Reread the original question and decided I was too vague.
How do you track if a product is implemented unchanged? You can't. You use the version ID number that came with the product.
Sure, they can lie about the version number or not changing the code, but that won't help them, and they are paying you per hour, as per your service contract, right?
This can be *confirmed* as simply as saying "We've replicated your setup and can't find the problem"
or
"Give us access to your setup so we can see what's going on."
What if a piece of unrelated code is changed and the customer finds a bug in another piece of code?
The unrelated code is irrelevant, then. Fix the bug, supply a patch, and incorporate into the product. Or document the bug and workarounds.
Who/how do you decide if this is covered under support?
Write a good support contract, and then prepared to be flexible and helpful. Customer satsifaction and all
It means if they can tweak the code, it means when they do call tech support, they already have the problem and solution firmly in hand, but don't have the resources, means, or capability to fully thresh out the solution.
A side benefit is that if company B mods the hell out of the product, we've created a second product by effectively outsourcing development to company B.
It's a different issue whether we can create a new product with said mods, but the issue would be the services and such company B is providing with software, and not the software itself
Support is the wrong term for an Open Source product.
You provide the source, so the only support you can provide is... how to open it in a text editor, how to compile it, how to modify it, how to check out and check in. In the sense that the Source is it's own product and all.
Support for the binary and all is no different than any other product; the source acts like documentation, which is all the difference...
"So I'm using version 3.X.X.Y and keep having this problem, with this trace and dump. We looked at the corresponding source and found this <description of problem> but dunno if this was it. When we recompiled with <this fix> the problem went away, but we still have <portion of problem>"
In this case, the Source is being leveraged by the customer, and you, against the product, making the product that much more useful and useable.
Does this make sense?
I dunno about a company buying your software, customizing it to hell, and then demanding support. If that company wanted support, it should be purchasing a support contract, with full disclosure and documentation of the changes and customization to said product. In the end it makes your product more useful and customer oriented and it makes your support issues easier because you have essentially outsourced a full development team at no cost to you for a new flavor of your product
The Source is available for everyone to access, use, compile, tweak, etc.
To be clear, make this kind of separation:
Branded binary release of an Open Source product. This is sold/given away/whatever, and this is supported. Each binary should have a ID, a version number or tag, such that your support organization can track and file problems against this version.
The Source itself has it's own, different, versioning scheme. Allow for forums, mailing lists, and chatrooms for this, different, product.
In a way you can treat the Source as a document describing and explaining the product; but treat the product like any other closed source product, and support it as such. If people have problems with the Open Source product, well, the whole point of Open Source is that they can and should fix it themselves. If they can contribute a fix, review, give credit, and incorporate.
If they find a bug or problem that is big enough that you *should* fix, then fix it, credit, document, and incorporate.
The point is that the product is not free, but that the Source is
If the challenge has been met, by these researchers, then it means it can be met again and again(the whole point of scientific process and such)
Which means any player or device that uses any of these technologies can be hacked or cracked or tampered with (or not, depending on what the research conclusions were) reliably and consistently.
Which means *not* publishing is actually fraud and lying to the various stock holders and people in charge of the music industry who may otherwise never know that they are about to pull another 'CSS'
The classic, if much decried, Freudian struggle...
on
What 1.7Ghz Is Like
·
· Score: 2
of id vs ego (and perhaps a dash of superego as well)
Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"
You know what? Mac people have had to rationalize for far too long. We've had to settle for 400Mhz!
Argh! When will someone come to quench our thirst for raw power? Motorola? IBM? Apple?
Do not bother to fight the irrational/id. The best you can do is placate it and compromise; promise it a *dual* 2Ghz system!
If you can't convince the market or the consumers you exist and are worth buying, why bother producing?
On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of reasons I prefer Debian to Redhat;
Debian has a better debug and design cycle (read longer and more thorough) such that it works on more systems and works more reliably.
