Yes, and if I were a sysadmin that received your email, I'd simply firewall you off my subnet.
What if our business wanted to buy something? By this definition, such an e-mail would be labeled spam.
So now every e-mail sent by a business is advertising, therefore it is spam. This is why screaming SPAM!! for *every* business e-mail is the wrong idea.
make sure it is ontopic for the email address you've found.
The topic being printed right next to the e-mail address no doubt...
The definition of spam is "unsolicited bulk e-mail." Sending a polite introductory e-mail to *one* address doesn't fit that definition.
The new definition is "if the e-mail didn't come from a familiar address, it is spam" and that is plainly ridiculous. I don't support mass random e-mail advertising by any means (I get about 50 such messages a week), but businesses have to communicate.
to advertise to them
I never said these e-mails were advertisements. We have a web site for advertising. E-mail is for communicating with people. Businesses may not have a right to advertise to you, but they do have the right to use e-mail like everyone else.
No. However there are times when I send "hello, our company is" e-mails to other web sites and news sites, one at a time. Is that spam? No.
Polite introductory correspondence is essential to business. Screeching SPAM!! SPAM!! SPAM!! every time an unfamiliar e-mail address appears in the From: field doesn't help solve the spam problem, and in fact, makes it worse.
That said, I'm glad to see Mandrake's newsletter is opt in. They don't seem like a spamming-type company (and they make an excellent Linux distribution).
Oh, and moderators: since the word SPAM appeared in the STORY, this is NOT offtopic.
I guess Mandrake is sending their newsletter to *@*.* now, right?
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail with a specific commercial pitch or advertisement including a price. Introductory e-mails (especially sent to a specific address), newsletters and business correspondence is not spam.
but only consider industry proven and supported software.
...the thin, whiny sound of an incompetent, bumbling, empire-building middle manager, easily identified by the unhyphenated buzz-phrase "industry-proven" which is part of the Management 2.0 Service Pack upgrade along with "customer-focused" and "memory-hungry."
It really is unfair to have such a staggering advantage over the competition.
No, please. PLEASE go overpay for your "industry-proven" version of the exact same thing everyone with a clue already has. Just don't lay off anyone when your budget runs out.
There is too much convergant thinking in PC games anymore.
The "clone and sequel" industry is another term for it. Same thing that is happening in Hollywood. Coincidence?:)
Or has the US gaming
industry
become so braindead that if a game doesn't fit perfectly into a given genre, it's "too hard and confusing".
Bingo. Tell him what he's won, Bob.
The game "industry," in their money-soaked, stumbling mad rush to become an interactive Hollywood has no tolerance for risk, and no tolerance for moderate success. Creativity is discouraged. Talent is fired. Only the "proven" get funded. It's a numbers industry, not a creative industry, and that is why it fails.
The game media is the other half of the problem, as they have no tolerance for a moderate budget. Warcraft 3 was every game journalists favorite as soon as the first concept sketches were released (I know this because I read the fawning, fanboy-esque 18-page "previews" in PCGamer, complete with cover feature), because they knew Blizzard would throw umpty million dollars at it.
Meanwhile, Warcraft 3 will lose to the Sims by a minimum of four million units, and they still don't get it. There are people making $70,000 a year at these companies that cannot explain why the Sims succeeded, but they can ALWAYS explain why THIS new idea WON'T sell.
Having someone around who actually knows how to build something is important to the empire-building, plant-watering donut list and their bonuses.
Japan in particular probably has a much better developed sense of loyalty and business ethics as well. Of course, the suits will disagree, but when was the last $4 billion "accounting error" in Japan?
How every new Microsoft initiative is the "riskiest ever" and they are all designed "to rework the entire architecture of computing as we know it?"
Why not just build better products?
Tells you who you're dealing with--and what they're doing. Palladium is all about deciding what's trustworthy.
Guess what? Anything written by a company with a market cap of less than $1B will be *un*trustworthy by default.
Protects information. The system uses high-level encryption to "seal" data so that snoops and thieves are thwarted. It also can protect the integrity of documents so that they can't be altered without your knowledge.
Hmmmm... sounds like the UNIX file system, without the encryption, of course.
