One can take this another way. The damage caused by music piracy is about equal to the value of petty theft in a grocery store.
In the US, quick google lookup shows the average supermarket loses around 2.5% of retail sales to shrinkage. However, only half of that is due to external forces. So, if we use the german analogy, perhaps the true loss to the industry is a little more than 1%. A percentage loss is, of course, better than unit sales as the percentage allows us to judge the impact.
What is interesting, according to various articles, is that Germany has about 82 million people, but only 127 million CD sales, a nearly 50% drop over 7 years. So each german is buying 1 maybe 2 cds a year. And you are trying to tell me that a country that is so uninterested in music is going to download the equivelent of 5 CDs a year. I mean at the height of the sales they were only buying 3 or 4 CDs a year. I guess copying music over the internet is so much easier than just copying an album from a friend that it encourages the people to steal that extra CD that they did not even want in the first place.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
My very old G4 tower has been upgraded from OS 9 through the current release updates (just updated it). The only problem I ever had was upgrading to Tiger, which required a fresh install.
It gets used very little because I have not had time to install everything the way I like it. The Tiger upgrade is not reccomended on a critical machine.
This assumes that people are generaly unaware that our rights are being trampled, and the consequences of that trampling. I do not see this as true. Conservatives are all over this, and seems to have concluded that it is neccesary to keep us safe, just like the borrowing of billions of dollars from China. Liberals are all over this but just as a way to embarass the president. Most people are just working to keep food on the table.
This game, IMHO, is just like the concerts of the 60's. A fun way to pass the time. Perhaps a way to deal with the futility of life, but ultimately nothing. I mean, what are most of those hippies doing now. Perhaps filing frivilous lawsuits against the common citizen to protect corporations. Or maybe figuring out new and innovative ways to hide the fact that their products are created by slave labor. You, just trying to make a living so that they buy a new 50K SUV every year, and waste 100 gallons of irreplacable gasoline every month, and eat up 500 dollars worth of electricity to keep thier 20K square foot mansion cool. And teaching that materialism to thier children and grandchildren by buying everything and anything in sight.
No, the only way to change the world is to change for real. If we are to play games, we should be simulating living that will help us sustain our country, not just whine. This fight in Iraw is no more about democracy and soveriegnty than the arranged revolution in Panama against Colombia. However, it is about national security and energy, and we certainly need energy, and need to insure the supply of energy. It might also be about a continuing line of credit with Japan and China. OTOH, anyone saying that the war is just about "oil" or just about "credit" clearly has their head up their ass, as few of us would be willing to live without either of these, even those of us that whine every day about our diminishing rights. For instance, if one and rich and wealthy, and lives in a place surrounded by people with no food, there are two ways to deal with it. Build a big fence, hire security gaurds, and complain about all you have to do just to protect all your stuff. Or you can admit that you are part of the problem, and stop complaining or share the stuff. And yes I know you deserve the stuff becuase you worked for it, and those lazy people deserve nothing. But then we get back to the difference between the real world and the fantasy that delusional people create to justify their excesses.
Fry get seduced into a cult that is at war with a particular lord Zeno. The cult accuses this universally loved and admired, benovelent, democraticaly elected, Prime Minister of hijacking human bodies and causing all pain and misery on earth. It will star Issac Hayes head as lead shokesman for the church. Fry is forced to take the Planet Express Ship on a suicide mission, which only fails becuase he does, in fact, know how to fly the ship. Mr. Hayes is traded to Zeno in an effort to avert intergalactice war, where, through the lords infinite compansion, the Mr. Hayes is allowed to end his years of ridicule and humiliation in peace.
My question is what information does the store have to save in order to do a refund. If the system was well done, it would just be a CC number with the original tranaction number to confirm. Such a system makes a lot of sense as it insures that the credit is applied to the same card and limits the number of person handling the card. Furthermore, it makes some sense for a operation to store the CC number along with the transaction in case the customer later protests the charge. Given the current practice of asking other questions to confirm the purchase, it is not such a big deal. For most retail outlets, a person must have a valid card with valid magnetic strip to make a purchase. These cards are not impossible to fabricate, but it an additional hurdle.
The problem, as I see it, is vendors that store all customer information, in a single logical location, long term. For instance, after a purchase is valiated, which online takes 30 seconds, my adress and CVVC should be delinked from my cc number. Keep the CC number in a transaction log, but get rid of the CVC and only keep the address in a ship log. I know this is not going to happen, as it is complicated, but it should help protect us. I am with you though. We need laws that makes bad practice a liability on the vendors, banks, and device providers that utilize it.
There are so many bigoted assumption in these statements, it is beyond sad. To wit don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent person can use it first. Then we can worry about the blind.
Which I will rephrase as
don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent person can have a good first time user experience. Then we can worry about the security.
Or In the mean time if a blind person wants to run linux please have them contact their local LUG, I am pretty sure somebody would step up to the plate.
Which can be rephrased as
In the mean time, if a negro wants to join a golf course please have them contact local course and I am sure, if they are good enough, someone will sponsor them
The reality is that somethings should be considered during the initial design phase or else they become prohibitively difficult. For instance, if we ignore the blatant prejudice that disable people are somehow less intelligent, one can imagine that a person with limited vision, limited mobility, and limited hand dexterity could easily
configure any of the above system using the command line, as long an appropriate input device and display were used. Some OS have always provided such accommodations through screen magnification and large keyboards.
If we move beyond the command line, to a full WIMP interface, it them becomes an issue which disability is targeted. For limited dexterity, the OS or application should work well with a single button mouse, or spoken commands. For a person with limited sight or hearing, the OS or application must be designed not to depend on a single sense to communicate information. The interesting thing is that we have systems that have accomplished at least some of these requirements for many years.
This seems like the same argument that comes up periodically about the web. In the usability studies done in the early years there was great excitement about the ability to mark up text without concern of the output device, thereby serving a larger number of people. Of course everyone ignored this and continued to write for the CRT, in the same way people wrote for the print terminal long after they were gone, note the longevity of ed. So we have wasteful flash intros and web pages that will not render on our cell phones.
