It seems to me that the price of a DVD is not set by the intrinsic value of the product, but the economics of the markets. I mean it used to be a movie cost $50 or more retail. It was not that the movie was worth that much. After all, a movie is a stale product. My the time it is released to home video it has been in the theater, pay TV, free TV, and god knows where else. The vlaue to the consumer is merely wanting a good copy of it to watch when one wants.
I think video rental changed that by showing that alot of people would buy a video if it were sold at a lower price, and the studios would reap the profit instead of the people who rented the video. In many ways the video rentals places were stealing money from the studios in the same want online piracy is, and video became priced to compete with that grey area of acquisition.
Now, when we got DVDs the studios got greedy. They jacked the price, but that was somewhat defesible becuase of the added value. What they did do is put unskippable ads, warning, etc that made the DVD less valuable. In most cases, one cannot just put a DVD in and have it play. In addition, if one just wants a movie, it can't be had. The consumer is forced to pay for the extra content. And if the consumer wants to keep the original for backup and watch a compressed version in a more convinent format, for instant putting an entire series of one DVD, that cannot be easily done.
So the economics is this. People who want the DVD product tend to pay for it. People who merely want to watch the film once tend to rent it. People who do not want the DVD product, but want the film, are just out of luck. There is simply no legal way to aquire the film without the baggage.
And so we back to the dawn of video rental. There is no legal way to acquire the product, but there are many grey areas in which the product can be aquired. So the studios are either going to ignore this demand and perhpas not maximize profit, or find a way to tap at least some of the sales. There are limits. DVD DRM is not going away, so person who do not want to deal with 10 DVD for a season are still going to download, but a $1-5 basic edition goes a long way to satisifying the basic market.
The thing is that people who have much more than enough tend to be delusional about those who don't. The WSJ is a classic example. They do not have ads for people looking for a home. They have ads for people looking for yet another vacation home, with prices starting in the low millions.
Very few of the have nots can even afford to buy the clubs and balls, much less the green fees, necesary for a good game of golf. Therefore, the have not, in the classic sense, are not even an issue. What we are talking about here is the fact that the comfortably wealthy middle class, the have nots in the sense that they perhaps only have a second home, cannot afford these things. And, when you get done to it, in the US we are increasingly divided into the working class, with little expendable income, the wealthy middle class, and the insanely rich upper class. Only the later two matter in terms of political and economic power. Everyone in the former shops at Wal*Mart and votes along religious lines.
There has to be a path to reward companies and individuals who innovate and produce new products, or real wealth while not rewarding jerks who figure out how to charge us extra for something that either used to be free, or that we never needed.
I think your assumption may be less than perfect and your language unclear.
If we start at the end, there is nothing wrong if charging for something that used to be free or we never needed. This is the basis of any economy. For example, one may have never considered the need for a king, but when the king comes a knocking, one needs to pay the dues. In modern terms, it is simply a matter of adding value. This might be as simple as bottling city water so that consumers can get cold fresh water instead of just our fo the water fountain. My favorite is that one now buys prefab Rice crispy treats. I mean how lazy can be that they cannot spend 15 minutes and 1/10th the cost making a batch of these things. For another example, how about selling land that your grandparents got for free?
Then there is the issue of 'real wealth'. If you mean cash or cash equivelents, then I must respectfully disagree. There is nothing less important to the long term economy than the accumulation of paper wealth. Spain of the 19th century learned this. The only real wealth is the technolgoy of a culture. This allows the culture to grow and prosper even after the easy money goes away. I mean look at the US today. We have a lot of people who use to make good money, but because these people never had any real wealth, just money, they are totaly screwed when the factory shuts down or the mall closes.
What is wrong is that we are patenting the basics of wealth, the technology and ideas, instead of the physical manisfestations of those ideas. Patents are supposed to be for things that are real. This allows for the free growth of wealth because then others can build equally real things that are similiar but different from the patented thing. This is the basic of the patent system. In exchange for a period of exclusive right, you expose the technology so that others may build upon it and increase the wealth. By patenting this that are not real, we are back to valueing monies over wealth.
circa 1985 with MS Excel. It was spreadsheet unlike anything we ever saw. 3D calculations, macros, the whole shebang. I used every major spreadsheet at the time, and it was the best.
circa 1995 with MS Windows NT. It was a real OS that let go the toys to support perfomance. My whole problem with MS Windows is that it is a toy trying to be a real boy. For a while, with NT, it was no longer a toy.
we should have seen something circa 2005. I suppose it was supposed to be Vista nee Longhorn fullfilling the 15 year dream of the Humane Interface. Not only it is 3 years late, but everything revolutionary has been stripped out. I suspect Apple will have Spotlight perfected and Leopard released before MS releases the abridged version of Longhorn.
Which is exactly why I kept Office 97/95 as long as I could, and then switched to OO.org.
The thing with MS is they cycle between good interface and bad interface. My strategy these 20 years has been to, as much as possible, only update when the reviews say 'MS is back to usable menus". Unfortanately, this time it took them so long, and the usable version became so outdated, that it just became simpler to switch to another vendor.
For firms that have to switch with every version, I can appreciate the anticipation that they might now be free of the torture.
MS is popular because it caters to the large enterprise clients, just like IBM did. And just like IBM, this focus on large enterprise means that the needs of the small customer are often not served. It is one thing to for the upper management to tell middle management to tell the worker bees that they must work with crap, but quite another for a small firm to do the same. And the home user will be satisfied as he or she basically gets all the MS for free, but how many are going to continue to shell out money when there are plausible alternatives?
So why does the host file have to live in userland, or why can't the computer prompt for the user to verify identiy when certain dangerous operations are about to occur.
