Yeah, but the problem for the record industry is that adopting means they are practically out of business in the long run - at least their traditional business. The music industry is - at it's base - "selling" to artists the service for distributing music. That means (or meant) basically the technology to record and produce music to sound storage mediums, the marketing to promote it and the infrastructure to distribute it. The recording technology became commodity with the advent of digital recording, marketing was never a unique selling point for them, and the infrastructure question is answered by the internet.
For years now they reaped the benefits of vastly cheaper production, but now they are facing a situation where the everything has come together even for the average music customer.
In my opinion, what they are trying to do with that DRM stuff is trying to put the genie back in the bottle, by recapturing control of the distribution channel. Not only because of pirating, but also to save the heart of their business model.
Small release cycles and having a working software most of the time. Isn't there a huge loss in testing efforts to avoid regressions? Or is automated testing mandatory for this?
please try to go to google an other big content providers and tell them that they have to pay you. Watch what happens if they just stop providing content to your customers for a while, just to make a point.
Oh, and btw. only in Soviet Russia, the content provider PAYS YOU!!!!
Slightly offtopic, but I stumbled over something on this site and that leads to a plea:
Could someone please have a look at the "The Free Software Song" music video and tell me if it's save to watch? Subtext: "The Free Software Song" is performed by the office park band, The GNU/Stallmans. The lyrics are by Richard Stallman. The music video is a three minute-long, 28 mb MPEG file.
ITIL and similar standards are important. For instance Service Management - "keep shit running" if you prefer - is important since for nearly every company your Service Mgmt. Processes (not Tools, this is just the second step) have to interface to external partners. One thing is that therefore, there needs to some kind of commonality. Beginning with a certain size of operations on either side, "just call the IT guy" doesn't cut it anymore. You have Service Level Agreements, first, second, third level support structures etc. etc. Another point, believe it or not, there is a huge amount of unnecessary downtime in companies because some guy changes stuff (e.g. firewall or router configs), taking down something he doesn't even know exists, and causes a bunch of unrelated guys chasing the source of the problem. This is because they didn't organize their processes in a good way. ITIL gives a blueprint on how you would do is, and hopefully avoids a commitee of theorists in each company reinventing the wheel (just worse) again and again.
I first read it as "Quake 4 Linux", then thought, oh that's wrong, it's l44t speak for "Quake for Linux", then, realizing that Quake running on Linux is seriously old news, I was totally confused.
Professionalism: wrong - all in all most of the OSS I see is more professionally done than the closed sourced crap I have to work with.
Conceptual Integrity: Totally wrong, see above. Yes, there are damn good closed source products, but the same is true for some OSS stuff. I cannot be assed to provide examples, but it's easy for everybody taking having have a clue. Yes, there is totally rubbish OSS around, but first, it's just a function of the mass of what is out there, and second, the same is also true for closed source stuff.
Innovation: Half true, but OTOH, there are many examples where the fact that something is OSS drives innovation in a way that wouldn't be possible with closed source. Internet Explorer for example would've been forked long ago if it was open source.
As a CSR working for a cable company im going to have to say your slightly wrong, at least from all the information i have on the 3 cable companies that I and my roomates work for.
I used a cable company as an example that could be easy to understand - not because they have this problem. In fact I can easily believe they haven't, because their type of business is relatively static compared to the one where I have good visibility on.
One word of caution, though, exposing the GUI to an application via web doesn't automatically give you a webservice. If a vendor really wants to f*ck up, he just needs to expose the webinterface like via something like path_to_appserver/UI/start.exe, and leave it up to the poor developer to try reverse engeneer what's going on between browser and server.
Applications like this are in vast usage in companies. Besides office applications, editors and browsers they should outnumber most of the other applications.
As I said, it's a step in the right direction for interoperability. And one can at least hope to get some minumum benefits from this like the possibility to address specific pages of the Client via links.
In relation to the story itself - you replace a OS dependend fat client with an OS independend web client, and that is indeed a fundamental change.
Many enterprises are plagued with too many proprietary, non-modular fat clients needed for Customer Care, Service Management, Billing, HR, etc. etc. The people on this sometimes have to work with 1-5 apps for one transaction (e.g. Cable Service Customer calls Customer Care about a billing problem for a PPV event, CC maybe agent has to look in one app details of the Customer, in another if there was a know outage, in a third if the money was transfered from the customer, and then maybe open a ticket in a 4th, etc., all while copying&pasting data from one app to the next) All that because each of the applications just offers a dumb fat client to access it per default.
