Wrong. I'm saying that of all monopolies that have ceased to exist, all of them either collapsed due to internal incompetence and bad decisions, or they were killed by government. None of them was taken down from outside by competitors who came to the respective part of market while they were still significantly smaller than the monopoly.
There are two ways a company can die naturally. It can be either crushed by competitors who push it out of market, or it can collapse on its own with competitors merely filling the void afterwards. Only the first way can be attributed to forces of free market. And what I'm saying is that the first way never happens unless the competitors are already about the same size as the monopoly in question.
You're obviously assuming that the big players will never, ever abuse their market power to keep startups too small. This assumption is false. Oligopoly may be highly competitive... or not. I live in a small EU country where all banks are owned by big European bank houses. Instead of fierce competition, our banking system is actually a testing ground for the big bank houses to see what ridiculous fees they can come up with and how high can they take them before they completely piss their customers off. There already was an antitrust investigation with no effect. The banks in question have no collusion, they just follow orders from their foreign owners.
The only room for "garage" innovation is in land rushes. Upstarts can be successful in a land rush and become giants but they have no chance of attacking established markets directly. And if the old giants don't bet everything on one product, land rushes are not that dangerous for them. That's as far from open market as you can get.
The anti-bigness movement is usually too small to pose any threat to market dominance. So are the niche markets. Tiny upstarts can fill the niche markets but the big corporation has lots of options how to keep them from becoming a real competition. Big corporations can collapse due to internal incompetence and bad decisions but that's a failure on the inside. That's not a result of market forces at all. If the big corporation gets big enough, there's no longer any way to bring it down from the outside as long as the corporation is willing to abuse their market power to keep any competition too small.
Microsoft has enough market power to be a dynastic winner of all time. Any upstart trying to crush it in conventional competition would need similar amount of funds as Microsoft has now. That's simply not going to happen. But. Microsoft is not going to be a dynastic winner of all time for two reasons: 1) Main Microsoft products have reached their peak potential and there's very little left to make users pay for new versions. All that new versions offer are mostly prettier interfaces which do the same as the previous ones. 2) Microsoft's strategy of vendor lock-up has backfired and they've managed to create version lock-up instead. Many big customers are stuck with systems that require specific versions of Microsoft products, particularly IE6. Those customers are going to stick to the old versions as long as they can and then a bit longer.
Microsoft is going to fail. They won't be taken down by some clever upstart but by their own mistakes. This is not a victory of free market but a mixture of bad decisions and general incompetence. And if you look at non-artificial monopolies of the past, you'll notice that all of them either failed due to bad decisions and general incompetence, or they were forced to split up by government.
Critical mass is a requirement only for services which separate their infrastructure from infrastructure of their competitors. Most services simply try to achieve dominance through vendor lock-up. However, vendor lock-up in Internet services is not as strong as it is in proprietary software so most monopolies are eventually going to lose to open competition (like Jabber, though I'm not sure if I can count Diaspora for technical reasons). The bad news is that it could take more than a decade before users realize that they should require open infrastructure where they can change service providers like socks instead of sucking up to the biggest closed player in the field.
I'm not going to fall for the "Oh, but there's a bunch of dwarves that managed to scavange 1% of market share so the huge company with 99% of market share is not really a monopoly" semantics. If one or more companies can and do use their (combined) market power to screw both their customers and competitors, that's good enough monopoly for me. Those who are elected to enact laws are the formal government. Those who can abuse their power to make your life miserable if they want to are the effective government. As for the example of monopoly: Microsoft.
You're missing the point. It may very well be possible for another college student to overtake Facebook with his own project. But that just replaces one monopoly with another. At the moment, it's highly unlikely that there will be multiple social network services which compete while being compatible with each other (for example that Facebook users could add MySpace users as friends on Facebook and vice versa). THAT is the point. The Internet of today is still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality which seriously hinders both competition and innovation.
When a monopoly grows big enough, it becomes the effective government. No support from formal government is required. Free market alone has no means to break down huge monopolies that have reached the stage of effective government. This stage of monopoly is impervious even to ridiculous amounts of internal incompetence which could bring down earlier stages quite easily. If you disagree, please tell me just one feature of the free market that is capable of bringing monopoly in this stage down that doesn't require existence of another monopoly of similar size and explain how this feature works while interacting with said monopoly.