By MS doing this Host file management, they are admitting that most users don't use or know the host files, and the most probable reason for host file change, expecailly as it relates to MS, is an attack.
I should, in my user account have a wide variety of leeway. If I mess up, I or my qualified agent should be able to go to an admin account and troubleshoot. This measn that as long as I am running XP as a user, that should not mess up the admin host file.
When I think about this it seems that this seem like guns for airline pilots. We really don't want guns on board an aircraft. The proper fix is to make the cockpit an extremely secure location so that pilots can do thier job, which is not battle terrorists, but fly the plane. It has been shown that as long as a pilot is in control, and given certain leeway, the pilot has a good chance of halting dangerous activity with minimal danger. But simply securing the cockpit is not sexy enough and does not satisfy the ulterior motvies, so we find this other silly thing that does not help much, but does promote secondary goals.
Netscape did drop the ball. However, there were other things going on. First, MS transformed the game from producing a web browser to producing a programmable application front end. Now, there was no problem with this, and the technology was limited, but what happened was that many started writing web pages as if they applications that would run on windows in IE instead of web content that would run on any complient browser. Sometimes this was done just for cosmetic effect. The big guys, like Yaho, never made this mistake.
Second, MS created an excessively forgiving browser. This allowed management to promote the creation of malformed content that would still work. To get anything to run a on a real browser would have taken more money, and why budget the money when the market leaders has the browser that everyone is going to use anyway?
So we are in a situation today where short sighted management has pages that will only run on IE. For intranets in which the employees are going to always use company resources, or subscription services, this is not really a problem. However, way too often I see managment created employee resources, resources that employees are expected to access from anywhere and often critical to the job, only run in IE. This quite frankly is level of ineffeciency that should not be tolerated. It is like some stuff I saw early on where the order would be written in hand, then entered into the computer, then manually logged into a order book by hand because no one in management would accpet a summary print.
I did business development all through the 80's, my first browsser was Mosaic, and to this day never had to use IE except for a few malformed intranet pages. IE is a good browser, and the only issue is that persons that know no better, often developers that are as unsophisticated as the average user, design to it as a reference platform. Netscape lost the market, and it was theirs to lose. However, Netscapes mistakes did not lead to the rise of IE. Leveraging of a monopoly did.
These guys have been making the TV and radio rounds for a couple weeks. They routinely admit two things. First, that the technology is not ready, mostly due to the enviromental degradation issue. Second, light bulbs are a commodity item and no one wants to pay money for replacement bulbs.
Now to address your concerns. The flourescent has a problem becuase it reguires a special setup, initially costs signficantly more, and only pays off through energy savings. I have had flourescents around since I was a kid because my father understood the costs savings.
The current success of flourescents has only been partially due to lower costs. It also has to do with with higher energy costs and new compact designs that will fit into existing incadescent forms.
Ultimately the success if these new bulbs will depend on the incorpoartion of the lighting into new houses and offices. We might also expect some offices to be retrofitted due to the saving on cooling costs and maintaniance.
To recap, flourescents have not been succesful because they have gotten a bad rap and people do not seem to care if they are wasting 95% of the energy to heat and the ventilation needed to remove that heat. It is just like CRTs. Sure they provide better game rendering, and sometimes better color, but it one is not playing games or doing exact color stuff, it is really worth the use of extra energy?
One thing that NASA is really good at is producing and promoting pretty pictures, as in the Astronomy Picture of the Day"
Now, some would regard this outreach work as a waste of money, but it ignores the fact that exploration and research requires trained motivated persons, person who have been exposed to the subject since childhood. Persons who have seen exploration and research as an exciting and compelling profession. This means making the subject accesible to average children and thier parents.
NASA used to be much better at this. There was a time when one could get a much closer unsanitized look at the operations. The profit motive and corruption has limited those opportunities, and now visitors are limited to Theme Park representation of the Space Admninistration, involving misrepresentation of science and 20 year old movies.
In spite of all this, I stil give NASA more points for not forcing a click wrap license before every picture.
Today MS admitted that its market share was largely due to piracy. Rather than MS Windows being the best value for the money, it is the best widely distributed and supported free OS. A such, the MS will be adopting a new strategy in which the OS will be given away, and only support contracts and cosmetic add ons will be sold. A senior MS official was quoted as saying "Consumer have always realized that MS Windows had no real financial value, and now MS itself has come to the same conclusions. The technology in MS Windows is 20 years old, of no innovative consequence. We will focus of serving bussiness customers and leveraging the MS Office franchise to grow the company"
What is more if China begins to stadardize on OSS solutions, and open standards, then the US is at a disavantage when trading with China, as MS standards are often incompatible. [China loans us billions of dollars a month so we can continue to buy stuff from them]
It think this is why MS is pushing virtualization. IF MS Windows cannot be the OS of choice, it can at least be the OS that is run on servers that run the OS of choice.
If you run GNU tools on the mac side, download and install cygwin. This will allow some common apps on both platforms. I also run Emacs and OO.org on both my machines. I use iDisk with the MS Windows iDisk utility so i can get to things from the MS Windows machine.
If you are into development, the MS development tools are pretty nice. Most people can mock up a GUI in no time. It is fun to make pretty pictures. In particular, Visual FoxPro is still a very good tool to rapidly create small and midsize databases, complete with GUI and reporting tools. MS, unfortunately, made it Windows only several years ago, and jacked up the price so that the POS Access would be a viable product.
As most say, the big thing Windows has is games. There are also a few verticle market applications that are mostly available for Windows.
