They still run on telephone modem due to restrictions imposed by the FTC from the TW/AOL merger - AOL cannot use TW's cable resources unless TW opens their pipes to competitors (which they have refused to do).
No geek of any stature would even think of subscribing to AOL and there is a uncomplimentory generalization of AOL members when they post to a forum.
AOL's solution to the spam problem is a whitelist which you have to pay a fee to send mail to.
If you send an email to an AOL account that is dead, you don't get a bounce so you have no feedback if your friend received it. Over time people stop bothering to email to any AOL account.
There are better alternatives to AIM and it has no place in the office. TW tried to make AIM the corporate messaging standard and it failed miserably.
AOL is on the blacklist at corporation IT departments. AOL software takes over your PC and requires a complete reinstall to remove it, which is not a favorite pasttime of IT.
AOL does everything possible to keep their members in their "walled garden" - you cannot even change the home page in the AOL browser, it is fixed at AOL dot com.
There is a growing backlash against aggressive mass marketing and people are getting tired of AOL junk mail CDs landing in their mailbox.
AOL goes to great lengths to prevent members from unsubscribing. Frustrated customers will tell all there friends to stay away from AOL. That's not how you build loyalty.
Someone please tell me how a shift to advertising revenue model is going to solve all this.
Another reason the writing is so bad in movies today is the reluctance of authors/writers to negotiate with the studios. The contracts that studios insist on are so one-sided that they take all control from the author and return little profit. Studios have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude with the contracts and they can afford to shop around for another starving author willing to sign any contract. The same arrogance has been happening in the music industry the last twenty years.
As time went on, more authors/publishers have wised up to Hollywood's tactics and have refused to relinquish the rights to their works. They can afford to dismiss Hollywood because they have found other ways to earn money from their works. Hollywood is finding fewer cooperative parties to extort source material (some even plagiarize them), thus there is little originality in movies today and they are resorting to material they already own or seeking out works whose copyrights have expired and are in the public domain (but have been picked dry). That is why Hollywood is releasing so many sequels, remakes, and big screen versions of TV shows and why there is so little originality in movies today.
It's a well known fact that the MPAA monitors/. so I'm talking to you.
I quit watching cable TV and going to movie theaters since 2000.
You want to know why?
TOO MUCH ADVERTISING!
I am sick of more time delegated to ads and less to programs. I am sick of product placement in shows and movies. I am sick of banner ads consuming the margins of my TV. I am sick of "infomercials". I am sick of movie/show commercials disguised as "interviews". I am sick of sitting through twenty minutes of ads in a theater waiting for the movie I paid $10 to see. I am sick of paying $$$ for cable TV with more and more ads and less content as the valuable channels are pushed into upper tiers to draw more green from my wallet.
I am not alone and this is the group that the TiVo survey will miss. I don't sub to TiVo because it offers nothing of value to me. I threw my cable TV and movies out of my house and I discovered a real world out there that reflects nothing like what Hollywood wants me to see.
Get off the ad revenue bandwagon that floats your boat, and you will stop losing customers. It's that simple.
When the police are breaking the laws (or sneaking around them) who do we ask to protect us?
Defense lawyers who have had evidence stricken from the record because it was obtained without a subpeona.
I'm all for aggressively pursuing child sex offenders, but the librarian did the right thing because otherwise the crook would have gotten a get-out-of-jail-free card by some criminal defense lawyer who exposed the law authorities operating without a subpeona.
The mayor and law authorities were the arrogant ones here, and they better watch their step.
Back in the late 70's there was a little know company called AMECTRAN, that a the first production ready electronic vehicle that could go 80mph, had a range of 100+ miles, and costs less than $10,000.
We had electric cars as far back as the 1890s, and they could exceed 40 mph. That is impressive when you consider that paved roads didn't even exist back then.
GM always had a history of oppressing technology hostile to its business model. It's been well documented that they colluded with the tire and oil companies to kill the streetcar industry so they could force consumers to buy more cars.