You're looking at a bug that was fixed some time ago but those patches didn't make it into stable kernel yet. It should be fixed for everyone in 2.6.37 (about 3 months from now as 2.6.36 came out 3 days ago). In the mean time, you can grab those patches and compile your own kernel.
Strohmeyer is throwing the towel in a little too early. The main problem of desktop Linux is that Windows XP is a "good enough" system. For now, there's little incentive for average users to switch from XP to Linux other than user's own curiosity or catastrophic Windows breakdown. But eventually, XP users will be forced to switch. The year of desktop Linux will come when Microsoft forces its users to leave XP. I say that Linux will score above 5% in web statistics before XP drops below 50% of Windows market share and above 10% before XP drops below 25%.
If you think that source code isn't valuable, you're focusing on just one part of a big picture. Availability of source code won't magically improve specs or architecture. But it allows good software to stay around much longer than it could if it was closed source and it also makes it much harder to turn down important features and fixes.
In the corporate world, maybe (depends on how stupid the pointy haired bosses are). In the government, against all the lobbyists? No way. Big software corporations will do anything to get governments locked in vendor lock-in. It takes some time to realize how special the "special offer" really is and government agencies either don't have experts who know that beforehand or don't listen to them. And don't forget that locking the government in proprietary system also means locking half of the country's market as well because a lot of companies will be forced to use the system by the government.
Rozpaky kuchare Svatopluka, TV series, 1985, Czechoslovakia. When the series first aired, the TV viewers could vote for one of two alternatives by turning lights on and off. An engineer from central power control would then announce the result in then-live transmission and the story would continue with the alternative chosen by viewers. If you watch a rerun of this series, you'll find out it actually covers all the claims because the reruns include then-live footage from 1985 (no more voting) and there was live audience in the studio who voted using a voting box whose votes didn't actually count.
Actually this kind of branched movie was done as far back as 1985 in Czechoslovakia in a television series Rozpaky kuchare Svatopluka. When the series aired for the first time, the story would stop at certain points for then-live transmission where Josef Dvorak (the starring actor of the series) would ask the viewers to vote for one of two possible alternatives in the story. Both live audience in the studio and TV viewers could vote, the former with a voting box that was passed around, the latter by turning lights on and off. An engineer from central power control would then announce which alternative caused a bigger power drain (got more votes) and the story would continue with the alternative chosen by TV viewers. Reruns of the series today show the story chosen by viewers in 1985.
You should avoid teaching user interface of particular programs as much as possible. You should teach the concept of those programs by making them do the same thing in two programs which have as different interface as possible. Don't forget that when those kids leave high school, most user interfaces will be different, only the basic concepts will be the same. When you teach text processors for example, you should teach OpenOffice in the first half of the lesson and LaTeX in the second half. You should also explain that they shouldn't associate file formats with particular programs in their minds. Show them that they can use more than one program to complete a task which might be almost impossible in any of those programs alone. Encourage them to be creative in solving problems.
Now for what you should teach them:
Basics of data storage - what's a file, what's a directory, what's a file system and how to navigate it (preferably both in command line and GUI)
Typing - if you have to think about which key to press, you have no time to think about what you actually want to write
Internet basics - sending and reading emails, browsing web and searching
Text processors - don't waste time explaining each text format option, make a competition who can find the most in 15 minutes in OpenOffice. Then explain how to create and use paragraph styles and other "advanced" formatting like page breaks. When the lesson is over, they should understand that making lots of spaces and blank paragraphs for page layout is wrong. Teaching the same thing in LaTeX should help them understand why.
Spreadsheets - don't waste time on pretty colors and frames, teach them to use basic formulas and introduce conditions. You could explain the concept of conditions in an "if... then... else..." game: you tell a student some if-then-else statement with 2 simple tasks and he has to chose which task to do (eg. stand up, open classroom door etc.) according to the condition.
HTML - teach them the basic HTML tags and CSS basics (just how to properly change font color etc.) and explain the importance of standards.