If vendors - which should have no interest in that kind of lock-in - started to offer modern Web GUIs, that would be a step in the right direction.
Though expect that these Web interface will pop up, and have already, I also know that the underlying interfaces often doesn't lend itself for easy integration with others.
hey look, this entry on "Poststructuralism" was written by a Columbia professor!--I can probably assume it's accurate
So? I know a philosophy professor, and I can assure you that there is some much debate in this circles that one arbitry professor's view on something like post-structuralism is probably contestet by 80% of all others.
Wikipedia links to an article by Derrida - I'd say that the probability of this being accurate is also quite high;).
But what you also have to factor in is that your paper encyclopedia is probably more outdated than wikipedia. So there is an additional source for impreciseness, just this time something which inherent not for wikipedia. Granted, this might not be a factor for most of the articles, but really, you never know - for instance even the knowledge about historic subjects might change over time. And how many people can afford always having the newest encyclopedia available at home?
Additionally, you can crosscheck the stuff from wikipedia easily, most of the articles rossreference other pages, and then there is still google.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the problem for the record industry is that adopting means they are practically out of business in the long run - at least their traditional business.
The music industry is - at it's base - "selling" to artists the service for distributing music.
That means (or meant) basically the technology to record and produce music to sound storage mediums, the marketing to promote it and the infrastructure to distribute it.
The recording technology became commodity with the advent of digital recording, marketing was never a unique selling point for them, and the infrastructure question is answered by the internet.
For years now they reaped the benefits of vastly cheaper production, but now they are facing a situation where the everything has come together even for the average music customer.
In my opinion, what they are trying to do with that DRM stuff is trying to put the genie back in the bottle, by recapturing control of the distribution channel. Not only because of pirating, but also to save the heart of their business model.
It seems nobody mentioned it.
I fondly remember the special effects - the aliens were done with amazing effects even for that time.
Small release cycles and having a working software most of the time.
Isn't there a huge loss in testing efforts to avoid regressions?
Or is automated testing mandatory for this?
Dear Pipe Dude,
please try to go to google an other big content providers and tell them
that they have to pay you.
Watch what happens if they just stop providing content to your customers for a while,
just to make a point.
Oh, and btw. only in Soviet Russia, the content provider PAYS YOU!!!!
Slightly offtopic, but I stumbled over something on this site and that leads to a plea:
Could someone please have a look at the
"The Free Software Song" music video and tell me if it's save to watch?
Subtext:
"The Free Software Song" is performed by the office park band, The GNU/Stallmans.
The lyrics are by Richard Stallman. The music video is a three minute-long, 28 mb MPEG file.
I don't dare to.
Many thanks.
ITIL and similar standards are important. For instance Service Management - "keep shit running" if you prefer - is important since for nearly every company your Service Mgmt. Processes (not Tools, this is just the second step) have to interface to external partners.
One thing is that therefore, there needs to some kind of commonality. Beginning with a certain size of operations on either side, "just call the IT guy" doesn't cut it anymore. You have Service Level Agreements, first, second, third level support structures etc. etc.
Another point, believe it or not, there is a huge amount of unnecessary downtime in companies because some guy changes stuff (e.g. firewall or router configs), taking down something he doesn't even know exists, and causes a bunch of unrelated guys chasing the source of the problem.
This is because they didn't organize their processes in a good way. ITIL gives a blueprint on how you would do is, and hopefully avoids a commitee of theorists in each company reinventing the wheel (just worse) again and again.
Me too!
I first read it as "Quake 4 Linux", then thought, oh that's wrong,
it's l44t speak for "Quake for Linux", then, realizing that Quake
running on Linux is seriously old news, I was totally confused.
I'm getting old.
Fascinating! It's so good, I'm even a little bit proud I solved it after some hard thinking. At least I'm very sure that I solved it ;).
m l#1000wiresm l#sinkTheSub
This
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/hard.sht
and this
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/hard.sht
were also two I quite enjoyed.
zero? I mean they'd never be able to see the mark on themselves (assuming they have no mirrors to get any sense out of that riddle)
Professionalism: wrong - all in all most of the OSS I see is more professionally done than the closed sourced crap I have to work with.
