As a coder I could work on things in small pieces and just meet the requirments, as the manager/designer I have to know how those pieces will go together and recognize the obstacles before hand.
To focus on the relevent portion: as the manager/designer
All agreed. Looked at that way, of course your programmers have an easier job than you. Programmers who don't do design are a very different animal from those that do. The long term monetary value of software lies almost entirely in the design. The short term value lies almost entirely in the ability to solve a given business problem. That implies the actual application of keystrokes to magnetic media has relatively little value.
But this all assumes that software development can be successfully compartmentalized into requirements / design / coding. For my X dollars I'll take one designer programmer who can talk to business users over ten non-designer programmers who can't. The latter produce components that meet the written requirements but have a nasty habit of not furthering the business objective. For a quick thumbnail check of this hypothesis, ask yourself: How much of my time each day is spent either explaining the design to the programmer or explaining how to correct an implementation to match the intent? How much time is spent with the programmer saying, "I wrote what the spec says", which it may do, when it doesn't match the business need?
Your system may work well for you. If it doesn't, consider looking into agile programming. Generally speaking it requires more programmers with the potential to become designer/programmers (in my humble opinion, the other type are not worthy of the title programmer), but the functional-unit-of-software output will be higher per dollar (at least it is in my experience).
And all that said, I'm not saying designer programmers have a harder job than project managers. Good instances of either are worth size cash, and bad instances of both dramatically outnumber the good.
Fact of the matter is that is really the *right* answer. I poked through gnus a couple times (maybe 30 minutes total, never established an actual connection) and kept going back to the familiarity and comfort of Pine. Then I had to use IMAP at the office, and it became a "do I want to figure out IMAP/Pine, IMAP/Emacs, or just use Evolution?" Evolution and laziness won (that's an amusing juxtaposition of words). Then Debian pulled Evolution out of the apt tree, so now it's deal with no Emacs keys, figure out IMAP/Emacs or figure out IMAP/Pine. Last night (after posting) I got Emacs working.
Does anyone know if or when Thunderbird will support either an Emacs mode or configurable bindings without editing the source code? I seem to recall somewhere in some Mozilla manifesto that Emacs bindings were supposed to take precedence. Thunderbird has a fine set of keybindings, but it's nothing like Emacs.
When these two bindings conflict (as in ctrl-A or ctrl-H), the emacs binding wins.
Not that I'm saying they should necessarily make this the default, but the above implies they recognize how large the Emacs userbase is; it would be nice to at least be able to configure it myself without having to recompile.
I use Thunderbird at the office against an Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Exchange calendaring (at least AFAIK), but the mail works great. Set it up as a IMAP client. You can get the settings from your Outlook install.
There seem to be a lot of admins here who are missing a point he implies early in the article, and which he does not sufficiently amplify:
I understand that those DBAs who understand the details of the database engines are worth their weight in gold.
My impression is that he is not talking about the sort of admin that is likely to be reading Slashdot on a Saturday. He should have repeated this statement in each section, to make it clear that there are good and valuable admins in every sector.
It is my experience that we are now 60% over-administrated.
This is also a bit too understated. He implies at a few points earlier in the article that he works for large enterprises. If you've worked in a large enterprise, you know that in such places, the paper-pusher admin to skilled admin ratio is 60/40 on a good day, going downhill, with a gale-force tailwind.
The people he's attacking are (for example) the sorts that engage in "security by chewing through the wires" - putting a firewall at every major network nexus, shutting down all traffic, and demanding written justification and properly red-tapified authorization for every open port. Don't get me wrong - default deny at the perimeter is a must, and default deny on some nexuses is the right choice. OTOH, for example, a default deny firewall between the developers and the appservers has a very real cost (EG: waiting six days for paper to clear before being able to turn on JMS). He's not even saying this cost can't be justified - he's just saying that cost has to be assessed and charged to the administration budget, and it is currently charged to development:
the true cost of administration must be accounted for when totalling up the cost of any project.
The point he's making is not that administration is bad, but that because management has lost it's grasp of development, and because they can grasp the paperwork-and-authorization oriented style of administration, management has given administration more power than is optimal. There's a balance that must be struck between wild-eyed developers and stodgy administrators - safety and speed are both valuable, and they are naturally at odds. In major enterprises, the balance is askew and getting worse, because the practice of software development is evolving so rapidly. Likewise, administrators are quick (and right) to point out that in smaller companies the balance is askew in the other direction.