If it is about the verfing the sender, then it is a nobel goal. Even though banks do not do the sort of stupid things they used to do, the ability to spoff the URL location bar and universal font sets still allow the motivated phisher to fool the unwary customer.
So there is clearly a need for someone to help the average user discriminate between legitimate and nefarious email. The need could result in a significant market opportunity if an ISP developed appropriate technology and backed up the technology with a meaningful guarantee. People will pay for security, even shallow security.
I also believe this will reduce email that maight be strictly catagorized as spam. Not the broad definition of unsolicited email that has resulting in no meaningful agreement on how to deal with the problem, but email that has a misleading subject, spoofed headers, clearly obtuse text content meant to disguise the HTML rendered message, and links to shady websites. If the ISP allowed users to set up a list of safe addresses, provided the level of protection that the USPS service does for unsolicited mail, and provided a good customer crisis line, that would provide a big competitive advantage. If, however it is just charging spamers for email while the user dangles on the vine, that it is quite useless.
Except in the case of truly irrational people, for the purpose of killing people, history tells us that the simplest tool will be used, and complexity is only introduced to minimize risk. For example, any crazy can go into a crowded place and kill several people prior to succumbing to the same fate. Likewise, a person may plant a conventional bomb and do significant damage. Certainly we have seen few cases where 'mass destruction' is caused by the use of biological agent by non-governmental foces. Even the Anthrax in the mail scare caused no more damagae than the unibomber, and that anthrax may have been top grade US governement.
So here is the rub. One not only has to have the equipment and expertise to create the biowepon. One also needs a way to infect people in lethal doses. And, to begin with, one needs to believe the bioagent will be more effecient than conventional weapons. Look at it this way. The allies probably did more damage in Dresden using conventional weapons that in Japan using nukes. However, the Japan attack was much more effecient, posed almost no risk to the Allies, had no real defense, and was not limited by the logistics of flying many planes. For a bioagent to be preferable, it must be like a nuke. If Bush is to believed the Iraqis have a bunch of biological agents, yet we see bombs are used more. Perhpas the Iragis to have WMDs, and bombs are just so much more effecient and dramatic. I mean proving to the US forces that defending against IEDs is hopeless to so mouch more dramatic than simply killing everyone in the green zone with lead poisoning, for instance.
This seems like another fear mongering article planted to create an impression that certain not-so-dangerous things are critical, so that the complex really dangerous things can be ignored. It just shows a true lack of imagination. I tink in most cases the villians just want the drama. That is why they blow up the building after it is evacated, instead of blowing up the location to which the people are evacuated to.
Any OS released today should run adequately well on any decent machine released in the last 3-5 years. This does not mean that one should be able to have a movie running in the background, mail check every few minutes, and a browser running the foreground, But the OS an application or two should be usable
If we take about the conditions 20 years ago, then we must acknoledge that the hardware was very slow. In many cases the microcomputer was running an OS,a single application, and limited if non-existant network activity. Even with the reletively limited demand on resources, the machines were generally slower to respond and process that they are today. This was especially true for MS Word and Excel.
So we were hungry for resources. The technology was catching up with demand, and a new computer every couple years, or every year, and new OS and Apps to use the speed were not out of line. Running on a machine even a few years old was not reasonable because such a machine was slow. But then resources began to catch up. It then became a question of what can we think of to use the extra cycles? How many different applications can we run? How many resources can we waste to continue regular upgrades?
The reality is that one should be able to design a computer use 3 years old technology that will runany reasonalbe current and near future OS. If it is not possible, then the OS is not reasonable. It is just not neccesary to be that much in front of the curve anymore. I would that Linux would be such an OS, if it was propery configured. Likewise, a proper office app and movie viewer and picture viewer and the like should run well, though perhaps only one at the time. The key here is to manage expectation. A $100 laptop, like the $500 mac mini, or a 20K SUV, or $50 speakers, are only going to produce adequate performance. Most people will deal with the cheap car, or cheap stove, or cheap laundry detergent, simple because they are cheap, even if the performance is not up to some arbitrarily high standards.
He could have still been famous. How many starlets have their 'personal videos' posted on the net, collect from a law suit, and still use the publicity?
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
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I think some Apple users are excited because there has been no way to run a dangerous OS in a sandbox since MS bought VPC. There are a few applications that I would like to run on Windows, but I have never bothered to buy a new VPC for OS X, plus I would probably have to upgrade from NT.
I don't want to dual boot. I want MS windows on a glob that can be backed up and easily restored when infected. I would be ok with a *nix on a dual boot, but would be nicer just to run that in the background.
The thing is that behemoth ineffecient corporations always claim that it is impossible to deliver goods and services for less than they are willing to charge. In a way they are right. For the corporation, with outrageous overhead, thousands of mid level managers, hundreds of accountants paid well to fabricate a loss while meetting wall street expectations, not to mention free trips for congressmen to French Polynesia, one has to charge a premium. It was this way with IBM, and now with MS and Intel. Even Sun has managed to get a Sparc desktop down to the $1.3K range.
Who know what an effecient firm, using commodity parts, can do with a laptop. I mean Apple, which sells in relitively small quantities, and has to pay premium for parts and engineering, can create laptops that sell for under 1K to the education market, yet Dell which gets the best price of everything, can use the cheapest part for the entry machines, and probably end up getting money from MS when all is said and done, can only knock 25% off that cost for a similiarly equipped machine, and still needs to play games with rebates to create the impresion that it has respectible sales?
These ineffecient dinosaurs are in for a rude awakening if even the $200 laptop comes about. Are people really going to pay 25% of the cost of the machines for the OS? I bet if the MS machine is $200 and the BSD machine is $150, the BSD will begin to quickly gain marketshare.
