When you accept the EULA from MS, Oracle, or whatever closed min^H^H^H source software, BSA participating company you purchase from, you agree to let the copyright holder _OR_ANY_DESIGNATED_ASSIGNEE_ come in and audit your system for license violations.
I think it is high time these damn EULAs get properly tested in court. I have a feeling they will ultimately fail the legal test. It's absurd that you "have" to read more legalese to install a piece of software than to buy a car (assuming you pay cash). It's also absurd that you can't read the legalese until you've purchased the software, opened the packge, and many times broken a stick on the internal CD sleave that reads "Breaking this sticker indicates your acceptance of the EULA"--which you see once you install the software.
Last I heard, ripping a sticker wasn't quite as legally binding as a signature.
The BSA coming charging in would be a perfect opportunity to test a EULA. Unless they come with cops and a warrant, you can tell them to take a hike even if they have a signed contract (which they don't). Tell them to get a court order. They may do that and they way try to sue you: But they'd sue you for violation of a contract, not copyright infringement. You could then argue that the EULA is invalid. Aside from the issue of whether "clicking accept" forms a contract, the EULA is invalid because no contract (in the United States) is enforceable if it abdicates a recognized right of one of the parties--in this case, unreasonable search and seizure.
You, as an adult can sign a contract that says you will never marry, that anyone can search your home and kill your sister--all three of those clauses will not be enforced by a court because they abdicate recognized rights that CANNOT be taken away by a contract. Otherwise many labor laws that protect workers would be useless since workers would just be forced to sign away their rights. You can't do it. You can't sign away your rights (well, you can, but no court will enforce them).
I think it'd be great if a BSA-initiated conflict resulted in the definitive invalidation of EULAs!:)
I have the title Software Engineer. I guess I am on the engineer side. And anyone who tells you that software engineers aren't real engineers are just PO'd because we don't have to wear ties.:-)
I agree. I don't know technically what makes an "engineer." I could care less, actually. I got my Bachelor's in Business Admin with emphasis on Information Systems. I took it for the piece of paper--I was working full-time programming after my first year at school.
That said, I know people from virtually every technical field (EE, CS, whatever) that all eventually left their specific "focus" and became "programmers." They found it more interesting and more job opportunities.
I think the issue here is how you define "programmer." If you programmer="code monkey" then, yeah, a lot of those jobs are going overseas, you'll be bored after awhile, and your income potential is limited.
I'm not a code monkey. I can and have taken a project from its infancy in design all the way through design, coding, and implementation. These jobs are not going to be exported, believe me.
I also think you'll see a change before too long in that fewer of these tech jobs, even code monkey jobs, will be exported. I have first-hand experience rescuing companies that thought it would be a good idea to outsource to India. First the quote was 3 months and $250,000 dollars. After 3 months they were told it would be another 6 months and would be another $750,000. I couldn't believe how long they kept "buying it" until finally they ditched it. They lost a year and a half and over $2 million and had nothing to show for it.
There's only so much efficiency (and, thus, savings) that can be obtained when the people doing the work are awake when we are asleep, many don't speak our language, it costs $4000 to go on-site, requires a one-week time investment (considering travel time, time changes, time on-site, coming back, etc.). In the case I speak of it was a U.S. company with a Mexican version that had to handle Mexican tax system. They sent the code to India to have it rewritten. Heck, Mexicans don't even understand their own tax system--do you think the Indians were going to be able to understand it? Not to mention most of the variables in the program were in Spanish.
All in all, outsourcing of programming jobs is going to hit critical mass. It may have already. It's not a long-term threat.
Just because you say the advertisement somewhere and click 'ok' doesn't mean you're entitled to that price.
I may be mistaken, IANAL, but the BestBuy thing wasn't an advertisement. It was listed in their online store. Users saw the offer, accepted it by adding it to their basket and submitting their order with their credit card number, and the order was acknowledged.
It would be different if they had a banner ad on some site that said "$129" but upon arriving at BestBuy.com it appeared as $299 in the shopping basket.
But here we're talking about a price that was listed on their site. Their site takes the place of a traditional salesperson making the offer. Your submitting the order takes the place of walking to checkout with the item, and their confirmation email takes the place of a printed receipt as you walk out the door.
The price was not so low as to be unreasonable (10 cents, a dollar). The price was confirmed by not only showing the price ($129) but also showing the savings ($200). The price was confirmed by calling a store twice. Email confirmations were received. You can't say that the affected people are trying to get stuff "for free." That's not true. They are trying to pay $129 (definitely not free) for a product that was offered by BestBuy, and which they accepted.
Yes, BestBuy screwed up. Probably it was unintentional. It's probably going to cost them half a mil plus bad PR. Tough luck; that's the downside of being a multi-billion corporation with locations in most of the states of the country. And perhaps they'll hire an extra person to verify data entry in their online store database in the future. If I were them I would have two people capturing prices separately, have them captured into two fields in the database, and only list the item online if the two prices were the same.
