Or even better, we'll spend a few bucks a year on Recharger Magazine, make friendly with some reset chip manufacturers, and do it ourselves for our businesses, our friends and our family. I'd guess just in my mini-community, I pass on 5 figures of savings to people. Even when Xerox decided to make my life difficult on their newest laser line, some guy from China on Alibaba.com provided me with a reset chip within 30 days of the printer being released to market.
So far, though, Epson is the best company for inkjets in terms of not making it hard to buy 3rd party. HP is also excellent when it comes to lasers and a relatively open market for third party products.
If you do print more than average, pick up Recharge Magazine. It's an excellent resource for finding reasonable priced replacement products.
Only on Slashdot would someone argue that antitrust laws make it harder for new companies to enter the market. By definition, a company can't become subject to the antitrust laws unless it is already a major player in the marketplace. The whole RAM price fixing debacle wasn't solved by the oh-so-perfect market. It was solved by billions of dollars in fines for the companies involved. IIRC, Samsung got a $300 million fine, and other companies got fines in excess of $100 million.
What are you talking about? Fines stopped the price fixing scheme?
Let's look at what happened in RAM price fixing history:
2001, Elpida, Infineon, Hynix, Micron, and Samsung collude to fix prices on RDRAM. 2003, RDRAM is dead, Intel gives up hope. Reason? Price was too high. 2004, Discovery is made regarding price fixing. 2005, Found that companies colluded, were fined.
So let's see -- they stopped price fixing in 2003 because in 2005 they were fined?
What sort of malarkey are you trying to pass off in order to be seen as correct? You didn't provide one source of information, you didn't properly compose an answer that could be reviewed easily.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Thank God! I have competitors who have colluded together on numerous occasions to land contracts. It's called a boat race. "You win this one at a major profit, we'll win the next." Guess why my company has sustained steady, 10%-20% growth annually, for 15 years? Because we decided against colluding. Seven of our largest suppliers offer us kickbacks, which we said no to. We're more competitive without them.
I _love_ collusion. It opens a huge market for those of us who want to compete. It's VERY easy to raise money to start a business in a competitive market, even if you need 9 figures. The biggest reason we've seen fund-raisers fail is when venture capitalists ask: "How are the government regulations in that sector?"
When government introduces new laws (supposedly to prevent monopolization), the smaller venture capitalists exit the market. The bigger ones stay, of course, because they're powerful enough to subvert, or even write, the government laws.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, understands that the Federal government has absolutely no Constitutional power to declare regulations on businesses this way. They're anti-consumer, anti-competition, and anti-liberty. Collude away! I say. The competition will love you for it.
You wouldn't believe how many times I continue to order from my ink supplier by the kilogram, and from my toner supplier by the half gallon. For some reason, my brain made that mistake once and won't reset itself.
Lately, I'm having a really hard time saying "salt" instead of "ice" when it comes to buying the stuff you melt ice with. My wife goes crazy whenever I tell her we need to pick up "ice" mean in fact I meant to say "salt."
Old age at 33? No, it's been happening since I was a kid. Mental reject I am indeed.
Since I run a small print shop for churches, we go through a ton of ink and toner, to the tune of about $3000 per week. We buy ALL our ink and toner is very large amounts (toner by the kilogram, ink by the half gallon). Refills are cheap. And yet, I don't think that retailers deciding together to not stock competitive products is "bad" collusion -- it's just how their market needs to work to be profitable.
Anyone can go online and buy cheap refilled cartridges that tend to work. If they're buying locally, it might be that they don't trust the Internet (stupid reason), or that they waited too long to stock up on ink (probably true). I yell at my folks constantly for paying $40 for one cartridge when I can get them a replacement for $3, but usually its due to the dreaded "Out of ink" message. Convenience can often times mean MONEY.
The manufacturers screwed up, big time. They didn't listen to the market, and they decided to give away the printer and hope to make it up on the ink. That's not how most markets work, not even the razor market now. Every item has to have a profit, or someone will find a way to sell your high markup goods cheaper. Many more people now are learning that the $49 inkjet has $49 cartridges OEM, or $12 cartridges aftermarket. The days of the $49 loss-leader are over (although I think you can probably make a profitable inkjet that sells at $35, with reduced features and a generic print driver).
I honestly don't think collusion is a big deal. I know it supposedly hurts consumers, but in the long run, competition DOES begin due to what seems like obvious price fixing. I recall the early days of computer RAM when you honestly had few resources for brands. Now we have dozens. When a few companies collude on RAM pricing, the competition generally fixes it. It may take a few years, but it happens, and the worst thing to happen to those colluding is that they lose market share or go out of business when consumers discover that they've gouged people.
Legal action is unnecessary. Let the market work. More laws and regulations will make it HARDER for new companies to enter the market.
This is absolutely true. I'm not anywhere near the most attractive man in the universe (although I do have a very hot wife), but my wife won't let me even THINK about being in a band, and she's not the jealous type. She's just aware of the stories of my previous years in various lame bands. I love playing music, but was never dedicated enough to get great at any one instrument, but there is just a fact of life that women, even intelligent and secure women, have a thing for musicians with the jewels to get on stage, even a small stage.
Thankfully, that life didn't entertain me, but I still have friends my age (unmarried, usually single) who stay in a bad primarily for the women.
And I'd still love to be in a band, but she gets one wish answered and that's my promise that I won't.
Producing bands, though, is OK, so I still get my fix.
You just NAILED another reason copyright is useless, or at least useless for the current years (beyond the life of the author).
Here's a guy who just happens to be a KID of someone who created something fine. Someone else, who puts his money, time and name on the line decides to produce the movie. The movie is a success (by most), but the risk was huge. We're talking a risk of probably 9 figures? But yet the kid who has done nothing, can do nothing, and has no moral connection to the creation thinks he is due some money?
That's the problem with copyright: the actions of an individual are prevented from even being done. If the rights to the movie weren't optioned out a long time ago, its possible the movie might never have been made. I can think of quite a few movies that are prevented from being made because of the rights of the long-dead authors being held closely.
Sidenote: Just yesterday I inquired by Bozo the Clown (Chicago's version in Bob Bell) didn't wear the Bozo outfit when he accepted an award many years ago (before his death). I guess the guy who owned the rights to Bozo's look denied him the costume. Even worse, the guy who owned the rights wasn't even the guy who invented Bozo, but a guy who distributed Bozo shows. Unbelievable!
They really hate it when people bring up Gitmo as an example of the erosion of the rights of the average American. The less then 400 non-American detainees at Gitmo get treated better then the average American in a state run jail. Our soldiers would be more then happy with the same accomodations when captured as opposed to being deheaded on the intertubes.
Err, when I bring up Gitmo, I call it out for the U.S. government's erosion of rights of every one, not just Americans. The Constitution is clear that it restricts the US government from trampling on the rights of any individual, not just citizens. People in Gitmo, people in Iraq, people in Antarctica are born with certain inalienable rights. The U.S. government has a restriction on what they can do to them, regardless of where they happen to be.
And if Gitmo is all wonderful and nice and country-club like, why can't reporters take some photos and interview some of the enslaved captives there? Why can't a Writ of Habeus Corpus be issued, and a lawyer discuss issues privately?
It's just me, I always get flamebait mods on my posts. There are a lot of people here with cushy government tech jobs, and they don't like the idea of having to compete in the market that would exist should my "utopia" come to fruition.
Luckily, there are many more freedom-inspired moderators today than 4 years ago. I think I had the worst Karma for a good year with basically the same opinion.
This is just a gimmick used by those in government to push the issue away from the real issue: government's unnatural immunity against committing crimes against the People.
Seriously, I could care less about the telecoms. That's not my worry. When government tells you to jump, you jump. Gitmo is an ugly hotel for those who refuse. If the State forced me to release my logs, what can I do to fight it? Call the EFF or the IJ? That'll help, maybe 3 years down the road.
No, the real issue is the one most geeks and freedom-lovers ignore: that our elected candidates continue to violate their oath to uphold the Constitution. The President, the Senators, and almost all of the Congressional Representatives save 2 have violated this oath. The penalty should be the equivalent to the most extreme penalty available for the greatest crime that specific level of government can enforce.