OK, so a minidisc is only a few Euros, or $5 for 1 gig. This is several times the cost per gig of a DVD, and significantly more that a CDRW. A minidisk player is at least $200, while a CD player can be had for $20. If the CD player breaks, who cares, buy another for $20 If a CD gets damaged, who cares, burn another for $.25.
As far as durability, I have dropped my iPod anumber of times. The iPod costs less than a Minidisk player and has the capacity of multiple disks, without the hassel of carrying extra disks around. My iPod still seems to work fine.
I also wonder how quickly on can record a minidisk. Reading a CD and burning a new one, or copying to the iPod over firewire. can happen in a matter of minutes. Does the mini disk do an analog record in real time, or a digital transfer?
Ultimately Sony wanted a protected format that it could sell content and allow a limited amount of copying. It wanted to control the format, and control access. Apple beat sony at it's own game by allowing MP3s from the begining and not worrying about the copying. For instance, a one gig Shuffle might only hold a single disc of songs, but it is easy to frequently change the songs, it is easy to recharge, and it is a significantly easier to carry around. Back when Creative was the best, those players were nicer than anything sony had. One would sooner buy a CD player than a minidisc.
So, as has been it's wont for 15 years, Sony makes cute gadgets, but has become obsesed with protecting content rather than serving the consumer. The walkman would have been dead if it required a special unit to copy, or if it had not allowed a generation to pirate vinyl to tape.
Especially the gambling thing. We seem to be increasingly turning to sin taxes, not as a means to make it more expinsive to 'sin', but as a means to facilitate the behavior that many find unethical. The fact that many high and mighty alleged christian condone this behavior remind me of a person who got angry at the moneychangers in the temple.
One example of this is the Texas State lottery, which exist under the guise of increasing funding to education. Of course funding for education, as a percentage of the Texas budget, has fallen considerable over the past 15 years even as lottery revenue has grown. So what is the new proposal? Well a official named Strayhorn want gambling machines. Now this is the lady that attempted to start the process of a state religion for Texas by attempting to rescind the tax exempt status of a church, the denomination of which has existed from the birth of the United States and in many ways reflects the values of our founding fathers, as many of these men had input in it's creation. Combine this with the fact that the demonination has no profit motive, unlike the megachurches that infest Texas, and one wonders if Strayhorn is primarily concerned with well being of the average Texan or the a personal campaign of religious zelotry in which those that disagree with her liberal view of gambling are ignored.
To be clear I am not concerned if people gamble or not. I do not see how we can justify lottery machines in an time when we no longer have cig machines. How can one say that we can enforce the 18+ limit on tickets any more that cigs? I am not sure that having gambling machines in every corner is a net benifit. Like illegal drugs it take money to feed the habit. But, at the end of the day, in a capatilist conservative country like ours, built on a the standards of minimal government and private enterprise, I suppose the government is in the best position to effecintly run a gambling bussiness.
Wow, a new email reader. The ability to manage multiple accounts has never existed before, and integration with a product that does not yet even exist! And how did they manage to read through the standards to interface with a standards complient service like Google Mail. What great innovation will MS come up with next, a CLI with predictive typing?
With all the email clients out there, one must ponder why MS would create a new product instead of just using Outlook Express. One must also wonder how MS will replace the revenue of allowing users to not user to skip the ads when reading mail.
It is possible that they are just desperate to win back a portion of the market that they still have not understood. MS has missed the Intenet again by not updating IE, and IE has lost some trust. Windows live is going to require a client, and it may be that IE is not going to be that client. it might be that they are thinking of seperating the application interface from the browser. This would be a good thing.
OTOH, it could be that this innovative email client simply shifts the ads from the browser to the client, just like Eudora does. The client could also be some form of spyware.
Why we do know is that MS does not give away product except to gain a share in a long negleted marketspace. We also not that MS says it wil unbundle IE. What all these things mean will only become clear as Vista is released.
But not greater than the access of election officials. Election material should be clearly tamper resistant and evident, and if the machine is compromised, should fail to function.
The problem is this. In paper voting I am given a ballot to mark, and then put it in a locked box. If all is set up correctly, the lock can only be opened with many people watching, and it will be evident if the lock has been opened or changed.
What Diebold appears to be saying, and what makes the snide comments of the poster somewhat appropriate, is that these machines can be tampered with and the only way to detect it is by bringing in a specialist to spend huge amounts of time analyzing the system.
In fact, if the system were secure, any tampering should be immidiately evident to any reasonable person looking at it. Any changes in code should be immidiately visible, at least though a permanant change log. Any changes in hardware should equally be immidiately apparrent. Diebold is not only saying the machines are not secure, but there is no adaquate audit trail to prove that the machines have been properly used.
This is the client/server versus desktop argument. Is it better to have a central server that can be easily maintained, or a distributed system. As we have seen, a distributed system can be cheaper because the reliability of the compenent can be orders of magnitude less reliable than a server, and reliability often increase price non linearly.
In addition, we do not always have sufficient runs of network cables. This means that we may be talking about a wireless solution, which will be fine for audio, but is not yet enough for good video.
In the end, we will probably see that a central solution is significantly more expensive than a distributed solution, without the advantages of reliability and power.
It seems these two problems have to do with perspecitve. Is the.xxx TLD is a ghetto in which we force any objectionable content to reside, or an equal area that those who choose to produce content that some might find objectionable have the option of utlizing?
If the purpose is the later the benifit could be significant to all parties. The.xxx TLD can easily be filtered. Those that reside in the.xxx TLD will be less likely to be accused of targeting the content to unsuitable audiences. Those who operate in this TLD will also likely have a competative advantage to those who do not, at least in term of the adult paying customer.