I think his main point is that bad admins are a bad thing, and that management often sees bad admins as good admins, because bad admins generate more sturm und drang. "If people are complaining about things being shut down, there must be some security goin' on. If they're not complaining, what did we hire these guys for?"
So unruffle your feathers - if you're not allowing your developers to host outside accessible websites on their desktops, he's not talking about you.
OTOH, if you don't know enough SQL to understand a script that has been submitted, and you reject it because it is not indented properly, remain ruffled - you are the problem.
They make no mention of not being able to make your own FAT-system (which what everyone has been doing up 'till now).
Patents don't cover a particular implementation. They cover the right to implement an idea. Mentioning their patents at the end of the article is most definitely sabre rattling aimed at *all* implementations of FAT IO.
What I would do, if I were an evil overlord type is this: Mention in the C&D's that MS isn't charging for NTFS. This could be justified behind a smokescreen of "FAT is bad, NTFS is better, we want to give you an incentive to move to the better FS."
Then, only MS can write to these devices (safe NTFS drivers for other OSs don't exist). Instant platform dependence.
And, of course, since the C&D would say nothing about future royalties on NTFS, they could start charging for NTFS after everyone switches.
Nowhere does it say that companies providing their own 'clean room' implementation of the FAT filesystem will have to pay.
At the end of the document they mention the patents that cover FAT (dumb patents that should never have been granted, but granted patents they be). I think mentioning patents can be sufficiently considered an implication that clean rooom implementations will not escape notice (patents cover any implementation of an idea, not just the one the "inventor" came up with).
Is Telstra really excessively dumb? I would guess not, so let's suppose for a moment that they aren't.
If they're not really really stupid, they might have thought: Gee, I wonder if there's any way to tell what's 3 standard deviations above the mean as far as peak mail sending rate is? Do we have, anywhere, a listing of all the emails that have been sent by our users? Preferably arranged in chronoligical order, with timestamps? If we had that, why all we'd have to do is a little grep and wc action, toss in some particularly ugly perl to aggregate the results, and we'd be able to figure out what normal is. From there, we'd be able to figure out what weird is. Once we know what weird is, we'll know which accounts we should take a closer look at.
I've gotta think they figured that out. After all, they have to have figured out how to count the mails per minute per user to be able to implement this (and their former rule), right?
Of course, it's possible they really are too dumb to look at their own server logs. Maybe they pulled this number out of some business weenie's ass during one of those catered lunch meetings in the big glass windowed room with the collossal oak table. If this is the case, then they'll get false positives by the cartload and they'll quickly be swamped in the acrid stench of their own foolishness.
I find the latter a little implausible. Telstra may be a big evil monopoly, but I don't think they're a big evil imbecilic monopoly.
Slashdot effect seems to be bringing Port80 Software's server to its knees. On a holiday night. At 1:30 AM Eastern US Time. Words cannot express the level of amusement I am feeling.
That would basically be the end of P2P networks: without any fast uplinks, P2P traffic would be starved down to dial-up speeds.
For once the bloated MS.doc file format serves us well. Joe Sixpack wants to be able to put his 3 megapixel photographs of his kids in a word doc and email them to Mom.
But KDE is far more configurable, so I like it better.
I use GNOME, almost entirely because of the keybinding capability offered by Sawfish. Is there a KDE equivalent? I'd like to spend more time with KDE, but I have to be able to control minimize/maximize, change desktop pane, and fire arbitrary shell commands all from user configurable keychords (my RSI is bad enough without having to use the rat). I'm guessing it's possible in KDE, but I haven't found out how.
That's good stuff. Sorry I can't mod back the point I just saw you lose.
It's not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.
Agreed. It would definitely work to an extent. This is the tip-jar model that has been proposed, and which works to an extent for free software.
The problem with the moral sanction is that in practice it just doesn't pan out as being as productive as quid-pro-quo. Communism (the prime example of moral economics) works, but not as efficiently as free market economics. Some people, perhaps most people, are inherently good, but the few bad apples cause a lot of damage (both financial and social) in a trust-based system.
The problem with the legal sanction is that it is expensive. It means giving up time, money, and liberty. When it's the only viable answer (like with building freeways), it's the right choice. But it should always be treated as the avenue of last resort.
And that last bit is where I get really pissed off about the DMCA. We didn't even try to go down any other avenues. We just ran whining to congress and said, "save our current business model." We didn't even try a single alternative business model. The labels aren't thinking about the efficiency of the market - they're just thinking about the next quarterly report. To me, abusing the market for the sake of a quartely report is tantamount to treason.
