Sequels are very low risk. This is true whether the subject is games, movies, music, or books. The Econ 101 model is that high risk gives high reward--that isn't true where you have a franchise (i.e., a monopoly on the game title, the movie, etc.). Once you have a popular franchise that has built-in success you have a low-risk, high-reward proposition for your next investment.
All these entertainment media are now owned/controlled by large corporations. Executives at these corps hate to lose money--even small losses on projects that had very large potential paybacks are career killers. These large corps are going to crank out the reliably profitable projects and only rarely invest in the more creative, more inovative, more risky ones.
The good news is that technology has allowed small independents to produce projects. This is where the creativity is going to come from in the future. These small indes don't have the money for promotion and advertising, so they are not (usually) going to be the big mega hits. So these small, creative projects will probably be low sellers to a niche market--then the franchise gets picked up by a big guy...sequel!
If Kodak wants to be like Darl, they need to send a bill for $699 to everybody that uses a Sony camera. This *sounds* pretty legit; they have already licenced a couple of companies and they've been working on Sony for 3 years. That's only an idication--sometimes companies will go ahead and pay for patents that are probably bogus, just because it is quicker, easier, and sometimes cheaper.
The Fountainhead (one of her books; also an OK movie) was all about the creator owning his/her creation. If Howard Roarke writes a program, then it is his choice to sell it as closed source or to distribute it under the GPL. The creator decides--what could be better? Howard Roarke is the protagonist of The Fountainhead and he destroys one of his creations rather than have it bastardized for profit. The Fountainhead is a good book; read it.
As usual, the problem is the email user. There are enough clueless email users who will actually spend money for penis enlargement or to invest in incredibly profitable opportunities in Nigeria that the spammers and the scammers that use them make a profit. I really don't understand how this could be, but it is. When the spamming and scamming is no longer profitable, then spam won't be a problem.
I disagree. The problem is the clueless manager that allowed the live, confidential data sent out in the first place. If I hire an outside programmer to work on my live, confidential data, he will do it on site on my computers. He can do the bulk of the programming on his site, but if the real data is involved he has to come to me. If there is a design problem, like how long to make the name field, we can look in the live db and tell him that the current longest name is 20 chars, so let's make it 32.
If you are sending you confidential data out to these sorts of contractors, then you don't have confidential data.
The primal problem is that the government agency gave the data to their outsourcing provider. That data should have never left the secure area of the government. Once it is out, it is out. It doesn't matter whether it has gone to Gennessee CC or RentaCoder. Posting it on the web is just a matter of degree.
Everybody is ready to hop all over this clueless coder and blame everybody's favorite boogie man of outsourcing. There is a manager back in the government that originally disclosed the data.
Don't tell me about NDCs. The first rule of confidential data is NEED TO KNOW. It would have taken someone 15 minutes to put in some dummy data for the programmer to work with, but they couldn't be bothered. Now that person wants to crucify the programmer.
The programmer who screwed up is only the last (and most visible) in the chain of screw ups.
There are some jobs that the company would not negotiate the NDC (+etc). For example, most companies would not let an R&D guy have an even distantly related outside business. OTOH, if you are the network support guy, they are not going to be too concerned about an outside interest.
There will be some companies that will not want to negotiate their agreements. If this is a junior position, it isn't worth it for them to get the legal department cranked up to mod the contracts. In one of my previous jobs it took 4 weeks to get a contract looked at by legal. If the manager has a choice between you and a guy that he can hire without talking to the lawyers, guess who he's pick.
You've already had plenty of advice to get a lawyer. Get one.
The media was complicit in Dean's downfall, just as they cooperated in his rise. Only 5 weeks ago Dean was an unstoppable juggernaught, who would have the nomination wrapped up after the New Hampshire primary (according to most of the media).
I think Dean's downfall goes to two things:
1. People want a horse race. People are hard on the front runner and are looking to build up a challenger. The 2000 primary race between GWB and John McCain is a great example. McCain was the darling of the media as long he had no chance.
2. That there was no downfall. When Dean was leading the polls he was 20-25% (these numbers are from memory) and everybody else was 15%. Now that there is voting, Dean is still at 20%, but Kerry is at 50%. Dean immediately collected a core of activist, true believers, but was not able to appeal to a wide spectrum (even in the narrow spectrum of Democrat primary voters). When Dean first appeared and started leading the polls, he became the media's new toy-he was their darling. So Dean's downfall was not from a real position of strength, but from the media expectations. Kerry has only been in the spotlight for a few weeks--more to come.
