Apple and AT&T are better off, but everyone else is worse off.
Not entirely true. AT&T spent a lot of time and cash upgrading various network elements to support iPhone features like Visual Voicemail and 'improved' Safari web browsing. No carrier would have made those investments if it weren't in an exclusive deal, because it wouldn't have justified the cost.
So those things may not be important to you, but in this case at least there were a few benefits to consumers derived from the exclusive deal that otherwise would not have materialized. I'm not saying phone locking is a desirable thing from a consumer perspective, but in this case it's not completely a one-way street in terms of benefits.
Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself.
I call 110% BS. AT&T has a mobile device application developer program today, which costs absolutely $0 to developers and allows developers to self-certify any application that meets basic standards for basic fitness, reasonable UI and compatibility with the data network. See developer.att.com - it's all there.
In addition, AT&T has lots and lots of devices certified on its network, and strong developer communities for nearly all of them... with ONE notable exception. What does that tell you about who has been calling the shots on developer access to the iPhone, AT&T or Apple?
Fair enough. I was thinking about "most" broadband users there, where the impediment to online gaming is their first concern.
VoIP over satellite can be usable in some cases despite the latency, but it violates almost all satellite ISPs' terms of service. VPN breaks the HTTP/TCP acceleration that they apply to their connections so you get "unaccelerated" service that caps out around 100 kbps because of the way ACK packet requests pile up over the high-latency link. Satellite works poorly with two-way services with a lot of "real time" back-and-forth such as VNC (or X11, or PC Anywhere) as well. If you really need those things, then you're pretty much stuck with needing a landline circuit.
In my experience it takes about a month to figure out why you can't get what you want to get from rural ISPs.
What I'm surprised by here is that it seems like everybody thinks that broadband = cable or DSL (or, God help you, a Point To Point T1). From reading the comments, nobody is even looking at rural wireless satellite broadband. Disclaimer: I used to work for a satellite ISP so I'm biased. Satellite especially is available anywhere you can see the southern sky (specifically, a satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit) and offers OK speeds for $200 - $600 upfront and anywhere between $50 and $200 per month. The latency sucks (600 ms) but if you aren't using it for gaming, then you certainly don't need a private line circuit with PTP or Frame Relay...
I was always amazed that so few people knew about or considered satellite broadband despite the millions of bucks a year that HughesNet throws at advertising, especially on DirecTV. WildBlue now also has big co-marketing programs with DirecTV, DISH Network and AT&T. So I'm curious - do people not know about satellite or do they know and just don't want it?
This sort of thing is a classic fascist move where *free* representatives from government are not allowed to speak to a *free* press.
Look, I'm all for open access to the press (speaking as a former reporter). However, I have to confess that in this case it's not fascism, it's just sensible public relations. I don't think it's about muzzling whisteblowers, it's about making sure people talking to the press are trained to pick their words carefully in a situation where public hysteria or calmness is at stake.
If you allow any random employee from within the organization - who probably hasn't had media training - to be quoted by reporters, then serious bad PR or misinformation can result. I think what's driving this in particular is a desire not to have Joe Engineer who's used to talking with other engineers give raw quotes to a clueless reporter and have his words completely misunderstood and thereby throw the public into a tizzy.
A fanciful but illustrative example: Joe Engineer from NHTSA may talk to the New York Times and use some intra-agency jargon like "in our latest survey, 99% of the bridges in the country got a designation of 'likely to collapse'." It turns out that 'likely to collapse' is an agency term measuring whether it is more likely to collapse or be struck by a meteor, but the reporter (who doesn't know any better, and wouldn't be expected to know better unless Joe explains it to him - and we've never heard before of a technical person who fails to explain their jargon) puts in the paper verbatim: "NHTSA says 99% of bridges likely to collapse." (Cue mass hysteria.) Executives and other people in the organization who are given media training are at least taught how to choose their words for public consumption carefully (whether they do it properly or not is a different issue).
So, as much as I enjoy getting into a tizzy about censorship, I gotta say there isn't much here to get worked up about, let alone decry as government "fascism." The TSA and airport security procedures, though... don't get me started about those guys.
The press in the past was more free because a) it wasn't backed/directed by large economic powers (Rupert Murdoch) and b) there were a ton of newspapers, most of the them independent.
I studied the history of journalism in college (journalism major, natch) and your impression is a common one but it's overly romanticized. In the late 19th century and early 20th century heyday of American newspaper journalism, there were indeed more papers - but many if not most of the largest papers were owned by robber barondemagogues who make Rupert Murdoch look like a saint. Read up on yellow journalism and the antics of the American press of yesteryear will amaze you.