Of course this is all word of mouth; I run only one Debian system, but I failed to get Red Hat, Mandrake, and Caldera to install on it. I tried Debian because it was touted as more reliable and better debugged, though almost an entire release cycle behind, and found that it worked.
Debian also has a nice update/package manager, apt, though a bit cryptic in UI, is very useful. Network aware and dependency aware! It's cool.
So Debian has a place; if a company existed that managed to market it correctly (just those two above make TCO for corporations much smaller) I'm sure it could survive, but you're right, it does boil down to marketing.
Imagine, me downloading Delerium's Silence, and then asking the server for other songs with similar fingerprints?
Now I can search across the spectrum!
Or I can encode my own songs for Napster, say my fav CDs, and then get other hits for similar music!
I'd love to find music that sounds like Chrono Cross "Time of the Dreamwatch". Yet I don't know how. Or songs that sound like Ah! My Goddess, melancholy and sentimental.
I dunno, if they use it to actually characterize songs, for filtering purposes, they can also use it for searching and indexing purposes too!
I haven't seen anyone post concerning the network to the kitchen or bathroom:)
My first thought would be to use wireless; that's one less interface to have to deal with. Create a wireless network for the ethernet, and you're set. Add wireless keyboards and mice, and that improves the situation, though due to the hazardous nature of the two environments, an optical mouse like Apple's (one button, no openings for stuff to fall in, you can actually wrap it up in saran wrap as well), and one of those freaky waterproof membrane keyboards. But keyboards are cheap, you cah probably use a standard USB keyboard and just be careful to clean it out once in a while:)
For the monitor you almost definitely want some form of LCD; they don't have some of the size/water problems that a CRT does:)
Even better, get an LCD and encase it in a plexiglass/aluminum container to protect it:)
Essentially a laptop will work best; get an old one, place it inside a secure and protected container, and give it some wireless optical accessories. When it's not in use, fold it up into it's protected container, and it won't ever get in trouble. The optical mouse will have no tracking issues, no gunk issues, and the keyboard, well, make sure it's cheap:)
That's the problem Apple faces squarely, except they don't have the option of faster processors.
They have machines that can do DVD burning, mp3 ripping, movie making, and game playing. Is the GHz issue hurting them? I dunno, they seem to be marketing their other strengths, such as wireless networking, style and fashion, and plain useability.
I hope it works out, I happen to enjoy my Titanium PowerBook:)
Very nice comment, sympathetic, nostalgic, conceding, yet still ending with a note of doom.
As long as Apple continues to make a profit, it can survive. That's necessary, but not sufficient. Apple also needs to continue gaining/getting developer support. It needs to get commercial apps.
It's already got the Microsoft products, so it's not being kept out of the office. It's got the Adobe products, so it's still strong in the graphics industry. It's got the BSD OS in OS X, so hopefully they can woo and attract the large and diversified Open Source guys.
Apple's strength and hope is diversification. It can, right now, tackle multiple growth points; the development community who prefer a Unix workstation (at commodity prices with a slick if unoptimized UI), the education community which has traditionally worked with Macs, the business community with it's full suite of M$ Office programs and sealed box hardware, the Good Looking People, with the Titanium powerbook and the Cube, the graphics and DTP community as a traditional stronghold for Macs, and the consumer market, with it's pretty and stylish iMacs.
Apple just has to be smart enough to choose 2 or 3 of the fastest growing markets and jump in; will it be people who, having become saturated with cheap fast computers, desire style and flash? Will it be the education market, as schools start to get networked and connected as never before? Will it be the business industry, as the economy recovers and gets back on track? Or the development community, as the economy recovers and everything tech becomes hot again? Or the home market, with the push for digital content, digital hubs, and digital media?
Hopefully Apple will choose wisely, because it would be nice to see what other cool stuff they can pull off in six years:)
You know, if someone were willing to take the fall (because of loyalty, deferred rewards, or stupidity), wouldn't just going out and killing all the lawyers, destroying their offices, their computers, their servers, and their homes get Rambus out of trouble?