Stops viruses and worms. Palladium won't run unauthorized programs
Like those of competitors.
Cans spam.
Procmail.
...
How about an OS that doesn't crash every five minutes? How about development platforms where more time is spent on stabilizing the API than coming up with impressive sounding error messages?
Most of Salon's expensives come from actually paying well-respected and well-written authors.
Fair enough, but $75 million worth???
$75 million dollars is a gargantuan amount of money, enough to employ hundreds of people for years. They had ad revenue and 40,000 subscribers too. Incredible.
Re:Charging for content sealed Salon's fate
on
Salon in Dire Straits
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
content isn't something people will pay for on the web
This is a myth. Right along with "people are basically stupid" and "piracy is keeping content from being profitable on-line."
There is a 100% chance that if a large record company put up a comprehensive, indexed database of downloadable high-quality.mp3s of their entire music library complete with lyrics and background information on the artists connected to a massive high-capacity backbone, people would subscribe by the hundreds of thousands, and quite probably the millions.
That's content, and people would pay for it if it were available. People will pay for other content too.
Re:Spielberg annoys to the end
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
# the trite music from John Williams (which seemed especially bad this time... is he even trying anymore?)
I'll guess you noticed that the growing suspense music from the television commercial is exactly the same music used at the end of Aliens (and about eleven hundred other movies).
Then again, that stupid "heavily filtered guy screaming on roller coaster sound" and radio commercial happy violin music have been overused to the point of total absurdity too, so...
First Sentence, Paragraph 2: "LINUX HASN'T gone away."
some 40 percent said they were either using or testing Linux
With some 27 percent of the market, Linux is now the second most popular operating system for servers
Linux server sales jumped by more than 50 percent to $400 million, with IBM leading the pack.
WalMart recently began selling a house brand PC at rock bottom prices -- available with Linux for the thriftiest PC buyers.
Well, there you have it. What was the point of this article again?
purveyors of Linux software and support have fallen back to earth -- along with their stocks.
Yes, well we should certainly expect Linux stocks to buck the trend and grow 40% a year while the rest of the market drops.
managers of large corporate technology departments.
Oh, yes. Those forward-thinking, risk-taking, visionaries of the business world. They'd all be using Linux by now, but they had to go to a meeting.
Until recently, interacting with Linux was almost entirely text-driven
Wasn't X written back in the 70s? So Jimmy Carter was President until recently too, right?
But adopters of Linux still face hurdles living in a Microsoft world.
rofl A Microsoft world...
Oh, memorandum for "journalists"
Hyphenated buzzwords such as:
industry-dominant mainframe-like cost-consciou s
and the obligatory but thankfully absent
memory-hungry
make the article sound like it was written by an idiot. They do not sound hip, and they are poor substitutes for good grammar, despite what your soccer-mom readership tells you.
They distract readers from the point of your article like someone dropping an industrial dishwashing machine down four flights of stairs would distract players in a chess game.
So when records go off like a bomb, and record companies sit there raking in the profits, don't forget that these profits go to pay for the other 90% of albums that didn't make any cash.
Awwww... poor babies.
This is the same tired excuse that the game industry trots out every time someone complains that the product is crap, the prices are too high and everything is a focus-group-developed clone. The recording industry doesn't make it sound any better.
The other 90% are also a WRITEOFF.
If they were super-profitable, don't you think everyone would be doing it?
No. The recording industry has the same advantage over potential competition as the game industry: a hammerlock on distribution and shelf space. It not only makes them super-profitable, but it also makes it nearly impossible to compete with them.
Copyright does not apply to ideas, it only applies to the tangible representation of those ideas. Only using a patented process would be infringement, and given the state of patents these days, perhaps that would be a place to start.
Nevertheless, it is very unlikely to be a problem. Absent an enforceable NDA or non-compete, former employers' legal influence ends when the clock is punched.
People who copy albums have neither the incentive or the bandwidth to compete. It really is a competition. A business' product vs. their product for free. Fine. Let's look at a comparison. (Businesses here mainly includes independent artists):
1) Businesses can afford readily available and reliable bandwidth in large amounts.
The free copies probably can't.
2) Businesses can advertise.