Stop turning the issue to the telecoms, who are merely shills for the State. The true crime has been committed by every branch of government, and it is a crime that must be investigated. Unfortunately, the investigators are themselves, so the crime will be ignored, with the anger pointed at businesses who will likely get what they deserve.
Here's an artist worth supporting, not for the work he's done, but for the work he's going to do.
Is it frivolous? Yes, but most art can be called that. Is it useful? Probably not, but we all need entertainment.
As a "jackass-of-all-trades" myself, my biggest wish was to be able to make my dreams into reality in a physical aspect, but I don't have the drive to work on a project as long as this guy does. Heck, even complicated LEGO designs lose my interest less than half-way through.
If you have a little bit of wealth, don't forget to support the arts -- it's the job of the wealthy to bring the unmarketable to the masses.
You mean that recorded music has zero monetary value to you. I'll even wager that all your friends feel the same way: you enjoy acquiring music but you do not think it is worth paying for. No argument there -- but the iTunes Store is seeing its business grow each year, along with the rest of the digital music market. That's the problem that some record companies are having right now: customers are turning away from CDs and buying too many digital tracks.
Not true at all. My wife and I don't pirate any music whatsoever. I think we downloaded one album using utorrent, but it was an album that was out-of-print, and the record label had no idea how to acquire it. I also downloaded a soundtrack that was never sold as far as I know, except on LP form (North Shore the movie). Other than that, I've downloaded 20+ albums that we had already purchased, but the CDs were too scratched to RIP to our iPods.
I do morally believe in compensating musicians for the time spent recording. But I don't do it through buying an album always. I produce some records with my money, putting cash up so the musicians can record it. I get a thank-you in the form of hearing that music be completed, seeing them live, and maybe getting my name in the liner notes. Good enough. For most of history, people like me "produced" art by paying for the work to be performed. That still occurs.
The mistake here is not taking into account market behavior. You've taken the behavior of you and your friends (you opt for P2P rather than purchases) and you're attempting to map it to the market as a whole to make a general statement. If your thesis were correct, then fewer and fewer people would be using the iTunes Store as they decide that the correct price for tracks is zero. But the reality is that more and more people are using the iTunes Store. This is simply because the market as a whole does not behave in the same manner as you and your friends.
No, people use iTunes for convenience, and because they have a moral backbone to support the artist. The market price for recorded music is zero. The market price for compensating some musicians has value, but it is above and beyond the music you acquired. It's a sign of wanting to hear more in the future.
The market may not behave like I theorize, yet, but it is moving in that direction. I've worked with over a dozen bands in 2007 who are forgoing CD sales and iTunes as their income source (but still sell them for those who want that convenience), and have moved primarily to playing more shows, and producing more marketable goods that can't be easily duplicated. A few bands even tell their fans to bootleg the CD for their friends -- and these are bands who are covered in Guitar Player magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and MTV. Not big enough to be huge, but big enough to realize their income comes from getting in a van, and playing a gig.
You've forgotten that cost is a factor of both supply and demand. The demand for pirated music is not yet enough to stop the iTunes Store from having positive growth. And (I'm sure, unintentionaly), you've confused cost of goods with cost of sale, and not acknowledged that price is a factor of both supply and demand. There are vertical market software vendors which have absolutely no problem hitting their sales forecasts for software that costs upwards of $3,000 per seat -- despite the fact that downloading a copy via P2P would cost very little in terms of bandwidth. The reason is that demand for pirated copies among their target market simply is not big enough.
And it won't. But the act of piracy is not an act of theft, in my opinion, because a physical item wasn't taken. The same is true for software, which is a market that I am active in (I own a small programming shop). We practically give away our software, but do charge for support. For custom applications, we charge the labor for the act of producing the software, but we don't charge a per-seat fee. Some huge software programs that are easily "p
I've had a friend buried over abusing drugs. It wasn't pretty, but neither was their life that led them to drugs. It was doubtful that they were conned into using something they were warned about. Sad, yes, but also reality.
What's worse is that I have more friends who are addicted to prescribed Vicodin and Percocet. My late Brother-in-Law was addicted to prescribed Oxycodon. Some of the friends I know who pop pills are upper middle class mothers and fathers. I see people abusing alcohol, too. But it isn't my place to control their choices, and it surely isn't my place to tell people what they can take if they have a good relationship with a doctor who isn't out for a quick buck by Big Pharma.
That Brother-in-Law that was addicted to Oxycodone had late stage MS. He was told by many people to smoke pot, but he didn't want to break the law. Sad, too, because it really looks like pot has lesser side-effects than the legal stuff.
Sorry about your friend. Maybe if you have time, you can post something on a blog somewhere detailing what pushed her (or him?) to even think about drugs as an escape. All the methheads I've met have the same story: families ignore them, they were never good enough, and they had no one who cared enough to catch their downfall before it happened.
These spying operations are both unconstitutional, and a complete waste of taxpayer time and money.
Black marketters (i.e., criminals) have wisened up to the fact that the telephone, and the Internet, is not a safe way to communicate. Many of them are even weary of the keyboard, since tapping into a keyboard with a stroke logger has been used to put some people away.
The drug war amazes me. Powerful interests involved in the profiteering over private medicinal use co-opt the security organizations to battle their competition. And yet few people call for the end to the drug war. The masterminds have long walked away from using technology that is easily spied on. The software, and hardware, that the masterminds use is far and away more powerful than most of the pro-privacy stuff I use. While I'm sure that the security organizations are continuously working to hack into the newer systems, they'll constantly lose ground to that battle.
Even the lesser members of the underground are moving away from open communications. Technology isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than jail. It's a wonder that people have faith in our security forces, who will always be one-step behind. As far as I'm aware, many of the ex-government security technologists are likely working for the other side (it's much more profitable). If I was truly profit-motivated, I'd likely do it myself, considering the amount of money that is available for someone tech savvy who is willing to provide the latest and greatest hardware and software to stay ahead of the security forces. Of course, morally I'm opposed to such work, but not because it is illegal. It just doesn't interest me to be part of the organizations of that sort. I'd rather do things morally, the law be damned.
So what is the end purpose of all this technology? It isn't safety for the citizens. I can only think of one reason, mostly conspiratorial, for the money and time spent: the learn how to use it for the powers that control the security forces. They all have their fingers in the pie, and by using taxpayer money for their research, they get the best of both worlds. Yes, it sounds like NWO-Alex-Jones mumbo-jumbo, but it's the only answer I can think of as to why we continue on with these programs.
That's an exceptional reply, and had I not posted the original one, you'd get one of my rare modpoints. Thanks for that insight.
I've come up with a theoretical replacement for copyright, one that I use myself. Nothing I produce is held under copyright, it is all pseudo-public domain. Because of this, my own income has gone up significantly more than when I "protected" myself through copyright or subscription-only services.
My system is MoralIP, which has two color: green and red. Green means the topic is freely distributable without referencing the original content producer. Red means the content producer gives you the opportunity to distribute it, but to acknowledge the author. There is no financial tie to either subsystems.
How does one enforce MoralIP? Simple. Imagine a Google-Toolbar-like program that utilizes search engine data to perform comparisons to data, be it text or otherwise. Yes, today's servers and workstations may not be able to handle it real-time, but the power will be there. The toolbar could look up entire pages of text, or even just paragraphs. When it finds a hit, it offers the reader a link to the original author. Say you quote a paragraph on your website without attributing another; this toolbar would instantly tell you where it came from.
The original content creator could submit their content to competitive "comparison engines" (like a search engine) for archiving and proof-of-creation. Someone looking to steal your content would have the liability of being called a fraud or a plagiarizer. Of course this gives no financial protection, but it does increase the original creators reputation to the reader. Those who copy without attribution (unless the content is released into the public domain, or through MoralIP) would be called out instantly, digitally, and without overhead.
The system could be paid for by content creators who wish to be archived as the original. The costs would be minimal, due to the comparison engines feeding the same data into ad-revenue run search engines. Google would be a prime candidate to offer a competitive product.
This also has the ability to give content creators a point of reference as to who is quoting them or using "their" content. Just like a trackback link on my blog tells me who is linking to me, the same feature would be possible in a comparison engine network.