I mean allegations of fraud require evidence, but if all the evidence were gone...
Still would there be enough circumstancial evidence lying around?
The cost of developing verifiably bug-free software is not justifiable in some situations. The use of the word many is a value judgement that is at best subjective.
NASA, for example, can ill afford buggy software.
Medical centers and hospitals can ill afford buggy software.
The Army and armed services can ill afford buggy software.
Now the real question is, can the average user afford buggy software?
I dunno, I would much prefer no bugs to bugs. How much would I pay for that?
How ironic that NVIDIA is pushing hard into the Mac market with their GeForce line of cards, when the Mac OS X system is exactly a BSD OS on the PPC platform =)
It's not currently, shall we say, polished to a glowing shine, but it's out there. It's goal and intent is to allow e-services (web being a superset of this. PDAs, cell phones, cars, and other devices could be serviced as well as PCs) in which 'composition' and 'mediation' can occur between services from different vendors or suppliers.
It currently runs on HPUX, Red Hat Linux, and Windows NT. It's known to have been compiled to run on Win2k, Madrake, and Debian, but those aren't supported.
It's cross platform nature is due to it's being written in Java, though there are XML, Python, and C interfaces (some are a little dusty)
It was mainly a joke response to LA,T's post, more than anything else.
Anyway, to address your points, if you're being serious;
What is civilised or refined about a nation that shoots it's own students (Kent State)? or Murders it's people(Waco, Ruby Ridge)? Or kills babies (abortion)?
No, USA is not civilised or refined by any benchmark, indeed, it makes me wonder if you are just a fool?
Do you see what I'm saying? China breaking into superpower status is not tied to becoming a democracy. Being a democracy does not prevent a nation from being brutish or evil.
History has shown that it is ambition, greed, and desire that makes a state 'super'. Freedom and Democracy just make it a nicer place to live, for the people; in the case of the US, it *is* arguably the reason the people are here, and it is the people who make the nation 'super', nothing else.
1) Consumer loyalty actually exists, believe it or not. It translates into many little subtle things; like preference for Coke just because it tastes better, or always buying Ford because you're comfortable and secure in buying them, or always wearing Nike because Nike has always been comfortable, etc.
None of these have to do with advertising, per se. Advertising isn't meant for people who are already brand loyal; it's to build a correlation between the brand and the image it projects. When you have a cold, and you're miserable, what do you do? Vicks vaporub, some Tylenol cold and flu, maybe Kleenex medicated tissues, and Campbell's chicken soup.
2) I think the more precise view is that Coke needs to get enough mindshare to get people to drink until they become addicted =)
Coke and Pepsi really don't need to worry about 'stealing' the other's market share; if both are making a profit, than trying to steal from one another would only hurt themselves in a vicious duel. If they tried to win converts by changing flavors, they would probably only alienate their installed markets, so all they can do is try to inundate non-drinkers. What they can do is grow the market, however, by creating new drinks that the other doesn't dominate yet, like lightly flavored caffienated water drinks, or sports drinks, or whatever, but as each market matures, they... ah, I'm tired. I'll let someone else address your further points =)
Well, I browse and surf the web for content. Not ads. I want to know more about, for example, gardening, how to make fountains, home repair, etc. Things that I do.
So it's a symbiotic approach. Corporate interests want me to be successful in these endeavors because it means I buy more, do more, spend more. If the various companies provide the sites and the info, while remaining branded or acknowledged, I get the info I want, and they get the presence they want.
So I don't see how this creates a problem. Coke, J&J, and John Deere hits their target audiences. The 'other' companies don't lose out; they just failed to advertise, but this metric of creating compelling sites with compelling content.
The Banner Ads only work where sites draw in viewers for people to see the Banner Ads. You can't advertise on non-existent sites, right?
The analogy to this is how tv ads sponsor and subsidize the tv shows that encapsulate and surround the ads. By making popular and successful tv shows, tv broadcasting can sell ads at high prices. By buying ads to link with popular tv shows, companies can create positive mindshare.