The free copies probably won't.
3) Businesses have an incentive to provide a higher quality product at a better price due to increased competition.
The free copies probably won't put in the required time, and certainly not for free.
4) Businesses can make new products.
Copies, by definition, are never new.
5) Businesses have an incentive to make it very convenient to find and purchase their products.
Free copies are usually very difficult *and time consuming* to find. That's not free. Time is money.
Add to this the fact that most people are honest, and the whole "piracy" argument becomes quite flimsy indeed.
I'm not in support of draconian *AA legislation and irrational copyright controls, but I *am* in support of artists earning a fair living from their work. Technology should be used to encourage that.
"Illegal" copying will never go away. It's no different than shoplifting or people writing bad checks. It's going to happen. That should not be an excuse to treat everyone else poorly (Best Buy, are you listening?). If you treat people like thieves, that's exactly how they will behave, mainly because of the implied insult, not because they weren't willing to buy your precious "content."
Note to the music and video publishers: Put your stuff on line sooner, and these problems will be reduced.
Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it.
This is the most important statement in the article. Bandwidth is the main component of every Internet policy discussion. Upstream is probably at least as important as downstream. To seperate the two significantly is an attempt to confine people to the role of consumer: i.e. "stay on the couch."
Upstream bandwidth allows people to become *producers* too, which is a good thing(tm).
Slashdot Mirror
They'd have to just charge for the content directly, which hasn't been a very successful model on the web so far.
Salon did $1.1M selling subscriptions with over 30,000 sales. Sounds successful to me.
Now, because they SPENT $75 million, doesn't mean that people "won't pay for content." (Web myth #47)
Yes, and if I were a sysadmin that received your email, I'd simply firewall you off my subnet.
What if our business wanted to buy something? By this definition, such an e-mail would be labeled spam.
So now every e-mail sent by a business is advertising, therefore it is spam. This is why screaming SPAM!! for *every* business e-mail is the wrong idea.
make sure it is ontopic for the email address you've found.
The topic being printed right next to the e-mail address no doubt...
The definition of spam is "unsolicited bulk e-mail." Sending a polite introductory e-mail to *one* address doesn't fit that definition.
The new definition is "if the e-mail didn't come from a familiar address, it is spam" and that is plainly ridiculous. I don't support mass random e-mail advertising by any means (I get about 50 such messages a week), but businesses have to communicate.
to advertise to them
I never said these e-mails were advertisements. We have a web site for advertising. E-mail is for communicating with people. Businesses may not have a right to advertise to you, but they do have the right to use e-mail like everyone else.
[i]I hope you are not a spammer[/i]
No. However there are times when I send "hello, our company is" e-mails to other web sites and news sites, one at a time. Is that spam? No.
Polite introductory correspondence is essential to business. Screeching SPAM!! SPAM!! SPAM!! every time an unfamiliar e-mail address appears in the From: field doesn't help solve the spam problem, and in fact, makes it worse.
That said, I'm glad to see Mandrake's newsletter is opt in. They don't seem like a spamming-type company (and they make an excellent Linux distribution).
Oh, and moderators: since the word SPAM appeared in the STORY, this is NOT offtopic.
Any e-mail I don't want = spam
I guess Mandrake is sending their newsletter to *@*.* now, right?
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail with a specific commercial pitch or advertisement including a price. Introductory e-mails (especially sent to a specific address), newsletters and business correspondence is not spam.
but only consider industry proven and supported software.
...the thin, whiny sound of an incompetent, bumbling, empire-building middle manager, easily identified by the unhyphenated buzz-phrase "industry-proven" which is part of the Management 2.0 Service Pack upgrade along with "customer-focused" and "memory-hungry."
It really is unfair to have such a staggering advantage over the competition.
No, please. PLEASE go overpay for your "industry-proven" version of the exact same thing everyone with a clue already has. Just don't lay off anyone when your budget runs out.
Bad loans are not accounting "errors."
But thanks for playing.
There is too much convergant thinking in PC games anymore.
:)
The "clone and sequel" industry is another term for it. Same thing that is happening in Hollywood. Coincidence?