I've laid out a nice summary of this theory, which I unfortunately don't have online (yet). Hopefully some young geek in a garage can implement it, and take the profits to use on whatever he or she wants to.
Recorded music will always have a market value of zero, or close to it. Even $1 per song is too high, and this price will fall.
All markets rely on supply and demand: as the supply of an item, prices fall. As the demand for an item goes down, prices fall.
Digital music has a near-infinite supply. Transfering 3MB of data (say, one song), as a cost of less than 1/2 cents from a server. P2P the cost is trivial and far lower.
Yet there IS a way to make money with music: it's called performing and value added items. When you go to work, say flipping burgers, you're paid for the act of working, the labor. The person who invented the burger doesn't charge fees for the act of making a burger. Music is no different. Making music, the act of writing it, is akin to learning how to make a burger. All of us get trained at no profit, and sometimes at great risk of a loss of time. Learning to make music is tricky, and it is artistic, but it should be no different in terms of learning how to make a burger, or learning how to fix a leaky faucet.
Bands will soon rely only on the performance of their music. That's what differentiates one band from another: their ability to entertain. And entertainment has GREAT value. There are many ways for bands to make money entertaining. You can play live. Maybe sell your CDs and include 1 ticket to a live concert. Or sell a CD, and include 5 tickets to an online performance.
Making money doesn't end there. How about selling CDs and offering CD purchasers the chance to win an hour of lessons in how to play their favorite song? Oh wait, the government prevents bands from offering contests in exchange for buying an item. It's the law that harms the musician.
You can make money selling autographed albums, or selling DVDs or CDs of the actual concert people attended. The cost to record a concert, and burn 50 CDs in 10 minutes before people leave, is trivial.
Don't complain about the zero value of recorded music -- its a market process that can't be worked around. Instead, find ways to MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR NEW AND ONGOING LABORS. Just like the burger flipper or the faucet-leak fixer. ---
I own a small music production and marketing business, and I help quite a few local bands make money. How do we do it? We book them shows non-stop. We target cities in the middle of nowhere, visit there once, build a street team, and then go back over and over and over. We sell awesome and rare silkscreened posters that cost us $0.15 each but sell for $5, $10 with an autograph. We sell limited edition LPs (yes, records) and move to sell them out faster than we get them in.
I designed a system that records a concert (music feed from the board, two cameras without cameramen) and burns DVDs of the show within 15 minutes of the end of the show. Those DVDs can be given away, or sold for a small price. Sell 5 DVDs for $5 and let people in the town give them to friends (or better yet, give them away freely). This generates more buzz for future shows.
A band is no different than a plumber, a burger-flipper, or an architect. We all learn how to produce new labor on our own time and dime, and then we use that learning to generate income by working. Recorded music is marketing, and marketing has a cost, rarely a profit. You market yourself to get people to pay for your future labor, not your past.
I see a future in my small market to generate millions, but not online, and not with the recorded music. Instead, we're talking about packing shows in Bertrand, Nebraska and DeKalb, Illinois, where there are thousands of teenagers and young adults who are seriously bored out of their minds sitting on the web all day long. They want, and pay for, good bands to come out and charge their lives with loud and fun music. Don't visit a town once, visit it 6 times a year. A tour van costs $15,000, and the gas is $100 or so a show. Pack a venue with 300 young adults paying $6 each, sell $1000 in completely
I've seen this often in real life, going back as far as 21 years ago.
Personally, I'm a risk-taker, but not a long term responsible individual. My failures in business or projects have generally come from a lack of finding responsible people who can carry the long term needs after the risk I take starts earnings its rewards. I ran a succssful BBS 2 decades ago, and I saw many failures due to there being a risk taker who took off, leaving the responsible ones with no "leader."
I think the same is true in social groups, although maybe it isn't the factor of having a risk-taker, but having a natural leader who others look to for support even if it is purely "spiritual" in nature.
I run a not-for-profit that works with hundreds of churches, and I see the same thing. The leader leaves, retires, dies, whatever: the church falls apart. Recently a large client of mine went under after 25 years of being in business. The boss left, leaving his responsible managers but no leader/risk-taker.
There's nothing to see here. These are proven truths over millenia that have surfaced in every area of life: politics, businesses, faiths, even families. If there isn't a new leader to move the group in a direction away from complacency, the group will fail. Sometimes a responsible individual finds a natural tendency to lead/take new risks in new directions, but I'm not sure its a matter of nurturing those skills. I do believe firmly that there is a natural propensity to either being responsible, or being risky. A very rare few have both talents, although I personally have never met anyone like that. It's either one or the other, generally.
The majority, though, seem to have neither. They want to follow in hopes that some day they will lead, but in the end they're driven to neither. They follow long enough until it is obvious that they'll never lead (because they don't push to become an obvious leader/risk-taker), so they fall away from the project. In this case, though, I don't see many failures, because a natural leader has a tendency to attract others to the project. When that risk taker gets bored, runs out of money, or gets caught up in something else, the project fails.
Every project I've worked on that has failed has been my fault, and no one else's. Usually it boiled down to getting bored, but sometimes it was pure irresponsibility. Sometimes it was a lack of trusting another person to take over for me, at which point I put too much burden on the future leader, and they left. Life lessons.
The employees don't profit as the company does, but it's more comfortable to be an employee in a company that's doing well.
We generally won't work for businesses that don't offer a decent year-end bonus or profit-sharing, as our own company does. I am adamant about not supporting bad companies, as they tend not to last or they tend to be the slowest to pay. The companies that treat employees well treat consultants well, too.
So, do you try to educate the CEOs to do things halfway intelligently? To recognize that some technical people understand the technical issues better than they do? To realize that overly stringent policies can hurt productivity? Heck, to realize that people who complain are not necessarily crybabies, and that people who say such-and-such is bad for productivity are not just looking for excuses?
Absolutely. My key role (as CEO myself) is to discuss efficiency versus productivity with other owners and top managers. You'd be surprised at how many MBAs have no clue as to the proper balance of efficiency versus productivity. We also do handle complaints for employees to managers at some offices, generally in an anonymous fashion, because there ARE companies that don't handle internal complaints well. We just write it in our quarterly recommendations and try to find a good solution that can make the employee happy, while not harming the company's goals and bottom line figures. That's also a good reason to use a consulting company -- we can see much more of the operational mistakes than an in-house guy can.
Anyway, if you encourage CEOs to trust their technical staff to know their stuff (as opposed to trust them to make business decisions, which they typically are not qualified for), and to make it easier for the average guy to get his or her job done, you aren't evil.
I agree, and so do most of the users we serve (now, at least). But I do feel we have an aggressive streak -- the information we offer to our customres (managers and owners) can be VERY judgmental on bad employees. I know that our figures and information has been used to can people in the past, and not over personal grudges but over a lack of ability. Of course we're the fall guy when it comes to users not liking us because someone they liked was canned, but we're there to make the company profitable and the GOOD employees happy -- the bad employees are useless, and unprofitable companies means no future employees, and no check for us.
Sorry? Do you mean that in the sense of not the boss' nephew, or not having any IT department period?
No IT period. You'd be amazed at how many large companies have discovered that in-house IT guys can be VERY hit or miss. By using consultants, they can quickly fire a company who is not living up to requirements. In-house staff can be much more difficult to nuke, especially if the staff doesn't follow any sort of documentation and logging standard.
Out of curiousity, how can you tell whether or not a voice mail requires a response, or if perhaps the recipient ran into the sender in the hall and resolved the issue in person?
We don't judge that. Our charts offer the following information:
1. Average voice mails left per day 2. Average incoming phone calls per day 3. Company average voice mails left per day per employee 4. Company average phone calls per day per employee 5. Average time before listening to voice mails 6. Average number of voicemails in queue unread
#5 and #6, compared to #1 and #2, give a very good overview as to whether or not the employee properly handles missed calls, or any calls. Someone who gets 2 calls per day on average, and has an average of 1.4 voice mails per day is probably NOT answering the phone. Maybe those calls should be patched through by reception to someone else. If that same person has a #5 value of 32 hours, you know they're not attending to the needs of customers and suppliers.