In any case, the PR damage is done. I've always had a pretty warm fuzzy feeling when shopping at BestBuy. I'm in the market for a laptop within the next month and while I previously planned to just pick it up at BestBuy, I will now definitely comparison shop at Circuit City, CompUSA, and a couple of other local electronics stores. And I'll probably buy it at the competition even if it's an extra hundred bucks or so.
Major corporations need to learn REAL FAST, right or wrong, they can no longer piss off their customers. Welcome to the Information Age.
But how will those people whose music isn't able to be played live, such as many in the various "electronic" genres, make money from touring? Are we going to just throw away every genre of music that can't be replicated by a group of people on a stage?
The vast majority can be played by a group of people. Those that can't, I suspect they'll haul their computer with them and basically "play along" with the electronic track being played by the computer.
That said, there are many things in the world that aren't profitable. Those things are either done for fun as a hobby or aren't done. Nothing new there...
Selling music over the 'net still isn't a viable business model. It takes money, time, and connections in order to go national/international.
It will never be a viable business. Music is free now. You can't sell it.
What you CAN do is look at the expense of distributing your music online as a promotional expense. People get to know you. Eventually your music gets on P2P and you don't have to pay for THAT bandwidth.
The whole trick is getting people to hear your stuff so they want to go to your show. That's where money will be made by musicians in the future, NOT by selling the sound waves themselves.
Might take a few more years for musicians and the recording industry to grasp that, but mark my words, that's where we're going.
I have a sister-in-law who doesn't have a CD burner and only has a 56k modem connection. But she somehow has found the desire and the time to download 3000+ MP3s for her HD collection. She listens to them on her computer.
I especially liked the part of the artcile where Rosen complains that people will spend "thousands of dollars" on hard drives but won't pay for music. Makes me wonder where she buys her hard drives??
I wish you worked for me. I'd love to fire you for taking a week off from work because you didn't feel like it and couldn't come up with a reason.
Well, you'd be the first. I've never been fired, layed-off, or downsized. Ever.
I've also never taken a week off because I didn't "feel like it." I don't know where you came up with that response. Granted, you posted as AC so I guess that pretty much explains it.
You're kidding me right? The rest of us live in the real world where the dot com bubble has burst and the video games were auctioned after the company went broke (probably because the coders were playing counterstrike all day long instead of doing anything). I get so sick of prima donna attitudes like that, it makes the rest of us (who are willing to work a normal work day and be productive) look bad.
Why should he be kidding?
Brilliance and inspiration are both required in programming, neither of which were created nor destroyed by the "dot com bubble." We're not accountants. What we do requires creativity AND logic and not all days are created equal. I've spent an entire day on a problem with no particular success only to come in fresh the next morning, enter "the zone," and knock the thing out in 30 minutes.
If you truly can produce brilliant and creative code every hour you are at work every day, kudos to you.
More likely than not, however, I suspect that the "prima donna" gets more done in his one "zone day" then you do all week. Don't get pissed because he can work one day and play Doom for 4 days and still produce more and better code than you.
There are set ways to approach and solve a problem, and if you tell your boss that you can't work right now because it just isn't coming to you, you're out of a job.
Hahah, you aren't a programmer are you? Probably are a poorly paid manager.
Truth is, I have yet to find ANYONE (thank God) in a position of any managerial importance that agrees with you. Everyone I've ever known recognizes that there are days that a programmer just can't crank out code, and there are days that in a single day he'll crank out 4 days worth of "slow days."
Programming isn't an exact science. It DOES require being in "the zone."
When you're in the zone the code will just flow and it'll normally be much better code. A programmer who isn't in the zone but feels "forced" by management (or, more often, by himself) to crank out code will produce poor code, will have low morale, will probably tend to take a long lunch break and probably frequent "cigarette breaks," and probably leave right at 4:30pm. Basically an unproductive day whose output is of little value.
On the other hand, a programmer that is in the zone may easily forget about lunch or eat his lunch in 5 minutes at his desk while he codes. He might remember to go to the bathroom. And it is doubtful he'll leave before 5pm. And the code he produces will be some of his best.
When I'm not in the zone, I tend to do non-programming work. Returning calls, writing up documentation, meeting with those that may have been wanting a meeting for some time. There's no reason to waste time on programming when you're not in the zone.
If you really think it's as simple as "pay the programer and he'll produce 500 quality lines of code a day, every day" you're sadly mistaken. While you can't have a non-productive programmer and being "out of the zone" isn't an excuse to avoid working, it is equally unreasonable to expect programmers to be 100% productive every day. Aint gonna happen. Some days they'll be at 50% and other days at 150%. Every manager I've worked with or for knows that and accepts it.
I suspect those that don't know or accept it are hiring code monkeys in a sweat-shop environment. I've never worked in those environments, though, so I wouldn't know.
You can play with it if you want, running ads and content from the same server...but most don't work that way, as far as i've seen.
I serve my banner ads from the same webserver as the content. Not any intentionally sneaky trick to get the ads not blocked, but just the way I've always done it.