Or has the US gaming
industry
become so braindead that if a game doesn't fit perfectly into a given genre, it's "too hard and confusing".
Bingo. Tell him what he's won, Bob.
The game "industry," in their money-soaked, stumbling mad rush to become an interactive Hollywood has no tolerance for risk, and no tolerance for moderate success. Creativity is discouraged. Talent is fired. Only the "proven" get funded. It's a numbers industry, not a creative industry, and that is why it fails.
The game media is the other half of the problem, as they have no tolerance for a moderate budget. Warcraft 3 was every game journalists favorite as soon as the first concept sketches were released (I know this because I read the fawning, fanboy-esque 18-page "previews" in PCGamer, complete with cover feature), because they knew Blizzard would throw umpty million dollars at it.
Meanwhile, Warcraft 3 will lose to the Sims by a minimum of four million units, and they still don't get it. There are people making $70,000 a year at these companies that cannot explain why the Sims succeeded, but they can ALWAYS explain why THIS new idea WON'T sell.
Sigh. Another $10 million yawn.
Anyone who saw the demo dropped their jaws in awe.
Sure. It has great graphics. Fine. Spectacular. I have always been amazed by Id's graphics engines.
However, the *point* was something entirely different.
They don't lay off their staff every six months.
Having someone around who actually knows how to build something is important to the empire-building, plant-watering donut list and their bonuses.
Japan in particular probably has a much better developed sense of loyalty and business ethics as well. Of course, the suits will disagree, but when was the last $4 billion "accounting error" in Japan?
At several million $ each, my guess is there will be limited "snapping up" of these aircraft.
Donuts are "snapped up" Passenger aircraft are not.
How every new Microsoft initiative is the "riskiest ever" and they are all designed "to rework the entire architecture of computing as we know it?"
Why not just build better products?
Tells you who you're dealing with--and what they're doing. Palladium is all about deciding what's trustworthy.
Guess what? Anything written by a company with a market cap of less than $1B will be *un*trustworthy by default.
Protects information. The system uses high-level encryption to "seal" data so that snoops and thieves are thwarted. It also can protect the integrity of documents so that they can't be altered without your knowledge.
Hmmmm... sounds like the UNIX file system, without the encryption, of course.
Stops viruses and worms. Palladium won't run unauthorized programs
Like those of competitors.
Cans spam.
Procmail.
...
How about an OS that doesn't crash every five minutes? How about development platforms where more time is spent on stabilizing the API than coming up with impressive sounding error messages?
Most of Salon's expensives come from actually paying well-respected and well-written authors.
Fair enough, but $75 million worth???
$75 million dollars is a gargantuan amount of money, enough to employ hundreds of people for years. They had ad revenue and 40,000 subscribers too. Incredible.
content isn't something people will pay for on the web
.mp3s of their entire music library complete with lyrics and background information on the artists connected to a massive high-capacity backbone, people would subscribe by the hundreds of thousands, and quite probably the millions.
This is a myth. Right along with "people are basically stupid" and "piracy is keeping content from being profitable on-line."
There is a 100% chance that if a large record company put up a comprehensive, indexed database of downloadable high-quality
That's content, and people would pay for it if it were available. People will pay for other content too.
# the trite music from John Williams (which seemed especially bad this time...
is he even trying anymore?)
I'll guess you noticed that the growing suspense music from the television commercial is exactly the same music used at the end of Aliens (and about eleven hundred other movies).
Then again, that stupid "heavily filtered guy screaming on roller coaster sound" and radio commercial happy violin music have been overused to the point of total absurdity too, so...
Godwin wins again.
I mean, doesn't this article just *scream* Godwin's law?
Headline: "So whatever happened to Linux?"
u s
First Sentence, Paragraph 2: "LINUX HASN'T gone away."
some 40 percent said they were either using or testing Linux
With some 27 percent of the market, Linux is now the second most popular operating system for servers
Linux server sales jumped by more than 50 percent to $400 million, with IBM leading the pack.
WalMart recently began selling a house brand PC at rock bottom prices -- available with Linux for the thriftiest PC buyers.
Well, there you have it. What was the point of this article again?
purveyors of Linux software and support have fallen back to earth -- along with their stocks.