Those were SNL skits where Chevy Chase played Ford. Later Chevy Chase took credit for delivering California to Carter, due to the negative image created in those skits. (I have not been to a Chevy Chase movie since!) I used to know a guy who decided who to vote for based on what he heard watching the late night TV shows (Leno, not Koppel).
Does this have to do with money?? It seems that more and more sources that used to stream MP3 or Real are going to WMA.
It certainly seems that the simple thing to do would be to stream MP3--all (nearly all?) players handle MP3 just fine. I like to capture certain radio shows and listen to them at a time convenient for me (using cron jobs). This is easy with MP3 streams, less easy for Real and WMA.
Is there a big difference in cost for using real/WMA/MP3? What about big differences in bandwidth?
This was, sort of, a throwaway line in the article, but it really bothered me. This little paragraph on PhDs added nothing to the article, but demonstrated a blind spot or a prejudice in the author. I would like to know why he thought he needed to include that paragraph.
In a typical (for an engineer) PhD program you might:
determine a topic review literature devise detailed plan present/defend plan to committee build/debug equipment run experiments/take data analyze data develop theoretical model of process build computer model of process based on theoretical model compare results revise models do more experiments repeat until satisfied WRITE A BOOK! sell your book/theory/experiments/analysis to a sceptical audience of reviewers revise book based on review get book into (arcane and obsolete) format required by grad school deliver printed book to grad school
Yes, to get a PhD you have to have a great deal of focus on a (usually) very narrow subject. You also have to have a lot of versatility and a lot of get-the-job-done spirit. One of the things you do to get a PhD is to demonstrate that you can work for years towards a goal that sometimes seems unreachable and will have many unexpected roadblocks along the way.
suggests that you not use your real name when you are on the run from the FBI. It might also be a good idea to steal more than $180k--that won't let you live it up for long in NYC.
I agree with the morons. It is much better for the ChiComs to buy one copy of Windows and distribute millions of cracked copies. The cracked copies are for sale for less than $10 on the streets of most asian cities.
I've started using CVS to hold my fiction. This lets me roll back revisions that don't work. I think most authors stash old versions in subdirectories or some such, but it gets hard to keep things straight.
CVS would have been handy when I was writing my PhD dissertation. That thing had many, many revisions--depending on your advisor, you can spend a lot of time revising and then revising it back.
Most big corps have an army of salesmen, tech guys, whatever, roaming around the world handing out business cards with an email address printed on them. The idea is that potential customers or potential partners with actually email us and we'll do things with them that make money for the corporation. Cutting off that communication sounds like a very bad idea.
This seems pretty odd. Is this just a small division somewhere that is trying this or THE AT&T.
Under the system here everybody gets the cheapest possible bypass, unless they have cash to go to a private hospital or overseas. My company has employee health insurance, but it is nearly worthless (though plenty expensive to the company) and the government taxes that benefit at 69% to discourage private insurance and push people into the government system. I'm no expert on health care, but my observation is that indigents in the US get better health care than the 95% of the people here that use the government system.
I take naproxin for a chronic inflamation. I can buy a bottle of 220 mg tabs at Costco for about US$0.04/tab. Here, they are about US$0.50/tab for a lower mg tab and they will only sell me 30 at a time. The government claims they are subsidizing this drug and they might be, because it is locally produced by in a small plant that has no economies of scale and even less QA. I, of course, but a year's supply when I visit the US. Other drugs are similarly costly, even taking into account the government subsidy.
The US private system looks bad when compared to an idealized, imaginary government system, but looks great when compared to any real government system.
I am an American who lives in a country that has all those things. The US system is far better. There are waiting lists here for all medical procedures--people with conditions that would get immediate surgury in the US are told to go home and we'll call you in a month or two. Of course if that chest pain gets a lot worse, we can move you up the list.
I've told my friends: If I'm really sick, don't take me to the hospital, take me to the airport.
If M$ was getting a good deal now they would settle, if not, wait for Judge Jackson's ruling and appeal. They have the option of dragging this out for years, like AT&T did--by that time the whole question will probably be meaningless. They can also settle at any time during the appeals. I suspect they are stalling until the January 20, 2001 pemier of "Bush administraion II--The New Generation." Its four-year mission...