As one of the above posters mentioned, we are much better off today: you still have biased media moguls pushing their agendas, but at least you have literally thousands of media sources to choose from instead of one to three daily papers (in the 19th or early 20th centuries) or three television stations (for much of the late 20th century). The rise of "citizen journalism" has increased the crap quotient somewhat (just like the rise of "citizen architects" would dilute the overall quality of building structures) but it is much more democratized. There are many reasons to admire the historical legacy of American journalists, but they didn't operate in any idyllic vacuum free from corporate interest or bias.
Apple is advertising like crazy for the iPhone but it's almost as if AT&T is forbidden from advertising using this relationship. Has this struck anyone else as strange or am I having too much coffee?
An interesting take, and it might suggest partner friction in other situations. But in this case, there's nothing strange about it. The simple fact is that AT&T doesn't need to advertise the iPhone, since Apple is already spending a lot of money doing it. AT&T isn't losing any iPhone subscribers to other carriers of course, and AT&T even gets brand halo points from Apple's ads (AT&T's tag appears at the end of every iPhone TV spot).
It's very common for device manufacturers to subsidize a service provider's advertising, and vice versa. Presumably there's some cross-funding going on. And since AT&T has lots of other mobile products they want you to buy (Blackberries, 3G laptop cards and so forth), they're going to spend their cash on that.
The reason people get so angry is because for years "unlimited" bandwidth has been advertised.
What you say gets at the heart of the issue. Speaking as someone who has worked for several ISPs, I can tell you that the fundamental problem is this: the breaking of oversubscription models. Why is this?
First, in the United States, Internet service has traditionally been advertised as "unlimited" transfer, throttled only by the capacity of your pipe. American consumers typically prefer unlimited packages of any sort - people don't want to have to count or manage their usage, which is why they do things such as buying cell phone packages that offer more minutes than they really need just so they don't need to feel like they're "counting." You can see this trend in Cingular/AT&T's new campaign to offer unlimited text messaging (elsewhere a pay-per model) for a set fee.
Second, the cost of upstream Internet bandwidth/transit is far more than what is being charged to end customers. An ISP would go out of business instantly if it actually bought a T3, for example, each time that it signed up eight 6 Mbps customer connections. Therefore, an ISP maps its expected usage to its capacity - the result is an oversubscription ratio or contention ratio. For example, my usage data may tell me that 10 customers with circuits up to 1.5 Mbps generate an actual peak traffic usage of 3 Mbps rather than 15 Mbps. Therefore I only order that amount of bandwidth per customers (theoretically a 5x oversubscription ratio in this case). Of course, that is highly conservative; business ISPs will typically maintain a 5-15x oversubscription ratio, and consumer ISPs may have a 30-50x ratio. If you're using a satellite ISP, transponder bandwidth is absurdly expensive and oversubscription of residential services over VSAT are typically even higher (they're also the only ISPs that actually throttle down your data rate if you exceed a usage quota).
So the problem is this: you're an ISP and you have an oversubscription ratio that you can work with and offer competitive pricing while actually maybe making some money. But the bandwidth used by a heavy video & P2P user is dramatically more than a more typical web & e-mail user. These people bust your oversubscription model, and are costing you lots of cash. Therefore, from a business perspective, you need to a.) charge more for everybody; b.) institute a cap whereby these users are prevented from sucking down model-busting bandwidth amounts; or c.) charge by usage.
The US market has indicated that they don't generally accept option "c", so that is why the caps etc. are in place. I've seen it at ISPs over the years - "average" usage increases year over year. So ISPs need to re-evaluate their pricing structures (bad because unless everybody does it, the first ones to do this will lose customers left and right), charge per use (you may personally find this a keen idea but most US Internet users don't) or keep caps in place. As long as transit costs more than the price point that consumers are willing to pay for home Internet access, this will (sadly) continue to be the case.
So please don't confuse the PR perspective of the World from the PR perspective of the G.O.P.
Respectfully, I think you're really missing my point. What my original post says is not that the GOP == world; it says that if you are trying to appeal to everyone across the board, then you need to avoid associating yourself with polarizing figures of either extreme. If the FSF doesn't care - and it may be that this is the case - about ever getting the support of corporate/government American GOP types, then go right ahead. But if you're trying to evangelize your position to everyone, then it's a poor idea to identify yourself with the sworn enemies of those you're trying to attract.
I realize my original post - which has been mod-bombed a couple times now - was read by many somehow as some kind of "USA rules GWB OMG R0XX0R" post or something. It's not. It's about something you learn in PR 101 - unless you are only trying to address your message to one side of an issue, you stay away from extreme/polarizing figures on either wing. And that's what RMS is very much not doing.
Hey, maybe this is just the irrelevant concern of somebody who works in PR and marketing. But if you're trying to be the ambassador of a broad-based movement, you generally avoid making public appearances with anyone who's a polarizing figure on either side politically. (i.e., if you're with a charity that wants people of all parties to donate, you don't make public appearances with either Dick Cheney or Michael Moore.)