As per your thought that generic portals will win... it's all a matter of semantics between "portals" and generic portals. There is nothing that stops a Coke-web site from being a generic portal.
With OS X you can actually boot into OS 9, if you so wish.
With W2k, you can't 'boot' into the OS/2, the POSIX, the Win95, Win99, or Dos layers.
In my original post, I was speculating on the fact that you could actually throw out the OS X and keep the OS 9, or throw out the OS 9 and keep the OS X; You can slim down and pare the Mac OS to something much more reasonable, where with XP, 3gb is 3gb, unless you want to pare down to Win2k instead, or Win98 (which isn't technically 'paring')
OS X needs 1.5gb, but ~350 is Classic; that drops it to 1.2gb
From there we can compare that WinXP is still more than twice the size of OS X =)
It's about time, too. It's sort of insulting, that one of the oldest civilizations on Earth is not quite a superpower, despite having developed and refined governement and buearacracy for the past 4000 years. Go team!
I wonder what you mean by the demise of the nation-state. A nation-state does not preclude the rise of geopolitical economic power structures, it just means that a nation-state has to be particularly large to achieve this. US is a good example of what could be potential 30 or so nation-states that collude and pool together to form a vaster, greater nation-state. So China already has that advantage, and the EU is finally catching up, in bits and pieces.
I actually think the EU is one of the smaller economic areas, in comparison to the US or to the Asias; do you remeber Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea? They form a formidable engineering and technology quartet, with India rising quickly too. But this is an uninformed 'opinion' post, on my part.
I don't think America will be challenged by these entities at all. I think what will happen is that America will *assimilate* these entities. We've already swallowed a large amount of India's talent pool; when they go back to further grown India, they will have been corrupted by the influences of American culture(as we have been by their music, curries, and tandori chicken =). This is happening to China, to Japan, to Taiwan, and many other places.
As much as I want to see a global government, I don't think that will happen any time soon. Too many vast cultural divides exist for that to be possible in the near future. Heck, the Taliban still wages war on womanhood, how the heck would they coexist with great nations where women are prime ministers and leaders of technology, finance, and economy?
I hope the US becomes a great force in this global govt, by assimilating and adapting all the relevent cultural forces and movements into itself, and spreading it's own sense of culture and values (hopefully not at the expense of diversity!) into a global economy and existence.
Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.
If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!
*Grow* the market, and makes sure your name is attached to it! So create http://www.jdweb.com/Garden or http://www.jdweb.com/DIY, etc.
I think this can be expanded to *any* product. If you're Johnson and Johnson, create the home healthcare, health, and self improvement pages. Don't bother too heavily with product placement, I don't think, but when people start associating 'health' and 'wellness' with J&J, they've done good advertsing.
Let's try more esoteric examples: Coke, which sells a drink.
Actually, they sell a lifestyle, in which the drink is part of the image and the taste. Create something hip and free for people to visit; web boards, movie reviews, hiking, bike, and rollerblade info sites, etc. Sites where people can go do things, and while they are at it, drink Coke.
Safeway Foodstores could host cooking sites, with recipes. Activity sites, like Coke. BBQ sites, with hints, anecdotes, stories, and recipes. Whatever!
It's similar to how a portal works, but much more targeted.
It's all a function of perspective; a display that emits light in the RGB colorspace or reflects light in the CMYK colorspace can be functionally identical, because in the end they are both measured by the light your eyes absorb. The only advantage that a lighted display has is that it has a much broader dynamic range than a piece of paper; it can get brighter than ambient light.
Slashdot Mirror
Reread the original question and decided I was too vague.
How do you track if a product is implemented unchanged? You can't. You use the version ID number that came with the product.
Sure, they can lie about the version number or not changing the code, but that won't help them, and they are paying you per hour, as per your service contract, right?
This can be *confirmed* as simply as saying "We've replicated your setup and can't find the problem"
or
"Give us access to your setup so we can see what's going on."