Perhaps it is all about limited resources. Perhaps it is all about the dominant culture not wanting to make concessions to accommodate the needs of various subcultures, especially when those accommodations might reduce the power of the dominant culture. Who knows. But if we are not going to design systems that are usable by the greatest number, let us try not design systems that are hostile to those who are different from us.
IBM in the 80's were arrogant assholes, until they got sense beat into them with MS. This was really a matter of changing climates, and did not have so much to do with thier products. The products are generally rock solid and well supported, if you are big enough to get their attention.
Now, maybe one day MS will be a solutions supplier, but right now all they do is a bit of software. Someone else does the hardware, someone else does the integration, someone else does the process. Let me repeat that. MS only does on small compenent of the software development, and has little to no experience in anything else. Therfore MS can force Dell to sell only MS OS on the servers, and can provide vouchers to consumers for MSCE support, but, AFAI, cannot roll in with a complete solutions. Furthermore, they can't roll in with a solution supported by company with decades of experiences supported complete solution. All they can say is that provide a bit of software that everyone uses. Significant, but i would not trust my firm to the guy who packs the computers.
To be clear, I am not saying that what IBM does is always right, or what MS is always wrong. MS caught a lucky break by being the OS that poeple chose after Compaq broke the IBM ROM. If I wanted a complete solution, I would more likely go to dell, and then tell them I wanted a combination between MS and *nix, simply because it would be a waste of money to buy licenses that served no purpose. Of course, IBM can already provide this, though I myself have never been a fan of anyting IBM except for the typewriters.
First, let me say that I believe Apple should license the DRM to other online stores. I think this will help with the PR on the growing realization of the Apple monopoly, and won't hurt Apple. Other than Walmart, no one one else has the volume and pull to get the kind of deals Apple is getting. The DRM license fee, and branding, will help protect Apple from Wal*Mart.
That said, this current issue is not an issue with Apple. The iPods only major restriction that if the file contain DRM, then the only DRM that will work is Apple's. The other major restriction, unfortunately, is the OGG files must be converted to supported format, but I doubt France is taking umbrage with this.
So the real problem is DRM, and the people responsible for the DRM are the record labels. They have pushed this solution, and they have help create these near monopolies. Ultimately it is up to them to relinquish some control. The consensus outline of the solution appear to be well known. A royalty tax on a variety of products and services. The royalties will be paid based on tracking data, just like radio. It will be harder, but with good watermarks and random sampling of the P2P networks, it would work. The source will still be CDs and online, with CDs often the better choice in terms of value.
Apple could play a role in this, but building such tracking into itunes. The labels could be more happy if Apple tacked another dime on the price and submitted to the central royalty bank. The only downside is that this might open the market up to independents.
The problem with the UN is that they have a constituency, at least from time to time, that is greater than meglomaniacs of the United States and Europe. THe UN occasionally has to do things becuase it is the right thing to do. This is of great chagrin to those anti-UN people who sometimes tend to also believe that the white race is the greatest, as lower persons gain access to opportunity. If the internet is going to remain a pure playground, safe for our kids, then control must remain in a responsible US company.
The UN would likely do no better or worse than verisign. The difference would be resources would be more likely to be spread out more evenly, not just based on prefered demographics and income. I mean everyone is complaining about the slowing internet growth, but there are inner city middle class neighborhoods that still do not have DSL. I am talking about just a few miles outside of the central bussiness district.
Why has Sony died as an major consume electronics supplier? Becuase they are so into the technology they don't know how to make a cool product anymore. The walkman was a simple, elegent, device, not to mentions a pirates drem. No encrypted memory sticks, no need for a second device to specially encode the tapes.
Now look at them. Some of the most pretty laptops on the market, burdened with all the extra cost of paying for proprietary formats and slots. They are pushing formats not to make the consumers life easier, but to insure that the executives can afford drugs and boys/girls.
What mad the electronics market thrive was that one could plug an RCA cable from any decent device to any other decent device and get reasonable results. No need to hire an MSCE person to hook up the TV to the video player. No worry about if the disc was acually made for this region. DVD won on convinence, and the fact that VCR was getting complex, but why is it that I cannot just put a DVD in and watch a movie? Why can't I fast foward over the stuff I dont' want to see.
Shoudn't design be for the sake of the person paying, or is it that consumers no longer are a source of profit on thier own? Is it that Dell makes money only becuase of MS and AOL/TW kickbacks? Is it that Sony does not expect to make any money of the players, but only on the content, which will be so chock full of advertisements that it will be just like watching a tv program? Why can't movie theatres make a profit on ticket sales and concesions? It is because the studios are so greedy that they each up all the sales, yet, because of the rational fear that the major releases are crap compared to the indepdent, won't fund digigtal distribution which might singnificantly increased profits, if only they would stop letting the likes of Michael Bay make films and tom cruise appear in them.
I used to think I understood what these guys were saying. Now, it seems like they are just spouting technobabble to impress the masses. To wit:
Resist the current temptation to make incremental changes to attract funding. It might get you off the ground,
Is this just another version if the new economy of the 90's? When we all threw out the basic laws of conservation, and thought that money could be grown from nothing. That we could totally recreate the economy in a new image, one in which customers would magically appear, and profits would be generated by the invisible elf hand, as the customers themselves got everything for less than cost? Incremental changes have always been very profitable, and major changes are seldom so.
Companies are now paying attention to some of the major socioeconomic problems in the First and the Third World.
In as much as companies must work in those places, and customers do not seem to want the worker in those places to be excessively abused. However, it still appears that the oil companies in Nigeria facilitate oppression, and it does not seem we mind so much as not to use oil, Google has no problem censoring material for the chinese people. Just like imperialism, the current engagement is more a matter of cheap material and labor than solving socioeconomic problems.
We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop
I will tell you what happens when 100 million kids have a smart phone. They surf porn in class and chat with their friends rather than learning. But this is no different form pencil and paper. A kid can take notes or draw naked pictures. Their choice. Unless the smart phone or laptop meets a stated and funded objective, it is a distraction.
We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.
This is just scary. Only the most undereducated or unsophisticated person thinks of a game as a way to kill time. Games are, and always has been, the primary form of socialization. The game teaches the kid, in a safe environment, the rules and expectations of society. Think of the games that small children play and the rules and expectations of those games. Follow rules. Wait your turn. Effort produces reward. As people gets older the games can help them release the animal desires though simulation of socially unacceptable behaviors. Games are our primary form of education, and, often, are our primary form of testing new technologies.