RMS is Free(TM) of course to make public appearances wherever he wishes in support of Free(TM) software etc. I'm just saying that the image of Stallman getting snuggly with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez - other than being kind of physically gross - is not likely to assuage any US government or business fears about the ideals or politics behind the F/OSS movements. Free software seemed to be gaining some wide acceptance... but RMS has just given the Bill O'Reillys of the world a powerful tool to shill Microsoft et. al. with once more. Again, it's his right to go... but I think it's an exceedingly poor idea from a PR perspective. Then again, if RMS cared about PR, he wouldn't be RMS...
MS had a choice - comply and offer playback on Vista, or refuse to comply and not offer playback. They evidently decided that their customers would prefer the former.
Look... I'm all for bashing Microsoft for their many awful software design and business tactics choices, but this isn't really one of them. First: yes, the majority of their customers probably do prefer the former choice. And second: Microsoft is allowing the user the freedom to buy into DRM-ed media or not. If they simply removed the ability to play these content forms from the OS, they'd be making the choice for the user. Aren't we all usually dumping on MS for taking away freedom and choices?
With everything coming out (hardware DIVX players, most phones, etc.) starting to be able to play M4A files, I don't know why anyone would still be using MP3. YMMV, of course;)
Except, unfortunately, things like TiVos. TiVo promised AAC support in their "view your home content through the TiVo" package something like two years ago and still haven't produced jack. It's very frustrating and it's one of the reasons I am still using MP3 for ripping in most cases. I'm sure other folks out there have lots of other examples of common products not supporting AAC.
Or poor marketing. If it wasn't for/., I'd probably not have read much about the PS3. Less than a month before launch, I've not seen a TV ad or recall seeing other ads.
Actually, any marketing they do at this point is going to be a waste. They already know their initial (and pre-Christmas) shipments will sell out many times over to the people who are already planning on buying one. Spending money trying to get more people to go out to the store and buy something that isn't there is a waste.
So I agree that they haven't ratcheted up the "buzz-meter" like they could have... but with such a massive shortage already likely, they would just be throwing away any money they spent. Expect their marketing expenditures to go up significantly next year once there are boxes on the shelves for "casual" purchasers to buy.
If I remember correctly Merry slays the Witch King in the book.
Nope, in both the book and movie, Merry wounds the Witch King with the dagger (back of the knee, I believe). Eowyn stabs him in the face (or where the face should be if he had one). In both contexts, the "no man" bit (from the prophecy of Glorfindel) is designed to be flexible in usage - the Witch King is clearly meant to be interpreting it in the "human" sense and completely overlooking the possibility of it referring to gender, thus in part leading to his downfall.
Oh God I can't believe I just responded to a Slashdot post to correct someone's Tolkien knowledge.
5 years have gone by, and on average, people get new machines every two years.
I don't have any research to back this up - then again, this is/. so that isn't an issue. Anecdotally, at least, I can tell you that the vast majority of Joe-and-Jane-Sixpack computer users probably don't upgrade their PCs any more often than four or five years. My office - a purportedly high-tech company - is running on primarily four-year-old laptops. Only geeks upgrade them every two years or more. Heck, I don't even buy computers every two years any more - it's more like three, now that the obsolescence curve for everything but cutting-edge games has flattened quite a bit.
This doesn't invalidate your point about DRM, but it does suggest that it's far less onerous to the "average" user than it is to Slashdot alpha nerds. It's tempting to impute our own habits and preferences to the masses, but it's often very inaccurate. (Anyone that really does have some reasonable data on this is very welcome to contradict me here.)
the only real winner here might just be directv, if tivo holds out and refuses to license their questionable patent to echostar. without dvr, many of their customers will switch to directv.
Ahh, you're thinking of the old TiVo/DirecTV alliance. But beginning last year, DirecTV ditched TiVo in favor of selling its own PVRs. DTV customers who got one of the older TiVo-based systems still get to keep theirs, but all new DTV customers get home-grown PVRs. I would think they might be next on the list of lawsuit targets.
It may become a moot point, though, since - as you point out - an EchoStar/DirecTV merger has been attempted twice before and is continually being rumored afresh.
It's not chicken and egg at all - Apple have stated that they are not and do not intend to be a serious platform for games. They don't help game development at all, and don't intend to.
I think you're working from some very old data. In the late eighties and early nineties, Apple somewhat misguidedly tried to bolster its reputation in the business market by discarding the "toy" image and not encouraging game development. However, once their market share began to seriously tank in the mid/late nineties, Apple "got religion" about games and realized how important they were to keeping their users happy.
I'd venture to say that most Linux users would jump at the chance to pay for the Linux version of a game as a way to encourage publishers to release for their platform.
I swear I'm not trolling here. But I have to ask, "isn't that what Loki thought?" I don't know a lot about the twists and turns of their saga; I read a comment earlier suggesting that internal fraud (!) brought the company down rather than any kind of market failure. But - if that's the case and there is a market for porting Linux games that everyone will go any buy - why hasn't another company (or several!) stepped up into their place?