If someone blocks my ads--which are not very intrusive at all--then that's a pretty jerky thing to do to a webmaster that is still providing completely free service in a web that is becoming more and more subscription based. Nonetheless, it still doesn't affect me (yet) because I quote my rates based on page views and my advertisers pay by the month. So if some people turn off banners all they do is reduce my click-thru; but if they weren't going to click on the ads anyway I don't really lose anything.
Maybe add "adv,/adv" tags, not the html but make it visible, you know?
Yeah, I've seen that done. It's ok. I tend not to like it myself because I feel like it's much more of a direct endorsement of something, which I may or may not be willing to do. When it's a banner advertisement it's obvious the company is paying for a place on my site and that's it. When I do something like what you mentioned here it may be more effective, but I feel that the advertiser is buying my personal endorsement. That'd make me feel like a whore which is not a feeling I get by accepting banner ads.
I can live with pop-up ads even easier than normal ads, because Mozilla lets me supress additional windows from popping up without my request.
I don't filter banner ads or banner icons, nothing. I'm not going to install programs of plug-ins in my browsers to censor content, even if they are ads. What I do and will continue to filter is pop-up anything. Not beacuse they are ads but because they annoy me and clutter my desktop.
I run a popular website with traditional banner ads (468x60 up top an a few 100x100 on the left sidebar). That's the way it was, that's the way it will be. The day an advertiser demands that I give them pop-up is the day they can look for a new place to put their ads.
In any case, I still think traditional banner ads are both more asthetic and more effective. The bigger and more intrusive an ad, the quicker it will be closed or scrolled over. And in the case of pop-up ads it's just too easy for users to disable them entirely.
In fact, I've been tempted to go to text-based ads. The main reason I don't is because I think they'd be TOO effective: users would actually see them as content rather than the advertisement that they are. I want to maintain a distinction. I think traditional banner ads are the right balance.
I hate Jar Jar Binks as much as the next person, and I don't mean to defend him, but...
Am I the only one that can still go to a movie and just try to enjoy it without trying to read social or racial inuendo into it? I mean, I didn't enjoy Episode I. But that was because the movie sucked, not because of Chinese aliens and a Jamaican Jar Jar.
Come on, IT'S A MOVIE! I don't think any racial insults were intended and even if they were, who cares? Do you think there is going to be more racism against Jamaicans because Jar Jar supposedly talks like them? Do you think there's going to be more racism against Chinese because in Episode I they were apparently non-trustworthy traders? Cone on, that's absurd.
FWIW, I had NEVER (until now) even heard anyone comment that Jar Jar spoke like a Jamaican. I guess everyone I know is in that 1% that doesn't think Jamaican when they think of Jar Jar.
In fact, I think 99% of people try NOT to think of Jar Jar at all.
Is it still the case that in the U.S. you have to pay to receive calls on a cell phone? I never understood how the carriers got away with that. I know we complain (rightly) about the call charges here, but at least we don't pay to be called.
Yes, we still pay to receive calls.
I've worked under both systems. Having the caller have to pay to call a cell phone (as apparently the case in the UK and where I currently live, Mexico) and the way its done in the U.S. where the owner of the cell phone pays for received calls.
I prefer the latter. Especially when you get 2000 or 3000 minutes per month--there's no way I call more than 100 or 200 per month so I'd just assume that the caller call me free and get that rolled into the 3000 minutes I wouldn't otherwise use.
As towards third world countries perhaps the calls are so expensive because maintaining a relibable connection is costly.
Except in the worst third-world countries (which are technically, "fourth" and "fifth" world countries!), the technology is the same as that found in the U.S.
The difference is they have crashing monopolies and there is a cultural tendency in Latin America to steal every last "peso" you can. The owners of the telcos pay top government officials so they won't regulate the telcos, and the telco owners and top government officials earn major bucks at the expense of the phone-using public.
That's why calls are so expensive in Latin America, not because it is any harder to maintain a reliable connection.
That's what I've been saying for years. VoIP, while still definitely in its infancy, is just as much the future undoing of the LD industry as P2P is the undoing of the (current) music industry.
I hope those third world countries really save enough money from these large first world corporations to make a quality lifestyle change. I hope they take this opportunity to manage their own services and dont let USA bully and sanction and threaten their way into corporate control of the new technologies there.
I'm an American but currently live in Mexico. I don't know what you're talking about in terms of "these large first world corporations." If you are implying that American telco companies are robbing the poor in third world countries you are sadly mistaken--at least in Mexico.
Mexico has a terrible telephone monopoly, "Telmex." It historically has terrible quality and their prices are outrageous. It costs about 80 cents per minute for me to call the U.S. but only about 15 or 20 to call from the U.S. to Mexico. And Telmex is entirely a Mexican monopoly.
In fact, a few years ago the phone monopoly was "broken" by the Mexican government and competition was introduced. Both MCI and AT&T entered the market, and we even have competition in local service in many parts of Monterrey. However, Telmex is still the monopoly. Since most people get their phone lines with Telmex they generally get new subscribers to sign-up for their LD service. AT&T and MCI are at a distinct disadvantage and have even considered leaving the Mexican market because Telmex maintains its monopoly in fact, if not in law.