If the purpose is the former the results are as doomed as the effect of most filtering software. Ponography, pretty much by defnintion, is content that has little other purpose than to titilate. There is enough of such clear cut content that we don't realy need to waste time with content that has some educational or artistic merit. Of couse many people do, and such actions play directly into the hands of those that wish to market clear ponography to person who do not yet have the context to understand it.
So, an enyclopaedia really does not need to be in.xxx. Any educated person has read such a book since they started reading, and has seen the naked people and diagrams in it. Likewise any intellegent kid has looked up the naughty words in the dictionary. In the area of questionable material, I have seen many a pre teen improve reading skills through the "romance" novel and questionable magazines are also occasionally read, and satisfy a curiousity in a arguable appropriate manner. For example Hustler and the current incarnation of playboy might in the.xxx, but Maxim and Cosmo are arguable ok.
In any case, it is best to let this a decision left to the content provider. If it is clear that.xxx provides some protection to the provider, then many will move. It is like this. In the US strip clubs and bars are often not allowed near schools and churches, but there are often small stores that sell alcohol and naughty magazines. The place that is ponographic is forbidden, while the place with other value is allowed.
In the end we must ask how much time has been wasted in the court system and law enforcement prosecuting such cases as Ulyses and Howl and the like. In this day when we are giving up rights left and right in a frightened fit of what the bogeyman might do, is it really important to continute to waste such time on such a trivial matter? I mean let the.xxx domain happen. Let the ponographers that choose to be there go there. Let everyone else stay where they are, and, in either case, let the current laws prevail. Just don't get obsessed with a nipple while while the next bomber's roomate is on hold with trying to warn the FBI.
There is no difference. In most modern spyware you are either explicitely or implicitely agreeing to have you movements tracked, either by clicking or using a product that is funded by the spyware.
The disclosures for a supermarket card are no less broad or troublesome than spyware. In both cases the product is forced on you, and if you don't agree, the product is further forced on you though annoying popups or cashiers.
Finaly, not all spyware comes with no return. Spyware may come as part of a software package that is presented as useful. Likewise the supermarkets present the card as a discount card, but in reality they are just jacking up the prices as a punishment for customers that do not have the card.
I am fortunate as I do not need to use the software that has spyware attached. Likewise, I live a city big enough where I have retailers that will give me a good price without the use of tacking card. These retailers still compete on the basis of price and quality. I can go to one retailer when I want the best price, and another when I need specialtiy products. Niether demands that I present extra papers before they will be bothered to take my money. In fact I can easily get goods cheaper at my no-card retailer, and don't even have to suffer the shake down on exit.
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I think video rental changed that by showing that alot of people would buy a video if it were sold at a lower price, and the studios would reap the profit instead of the people who rented the video. In many ways the video rentals places were stealing money from the studios in the same want online piracy is, and video became priced to compete with that grey area of acquisition.
Now, when we got DVDs the studios got greedy. They jacked the price, but that was somewhat defesible becuase of the added value. What they did do is put unskippable ads, warning, etc that made the DVD less valuable. In most cases, one cannot just put a DVD in and have it play. In addition, if one just wants a movie, it can't be had. The consumer is forced to pay for the extra content. And if the consumer wants to keep the original for backup and watch a compressed version in a more convinent format, for instant putting an entire series of one DVD, that cannot be easily done.
So the economics is this. People who want the DVD product tend to pay for it. People who merely want to watch the film once tend to rent it. People who do not want the DVD product, but want the film, are just out of luck. There is simply no legal way to aquire the film without the baggage.
And so we back to the dawn of video rental. There is no legal way to acquire the product, but there are many grey areas in which the product can be aquired. So the studios are either going to ignore this demand and perhpas not maximize profit, or find a way to tap at least some of the sales. There are limits. DVD DRM is not going away, so person who do not want to deal with 10 DVD for a season are still going to download, but a $1-5 basic edition goes a long way to satisifying the basic market.
Very few of the have nots can even afford to buy the clubs and balls, much less the green fees, necesary for a good game of golf. Therefore, the have not, in the classic sense, are not even an issue. What we are talking about here is the fact that the comfortably wealthy middle class, the have nots in the sense that they perhaps only have a second home, cannot afford these things. And, when you get done to it, in the US we are increasingly divided into the working class, with little expendable income, the wealthy middle class, and the insanely rich upper class. Only the later two matter in terms of political and economic power. Everyone in the former shops at Wal*Mart and votes along religious lines.
I think your assumption may be less than perfect and your language unclear.
If we start at the end, there is nothing wrong if charging for something that used to be free or we never needed. This is the basis of any economy. For example, one may have never considered the need for a king, but when the king comes a knocking, one needs to pay the dues. In modern terms, it is simply a matter of adding value. This might be as simple as bottling city water so that consumers can get cold fresh water instead of just our fo the water fountain. My favorite is that one now buys prefab Rice crispy treats. I mean how lazy can be that they cannot spend 15 minutes and 1/10th the cost making a batch of these things. For another example, how about selling land that your grandparents got for free?
Then there is the issue of 'real wealth'. If you mean cash or cash equivelents, then I must respectfully disagree. There is nothing less important to the long term economy than the accumulation of paper wealth. Spain of the 19th century learned this. The only real wealth is the technolgoy of a culture. This allows the culture to grow and prosper even after the easy money goes away. I mean look at the US today. We have a lot of people who use to make good money, but because these people never had any real wealth, just money, they are totaly screwed when the factory shuts down or the mall closes.