Your suggested sale price for music (and total income for the distributor and artist) is zero.
I said copies, not music.
Something's going to have to give here
Agreed.
it's not going to be the fixed costs.
And it's not going to be the willingness to pay for something that costs arbitrarily close to nothing. It is law, like gravity.
Something's going to have to give here
Agreed. It won't be the fixed cost of production, and it won't be the zero copy price. So now should we throw up our hands in defeat and let the music go quiet? Should we sacrifice money, time, and freedom on DRM that can't work? Should we pirate music and screw the artists? Or should we think in terms of what can be changed between the fixed cost of production and the zero price of copies?
There's some quote that goes something like, "when you've exhausted all the probable answers, the answer must be something improbable." We sell music today like we sell bananas, except it isn't like bananas. Bananas have a marginal cost of production.
"But we don't know how to sell things any other way!"
I know. It's OK. We just have to learn.
I can usually tell when I'm on to something, 'cuz both sides tell me I'm a shill for the opposite side.
I wish I had points and could mod a thread I've commented on. Your post is excellent. A few public points, then I'm off to your blog to try to contact you.
Price isn't necessarily determined by costs, it's determined by what the market will bear.
You're talking demand side, I'm talking supply side. Both are upper limits on the price, and act independently.
On the demand side, I think that the market would bear higher-than-zero prices for copies (as demonstrated by music sales in the pre-MP3 era (PME, haha)). Assuming this is the case, the demand side can't explain current behavior.
On the supply side, if copying has a zero cost, a manufacturer will always step into the profit margin between zero and the current price of copies - new manufacturers keep appearing at a lower price until the profit margin approaches zero. This is exactly what the original Napster was, incarnated at Internet speed. It is also what the Southeast Asian piracy market is all about.
If the market will only bear 0 price music, then the system has broken down, and the opportunity cost of spending most of your time as an artist will become much steeper.
I think you've shifted in this sentence to talking about the natural price of music. I strongly believe that the natural price of music is extremely non-zero. It has both demand side value (I love music, and buy a lot of disks (yes, still - as it stands I don't feel personally justified in pirating)) and supply side value (I play guitar - there is definitely a non-zero cost of producing new music).
But then we have a problem: the master copy costs $X to make and such costs (plus profit, which is really just a future cost) must be covered to create an economic system.
Ahh, here we go, the supply side. Keep going, you're getting close.
a capital-market model where you give the artist money after the fact to keep them making their art (whether software, music, etc.).
Yes. YES. YES. You've hit the nail on the head. The problem is how? Well then, off to your blog.
You sir, are the biggest fucking moron I've seen yet.
6'2", 228. But I've seen bigger.
This IS about fair use...
It is also about fair use. Even if the natural price were $50 per copy, DRM would still suck. But then, I would say that fair use is at least partially rooted in the zero natural price of copying.
you narrow minded fuck,
My mind is sufficiently broad to accept more than one cause behind the cracking of DRM. Is yours?
not about "screwing over the man"
You are correct, I should have been more clear - I was agreeing with the latter half of the statement; "any company that uses price tags." It is not for the purpose of denying money to the man - it is about refusing any system of paying for copying. Not because music has no value (it does and people will pay for music - I'll be responding to the other response to this post with a bit more on that), but because copying has no value (it costs nothing and so people will pay nothing in the long run).
You think that is what it's about because that is what rebellious teenagers like to do,
I think this and hope this. I did it when I was a teenager (and to a lesser extent I do it now - as a minor the risks were less). I think that rebellion against irrationl or unethical acts is healthy and right in society as a whole, and an important part of teenagers exploring their place in society - learning how their actions affect others. I think this is why the law is dramatically more lenient with teenagers, and why they typically expunge the record at age 18. Teenagers are supposed to be testing their limits (and they are supposed to get burned a little when they touch a hot stove - it's part of the feedback loop that induces learning). Disclaimer: quoting this won't keep your parents from grounding you.
The truth is that people who are knowledgeable about computers don't like it when their computer is telling them what they can and can't do instead of the other way around.
I'm with you 100%. DRM is shite, and people hate it for good reason. But that's a separate issue from the natural price of copies.
I know you think you are being all insightful and shit
Why yes, yes I do.;)
when you go and call us all hypocrites
I should have been more clear about not agreeing with the "fucking over" part of the statement. Far from calling the act hypocritical, I am saying that it is entirely justifiable (in fact inevitable) according to economic law.
you really just make yourself look like a holier-than-thou
I am arrogant, and since I both hate DRM and understand the reason why it will inevitably crumble, I believe I am holier than thou (not intended as an insult - ignorance is transient, and I believe you will learn). I assume that you also consider yourself to be holier than the DRM supporters (as you should, as you are). There's nothing wrong with a holier than thou attitude by those who are more holy, is there?