Simple scripting - teach them the basics, what's a variable, what's a constant, how to write simple loops, conditions and functions. I think that algorithms will be beyond the scope of the class but you can use them as examples. You should use both Python and some shell, for example BASH, to encourage creativity in solving common tasks.
That's great, except that copyright doesn't guarantee success in the art business. All it does guarantee is that demand will reflect success.
At least for the past 20 years, copyright law has been written by big media for big media. It was specifically changed to strenghten the monopoly of big corporations and hurt individual artists and startups (see the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig for examples). Free market in the world of culture has been destroyed decades ago and it'll take several more decades to rebuild it from scratch if the dinosaur is kept on life support.
Of course, no lasting damage will be done, but I think that punishing the entire population for the stupidity of a small vocal subset is not acceptable.
The "small vocal subset" has no voice in this matter. It takes just a handful of people willing to pay to make the recordings worth it for the artist. Look at Pioneer One or Mister Deity for example.
So, how can you still claim that it's market inertia? If it could have adopted the change 5 years ago, then why hasn't it done it yet?
Because market inertia is all that's left for entertainment industry. The role of the industry is over and when they run out of inertia, the industry is going to collapse. They can't do anything about it, there's no place for them in the future, they can just ride the inertia as long as possible, hurting everybody else in the process. And this agony could last for decades.
Sorry, but why can't we build a new system parallel to copyright? It's trivially easy to release something without copyright while copyright law is in effect, and copyright law has no bearing on such media. If you have such a system, start building it. Nobody is going to stop you.
The system has been under construction for years now. You just need to stop looking up at the dinosaur to see it.
What you want to do is use their dependence on copyright to hurt them, even at the expense of everyone else.
No, I just want to turn the life support off and end their pointless agony which hurts everybody else much more. Let the market take over. We're pumping a lot of resources into the life support in fear that when the dinosaur is gone, our entire culture will go with it. But that fear is irrational. Our culture was here long before the dinosaur and it will survive no matter how big earthquake the dinosaur makes when it finally falls. We're just wasting resources that could be used to build the new system instead. And at this rate, it's going to take decades before the public realizes that there is a new system already in place and we don't need the dinosaur anymore, just like it took years for the public to notice that there's a lot of browsers much better than Internet Explorer.
Your feeling would probably be correct, but if they felt a need, they could do like Canada and say, collect a fee with every bit of recordable media and use that?
Czech collecting societies already do that. And it was really funny a few years ago when the growing capacity of thumb drives made this fee inflate up to 30% of thumb drive price.
"You get what you're willing to pay for" was the point; we are not willing to pay for recordings, so we don't get them.
And again, I fail to see the problem. If people want recordings so badly, they'll learn to pay for them.
OK then, perhaps we should wait until the market is ready to adopt such a change. You know, so that we can prove once and for all that it is just market inertia, and not that the idea is clearly infeasible. It just seems more sensible than throwing the system up in the air, and hoping it will reassemble itself as something nice. I think we might be waiting a long time though.
The market was ready 5 years ago. Just look at piracy statistics, they mostly represent demand for simple digital distribution and alternative business models. When we throw the old system up in the air, it won't reassemble itself because it's not capable of doing that since 1930s. It will come down in pieces. The new system has to be built from ground up in its place and we can't start building it until at least a part of the old system collapses and gives us some clear ground to build on.
I'm sorry, but how does "supporting dinosaurs" prevent indie artists from trying new business models?
The dinosaurs do because they control what gets into mainstream media and what doesn't. Right now, if you're not in mainstream media, you don't exist for vast majority of people.
Your suggested handling of Copyleft licenses: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the Copyright Office to return my paperwork before I'm legally allowed to hand it to you."
Actually, it's "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the collecting society to return my paperwork before I hand it to you or I'll have to pay them for showing you."
Actually, it IS headline material. This royalty change along with new printer/copier royalties means that school and public library expenses on copyright royalties will more than triple for no reason. The estimated total of new expenses (€ 7 million) exceeds the total annual income of DILIA (€ 6 million), the collecting society which will get most of the money. As of 2009, these expenses were about 30% of DILIA's income (€ 2 million).
