CD should be the same as the cost of a single blank CD in a jewel case with a printed four-color insert (somewhere south of $1) -- the channel by which they arrive at the local Fry's is sufficiently similar that the distribution costs and retailer overhead should be on the same order of magnitude.
Keep in mind that what we're arguing here is that the music currently being sold is overpriced; the question of "what these costs should be" is more relevant than "what these costs are." I think the overarching problem is that everyone along the chain has long ago rejected the notion that recorded music should merely be profitable, and replaced it with a sense of entitlement that it should be wildly lucrative (at least, for everyone except the artists).
Yeah, my guess is that the cassette version has been price protected (that is, the record company issued a credit to Amazon to help them sell it down). Not a huge demand for Kenny Rogers cassettes any more.
My other example was far more relevant: children's music -- even new and popular chidren's music -- is still largely available on cassette tapes (c.f. http://www.thewigglesshop.com/index.php?cPath=33). Tapes are still marketed at significantly lower costs than CDs not because they're cheaper to make (quite the opposite) but because that's what people are used to.
My point here is that it's not just old stock causing this disparity. Cassettes are actively being produced and sold at lower cost than CDs -- and only the most steadfast idiot would continue to do so if it required losing money. Assuming that record companies aren't actively trying to lose money, the only conclusion one can possibly draw is that record companies are perfectly capable of chopping 20% to 40% off the price of CDs while still turning a profit.
I don't doubt that you understand the economic realities of the industry that you work in; however, I think you're making some erroneous extrapolations from equipment manufacture and distribution into the Alice-in-Wonderlandesque world of music production.
That's correct. It doesn't do anything to dispel the prospect that net revenues on CDs are pretty high.
Even if the record companies are selling cassettes at cost (and that would be ridiculous), then the profit on a CD must be at least (price of CD - price of casette). That amount has historically been rather large -- in the 30% to 50% range -- as a percentage of purchase price.
Admittedly the data points are becoming harder to locate, but I'm going to assert "complete and utter bullshit," based on the relative costs of CDs and Cassettes (which are much more expensive to manufacture, by the way).
Here's one datapoint for you; you can find others. (For example, "The Very Best of Kenny Rogers" on Amazon: $5.95 on tape versus $9.95 on CD). Based on what I've seen, margins on CDs must top 50% -- unless record companies take a significant loss on cassettes.
epicRealm pretty much imploded a couple of years ago. I suspect all that remains is a holding company that retains the IPR associated with their patents. (I worked with a couple of the guys that pretty much shut the lights off on their way out of the company -- some of the most brilliant engineers I've had the pleasure of working with).
Another very useful observation about epicRealm is that the letters of its name can be rearranged to spell "Ripe camel." I can't take credit for this observation, however; that honor goes to an anonymous employee who made that physical rearrangement of their official logo on the entrance to their main offices around the time everything started going down the tubes.
The problem with the proffitability is that the average consumer IQ is 100, and that means 1/2 of them are below 100
You're confusing "average" with "median."
I suspect that you'll find that the distribution tends more towards a huge pool of people who are moderately less intelligent than 100, balanced by a few brilliant outlyers that bring the whole average up -- very similar to the distribution of wealth (see http://www.gumption.org/1993/memo/landmarks/percep tions.gif). At least, that kind of distribution would match my (admittedly non-scientific) observations.
Yes you do need a huge wad of cash to start a decent business.
Umm... I have to disagree. Over a year ago, I and a small number of partners formed a company with literally zero cash outlay (unless you want to count the money we each paid for our laptops -- but most of us already had those before starting the company). We have been in the black from day one onwards. Currently, we have annual gross revenues in the millions, employ 6 full-time employees (and a small number of contractors), and anticipate continued growth.
So maybe having a good idea isn't quite enough anymore -- but having several potentially good ideas, a group of brilliant talent to draw from, and enough energy to execute on those ideas seems to be working in at least one case.
What do you think venture capitalist firms do every day?