Not only does outsourcing fail to produce the promised results, but the betrayal felt by displaced employees is so great that many of them will refuse to return to their former jobs. I know of at least one local employer who recognized that outsourcing was not producing the returns it expected, and when it tried to hire back the former US employees they refused to return. So they lost out on their pool of talent, they tarnished their reputation as a good place to work - long term damage that should have been predicted by sane minds.
I worked for another company whose employees had outsourcing hanging over their heads, and they got everybody so scared sh!t out of their heads that they refuse to share their knowledge out of fear of losing their jobs. I complained to their managers, their managers rebuked the engineers - but to no effect. The fear of outsourcing has created a hostile workplace there, and smart engineers will not apply for work there. Thus even the spectre of outsourcing will scare away good talent.
Outsourcing is the greatest betrayal a corporation can inflict on their employees. I plan to have at least a year of savings to support myself in the event that I am asked to train my foreign replacement or lost my severance (you should anyway in the event of a catastrophe like medical emergencies) - and I'll stick it to the man and tell all my buddies not to work there. So they lose a good reputation, they lose resources because now they have to train the replacement themselves, and when they revert to US labor they will have trouble attracting talent. That gets the message across better than anything.
Be very afraid. One thing that sets Microsoft apart from many of its competitors is persistence when it comes to products and technologies that are important to Microsoft's core business. Add to that the fact that MS has a huge multi-billion $$ war chest and their dominant position in the operating systems and web browsers and you see that they have not only the will but also the resources to be persistent. This battle won't be over any time soon.
M$ had the will and bottomless resources to acquire Intuit and their Quicken accounting suite back in 1995, but the FTC filed suit to stop M$ in its tracks. M$ responded by giving away M$ Money, but unlike giving away IE they are still far from being the dominant 800lb gorilla in the accounting business.
I would not be so confident that M$ will win this battle.
Hollywood doesn't want the words "fair use" to be uttered to their congresscritters, and they want to draw attention away from the Sony fiasco. This is just an evasive tactic to lend legitimacy to DRM.
I'm also a bass player. I bought an Alesis Nanocompressor to tame the audio from the DVD - patched between the DVD player and my stereo system. Great $50 (used) solution.
the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience'
I see nothing entertaining about enduring high ticket/concession prices, twenty minutes of commercials, rude cell phone addicts and play-by-play artists, and then being disappointed in the end with inferior product.
Do the math. A family of four can pay $80+ to see a movie in a theater, or $15-20 to watch it in the comfort of their own home. Thanks to rising fuel/insurance costs and a shrinking labor force, families do not have the disposable income they did 10-20 years ago. We adapted, now it's the theater's turn.
The theater owners are fighting a losing battle to perpetuate a failing business model. Adapt or die. Or lobby your congresscritters. Whatever.
Judas, they even used the Oscars as a vehicle to pitch their bitch about missing out on the 'movie theater experience' ENOUGH!!!
I remember M$ infiltrating some JAVA organization and then tried to derail the standard by releasing their own Windows-centric JAVA engine. Sun successfully sued them for breach of contract and the M$ JAVA engine was pulled off the market.
There was some reluctance from members of that JAVA organization back then too, and their worst fears proved correct.
Other examples of the same M$ infiltration method are out there and they earned a reputation that they cannot be trusted on a standards organization.
I saw a total of three movies in the theater the last ten years. I went to see King Kong only because I was going with a group of friends.
Besides the poor material, the commercials are too long and the dynamics are too much. I hate sitting through ads before the movie, now that they run twenty minutes that was the breaking point. I will never go back. Movies are way too dynamic - street noises and crashes blast at you from the speakers, then the dialogue is so frigging soft you have to strain to hear it. The ears get fatigued fast.
And I won't repeat the host of other reasons why the theater experience sucks today.
DVDs solved many problems. I can zap the damn ads, and the audio output of my DVD player gets tamed by a compressor so that dynamics are flattened to a much more enjoyable level before they reach my stereo system. I don't want my speakers to get blown or my neighbors to be disturbed.
As a matter of fact, a member of the RIAA (Universal Music) has acknowledged that they do read/. articles on p2p. And they're not happy at what they see.