What is wrong is that we are patenting the basics of wealth, the technology and ideas, instead of the physical manisfestations of those ideas. Patents are supposed to be for things that are real. This allows for the free growth of wealth because then others can build equally real things that are similiar but different from the patented thing. This is the basic of the patent system. In exchange for a period of exclusive right, you expose the technology so that others may build upon it and increase the wealth. By patenting this that are not real, we are back to valueing monies over wealth.
circa 1995 with MS Windows NT. It was a real OS that let go the toys to support perfomance. My whole problem with MS Windows is that it is a toy trying to be a real boy. For a while, with NT, it was no longer a toy.
we should have seen something circa 2005. I suppose it was supposed to be Vista nee Longhorn fullfilling the 15 year dream of the Humane Interface. Not only it is 3 years late, but everything revolutionary has been stripped out. I suspect Apple will have Spotlight perfected and Leopard released before MS releases the abridged version of Longhorn.
The thing with MS is they cycle between good interface and bad interface. My strategy these 20 years has been to, as much as possible, only update when the reviews say 'MS is back to usable menus". Unfortanately, this time it took them so long, and the usable version became so outdated, that it just became simpler to switch to another vendor.
For firms that have to switch with every version, I can appreciate the anticipation that they might now be free of the torture.
MS is popular because it caters to the large enterprise clients, just like IBM did. And just like IBM, this focus on large enterprise means that the needs of the small customer are often not served. It is one thing to for the upper management to tell middle management to tell the worker bees that they must work with crap, but quite another for a small firm to do the same. And the home user will be satisfied as he or she basically gets all the MS for free, but how many are going to continue to shell out money when there are plausible alternatives?
By MS doing this Host file management, they are admitting that most users don't use or know the host files, and the most probable reason for host file change, expecailly as it relates to MS, is an attack.
I should, in my user account have a wide variety of leeway. If I mess up, I or my qualified agent should be able to go to an admin account and troubleshoot. This measn that as long as I am running XP as a user, that should not mess up the admin host file.
When I think about this it seems that this seem like guns for airline pilots. We really don't want guns on board an aircraft. The proper fix is to make the cockpit an extremely secure location so that pilots can do thier job, which is not battle terrorists, but fly the plane. It has been shown that as long as a pilot is in control, and given certain leeway, the pilot has a good chance of halting dangerous activity with minimal danger. But simply securing the cockpit is not sexy enough and does not satisfy the ulterior motvies, so we find this other silly thing that does not help much, but does promote secondary goals.
Second, MS created an excessively forgiving browser. This allowed management to promote the creation of malformed content that would still work. To get anything to run a on a real browser would have taken more money, and why budget the money when the market leaders has the browser that everyone is going to use anyway?
So we are in a situation today where short sighted management has pages that will only run on IE. For intranets in which the employees are going to always use company resources, or subscription services, this is not really a problem. However, way too often I see managment created employee resources, resources that employees are expected to access from anywhere and often critical to the job, only run in IE. This quite frankly is level of ineffeciency that should not be tolerated. It is like some stuff I saw early on where the order would be written in hand, then entered into the computer, then manually logged into a order book by hand because no one in management would accpet a summary print.
I did business development all through the 80's, my first browsser was Mosaic, and to this day never had to use IE except for a few malformed intranet pages. IE is a good browser, and the only issue is that persons that know no better, often developers that are as unsophisticated as the average user, design to it as a reference platform. Netscape lost the market, and it was theirs to lose. However, Netscapes mistakes did not lead to the rise of IE. Leveraging of a monopoly did.
Now to address your concerns. The flourescent has a problem becuase it reguires a special setup, initially costs signficantly more, and only pays off through energy savings. I have had flourescents around since I was a kid because my father understood the costs savings.
The current success of flourescents has only been partially due to lower costs. It also has to do with with higher energy costs and new compact designs that will fit into existing incadescent forms.
Ultimately the success if these new bulbs will depend on the incorpoartion of the lighting into new houses and offices. We might also expect some offices to be retrofitted due to the saving on cooling costs and maintaniance.
To recap, flourescents have not been succesful because they have gotten a bad rap and people do not seem to care if they are wasting 95% of the energy to heat and the ventilation needed to remove that heat. It is just like CRTs. Sure they provide better game rendering, and sometimes better color, but it one is not playing games or doing exact color stuff, it is really worth the use of extra energy?
Now, some would regard this outreach work as a waste of money, but it ignores the fact that exploration and research requires trained motivated persons, person who have been exposed to the subject since childhood. Persons who have seen exploration and research as an exciting and compelling profession. This means making the subject accesible to average children and thier parents.
NASA used to be much better at this. There was a time when one could get a much closer unsanitized look at the operations. The profit motive and corruption has limited those opportunities, and now visitors are limited to Theme Park representation of the Space Admninistration, involving misrepresentation of science and 20 year old movies.
In spite of all this, I stil give NASA more points for not forcing a click wrap license before every picture.
Today MS admitted that its market share was largely due to piracy. Rather than MS Windows being the best value for the money, it is the best widely distributed and supported free OS. A such, the MS will be adopting a new strategy in which the OS will be given away, and only support contracts and cosmetic add ons will be sold. A senior MS official was quoted as saying "Consumer have always realized that MS Windows had no real financial value, and now MS itself has come to the same conclusions. The technology in MS Windows is 20 years old, of no innovative consequence. We will focus of serving bussiness customers and leveraging the MS Office franchise to grow the company"
It think this is why MS is pushing virtualization. IF MS Windows cannot be the OS of choice, it can at least be the OS that is run on servers that run the OS of choice.