Drive otherwise viable businesses into the ground by taking a short-sighted approach to getting their money out of the companies they fund in an artificially short timeframe?
Check out this UC Riverside report, which details experiments to compare the normal California diesel fuel (labeled "CARB" in the graphs) with a specially formulated "reduced emissions" diesel (referred to as "EC-D") and three different biodiesel formulations.
In particular, look at the graph on page 17. In three of the seven vehicles, the reduction in particulate matter is negligible; in the other four, it is generally worse (significantly worse in one case).
The report's conclusions on particulate emissions are:
[The reformulated diesel] showed the greatest reductions in PM emission rates with reductions ranging from 5 to 43%. The OXyG B-60 showed some promise in reducing PM emissions for the highest emitting vehicle, but had PM emissions rates comparable to those of the in-use fuel for the remaining vehicles. The soy-based biodiesel blends had slightly higher PM emissions rates than the CARB fuel for 4 of the 7 vehicles, with comparable PM emission rates for the remaining three vehicles.
I'll note that the biodiesels didn't improve NOx emissions either.
What I'm worried about -- and it's completely unrelated to either, and *not* addressed by biodiesel -- is PARTICULATE emissions. Diesel engines produce very, very high particulate emissions. The health impact of those emissions is severe and well documented. Check the articles I cite above.
Yes, turbo diesel cars get incredible mileage, but the particulate emissions -- despite dramatic improvements over the past decade -- still fall near the bottom of the heap.
So, if you want to improve your mileage to save a couple of hundred dollars a year and/or to reduce dependance on foreign oil, a diesel is definitely the car for you.
On the other hand, if you're concerned about that grey haze hanging low in the sky that you notice every morning driving to work and wonder about
whatit'sdoingtoyourlungs,
the current batch of gasoline hybrids make a ton more sense.
Google actually did take this technology and try it. The first version of their image search had a "find similar" link next to every image. These tended to work okay at first (they weren't great, but you usually got enough photos back that you could visually scan them and find something of interest that was related to the original image). After a few months, for some reason, the "find similar" links started returning increasingly nonsensical results. After it degenerated to the point of near uselessness, they took the "find similar" link away from the image search results. I expected it to turn up again once they got the kinks worked out, but apparently they just decided to stop working on it.
And here is some random text to attempt to satisfy Slashdot's inane content filters. Apparently, it has to be quite a bit of text. I don't know what the average line length is that it requires, but it looks like it's unreasonably high.
I have done a little bit of reading into acoustics as it relates to various codecs and the mental processing involved in listening to audio that has been mangled in certain ways. It simply comes down to the fact that you must concentrate very hard to interpret a voice that has had all freqencies above 4kHz cut off, a notch cut out around 1.8kHz, and then had the resultant audio compressed down to something in the 5 to 13 kbps range (depending on the technology your phone uses).
Not only does it sound bad, but it taxes your brain much more than listening to a person sitting next to you. Based on earlier studies on handsfree mobile phone use, I've often joked that the codecs used in modern telephones are lethally bad.
In terms of profit and penetration, they're still a market leader, by long shot.
If you're talking about leading in features, I'm sure that's because of the Microsoft PARC research that led to such innovations as overlapping window systems and the now-ubiquitious mouse, the Microsoft ARPA initiative back in the '70's that got the internet going, Microsoft NCSA Mosaic and Microsoft CERN that got this whole web thing off the ground, Microsoft VT, which got the whole VoIP thing up and running, and -- of course -- Microsoft's work in Cambridge on the Zephyr system, which is the spiritual predecessor of all modern IM clients.
Wait? Did I say Microsoft? I meant Xerox, the US Department of Defense, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the University of Southern California, and the Massachusets Institute of Technology. Sorry. Typos.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft has never done much in the way of innovation; that comes out of true research communities, which they are not. Microsoft has been good at making existing technologies into commodities -- nothing more.