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Sequels are very low risk. This is true whether the subject is games, movies, music, or books. The Econ 101 model is that high risk gives high reward--that isn't true where you have a franchise (i.e., a monopoly on the game title, the movie, etc.). Once you have a popular franchise that has built-in success you have a low-risk, high-reward proposition for your next investment.
All these entertainment media are now owned/controlled by large corporations. Executives at these corps hate to lose money--even small losses on projects that had very large potential paybacks are career killers. These large corps are going to crank out the reliably profitable projects and only rarely invest in the more creative, more inovative, more risky ones.
The good news is that technology has allowed small independents to produce projects. This is where the creativity is going to come from in the future. These small indes don't have the money for promotion and advertising, so they are not (usually) going to be the big mega hits. So these small, creative projects will probably be low sellers to a niche market--then the franchise gets picked up by a big guy...sequel!
If Kodak wants to be like Darl, they need to send a bill for $699 to everybody that uses a Sony camera. This *sounds* pretty legit; they have already licenced a couple of companies and they've been working on Sony for 3 years. That's only an idication--sometimes companies will go ahead and pay for patents that are probably bogus, just because it is quicker, easier, and sometimes cheaper.
The Fountainhead (one of her books; also an OK movie) was all about the creator owning his/her creation. If Howard Roarke writes a program, then it is his choice to sell it as closed source or to distribute it under the GPL. The creator decides--what could be better? Howard Roarke is the protagonist of The Fountainhead and he destroys one of his creations rather than have it bastardized for profit. The Fountainhead is a good book; read it.
As usual, the problem is the email user. There are enough clueless email users who will actually spend money for penis enlargement or to invest in incredibly profitable opportunities in Nigeria that the spammers and the scammers that use them make a profit. I really don't understand how this could be, but it is. When the spamming and scamming is no longer profitable, then spam won't be a problem.
I disagree. The problem is the clueless manager that allowed the live, confidential data sent out in the first place. If I hire an outside programmer to work on my live, confidential data, he will do it on site on my computers. He can do the bulk of the programming on his site, but if the real data is involved he has to come to me. If there is a design problem, like how long to make the name field, we can look in the live db and tell him that the current longest name is 20 chars, so let's make it 32.
If you are sending you confidential data out to these sorts of contractors, then you don't have confidential data.
OK the coder screwed up.
The primal problem is that the government agency gave the data to their outsourcing provider. That data should have never left the secure area of the government. Once it is out, it is out. It doesn't matter whether it has gone to Gennessee CC or RentaCoder. Posting it on the web is just a matter of degree.
Everybody is ready to hop all over this clueless coder and blame everybody's favorite boogie man of outsourcing. There is a manager back in the government that originally disclosed the data.
Don't tell me about NDCs. The first rule of confidential data is NEED TO KNOW. It would have taken someone 15 minutes to put in some dummy data for the programmer to work with, but they couldn't be bothered. Now that person wants to crucify the programmer.
The programmer who screwed up is only the last (and most visible) in the chain of screw ups.
There are some jobs that the company would not negotiate the NDC (+etc). For example, most companies would not let an R&D guy have an even distantly related outside business. OTOH, if you are the network support guy, they are not going to be too concerned about an outside interest.
There will be some companies that will not want to negotiate their agreements. If this is a junior position, it isn't worth it for them to get the legal department cranked up to mod the contracts. In one of my previous jobs it took 4 weeks to get a contract looked at by legal. If the manager has a choice between you and a guy that he can hire without talking to the lawyers, guess who he's pick.
You've already had plenty of advice to get a lawyer. Get one.
The media was complicit in Dean's downfall, just as they cooperated in his rise. Only 5 weeks ago Dean was an unstoppable juggernaught, who would have the nomination wrapped up after the New Hampshire primary (according to most of the media).
I think Dean's downfall goes to two things:
1. People want a horse race. People are hard on the front runner and are looking to build up a challenger. The 2000 primary race between GWB and John McCain is a great example. McCain was the darling of the media as long he had no chance.
2. That there was no downfall. When Dean was leading the polls he was 20-25% (these numbers are from memory) and everybody else was 15%. Now that there is voting, Dean is still at 20%, but Kerry is at 50%. Dean immediately collected a core of activist, true believers, but was not able to appeal to a wide spectrum (even in the narrow spectrum of Democrat primary voters). When Dean first appeared and started leading the polls, he became the media's new toy-he was their darling. So Dean's downfall was not from a real position of strength, but from the media expectations. Kerry has only been in the spotlight for a few weeks--more to come.