I don't know but would assume that people would tend to stay in their countries of origin if a combination of available work, appropriate government policies, nice environment, and social connections all fit together.
Umm, you do realize that you're talking about descendants of nomadic tribes who don't consider settling down, getting education and working like the rest of us as acceptable way of life, right? Most of them were forced to settle down by law less than a century ago. A lot of them will move anywhere if it means they'll get bigger social security cheque there.
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Wrong. I'm saying that of all monopolies that have ceased to exist, all of them either collapsed due to internal incompetence and bad decisions, or they were killed by government. None of them was taken down from outside by competitors who came to the respective part of market while they were still significantly smaller than the monopoly.
There are two ways a company can die naturally. It can be either crushed by competitors who push it out of market, or it can collapse on its own with competitors merely filling the void afterwards. Only the first way can be attributed to forces of free market. And what I'm saying is that the first way never happens unless the competitors are already about the same size as the monopoly in question.
You're obviously assuming that the big players will never, ever abuse their market power to keep startups too small. This assumption is false. Oligopoly may be highly competitive... or not. I live in a small EU country where all banks are owned by big European bank houses. Instead of fierce competition, our banking system is actually a testing ground for the big bank houses to see what ridiculous fees they can come up with and how high can they take them before they completely piss their customers off. There already was an antitrust investigation with no effect. The banks in question have no collusion, they just follow orders from their foreign owners.
The only room for "garage" innovation is in land rushes. Upstarts can be successful in a land rush and become giants but they have no chance of attacking established markets directly. And if the old giants don't bet everything on one product, land rushes are not that dangerous for them. That's as far from open market as you can get.
The anti-bigness movement is usually too small to pose any threat to market dominance. So are the niche markets. Tiny upstarts can fill the niche markets but the big corporation has lots of options how to keep them from becoming a real competition. Big corporations can collapse due to internal incompetence and bad decisions but that's a failure on the inside. That's not a result of market forces at all. If the big corporation gets big enough, there's no longer any way to bring it down from the outside as long as the corporation is willing to abuse their market power to keep any competition too small.
Microsoft has enough market power to be a dynastic winner of all time. Any upstart trying to crush it in conventional competition would need similar amount of funds as Microsoft has now. That's simply not going to happen. But. Microsoft is not going to be a dynastic winner of all time for two reasons: 1) Main Microsoft products have reached their peak potential and there's very little left to make users pay for new versions. All that new versions offer are mostly prettier interfaces which do the same as the previous ones. 2) Microsoft's strategy of vendor lock-up has backfired and they've managed to create version lock-up instead. Many big customers are stuck with systems that require specific versions of Microsoft products, particularly IE6. Those customers are going to stick to the old versions as long as they can and then a bit longer.
Microsoft is going to fail. They won't be taken down by some clever upstart but by their own mistakes. This is not a victory of free market but a mixture of bad decisions and general incompetence. And if you look at non-artificial monopolies of the past, you'll notice that all of them either failed due to bad decisions and general incompetence, or they were forced to split up by government.
Critical mass is a requirement only for services which separate their infrastructure from infrastructure of their competitors. Most services simply try to achieve dominance through vendor lock-up. However, vendor lock-up in Internet services is not as strong as it is in proprietary software so most monopolies are eventually going to lose to open competition (like Jabber, though I'm not sure if I can count Diaspora for technical reasons). The bad news is that it could take more than a decade before users realize that they should require open infrastructure where they can change service providers like socks instead of sucking up to the biggest closed player in the field.
Mafia that the government failed to stop is sufficient. No accomplices in formal government are required.
I'm not going to fall for the "Oh, but there's a bunch of dwarves that managed to scavange 1% of market share so the huge company with 99% of market share is not really a monopoly" semantics. If one or more companies can and do use their (combined) market power to screw both their customers and competitors, that's good enough monopoly for me. Those who are elected to enact laws are the formal government. Those who can abuse their power to make your life miserable if they want to are the effective government. As for the example of monopoly: Microsoft.