Or maybe all the good flag-waving Linux folks out there ran to buy copies of the Linux-supporting games, but there just wasn't enough of them? As a longtime Mac user, I'm very familiar with the disappointment of not having games ported to your platform, but I've heard it often enough from folks in the game publishing community that they just didn't think it was worth their time to develop it in a cross-platform fashion vs. the extra ~50k sales they would get from the Mac platform. Does anyone have numbers on how many copies the Loki games sold? I suspect that's the culprit.
the subtle difference is that all things being equal, the court should side with the defendant in these cases
Despite the fact that I was making light of the assertion, I agree that defending yourself in a case like this is something Joe Average should be able to do. I think the real problem is grounding your defense firmly among the twists/turns and precedents established in intellectual property law cases of this type already - if you could get a real lawyer to tell you what points to go after and which traps to avoid, you probably could do at least a functional job of it yourself.
Hmm... maybe "Everyman's Guide To Defending Yourself Against **AA Lawsuits" is something the EFF should put on their project list?
No, I meant you defend yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic law, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
Describing an intellectual property civil lawsuit against people with law degrees and years of experience like this may just be a little cavalier. Let's try a little substitution here and see how it sounds:
No, I meant fix your transmission yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic automotive engineering, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
or:
No, I meant perform a root canal on yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic orthodontics, some local anesthesia and a mirror, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
Honestly, how many people do you know are familiar not only with autos themselves, but understand the dynamics of the industry as a whole (including politics, alignment, strategies, past products, current products, future products) and can speculate the significance of each morsel?
Actually, there are lots and LOTS of people like this. There is an enormous "car culture" in the United States replete with otherwise un-tech-savvy folks who probably can't set their VCR clock but can nonetheless tell you the purpose of every moving part in their car and how much torque it's rated for. It's actually very, very similar... you've got the eagerly awaited trade shows, the review/preview magazines, the mass marketing... you've even got legions of fanboys (witness all the "Calvin peeing on a [Ford | Chevy | Kia | Whatver] logo stickers on pickup trucks around the country). So cars do actually have a similar dedicated, uber-knowledgeable fanbase... it's just invisble to most geeks since the two crowds don't usually mingle together much.;-)
Java is probably the best example of great technology held back by completely incompetent marketing.
I had heard about numerous problems with Java in the past (JVM performance, licensing issues, etc.) but had not known its marketing was widely perceived to be one of them. I'm curious... what was it that the Sun marketing staff did that was so "incompetent?" Did they do something that turned off users or developers in the way it was marketed? Did they run big ads saying 'Java causes intestinal cramps' or hand out Java-logo clubs for killing baby seals?
There's been an outlook client on the Mac since forever.
Yes and no. For the past several years, MSFT has taken the position that the preferred Exchange client on the Mac is Entourage (part of the Mac Office suite). The problem is that Entourage doesn't "speak" MAPI and instead relies on a semi-kludge of synchronizing through Exchange webmail/WebDAV. It also will not work with Exchange servers older than 2000/SP2. At my office, I can use Entourage to sync nicely with my e-mail, but the calendaring functionality is completely broken, as are task lists etc. (this might be cured if you have a newer version of Exchange than we do). For those interested, Microsoft has a guide for Exchange admins with Entourage users.
As you mentioned, there is a true Outlook client for the Mac that synchronizes natively with Exchange servers - but it was dropped in favor of Entourage years ago and hence was never Carbonized to run natively under OS X. So running the program under Classic (which isn't even an option on the Intel Macs) would be your only way of getting 100% Outlook functionality. As a result, those users on Intel Macs or those looking for true OS X solutions are very much stuck with using Windows to get the full functionality.
It seems to me that he's talking about businesses such as RedHat, who include OpenSSH in their products, not random open-source projects.
Certainly a reasonable interpretation, but their use of the word "projects" rather than "businesses" in the original post is what makes me think that it's aimed at F/OSS projects. I may be wrong, but the distinct impression I got was that they were asking projects like Mozilla to fork over some cash. The Mozilla folks - who, frankly, weren't very good at promoting themselves until the Firefox gang started building momentum - have recently done a great job of rousing the troops and marketing themselves, deriving revenue streams besides selling CD-ROMs. My point is that OpenBSD should be taking notes from them, rather than asking to take cash.
And if you were keener on reading the article than flaming, you would see that they had a working revenue stream in the form of selling CDs, but that people were moving away from it in preference to obtaining it for free.
That's my point. They had a revenue stream which was, to be brutally honest, not very creative. It's going away now. I don't wish OpenBSD ill - I want them to succeed! But I think the only way they're going to do that is to learn how to go about this themselves, not ask to glom off projects that have figured out how to build a revenue stream.