The overall thrust might be correct. Technology often allows more people to participate in the development of new technology. The cheap book helped people educate themselves. The cheap computer allows more of us to create models that help other work more efficiently. The technology of standard measures helps us do research. But in the end, it is still a few small groups of people that refines the technology that the larger society creates, and often a single group that wins in the marketplace.
You have a point, but in most cases the market does bow to governmental pressures, even in the long term. For instance, at one time the the cost of picking crops was whatever it cost to buy or breed a person plus room and board. How, according to various figures, a farmer might pay $50 to over $100 a day to pick crops. It could be argued that the current pay-per-day-with-no-security system is cheaper, but that does not chang the fact that the government and liberal interest were instrumental in the change.
There are many other examples of this long term change in the face of the short term resistance of the market. Child labor laws, ADA laws, minimum wage.
One of the most interesting statements from conservatives is that unions drive companies out of bussiness. There seems to be a philosophy that a bussiness is never responsible for failure. It is never greed or incompetance of management, or failure to adapt to change, or just even natural changes in the market. I mean were the buggy whip manufacturers, the trolley cars, the typewriter companies put out of bussiness by the unions? Not likely. In fact the trolley car compnanies were destroyed by other corporations abusing the market.
In the end a labor union is no more than the dairy counncil or beef council. All of these protect the interst of a particular group, all distort the market, and all are benificial by keeping compensation at reasonable levels. I mean look at it this way. In order for the market to run, one must have a wide range of people with at least some disposable income. No disposable income means no money to fund or purchase innovations in the market. We see by the current negative savings rate in the US that our disposable income is at the lowest level in quite a while. Therefore, even in an employer appaulds Wal*mart wages, the employer is going to be in trouble unless he or she is Wal*mart or sells to Wal*Mart, because the Wal*mart workers are hardly going to have enough money to go to The Gap or Circuit City and get the even slightly higher end stuff.
True plug and play features are what makes the Mac a wonderful machine. Gaining basic functionality without software drivers is why many of us buy a mac.
Of course the drawback is that devices that are not supported are nearly impossible to make work. And sometimes advanced features are sometimes not supported. And one sometimes needs to buy more expensive peripherals.
In spite of this, I always had better luck with the SCSI devices than any plug and play hack on the PC. Even now, iLife does a better job recognizing cameras and video and memory card, with no additional drivers, than anything else I have used. I would be surprised if the Mini required anything special to become a media center.
When talking about a media center, remember this. The PC has alwsy been about craming in as much as possible because adding stuff, no matter what anyone says, has always been a pain. Recall the hours spend figuring out the slave and master drives? Sure they were easy to install, just often impossible to get runing. OTOH, the mac has always including fast external busses so one could add what one needed. The busses were even chained so new hardware would not need to be added to connect new devices. This is not saying one is better than another, but I prefer upgrading a DVD drive by simply plugging it into the firewire port than having to muck around the inside and setting pins and installing new drivers.
Years ago I helped spec and install a new network. We needed to run a few application on several tens of computers. The computers did not have that powerful, and, in fact, the management was finally convinced to go with a central server running most critical applications, with remote stations simply running clients. Pretty much a mainframe with dumb terminal thing. This meant a much more expensive server, and hopefully cheaper computers. But in the end the sales people convinced management that they still needed to run Windows, and office, etc. We could have run something stripped down and cheap, but once you get into MS Windows, you have to have MS windows on every computer, or the sales droids will give you trouble.
From this experience I will make an assertions. This device is simply a way for MS to push Windows Mobile, or whatever name they have chosen this week. It is interesting that there is so little interest in this product that MS had to invest it's own money to create a reference design. Equally intersting is they are not going to take the risk of manufacturing this device, as they did with xBox. As such, it would do no good as merely a wireless screen. There would be no fee for MS and it would set a precedent about the ability to run remote terminals from a Windows machine with no fee.
Imagine if I were running an operation where several workers had to occasional input data from a number of different locations within a plant. With this device, or any tablet PC, or even an MS Windows PDA, each user can have a data terminal, and MS gets a fee. However, with a wireless screen, one can imagine a single PC, and users taking turns entering data. It might be too far to walk to a single PC, but not too difficult to wait a couple minutes to get access. And the PC is safely held in a remote room. And MS only gets on license fee.
Not to mention rising prices. Increasing, movie theatres have consolidated. Instead of having movie theatre withing a couple miles, the new dogma is to have megatheaters, and if one is within 10 miles that is close enough to the customers.
When I was growing up going to a movie was inexpensive and easy. A short drive and my parents got two hours of silence. Even a few years ago I had a regular theater within a couple miles of me. Now, I am more likely to go see an art house movie as I have a couple of those close by, but to see a popular movie I have to go to an area that the movie house finds convinent.
And this realy is the problem. The arrogance of the industry. I am expected to inconvinence myself to go consume their product. I mean, Wal*mart knows thier locations are inconvinent, but they make for it in price. Regular grocery stores do not force customers to drive far away. Malls actively try to create a lifestyle to attract customers. What do movie theaters do. Frankly, very little.
So it is just not the lack of quality product, it is the lack of availability of quality product. The producers created such expensive product, and demanded such high returns, that they destroyed their distribution channel.
And, one other thing on that note. One innovation could have been pure digital movies. Save money on film, transportation, etc. Studios probably could have footed the retrofit bill. The main reason they did not, I believe, is so they keep distribution costs high and squeeze out competitors. What was the results? People like me spend my money at the local theatres that show the art films and not the megaplexes. What happened at the Oscars, independent films won the day, even though some of the mainstream films were equally good or better.
I see this kind of like the fast food value meals. A customer can either buy an individual item, or for more, but less than the seperate items, the customer. The fast food stores implement these schemes to, among other things, increase the average order price. This then begs the question of why fast food stores don't implement a value meal only policy? Sure, some customers would be lost, but the price of a hamburger probably barely covers costs.
This attempt by the labels to push albums is nothing new. The last time we saw, which was only several years ago, was when they were trying to stop the sales of singles. The singles were cutting into sales of albums, and the theory was that if singles were not available, then the consumer would be more likely to buy an album.