If you are into development, the MS development tools are pretty nice. Most people can mock up a GUI in no time. It is fun to make pretty pictures. In particular, Visual FoxPro is still a very good tool to rapidly create small and midsize databases, complete with GUI and reporting tools. MS, unfortunately, made it Windows only several years ago, and jacked up the price so that the POS Access would be a viable product.
As most say, the big thing Windows has is games. There are also a few verticle market applications that are mostly available for Windows.
So there is clearly a need for someone to help the average user discriminate between legitimate and nefarious email. The need could result in a significant market opportunity if an ISP developed appropriate technology and backed up the technology with a meaningful guarantee. People will pay for security, even shallow security.
I also believe this will reduce email that maight be strictly catagorized as spam. Not the broad definition of unsolicited email that has resulting in no meaningful agreement on how to deal with the problem, but email that has a misleading subject, spoofed headers, clearly obtuse text content meant to disguise the HTML rendered message, and links to shady websites. If the ISP allowed users to set up a list of safe addresses, provided the level of protection that the USPS service does for unsolicited mail, and provided a good customer crisis line, that would provide a big competitive advantage. If, however it is just charging spamers for email while the user dangles on the vine, that it is quite useless.
So here is the rub. One not only has to have the equipment and expertise to create the biowepon. One also needs a way to infect people in lethal doses. And, to begin with, one needs to believe the bioagent will be more effecient than conventional weapons. Look at it this way. The allies probably did more damage in Dresden using conventional weapons that in Japan using nukes. However, the Japan attack was much more effecient, posed almost no risk to the Allies, had no real defense, and was not limited by the logistics of flying many planes. For a bioagent to be preferable, it must be like a nuke. If Bush is to believed the Iraqis have a bunch of biological agents, yet we see bombs are used more. Perhpas the Iragis to have WMDs, and bombs are just so much more effecient and dramatic. I mean proving to the US forces that defending against IEDs is hopeless to so mouch more dramatic than simply killing everyone in the green zone with lead poisoning, for instance.
This seems like another fear mongering article planted to create an impression that certain not-so-dangerous things are critical, so that the complex really dangerous things can be ignored. It just shows a true lack of imagination. I tink in most cases the villians just want the drama. That is why they blow up the building after it is evacated, instead of blowing up the location to which the people are evacuated to.
If we take about the conditions 20 years ago, then we must acknoledge that the hardware was very slow. In many cases the microcomputer was running an OS,a single application, and limited if non-existant network activity. Even with the reletively limited demand on resources, the machines were generally slower to respond and process that they are today. This was especially true for MS Word and Excel.
So we were hungry for resources. The technology was catching up with demand, and a new computer every couple years, or every year, and new OS and Apps to use the speed were not out of line. Running on a machine even a few years old was not reasonable because such a machine was slow. But then resources began to catch up. It then became a question of what can we think of to use the extra cycles? How many different applications can we run? How many resources can we waste to continue regular upgrades?
The reality is that one should be able to design a computer use 3 years old technology that will runany reasonalbe current and near future OS. If it is not possible, then the OS is not reasonable. It is just not neccesary to be that much in front of the curve anymore. I would that Linux would be such an OS, if it was propery configured. Likewise, a proper office app and movie viewer and picture viewer and the like should run well, though perhaps only one at the time. The key here is to manage expectation. A $100 laptop, like the $500 mac mini, or a 20K SUV, or $50 speakers, are only going to produce adequate performance. Most people will deal with the cheap car, or cheap stove, or cheap laundry detergent, simple because they are cheap, even if the performance is not up to some arbitrarily high standards.
He could have still been famous. How many starlets have their 'personal videos' posted on the net, collect from a law suit, and still use the publicity?
I don't want to dual boot. I want MS windows on a glob that can be backed up and easily restored when infected. I would be ok with a *nix on a dual boot, but would be nicer just to run that in the background.
Who know what an effecient firm, using commodity parts, can do with a laptop. I mean Apple, which sells in relitively small quantities, and has to pay premium for parts and engineering, can create laptops that sell for under 1K to the education market, yet Dell which gets the best price of everything, can use the cheapest part for the entry machines, and probably end up getting money from MS when all is said and done, can only knock 25% off that cost for a similiarly equipped machine, and still needs to play games with rebates to create the impresion that it has respectible sales?
These ineffecient dinosaurs are in for a rude awakening if even the $200 laptop comes about. Are people really going to pay 25% of the cost of the machines for the OS? I bet if the MS machine is $200 and the BSD machine is $150, the BSD will begin to quickly gain marketshare.
As far as durability, I have dropped my iPod anumber of times. The iPod costs less than a Minidisk player and has the capacity of multiple disks, without the hassel of carrying extra disks around. My iPod still seems to work fine.
I also wonder how quickly on can record a minidisk. Reading a CD and burning a new one, or copying to the iPod over firewire. can happen in a matter of minutes. Does the mini disk do an analog record in real time, or a digital transfer?
Ultimately Sony wanted a protected format that it could sell content and allow a limited amount of copying. It wanted to control the format, and control access. Apple beat sony at it's own game by allowing MP3s from the begining and not worrying about the copying. For instance, a one gig Shuffle might only hold a single disc of songs, but it is easy to frequently change the songs, it is easy to recharge, and it is a significantly easier to carry around. Back when Creative was the best, those players were nicer than anything sony had. One would sooner buy a CD player than a minidisc.
So, as has been it's wont for 15 years, Sony makes cute gadgets, but has become obsesed with protecting content rather than serving the consumer. The walkman would have been dead if it required a special unit to copy, or if it had not allowed a generation to pirate vinyl to tape.