There comes a time when you need to look yourself in the mirror and say, "My technical work has been brilliant, but boy have I FUBARed the business side of things. Perhaps I should rethink my strategy or get some help in turning this around." I think the OpenBSD folks can use this as a wake-up call to build a sustainable business model for themselves, not to ask for a temporary hand-out.
"It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going."
Wow, that's a weak response. It sounds like they're basically asking other F/OSS projects to fork over cash because OpenBSD can't raise money. And it makes F/OSS groups look like the business-challenged hippies that some people think they are.
If you are going to have an OpenBSD organization, then that means that part of your job is raising funds to keep yourself a going concern. Let me repeat: your job is no longer just to write code, but to bring cash in the door so that you can continue to get paid. If you are building products that world + dog are using, then that should be pretty easy. If you are not capable of raising funds, then you need to find someone who is good at it to help you out. There are plenty of those people out there - any semi-competent second-year marketing student should be able to significantly increase their funding channels over what they have now.
I'm sorry but I just don't think you can say, "hey, other open source organizations have done a good job working with the public and the press, and they raised funding, so why can't we have it?" It just hacks me off when programmers complain about the business-types at an organization, then discover it's actually harder than they think. And in this case they have taken the additional step of not trying to remedy the problem, but actually glomming off other groups that have maintained done great work with fundraising and marketing their products.
I have supported OpenBSD myself in the past by buying install discs and T-shirts. I think OpenBSD is a fantastic OS and I will contribute my few bucks here and there to keep them going. But if OpenBSD's answer to their money problems is not to fix their own house but rather to ask others to fork over - it probably means they'll just get in this same hole again later! I think they need to have a better answer to this question if my support (or anyone else's) isn't just going to be money down the drain.
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Not entirely true. AT&T spent a lot of time and cash upgrading various network elements to support iPhone features like Visual Voicemail and 'improved' Safari web browsing. No carrier would have made those investments if it weren't in an exclusive deal, because it wouldn't have justified the cost.
So those things may not be important to you, but in this case at least there were a few benefits to consumers derived from the exclusive deal that otherwise would not have materialized. I'm not saying phone locking is a desirable thing from a consumer perspective, but in this case it's not completely a one-way street in terms of benefits.
I call 110% BS. AT&T has a mobile device application developer program today, which costs absolutely $0 to developers and allows developers to self-certify any application that meets basic standards for basic fitness, reasonable UI and compatibility with the data network. See developer.att.com - it's all there.
In addition, AT&T has lots and lots of devices certified on its network, and strong developer communities for nearly all of them ... with ONE notable exception. What does that tell you about who has been calling the shots on developer access to the iPhone, AT&T or Apple?
Fair enough. I was thinking about "most" broadband users there, where the impediment to online gaming is their first concern.
VoIP over satellite can be usable in some cases despite the latency, but it violates almost all satellite ISPs' terms of service. VPN breaks the HTTP/TCP acceleration that they apply to their connections so you get "unaccelerated" service that caps out around 100 kbps because of the way ACK packet requests pile up over the high-latency link. Satellite works poorly with two-way services with a lot of "real time" back-and-forth such as VNC (or X11, or PC Anywhere) as well. If you really need those things, then you're pretty much stuck with needing a landline circuit.
What I'm surprised by here is that it seems like everybody thinks that broadband = cable or DSL (or, God help you, a Point To Point T1). From reading the comments, nobody is even looking at rural wireless satellite broadband. Disclaimer: I used to work for a satellite ISP so I'm biased. Satellite especially is available anywhere you can see the southern sky (specifically, a satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit) and offers OK speeds for $200 - $600 upfront and anywhere between $50 and $200 per month. The latency sucks (600 ms) but if you aren't using it for gaming, then you certainly don't need a private line circuit with PTP or Frame Relay...
I was always amazed that so few people knew about or considered satellite broadband despite the millions of bucks a year that HughesNet throws at advertising, especially on DirecTV. WildBlue now also has big co-marketing programs with DirecTV, DISH Network and AT&T. So I'm curious - do people not know about satellite or do they know and just don't want it?
Look, I'm all for open access to the press (speaking as a former reporter). However, I have to confess that in this case it's not fascism, it's just sensible public relations. I don't think it's about muzzling whisteblowers, it's about making sure people talking to the press are trained to pick their words carefully in a situation where public hysteria or calmness is at stake.
If you allow any random employee from within the organization - who probably hasn't had media training - to be quoted by reporters, then serious bad PR or misinformation can result. I think what's driving this in particular is a desire not to have Joe Engineer who's used to talking with other engineers give raw quotes to a clueless reporter and have his words completely misunderstood and thereby throw the public into a tizzy.