As is usually the case, problems in the third world--political and economic--are NOT the fault of the U.S. or other first-world countries. They are almost always the fault of powers closer to home. In this case, telco providers in Latin America make a killing because they either have a government-mandated monopoly, or the government allows competition but silently supports the original monopoly by not encouraging the competition or forcing the monopoly to act in non-monopolistic ways.
I'm not sure where this 'legal requirement' is spelled out, but I would read this to mean that the OS need only be included with the machine--not necessarily pre-installed.
It's also silly since, anymore, you're lucky to get a "recovery CD-ROM" let alone a real copy of the OS with your OEM machine.
My sister-in-law recently had a problem with her 98SE machine. She had installed one to many spyware programs and things were crashing randomly. I offered to format it and reinstall. It was an HP that came pre-loaded with 98SE and I found the recovery disk. After backing up the data from her HD, I formatted it and went to recover with the included HP recovery disk.
Things looked to work smoothly. Everything apparently installed fine and I was booting up to Windows "for the first time" when I got to a point where a window opened and said "Can't find Windows license agreement. The machine will be shut down." I clicked on "Ok" and the machine turned itself off.
I tried the format/recover process one more time and got the same bogus message.
Screw that, I formatted the hard drive and installed my "clean" copy of 98SE. Worked like a charm.
Point being: It's not really like they actually give you enough install material to be ABLE to install the OS even on the OEM machine, let alone some other machine. Heck, I had a "legitimate" HP with a "legitimate" recovery CD and I had to resort to installing a "pirated" copy of 98SE because the legit stuff didn't work.
It's amazing Microsoft has lasted as long as it has. Between their continuosuly more restricted legal BS and their products that don't work it's absolutely amazing they hold the position they do, even with monopoly powers.
What MS is saying is that it is illegal to buy a PC with, say, Windows 2000 pre-installed, then later give the PC away but keep the copy of Windows 2000. That would be in violation of the terms of the licence.
Well, yeah, it would be a violation and software piracy to give away the PC and keep the original OS for the seller.
But that's not what is said on the Microsoft page.
Microsoft says: "make sure that the hardware donation includes the original operating system software. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement."
That's a crock. It's misleading, misinformation, a misrepresentation of the facts, and just there to scare educators.
Hopefully it will scare them into using Linux...
It's almos a no-brainer. Mac doesn't have much market penetration but it owns the school market. I think most schools would end up rejecting a Windows machine based on the fact that it isn't compatible with the other dozen Macs they have--not because it comes with a Windows license or not.
This is just an Internet zoning regulation and I think it makes a lot of sense. We use zoning in municipal government so that someone doesn't build a pig farm or a steel mill next to your condo. All this does is allow those that want to to filter on the TLD.
I agree, I don't see anything wrong with adding a.prn TLD and requiring all porn sites to be there. As you say, it's a "zoning regulation." No-one is saying they can't exist, just saying that they must be located somewhere--just like a strip-joint isn't generally acceptable in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
I would personally think a ".mature" TLD would be more appropriate than.prn. You could reasonably include artistic nudes there without calling artistic nudes porn or having to make a distinction between the two.
I think the toughest part isn't so much keeping smut from children, but deciding what else (if anything) ought to be sorted in similar ways. I wouldn't agree with a ".subversive" or ".radical" domain--and likewise "hate speech" certainly wouldn't belong in a ".prn" TLD (although it could be put under.mature, I guess).
As for the hidden camera thing, I think it should be refined, as others have said. Make it illegal to film and distribute films of people in any state of undress or performing physiological needs where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy unless you obtain their explicit permission.
In fact, there is a recent article in Scientific American (maybe 3 months ago) of a psychological study which showed exactly that: given the choice between paying a cheapish price for a good or service and getting the good or service for free, people will consistently pay the cheapish price. We don't really want to be freeloaders. Go figure.
I think that's a case of academia being in contradiction to real-world observable facts.
I've sold shareware. Damn cheap. And no, not low quality. I can assure you, most people are freeloaders even when given the chance to pay a very small price.
I think you'd be surprised how many people *would* pay.
You're obviously not a shareware author. Given the choice between free and cheap, people will choose free.
It's not just being cheap or free that's at issue. It's the whole "relationship." It's easier and "safer" to hop online and grab the song anonymously from someone you don't know (and who doesn't know you, and doesn't care) than it is to log on, identify yourself, probably provide your credit card number, etc.
Selling music, even online in MP3 format, can't compete with free music on price nor on ease-of-use and on privacy points. The only possible benefit is quality, and that can be resolved by looking for a high BPS version of the track you want. I normally download 128k which is sufficient for most pop music; but I almost always see the same track in 160, 192, and even 256k versions--for those that really need to hear every minute frequency of Britney Spears.
The music industry is a losing proposition as it stands now. They can't just "move" to an online model. They are obsolete. The current music market is history.