Let's say that another person gets 40 callers per day, and 26 voice mails, but their #5 average is 3 hours. They get MANY more calls, but handle them much quicker, or at least listen to them.
Again, the numbers aren't weighted well, but it is an important figure to review with owners.
We specifically do NOT sell hardware directly any longer, primarily due to questions over how to support hardware we sell (is it warranty? does it meet spec? what if it fails, do we eat the time to ship to manufacturer?). We also stopped selling hardware due to the rampant amount of kickbacks from surprisingly large companies. I don't want to be part of that fiasco when it finally blows up.
Our contracts state that all time spent on the job is to be billed at the normal rate. We do warranty any work done for a period of 2 weeks, meaning if something blows up after we fix it, we'll fix it again at no cost.
When it comes to setting up a machine properly, that is billed at the contracted normal rate, of course. If an end user realizes that their machine is NOT up to snuff, it's just a service ticket (and users can call my staff directly on their cell phone). Based on the priority of need, our staff will go out and fix it within 2-4 hours.
Since most of our clients are contractors (building, architecture, etc), most of their workstations and notebooks within the office or in the field are fairly identical. We also don't generally handle, or even recommend, locking down PCs too much since most employees are aware already of our "don't touch it" policy. If they NEED to install software or hardware themselves, of course they are free to, but if they blow something up it's a service call. After a few explosions due to self-installing, they stop.
Since our turn-around time is very fast, much faster than most in our particular industry, the downtime is rarely a concern. In the past 4 months almost all our service calls were handled on-site within 1 hour of the call. In dire emergencies, if we can VNC in, we can fix it without the delay, and most of the staff have 3G broadband access from their notebooks, so they can take time out of their current project/job to deal with the emergencies.
Thankfully, most of the systems we work on are hardy enough that we don't deal with many emergencies. That's usually a selling factor for us when we look for new customers (we're not at the moment): we refer new pitches to previous customers who know to promote our very low emergency-billing. If it works, don't mess with it. If it breaks, it's usually a hardware failure or just a reboot away. I haven't seen to many other situations that would require emergency service, short of the "I deleted this file I didn't save on the server" emergencies, which we have desktop software that generally protects against.
Our company would be viewed as evil by some in the IT or the consulting industry. We sell ourselves as "the CEO's consultant." We openly admit that we're working to better the interests of the person in charge of the company, or the ownership, and not necessarily end users. We believe that by making a company more efficient, the employees will profit as the company does. Our 10 year anniversary is this week, and our world has changed greatly in terms of how we're viewed by the "common" employee.
First of all, if we have bad users, we're the first to highlight them in our quarterly and yearly billing breakdowns. The users who are surly, obnoxious, and complain the most are usually the ones who get the biggest chunk of the maintenance budget. Their name is usually at the top, and each user is also compared to the company average. Many CEOs and owners love our breakdowns, and look forward to them each quarter.
Secondly, the hard workers in an organization also appreciate our reports, which we request to be open if the company's policy allows it (about half do). They know who the jerks and deadbeats (Finger-pointer and Mr. Entitlement) are, and they're happy to be "below average" in terms of company burden. It is also those users/employees who like us the most because we give them extra-special attention when they really do have emergencies. The guy who cries wolf all the time is still served well, but most quickly learn that they'll be singled out at their next review -- "Why do you need so much support?"
The finger-pointer loses power under this system. When it is obvious that the finger should point to them (and that's what the report clearly shows) they have little in the way of demanding a change in consultant or operations. Most finger-pointers we've dealt with have been the first to leave or be fired, based on the clarity that we show to the owners to see who is bringing down efficiency. Since we've taken over some telephone system operations, we also generate a report that shows the delay in responding to voice mails (a skewed report in some ways, because we don't use a weight-system for people who get way more voice mails than average), and it's usually the finger pointer and Mr. Entitlement who ignore the voice mails significantly more than average.
The Whiz-Kid is usually a good person to have for us, as we are open to changes in our system. If the Whiz-Kid gives us a recommendation, we'll include it in our summary of recommendations, and give them the credit. If that recommendation is accepted, and it works, more power to the Whiz-Kid, maybe he should go off on his own and consult. If the recommendation fails, it's also his responsibility. But here's the good part: the Whiz-Kid doesn't have the time to take over our work, so it's not competition for us. Owners should know if they have a talented worker, but they should also be aware that the talented worker should do what his job description says he should do, or he should be moved to a different department. About 20% of our customers have attempted to hire in-house staff, but their costs go up, not down, and the service seems to get worse. Currently, we work with no business with an in-house IT guy (even one customer who generates over $100m a year in income).
The Know-It-All is not a problem for us, because every invoice we produce references industry recommendations or knowledge base articles as to why we do it. If the Know-It-All calls us out in a meeting (or otherwise), all we have to do is say "Maybe we missed something, can you point us to two industry experts who recommend that action?" So far, maybe 5% of Know-It-All complaints have led us to making changes, but 95% of them fail miserably. And no, slashdot is not a great place to grab links to recommendations, because it also usually has replies from other "experts" who recommend against the same idea.
The Know-Nothing is our worst user, and maybe the only bad one. Because some WANT to know more, but don't have the aptitude, it seems part
Sadly enough, all the games from the C64 are still under copyright (because of the law, not because of common sense), so if you go to download some old stuff, it's piracy. Ridiculous.
...but I need a power source. I usually travel with my "lite" laptop, and a spare battery, but even that's not always enough. Some of my flights (ORD->BOM) last nearly 20 hours (with 1 stop, where I could theoretically recharge somewhere).
I don't mind paying upwards of $40 for a flight for web access, actually, but I'd assume few others would. Speed/latency isn't an issue, but I do wonder how well it would work over large bodies of water.
That IS an intriguing response, and one I've heard before but never spent time answering. I'll give it some thought.
I actually do hang out with one of my UPS drivers regularly at a local saloon, and he's told me that he would have no problem at all delivering first class mail to customers he alreadys serves (duh). We receive a daily UPS and FedEx pickup, as do hundreds of my customers. For those customers, the cost to UPS is negligible in terms of warehouse-to-end costs. Sorting would introduce a cost, but UPS and FedEx have significantly better sorting equipment than the postal service does (and I know this from someone who quit USPS and moved to UPS).
I'm not saying that EVERYONE would use it, but the added advantage of the competition would bring prices down for urban areas almost immediately, and allow the companies to look into competing in suburban and exurban areas. The priority would be the competitive pressures on the USPS to do better, faster, cheaper than currently.
All our shipments are done faster through FedEx or UPS than USPS. Both companies have provided me with thermal printers, and our software allows us to look up an address, weigh a package, and print the tag in seconds. I can do a batch of 20 shipments in just a few minutes. USPS has done better by allowing third party stamp sellers (which we now use when we have to use USPS), so they have made some positive changes.
Would UPS deliver at 41 cents per letter? I'm doubtful, but we also don't really know. Our house gets, on average, about 15 pieces of mail a day. Based on weight (I just weighed my mail from today), we're talking about a overall cost of about $11.15 to the companies sending the mail. Because UPS and FedEx would work on the total grossdelivery cost (not the individual net sending cost), I would believe that $11.15 is more than enough for them to sort and deliver letters to me daily. On my slowest days we receive one ground shipment that costs the shipper $6.00 or so. $11.15 is more gross income, but more work, so I'm sure they make more on the $6 delivery than on 15 deliveries totaling $11.15, but again, it depends on if their market forecasts can see a profit.
I'd think they could. The current system of USPS is huge, but I see new UPS Stores and FedEx Kinkos stores opening up regularly all around me. That means that they've built a decent infrastructure, and can likely cover many suburban areas already (my town is small, and I believe we have 20 FedEx depots of various sorts within a 20 minute drive of me).
If we leave people alone, we don't have to worry about bomb proof vests.
I see tremendous opportunity in a peaceful market for this product: paintball vests, snowboarding and motorcycling clothing, maybe even using it in some kind of car bumper to reduce damage or absorb impact, especially if it could expand sideways during a collision.
I'd also like a blanket so when my cat goes psycho and jumps on the bed, she's repelled with great force.
