One factor that is not being directly addressed here concerning media of exchange is the tremendous power held by the one who controls the currency. Whether it is paper notes or bits in the database, there is nothing to prevent the person or institution keeping track from making more. You're a bank and want to buy something? Go print yourself some money ( or store some different bits on a disk somewhere ). Voila! "Money!" But let you or me try it and it is called counterfeiting.
Any medium of exchange is prone to some kind of degradation due to someone cheating trying to get more out of it. This includes things with intrinsic value such as gold or tobacco. In POW camps where soldiers got cigarettes in their Red Cross packages, cigarettes became a medium of exchange. But what if you wanted to smoke AND buy that tin of sardines that other POW has? You could pull out a few shreds of tobacco from the cigs you have before you trade them... You get the picture. Even with gold coin, this sort of degrading of the medium of exchange was common. Using gold as a medium of exchange was not practical until someone 3000 years ago discovered that you could rub a lump of gold on a 'touchstone' such that one could tell from the resulting streak that the gold was pure or alloyed with copper or something else. More recent countermeasures were the ribbed 'rolled' edge on coins and the use of scales and standardized weights to discourage the practice of shaving gold from the edge of the coins. These went a long way to keep someone from getting something from nothing.
The current 'money' system that we have, on the other hand, has 'shaving' of the currency built into it. To explain how it works is not complicated, but extemely boring and most of the facts fly in the face of 'conventional wisdom'. In this short space I can best point those who are interested to an excellent book on the subject - "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin (ISBN 0912986212) or more briefly a series of online articles from a week or two ago at WorldNetDaily.
The main motivation of the raid may be some concern of some higher ups that this non-inflatable method of exchange might catch on, and those who derive their wealth and power from creating 'money' out of thin air will again face some competition.
What you had to say about Lemon Angel is not entirely correct. There actually was a group of JPOP singers in Japan called Lemon Angel, featuring singer Tomo Sakuai who is still somewhat big in Japan. They DID have some H Anime music videos done by the Cream Lemon animators, however. You can see them via anonymous ftp from the link at http://www.erehwon.org/Mem-info.cgi/MembersOnly/me mber.html, after logging in, go
to http://www.erehwon.org/MembersOnly/LMA/LMA_01.html.
I see a lot of comments comparing this to WebTV, and rightly so. Having worked there and now working at Nokia ( but it is a big company and it is the first time I have seen this 'appliance') I have to wonder how this is going to shake out.
Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market since they are providing the right piece of the puzzle - the sleek phone that everybody loves, and leaving all the messy customer relations to the mobile phone service providers. The question is whether that approach will work for the emerging television/web convergence market.
The pioneer of this market, WebTV decided a long time ago that the money to be made is in the subscription to services, and not in selling the hardware itself. There is a subsidy given to the licensees of the WebTV hardware, so what you pay for a WebTV box is really not what it costs to make. The hope is that the subsidy will be made up in future subscription revenues. Fine if every body signs up for the WebTV service, but what frequently happens is that WebTV box you bought for Great Uncle Elmer's Christmas present is still sitting in the box since he is unsure how to hook up all of those cables. No hook-up, no subscription revenue stream.
WebTV's approach is a lot like the razor manufacturer that gave away razors so that you would buy their replacement razor blades, the profit being in the selling of the blades. Nokia seems to think that they can profit from the selling of the shavers, and giving the profits from the replacement blades to someone else. Good luck.
I do have to commend Nokia for embracing Open Standards though. WebTV was acquired by M$ and a lot of changes were imposed that did not work out.
There are a lot of Linux and *nix friendly prople there; they were still using Linux for hardware bringup when I left there. When we were told that the client OS was going to be WinCE, the developers soon were in the habit of squinting and gritting their teeth while saying "wince" whenever they mentioned the OS's name. Nice thing about Open Systems is that if it doesn't do what you want it to do, you open up the source code and code it yourself. With a proprietary OS, even in the mother company, you submit your ECRs(Engineering Change Requests) and wait for it to work its way through the system and pray that it did not get too mangled after those dozen planning meetings before it finally gets assigned to someone to code.