...[Y]ou clearly have no idea what you are talking about, you can use tens of thousands of sockets just fine, you will not run out of sockets or RAM unless you have set your system limits low, or are running on underpowered hardware
So there are only tens of thousands of slashdot readers? Wow. There sure is a lot of noise around here for that -- not to mention user IDs that are somewhat inflated.
The point he was trying to make -- and he's right -- is that, if you keep persistent TCP connections open for every interested client, you'll run out of local resources long before you exhaust network bandwidth. You've managed to reduce a difficult-to-solve problem to an impossible-to-solve problem.
Trust me on this one; I design large-scale network servers for a living.
Have you looked at an LCD monitor hooked up to an analog output? I have a couple at home (1024 x 768), and can't tell the difference from an equivalent laptop screen. There's no bleeding over from one pixel to the next, and response time is up there with every other LCD screen I've ever seen.
Next time you find yourself in Fry's or an equivalent store, seek out the analog LCD screens, and try to find some quality difference between them and the digital screens. You'll probably be surprised.
I think eliminating global trade would be great for Detroit & Texas
You've never actually been to Texas, have you? There's still a bit of money to be made in oil and natural gas to be sure, but we have the largest collection of tech and telecom companies in the U.S. outside of California. Think world headquarters for TI, AMD, and Dell; think major operation centers for Cisco, Ericsson, Rockwell, Honeywell, Tekelec, Lockheed Martin, IBM, HP, and Nortel. The list goes on.
Radical U.S. protectionism would certainly do more to harm Texas than it would to help it.
A lot of that depends on how much you care about entertainment -- movies, music, and television shows -- produced in the US. If you don't, the most you will probably notice is a wave of electronics touting "DRM Free!" like the region free DVD players available all over the continent.
On the other hand, if you do care about any US-produced entertainment, it will probably result in crippled media -- crap like DVDs that expire 24 hours after you first watch them, a blackout on new US TV shows until your government passes laws that keep its citizens from recording them off the air, and CDs that you can't transfer to your iPod or similar devices.
Europeans not knowing where Florida is is a totally different thing to Americans not knowing where Sweeden is.
Without making comments about relative sizes and populations that would seem to prove this statement wrong on its face, I would like to point out that Europeans not knowing how to spell "Sweden" is pretty much the same as Americans not knowing how to spell "Canada."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have the old TOS here (it's on a hard drive at home), but I'll find it and follow up with the diffs. Truth is, it's the principle of the matter that offends me far more than the changes themselves -- they're artificially coupling the 911 notification with a TOS change.
In terms of finding someone price competitive with Vonage, I'm switching to iConnectHere (http://www.iconnecthere.com/). They're the consumer arm of DeltaThree, who has been doing VoIP since 1996.
The way Vonage is going about this is slimy at best.
They send out email saying, "go to this web page and acknowledge this FCC required notice, or we'll cut off your service."
When you get to the web page, it has the notice and a link to a new terms of service agreement. A side-by-side comparison of the new TOS reveals that every change made is worse for the subscriber and better for Vonage. No way am I agreeing to this thing.
At the bottom of the web page, there are two checkboxes. One says, "I acknowledge that I read and understand the above 911 Dialing notice." The other says, "I accept the new Terms of Service Agreement."
If you check the 911 box but leave the TOS box blank, it won't let you continue.
So, Vonage is taking advantage of these FCC regulations to cram a new, worse TOS down its subscribers' throats, and pretending that it's the FCC's fault.
I'm canceling on Monday, as soon as my unlocked ATA shows up. There are much better services out there who aren't trying to screw their customers at every turn.
You don't need to ask someone for an invite anymore...
https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1
I think this is probably the crux of the matter: music isn't widgets. Music is licensing. The widgets are merely a relic. The real product in question here -- the music -- has a fixed overhead. Once the music exists, it exists. The music companies then need to make enough money licensing this music to recoup these fixed costs and compensate the artists. Beyond that, the incremental cost of a single music CD should be the same as the cost of a single blank CD in a jewel case with a printed four-color insert (somewhere south of $1) -- the channel by which they arrive at the local Fry's is sufficiently similar that the distribution costs and retailer overhead should be on the same order of magnitude.