One example of this is the Texas State lottery, which exist under the guise of increasing funding to education. Of course funding for education, as a percentage of the Texas budget, has fallen considerable over the past 15 years even as lottery revenue has grown. So what is the new proposal? Well a official named Strayhorn want gambling machines. Now this is the lady that attempted to start the process of a state religion for Texas by attempting to rescind the tax exempt status of a church, the denomination of which has existed from the birth of the United States and in many ways reflects the values of our founding fathers, as many of these men had input in it's creation. Combine this with the fact that the demonination has no profit motive, unlike the megachurches that infest Texas, and one wonders if Strayhorn is primarily concerned with well being of the average Texan or the a personal campaign of religious zelotry in which those that disagree with her liberal view of gambling are ignored.
To be clear I am not concerned if people gamble or not. I do not see how we can justify lottery machines in an time when we no longer have cig machines. How can one say that we can enforce the 18+ limit on tickets any more that cigs? I am not sure that having gambling machines in every corner is a net benifit. Like illegal drugs it take money to feed the habit. But, at the end of the day, in a capatilist conservative country like ours, built on a the standards of minimal government and private enterprise, I suppose the government is in the best position to effecintly run a gambling bussiness.
With all the email clients out there, one must ponder why MS would create a new product instead of just using Outlook Express. One must also wonder how MS will replace the revenue of allowing users to not user to skip the ads when reading mail.
It is possible that they are just desperate to win back a portion of the market that they still have not understood. MS has missed the Intenet again by not updating IE, and IE has lost some trust. Windows live is going to require a client, and it may be that IE is not going to be that client. it might be that they are thinking of seperating the application interface from the browser. This would be a good thing.
OTOH, it could be that this innovative email client simply shifts the ads from the browser to the client, just like Eudora does. The client could also be some form of spyware.
Why we do know is that MS does not give away product except to gain a share in a long negleted marketspace. We also not that MS says it wil unbundle IE. What all these things mean will only become clear as Vista is released.
The problem is this. In paper voting I am given a ballot to mark, and then put it in a locked box. If all is set up correctly, the lock can only be opened with many people watching, and it will be evident if the lock has been opened or changed.
What Diebold appears to be saying, and what makes the snide comments of the poster somewhat appropriate, is that these machines can be tampered with and the only way to detect it is by bringing in a specialist to spend huge amounts of time analyzing the system.
In fact, if the system were secure, any tampering should be immidiately evident to any reasonable person looking at it. Any changes in code should be immidiately visible, at least though a permanant change log. Any changes in hardware should equally be immidiately apparrent. Diebold is not only saying the machines are not secure, but there is no adaquate audit trail to prove that the machines have been properly used.
In addition, we do not always have sufficient runs of network cables. This means that we may be talking about a wireless solution, which will be fine for audio, but is not yet enough for good video.
In the end, we will probably see that a central solution is significantly more expensive than a distributed solution, without the advantages of reliability and power.
If the purpose is the later the benifit could be significant to all parties. The .xxx TLD can easily be filtered. Those that reside in the .xxx TLD will be less likely to be accused of targeting the content to unsuitable audiences. Those who operate in this TLD will also likely have a competative advantage to those who do not, at least in term of the adult paying customer.
If the purpose is the former the results are as doomed as the effect of most filtering software. Ponography, pretty much by defnintion, is content that has little other purpose than to titilate. There is enough of such clear cut content that we don't realy need to waste time with content that has some educational or artistic merit. Of couse many people do, and such actions play directly into the hands of those that wish to market clear ponography to person who do not yet have the context to understand it.
So, an enyclopaedia really does not need to be in .xxx. Any educated person has read such a book since they started reading, and has seen the naked people and diagrams in it. Likewise any intellegent kid has looked up the naughty words in the dictionary. In the area of questionable material, I have seen many a pre teen improve reading skills through the "romance" novel and questionable magazines are also occasionally read, and satisfy a curiousity in a arguable appropriate manner. For example Hustler and the current incarnation of playboy might in the .xxx, but Maxim and Cosmo are arguable ok.
In any case, it is best to let this a decision left to the content provider. If it is clear that .xxx provides some protection to the provider, then many will move. It is like this. In the US strip clubs and bars are often not allowed near schools and churches, but there are often small stores that sell alcohol and naughty magazines. The place that is ponographic is forbidden, while the place with other value is allowed.
In the end we must ask how much time has been wasted in the court system and law enforcement prosecuting such cases as Ulyses and Howl and the like. In this day when we are giving up rights left and right in a frightened fit of what the bogeyman might do, is it really important to continute to waste such time on such a trivial matter? I mean let the .xxx domain happen. Let the ponographers that choose to be there go there. Let everyone else stay where they are, and, in either case, let the current laws prevail. Just don't get obsessed with a nipple while while the next bomber's roomate is on hold with trying to warn the FBI.
The disclosures for a supermarket card are no less broad or troublesome than spyware. In both cases the product is forced on you, and if you don't agree, the product is further forced on you though annoying popups or cashiers.
Finaly, not all spyware comes with no return. Spyware may come as part of a software package that is presented as useful. Likewise the supermarkets present the card as a discount card, but in reality they are just jacking up the prices as a punishment for customers that do not have the card.
I am fortunate as I do not need to use the software that has spyware attached. Likewise, I live a city big enough where I have retailers that will give me a good price without the use of tacking card. These retailers still compete on the basis of price and quality. I can go to one retailer when I want the best price, and another when I need specialtiy products. Niether demands that I present extra papers before they will be bothered to take my money. In fact I can easily get goods cheaper at my no-card retailer, and don't even have to suffer the shake down on exit.