Notice that on the second page of the letter from KENYON & KENYON they cc: a certain John Huncke, Digital:Convergence Executive Vice President of Business Affairs. From checking his bio linked above, you can see that he previously was an attorney for various media corporations and "a clerk at The Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas during Hillary Clinton's tenure", which should tell you a lot about his outlook towards intellectual property and innovation.
jms - Here's hoping you check back for responses to your posts...
You seem to understand much about what is going on with the low-level stuff of VM needed to make all this fly. I have some detailed questions I want to ask you directly. I am trying to convince the powers that be to get VM set up here.
Please email me at gill at iprg dot nokia dot com.
This is not a deterrent against abuse. Where do you think the gub'mint gets their money anyway? Wouldn't it be the money of the people collected as taxes that they would be spending should they be fined? What might interest me is if individuals responsible be made to pay penalties out of their own pockets and receive jail sentences for said offenses.
iMac Case - maybe not so cool in the long run
on
Cooler Cases
·
· Score: 1
While we all are on the subject of cases, I thought I might bring up the iMac, which has been getting a lot of attention lately because of its cool case design. Some acquaintances at Apple actually tried to get Steve Jobs to change his mind for the design that became the iMac production case. Since they are analog and monitor types, they are familliar with the guts of a CRT, working with them daily. They were agast that Jobs intended to show off yoke portion of the monitor through those 'sexy' blue windows in the top. The guys wheeled a monitor on an AV cart into Jobs office, turned it around, and pulled the back off of the monitor. They said "In one year this is what our customers will see through those blue windows in the iMac." For those of you who have never opened up your monitor (as Jobs probably never had) let me tell you what he saw - a CRT fuzzy with a grey carpet of dust. It turns out the high voltage of a CRTs is a magnet for dust. I know that this may not be of any concern to most of you since most computers have the monitor separate from the CPU, but you do still have dust build-up in the processor box, and a clear case of any kind will show that off right away. (I know, most of you upgrade your gear so quick it doesn't have time to get dusty.) Just thought you would like one more anectdote to add to the voluminous corpus of Steve Jobs lore, and to remind you that some products that are visually appealing on the showroom floor sometimes don't age well.
Coolness where it counts....
on
Cooler Cases
·
· Score: 1
Check out http://www.kryotech.com and check out their cases. How is -40 C for coolness? Unfortunately, you might have to buy a system along with their cases since the cooling head is matched to the CPU. Their cases don't look half bad for beige hardware, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Any medium of exchange is prone to some kind of degradation due to someone cheating trying to get more out of it. This includes things with intrinsic value such as gold or tobacco. In POW camps where soldiers got cigarettes in their Red Cross packages, cigarettes became a medium of exchange. But what if you wanted to smoke AND buy that tin of sardines that other POW has? You could pull out a few shreds of tobacco from the cigs you have before you trade them... You get the picture. Even with gold coin, this sort of degrading of the medium of exchange was common. Using gold as a medium of exchange was not practical until someone 3000 years ago discovered that you could rub a lump of gold on a 'touchstone' such that one could tell from the resulting streak that the gold was pure or alloyed with copper or something else. More recent countermeasures were the ribbed 'rolled' edge on coins and the use of scales and standardized weights to discourage the practice of shaving gold from the edge of the coins. These went a long way to keep someone from getting something from nothing.
The current 'money' system that we have, on the other hand, has 'shaving' of the currency built into it. To explain how it works is not complicated, but extemely boring and most of the facts fly in the face of 'conventional wisdom'. In this short space I can best point those who are interested to an excellent book on the subject - "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin (ISBN 0912986212) or more briefly a series of online articles from a week or two ago at WorldNetDaily.
The main motivation of the raid may be some concern of some higher ups that this non-inflatable method of exchange might catch on, and those who derive their wealth and power from creating 'money' out of thin air will again face some competition.
What you had to say about Lemon Angel is not entirely correct. There actually was a group of JPOP singers in Japan called Lemon Angel, featuring singer Tomo Sakuai who is still somewhat big in Japan. They DID have some H Anime music videos done by the Cream Lemon animators, however. You can see them via anonymous ftp from the link at http://www.erehwon.org/Mem-info.cgi/MembersOnly/me mber.html, after logging in, go
l .
to http://www.erehwon.org/MembersOnly/LMA/LMA_01.htm
I see a lot of comments comparing this to WebTV, and rightly so. Having worked there and now working at Nokia ( but it is a big company and it is the first time I have seen this 'appliance') I have to wonder how this is going to shake out.
Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market since they are providing the right piece of the puzzle - the sleek phone that everybody loves, and leaving all the messy customer relations to the mobile phone service providers. The question is whether that approach will work for the emerging television/web convergence market.
The pioneer of this market, WebTV decided a long time ago that the money to be made is in the subscription to services, and not in selling the hardware itself. There is a subsidy given to the licensees of the WebTV hardware, so what you pay for a WebTV box is really not what it costs to make. The hope is that the subsidy will be made up in future subscription revenues. Fine if every body signs up for the WebTV service, but what frequently happens is that WebTV box you bought for Great Uncle Elmer's Christmas present is still sitting in the box since he is unsure how to hook up all of those cables. No hook-up, no subscription revenue stream.
WebTV's approach is a lot like the razor manufacturer that gave away razors so that you would buy their replacement razor blades, the profit being in the selling of the blades. Nokia seems to think that they can profit from the selling of the shavers, and giving the profits from the replacement blades to someone else. Good luck.
I do have to commend Nokia for embracing Open Standards though. WebTV was acquired by M$ and a lot of changes were imposed that did not work out.
There are a lot of Linux and *nix friendly prople there; they were still using Linux for hardware bringup when I left there. When we were told that the client OS was going to be WinCE, the developers soon were in the habit of squinting and gritting their teeth while saying "wince" whenever they mentioned the OS's name. Nice thing about Open Systems is that if it doesn't do what you want it to do, you open up the source code and code it yourself. With a proprietary OS, even in the mother company, you submit your ECRs(Engineering Change Requests) and wait for it to work its way through the system and pray that it did not get too mangled after those dozen planning meetings before it finally gets assigned to someone to code.
Notice that on the second page of the letter from KENYON & KENYON they cc: a certain John Huncke, Digital:Convergence Executive Vice President of Business Affairs. From checking his bio linked above, you can see that he previously was an attorney for various media corporations and "a clerk at The Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas during Hillary Clinton's tenure", which should tell you a lot about his outlook towards intellectual property and innovation.
jms:
Here's hoping you review your posts for comments...
I am interested in asking some questions about VM - please email me at:
gill at iprg dot nokia dot com
Thanks
jms - Here's hoping you check back for responses to your posts...
You seem to understand much about what is going on with the low-level stuff of VM needed to make all this fly. I have some detailed questions I want to ask you directly. I am trying to convince the powers that be to get VM set up here.
Please email me at
gill at iprg dot nokia dot com.
This is not a deterrent against abuse.
Where do you think the gub'mint gets their money anyway? Wouldn't it be the money of the people collected as taxes that they would be spending should they be fined? What might interest me is if individuals responsible be made to pay penalties out of their own pockets and receive jail sentences for said offenses.
While we all are on the subject of cases, I thought I might bring up the iMac, which has been getting a lot of attention lately because of its cool case design.
Some acquaintances at Apple actually tried to get Steve Jobs to change his mind for the design that became the iMac production case. Since they are analog and monitor types, they are familliar with the guts of a CRT, working with them daily. They were agast that Jobs intended to show off yoke portion of the monitor through those 'sexy' blue windows in the top.
The guys wheeled a monitor on an AV cart into Jobs office, turned it around, and pulled the back off of the monitor. They said "In one year this is what our customers will see through those blue windows in the iMac." For those of you who have never opened up your monitor (as Jobs probably never had) let me tell you what he saw - a CRT fuzzy with a grey carpet of dust. It turns out the high voltage of a CRTs is a magnet for dust.
I know that this may not be of any concern to most of you since most computers have the monitor separate from the CPU, but you do still have dust build-up in the processor box, and a clear case of any kind will show that off right away. (I know, most of you upgrade your gear so quick it doesn't have time to get dusty.)
Just thought you would like one more anectdote to add to the voluminous corpus of Steve Jobs lore, and to remind you that some products that are visually appealing on the showroom floor sometimes don't age well.
Check out http://www.kryotech.com and check out their cases. How is -40 C for coolness? Unfortunately, you might have to buy a system along with their cases since the cooling head is matched to the CPU. Their cases don't look half bad for beige hardware, either.