A fanciful but illustrative example: Joe Engineer from NHTSA may talk to the New York Times and use some intra-agency jargon like "in our latest survey, 99% of the bridges in the country got a designation of 'likely to collapse'." It turns out that 'likely to collapse' is an agency term measuring whether it is more likely to collapse or be struck by a meteor, but the reporter (who doesn't know any better, and wouldn't be expected to know better unless Joe explains it to him - and we've never heard before of a technical person who fails to explain their jargon) puts in the paper verbatim: "NHTSA says 99% of bridges likely to collapse." (Cue mass hysteria.) Executives and other people in the organization who are given media training are at least taught how to choose their words for public consumption carefully (whether they do it properly or not is a different issue).
So, as much as I enjoy getting into a tizzy about censorship, I gotta say there isn't much here to get worked up about, let alone decry as government "fascism." The TSA and airport security procedures, though ... don't get me started about those guys.
I studied the history of journalism in college (journalism major, natch) and your impression is a common one but it's overly romanticized. In the late 19th century and early 20th century heyday of American newspaper journalism, there were indeed more papers - but many if not most of the largest papers were owned by robber baron demagogues who make Rupert Murdoch look like a saint. Read up on yellow journalism and the antics of the American press of yesteryear will amaze you.
As one of the above posters mentioned, we are much better off today: you still have biased media moguls pushing their agendas, but at least you have literally thousands of media sources to choose from instead of one to three daily papers (in the 19th or early 20th centuries) or three television stations (for much of the late 20th century). The rise of "citizen journalism" has increased the crap quotient somewhat (just like the rise of "citizen architects" would dilute the overall quality of building structures) but it is much more democratized. There are many reasons to admire the historical legacy of American journalists, but they didn't operate in any idyllic vacuum free from corporate interest or bias.
An interesting take, and it might suggest partner friction in other situations. But in this case, there's nothing strange about it. The simple fact is that AT&T doesn't need to advertise the iPhone, since Apple is already spending a lot of money doing it. AT&T isn't losing any iPhone subscribers to other carriers of course, and AT&T even gets brand halo points from Apple's ads (AT&T's tag appears at the end of every iPhone TV spot).
It's very common for device manufacturers to subsidize a service provider's advertising, and vice versa. Presumably there's some cross-funding going on. And since AT&T has lots of other mobile products they want you to buy (Blackberries, 3G laptop cards and so forth), they're going to spend their cash on that.
What you say gets at the heart of the issue. Speaking as someone who has worked for several ISPs, I can tell you that the fundamental problem is this: the breaking of oversubscription models. Why is this?
The US market has indicated that they don't generally accept option "c", so that is why the caps etc. are in place. I've seen it at ISPs over the years - "average" usage increases year over year. So ISPs need to re-evaluate their pricing structures (bad because unless everybody does it, the first ones to do this will lose customers left and right), charge per use (you may personally find this a keen idea but most US Internet users don't) or keep caps in place. As long as transit costs more than the price point that consumers are willing to pay for home Internet access, this will (sadly) continue to be the case.
Respectfully, I think you're really missing my point. What my original post says is not that the GOP == world; it says that if you are trying to appeal to everyone across the board, then you need to avoid associating yourself with polarizing figures of either extreme. If the FSF doesn't care - and it may be that this is the case - about ever getting the support of corporate/government American GOP types, then go right ahead. But if you're trying to evangelize your position to everyone, then it's a poor idea to identify yourself with the sworn enemies of those you're trying to attract.
I realize my original post - which has been mod-bombed a couple times now - was read by many somehow as some kind of "USA rules GWB OMG R0XX0R" post or something. It's not. It's about something you learn in PR 101 - unless you are only trying to address your message to one side of an issue, you stay away from extreme/polarizing figures on either wing. And that's what RMS is very much not doing.
Hey, maybe this is just the irrelevant concern of somebody who works in PR and marketing. But if you're trying to be the ambassador of a broad-based movement, you generally avoid making public appearances with anyone who's a polarizing figure on either side politically. (i.e., if you're with a charity that wants people of all parties to donate, you don't make public appearances with either Dick Cheney or Michael Moore.)
RMS is Free(TM) of course to make public appearances wherever he wishes in support of Free(TM) software etc. I'm just saying that the image of Stallman getting snuggly with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez - other than being kind of physically gross - is not likely to assuage any US government or business fears about the ideals or politics behind the F/OSS movements. Free software seemed to be gaining some wide acceptance ... but RMS has just given the Bill O'Reillys of the world a powerful tool to shill Microsoft et. al. with once more. Again, it's his right to go ... but I think it's an exceedingly poor idea from a PR perspective. Then again, if RMS cared about PR, he wouldn't be RMS...
Look ... I'm all for bashing Microsoft for their many awful software design and business tactics choices, but this isn't really one of them. First: yes, the majority of their customers probably do prefer the former choice. And second: Microsoft is allowing the user the freedom to buy into DRM-ed media or not. If they simply removed the ability to play these content forms from the OS, they'd be making the choice for the user. Aren't we all usually dumping on MS for taking away freedom and choices?