I think the more likely aspect is the key. Wiithout singles, one might be more likley to record a song from the radio or just copy it from a freind. Even then there were albums that are so bad no one wanted anything but the same album. Not even the b-side was worht anything. With singles it was more likely all parties would be compensted for the product the consumer wants, and if we dig our heads of the artistic bigotry, when one is talking about selling a million albums, we are fundementally talking about providing a product that the student wants.
So, when singles were pulled, it was a statement that the labels would tolerate more copying in the hope they would end up with increased overall profits, even if the formula used to calculate royalties meant the perfomers and other parties recieved less. I wonder if this algebra will work out in the current climate of rampant unlicensed distribution of any hit track, not to mention much more sophiticated distribution channels for used albums. Frankly there have been way too many times lately when I have gone to iTunes hopeing to legally acquire a track, only to find it unavailable or only as an album. If it is an older album, I can get it used for much less than iTunes. If it is a new album, I soon will be able to get it used. Does this help the company bottom line?
Back to the original question. If the fast food joint only offered value meals, then a person with only a burger would cause a great deal of havok at the unfairness of the situation, disrupting bussiness. And such a person would have a point. The burger is seperate, you could sell it seperately, but you choose not to. It is simply not worth the effort, despite the clear benifits.
The sad thing is that most upgrades are about bussiness model change. The developer incorporate a few added features, a few security fixes, but most of it is about increasing the opportunity to make a profit. Which is totaly valid, but often significantly decreases value to the consumer.
My favorite two examples of this were my stalwart applications of the 90's. Quickbooks and Eudora. Both are wonderful applications. Both are very useful. But both began to have agressive upgrade schedules in which one basically had to upgrade every year. The result is that if I did not pay every year, I could lose access to the data. This was particularly true for Eudora. The risk was just not worth it, so I switch to inferior products that did not have the significant opportunity costs.
iTune is the same deal. Very good appplication. It if free. But it is becoming annoying. Every upgrade I have to turn off those arrows. Every coupel upgrades it seems the licenses changes slightly. However, since i use it as an interface to my music, which is all in standard MP3, there is little risk if one day it does becomes overall useless. I can just get a new interface for my tunes.
They key i think is not storing data in propreitary format. This is why the MS users are stuck, and why MS threatens anyone who wnats to build a filter with lawsuits. They know thier only hope is to keep users indentured.
It's not so much that Google can't keep documents from prying eyes, it is that they are in the bussiness of selling ads, and one way they get people to look at the ads is to actively prying open documents to index and match to advertisers. For istance, Google mail works by matching ads to the content of the mail. Your privacy is not specifically violated, but googles still gets to index your information and match it ads. Also there is no guarantee that personal information or corporate secrets won't someday be revealed.
Likewise, the storage scheme will be the same thing. Google now gets to look at your entire life, and figure out how which of thier clients can help you with your lifestyle. Again, your privacy may no be specifically violated, at least in the near term, but it is still too much of a price for me to pay, when i can get the same thing without the risks for $10 a month.
This is truely an insightful comment. The problem I have with this 'war of terrorism' is the allocation of our limited assets. For instance, we know where the terrorist are, and where they meet. Do we attack those places? No. We use terrorism as an excuse to settle a decade old vendenta, at a cost of $100 billion dollars a year.
Likewise, we know that historiacally the local terrorist and traitors are going to be of christian origin, white, and male. So do we concentrate on those people. No. We find a suspect ethnic person to persecute, while allowing the white christian male to undermine the national security.
It goes on forever. We want to control illegal immigration. Since these immigrant come here for jobs, logic would state that we provide significant disincentives to those who would hire these undocumented persons. Instead we use the whole thing to militarize the borders and treat those person who might help these people, like priests, rabbis, doctors, teachers, union organizers, as common criminals.
The whole thing only makes sense if we assume that those in charge are less interesting in democracy and freedom than lining thier own pockets at the public's teat.
You hit the nail on the head. There are a lot of products out there for the iPods. Not every product is going to be of reasonable quality but, due to the default markup, they will all be quite expensive.
So how do you find a good product. Certainly an Apple branded product will be a good risk. It will probably be of reasonable quality, and not neccesarily out of line on price. For instance, a $100 Apple case might compare favorable with a $215 Prada case.
Now, with me, I have my favorite companies. Most cases for my apple products are Marware. Mostly I like to by Lacie for peripherals. Others will have fovorites. But for those that do not wish to look for quality, or just want the Apple brand, the option exists.
much ado about nothing, in practical terms. The security contest also allowed people to have local access via SSH, so that had a lot to do with the crack.
Didn't we just have a discussion over how people leave their wireless AP open for anyone to use? I don't think the SSH agent is on by default, and I think that the firewall blocks it by default, but that doesn't mean this is always the case. Given the reality of modern setups, where cable modems and wireless gives untrusted parties direct acess to the computer, I hardly see this hack as having no practical implications.
Of couse such contents are of no practical use. Either they end with the machine hacked, which is simply to be expected, or they end with the machine not hacked, which proves nothing.
Much of the internet is unsafe to some degree. For instance, I don't let the students use the production computer because they will invariably go to yahoo, which will install the toolbar, and then magically a few more things get installed. None of this is exactly evil, but since this is an older fragile windows machine, the uptime is already measured in hours, even without the added junk. To be sure, it is easy enough to uninstall the toolbar, and Adaware or spybot takes care of the rest, but the issue still stands.
In reality, for the unsuspecting user, there is hardly a site that is safe. Almost every site uses tracking cookies that violates the original security model that only an original site will acess data about the sesion. If the 12o7 cookie exists at amazon and the fly-by-night-shady-blogger, one must assume that the safety of your amazom stored credit card informaiton is compromised. The yahoo or google toolbar should be safe, but it is now suspected that the google toolbar is collecting personal web traffic, and gathering information that might be corporate sensitive. The 5% number might represent the truly malignant websites, but those are not the problem. As in nature, the truely malignant parasites will have a hard time surviving, as many will kill the host before they spread. It is the subtle parasites, the other 95%, that will continue to cause problems if we do not educate users to wash thier hands and avoid unprotected sex. In other words, do not accept all cookies and do not faoll for a horse or a rabbit, no matte how pretty it might look.
