The Internet holds the potential to be the first perfectly competetive marketplace. While good for consumers, perfect competition is horrible for businesses. If you are guaranteed to mark zero profits, VC money disappears.
Well, if you remember Econ 101, you will recall that so long as there are barriers to entry, there is money to be made, even if consumers have perfect information about market prices.
Not everyone can afford to start up a huge website, with high bandwidth, big servers, etc. Other barriers to entry are specific knowledge, which could vary depending on the business (Think Red Hat). Some Internet services are going to not be so profitable, because of the small barriers to entry, but there is lots of money out there, not the least of which is the "Internetizing" of conventional products and services.
I don't see IP being a major force behind the economics of the Internet. I think that patents are good for the stuff they have always been used for, but on the Internet, I think it isn't going to be who controls the inventions, but rather who makes the inventions work best for them. -
I know I personally wouldn't mind something like that... we're talking roughly $5 a month for all the music your bandwidth can handle... and if you want to share with your roommates/housemates, you would be able to and save more money... seems like it could work.
Haha, I want to believe that, but common sense tells me otherwise.
If Napster went subscription based, a few things could happen:
1. Massive hoarding of mp3s. Right now, you probably only download what you want to hear. If Napster went subscription based, people would just download gigs and gigs of mp3s for a couple months, then cancel the subscription. When you have 10 days of continous non-repeating music on your hard drive, you really don't need much more, you are already stocked more than the playlists of 99% of all radio stations.
2. People simply wouldn't pay it. You can run fserves on IRC, or use an open version of Napster.
3. These are the people that won't pay for music at stores. You really think that they are going to pay to download it, when they can get it for free through other, slightly less convienent means?
Face it, there is no way at all to make money directly from something that can be infinitely copied for free (other than opportunity cost). You can make money from added value, but the only added value of napster over IRC or other peer to peer sharing is the convienence, which in my opinion isn't worth $5 a month to most people.
Besides, this would eliminate Napster's main legal defense, that it is legal to copy music person to person, so long as there is no commercial gain.
And you really think that the artists/labels are going to accept less than 1 cent per song, considering that someone could easily download over 500 mp3s per month? -
Some people have commented that an ISP would be insane to spend so much for trivial software, but you are missing the point.
Before Napster, searching mp3s out sucked. There was Scour, which sucked big time, with many servers listed but unavailable. There were a couple other similar services, and IRC. That was about it. (Unless you lived on campus and had a big network neighborhood.)
Napster was revolutionary because it was the first service that actually worked for the most part, and didn't require hanging out with script kiddies on IRC in mp3 channels. The software sucked at first, but none of the bugs were fatal, they were just annoying things, like windows not redrawing correctly and such. -
Wait till they start holding data hostage. so you don't want to pay the new licensing fee? Here's how much it will cost to get your companies data back.
Yep, I have seen scenarios like this, most often because a company adopted a propritary format in a vertical market. They are the only ones that know how to get your data out of their weird files, and the market is too small for anyone else to be motivated to break the system. Allows mini-monopolies. -
How about the S.E.T.I. league? I'm sure they could put it to good use. Or the Human Genome project?
SETI is a joke and a waste of computer time. Suppose that some alien culture did use radio waves for communication. Suppose they were oh, 100,000 light years away from us. That would mean they would have to have been using radio 100,000 years ago for us to get it, and then even when we did get it, would we be even recognize it as anything but noise? And if we did recognize it, what are the chances we could decode anything intelligible. Even if we did that, our info would be 100,000 years old. And all that is only if their planet is actually letting any radio waves out. Most of our noise is being abosrbed by the atmosphere, theirs might be more ionized than ours and reflect even more.
What the point? We are probably not alone, can't we just work on more relevant things and assume that there probably other beings out there and be content with that?
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Alright everyone! Start making those campaign contributions! America has the best government money can buy, let's all get to work!
You know this is getting offtopic, but something really bothered me today. There were people all over my campus, hundreds of people, holding up signs, all day. What were they protesting? Nothing.