Except, unfortunately, things like TiVos. TiVo promised AAC support in their "view your home content through the TiVo" package something like two years ago and still haven't produced jack. It's very frustrating and it's one of the reasons I am still using MP3 for ripping in most cases. I'm sure other folks out there have lots of other examples of common products not supporting AAC.
Actually, any marketing they do at this point is going to be a waste. They already know their initial (and pre-Christmas) shipments will sell out many times over to the people who are already planning on buying one. Spending money trying to get more people to go out to the store and buy something that isn't there is a waste.
So I agree that they haven't ratcheted up the "buzz-meter" like they could have ... but with such a massive shortage already likely, they would just be throwing away any money they spent. Expect their marketing expenditures to go up significantly next year once there are boxes on the shelves for "casual" purchasers to buy.
Nope, in both the book and movie, Merry wounds the Witch King with the dagger (back of the knee, I believe). Eowyn stabs him in the face (or where the face should be if he had one). In both contexts, the "no man" bit (from the prophecy of Glorfindel) is designed to be flexible in usage - the Witch King is clearly meant to be interpreting it in the "human" sense and completely overlooking the possibility of it referring to gender, thus in part leading to his downfall.
Oh God I can't believe I just responded to a Slashdot post to correct someone's Tolkien knowledge.
I don't have any research to back this up - then again, this is /. so that isn't an issue. Anecdotally, at least, I can tell you that the vast majority of Joe-and-Jane-Sixpack computer users probably don't upgrade their PCs any more often than four or five years. My office - a purportedly high-tech company - is running on primarily four-year-old laptops. Only geeks upgrade them every two years or more. Heck, I don't even buy computers every two years any more - it's more like three, now that the obsolescence curve for everything but cutting-edge games has flattened quite a bit.
This doesn't invalidate your point about DRM, but it does suggest that it's far less onerous to the "average" user than it is to Slashdot alpha nerds. It's tempting to impute our own habits and preferences to the masses, but it's often very inaccurate. (Anyone that really does have some reasonable data on this is very welcome to contradict me here.)
Ahh, you're thinking of the old TiVo/DirecTV alliance. But beginning last year, DirecTV ditched TiVo in favor of selling its own PVRs. DTV customers who got one of the older TiVo-based systems still get to keep theirs, but all new DTV customers get home-grown PVRs. I would think they might be next on the list of lawsuit targets.
It may become a moot point, though, since - as you point out - an EchoStar/DirecTV merger has been attempted twice before and is continually being rumored afresh.
I think you're working from some very old data. In the late eighties and early nineties, Apple somewhat misguidedly tried to bolster its reputation in the business market by discarding the "toy" image and not encouraging game development. However, once their market share began to seriously tank in the mid/late nineties, Apple "got religion" about games and realized how important they were to keeping their users happy.
After that, Apple hired a series of people as "Games Partnership Managers" to reach out to the game developer community. Apple has recently been rumored to be adding gaming functionality to the iPod. Apple famously reached out to John Carmack with OpenGL to bring iD games to the Mac. Apple devotes a whole section of their retail stores to games. And, of course, they have made gaming a featured section on their website.
So, I think your assertion about Apple discouraging games was once true but is very much outdated.
I swear I'm not trolling here. But I have to ask, "isn't that what Loki thought?" I don't know a lot about the twists and turns of their saga; I read a comment earlier suggesting that internal fraud (!) brought the company down rather than any kind of market failure. But - if that's the case and there is a market for porting Linux games that everyone will go any buy - why hasn't another company (or several!) stepped up into their place?
Or maybe all the good flag-waving Linux folks out there ran to buy copies of the Linux-supporting games, but there just wasn't enough of them? As a longtime Mac user, I'm very familiar with the disappointment of not having games ported to your platform, but I've heard it often enough from folks in the game publishing community that they just didn't think it was worth their time to develop it in a cross-platform fashion vs. the extra ~50k sales they would get from the Mac platform. Does anyone have numbers on how many copies the Loki games sold? I suspect that's the culprit.
Despite the fact that I was making light of the assertion, I agree that defending yourself in a case like this is something Joe Average should be able to do. I think the real problem is grounding your defense firmly among the twists/turns and precedents established in intellectual property law cases of this type already - if you could get a real lawyer to tell you what points to go after and which traps to avoid, you probably could do at least a functional job of it yourself.
Hmm ... maybe "Everyman's Guide To Defending Yourself Against **AA Lawsuits" is something the EFF should put on their project list?