Slashdot Mirror
They still run on telephone modem due to restrictions imposed by the FTC from the TW/AOL merger - AOL cannot use TW's cable resources unless TW opens their pipes to competitors (which they have refused to do).
No geek of any stature would even think of subscribing to AOL and there is a uncomplimentory generalization of AOL members when they post to a forum.
AOL's solution to the spam problem is a whitelist which you have to pay a fee to send mail to.
If you send an email to an AOL account that is dead, you don't get a bounce so you have no feedback if your friend received it. Over time people stop bothering to email to any AOL account.
There are better alternatives to AIM and it has no place in the office. TW tried to make AIM the corporate messaging standard and it failed miserably.
AOL is on the blacklist at corporation IT departments. AOL software takes over your PC and requires a complete reinstall to remove it, which is not a favorite pasttime of IT.
AOL does everything possible to keep their members in their "walled garden" - you cannot even change the home page in the AOL browser, it is fixed at AOL dot com.
There is a growing backlash against aggressive mass marketing and people are getting tired of AOL junk mail CDs landing in their mailbox.
AOL goes to great lengths to prevent members from unsubscribing. Frustrated customers will tell all there friends to stay away from AOL. That's not how you build loyalty.
Someone please tell me how a shift to advertising revenue model is going to solve all this.
As time went on, more authors/publishers have wised up to Hollywood's tactics and have refused to relinquish the rights to their works. They can afford to dismiss Hollywood because they have found other ways to earn money from their works. Hollywood is finding fewer cooperative parties to extort source material (some even plagiarize them), thus there is little originality in movies today and they are resorting to material they already own or seeking out works whose copyrights have expired and are in the public domain (but have been picked dry). That is why Hollywood is releasing so many sequels, remakes, and big screen versions of TV shows and why there is so little originality in movies today.
I quit watching cable TV and going to movie theaters since 2000.
You want to know why?
TOO MUCH ADVERTISING!
I am sick of more time delegated to ads and less to programs. I am sick of product placement in shows and movies. I am sick of banner ads consuming the margins of my TV. I am sick of "infomercials". I am sick of movie/show commercials disguised as "interviews". I am sick of sitting through twenty minutes of ads in a theater waiting for the movie I paid $10 to see. I am sick of paying $$$ for cable TV with more and more ads and less content as the valuable channels are pushed into upper tiers to draw more green from my wallet.
I am not alone and this is the group that the TiVo survey will miss. I don't sub to TiVo because it offers nothing of value to me. I threw my cable TV and movies out of my house and I discovered a real world out there that reflects nothing like what Hollywood wants me to see.
Get off the ad revenue bandwagon that floats your boat, and you will stop losing customers. It's that simple.
customer: Is the internet broken? I can't get onto mySpace.
tech support: (sound of eyes rolling)
Y3st3rd4y
4ll my troubl3s s33m3d so f4r 4w4y
Now it loo| Oh, I b3li3v3 in y3st3rd4y
Sudd3nly
I'm not h4lf th3 m4n I us3d 2 b3
Th3r3's 4 sh4dow h4nging ov3r m3
Oh, y3st3rd4y c4m3 sudd3nly
Why sh3 h4d 2 go I don't know
sh3 wouldn't s4y.
I s4id som3thing wrong
now I long for y3st3rd4y
Y3st3rd4y
lov3 w4s such 4n 34sy g4m3 2 pl4y
Now I n33d 4 pl4c3 2 hid3 4w4y
Oh, I b3li3v3 in y3st3rd4y
1) Ebay isn't an auction site.
But if you check their home page, eBay promotes their eBay live auctions.
...that cell phones belong with the passenger side airbag.
Darl McBride of SCO should have the top spot on this list!
Defense lawyers who have had evidence stricken from the record because it was obtained without a subpeona.
I'm all for aggressively pursuing child sex offenders, but the librarian did the right thing because otherwise the crook would have gotten a get-out-of-jail-free card by some criminal defense lawyer who exposed the law authorities operating without a subpeona.
The mayor and law authorities were the arrogant ones here, and they better watch their step.