They were advertising their candidate for Homecoming Queen and King.
Why do people choose to live with their head in the sand? Why waste your time on stupid shit like that, when you could be trying to change things for the better. I could just imagine that many people holding up signs calling for a debate on the Drug War, or that many people holding up signs protesting the ludicrous state of Intellectual Property. -
Ironically, this all revolves around Merkey's NWFS drivers for Microsoft and Linux.
Yeah. I don't like the way Netware has been heading. I get the feeling they are turning into the Netscape of NOS, being gutted by MS. Zen was cool and all, but I remember when NDS came out and they were touting it as the end all of information organization. It seems that lots of my time is spent trying to make the NT authentication work with NDS, which is a bitch with NT4, don't know if it has improved much with 2000 or not (seems like we have to compromise security to get the thing to work half the time). So we have this messy situation where we use peer to peer sharing layered on top of Netware servers, and they don't interact very much. It doesn't help that the Netware clients for windows have tons of bugs. -
I am just worried that the original disks are going to start to fail from old age/bad environmental conditions/etc.
I think this stuff qualifies as abandonware, since there is pretty much no hope for commercial gain, indeed, it would take some hacking to get them to run on a modern MS OS. (DOS boot disk at least) -
Some good games similar to this type are of course the Zork Trilogy, and some older Sierra stuff. Leisure Suit Larry, any version less than or equal to 5, Police Quest 1 or 2. Basically any game Sierra made before they switched over to the "click based exploring" is great.
Just think, there are readers of slashdot young enough to have never experienced LSL! We can't let these great old games die. Maybe a napster for classic great PC games?:) I got a CD of these things, its amazing how many of these old games you can fit on one CD (400-500). -
You should try Age of Wonders. It is kind of an RPG, kind of a millitary strategy game. Reminds me a little of Civ. Demo version on download.com, comes with two scenarios, which is like 20 hours of gameplay. Has a steep learning curve at the beginning, but if you stick with it, its pretty good. -
I don't know, I get the feeling this would become more of a popularity contest. Rather than ideas getting moderated, people would moderate more on the basis of who posted a certain thing.
I think there are definite flaws in the current moderation system on/.
One glaring one I see is that you have to wait forever to be able to meta moderate. This account is at least 4-5 months old and I still can't metamoderate. I even have the +1 bonus available now, and yet cannot metamod, and probably am ineligible to moderate too (I never have gotten any points on this account). While a do agree with not letting new accounts moderate, I think especially think that metamoderation should be available sooner to people with karma. -
BTW, "mixed environment" doesn't mean dual-boot. Having two OSes on your hobby machine might be useful, but in a real environment it only happens during migration.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking dual boot so much as migration, and other stuff you would run across in real life. Maybe someone would stick an NT drive into a Linux workstation for data recovery. Maybe removable media/portable drives with NTFS, things like that. More compatibility is never a bad thing.
I think I know what mixed environment means. At work we have Irix, Linux, SCO, MacOS, Windows 95/98/NT4.0, whatever OS a S/36 runs (everything on it is in RPG), Netware, and used to have CLIX about 6 months ago, until we migrated all the data out of the Integraph system. Things are interesting to say the least. Good thing we are a pretty small company.
I am personally pushing them toward migrating the SCO and Netware stuff to Linux servers. We will never be rid of MS or Mac stuff in the forseeable future though. -
Well this makes sense for MS, because it allows NTFS to live on, no matter how big linux gets. Really these people are writing something that MS should be writing. Its going to make an MS product easier to use in a mixed environment.
MS just realized it a way to get free innovation.:) -
Yeah scour.net does this, indexing media on HTTP and FTP sites. It sucks. There is no way to confirm the availability of the servers reliably. The site attempts to ping the sites and remove unavailable ones, but if you have ever used the system, you know how inferior it is. If someone could build a better system layered on top of FTP, then this would have a chance.