Slashdot Mirror
Or even better, we'll spend a few bucks a year on Recharger Magazine, make friendly with some reset chip manufacturers, and do it ourselves for our businesses, our friends and our family. I'd guess just in my mini-community, I pass on 5 figures of savings to people. Even when Xerox decided to make my life difficult on their newest laser line, some guy from China on Alibaba.com provided me with a reset chip within 30 days of the printer being released to market.
So far, though, Epson is the best company for inkjets in terms of not making it hard to buy 3rd party. HP is also excellent when it comes to lasers and a relatively open market for third party products.
If you do print more than average, pick up Recharge Magazine. It's an excellent resource for finding reasonable priced replacement products.
Only on Slashdot would someone argue that antitrust laws make it harder for new companies to enter the market. By definition, a company can't become subject to the antitrust laws unless it is already a major player in the marketplace. The whole RAM price fixing debacle wasn't solved by the oh-so-perfect market. It was solved by billions of dollars in fines for the companies involved. IIRC, Samsung got a $300 million fine, and other companies got fines in excess of $100 million.
What are you talking about? Fines stopped the price fixing scheme?
Let's look at what happened in RAM price fixing history:
2001, Elpida, Infineon, Hynix, Micron, and Samsung collude to fix prices on RDRAM.
2003, RDRAM is dead, Intel gives up hope. Reason? Price was too high.
2004, Discovery is made regarding price fixing.
2005, Found that companies colluded, were fined.
So let's see -- they stopped price fixing in 2003 because in 2005 they were fined?
What sort of malarkey are you trying to pass off in order to be seen as correct? You didn't provide one source of information, you didn't properly compose an answer that could be reviewed easily.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Thank God! I have competitors who have colluded together on numerous occasions to land contracts. It's called a boat race. "You win this one at a major profit, we'll win the next." Guess why my company has sustained steady, 10%-20% growth annually, for 15 years? Because we decided against colluding. Seven of our largest suppliers offer us kickbacks, which we said no to. We're more competitive without them.
I _love_ collusion. It opens a huge market for those of us who want to compete. It's VERY easy to raise money to start a business in a competitive market, even if you need 9 figures. The biggest reason we've seen fund-raisers fail is when venture capitalists ask: "How are the government regulations in that sector?"
When government introduces new laws (supposedly to prevent monopolization), the smaller venture capitalists exit the market. The bigger ones stay, of course, because they're powerful enough to subvert, or even write, the government laws.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, understands that the Federal government has absolutely no Constitutional power to declare regulations on businesses this way. They're anti-consumer, anti-competition, and anti-liberty. Collude away! I say. The competition will love you for it.
You wouldn't believe how many times I continue to order from my ink supplier by the kilogram, and from my toner supplier by the half gallon. For some reason, my brain made that mistake once and won't reset itself.
Lately, I'm having a really hard time saying "salt" instead of "ice" when it comes to buying the stuff you melt ice with. My wife goes crazy whenever I tell her we need to pick up "ice" mean in fact I meant to say "salt."
Old age at 33? No, it's been happening since I was a kid. Mental reject I am indeed.
Since I run a small print shop for churches, we go through a ton of ink and toner, to the tune of about $3000 per week. We buy ALL our ink and toner is very large amounts (toner by the kilogram, ink by the half gallon). Refills are cheap. And yet, I don't think that retailers deciding together to not stock competitive products is "bad" collusion -- it's just how their market needs to work to be profitable.
Anyone can go online and buy cheap refilled cartridges that tend to work. If they're buying locally, it might be that they don't trust the Internet (stupid reason), or that they waited too long to stock up on ink (probably true). I yell at my folks constantly for paying $40 for one cartridge when I can get them a replacement for $3, but usually its due to the dreaded "Out of ink" message. Convenience can often times mean MONEY.
The manufacturers screwed up, big time. They didn't listen to the market, and they decided to give away the printer and hope to make it up on the ink. That's not how most markets work, not even the razor market now. Every item has to have a profit, or someone will find a way to sell your high markup goods cheaper. Many more people now are learning that the $49 inkjet has $49 cartridges OEM, or $12 cartridges aftermarket. The days of the $49 loss-leader are over (although I think you can probably make a profitable inkjet that sells at $35, with reduced features and a generic print driver).
I honestly don't think collusion is a big deal. I know it supposedly hurts consumers, but in the long run, competition DOES begin due to what seems like obvious price fixing. I recall the early days of computer RAM when you honestly had few resources for brands. Now we have dozens. When a few companies collude on RAM pricing, the competition generally fixes it. It may take a few years, but it happens, and the worst thing to happen to those colluding is that they lose market share or go out of business when consumers discover that they've gouged people.
Legal action is unnecessary. Let the market work. More laws and regulations will make it HARDER for new companies to enter the market.
This is absolutely true. I'm not anywhere near the most attractive man in the universe (although I do have a very hot wife), but my wife won't let me even THINK about being in a band, and she's not the jealous type. She's just aware of the stories of my previous years in various lame bands. I love playing music, but was never dedicated enough to get great at any one instrument, but there is just a fact of life that women, even intelligent and secure women, have a thing for musicians with the jewels to get on stage, even a small stage.
Thankfully, that life didn't entertain me, but I still have friends my age (unmarried, usually single) who stay in a bad primarily for the women.
And I'd still love to be in a band, but she gets one wish answered and that's my promise that I won't.
Producing bands, though, is OK, so I still get my fix.
You just NAILED another reason copyright is useless, or at least useless for the current years (beyond the life of the author).
Here's a guy who just happens to be a KID of someone who created something fine. Someone else, who puts his money, time and name on the line decides to produce the movie. The movie is a success (by most), but the risk was huge. We're talking a risk of probably 9 figures? But yet the kid who has done nothing, can do nothing, and has no moral connection to the creation thinks he is due some money?
That's the problem with copyright: the actions of an individual are prevented from even being done. If the rights to the movie weren't optioned out a long time ago, its possible the movie might never have been made. I can think of quite a few movies that are prevented from being made because of the rights of the long-dead authors being held closely.
Sidenote: Just yesterday I inquired by Bozo the Clown (Chicago's version in Bob Bell) didn't wear the Bozo outfit when he accepted an award many years ago (before his death). I guess the guy who owned the rights to Bozo's look denied him the costume. Even worse, the guy who owned the rights wasn't even the guy who invented Bozo, but a guy who distributed Bozo shows. Unbelievable!
I thought LANtastic barely supported IPv4. That IS what the Feds are using still, right?
They really hate it when people bring up Gitmo as an example of the erosion of the rights of the average American. The less then 400 non-American detainees at Gitmo get treated better then the average American in a state run jail. Our soldiers would be more then happy with the same accomodations when captured as opposed to being deheaded on the intertubes.
Err, when I bring up Gitmo, I call it out for the U.S. government's erosion of rights of every one, not just Americans. The Constitution is clear that it restricts the US government from trampling on the rights of any individual, not just citizens. People in Gitmo, people in Iraq, people in Antarctica are born with certain inalienable rights. The U.S. government has a restriction on what they can do to them, regardless of where they happen to be.
And if Gitmo is all wonderful and nice and country-club like, why can't reporters take some photos and interview some of the enslaved captives there? Why can't a Writ of Habeus Corpus be issued, and a lawyer discuss issues privately?
It's just me, I always get flamebait mods on my posts. There are a lot of people here with cushy government tech jobs, and they don't like the idea of having to compete in the market that would exist should my "utopia" come to fruition.
Luckily, there are many more freedom-inspired moderators today than 4 years ago. I think I had the worst Karma for a good year with basically the same opinion.
This is just a gimmick used by those in government to push the issue away from the real issue: government's unnatural immunity against committing crimes against the People.
Seriously, I could care less about the telecoms. That's not my worry. When government tells you to jump, you jump. Gitmo is an ugly hotel for those who refuse. If the State forced me to release my logs, what can I do to fight it? Call the EFF or the IJ? That'll help, maybe 3 years down the road.
No, the real issue is the one most geeks and freedom-lovers ignore: that our elected candidates continue to violate their oath to uphold the Constitution. The President, the Senators, and almost all of the Congressional Representatives save 2 have violated this oath. The penalty should be the equivalent to the most extreme penalty available for the greatest crime that specific level of government can enforce.