You're missing the point. It may very well be possible for another college student to overtake Facebook with his own project. But that just replaces one monopoly with another. At the moment, it's highly unlikely that there will be multiple social network services which compete while being compatible with each other (for example that Facebook users could add MySpace users as friends on Facebook and vice versa). THAT is the point. The Internet of today is still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality which seriously hinders both competition and innovation.
When a monopoly grows big enough, it becomes the effective government. No support from formal government is required. Free market alone has no means to break down huge monopolies that have reached the stage of effective government. This stage of monopoly is impervious even to ridiculous amounts of internal incompetence which could bring down earlier stages quite easily. If you disagree, please tell me just one feature of the free market that is capable of bringing monopoly in this stage down that doesn't require existence of another monopoly of similar size and explain how this feature works while interacting with said monopoly.
You're looking at a bug that was fixed some time ago but those patches didn't make it into stable kernel yet. It should be fixed for everyone in 2.6.37 (about 3 months from now as 2.6.36 came out 3 days ago). In the mean time, you can grab those patches and compile your own kernel.
Strohmeyer is throwing the towel in a little too early. The main problem of desktop Linux is that Windows XP is a "good enough" system. For now, there's little incentive for average users to switch from XP to Linux other than user's own curiosity or catastrophic Windows breakdown. But eventually, XP users will be forced to switch. The year of desktop Linux will come when Microsoft forces its users to leave XP. I say that Linux will score above 5% in web statistics before XP drops below 50% of Windows market share and above 10% before XP drops below 25%.
If you think that source code isn't valuable, you're focusing on just one part of a big picture. Availability of source code won't magically improve specs or architecture. But it allows good software to stay around much longer than it could if it was closed source and it also makes it much harder to turn down important features and fixes.
In the corporate world, maybe (depends on how stupid the pointy haired bosses are). In the government, against all the lobbyists? No way. Big software corporations will do anything to get governments locked in vendor lock-in. It takes some time to realize how special the "special offer" really is and government agencies either don't have experts who know that beforehand or don't listen to them. And don't forget that locking the government in proprietary system also means locking half of the country's market as well because a lot of companies will be forced to use the system by the government.
Not that I know of. Google found an article from 2006 which says that a DVD of this series would be released soon but nothing else.
Rozpaky kuchare Svatopluka, TV series, 1985, Czechoslovakia. When the series first aired, the TV viewers could vote for one of two alternatives by turning lights on and off. An engineer from central power control would then announce the result in then-live transmission and the story would continue with the alternative chosen by viewers. If you watch a rerun of this series, you'll find out it actually covers all the claims because the reruns include then-live footage from 1985 (no more voting) and there was live audience in the studio who voted using a voting box whose votes didn't actually count.
Actually this kind of branched movie was done as far back as 1985 in Czechoslovakia in a television series Rozpaky kuchare Svatopluka. When the series aired for the first time, the story would stop at certain points for then-live transmission where Josef Dvorak (the starring actor of the series) would ask the viewers to vote for one of two possible alternatives in the story. Both live audience in the studio and TV viewers could vote, the former with a voting box that was passed around, the latter by turning lights on and off. An engineer from central power control would then announce which alternative caused a bigger power drain (got more votes) and the story would continue with the alternative chosen by TV viewers. Reruns of the series today show the story chosen by viewers in 1985.
You should avoid teaching user interface of particular programs as much as possible. You should teach the concept of those programs by making them do the same thing in two programs which have as different interface as possible. Don't forget that when those kids leave high school, most user interfaces will be different, only the basic concepts will be the same. When you teach text processors for example, you should teach OpenOffice in the first half of the lesson and LaTeX in the second half. You should also explain that they shouldn't associate file formats with particular programs in their minds. Show them that they can use more than one program to complete a task which might be almost impossible in any of those programs alone. Encourage them to be creative in solving problems.
Now for what you should teach them:
I did a stage3 Gentoo installation last month and it hasn't changed since the last time (4 years ago) at all.
That's great, except that copyright doesn't guarantee success in the art business. All it does guarantee is that demand will reflect success.