This isn't about fair use any more. This is about "fuck over any company that uses price tags."
This is the most rational statement I've seen in this thread so far.
You are exactly right. The natural price of copies is zero. The market is moving toward that natural price (though you have found a more colorful way to express this economic identity). The cost of copying IP is zero. Therefore, the natural price of copies is zero (the natural price in an economic system is equal to the unit cost of production).
This entire argument has lost every last shred of whatever legitimacy it may have once had.
On this I must disagree. It is just now gaining the very first glimmer of legitimacy. When people were claiming that it was just a matter of having the right feature-set to make the consumer want to pay a non-zero price for a good with a zero unit cost of production, it had no legitimacy.
I'm not saying this is a good thing (though that is also true, but requires a much longer discourse on price theory), but it is as true as gravity.
Can't people figure out when there's a good thing happening, that they should sit the hell down and let it be?
No they can not. No they will not. No they should not. We are explorers by nature. DRM is broken as designed. Anything which makes the consumer's experience of a product worse (even if it's just a little bit worse), and which is circumventable, will not stand. It is absolutely inevitable. Wishing for it not to be so is irrational.
It's like saying "it's OK for this bearing to rub just a little bit on each revolution, because it costs so much less." If it's a bearing that is spinning a few million times a day, it will burn through.
Good? Bad? It's irrelevant. DRM is not economically efficient and it will not stand. Copying doesn't cost anything anymore, so charging for copies is not possible. The natural price of a good is equal to the unit cost of production. The market price of a good will always approach the natural price. Trying to break this identity is like trying to ignore friction.
If your portable won't play it, bitch at the manufacturer.... Jesus you people are whiney.
Of course we're whiney. It's what we're supposed to do. It is the natural state of an economic system for the consumers in that system to attempt to satisfy their wants. One of the wants of the music consumer is to lift DRM restrictions. Offering one "legitimate" path to that end does not mean it is the only path that the consumer will use. The concept of rational self interest is not going to go away. Just as corporations will continue to do whatever is profitable, whether it is ethical or not, so consumers will continue to do what satisfies their wants, whether it is "the chosen way" or not.
Is it whiney? Yes? No? It's irrelevant. It is absolutely inevitable that it will happen. Basing a business model on "if noone cracks this it'll work great" is no better than "once we've got all those eyeballs we'll find a way to monetize them" (the dot-com mantra).
By breaking the means the industry hopes to use to make their business viable you are only going to force them to cancel future projects which make music and other media easy for consumers to buy.
It is not possible for DRM to work. That's what researchers have been saying since day 1. If I can hear it, I can record it. These cracks aren't happening because people are unethical, they're happening because DRM is an inherently flawed idea. It's like asking people not to use pop-up blockers. Using an inherently broken technology in a way that is unpleasant to the end user is not ever going to stand the test of time. Even should police force be used it won't last forever - eventually the economic will of the consumer will be satisfied.
This is not unlike the lesson learned from the dot-coms. It has to be both technologically practical and an improved satisfaction of wants or it will not work. Having one and wishing really hard that the other was true is like trying to sell the electric cars from the 1980's.
The economic model behind music has got to change. Per-copy sales is not possible when copying has an arbitrarily close to zero cost. You can't charge for something that costs nothing.
For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.
Szulik is pretty much the definition of an unappreciative, unmitigated ass. Following is a quote I read on another forum, which is now my email sig. RedHat or nothing? Fuck you.
"RedHat is the single worst popular Linux distro. If you're
using it and you like it, try something else - you'll be
surprised how much better other distros are. If you're
using it and find it unpleasant, there's a reason for that.
Try another distro - you'll be pleasantly surprised."
- Anonymous
Slashdot Mirror
As a coder I could work on things in small pieces and just meet the requirments, as the manager/designer I have to know how those pieces will go together and recognize the obstacles before hand.
To focus on the relevent portion:
as the manager/designer
All agreed. Looked at that way, of course your programmers have an easier job than you. Programmers who don't do design are a very different animal from those that do. The long term monetary value of software lies almost entirely in the design. The short term value lies almost entirely in the ability to solve a given business problem. That implies the actual application of keystrokes to magnetic media has relatively little value.