This would be a worthy addition to classrooms.
We had electric cars as far back as the 1890s, and they could exceed 40 mph. That is impressive when you consider that paved roads didn't even exist back then.
GM always had a history of oppressing technology hostile to its business model. It's been well documented that they colluded with the tire and oil companies to kill the streetcar industry so they could force consumers to buy more cars.
I worked for another company whose employees had outsourcing hanging over their heads, and they got everybody so scared sh!t out of their heads that they refuse to share their knowledge out of fear of losing their jobs. I complained to their managers, their managers rebuked the engineers - but to no effect. The fear of outsourcing has created a hostile workplace there, and smart engineers will not apply for work there. Thus even the spectre of outsourcing will scare away good talent.
Outsourcing is the greatest betrayal a corporation can inflict on their employees. I plan to have at least a year of savings to support myself in the event that I am asked to train my foreign replacement or lost my severance (you should anyway in the event of a catastrophe like medical emergencies) - and I'll stick it to the man and tell all my buddies not to work there. So they lose a good reputation, they lose resources because now they have to train the replacement themselves, and when they revert to US labor they will have trouble attracting talent. That gets the message across better than anything.
M$ had the will and bottomless resources to acquire Intuit and their Quicken accounting suite back in 1995, but the FTC filed suit to stop M$ in its tracks. M$ responded by giving away M$ Money, but unlike giving away IE they are still far from being the dominant 800lb gorilla in the accounting business.
I would not be so confident that M$ will win this battle.
We've been seeing lots of your auctions on ebay, with starting bids during working hours. Care to explain that generous salary you're pulling?
They have games to do that now.
Just because technology lets you do something doesn't mean you should.
They also said that about the Titanic, which is ironically fitting coming from the MPAA.
Hollywood doesn't want the words "fair use" to be uttered to their congresscritters, and they want to draw attention away from the Sony fiasco. This is just an evasive tactic to lend legitimacy to DRM.
I'm also a bass player. I bought an Alesis Nanocompressor to tame the audio from the DVD - patched between the DVD player and my stereo system. Great $50 (used) solution.
I see nothing entertaining about enduring high ticket/concession prices, twenty minutes of commercials, rude cell phone addicts and play-by-play artists, and then being disappointed in the end with inferior product.
Do the math. A family of four can pay $80+ to see a movie in a theater, or $15-20 to watch it in the comfort of their own home. Thanks to rising fuel/insurance costs and a shrinking labor force, families do not have the disposable income they did 10-20 years ago. We adapted, now it's the theater's turn.
The theater owners are fighting a losing battle to perpetuate a failing business model. Adapt or die. Or lobby your congresscritters. Whatever.
Judas, they even used the Oscars as a vehicle to pitch their bitch about missing out on the 'movie theater experience' ENOUGH!!!
There was some reluctance from members of that JAVA organization back then too, and their worst fears proved correct.
Other examples of the same M$ infiltration method are out there and they earned a reputation that they cannot be trusted on a standards organization.
It's spelled Apple, but pronounce it Throat Warbler Mangrove.
Besides the poor material, the commercials are too long and the dynamics are too much. I hate sitting through ads before the movie, now that they run twenty minutes that was the breaking point. I will never go back. Movies are way too dynamic - street noises and crashes blast at you from the speakers, then the dialogue is so frigging soft you have to strain to hear it. The ears get fatigued fast.
And I won't repeat the host of other reasons why the theater experience sucks today.
DVDs solved many problems. I can zap the damn ads, and the audio output of my DVD player gets tamed by a compressor so that dynamics are flattened to a much more enjoyable level before they reach my stereo system. I don't want my speakers to get blown or my neighbors to be disturbed.
I run WIN2K. I do not want to upgrade my OS. Will IE7 run on it?
Didn't think so. Another reason to stay with FF.
As a matter of fact, a member of the RIAA (Universal Music) has acknowledged that they do read /. articles on p2p. And they're not happy at what they see.
Customer: I wish to lodge a complaint about this Chapman parody!
Clerk: Yes, what's wrong with it?
Customer: It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.