Stop turning the issue to the telecoms, who are merely shills for the State. The true crime has been committed by every branch of government, and it is a crime that must be investigated. Unfortunately, the investigators are themselves, so the crime will be ignored, with the anger pointed at businesses who will likely get what they deserve.
Here's an artist worth supporting, not for the work he's done, but for the work he's going to do.
Is it frivolous? Yes, but most art can be called that. Is it useful? Probably not, but we all need entertainment.
As a "jackass-of-all-trades" myself, my biggest wish was to be able to make my dreams into reality in a physical aspect, but I don't have the drive to work on a project as long as this guy does. Heck, even complicated LEGO designs lose my interest less than half-way through.
If you have a little bit of wealth, don't forget to support the arts -- it's the job of the wealthy to bring the unmarketable to the masses.
You mean that recorded music has zero monetary value to you. I'll even wager that all your friends feel the same way: you enjoy acquiring music but you do not think it is worth paying for. No argument there -- but the iTunes Store is seeing its business grow each year, along with the rest of the digital music market. That's the problem that some record companies are having right now: customers are turning away from CDs and buying too many digital tracks.
Not true at all. My wife and I don't pirate any music whatsoever. I think we downloaded one album using utorrent, but it was an album that was out-of-print, and the record label had no idea how to acquire it. I also downloaded a soundtrack that was never sold as far as I know, except on LP form (North Shore the movie). Other than that, I've downloaded 20+ albums that we had already purchased, but the CDs were too scratched to RIP to our iPods.
I do morally believe in compensating musicians for the time spent recording. But I don't do it through buying an album always. I produce some records with my money, putting cash up so the musicians can record it. I get a thank-you in the form of hearing that music be completed, seeing them live, and maybe getting my name in the liner notes. Good enough. For most of history, people like me "produced" art by paying for the work to be performed. That still occurs.
The mistake here is not taking into account market behavior. You've taken the behavior of you and your friends (you opt for P2P rather than purchases) and you're attempting to map it to the market as a whole to make a general statement. If your thesis were correct, then fewer and fewer people would be using the iTunes Store as they decide that the correct price for tracks is zero. But the reality is that more and more people are using the iTunes Store. This is simply because the market as a whole does not behave in the same manner as you and your friends.
No, people use iTunes for convenience, and because they have a moral backbone to support the artist. The market price for recorded music is zero. The market price for compensating some musicians has value, but it is above and beyond the music you acquired. It's a sign of wanting to hear more in the future.
The market may not behave like I theorize, yet, but it is moving in that direction. I've worked with over a dozen bands in 2007 who are forgoing CD sales and iTunes as their income source (but still sell them for those who want that convenience), and have moved primarily to playing more shows, and producing more marketable goods that can't be easily duplicated. A few bands even tell their fans to bootleg the CD for their friends -- and these are bands who are covered in Guitar Player magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and MTV. Not big enough to be huge, but big enough to realize their income comes from getting in a van, and playing a gig.
You've forgotten that cost is a factor of both supply and demand. The demand for pirated music is not yet enough to stop the iTunes Store from having positive growth. And (I'm sure, unintentionaly), you've confused cost of goods with cost of sale, and not acknowledged that price is a factor of both supply and demand. There are vertical market software vendors which have absolutely no problem hitting their sales forecasts for software that costs upwards of $3,000 per seat -- despite the fact that downloading a copy via P2P would cost very little in terms of bandwidth. The reason is that demand for pirated copies among their target market simply is not big enough.
And it won't. But the act of piracy is not an act of theft, in my opinion, because a physical item wasn't taken. The same is true for software, which is a market that I am active in (I own a small programming shop). We practically give away our software, but do charge for support. For custom applications, we charge the labor for the act of producing the software, but we don't charge a per-seat fee. Some huge software programs that are easily "p
I've had a friend buried over abusing drugs. It wasn't pretty, but neither was their life that led them to drugs. It was doubtful that they were conned into using something they were warned about. Sad, yes, but also reality.
What's worse is that I have more friends who are addicted to prescribed Vicodin and Percocet. My late Brother-in-Law was addicted to prescribed Oxycodon. Some of the friends I know who pop pills are upper middle class mothers and fathers. I see people abusing alcohol, too. But it isn't my place to control their choices, and it surely isn't my place to tell people what they can take if they have a good relationship with a doctor who isn't out for a quick buck by Big Pharma.
That Brother-in-Law that was addicted to Oxycodone had late stage MS. He was told by many people to smoke pot, but he didn't want to break the law. Sad, too, because it really looks like pot has lesser side-effects than the legal stuff.
Sorry about your friend. Maybe if you have time, you can post something on a blog somewhere detailing what pushed her (or him?) to even think about drugs as an escape. All the methheads I've met have the same story: families ignore them, they were never good enough, and they had no one who cared enough to catch their downfall before it happened.
These spying operations are both unconstitutional, and a complete waste of taxpayer time and money.
Black marketters (i.e., criminals) have wisened up to the fact that the telephone, and the Internet, is not a safe way to communicate. Many of them are even weary of the keyboard, since tapping into a keyboard with a stroke logger has been used to put some people away.
The drug war amazes me. Powerful interests involved in the profiteering over private medicinal use co-opt the security organizations to battle their competition. And yet few people call for the end to the drug war. The masterminds have long walked away from using technology that is easily spied on. The software, and hardware, that the masterminds use is far and away more powerful than most of the pro-privacy stuff I use. While I'm sure that the security organizations are continuously working to hack into the newer systems, they'll constantly lose ground to that battle.
Even the lesser members of the underground are moving away from open communications. Technology isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than jail. It's a wonder that people have faith in our security forces, who will always be one-step behind. As far as I'm aware, many of the ex-government security technologists are likely working for the other side (it's much more profitable). If I was truly profit-motivated, I'd likely do it myself, considering the amount of money that is available for someone tech savvy who is willing to provide the latest and greatest hardware and software to stay ahead of the security forces. Of course, morally I'm opposed to such work, but not because it is illegal. It just doesn't interest me to be part of the organizations of that sort. I'd rather do things morally, the law be damned.
So what is the end purpose of all this technology? It isn't safety for the citizens. I can only think of one reason, mostly conspiratorial, for the money and time spent: the learn how to use it for the powers that control the security forces. They all have their fingers in the pie, and by using taxpayer money for their research, they get the best of both worlds. Yes, it sounds like NWO-Alex-Jones mumbo-jumbo, but it's the only answer I can think of as to why we continue on with these programs.
Locklin:
That's an exceptional reply, and had I not posted the original one, you'd get one of my rare modpoints. Thanks for that insight.
I've come up with a theoretical replacement for copyright, one that I use myself. Nothing I produce is held under copyright, it is all pseudo-public domain. Because of this, my own income has gone up significantly more than when I "protected" myself through copyright or subscription-only services.
My system is MoralIP, which has two color: green and red. Green means the topic is freely distributable without referencing the original content producer. Red means the content producer gives you the opportunity to distribute it, but to acknowledge the author. There is no financial tie to either subsystems.
How does one enforce MoralIP? Simple. Imagine a Google-Toolbar-like program that utilizes search engine data to perform comparisons to data, be it text or otherwise. Yes, today's servers and workstations may not be able to handle it real-time, but the power will be there. The toolbar could look up entire pages of text, or even just paragraphs. When it finds a hit, it offers the reader a link to the original author. Say you quote a paragraph on your website without attributing another; this toolbar would instantly tell you where it came from.
The original content creator could submit their content to competitive "comparison engines" (like a search engine) for archiving and proof-of-creation. Someone looking to steal your content would have the liability of being called a fraud or a plagiarizer. Of course this gives no financial protection, but it does increase the original creators reputation to the reader. Those who copy without attribution (unless the content is released into the public domain, or through MoralIP) would be called out instantly, digitally, and without overhead.
The system could be paid for by content creators who wish to be archived as the original. The costs would be minimal, due to the comparison engines feeding the same data into ad-revenue run search engines. Google would be a prime candidate to offer a competitive product.
This also has the ability to give content creators a point of reference as to who is quoting them or using "their" content. Just like a trackback link on my blog tells me who is linking to me, the same feature would be possible in a comparison engine network.