Conceptual Integrity: Totally wrong, see above. Yes, there are damn good closed source products, but the same is true for some OSS stuff. I cannot be assed to provide examples, but it's easy for everybody taking having have a clue. Yes, there is totally rubbish OSS around, but first, it's just a function of the mass of what is out there, and second, the same is also true for closed source stuff.
Innovation: Half true, but OTOH, there are many examples where the fact that something is OSS drives innovation in a way that wouldn't be possible with closed source. Internet Explorer for example would've been forked long ago if it was open source.
As a CSR working for a cable company im going to have to say your slightly wrong, at least from all the information i have on the 3 cable companies that I and my roomates work for.
I used a cable company as an example that could be easy to understand - not because they have this problem. In fact I can easily believe they haven't, because their type of business is relatively static compared to the one where I have good visibility on.
Ok, I stand corrected. Wow, you should have some of the most sophisticated callcenter people I've ever heard of ;).
We are talking about applications. You won't find a callcenter agent use sql to access the customer db.
One word of caution, though, exposing the GUI to an application via web doesn't automatically give you a webservice. If a vendor really wants to f*ck up, he just needs to expose the webinterface like via something like path_to_appserver/UI/start.exe, and leave it up to the poor developer to try reverse engeneer what's going on between browser and server.
Cf. gmail.
Applications like this are in vast usage in companies. Besides office applications, editors and browsers they should outnumber most of the other applications.
As I said, it's a step in the right direction for interoperability. And one can at least hope to get some minumum benefits from this like the possibility to address specific pages of the Client via links.
In relation to the story itself - you replace a OS dependend fat client with an OS independend web client, and that is indeed a fundamental change.
Try saving and accessing a terabyte customer db on your peecee.
The idea is not that doom IV will be web based.
Many enterprises are plagued with too many proprietary, non-modular fat clients needed for Customer Care, Service Management, Billing, HR, etc. etc.
The people on this sometimes have to work with 1-5 apps for one transaction (e.g. Cable Service Customer calls Customer Care about a billing problem for a PPV event, CC maybe agent has to look in one app details of the Customer, in another if there was a know outage, in a third if the money was transfered from the customer, and then maybe open a ticket in a 4th, etc., all while copying&pasting data from one app to the next)
All that because each of the applications just offers a dumb fat client to access it per default.
If vendors - which should have no interest in that kind of lock-in - started to offer modern Web GUIs, that would be a step in the right direction.
Though expect that these Web interface will pop up, and have already, I also know that the underlying interfaces often doesn't lend itself for easy integration with others.
hey look, this entry on "Poststructuralism" was written by a Columbia professor!--I can probably assume it's accurate
;).
So? I know a philosophy professor, and I can assure you that there is some much debate in this circles that one arbitry professor's view on something like post-structuralism is probably contestet by 80% of all others.
Wikipedia links to an article by Derrida - I'd say that the probability of this being accurate is also quite high
But what you also have to factor in is that your paper encyclopedia is probably more outdated than wikipedia. So there is an additional source for impreciseness, just this time something which inherent not for wikipedia. Granted, this might not be a factor for most of the articles, but really, you never know - for instance even the knowledge about historic subjects might change over time.
And how many people can afford always having the newest encyclopedia available at home?
Additionally, you can crosscheck the stuff from wikipedia easily, most of the articles rossreference other pages, and then there is still google.
It's still IT economy, isn't it?
Lazy/stupid people driving the IT economy ...
How many people can watch a movie with gore and walk home without thinking twice? Probably 99.x percent of the people on this planet.
Yeah, no wonder, look at what boring stuff he played in!
I can't be assed into making links, but here's some stuff for ya:
3 7371,-118.082052&spn=0.006641,0.006652&t=k&hl=en 1 184,-76.330261&spn=0.018625,0.035448&t=k&hl=en 3 845,-76.331667&spn=0.005397,0.007918&t=k&hl=en 2 3520,-118.091547&spn=0.006641,0.006652&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=palmdale,ca&ll=34.6
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=norfolk,va&ll=36.95
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=norfolk,va&ll=36.95
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=palmdale,ca&ll=34.6
Well,
maybe we get the long awaited fusion between Star Wars and Trek with this
Borg Cube hidden beneath a sea.