But this all assumes that software development can be successfully compartmentalized into requirements / design / coding. For my X dollars I'll take one designer programmer who can talk to business users over ten non-designer programmers who can't. The latter produce components that meet the written requirements but have a nasty habit of not furthering the business objective. For a quick thumbnail check of this hypothesis, ask yourself: How much of my time each day is spent either explaining the design to the programmer or explaining how to correct an implementation to match the intent? How much time is spent with the programmer saying, "I wrote what the spec says", which it may do, when it doesn't match the business need?
Your system may work well for you. If it doesn't, consider looking into agile programming. Generally speaking it requires more programmers with the potential to become designer/programmers (in my humble opinion, the other type are not worthy of the title programmer), but the functional-unit-of-software output will be higher per dollar (at least it is in my experience).
And all that said, I'm not saying designer programmers have a harder job than project managers. Good instances of either are worth size cash, and bad instances of both dramatically outnumber the good.
why don't you use emacs for email?
Fact of the matter is that is really the *right* answer. I poked through gnus a couple times (maybe 30 minutes total, never established an actual connection) and kept going back to the familiarity and comfort of Pine. Then I had to use IMAP at the office, and it became a "do I want to figure out IMAP/Pine, IMAP/Emacs, or just use Evolution?" Evolution and laziness won (that's an amusing juxtaposition of words). Then Debian pulled Evolution out of the apt tree, so now it's deal with no Emacs keys, figure out IMAP/Emacs or figure out IMAP/Pine. Last night (after posting) I got Emacs working.
Does anyone know if or when Thunderbird will support either an Emacs mode or configurable bindings without editing the source code? I seem to recall somewhere in some Mozilla manifesto that Emacs bindings were supposed to take precedence. Thunderbird has a fine set of keybindings, but it's nothing like Emacs.
Yeah, here it is:
When these two bindings conflict (as in ctrl-A or ctrl-H), the emacs binding wins.
Not that I'm saying they should necessarily make this the default, but the above implies they recognize how large the Emacs userbase is; it would be nice to at least be able to configure it myself without having to recompile.
I use Thunderbird at the office against an Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Exchange calendaring (at least AFAIK), but the mail works great. Set it up as a IMAP client. You can get the settings from your Outlook install.
There seem to be a lot of admins here who are missing a point he implies early in the article, and which he does not sufficiently amplify:
I understand that those DBAs who understand the details of the database engines are worth their weight in gold.
My impression is that he is not talking about the sort of admin that is likely to be reading Slashdot on a Saturday. He should have repeated this statement in each section, to make it clear that there are good and valuable admins in every sector.
It is my experience that we are now 60% over-administrated.
This is also a bit too understated. He implies at a few points earlier in the article that he works for large enterprises. If you've worked in a large enterprise, you know that in such places, the paper-pusher admin to skilled admin ratio is 60/40 on a good day, going downhill, with a gale-force tailwind.
The people he's attacking are (for example) the sorts that engage in "security by chewing through the wires" - putting a firewall at every major network nexus, shutting down all traffic, and demanding written justification and properly red-tapified authorization for every open port. Don't get me wrong - default deny at the perimeter is a must, and default deny on some nexuses is the right choice. OTOH, for example, a default deny firewall between the developers and the appservers has a very real cost (EG: waiting six days for paper to clear before being able to turn on JMS). He's not even saying this cost can't be justified - he's just saying that cost has to be assessed and charged to the administration budget, and it is currently charged to development:
the true cost of administration must be accounted for when totalling up the cost of any project.
The point he's making is not that administration is bad, but that because management has lost it's grasp of development, and because they can grasp the paperwork-and-authorization oriented style of administration, management has given administration more power than is optimal. There's a balance that must be struck between wild-eyed developers and stodgy administrators - safety and speed are both valuable, and they are naturally at odds. In major enterprises, the balance is askew and getting worse, because the practice of software development is evolving so rapidly. Likewise, administrators are quick (and right) to point out that in smaller companies the balance is askew in the other direction.
I think his main point is that bad admins are a bad thing, and that management often sees bad admins as good admins, because bad admins generate more sturm und drang. "If people are complaining about things being shut down, there must be some security goin' on. If they're not complaining, what did we hire these guys for?"
So unruffle your feathers - if you're not allowing your developers to host outside accessible websites on their desktops, he's not talking about you.
OTOH, if you don't know enough SQL to understand a script that has been submitted, and you reject it because it is not indented properly, remain ruffled - you are the problem.
I think some companies increase their ability to create wealth by using Free Software.