What if a piece of unrelated code is changed and the customer finds a bug in another piece of code?
The unrelated code is irrelevant, then. Fix the bug, supply a patch, and incorporate into the product. Or document the bug and workarounds.
Who/how do you decide if this is covered under support?
Write a good support contract, and then prepared to be flexible and helpful. Customer satsifaction and all
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It means if they can tweak the code, it means when they do call tech support, they already have the problem and solution firmly in hand, but don't have the resources, means, or capability to fully thresh out the solution.
A side benefit is that if company B mods the hell out of the product, we've created a second product by effectively outsourcing development to company B.
It's a different issue whether we can create a new product with said mods, but the issue would be the services and such company B is providing with software, and not the software itself
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Support is the wrong term for an Open Source product.
You provide the source, so the only support you can provide is... how to open it in a text editor, how to compile it, how to modify it, how to check out and check in. In the sense that the Source is it's own product and all.
Support for the binary and all is no different than any other product; the source acts like documentation, which is all the difference...
"So I'm using version 3.X.X.Y and keep having this problem, with this trace and dump. We looked at the corresponding source and found this <description of problem> but dunno if this was it. When we recompiled with <this fix> the problem went away, but we still have <portion of problem>"
In this case, the Source is being leveraged by the customer, and you, against the product, making the product that much more useful and useable.
Does this make sense?
I dunno about a company buying your software, customizing it to hell, and then demanding support. If that company wanted support, it should be purchasing a support contract, with full disclosure and documentation of the changes and customization to said product. In the end it makes your product more useful and customer oriented and it makes your support issues easier because you have essentially outsourced a full development team at no cost to you for a new flavor of your product
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Support the binary version of the product.
That's what you sell, that's what you produce.
The Source is available for everyone to access, use, compile, tweak, etc.
To be clear, make this kind of separation:
Branded binary release of an Open Source product. This is sold/given away/whatever, and this is supported. Each binary should have a ID, a version number or tag, such that your support organization can track and file problems against this version.
The Source itself has it's own, different, versioning scheme. Allow for forums, mailing lists, and chatrooms for this, different, product.
In a way you can treat the Source as a document describing and explaining the product; but treat the product like any other closed source product, and support it as such. If people have problems with the Open Source product, well, the whole point of Open Source is that they can and should fix it themselves. If they can contribute a fix, review, give credit, and incorporate.
If they find a bug or problem that is big enough that you *should* fix, then fix it, credit, document, and incorporate.
The point is that the product is not free, but that the Source is
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If the challenge has been met, by these researchers, then it means it can be met again and again(the whole point of scientific process and such)
Which means any player or device that uses any of these technologies can be hacked or cracked or tampered with (or not, depending on what the research conclusions were) reliably and consistently.
Which means *not* publishing is actually fraud and lying to the various stock holders and people in charge of the music industry who may otherwise never know that they are about to pull another 'CSS'
Right?
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of id vs ego (and perhaps a dash of superego as well)
Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"
You know what? Mac people have had to rationalize for far too long. We've had to settle for 400Mhz!
Argh! When will someone come to quench our thirst for raw power? Motorola? IBM? Apple?
Do not bother to fight the irrational/id. The best you can do is placate it and compromise; promise it a *dual* 2Ghz system!
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If you can't convince the market or the consumers you exist and are worth buying, why bother producing?
On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of reasons I prefer Debian to Redhat;
Debian has a better debug and design cycle (read longer and more thorough) such that it works on more systems and works more reliably.
Of course this is all word of mouth; I run only one Debian system, but I failed to get Red Hat, Mandrake, and Caldera to install on it. I tried Debian because it was touted as more reliable and better debugged, though almost an entire release cycle behind, and found that it worked.
Debian also has a nice update/package manager, apt, though a bit cryptic in UI, is very useful. Network aware and dependency aware! It's cool.