As someone else said, it used to be artists went on tour to promote their CDs. Now the music will be given away free to promote themselves so people will go to see them in concert. The tours and live concerts is where the money is going to be made in music in the future--not in the digital or analog representations of the music itself.
Again, as someone else said, it was a market fluke that allowed people to become rich distributing music. They made billions of dollars providing a service and product that was necessary in its time. But they are no longer necessary. Laws, bitching and moaning, lawsuits may delay the inevitable for a few years--but it cannot change what is inevitable: Music will be free, and those artists wishing to make a living in music will have to tour. God forbid they actually have to "work" on an ongoing basis...
If we strip the athmosphere of CO2, at some point plant life will run out of air, though I guess that point is way off.
If we get to that point we can either stop stripping so much CO2 out of the atmosphere, or we can just increase greenhouse gas, ehr, CO2 production. Imagine that... increasing pollution to help the plants. Wait, that already makes sense.:)
Consider it like this, chop off a tree and burn it and the CO2 you create will at some point be the "food" of another tree. Chop it down and store the CO2 away and that tree won't have any food
But we don't normally burn trees, at least not on purpose or on a global scale.
Oil reserves are only trees chopped down a long time ago
And, since they've been oil so long, the environment's "cycle" assumes that a certain amount of CO2 will be out of that cycle. Whether it's stored in oil or consumed by our machine is not important.
Just for instance, at flying level, the H2O the planes create (out of Kerosine and O2) is just as damaging to the athmosphere as the CO2.
Sssh. Don't tell an environmnetalist that |gasp| clouds probably have a bigger affect on the whole show than all the CO2 produced by man and nature combined...
nope. flash is not a usability nightmare. it's very easy to make usable, and attractive sites based on flash.
I, as a user, almost always close the browser window if I arrive at a site that uses Flash.
1. I've found that most sites that use Flash do so to provide pretty colors and glitter to easily dazzled end-users, but usually don't have much in the way of real content.
2. Even on my DSL line, I can often click on "Back" and select the next website at google before the previous website was done loading and doing their silly animations.
3. I think Flash was developed near the end of the dot com boom when people were all thrilled about anything that looked cool on the Internet. Now, as mentioned by previous articles here and on CNN, the novelty of Internet is starting to wear off and it's becoming a tool to get a job done. Flash doesn't do anything to help you get the job done. It slows you down. Rather than waste my time I'll just move on to the next site.
the problem with flash is that it's a _functional_ nightmare
In other words, it's a nightmare for the visitors that will be using your site. Good idea.
if you find that certain sites rendered using flash are unusable, don't blame the hammer. blame the carpenter.
Right. The carpenter (web developer) is using the wrong tool (Flash). He should be using the right tool--HTML.
I can't think of many appropriate applications for Flash. HTML provides content, Java applets provide interactivity, when necessary. Flash is unnecessary bulk and fluf.
The harvested CO2 is removed from the earth's carbon cycle. This is not a valid long-term way of dealing with the problem.
Why not? I thought the whole global warming problem was that we were pumping too much of it into the atmosphere. If we use this method, aren't we just counteracting our own CO2 production? (assuming we don't take out more than we put into the system).
Or is our CO2 production now considered "natural" and we should just let it run its course? I would personally agree with that, but it doesn't jive with the environmentalist platform...
Re:Military threats promote innovation
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Space Wars
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Fact is all the $$ are going into a destructive porpose which could be avoided altogether with a little bit more smartness
Uh, what is the "smartness" approach you would suggest?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is high time these damn EULAs get properly tested in court. I have a feeling they will ultimately fail the legal test. It's absurd that you "have" to read more legalese to install a piece of software than to buy a car (assuming you pay cash). It's also absurd that you can't read the legalese until you've purchased the software, opened the packge, and many times broken a stick on the internal CD sleave that reads "Breaking this sticker indicates your acceptance of the EULA"--which you see once you install the software.
Last I heard, ripping a sticker wasn't quite as legally binding as a signature.
The BSA coming charging in would be a perfect opportunity to test a EULA. Unless they come with cops and a warrant, you can tell them to take a hike even if they have a signed contract (which they don't). Tell them to get a court order. They may do that and they way try to sue you: But they'd sue you for violation of a contract, not copyright infringement. You could then argue that the EULA is invalid. Aside from the issue of whether "clicking accept" forms a contract, the EULA is invalid because no contract (in the United States) is enforceable if it abdicates a recognized right of one of the parties--in this case, unreasonable search and seizure.
You, as an adult can sign a contract that says you will never marry, that anyone can search your home and kill your sister--all three of those clauses will not be enforced by a court because they abdicate recognized rights that CANNOT be taken away by a contract. Otherwise many labor laws that protect workers would be useless since workers would just be forced to sign away their rights. You can't do it. You can't sign away your rights (well, you can, but no court will enforce them).