That last one is Oxford. They run Debian. Cool.
They make no mention of not being able to make your own FAT-system (which what everyone has been doing up 'till now).
Patents don't cover a particular implementation. They cover the right to implement an idea. Mentioning their patents at the end of the article is most definitely sabre rattling aimed at *all* implementations of FAT IO.
Tinfoil hat warning.
What I would do, if I were an evil overlord type is this: Mention in the C&D's that MS isn't charging for NTFS. This could be justified behind a smokescreen of "FAT is bad, NTFS is better, we want to give you an incentive to move to the better FS."
Then, only MS can write to these devices (safe NTFS drivers for other OSs don't exist). Instant platform dependence.
And, of course, since the C&D would say nothing about future royalties on NTFS, they could start charging for NTFS after everyone switches.
Nowhere does it say that companies providing their own 'clean room' implementation of the FAT filesystem will have to pay.
At the end of the document they mention the patents that cover FAT (dumb patents that should never have been granted, but granted patents they be). I think mentioning patents can be sufficiently considered an implication that clean rooom implementations will not escape notice (patents cover any implementation of an idea, not just the one the "inventor" came up with).
Is Telstra really excessively dumb? I would guess not, so let's suppose for a moment that they aren't.
If they're not really really stupid, they might have thought: Gee, I wonder if there's any way to tell what's 3 standard deviations above the mean as far as peak mail sending rate is? Do we have, anywhere, a listing of all the emails that have been sent by our users? Preferably arranged in chronoligical order, with timestamps? If we had that, why all we'd have to do is a little grep and wc action, toss in some particularly ugly perl to aggregate the results, and we'd be able to figure out what normal is. From there, we'd be able to figure out what weird is. Once we know what weird is, we'll know which accounts we should take a closer look at.
I've gotta think they figured that out. After all, they have to have figured out how to count the mails per minute per user to be able to implement this (and their former rule), right?
Of course, it's possible they really are too dumb to look at their own server logs. Maybe they pulled this number out of some business weenie's ass during one of those catered lunch meetings in the big glass windowed room with the collossal oak table. If this is the case, then they'll get false positives by the cartload and they'll quickly be swamped in the acrid stench of their own foolishness.
I find the latter a little implausible. Telstra may be a big evil monopoly, but I don't think they're a big evil imbecilic monopoly.
Thanks for the tips!
Slashdot effect seems to be bringing Port80 Software's server to its knees. On a holiday night. At 1:30 AM Eastern US Time. Words cannot express the level of amusement I am feeling.
That would basically be the end of P2P networks: without any fast uplinks, P2P traffic would be starved down to dial-up speeds.
.doc file format serves us well. Joe Sixpack wants to be able to put his 3 megapixel photographs of his kids in a word doc and email them to Mom.
For once the bloated MS
And, even if home connections get throttled, virtual hosting and dedicated server prices are plummetting.
This particular genie is not going back in the bottle (though they are attacking on many fronts).
But KDE is far more configurable, so I like it better.
I use GNOME, almost entirely because of the keybinding capability offered by Sawfish. Is there a KDE equivalent? I'd like to spend more time with KDE, but I have to be able to control minimize/maximize, change desktop pane, and fire arbitrary shell commands all from user configurable keychords (my RSI is bad enough without having to use the rat). I'm guessing it's possible in KDE, but I haven't found out how.
Here's a screenshot of my current config.
That's good stuff. Sorry I can't mod back the point I just saw you lose.
It's not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.
Agreed. It would definitely work to an extent. This is the tip-jar model that has been proposed, and which works to an extent for free software.
The problem with the moral sanction is that in practice it just doesn't pan out as being as productive as quid-pro-quo. Communism (the prime example of moral economics) works, but not as efficiently as free market economics. Some people, perhaps most people, are inherently good, but the few bad apples cause a lot of damage (both financial and social) in a trust-based system.
The problem with the legal sanction is that it is expensive. It means giving up time, money, and liberty. When it's the only viable answer (like with building freeways), it's the right choice. But it should always be treated as the avenue of last resort.
And that last bit is where I get really pissed off about the DMCA. We didn't even try to go down any other avenues. We just ran whining to congress and said, "save our current business model." We didn't even try a single alternative business model. The labels aren't thinking about the efficiency of the market - they're just thinking about the next quarterly report. To me, abusing the market for the sake of a quartely report is tantamount to treason.
Your suggested sale price for music (and total income for the distributor and artist) is zero.
I said copies, not music.
Something's going to have to give here
Agreed.
it's not going to be the fixed costs.