So Debian has a place; if a company existed that managed to market it correctly (just those two above make TCO for corporations much smaller) I'm sure it could survive, but you're right, it does boil down to marketing.
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I would *love* if they did this!
Imagine, me downloading Delerium's Silence, and then asking the server for other songs with similar fingerprints?
Now I can search across the spectrum!
Or I can encode my own songs for Napster, say my fav CDs, and then get other hits for similar music!
I'd love to find music that sounds like Chrono Cross "Time of the Dreamwatch". Yet I don't know how. Or songs that sound like Ah! My Goddess, melancholy and sentimental.
I dunno, if they use it to actually characterize songs, for filtering purposes, they can also use it for searching and indexing purposes too!
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I haven't seen anyone post concerning the network to the kitchen or bathroom :)
:)
:)
:)
:)
My first thought would be to use wireless; that's one less interface to have to deal with. Create a wireless network for the ethernet, and you're set. Add wireless keyboards and mice, and that improves the situation, though due to the hazardous nature of the two environments, an optical mouse like Apple's (one button, no openings for stuff to fall in, you can actually wrap it up in saran wrap as well), and one of those freaky waterproof membrane keyboards. But keyboards are cheap, you cah probably use a standard USB keyboard and just be careful to clean it out once in a while
For the monitor you almost definitely want some form of LCD; they don't have some of the size/water problems that a CRT does
Even better, get an LCD and encase it in a plexiglass/aluminum container to protect it
Essentially a laptop will work best; get an old one, place it inside a secure and protected container, and give it some wireless optical accessories. When it's not in use, fold it up into it's protected container, and it won't ever get in trouble. The optical mouse will have no tracking issues, no gunk issues, and the keyboard, well, make sure it's cheap
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That's the problem Apple faces squarely, except they don't have the option of faster processors.
:)
They have machines that can do DVD burning, mp3 ripping, movie making, and game playing. Is the GHz issue hurting them? I dunno, they seem to be marketing their other strengths, such as wireless networking, style and fashion, and plain useability.
I hope it works out, I happen to enjoy my Titanium PowerBook
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Very nice comment, sympathetic, nostalgic, conceding, yet still ending with a note of doom.
:)
As long as Apple continues to make a profit, it can survive. That's necessary, but not sufficient. Apple also needs to continue gaining/getting developer support. It needs to get commercial apps.
It's already got the Microsoft products, so it's not being kept out of the office. It's got the Adobe products, so it's still strong in the graphics industry. It's got the BSD OS in OS X, so hopefully they can woo and attract the large and diversified Open Source guys.
Apple's strength and hope is diversification. It can, right now, tackle multiple growth points; the development community who prefer a Unix workstation (at commodity prices with a slick if unoptimized UI), the education community which has traditionally worked with Macs, the business community with it's full suite of M$ Office programs and sealed box hardware, the Good Looking People, with the Titanium powerbook and the Cube, the graphics and DTP community as a traditional stronghold for Macs, and the consumer market, with it's pretty and stylish iMacs.
Apple just has to be smart enough to choose 2 or 3 of the fastest growing markets and jump in; will it be people who, having become saturated with cheap fast computers, desire style and flash? Will it be the education market, as schools start to get networked and connected as never before? Will it be the business industry, as the economy recovers and gets back on track? Or the development community, as the economy recovers and everything tech becomes hot again? Or the home market, with the push for digital content, digital hubs, and digital media?
Hopefully Apple will choose wisely, because it would be nice to see what other cool stuff they can pull off in six years
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You know, if someone were willing to take the fall (because of loyalty, deferred rewards, or stupidity), wouldn't just going out and killing all the lawyers, destroying their offices, their computers, their servers, and their homes get Rambus out of trouble?
I mean allegations of fraud require evidence, but if all the evidence were gone...
Still would there be enough circumstancial evidence lying around?
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The cost of developing verifiably bug-free software is not justifiable in some situations. The use of the word many is a value judgement that is at best subjective.