Keep in mind that what we're arguing here is that the music currently being sold is overpriced; the question of "what these costs should be" is more relevant than "what these costs are." I think the overarching problem is that everyone along the chain has long ago rejected the notion that recorded music should merely be profitable, and replaced it with a sense of entitlement that it should be wildly lucrative (at least, for everyone except the artists).
My other example was far more relevant: children's music -- even new and popular chidren's music -- is still largely available on cassette tapes (c.f. http://www.thewigglesshop.com/index.php?cPath=33)
My point here is that it's not just old stock causing this disparity. Cassettes are actively being produced and sold at lower cost than CDs -- and only the most steadfast idiot would continue to do so if it required losing money. Assuming that record companies aren't actively trying to lose money, the only conclusion one can possibly draw is that record companies are perfectly capable of chopping 20% to 40% off the price of CDs while still turning a profit.
I don't doubt that you understand the economic realities of the industry that you work in; however, I think you're making some erroneous extrapolations from equipment manufacture and distribution into the Alice-in-Wonderlandesque world of music production.
That's correct. It doesn't do anything to dispel the prospect that net revenues on CDs are pretty high.
Even if the record companies are selling cassettes at cost (and that would be ridiculous), then the profit on a CD must be at least (price of CD - price of casette). That amount has historically been rather large -- in the 30% to 50% range -- as a percentage of purchase price.
Admittedly the data points are becoming harder to locate, but I'm going to assert "complete and utter bullshit," based on the relative costs of CDs and Cassettes (which are much more expensive to manufacture, by the way).
Here's one datapoint for you; you can find others. (For example, "The Very Best of Kenny Rogers" on Amazon: $5.95 on tape versus $9.95 on CD). Based on what I've seen, margins on CDs must top 50% -- unless record companies take a significant loss on cassettes.
epicRealm pretty much imploded a couple of years ago. I suspect all that remains is a holding company that retains the IPR associated with their patents. (I worked with a couple of the guys that pretty much shut the lights off on their way out of the company -- some of the most brilliant engineers I've had the pleasure of working with).
Another very useful observation about epicRealm is that the letters of its name can be rearranged to spell "Ripe camel." I can't take credit for this observation, however; that honor goes to an anonymous employee who made that physical rearrangement of their official logo on the entrance to their main offices around the time everything started going down the tubes.
On the internet, nothing is ever truly gone forever.
s upport.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q131/1/09 .asp -- but slashcode makes that look truly ugly).
(For those of you who fear clicking on ln-s.net links off slashdot [and I don't blame you], that link goes to http://web.archive.org/web/20011108213243/http://
I suspect that you'll find that the distribution tends more towards a huge pool of people who are moderately less intelligent than 100, balanced by a few brilliant outlyers that bring the whole average up -- very similar to the distribution of wealth (see http://www.gumption.org/1993/memo/landmarks/perce
So maybe having a good idea isn't quite enough anymore -- but having several potentially good ideas, a group of brilliant talent to draw from, and enough energy to execute on those ideas seems to be working in at least one case.
Drive otherwise viable businesses into the ground by taking a short-sighted approach to getting their money out of the companies they fund in an artificially short timeframe?In particular, look at the graph on page 17. In three of the seven vehicles, the reduction in particulate matter is negligible; in the other four, it is generally worse (significantly worse in one case).
The report's conclusions on particulate emissions are:I'll note that the biodiesels didn't improve NOx emissions either.
I'm not too concerned about the sulphur.
I'm not too concerned about the greenhouse gases.
What I'm worried about -- and it's completely unrelated to either, and *not* addressed by biodiesel -- is PARTICULATE emissions. Diesel engines produce very, very high particulate emissions. The health impact of those emissions is severe and well documented. Check the articles I cite above.
Yes, turbo diesel cars get incredible mileage, but the particulate emissions -- despite dramatic improvements over the past decade -- still fall near the bottom of the heap.