Scour.net was around almost a full year before Napster. That should tell you something about the relative reliabilities of the two systems. -
Nope, he isn't confusing it. The fries holder is patented. McDonald's is very "developed" in the area of patents. They even patented those seeds on the hamburger buns. No, I'm not kidding
Since I don't know for sure, and you seem to, I stand corrected!:)
I guess that is just another example of blurring and abuse of the IP laws. -
Do you guys know how many dumb patents there are? Have you ever looked at a McDonald's fry package? There's a patent there. There are patents on things like lamps, CD cases, even wrapping paper. We can look at it and say, "Oh, it's so obvious that wrapping paper should be like this," but that doesn't change the fact that the person/company/entity invented it first.
Don't confuse patent, trademark, and copyright. Most likely the McD's stuff is trademarked, while I believe that a lamp's artistic design can be copyrighted (sometimes). Still, very little of that stuff you mentioned is patented, most is under other IP laws. -
Kind of makes you wonder just how far ahead of the commercial market the military is regarding computer technology today.
Would be interesting if all our innovations from Intel and clan were really all developed by the government and leaked out.:)
Seriously though, they may have computers more massively parallel than any known acedemic (or known government) research facility. It isn't too likely they are very far ahead in the speed of a single processor, if they even work on such a thing. -
Re:Negative people on slashdot.
on
IRC Improvements
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· Score: 1
All valid points. But aren't 1 and 2 inherent problems with any public key system?
3 is probably the best criticism, and it will be hard to address. What about this, for each person you want to talk to on the channel, you select their public key out of your trusted keyring, and anyone in the channel you don't trust, you can just not select their key. You won't have to do this for each message, you can select which keys to use for every message in each channel, kind of an add/remove type function. That way if someone walks in the channel, they won't happen to see anything but encrypted garbage, until you add their key to your ring, and select them in that channel. Even the admins couldn't see anything but encrypted garbage. This of course requires a lot of client modifications, but if we came up with something standard, I am sure Kahled would be a willing listener, one who doesn't have to follow stupid US encryption laws either.
Problems with this idea include weakning the power of admins to be able to tell when abuses occur. They would be able to tell if someone is flooding the channel, and obvious things like that, but as far as harassment goes, it becomes hard to prove what text was actually sent. It already is kind of hard to prove, and there has to be a level of trust that the "victim" didn't modify log files.
Let me know what you think about these ideas. My original message was more critical of the undirected negativity that I saw on here, I think its good to talk about the weaknesses of the system, in a constructive way. -
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you remember Econ 101, you will recall that so long as there are barriers to entry, there is money to be made, even if consumers have perfect information about market prices.
Not everyone can afford to start up a huge website, with high bandwidth, big servers, etc. Other barriers to entry are specific knowledge, which could vary depending on the business (Think Red Hat). Some Internet services are going to not be so profitable, because of the small barriers to entry, but there is lots of money out there, not the least of which is the "Internetizing" of conventional products and services.
I don't see IP being a major force behind the economics of the Internet. I think that patents are good for the stuff they have always been used for, but on the Internet, I think it isn't going to be who controls the inventions, but rather who makes the inventions work best for them.
-
Haha, I want to believe that, but common sense tells me otherwise.
If Napster went subscription based, a few things could happen:
1. Massive hoarding of mp3s. Right now, you probably only download what you want to hear. If Napster went subscription based, people would just download gigs and gigs of mp3s for a couple months, then cancel the subscription. When you have 10 days of continous non-repeating music on your hard drive, you really don't need much more, you are already stocked more than the playlists of 99% of all radio stations.
2. People simply wouldn't pay it. You can run fserves on IRC, or use an open version of Napster.
3. These are the people that won't pay for music at stores. You really think that they are going to pay to download it, when they can get it for free through other, slightly less convienent means?
Face it, there is no way at all to make money directly from something that can be infinitely copied for free (other than opportunity cost). You can make money from added value, but the only added value of napster over IRC or other peer to peer sharing is the convienence, which in my opinion isn't worth $5 a month to most people.
Besides, this would eliminate Napster's main legal defense, that it is legal to copy music person to person, so long as there is no commercial gain.