I've laid out a nice summary of this theory, which I unfortunately don't have online (yet). Hopefully some young geek in a garage can implement it, and take the profits to use on whatever he or she wants to.
As I said in the comments on the p2p site:
Recorded music will always have a market value of zero, or close to it. Even $1 per song is too high, and this price will fall.
All markets rely on supply and demand: as the supply of an item, prices fall. As the demand for an item goes down, prices fall.
Digital music has a near-infinite supply. Transfering 3MB of data (say, one song), as a cost of less than 1/2 cents from a server. P2P the cost is trivial and far lower.
Yet there IS a way to make money with music: it's called performing and value added items. When you go to work, say flipping burgers, you're paid for the act of working, the labor. The person who invented the burger doesn't charge fees for the act of making a burger. Music is no different. Making music, the act of writing it, is akin to learning how to make a burger. All of us get trained at no profit, and sometimes at great risk of a loss of time. Learning to make music is tricky, and it is artistic, but it should be no different in terms of learning how to make a burger, or learning how to fix a leaky faucet.
Bands will soon rely only on the performance of their music. That's what differentiates one band from another: their ability to entertain. And entertainment has GREAT value. There are many ways for bands to make money entertaining. You can play live. Maybe sell your CDs and include 1 ticket to a live concert. Or sell a CD, and include 5 tickets to an online performance.
Making money doesn't end there. How about selling CDs and offering CD purchasers the chance to win an hour of lessons in how to play their favorite song? Oh wait, the government prevents bands from offering contests in exchange for buying an item. It's the law that harms the musician.
You can make money selling autographed albums, or selling DVDs or CDs of the actual concert people attended. The cost to record a concert, and burn 50 CDs in 10 minutes before people leave, is trivial.
Don't complain about the zero value of recorded music -- its a market process that can't be worked around. Instead, find ways to MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR NEW AND ONGOING LABORS. Just like the burger flipper or the faucet-leak fixer.
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I own a small music production and marketing business, and I help quite a few local bands make money. How do we do it? We book them shows non-stop. We target cities in the middle of nowhere, visit there once, build a street team, and then go back over and over and over. We sell awesome and rare silkscreened posters that cost us $0.15 each but sell for $5, $10 with an autograph. We sell limited edition LPs (yes, records) and move to sell them out faster than we get them in.
I designed a system that records a concert (music feed from the board, two cameras without cameramen) and burns DVDs of the show within 15 minutes of the end of the show. Those DVDs can be given away, or sold for a small price. Sell 5 DVDs for $5 and let people in the town give them to friends (or better yet, give them away freely). This generates more buzz for future shows.
A band is no different than a plumber, a burger-flipper, or an architect. We all learn how to produce new labor on our own time and dime, and then we use that learning to generate income by working. Recorded music is marketing, and marketing has a cost, rarely a profit. You market yourself to get people to pay for your future labor, not your past.
I see a future in my small market to generate millions, but not online, and not with the recorded music. Instead, we're talking about packing shows in Bertrand, Nebraska and DeKalb, Illinois, where there are thousands of teenagers and young adults who are seriously bored out of their minds sitting on the web all day long. They want, and pay for, good bands to come out and charge their lives with loud and fun music. Don't visit a town once, visit it 6 times a year. A tour van costs $15,000, and the gas is $100 or so a show. Pack a venue with 300 young adults paying $6 each, sell $1000 in completely
I've seen this often in real life, going back as far as 21 years ago.
Personally, I'm a risk-taker, but not a long term responsible individual. My failures in business or projects have generally come from a lack of finding responsible people who can carry the long term needs after the risk I take starts earnings its rewards. I ran a succssful BBS 2 decades ago, and I saw many failures due to there being a risk taker who took off, leaving the responsible ones with no "leader."
I think the same is true in social groups, although maybe it isn't the factor of having a risk-taker, but having a natural leader who others look to for support even if it is purely "spiritual" in nature.
I run a not-for-profit that works with hundreds of churches, and I see the same thing. The leader leaves, retires, dies, whatever: the church falls apart. Recently a large client of mine went under after 25 years of being in business. The boss left, leaving his responsible managers but no leader/risk-taker.
There's nothing to see here. These are proven truths over millenia that have surfaced in every area of life: politics, businesses, faiths, even families. If there isn't a new leader to move the group in a direction away from complacency, the group will fail. Sometimes a responsible individual finds a natural tendency to lead/take new risks in new directions, but I'm not sure its a matter of nurturing those skills. I do believe firmly that there is a natural propensity to either being responsible, or being risky. A very rare few have both talents, although I personally have never met anyone like that. It's either one or the other, generally.
The majority, though, seem to have neither. They want to follow in hopes that some day they will lead, but in the end they're driven to neither. They follow long enough until it is obvious that they'll never lead (because they don't push to become an obvious leader/risk-taker), so they fall away from the project. In this case, though, I don't see many failures, because a natural leader has a tendency to attract others to the project. When that risk taker gets bored, runs out of money, or gets caught up in something else, the project fails.
Every project I've worked on that has failed has been my fault, and no one else's. Usually it boiled down to getting bored, but sometimes it was pure irresponsibility. Sometimes it was a lack of trusting another person to take over for me, at which point I put too much burden on the future leader, and they left. Life lessons.
The employees don't profit as the company does, but it's more comfortable to be an employee in a company that's doing well.
We generally won't work for businesses that don't offer a decent year-end bonus or profit-sharing, as our own company does. I am adamant about not supporting bad companies, as they tend not to last or they tend to be the slowest to pay. The companies that treat employees well treat consultants well, too.
So, do you try to educate the CEOs to do things halfway intelligently? To recognize that some technical people understand the technical issues better than they do? To realize that overly stringent policies can hurt productivity? Heck, to realize that people who complain are not necessarily crybabies, and that people who say such-and-such is bad for productivity are not just looking for excuses?
Absolutely. My key role (as CEO myself) is to discuss efficiency versus productivity with other owners and top managers. You'd be surprised at how many MBAs have no clue as to the proper balance of efficiency versus productivity. We also do handle complaints for employees to managers at some offices, generally in an anonymous fashion, because there ARE companies that don't handle internal complaints well. We just write it in our quarterly recommendations and try to find a good solution that can make the employee happy, while not harming the company's goals and bottom line figures. That's also a good reason to use a consulting company -- we can see much more of the operational mistakes than an in-house guy can.
Anyway, if you encourage CEOs to trust their technical staff to know their stuff (as opposed to trust them to make business decisions, which they typically are not qualified for), and to make it easier for the average guy to get his or her job done, you aren't evil.
I agree, and so do most of the users we serve (now, at least). But I do feel we have an aggressive streak -- the information we offer to our customres (managers and owners) can be VERY judgmental on bad employees. I know that our figures and information has been used to can people in the past, and not over personal grudges but over a lack of ability. Of course we're the fall guy when it comes to users not liking us because someone they liked was canned, but we're there to make the company profitable and the GOOD employees happy -- the bad employees are useless, and unprofitable companies means no future employees, and no check for us.
Sorry? Do you mean that in the sense of not the boss' nephew, or not having any IT department period?
No IT period. You'd be amazed at how many large companies have discovered that in-house IT guys can be VERY hit or miss. By using consultants, they can quickly fire a company who is not living up to requirements. In-house staff can be much more difficult to nuke, especially if the staff doesn't follow any sort of documentation and logging standard.
Out of curiousity, how can you tell whether or not a voice mail requires a response, or if perhaps the recipient ran into the sender in the hall and resolved the issue in person?
We don't judge that. Our charts offer the following information:
1. Average voice mails left per day
2. Average incoming phone calls per day
3. Company average voice mails left per day per employee
4. Company average phone calls per day per employee
5. Average time before listening to voice mails
6. Average number of voicemails in queue unread
#5 and #6, compared to #1 and #2, give a very good overview as to whether or not the employee properly handles missed calls, or any calls. Someone who gets 2 calls per day on average, and has an average of 1.4 voice mails per day is probably NOT answering the phone. Maybe those calls should be patched through by reception to someone else. If that same person has a #5 value of 32 hours, you know they're not attending to the needs of customers and suppliers.