First, you never lie or piss off a judge. Doing so is simply a sign of great incompetance, and when on does this anything short of total humiliation is a generous punishment. in this case, the judge did not want to deal with these fools any longer, and just wanted the parties to work it out.
Second, this stuff should not have gone to court. Again, given the incompetent behavior of RIM, I can only assume the entire negotiations were handled badly. Perhaps RIM thought they were a multibillion dollar company, so they could just intimidate the small party. Perhaps they can, but it always better to take the high road in these situations, expecailly when dealing with a widow. Instead of fighting and lying and trying to invalidate the patents, an initial payment might have been in order. I have no idea what went on behind doors, but, again, given the public record these people just seemed really stupid.
And finally, the 600 million must be taken in context. This is like a years EBITDA, and who knows what it will actually mean to RIM after the tax accountants get done. And, since they have been effectivelty saving for a few years, the impact on this year is like 2 months EBITDA.
So, I am not saying that the payment in the best situation, but given RIM lied in court, continued to anger the judge during negotiations, and was clearly trying to play a waiting game, probably hoping that the parties would continue to die off, it was not a horrible outcome.
A couple more thing to put this in context. I recall an invention, perhaps the steam engine and Watts, that was not fully patented because it borrowed patented technology and it was easier to hide the technology than share the credit. In the end this left the inventor wide open for the product to be copied. The inventor would likely have been better off making the technology transparent, honestly fighting the patent, and probably winning in the end.
The second case is standard insurance industry practice, which is reminiscent of what RIM was trying to do. In most settlements, the insurance company will withhold all payments, even in the most open a shut cases. They will offer a fraction of what the policy would indicate. The injured party can either accept the token payment, or wait the statuatory three years to file suit. The insurance company usually ends up the winner as most people cannot self fund the recovery effort, or the insurance company rightly states that the cost of litigation will be greater than the present settlement. RIM was playing exactly this game, and it is probabl as sad they they won at this game as it is that NTP won at the orignal patent dispute.
Some hyperbolic use of the word tax are defesible. Like the MS tax is defensible because it is something that is added to the cost of nearly every PC, even though a finite number of PCs either already have a site license or use a non MS solution. Such a 'tax' would not exist without deals cut with manufactureres and MS effort to catagorize every naked white box buidler as a pirate. The v-chip is a tax because everyone must pay for this even though many will not need it, and it would not exist without federal mandate.
However this case is different. AOL is not asking eveyrone to pay to send email. AOL is saying that if a spammer wishes to spam, and will follow some rules, then AOL will accept a payment to let the certified spam through to AOL customers. One does not have to the email fee. One could just produce emails that would get through the AOL spam filters. However, it probably will be cheaper for spammers to just pay AOL, so AOL is providing a service for a fee. This is not a tax. It is like fee based municipal trash pick up. Part of my taxes pay for a certain amount of trash pick up. I can pay for additional trash pick up, if I desire, which is certainly not a tax.
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In the US, quick google lookup shows the average supermarket loses around 2.5% of retail sales to shrinkage. However, only half of that is due to external forces. So, if we use the german analogy, perhaps the true loss to the industry is a little more than 1%. A percentage loss is, of course, better than unit sales as the percentage allows us to judge the impact.
What is interesting, according to various articles, is that Germany has about 82 million people, but only 127 million CD sales, a nearly 50% drop over 7 years. So each german is buying 1 maybe 2 cds a year. And you are trying to tell me that a country that is so uninterested in music is going to download the equivelent of 5 CDs a year. I mean at the height of the sales they were only buying 3 or 4 CDs a year. I guess copying music over the internet is so much easier than just copying an album from a friend that it encourages the people to steal that extra CD that they did not even want in the first place.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
It gets used very little because I have not had time to install everything the way I like it. The Tiger upgrade is not reccomended on a critical machine.
This game, IMHO, is just like the concerts of the 60's. A fun way to pass the time. Perhaps a way to deal with the futility of life, but ultimately nothing. I mean, what are most of those hippies doing now. Perhaps filing frivilous lawsuits against the common citizen to protect corporations. Or maybe figuring out new and innovative ways to hide the fact that their products are created by slave labor. You, just trying to make a living so that they buy a new 50K SUV every year, and waste 100 gallons of irreplacable gasoline every month, and eat up 500 dollars worth of electricity to keep thier 20K square foot mansion cool. And teaching that materialism to thier children and grandchildren by buying everything and anything in sight.
No, the only way to change the world is to change for real. If we are to play games, we should be simulating living that will help us sustain our country, not just whine. This fight in Iraw is no more about democracy and soveriegnty than the arranged revolution in Panama against Colombia. However, it is about national security and energy, and we certainly need energy, and need to insure the supply of energy. It might also be about a continuing line of credit with Japan and China. OTOH, anyone saying that the war is just about "oil" or just about "credit" clearly has their head up their ass, as few of us would be willing to live without either of these, even those of us that whine every day about our diminishing rights. For instance, if one and rich and wealthy, and lives in a place surrounded by people with no food, there are two ways to deal with it. Build a big fence, hire security gaurds, and complain about all you have to do just to protect all your stuff. Or you can admit that you are part of the problem, and stop complaining or share the stuff. And yes I know you deserve the stuff becuase you worked for it, and those lazy people deserve nothing. But then we get back to the difference between the real world and the fantasy that delusional people create to justify their excesses.
Fry get seduced into a cult that is at war with a particular lord Zeno. The cult accuses this universally loved and admired, benovelent, democraticaly elected, Prime Minister of hijacking human bodies and causing all pain and misery on earth. It will star Issac Hayes head as lead shokesman for the church. Fry is forced to take the Planet Express Ship on a suicide mission, which only fails becuase he does, in fact, know how to fly the ship. Mr. Hayes is traded to Zeno in an effort to avert intergalactice war, where, through the lords infinite compansion, the Mr. Hayes is allowed to end his years of ridicule and humiliation in peace.
The problem, as I see it, is vendors that store all customer information, in a single logical location, long term. For instance, after a purchase is valiated, which online takes 30 seconds, my adress and CVVC should be delinked from my cc number. Keep the CC number in a transaction log, but get rid of the CVC and only keep the address in a ship log. I know this is not going to happen, as it is complicated, but it should help protect us. I am with you though. We need laws that makes bad practice a liability on the vendors, banks, and device providers that utilize it.
don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent person can use it first. Then we can worry about the blind.