Yes, well we should certainly expect Linux stocks to buck the trend and grow 40% a year while the rest of the market drops.
managers of large corporate technology departments.
Oh, yes. Those forward-thinking, risk-taking, visionaries of the business world. They'd all be using Linux by now, but they had to go to a meeting.
Until recently, interacting with Linux was almost entirely text-driven
Wasn't X written back in the 70s? So Jimmy Carter was President until recently too, right?
But adopters of Linux still face hurdles living in a Microsoft world.
rofl A Microsoft world...
Oh, memorandum for "journalists"
Hyphenated buzzwords such as:
industry-dominant
mainframe-like
cost-conscio
and the obligatory but thankfully absent
memory-hungry
make the article sound like it was written by an idiot. They do not sound hip, and they are poor substitutes for good grammar, despite what your soccer-mom readership tells you.
They distract readers from the point of your article like someone dropping an industrial dishwashing machine down four flights of stairs would distract players in a chess game.
What is it again? First they ignore you...
My inductive proof is better than your inductive proof, eh?
The amount of money wasted increases exponentially in proportion to the size of the company's revenues.
Because the only CDs they promote are the 10% that make millions.
We have a winner!
^^
So when records go off like a bomb, and record companies sit there raking in the profits, don't forget that these profits go to pay for the other 90% of albums that didn't make any cash.
Awwww... poor babies.
This is the same tired excuse that the game industry trots out every time someone complains that the product is crap, the prices are too high and everything is a focus-group-developed clone. The recording industry doesn't make it sound any better.
The other 90% are also a WRITEOFF.
If they were super-profitable, don't you think everyone would be doing it?
No. The recording industry has the same advantage over potential competition as the game industry: a hammerlock on distribution and shelf space. It not only makes them super-profitable, but it also makes it nearly impossible to compete with them.
First, IANAL.
Copyright does not apply to ideas, it only applies to the tangible representation of those ideas. Only using a patented process would be infringement, and given the state of patents these days, perhaps that would be a place to start.
Nevertheless, it is very unlikely to be a problem. Absent an enforceable NDA or non-compete, former employers' legal influence ends when the clock is punched.
It's breaking the law when the lawyers say it is.
rofl
Come on. Businesses couldn't get through Monday's breakfast if this were true.
It's breaking the law when a JUDGE or a JURY or a LEGISLATURE says it is.
I think I speak for many here when I say...
gaahhh!!
ahem...
What? What? Huge companies attempting to limit competition so they can collect assured profits perpetually?
Say it isn't so!
People who copy albums have neither the incentive or the bandwidth to compete. It really is a competition. A business' product vs. their product for free. Fine. Let's look at a comparison. (Businesses here mainly includes independent artists):
1) Businesses can afford readily available and reliable bandwidth in large amounts.
The free copies probably can't.
2) Businesses can advertise.
The free copies probably won't.
3) Businesses have an incentive to provide a higher quality product at a better price due to increased competition.
The free copies probably won't put in the required time, and certainly not for free.
4) Businesses can make new products.
Copies, by definition, are never new.
5) Businesses have an incentive to make it very convenient to find and purchase their products.
Free copies are usually very difficult *and time consuming* to find. That's not free. Time is money.
Add to this the fact that most people are honest, and the whole "piracy" argument becomes quite flimsy indeed.
I'm not in support of draconian *AA legislation and irrational copyright controls, but I *am* in support of artists earning a fair living from their work. Technology should be used to encourage that.
"Illegal" copying will never go away. It's no different than shoplifting or people writing bad checks. It's going to happen. That should not be an excuse to treat everyone else poorly (Best Buy, are you listening?). If you treat people like thieves, that's exactly how they will behave, mainly because of the implied insult, not because they weren't willing to buy your precious "content."
Note to the music and video publishers: Put your stuff on line sooner, and these problems will be reduced.
Another $0.02
Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it.
This is the most important statement in the article. Bandwidth is the main component of every Internet policy discussion. Upstream is probably at least as important as downstream. To seperate the two significantly is an attempt to confine people to the role of consumer: i.e. "stay on the couch."
Upstream bandwidth allows people to become *producers* too, which is a good thing(tm).