Let's say that another person gets 40 callers per day, and 26 voice mails, but their #5 average is 3 hours. They get MANY more calls, but handle them much quicker, or at least listen to them.
Again, the numbers aren't weighted well, but it is an important figure to review with owners.
We specifically do NOT sell hardware directly any longer, primarily due to questions over how to support hardware we sell (is it warranty? does it meet spec? what if it fails, do we eat the time to ship to manufacturer?). We also stopped selling hardware due to the rampant amount of kickbacks from surprisingly large companies. I don't want to be part of that fiasco when it finally blows up.
Our contracts state that all time spent on the job is to be billed at the normal rate. We do warranty any work done for a period of 2 weeks, meaning if something blows up after we fix it, we'll fix it again at no cost.
When it comes to setting up a machine properly, that is billed at the contracted normal rate, of course. If an end user realizes that their machine is NOT up to snuff, it's just a service ticket (and users can call my staff directly on their cell phone). Based on the priority of need, our staff will go out and fix it within 2-4 hours.
Since most of our clients are contractors (building, architecture, etc), most of their workstations and notebooks within the office or in the field are fairly identical. We also don't generally handle, or even recommend, locking down PCs too much since most employees are aware already of our "don't touch it" policy. If they NEED to install software or hardware themselves, of course they are free to, but if they blow something up it's a service call. After a few explosions due to self-installing, they stop.
Since our turn-around time is very fast, much faster than most in our particular industry, the downtime is rarely a concern. In the past 4 months almost all our service calls were handled on-site within 1 hour of the call. In dire emergencies, if we can VNC in, we can fix it without the delay, and most of the staff have 3G broadband access from their notebooks, so they can take time out of their current project/job to deal with the emergencies.
Thankfully, most of the systems we work on are hardy enough that we don't deal with many emergencies. That's usually a selling factor for us when we look for new customers (we're not at the moment): we refer new pitches to previous customers who know to promote our very low emergency-billing. If it works, don't mess with it. If it breaks, it's usually a hardware failure or just a reboot away. I haven't seen to many other situations that would require emergency service, short of the "I deleted this file I didn't save on the server" emergencies, which we have desktop software that generally protects against.
Our company would be viewed as evil by some in the IT or the consulting industry. We sell ourselves as "the CEO's consultant." We openly admit that we're working to better the interests of the person in charge of the company, or the ownership, and not necessarily end users. We believe that by making a company more efficient, the employees will profit as the company does. Our 10 year anniversary is this week, and our world has changed greatly in terms of how we're viewed by the "common" employee.
First of all, if we have bad users, we're the first to highlight them in our quarterly and yearly billing breakdowns. The users who are surly, obnoxious, and complain the most are usually the ones who get the biggest chunk of the maintenance budget. Their name is usually at the top, and each user is also compared to the company average. Many CEOs and owners love our breakdowns, and look forward to them each quarter.
Secondly, the hard workers in an organization also appreciate our reports, which we request to be open if the company's policy allows it (about half do). They know who the jerks and deadbeats (Finger-pointer and Mr. Entitlement) are, and they're happy to be "below average" in terms of company burden. It is also those users/employees who like us the most because we give them extra-special attention when they really do have emergencies. The guy who cries wolf all the time is still served well, but most quickly learn that they'll be singled out at their next review -- "Why do you need so much support?"
The finger-pointer loses power under this system. When it is obvious that the finger should point to them (and that's what the report clearly shows) they have little in the way of demanding a change in consultant or operations. Most finger-pointers we've dealt with have been the first to leave or be fired, based on the clarity that we show to the owners to see who is bringing down efficiency. Since we've taken over some telephone system operations, we also generate a report that shows the delay in responding to voice mails (a skewed report in some ways, because we don't use a weight-system for people who get way more voice mails than average), and it's usually the finger pointer and Mr. Entitlement who ignore the voice mails significantly more than average.
The Whiz-Kid is usually a good person to have for us, as we are open to changes in our system. If the Whiz-Kid gives us a recommendation, we'll include it in our summary of recommendations, and give them the credit. If that recommendation is accepted, and it works, more power to the Whiz-Kid, maybe he should go off on his own and consult. If the recommendation fails, it's also his responsibility. But here's the good part: the Whiz-Kid doesn't have the time to take over our work, so it's not competition for us. Owners should know if they have a talented worker, but they should also be aware that the talented worker should do what his job description says he should do, or he should be moved to a different department. About 20% of our customers have attempted to hire in-house staff, but their costs go up, not down, and the service seems to get worse. Currently, we work with no business with an in-house IT guy (even one customer who generates over $100m a year in income).
The Know-It-All is not a problem for us, because every invoice we produce references industry recommendations or knowledge base articles as to why we do it. If the Know-It-All calls us out in a meeting (or otherwise), all we have to do is say "Maybe we missed something, can you point us to two industry experts who recommend that action?" So far, maybe 5% of Know-It-All complaints have led us to making changes, but 95% of them fail miserably. And no, slashdot is not a great place to grab links to recommendations, because it also usually has replies from other "experts" who recommend against the same idea.
The Know-Nothing is our worst user, and maybe the only bad one. Because some WANT to know more, but don't have the aptitude, it seems part
Sadly enough, all the games from the C64 are still under copyright (because of the law, not because of common sense), so if you go to download some old stuff, it's piracy. Ridiculous.
...but I need a power source. I usually travel with my "lite" laptop, and a spare battery, but even that's not always enough. Some of my flights (ORD->BOM) last nearly 20 hours (with 1 stop, where I could theoretically recharge somewhere).
I don't mind paying upwards of $40 for a flight for web access, actually, but I'd assume few others would. Speed/latency isn't an issue, but I do wonder how well it would work over large bodies of water.
That IS an intriguing response, and one I've heard before but never spent time answering. I'll give it some thought.
I actually do hang out with one of my UPS drivers regularly at a local saloon, and he's told me that he would have no problem at all delivering first class mail to customers he alreadys serves (duh). We receive a daily UPS and FedEx pickup, as do hundreds of my customers. For those customers, the cost to UPS is negligible in terms of warehouse-to-end costs. Sorting would introduce a cost, but UPS and FedEx have significantly better sorting equipment than the postal service does (and I know this from someone who quit USPS and moved to UPS).
I'm not saying that EVERYONE would use it, but the added advantage of the competition would bring prices down for urban areas almost immediately, and allow the companies to look into competing in suburban and exurban areas. The priority would be the competitive pressures on the USPS to do better, faster, cheaper than currently.
All our shipments are done faster through FedEx or UPS than USPS. Both companies have provided me with thermal printers, and our software allows us to look up an address, weigh a package, and print the tag in seconds. I can do a batch of 20 shipments in just a few minutes. USPS has done better by allowing third party stamp sellers (which we now use when we have to use USPS), so they have made some positive changes.
Would UPS deliver at 41 cents per letter? I'm doubtful, but we also don't really know. Our house gets, on average, about 15 pieces of mail a day. Based on weight (I just weighed my mail from today), we're talking about a overall cost of about $11.15 to the companies sending the mail. Because UPS and FedEx would work on the total grossdelivery cost (not the individual net sending cost), I would believe that $11.15 is more than enough for them to sort and deliver letters to me daily. On my slowest days we receive one ground shipment that costs the shipper $6.00 or so. $11.15 is more gross income, but more work, so I'm sure they make more on the $6 delivery than on 15 deliveries totaling $11.15, but again, it depends on if their market forecasts can see a profit.
I'd think they could. The current system of USPS is huge, but I see new UPS Stores and FedEx Kinkos stores opening up regularly all around me. That means that they've built a decent infrastructure, and can likely cover many suburban areas already (my town is small, and I believe we have 20 FedEx depots of various sorts within a 20 minute drive of me).
If we leave people alone, we don't have to worry about bomb proof vests.
I see tremendous opportunity in a peaceful market for this product: paintball vests, snowboarding and motorcycling clothing, maybe even using it in some kind of car bumper to reduce damage or absorb impact, especially if it could expand sideways during a collision.
I'd also like a blanket so when my cat goes psycho and jumps on the bed, she's repelled with great force.