Those were SNL skits where Chevy Chase played Ford. Later Chevy Chase took credit for delivering California to Carter, due to the negative image created in those skits. (I have not been to a Chevy Chase movie since!) I used to know a guy who decided who to vote for based on what he heard watching the late night TV shows (Leno, not Koppel).
Does this have to do with money?? It seems that more and more sources that used to stream MP3 or Real are going to WMA.
It certainly seems that the simple thing to do would be to stream MP3--all (nearly all?) players handle MP3 just fine. I like to capture certain radio shows and listen to them at a time convenient for me (using cron jobs). This is easy with MP3 streams, less easy for Real and WMA.
Is there a big difference in cost for using real/WMA/MP3? What about big differences in bandwidth?
This was, sort of, a throwaway line in the article, but it really bothered me. This little paragraph on PhDs added nothing to the article, but demonstrated a blind spot or a prejudice in the author. I would like to know why he thought he needed to include that paragraph.
In a typical (for an engineer) PhD program you might:
determine a topic
review literature
devise detailed plan
present/defend plan to committee
build/debug equipment
run experiments/take data
analyze data
develop theoretical model of process
build computer model of process based on theoretical model
compare results
revise models
do more experiments
repeat until satisfied
WRITE A BOOK!
sell your book/theory/experiments/analysis to a sceptical audience of reviewers
revise book based on review
get book into (arcane and obsolete) format required by grad school
deliver printed book to grad school
Yes, to get a PhD you have to have a great deal of focus on a (usually) very narrow subject. You also have to have a lot of versatility and a lot of get-the-job-done spirit. One of the things you do to get a PhD is to demonstrate that you can work for years towards a goal that sometimes seems unreachable and will have many unexpected roadblocks along the way.
suggests that you not use your real name when you are on the run from the FBI. It might also be a good idea to steal more than $180k--that won't let you live it up for long in NYC.
I agree with the morons. It is much better for the ChiComs to buy one copy of Windows and distribute millions of cracked copies. The cracked copies are for sale for less than $10 on the streets of most asian cities.
I've started using CVS to hold my fiction. This lets me roll back revisions that don't work. I think most authors stash old versions in subdirectories or some such, but it gets hard to keep things straight.
CVS would have been handy when I was writing my PhD dissertation. That thing had many, many revisions--depending on your advisor, you can spend a lot of time revising and then revising it back.
Most big corps have an army of salesmen, tech guys, whatever, roaming around the world handing out business cards with an email address printed on them. The idea is that potential customers or potential partners with actually email us and we'll do things with them that make money for the corporation. Cutting off that communication sounds like a very bad idea.
This seems pretty odd. Is this just a small division somewhere that is trying this or THE AT&T.
We're getting way off topic here, but:
Under the system here everybody gets the cheapest possible bypass, unless they have cash to go to a private hospital or overseas. My company has employee health insurance, but it is nearly worthless (though plenty expensive to the company) and the government taxes that benefit at 69% to discourage private insurance and push people into the government system. I'm no expert on health care, but my observation is that indigents in the US get better health care than the 95% of the people here that use the government system.
I take naproxin for a chronic inflamation. I can buy a bottle of 220 mg tabs at Costco for about US$0.04/tab. Here, they are about US$0.50/tab for a lower mg tab and they will only sell me 30 at a time. The government claims they are subsidizing this drug and they might be, because it is locally produced by in a small plant that has no economies of scale and even less QA. I, of course, but a year's supply when I visit the US. Other drugs are similarly costly, even taking into account the government subsidy.
The US private system looks bad when compared to an idealized, imaginary government system, but looks great when compared to any real government system.
I am an American who lives in a country that has all those things. The US system is far better. There are waiting lists here for all medical procedures--people with conditions that would get immediate surgury in the US are told to go home and we'll call you in a month or two. Of course if that chest pain gets a lot worse, we can move you up the list.
I've told my friends: If I'm really sick, don't take me to the hospital, take me to the airport.
If M$ was getting a good deal now they would settle, if not, wait for Judge Jackson's ruling and appeal. They have the option of dragging this out for years, like AT&T did--by that time the whole question will probably be meaningless. They can also settle at any time during the appeals. I suspect they are stalling until the January 20, 2001 pemier of "Bush administraion II--The New Generation." Its four-year mission...