And you really think that the artists/labels are going to accept less than 1 cent per song, considering that someone could easily download over 500 mp3s per month?
-
Before Napster, searching mp3s out sucked. There was Scour, which sucked big time, with many servers listed but unavailable. There were a couple other similar services, and IRC. That was about it. (Unless you lived on campus and had a big network neighborhood.)
Napster was revolutionary because it was the first service that actually worked for the most part, and didn't require hanging out with script kiddies on IRC in mp3 channels. The software sucked at first, but none of the bugs were fatal, they were just annoying things, like windows not redrawing correctly and such.
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Hehe, well when bandwidth gets as fast as your PCI bus is today, it won't matter much, now will it?
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Yep, I have seen scenarios like this, most often because a company adopted a propritary format in a vertical market. They are the only ones that know how to get your data out of their weird files, and the market is too small for anyone else to be motivated to break the system. Allows mini-monopolies.
-
You thought diskless workstations sucked in the past? Just wait until MS builds one.
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SETI is a joke and a waste of computer time. Suppose that some alien culture did use radio waves for communication. Suppose they were oh, 100,000 light years away from us. That would mean they would have to have been using radio 100,000 years ago for us to get it, and then even when we did get it, would we be even recognize it as anything but noise? And if we did recognize it, what are the chances we could decode anything intelligible. Even if we did that, our info would be 100,000 years old. And all that is only if their planet is actually letting any radio waves out. Most of our noise is being abosrbed by the atmosphere, theirs might be more ionized than ours and reflect even more.
What the point? We are probably not alone, can't we just work on more relevant things and assume that there probably other beings out there and be content with that?
-
You know this is getting offtopic, but something really bothered me today. There were people all over my campus, hundreds of people, holding up signs, all day. What were they protesting? Nothing.
They were advertising their candidate for Homecoming Queen and King.
Why do people choose to live with their head in the sand? Why waste your time on stupid shit like that, when you could be trying to change things for the better. I could just imagine that many people holding up signs calling for a debate on the Drug War, or that many people holding up signs protesting the ludicrous state of Intellectual Property.
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Politicians always think logically. They act in a rational fashion to maximize their power. That's their only real goal, ever.
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Man, thats old, I played that in 1982, and it was called "Space Invaders", but you probably never heard of it.
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Ironically, this all revolves around Merkey's NWFS drivers for Microsoft and Linux.
Yeah. I don't like the way Netware has been heading. I get the feeling they are turning into the Netscape of NOS, being gutted by MS. Zen was cool and all, but I remember when NDS came out and they were touting it as the end all of information organization. It seems that lots of my time is spent trying to make the NT authentication work with NDS, which is a bitch with NT4, don't know if it has improved much with 2000 or not (seems like we have to compromise security to get the thing to work half the time). So we have this messy situation where we use peer to peer sharing layered on top of Netware servers, and they don't interact very much. It doesn't help that the Netware clients for windows have tons of bugs.
-
I am just worried that the original disks are going to start to fail from old age/bad environmental conditions/etc.
I think this stuff qualifies as abandonware, since there is pretty much no hope for commercial gain, indeed, it would take some hacking to get them to run on a modern MS OS. (DOS boot disk at least)
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Do you have a citation for this .sig? I love it.
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Just think, there are readers of slashdot young enough to have never experienced LSL! We can't let these great old games die. Maybe a napster for classic great PC games? :) I got a CD of these things, its amazing how many of these old games you can fit on one CD (400-500).
-
You should try Age of Wonders. It is kind of an RPG, kind of a millitary strategy game. Reminds me a little of Civ. Demo version on download.com, comes with two scenarios, which is like 20 hours of gameplay. Has a steep learning curve at the beginning, but if you stick with it, its pretty good.
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And I had to walk both ways through 6 feet of snow to the library to get them.
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ACK... should have proofread that one. :)
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I think there are definite flaws in the current moderation system on /.