At least for the past 20 years, copyright law has been written by big media for big media. It was specifically changed to strenghten the monopoly of big corporations and hurt individual artists and startups (see the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig for examples). Free market in the world of culture has been destroyed decades ago and it'll take several more decades to rebuild it from scratch if the dinosaur is kept on life support.
Of course, no lasting damage will be done, but I think that punishing the entire population for the stupidity of a small vocal subset is not acceptable.
The "small vocal subset" has no voice in this matter. It takes just a handful of people willing to pay to make the recordings worth it for the artist. Look at Pioneer One or Mister Deity for example.
So, how can you still claim that it's market inertia? If it could have adopted the change 5 years ago, then why hasn't it done it yet?
Because market inertia is all that's left for entertainment industry. The role of the industry is over and when they run out of inertia, the industry is going to collapse. They can't do anything about it, there's no place for them in the future, they can just ride the inertia as long as possible, hurting everybody else in the process. And this agony could last for decades.
Sorry, but why can't we build a new system parallel to copyright? It's trivially easy to release something without copyright while copyright law is in effect, and copyright law has no bearing on such media. If you have such a system, start building it. Nobody is going to stop you.
The system has been under construction for years now. You just need to stop looking up at the dinosaur to see it.
What you want to do is use their dependence on copyright to hurt them, even at the expense of everyone else.
No, I just want to turn the life support off and end their pointless agony which hurts everybody else much more. Let the market take over. We're pumping a lot of resources into the life support in fear that when the dinosaur is gone, our entire culture will go with it. But that fear is irrational. Our culture was here long before the dinosaur and it will survive no matter how big earthquake the dinosaur makes when it finally falls. We're just wasting resources that could be used to build the new system instead. And at this rate, it's going to take decades before the public realizes that there is a new system already in place and we don't need the dinosaur anymore, just like it took years for the public to notice that there's a lot of browsers much better than Internet Explorer.
Your feeling would probably be correct, but if they felt a need, they could do like Canada and say, collect a fee with every bit of recordable media and use that?
Czech collecting societies already do that. And it was really funny a few years ago when the growing capacity of thumb drives made this fee inflate up to 30% of thumb drive price.
"You get what you're willing to pay for" was the point; we are not willing to pay for recordings, so we don't get them.
And again, I fail to see the problem. If people want recordings so badly, they'll learn to pay for them.
OK then, perhaps we should wait until the market is ready to adopt such a change. You know, so that we can prove once and for all that it is just market inertia, and not that the idea is clearly infeasible. It just seems more sensible than throwing the system up in the air, and hoping it will reassemble itself as something nice. I think we might be waiting a long time though.
The market was ready 5 years ago. Just look at piracy statistics, they mostly represent demand for simple digital distribution and alternative business models. When we throw the old system up in the air, it won't reassemble itself because it's not capable of doing that since 1930s. It will come down in pieces. The new system has to be built from ground up in its place and we can't start building it until at least a part of the old system collapses and gives us some clear ground to build on.
I'm sorry, but how does "supporting dinosaurs" prevent indie artists from trying new business models?
The dinosaurs do because they control what gets into mainstream media and what doesn't. Right now, if you're not in mainstream media, you don't exist for vast majority of people.
Your suggested handling of Copyleft licenses: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the Copyright Office to return my paperwork before I'm legally allowed to hand it to you."
Actually, it's "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the collecting society to return my paperwork before I hand it to you or I'll have to pay them for showing you."
Actually, it IS headline material. This royalty change along with new printer/copier royalties means that school and public library expenses on copyright royalties will more than triple for no reason. The estimated total of new expenses (€ 7 million) exceeds the total annual income of DILIA (€ 6 million), the collecting society which will get most of the money. As of 2009, these expenses were about 30% of DILIA's income (€ 2 million).
I don't know but would assume that people would tend to stay in their countries of origin if a combination of available work, appropriate government policies, nice environment, and social connections all fit together.
Umm, you do realize that you're talking about descendants of nomadic tribes who don't consider settling down, getting education and working like the rest of us as acceptable way of life, right? Most of them were forced to settle down by law less than a century ago. A lot of them will move anywhere if it means they'll get bigger social security cheque there.