And it's not going to be the willingness to pay for something that costs arbitrarily close to nothing. It is law, like gravity.
Something's going to have to give here
Agreed. It won't be the fixed cost of production, and it won't be the zero copy price. So now should we throw up our hands in defeat and let the music go quiet? Should we sacrifice money, time, and freedom on DRM that can't work? Should we pirate music and screw the artists? Or should we think in terms of what can be changed between the fixed cost of production and the zero price of copies?
There's some quote that goes something like, "when you've exhausted all the probable answers, the answer must be something improbable." We sell music today like we sell bananas, except it isn't like bananas. Bananas have a marginal cost of production.
"But we don't know how to sell things any other way!"
I know. It's OK. We just have to learn.
I can usually tell when I'm on to something, 'cuz both sides tell me I'm a shill for the opposite side.
Music does NOT have zero cost of production. Songs don't grow on trees, the master still has to be produced.
I didn't say music. I said copies.
You can see it as a one-time cost amortized over every sale of the song if you want.
You can, but that doesn't work anymore. So now what?
And making a digital copy doesn't cost zero either. The ITMS still requires bandwidth, disk space, electricity, and staff.
Pennies. Artists need dollars. I frequently write this as, "arbitrarily close to zero", but it sounds so tedious.
I wish I had points and could mod a thread I've commented on. Your post is excellent. A few public points, then I'm off to your blog to try to contact you.
Price isn't necessarily determined by costs, it's determined by what the market will bear.
You're talking demand side, I'm talking supply side. Both are upper limits on the price, and act independently.
On the demand side, I think that the market would bear higher-than-zero prices for copies (as demonstrated by music sales in the pre-MP3 era (PME, haha)). Assuming this is the case, the demand side can't explain current behavior.
On the supply side, if copying has a zero cost, a manufacturer will always step into the profit margin between zero and the current price of copies - new manufacturers keep appearing at a lower price until the profit margin approaches zero. This is exactly what the original Napster was, incarnated at Internet speed. It is also what the Southeast Asian piracy market is all about.
If the market will only bear 0 price music, then the system has broken down, and the opportunity cost of spending most of your time as an artist will become much steeper.
I think you've shifted in this sentence to talking about the natural price of music. I strongly believe that the natural price of music is extremely non-zero. It has both demand side value (I love music, and buy a lot of disks (yes, still - as it stands I don't feel personally justified in pirating)) and supply side value (I play guitar - there is definitely a non-zero cost of producing new music).
But then we have a problem: the master copy costs $X to make and such costs (plus profit, which is really just a future cost) must be covered to create an economic system.
Ahh, here we go, the supply side. Keep going, you're getting close.
a capital-market model where you give the artist money after the fact to keep them making their art (whether software, music, etc.).
Yes. YES. YES. You've hit the nail on the head. The problem is how? Well then, off to your blog.
You sir, are the biggest fucking moron I've seen yet.
;)
6'2", 228. But I've seen bigger.
This IS about fair use...
It is also about fair use. Even if the natural price were $50 per copy, DRM would still suck. But then, I would say that fair use is at least partially rooted in the zero natural price of copying.
you narrow minded fuck,
My mind is sufficiently broad to accept more than one cause behind the cracking of DRM. Is yours?
not about "screwing over the man"
You are correct, I should have been more clear - I was agreeing with the latter half of the statement; "any company that uses price tags." It is not for the purpose of denying money to the man - it is about refusing any system of paying for copying. Not because music has no value (it does and people will pay for music - I'll be responding to the other response to this post with a bit more on that), but because copying has no value (it costs nothing and so people will pay nothing in the long run).
You think that is what it's about because that is what rebellious teenagers like to do,
I think this and hope this. I did it when I was a teenager (and to a lesser extent I do it now - as a minor the risks were less). I think that rebellion against irrationl or unethical acts is healthy and right in society as a whole, and an important part of teenagers exploring their place in society - learning how their actions affect others. I think this is why the law is dramatically more lenient with teenagers, and why they typically expunge the record at age 18. Teenagers are supposed to be testing their limits (and they are supposed to get burned a little when they touch a hot stove - it's part of the feedback loop that induces learning). Disclaimer: quoting this won't keep your parents from grounding you.
The truth is that people who are knowledgeable about computers don't like it when their computer is telling them what they can and can't do instead of the other way around.
I'm with you 100%. DRM is shite, and people hate it for good reason. But that's a separate issue from the natural price of copies.