Describing an intellectual property civil lawsuit against people with law degrees and years of experience like this may just be a little cavalier. Let's try a little substitution here and see how it sounds:
No, I meant fix your transmission yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic automotive engineering, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
or:
No, I meant perform a root canal on yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic orthodontics, some local anesthesia and a mirror, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
Actually, there are lots and LOTS of people like this. There is an enormous "car culture" in the United States replete with otherwise un-tech-savvy folks who probably can't set their VCR clock but can nonetheless tell you the purpose of every moving part in their car and how much torque it's rated for. It's actually very, very similar ... you've got the eagerly awaited trade shows, the review/preview magazines, the mass marketing ... you've even got legions of fanboys (witness all the "Calvin peeing on a [Ford | Chevy | Kia | Whatver] logo stickers on pickup trucks around the country). So cars do actually have a similar dedicated, uber-knowledgeable fanbase ... it's just invisble to most geeks since the two crowds don't usually mingle together much. ;-)
Java is probably the best example of great technology held back by completely incompetent marketing.
I had heard about numerous problems with Java in the past (JVM performance, licensing issues, etc.) but had not known its marketing was widely perceived to be one of them. I'm curious ... what was it that the Sun marketing staff did that was so "incompetent?" Did they do something that turned off users or developers in the way it was marketed? Did they run big ads saying 'Java causes intestinal cramps' or hand out Java-logo clubs for killing baby seals?
There's been an outlook client on the Mac since forever.
Yes and no. For the past several years, MSFT has taken the position that the preferred Exchange client on the Mac is Entourage (part of the Mac Office suite). The problem is that Entourage doesn't "speak" MAPI and instead relies on a semi-kludge of synchronizing through Exchange webmail/WebDAV. It also will not work with Exchange servers older than 2000/SP2. At my office, I can use Entourage to sync nicely with my e-mail, but the calendaring functionality is completely broken, as are task lists etc. (this might be cured if you have a newer version of Exchange than we do). For those interested, Microsoft has a guide for Exchange admins with Entourage users.
As you mentioned, there is a true Outlook client for the Mac that synchronizes natively with Exchange servers - but it was dropped in favor of Entourage years ago and hence was never Carbonized to run natively under OS X. So running the program under Classic (which isn't even an option on the Intel Macs) would be your only way of getting 100% Outlook functionality. As a result, those users on Intel Macs or those looking for true OS X solutions are very much stuck with using Windows to get the full functionality.
It seems to me that he's talking about businesses such as RedHat, who include OpenSSH in their products, not random open-source projects.
Certainly a reasonable interpretation, but their use of the word "projects" rather than "businesses" in the original post is what makes me think that it's aimed at F/OSS projects. I may be wrong, but the distinct impression I got was that they were asking projects like Mozilla to fork over some cash. The Mozilla folks - who, frankly, weren't very good at promoting themselves until the Firefox gang started building momentum - have recently done a great job of rousing the troops and marketing themselves, deriving revenue streams besides selling CD-ROMs. My point is that OpenBSD should be taking notes from them, rather than asking to take cash.
And if you were keener on reading the article than flaming, you would see that they had a working revenue stream in the form of selling CDs, but that people were moving away from it in preference to obtaining it for free.
That's my point. They had a revenue stream which was, to be brutally honest, not very creative. It's going away now. I don't wish OpenBSD ill - I want them to succeed! But I think the only way they're going to do that is to learn how to go about this themselves, not ask to glom off projects that have figured out how to build a revenue stream.
There comes a time when you need to look yourself in the mirror and say, "My technical work has been brilliant, but boy have I FUBARed the business side of things. Perhaps I should rethink my strategy or get some help in turning this around." I think the OpenBSD folks can use this as a wake-up call to build a sustainable business model for themselves, not to ask for a temporary hand-out.
"It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going."
Wow, that's a weak response. It sounds like they're basically asking other F/OSS projects to fork over cash because OpenBSD can't raise money. And it makes F/OSS groups look like the business-challenged hippies that some people think they are.
If you are going to have an OpenBSD organization, then that means that part of your job is raising funds to keep yourself a going concern. Let me repeat: your job is no longer just to write code, but to bring cash in the door so that you can continue to get paid. If you are building products that world + dog are using, then that should be pretty easy. If you are not capable of raising funds, then you need to find someone who is good at it to help you out. There are plenty of those people out there - any semi-competent second-year marketing student should be able to significantly increase their funding channels over what they have now.
I'm sorry but I just don't think you can say, "hey, other open source organizations have done a good job working with the public and the press, and they raised funding, so why can't we have it?" It just hacks me off when programmers complain about the business-types at an organization, then discover it's actually harder than they think. And in this case they have taken the additional step of not trying to remedy the problem, but actually glomming off other groups that have maintained done great work with fundraising and marketing their products.
I have supported OpenBSD myself in the past by buying install discs and T-shirts. I think OpenBSD is a fantastic OS and I will contribute my few bucks here and there to keep them going. But if OpenBSD's answer to their money problems is not to fix their own house but rather to ask others to fork over - it probably means they'll just get in this same hole again later! I think they need to have a better answer to this question if my support (or anyone else's) isn't just going to be money down the drain.