NASA, for example, can ill afford buggy software.
Medical centers and hospitals can ill afford buggy software.
The Army and armed services can ill afford buggy software.
Now the real question is, can the average user afford buggy software?
I dunno, I would much prefer no bugs to bugs. How much would I pay for that?
I don't know.
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Unless I'm mistaken, X on OS X is being worked on/works, and NVIDIA is just handling hardware access, isn't it?
Slap an X server (whether it be xFree or something else), and you get X-Windows, don't you?
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How ironic that NVIDIA is pushing hard into the Mac market with their GeForce line of cards, when the Mac OS X system is exactly a BSD OS on the PPC platform =)
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It's where I work =)
e-speak is open source.
http://www.espeak.net
It's not currently, shall we say, polished to a glowing shine, but it's out there. It's goal and intent is to allow e-services (web being a superset of this. PDAs, cell phones, cars, and other devices could be serviced as well as PCs) in which 'composition' and 'mediation' can occur between services from different vendors or suppliers.
It currently runs on HPUX, Red Hat Linux, and Windows NT. It's known to have been compiled to run on Win2k, Madrake, and Debian, but those aren't supported.
It's cross platform nature is due to it's being written in Java, though there are XML, Python, and C interfaces (some are a little dusty)
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It was mainly a joke response to LA,T's post, more than anything else.
Anyway, to address your points, if you're being serious;
What is civilised or refined about a nation that shoots it's own students (Kent State)? or Murders it's people(Waco, Ruby Ridge)? Or kills babies (abortion)?
No, USA is not civilised or refined by any benchmark, indeed, it makes me wonder if you are just a fool?
Do you see what I'm saying? China breaking into superpower status is not tied to becoming a democracy. Being a democracy does not prevent a nation from being brutish or evil.
History has shown that it is ambition, greed, and desire that makes a state 'super'. Freedom and Democracy just make it a nicer place to live, for the people; in the case of the US, it *is* arguably the reason the people are here, and it is the people who make the nation 'super', nothing else.
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Your 'two' points:
1) Consumer loyalty actually exists, believe it or not. It translates into many little subtle things; like preference for Coke just because it tastes better, or always buying Ford because you're comfortable and secure in buying them, or always wearing Nike because Nike has always been comfortable, etc.
None of these have to do with advertising, per se. Advertising isn't meant for people who are already brand loyal; it's to build a correlation between the brand and the image it projects. When you have a cold, and you're miserable, what do you do? Vicks vaporub, some Tylenol cold and flu, maybe Kleenex medicated tissues, and Campbell's chicken soup.
2) I think the more precise view is that Coke needs to get enough mindshare to get people to drink until they become addicted =)
Coke and Pepsi really don't need to worry about 'stealing' the other's market share; if both are making a profit, than trying to steal from one another would only hurt themselves in a vicious duel. If they tried to win converts by changing flavors, they would probably only alienate their installed markets, so all they can do is try to inundate non-drinkers. What they can do is grow the market, however, by creating new drinks that the other doesn't dominate yet, like lightly flavored caffienated water drinks, or sports drinks, or whatever, but as each market matures, they... ah, I'm tired. I'll let someone else address your further points =)
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You can change it now, with the advent of OS X!
You now have both a GUI and a command prompt =)
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Does it work?
Well, I browse and surf the web for content. Not ads. I want to know more about, for example, gardening, how to make fountains, home repair, etc. Things that I do.
So it's a symbiotic approach. Corporate interests want me to be successful in these endeavors because it means I buy more, do more, spend more. If the various companies provide the sites and the info, while remaining branded or acknowledged, I get the info I want, and they get the presence they want.
So I don't see how this creates a problem. Coke, J&J, and John Deere hits their target audiences. The 'other' companies don't lose out; they just failed to advertise, but this metric of creating compelling sites with compelling content.
The Banner Ads only work where sites draw in viewers for people to see the Banner Ads. You can't advertise on non-existent sites, right?