I think it'd be great if a BSA-initiated conflict resulted in the definitive invalidation of EULAs! :)
I agree. I don't know technically what makes an "engineer." I could care less, actually. I got my Bachelor's in Business Admin with emphasis on Information Systems. I took it for the piece of paper--I was working full-time programming after my first year at school.
That said, I know people from virtually every technical field (EE, CS, whatever) that all eventually left their specific "focus" and became "programmers." They found it more interesting and more job opportunities.
I think the issue here is how you define "programmer." If you programmer="code monkey" then, yeah, a lot of those jobs are going overseas, you'll be bored after awhile, and your income potential is limited.
I'm not a code monkey. I can and have taken a project from its infancy in design all the way through design, coding, and implementation. These jobs are not going to be exported, believe me.
I also think you'll see a change before too long in that fewer of these tech jobs, even code monkey jobs, will be exported. I have first-hand experience rescuing companies that thought it would be a good idea to outsource to India. First the quote was 3 months and $250,000 dollars. After 3 months they were told it would be another 6 months and would be another $750,000. I couldn't believe how long they kept "buying it" until finally they ditched it. They lost a year and a half and over $2 million and had nothing to show for it.
There's only so much efficiency (and, thus, savings) that can be obtained when the people doing the work are awake when we are asleep, many don't speak our language, it costs $4000 to go on-site, requires a one-week time investment (considering travel time, time changes, time on-site, coming back, etc.). In the case I speak of it was a U.S. company with a Mexican version that had to handle Mexican tax system. They sent the code to India to have it rewritten. Heck, Mexicans don't even understand their own tax system--do you think the Indians were going to be able to understand it? Not to mention most of the variables in the program were in Spanish.
All in all, outsourcing of programming jobs is going to hit critical mass. It may have already. It's not a long-term threat.
I may be mistaken, IANAL, but the BestBuy thing wasn't an advertisement. It was listed in their online store. Users saw the offer, accepted it by adding it to their basket and submitting their order with their credit card number, and the order was acknowledged.
It would be different if they had a banner ad on some site that said "$129" but upon arriving at BestBuy.com it appeared as $299 in the shopping basket.
But here we're talking about a price that was listed on their site. Their site takes the place of a traditional salesperson making the offer. Your submitting the order takes the place of walking to checkout with the item, and their confirmation email takes the place of a printed receipt as you walk out the door.
The price was not so low as to be unreasonable (10 cents, a dollar). The price was confirmed by not only showing the price ($129) but also showing the savings ($200). The price was confirmed by calling a store twice. Email confirmations were received. You can't say that the affected people are trying to get stuff "for free." That's not true. They are trying to pay $129 (definitely not free) for a product that was offered by BestBuy, and which they accepted.
Yes, BestBuy screwed up. Probably it was unintentional. It's probably going to cost them half a mil plus bad PR. Tough luck; that's the downside of being a multi-billion corporation with locations in most of the states of the country. And perhaps they'll hire an extra person to verify data entry in their online store database in the future. If I were them I would have two people capturing prices separately, have them captured into two fields in the database, and only list the item online if the two prices were the same.
In any case, the PR damage is done. I've always had a pretty warm fuzzy feeling when shopping at BestBuy. I'm in the market for a laptop within the next month and while I previously planned to just pick it up at BestBuy, I will now definitely comparison shop at Circuit City, CompUSA, and a couple of other local electronics stores. And I'll probably buy it at the competition even if it's an extra hundred bucks or so.
Major corporations need to learn REAL FAST, right or wrong, they can no longer piss off their customers. Welcome to the Information Age.
The vast majority can be played by a group of people. Those that can't, I suspect they'll haul their computer with them and basically "play along" with the electronic track being played by the computer.
That said, there are many things in the world that aren't profitable. Those things are either done for fun as a hobby or aren't done. Nothing new there...
It will never be a viable business. Music is free now. You can't sell it.
What you CAN do is look at the expense of distributing your music online as a promotional expense. People get to know you. Eventually your music gets on P2P and you don't have to pay for THAT bandwidth.
The whole trick is getting people to hear your stuff so they want to go to your show. That's where money will be made by musicians in the future, NOT by selling the sound waves themselves.
Might take a few more years for musicians and the recording industry to grasp that, but mark my words, that's where we're going.
I have a sister-in-law who doesn't have a CD burner and only has a 56k modem connection. But she somehow has found the desire and the time to download 3000+ MP3s for her HD collection. She listens to them on her computer.
I especially liked the part of the artcile where Rosen complains that people will spend "thousands of dollars" on hard drives but won't pay for music. Makes me wonder where she buys her hard drives??
Well, you'd be the first. I've never been fired, layed-off, or downsized. Ever.
I've also never taken a week off because I didn't "feel like it." I don't know where you came up with that response. Granted, you posted as AC so I guess that pretty much explains it.
The man speaks the truth in everything he wrote. I would mod you up if I hadn't disabled moderating for my account. :)
Why should he be kidding?
Brilliance and inspiration are both required in programming, neither of which were created nor destroyed by the "dot com bubble." We're not accountants. What we do requires creativity AND logic and not all days are created equal. I've spent an entire day on a problem with no particular success only to come in fresh the next morning, enter "the zone," and knock the thing out in 30 minutes.