Which I will rephrase as
don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent person can have a good first time user experience. Then we can worry about the security.
Or In the mean time if a blind person wants to run linux please have them contact their local LUG, I am pretty sure somebody would step up to the plate.
Which can be rephrased as
In the mean time, if a negro wants to join a golf course please have them contact local course and I am sure, if they are good enough, someone will sponsor them
The reality is that somethings should be considered during the initial design phase or else they become prohibitively difficult. For instance, if we ignore the blatant prejudice that disable people are somehow less intelligent, one can imagine that a person with limited vision, limited mobility, and limited hand dexterity could easily configure any of the above system using the command line, as long an appropriate input device and display were used. Some OS have always provided such accommodations through screen magnification and large keyboards.
If we move beyond the command line, to a full WIMP interface, it them becomes an issue which disability is targeted. For limited dexterity, the OS or application should work well with a single button mouse, or spoken commands. For a person with limited sight or hearing, the OS or application must be designed not to depend on a single sense to communicate information. The interesting thing is that we have systems that have accomplished at least some of these requirements for many years.
This seems like the same argument that comes up periodically about the web. In the usability studies done in the early years there was great excitement about the ability to mark up text without concern of the output device, thereby serving a larger number of people. Of course everyone ignored this and continued to write for the CRT, in the same way people wrote for the print terminal long after they were gone, note the longevity of ed. So we have wasteful flash intros and web pages that will not render on our cell phones.
Perhaps it is all about limited resources. Perhaps it is all about the dominant culture not wanting to make concessions to accommodate the needs of various subcultures, especially when those accommodations might reduce the power of the dominant culture. Who knows. But if we are not going to design systems that are usable by the greatest number, let us try not design systems that are hostile to those who are different from us.
Now, maybe one day MS will be a solutions supplier, but right now all they do is a bit of software. Someone else does the hardware, someone else does the integration, someone else does the process. Let me repeat that. MS only does on small compenent of the software development, and has little to no experience in anything else. Therfore MS can force Dell to sell only MS OS on the servers, and can provide vouchers to consumers for MSCE support, but, AFAI, cannot roll in with a complete solutions. Furthermore, they can't roll in with a solution supported by company with decades of experiences supported complete solution. All they can say is that provide a bit of software that everyone uses. Significant, but i would not trust my firm to the guy who packs the computers.
To be clear, I am not saying that what IBM does is always right, or what MS is always wrong. MS caught a lucky break by being the OS that poeple chose after Compaq broke the IBM ROM. If I wanted a complete solution, I would more likely go to dell, and then tell them I wanted a combination between MS and *nix, simply because it would be a waste of money to buy licenses that served no purpose. Of course, IBM can already provide this, though I myself have never been a fan of anyting IBM except for the typewriters.
That said, this current issue is not an issue with Apple. The iPods only major restriction that if the file contain DRM, then the only DRM that will work is Apple's. The other major restriction, unfortunately, is the OGG files must be converted to supported format, but I doubt France is taking umbrage with this.
So the real problem is DRM, and the people responsible for the DRM are the record labels. They have pushed this solution, and they have help create these near monopolies. Ultimately it is up to them to relinquish some control. The consensus outline of the solution appear to be well known. A royalty tax on a variety of products and services. The royalties will be paid based on tracking data, just like radio. It will be harder, but with good watermarks and random sampling of the P2P networks, it would work. The source will still be CDs and online, with CDs often the better choice in terms of value.
Apple could play a role in this, but building such tracking into itunes. The labels could be more happy if Apple tacked another dime on the price and submitted to the central royalty bank. The only downside is that this might open the market up to independents.
The UN would likely do no better or worse than verisign. The difference would be resources would be more likely to be spread out more evenly, not just based on prefered demographics and income. I mean everyone is complaining about the slowing internet growth, but there are inner city middle class neighborhoods that still do not have DSL. I am talking about just a few miles outside of the central bussiness district.
Now look at them. Some of the most pretty laptops on the market, burdened with all the extra cost of paying for proprietary formats and slots. They are pushing formats not to make the consumers life easier, but to insure that the executives can afford drugs and boys/girls.
What mad the electronics market thrive was that one could plug an RCA cable from any decent device to any other decent device and get reasonable results. No need to hire an MSCE person to hook up the TV to the video player. No worry about if the disc was acually made for this region. DVD won on convinence, and the fact that VCR was getting complex, but why is it that I cannot just put a DVD in and watch a movie? Why can't I fast foward over the stuff I dont' want to see.
Shoudn't design be for the sake of the person paying, or is it that consumers no longer are a source of profit on thier own? Is it that Dell makes money only becuase of MS and AOL/TW kickbacks? Is it that Sony does not expect to make any money of the players, but only on the content, which will be so chock full of advertisements that it will be just like watching a tv program? Why can't movie theatres make a profit on ticket sales and concesions? It is because the studios are so greedy that they each up all the sales, yet, because of the rational fear that the major releases are crap compared to the indepdent, won't fund digigtal distribution which might singnificantly increased profits, if only they would stop letting the likes of Michael Bay make films and tom cruise appear in them.
Resist the current temptation to make incremental changes to attract funding. It might get you off the ground,
Is this just another version if the new economy of the 90's? When we all threw out the basic laws of conservation, and thought that money could be grown from nothing. That we could totally recreate the economy in a new image, one in which customers would magically appear, and profits would be generated by the invisible elf hand, as the customers themselves got everything for less than cost? Incremental changes have always been very profitable, and major changes are seldom so.
Companies are now paying attention to some of the major socioeconomic problems in the First and the Third World.
In as much as companies must work in those places, and customers do not seem to want the worker in those places to be excessively abused. However, it still appears that the oil companies in Nigeria facilitate oppression, and it does not seem we mind so much as not to use oil, Google has no problem censoring material for the chinese people. Just like imperialism, the current engagement is more a matter of cheap material and labor than solving socioeconomic problems.