The analogy to this is how tv ads sponsor and subsidize the tv shows that encapsulate and surround the ads. By making popular and successful tv shows, tv broadcasting can sell ads at high prices. By buying ads to link with popular tv shows, companies can create positive mindshare.
As per your thought that generic portals will win... it's all a matter of semantics between "portals" and generic portals. There is nothing that stops a Coke-web site from being a generic portal.
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With OS X you can actually boot into OS 9, if you so wish.
With W2k, you can't 'boot' into the OS/2, the POSIX, the Win95, Win99, or Dos layers.
In my original post, I was speculating on the fact that you could actually throw out the OS X and keep the OS 9, or throw out the OS 9 and keep the OS X; You can slim down and pare the Mac OS to something much more reasonable, where with XP, 3gb is 3gb, unless you want to pare down to Win2k instead, or Win98 (which isn't technically 'paring')
OS X needs 1.5gb, but ~350 is Classic; that drops it to 1.2gb
From there we can compare that WinXP is still more than twice the size of OS X =)
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Hrmm, well, it was partially a joke post, too. I'm glad you enjoyed it =)
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Yay China, I guess, since I'm Chinese.
It's about time, too. It's sort of insulting, that one of the oldest civilizations on Earth is not quite a superpower, despite having developed and refined governement and buearacracy for the past 4000 years. Go team!
I wonder what you mean by the demise of the nation-state. A nation-state does not preclude the rise of geopolitical economic power structures, it just means that a nation-state has to be particularly large to achieve this. US is a good example of what could be potential 30 or so nation-states that collude and pool together to form a vaster, greater nation-state. So China already has that advantage, and the EU is finally catching up, in bits and pieces.
I actually think the EU is one of the smaller economic areas, in comparison to the US or to the Asias; do you remeber Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea? They form a formidable engineering and technology quartet, with India rising quickly too. But this is an uninformed 'opinion' post, on my part.
I don't think America will be challenged by these entities at all. I think what will happen is that America will *assimilate* these entities. We've already swallowed a large amount of India's talent pool; when they go back to further grown India, they will have been corrupted by the influences of American culture(as we have been by their music, curries, and tandori chicken =). This is happening to China, to Japan, to Taiwan, and many other places.
As much as I want to see a global government, I don't think that will happen any time soon. Too many vast cultural divides exist for that to be possible in the near future. Heck, the Taliban still wages war on womanhood, how the heck would they coexist with great nations where women are prime ministers and leaders of technology, finance, and economy?
I hope the US becomes a great force in this global govt, by assimilating and adapting all the relevent cultural forces and movements into itself, and spreading it's own sense of culture and values (hopefully not at the expense of diversity!) into a global economy and existence.
Louis
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Has no one realized yet how the web works?
Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.
If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!
*Grow* the market, and makes sure your name is attached to it! So create http://www.jdweb.com/Garden or http://www.jdweb.com/DIY, etc.
I think this can be expanded to *any* product. If you're Johnson and Johnson, create the home healthcare, health, and self improvement pages. Don't bother too heavily with product placement, I don't think, but when people start associating 'health' and 'wellness' with J&J, they've done good advertsing.
Let's try more esoteric examples: Coke, which sells a drink.
Actually, they sell a lifestyle, in which the drink is part of the image and the taste. Create something hip and free for people to visit; web boards, movie reviews, hiking, bike, and rollerblade info sites, etc. Sites where people can go do things, and while they are at it, drink Coke.
Safeway Foodstores could host cooking sites, with recipes. Activity sites, like Coke. BBQ sites, with hints, anecdotes, stories, and recipes. Whatever!
It's similar to how a portal works, but much more targeted.
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It's all a function of perspective; a display that emits light in the RGB colorspace or reflects light in the CMYK colorspace can be functionally identical, because in the end they are both measured by the light your eyes absorb. The only advantage that a lighted display has is that it has a much broader dynamic range than a piece of paper; it can get brighter than ambient light.
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