If you truly can produce brilliant and creative code every hour you are at work every day, kudos to you.
More likely than not, however, I suspect that the "prima donna" gets more done in his one "zone day" then you do all week. Don't get pissed because he can work one day and play Doom for 4 days and still produce more and better code than you.
Hahah, you aren't a programmer are you? Probably are a poorly paid manager.
Truth is, I have yet to find ANYONE (thank God) in a position of any managerial importance that agrees with you. Everyone I've ever known recognizes that there are days that a programmer just can't crank out code, and there are days that in a single day he'll crank out 4 days worth of "slow days."
Programming isn't an exact science. It DOES require being in "the zone."
When you're in the zone the code will just flow and it'll normally be much better code. A programmer who isn't in the zone but feels "forced" by management (or, more often, by himself) to crank out code will produce poor code, will have low morale, will probably tend to take a long lunch break and probably frequent "cigarette breaks," and probably leave right at 4:30pm. Basically an unproductive day whose output is of little value.
On the other hand, a programmer that is in the zone may easily forget about lunch or eat his lunch in 5 minutes at his desk while he codes. He might remember to go to the bathroom. And it is doubtful he'll leave before 5pm. And the code he produces will be some of his best.
When I'm not in the zone, I tend to do non-programming work. Returning calls, writing up documentation, meeting with those that may have been wanting a meeting for some time. There's no reason to waste time on programming when you're not in the zone.
If you really think it's as simple as "pay the programer and he'll produce 500 quality lines of code a day, every day" you're sadly mistaken. While you can't have a non-productive programmer and being "out of the zone" isn't an excuse to avoid working, it is equally unreasonable to expect programmers to be 100% productive every day. Aint gonna happen. Some days they'll be at 50% and other days at 150%. Every manager I've worked with or for knows that and accepts it.
I suspect those that don't know or accept it are hiring code monkeys in a sweat-shop environment. I've never worked in those environments, though, so I wouldn't know.
I serve my banner ads from the same webserver as the content. Not any intentionally sneaky trick to get the ads not blocked, but just the way I've always done it.
If someone blocks my ads--which are not very intrusive at all--then that's a pretty jerky thing to do to a webmaster that is still providing completely free service in a web that is becoming more and more subscription based. Nonetheless, it still doesn't affect me (yet) because I quote my rates based on page views and my advertisers pay by the month. So if some people turn off banners all they do is reduce my click-thru; but if they weren't going to click on the ads anyway I don't really lose anything.
Maybe add "adv, /adv" tags, not the html but make it visible, you know?
Yeah, I've seen that done. It's ok. I tend not to like it myself because I feel like it's much more of a direct endorsement of something, which I may or may not be willing to do. When it's a banner advertisement it's obvious the company is paying for a place on my site and that's it. When I do something like what you mentioned here it may be more effective, but I feel that the advertiser is buying my personal endorsement. That'd make me feel like a whore which is not a feeling I get by accepting banner ads.
I don't filter banner ads or banner icons, nothing. I'm not going to install programs of plug-ins in my browsers to censor content, even if they are ads. What I do and will continue to filter is pop-up anything. Not beacuse they are ads but because they annoy me and clutter my desktop.
I run a popular website with traditional banner ads (468x60 up top an a few 100x100 on the left sidebar). That's the way it was, that's the way it will be. The day an advertiser demands that I give them pop-up is the day they can look for a new place to put their ads.
In any case, I still think traditional banner ads are both more asthetic and more effective. The bigger and more intrusive an ad, the quicker it will be closed or scrolled over. And in the case of pop-up ads it's just too easy for users to disable them entirely.
In fact, I've been tempted to go to text-based ads. The main reason I don't is because I think they'd be TOO effective: users would actually see them as content rather than the advertisement that they are. I want to maintain a distinction. I think traditional banner ads are the right balance.
Am I the only one that can still go to a movie and just try to enjoy it without trying to read social or racial inuendo into it? I mean, I didn't enjoy Episode I. But that was because the movie sucked, not because of Chinese aliens and a Jamaican Jar Jar.
Come on, IT'S A MOVIE! I don't think any racial insults were intended and even if they were, who cares? Do you think there is going to be more racism against Jamaicans because Jar Jar supposedly talks like them? Do you think there's going to be more racism against Chinese because in Episode I they were apparently non-trustworthy traders? Cone on, that's absurd.
FWIW, I had NEVER (until now) even heard anyone comment that Jar Jar spoke like a Jamaican. I guess everyone I know is in that 1% that doesn't think Jamaican when they think of Jar Jar.
In fact, I think 99% of people try NOT to think of Jar Jar at all.
Yes, we still pay to receive calls.
I've worked under both systems. Having the caller have to pay to call a cell phone (as apparently the case in the UK and where I currently live, Mexico) and the way its done in the U.S. where the owner of the cell phone pays for received calls.