So, if you want to improve your mileage to save a couple of hundred dollars a year and/or to reduce dependance on foreign oil, a diesel is definitely the car for you.
On the other hand, if you're concerned about that grey haze hanging low in the sky that you notice every morning driving to work and wonder about what it's doing to your lungs, the current batch of gasoline hybrids make a ton more sense.
Google actually did take this technology and try it. The first version of their image search had a "find similar" link next to every image. These tended to work okay at first (they weren't great, but you usually got enough photos back that you could visually scan them and find something of interest that was related to the original image). After a few months, for some reason, the "find similar" links started returning increasingly nonsensical results. After it degenerated to the point of near uselessness, they took the "find similar" link away from the image search results. I expected it to turn up again once they got the kinks worked out, but apparently they just decided to stop working on it.
Or, more accurately, simply commented out of the HTML.
Shot 1
Shot 2
Shot 3
Shot 4
Shot 5
Shot 6
Shot 7
Shot 8
Shot 9
Shot 10
Shot 11
Shot 12
And here is some random text to attempt to satisfy Slashdot's inane content filters. Apparently, it has to be quite a bit of text. I don't know what the average line length is that it requires, but it looks like it's unreasonably high.
Xten is releasing their very nice eyeBeam SIP client for Linux very soon now; it is currently in beta.
I have done a little bit of reading into acoustics as it relates to various codecs and the mental processing involved in listening to audio that has been mangled in certain ways. It simply comes down to the fact that you must concentrate very hard to interpret a voice that has had all freqencies above 4kHz cut off, a notch cut out around 1.8kHz, and then had the resultant audio compressed down to something in the 5 to 13 kbps range (depending on the technology your phone uses).
Not only does it sound bad, but it taxes your brain much more than listening to a person sitting next to you. Based on earlier studies on handsfree mobile phone use, I've often joked that the codecs used in modern telephones are lethally bad.
Perhaps they can compile one that knows how to spell "kernel."
In terms of profit and penetration, they're still a market leader, by long shot.
If you're talking about leading in features, I'm sure that's because of the Microsoft PARC research that led to such innovations as overlapping window systems and the now-ubiquitious mouse, the Microsoft ARPA initiative back in the '70's that got the internet going, Microsoft NCSA Mosaic and Microsoft CERN that got this whole web thing off the ground, Microsoft VT, which got the whole VoIP thing up and running, and -- of course -- Microsoft's work in Cambridge on the Zephyr system, which is the spiritual predecessor of all modern IM clients.
Wait? Did I say Microsoft? I meant Xerox, the US Department of Defense, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the University of Southern California, and the Massachusets Institute of Technology. Sorry. Typos.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft has never done much in the way of innovation; that comes out of true research communities, which they are not. Microsoft has been good at making existing technologies into commodities -- nothing more.
So there are only tens of thousands of slashdot readers? Wow. There sure is a lot of noise around here for that -- not to mention user IDs that are somewhat inflated.
The point he was trying to make -- and he's right -- is that, if you keep persistent TCP connections open for every interested client, you'll run out of local resources long before you exhaust network bandwidth. You've managed to reduce a difficult-to-solve problem to an impossible-to-solve problem.
Trust me on this one; I design large-scale network servers for a living.
Have you looked at an LCD monitor hooked up to an analog output? I have a couple at home (1024 x 768), and can't tell the difference from an equivalent laptop screen. There's no bleeding over from one pixel to the next, and response time is up there with every other LCD screen I've ever seen.
Next time you find yourself in Fry's or an equivalent store, seek out the analog LCD screens, and try to find some quality difference between them and the digital screens. You'll probably be surprised.
Radical U.S. protectionism would certainly do more to harm Texas than it would to help it.
On the other hand, if you do care about any US-produced entertainment, it will probably result in crippled media -- crap like DVDs that expire 24 hours after you first watch them, a blackout on new US TV shows until your government passes laws that keep its citizens from recording them off the air, and CDs that you can't transfer to your iPod or similar devices.