One glaring one I see is that you have to wait forever to be able to meta moderate. This account is at least 4-5 months old and I still can't metamoderate. I even have the +1 bonus available now, and yet cannot metamod, and probably am ineligible to moderate too (I never have gotten any points on this account). While a do agree with not letting new accounts moderate, I think especially think that metamoderation should be available sooner to people with karma.
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Yeah, I wasn't thinking dual boot so much as migration, and other stuff you would run across in real life. Maybe someone would stick an NT drive into a Linux workstation for data recovery. Maybe removable media/portable drives with NTFS, things like that. More compatibility is never a bad thing.
I think I know what mixed environment means. At work we have Irix, Linux, SCO, MacOS, Windows 95/98/NT4.0, whatever OS a S/36 runs (everything on it is in RPG), Netware, and used to have CLIX about 6 months ago, until we migrated all the data out of the Integraph system. Things are interesting to say the least. Good thing we are a pretty small company.
I am personally pushing them toward migrating the SCO and Netware stuff to Linux servers. We will never be rid of MS or Mac stuff in the forseeable future though.
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Well this makes sense for MS, because it allows NTFS to live on, no matter how big linux gets. Really these people are writing something that MS should be writing. Its going to make an MS product easier to use in a mixed environment.
:)
MS just realized it a way to get free innovation.
-
Yeah scour.net does this, indexing media on HTTP and FTP sites. It sucks. There is no way to confirm the availability of the servers reliably. The site attempts to ping the sites and remove unavailable ones, but if you have ever used the system, you know how inferior it is. If someone could build a better system layered on top of FTP, then this would have a chance.
Scour.net was around almost a full year before Napster. That should tell you something about the relative reliabilities of the two systems.
-
Nope, he isn't confusing it. The fries holder is patented. McDonald's is very "developed" in the area of patents. They even patented those seeds on the hamburger buns. No, I'm not kidding
:)
Since I don't know for sure, and you seem to, I stand corrected!
I guess that is just another example of blurring and abuse of the IP laws.
-
Do you guys know how many dumb patents there are? Have you ever looked at a McDonald's fry package? There's a patent there. There are patents on things like lamps, CD cases, even wrapping paper. We can look at it and say, "Oh, it's so obvious that wrapping paper should be like this," but that doesn't change the fact that the person/company/entity invented it first.
Don't confuse patent, trademark, and copyright. Most likely the McD's stuff is trademarked, while I believe that a lamp's artistic design can be copyrighted (sometimes). Still, very little of that stuff you mentioned is patented, most is under other IP laws.
-
Kind of makes you wonder just how far ahead of the commercial market the military is regarding computer technology today.
:)
Would be interesting if all our innovations from Intel and clan were really all developed by the government and leaked out.
Seriously though, they may have computers more massively parallel than any known acedemic (or known government) research facility. It isn't too likely they are very far ahead in the speed of a single processor, if they even work on such a thing.
-
All valid points. But aren't 1 and 2 inherent problems with any public key system?
3 is probably the best criticism, and it will be hard to address. What about this, for each person you want to talk to on the channel, you select their public key out of your trusted keyring, and anyone in the channel you don't trust, you can just not select their key. You won't have to do this for each message, you can select which keys to use for every message in each channel, kind of an add/remove type function. That way if someone walks in the channel, they won't happen to see anything but encrypted garbage, until you add their key to your ring, and select them in that channel. Even the admins couldn't see anything but encrypted garbage. This of course requires a lot of client modifications, but if we came up with something standard, I am sure Kahled would be a willing listener, one who doesn't have to follow stupid US encryption laws either.
Problems with this idea include weakning the power of admins to be able to tell when abuses occur. They would be able to tell if someone is flooding the channel, and obvious things like that, but as far as harassment goes, it becomes hard to prove what text was actually sent. It already is kind of hard to prove, and there has to be a level of trust that the "victim" didn't modify log files.
Let me know what you think about these ideas. My original message was more critical of the undirected negativity that I saw on here, I think its good to talk about the weaknesses of the system, in a constructive way.
-