We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop
I will tell you what happens when 100 million kids have a smart phone. They surf porn in class and chat with their friends rather than learning. But this is no different form pencil and paper. A kid can take notes or draw naked pictures. Their choice. Unless the smart phone or laptop meets a stated and funded objective, it is a distraction.
We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.
This is just scary. Only the most undereducated or unsophisticated person thinks of a game as a way to kill time. Games are, and always has been, the primary form of socialization. The game teaches the kid, in a safe environment, the rules and expectations of society. Think of the games that small children play and the rules and expectations of those games. Follow rules. Wait your turn. Effort produces reward. As people gets older the games can help them release the animal desires though simulation of socially unacceptable behaviors. Games are our primary form of education, and, often, are our primary form of testing new technologies.
The overall thrust might be correct. Technology often allows more people to participate in the development of new technology. The cheap book helped people educate themselves. The cheap computer allows more of us to create models that help other work more efficiently. The technology of standard measures helps us do research. But in the end, it is still a few small groups of people that refines the technology that the larger society creates, and often a single group that wins in the marketplace.
There are many other examples of this long term change in the face of the short term resistance of the market. Child labor laws, ADA laws, minimum wage.
One of the most interesting statements from conservatives is that unions drive companies out of bussiness. There seems to be a philosophy that a bussiness is never responsible for failure. It is never greed or incompetance of management, or failure to adapt to change, or just even natural changes in the market. I mean were the buggy whip manufacturers, the trolley cars, the typewriter companies put out of bussiness by the unions? Not likely. In fact the trolley car compnanies were destroyed by other corporations abusing the market.
In the end a labor union is no more than the dairy counncil or beef council. All of these protect the interst of a particular group, all distort the market, and all are benificial by keeping compensation at reasonable levels. I mean look at it this way. In order for the market to run, one must have a wide range of people with at least some disposable income. No disposable income means no money to fund or purchase innovations in the market. We see by the current negative savings rate in the US that our disposable income is at the lowest level in quite a while. Therefore, even in an employer appaulds Wal*mart wages, the employer is going to be in trouble unless he or she is Wal*mart or sells to Wal*Mart, because the Wal*mart workers are hardly going to have enough money to go to The Gap or Circuit City and get the even slightly higher end stuff.
Of course the drawback is that devices that are not supported are nearly impossible to make work. And sometimes advanced features are sometimes not supported. And one sometimes needs to buy more expensive peripherals.
In spite of this, I always had better luck with the SCSI devices than any plug and play hack on the PC. Even now, iLife does a better job recognizing cameras and video and memory card, with no additional drivers, than anything else I have used. I would be surprised if the Mini required anything special to become a media center.
When talking about a media center, remember this. The PC has alwsy been about craming in as much as possible because adding stuff, no matter what anyone says, has always been a pain. Recall the hours spend figuring out the slave and master drives? Sure they were easy to install, just often impossible to get runing. OTOH, the mac has always including fast external busses so one could add what one needed. The busses were even chained so new hardware would not need to be added to connect new devices. This is not saying one is better than another, but I prefer upgrading a DVD drive by simply plugging it into the firewire port than having to muck around the inside and setting pins and installing new drivers.
From this experience I will make an assertions. This device is simply a way for MS to push Windows Mobile, or whatever name they have chosen this week. It is interesting that there is so little interest in this product that MS had to invest it's own money to create a reference design. Equally intersting is they are not going to take the risk of manufacturing this device, as they did with xBox. As such, it would do no good as merely a wireless screen. There would be no fee for MS and it would set a precedent about the ability to run remote terminals from a Windows machine with no fee.
Imagine if I were running an operation where several workers had to occasional input data from a number of different locations within a plant. With this device, or any tablet PC, or even an MS Windows PDA, each user can have a data terminal, and MS gets a fee. However, with a wireless screen, one can imagine a single PC, and users taking turns entering data. It might be too far to walk to a single PC, but not too difficult to wait a couple minutes to get access. And the PC is safely held in a remote room. And MS only gets on license fee.
When I was growing up going to a movie was inexpensive and easy. A short drive and my parents got two hours of silence. Even a few years ago I had a regular theater within a couple miles of me. Now, I am more likely to go see an art house movie as I have a couple of those close by, but to see a popular movie I have to go to an area that the movie house finds convinent.
And this realy is the problem. The arrogance of the industry. I am expected to inconvinence myself to go consume their product. I mean, Wal*mart knows thier locations are inconvinent, but they make for it in price. Regular grocery stores do not force customers to drive far away. Malls actively try to create a lifestyle to attract customers. What do movie theaters do. Frankly, very little.
So it is just not the lack of quality product, it is the lack of availability of quality product. The producers created such expensive product, and demanded such high returns, that they destroyed their distribution channel.
And, one other thing on that note. One innovation could have been pure digital movies. Save money on film, transportation, etc. Studios probably could have footed the retrofit bill. The main reason they did not, I believe, is so they keep distribution costs high and squeeze out competitors. What was the results? People like me spend my money at the local theatres that show the art films and not the megaplexes. What happened at the Oscars, independent films won the day, even though some of the mainstream films were equally good or better.
This attempt by the labels to push albums is nothing new. The last time we saw, which was only several years ago, was when they were trying to stop the sales of singles. The singles were cutting into sales of albums, and the theory was that if singles were not available, then the consumer would be more likely to buy an album.
I think the more likely aspect is the key. Wiithout singles, one might be more likley to record a song from the radio or just copy it from a freind. Even then there were albums that are so bad no one wanted anything but the same album. Not even the b-side was worht anything. With singles it was more likely all parties would be compensted for the product the consumer wants, and if we dig our heads of the artistic bigotry, when one is talking about selling a million albums, we are fundementally talking about providing a product that the student wants.
So, when singles were pulled, it was a statement that the labels would tolerate more copying in the hope they would end up with increased overall profits, even if the formula used to calculate royalties meant the perfomers and other parties recieved less. I wonder if this algebra will work out in the current climate of rampant unlicensed distribution of any hit track, not to mention much more sophiticated distribution channels for used albums. Frankly there have been way too many times lately when I have gone to iTunes hopeing to legally acquire a track, only to find it unavailable or only as an album. If it is an older album, I can get it used for much less than iTunes. If it is a new album, I soon will be able to get it used. Does this help the company bottom line?