I know you think you are being all insightful and shit
Why yes, yes I do.
when you go and call us all hypocrites
I should have been more clear about not agreeing with the "fucking over" part of the statement. Far from calling the act hypocritical, I am saying that it is entirely justifiable (in fact inevitable) according to economic law.
you really just make yourself look like a holier-than-thou
I am arrogant, and since I both hate DRM and understand the reason why it will inevitably crumble, I believe I am holier than thou (not intended as an insult - ignorance is transient, and I believe you will learn). I assume that you also consider yourself to be holier than the DRM supporters (as you should, as you are). There's nothing wrong with a holier than thou attitude by those who are more holy, is there?
This isn't about fair use any more. This is about "fuck over any company that uses price tags."
This is the most rational statement I've seen in this thread so far.
You are exactly right. The natural price of copies is zero. The market is moving toward that natural price (though you have found a more colorful way to express this economic identity). The cost of copying IP is zero. Therefore, the natural price of copies is zero (the natural price in an economic system is equal to the unit cost of production).
This entire argument has lost every last shred of whatever legitimacy it may have once had.
On this I must disagree. It is just now gaining the very first glimmer of legitimacy. When people were claiming that it was just a matter of having the right feature-set to make the consumer want to pay a non-zero price for a good with a zero unit cost of production, it had no legitimacy.
I'm not saying this is a good thing (though that is also true, but requires a much longer discourse on price theory), but it is as true as gravity.
Can't people figure out when there's a good thing happening, that they should sit the hell down and let it be?
No they can not. No they will not. No they should not. We are explorers by nature. DRM is broken as designed. Anything which makes the consumer's experience of a product worse (even if it's just a little bit worse), and which is circumventable, will not stand. It is absolutely inevitable. Wishing for it not to be so is irrational.
It's like saying "it's OK for this bearing to rub just a little bit on each revolution, because it costs so much less." If it's a bearing that is spinning a few million times a day, it will burn through.
Good? Bad? It's irrelevant. DRM is not economically efficient and it will not stand. Copying doesn't cost anything anymore, so charging for copies is not possible. The natural price of a good is equal to the unit cost of production. The market price of a good will always approach the natural price. Trying to break this identity is like trying to ignore friction.
If your portable won't play it, bitch at the manufacturer. ... Jesus you people are whiney.
Of course we're whiney. It's what we're supposed to do. It is the natural state of an economic system for the consumers in that system to attempt to satisfy their wants. One of the wants of the music consumer is to lift DRM restrictions. Offering one "legitimate" path to that end does not mean it is the only path that the consumer will use. The concept of rational self interest is not going to go away. Just as corporations will continue to do whatever is profitable, whether it is ethical or not, so consumers will continue to do what satisfies their wants, whether it is "the chosen way" or not.
Is it whiney? Yes? No? It's irrelevant. It is absolutely inevitable that it will happen. Basing a business model on "if noone cracks this it'll work great" is no better than "once we've got all those eyeballs we'll find a way to monetize them" (the dot-com mantra).
By breaking the means the industry hopes to use to make their business viable you are only going to force them to cancel future projects which make music and other media easy for consumers to buy.
It is not possible for DRM to work. That's what researchers have been saying since day 1. If I can hear it, I can record it. These cracks aren't happening because people are unethical, they're happening because DRM is an inherently flawed idea. It's like asking people not to use pop-up blockers. Using an inherently broken technology in a way that is unpleasant to the end user is not ever going to stand the test of time. Even should police force be used it won't last forever - eventually the economic will of the consumer will be satisfied.
This is not unlike the lesson learned from the dot-coms. It has to be both technologically practical and an improved satisfaction of wants or it will not work. Having one and wishing really hard that the other was true is like trying to sell the electric cars from the 1980's.
The economic model behind music has got to change. Per-copy sales is not possible when copying has an arbitrarily close to zero cost. You can't charge for something that costs nothing.
I Reiterate:
Should the RIAA be allowed to sue 2600 for making available a tool which can be used to crack DVD encryption?
Surely 2600 knew precisely what people were using it for. They're a cracker mag fer chrissakes.
For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.
Szulik is pretty much the definition of an unappreciative, unmitigated ass. Following is a quote I read on another forum, which is now my email sig. RedHat or nothing? Fuck you.
"RedHat is the single worst popular Linux distro. If you're
using it and you like it, try something else - you'll be
surprised how much better other distros are. If you're
using it and find it unpleasant, there's a reason for that.
Try another distro - you'll be pleasantly surprised."
- Anonymous