Back to the original question. If the fast food joint only offered value meals, then a person with only a burger would cause a great deal of havok at the unfairness of the situation, disrupting bussiness. And such a person would have a point. The burger is seperate, you could sell it seperately, but you choose not to. It is simply not worth the effort, despite the clear benifits.
My favorite two examples of this were my stalwart applications of the 90's. Quickbooks and Eudora. Both are wonderful applications. Both are very useful. But both began to have agressive upgrade schedules in which one basically had to upgrade every year. The result is that if I did not pay every year, I could lose access to the data. This was particularly true for Eudora. The risk was just not worth it, so I switch to inferior products that did not have the significant opportunity costs.
iTune is the same deal. Very good appplication. It if free. But it is becoming annoying. Every upgrade I have to turn off those arrows. Every coupel upgrades it seems the licenses changes slightly. However, since i use it as an interface to my music, which is all in standard MP3, there is little risk if one day it does becomes overall useless. I can just get a new interface for my tunes.
They key i think is not storing data in propreitary format. This is why the MS users are stuck, and why MS threatens anyone who wnats to build a filter with lawsuits. They know thier only hope is to keep users indentured.
Likewise, the storage scheme will be the same thing. Google now gets to look at your entire life, and figure out how which of thier clients can help you with your lifestyle. Again, your privacy may no be specifically violated, at least in the near term, but it is still too much of a price for me to pay, when i can get the same thing without the risks for $10 a month.
Likewise, we know that historiacally the local terrorist and traitors are going to be of christian origin, white, and male. So do we concentrate on those people. No. We find a suspect ethnic person to persecute, while allowing the white christian male to undermine the national security.
It goes on forever. We want to control illegal immigration. Since these immigrant come here for jobs, logic would state that we provide significant disincentives to those who would hire these undocumented persons. Instead we use the whole thing to militarize the borders and treat those person who might help these people, like priests, rabbis, doctors, teachers, union organizers, as common criminals.
The whole thing only makes sense if we assume that those in charge are less interesting in democracy and freedom than lining thier own pockets at the public's teat.
So how do you find a good product. Certainly an Apple branded product will be a good risk. It will probably be of reasonable quality, and not neccesarily out of line on price. For instance, a $100 Apple case might compare favorable with a $215 Prada case.
Now, with me, I have my favorite companies. Most cases for my apple products are Marware. Mostly I like to by Lacie for peripherals. Others will have fovorites. But for those that do not wish to look for quality, or just want the Apple brand, the option exists.
Didn't we just have a discussion over how people leave their wireless AP open for anyone to use? I don't think the SSH agent is on by default, and I think that the firewall blocks it by default, but that doesn't mean this is always the case. Given the reality of modern setups, where cable modems and wireless gives untrusted parties direct acess to the computer, I hardly see this hack as having no practical implications.
Of couse such contents are of no practical use. Either they end with the machine hacked, which is simply to be expected, or they end with the machine not hacked, which proves nothing.
In reality, for the unsuspecting user, there is hardly a site that is safe. Almost every site uses tracking cookies that violates the original security model that only an original site will acess data about the sesion. If the 12o7 cookie exists at amazon and the fly-by-night-shady-blogger, one must assume that the safety of your amazom stored credit card informaiton is compromised. The yahoo or google toolbar should be safe, but it is now suspected that the google toolbar is collecting personal web traffic, and gathering information that might be corporate sensitive. The 5% number might represent the truly malignant websites, but those are not the problem. As in nature, the truely malignant parasites will have a hard time surviving, as many will kill the host before they spread. It is the subtle parasites, the other 95%, that will continue to cause problems if we do not educate users to wash thier hands and avoid unprotected sex. In other words, do not accept all cookies and do not faoll for a horse or a rabbit, no matte how pretty it might look.
First, you never lie or piss off a judge. Doing so is simply a sign of great incompetance, and when on does this anything short of total humiliation is a generous punishment. in this case, the judge did not want to deal with these fools any longer, and just wanted the parties to work it out.
Second, this stuff should not have gone to court. Again, given the incompetent behavior of RIM, I can only assume the entire negotiations were handled badly. Perhaps RIM thought they were a multibillion dollar company, so they could just intimidate the small party. Perhaps they can, but it always better to take the high road in these situations, expecailly when dealing with a widow. Instead of fighting and lying and trying to invalidate the patents, an initial payment might have been in order. I have no idea what went on behind doors, but, again, given the public record these people just seemed really stupid.
And finally, the 600 million must be taken in context. This is like a years EBITDA, and who knows what it will actually mean to RIM after the tax accountants get done. And, since they have been effectivelty saving for a few years, the impact on this year is like 2 months EBITDA.
So, I am not saying that the payment in the best situation, but given RIM lied in court, continued to anger the judge during negotiations, and was clearly trying to play a waiting game, probably hoping that the parties would continue to die off, it was not a horrible outcome.
A couple more thing to put this in context. I recall an invention, perhaps the steam engine and Watts, that was not fully patented because it borrowed patented technology and it was easier to hide the technology than share the credit. In the end this left the inventor wide open for the product to be copied. The inventor would likely have been better off making the technology transparent, honestly fighting the patent, and probably winning in the end.
The second case is standard insurance industry practice, which is reminiscent of what RIM was trying to do. In most settlements, the insurance company will withhold all payments, even in the most open a shut cases. They will offer a fraction of what the policy would indicate. The injured party can either accept the token payment, or wait the statuatory three years to file suit. The insurance company usually ends up the winner as most people cannot self fund the recovery effort, or the insurance company rightly states that the cost of litigation will be greater than the present settlement. RIM was playing exactly this game, and it is probabl as sad they they won at this game as it is that NTP won at the orignal patent dispute.
However this case is different. AOL is not asking eveyrone to pay to send email. AOL is saying that if a spammer wishes to spam, and will follow some rules, then AOL will accept a payment to let the certified spam through to AOL customers. One does not have to the email fee. One could just produce emails that would get through the AOL spam filters. However, it probably will be cheaper for spammers to just pay AOL, so AOL is providing a service for a fee. This is not a tax. It is like fee based municipal trash pick up. Part of my taxes pay for a certain amount of trash pick up. I can pay for additional trash pick up, if I desire, which is certainly not a tax.