I prefer the latter. Especially when you get 2000 or 3000 minutes per month--there's no way I call more than 100 or 200 per month so I'd just assume that the caller call me free and get that rolled into the 3000 minutes I wouldn't otherwise use.
Except in the worst third-world countries (which are technically, "fourth" and "fifth" world countries!), the technology is the same as that found in the U.S.
The difference is they have crashing monopolies and there is a cultural tendency in Latin America to steal every last "peso" you can. The owners of the telcos pay top government officials so they won't regulate the telcos, and the telco owners and top government officials earn major bucks at the expense of the phone-using public.
That's why calls are so expensive in Latin America, not because it is any harder to maintain a reliable connection.
That's what I've been saying for years. VoIP, while still definitely in its infancy, is just as much the future undoing of the LD industry as P2P is the undoing of the (current) music industry.
I hope those third world countries really save enough money from these large first world corporations to make a quality lifestyle change. I hope they take this opportunity to manage their own services and dont let USA bully and sanction and threaten their way into corporate control of the new technologies there.
I'm an American but currently live in Mexico. I don't know what you're talking about in terms of "these large first world corporations." If you are implying that American telco companies are robbing the poor in third world countries you are sadly mistaken--at least in Mexico.
Mexico has a terrible telephone monopoly, "Telmex." It historically has terrible quality and their prices are outrageous. It costs about 80 cents per minute for me to call the U.S. but only about 15 or 20 to call from the U.S. to Mexico. And Telmex is entirely a Mexican monopoly.
In fact, a few years ago the phone monopoly was "broken" by the Mexican government and competition was introduced. Both MCI and AT&T entered the market, and we even have competition in local service in many parts of Monterrey. However, Telmex is still the monopoly. Since most people get their phone lines with Telmex they generally get new subscribers to sign-up for their LD service. AT&T and MCI are at a distinct disadvantage and have even considered leaving the Mexican market because Telmex maintains its monopoly in fact, if not in law.
As is usually the case, problems in the third world--political and economic--are NOT the fault of the U.S. or other first-world countries. They are almost always the fault of powers closer to home. In this case, telco providers in Latin America make a killing because they either have a government-mandated monopoly, or the government allows competition but silently supports the original monopoly by not encouraging the competition or forcing the monopoly to act in non-monopolistic ways.
It's also silly since, anymore, you're lucky to get a "recovery CD-ROM" let alone a real copy of the OS with your OEM machine.
My sister-in-law recently had a problem with her 98SE machine. She had installed one to many spyware programs and things were crashing randomly. I offered to format it and reinstall. It was an HP that came pre-loaded with 98SE and I found the recovery disk. After backing up the data from her HD, I formatted it and went to recover with the included HP recovery disk.
Things looked to work smoothly. Everything apparently installed fine and I was booting up to Windows "for the first time" when I got to a point where a window opened and said "Can't find Windows license agreement. The machine will be shut down." I clicked on "Ok" and the machine turned itself off.
I tried the format/recover process one more time and got the same bogus message.
Screw that, I formatted the hard drive and installed my "clean" copy of 98SE. Worked like a charm.
Point being: It's not really like they actually give you enough install material to be ABLE to install the OS even on the OEM machine, let alone some other machine. Heck, I had a "legitimate" HP with a "legitimate" recovery CD and I had to resort to installing a "pirated" copy of 98SE because the legit stuff didn't work.
It's amazing Microsoft has lasted as long as it has. Between their continuosuly more restricted legal BS and their products that don't work it's absolutely amazing they hold the position they do, even with monopoly powers.
Well, yeah, it would be a violation and software piracy to give away the PC and keep the original OS for the seller.
But that's not what is said on the Microsoft page.
Microsoft says: "make sure that the hardware donation includes the original operating system software. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement."
That's a crock. It's misleading, misinformation, a misrepresentation of the facts, and just there to scare educators.
Hopefully it will scare them into using Linux...
It's almos a no-brainer. Mac doesn't have much market penetration but it owns the school market. I think most schools would end up rejecting a Windows machine based on the fact that it isn't compatible with the other dozen Macs they have--not because it comes with a Windows license or not.
I agree, I don't see anything wrong with adding a .prn TLD and requiring all porn sites to be there. As you say, it's a "zoning regulation." No-one is saying they can't exist, just saying that they must be located somewhere--just like a strip-joint isn't generally acceptable in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
I would personally think a ".mature" TLD would be more appropriate than .prn. You could reasonably include artistic nudes there without calling artistic nudes porn or having to make a distinction between the two.
I think the toughest part isn't so much keeping smut from children, but deciding what else (if anything) ought to be sorted in similar ways. I wouldn't agree with a ".subversive" or ".radical" domain--and likewise "hate speech" certainly wouldn't belong in a ".prn" TLD (although it could be put under .mature, I guess).
As for the hidden camera thing, I think it should be refined, as others have said. Make it illegal to film and distribute films of people in any state of undress or performing physiological needs where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy unless you obtain their explicit permission.
I think that's a case of academia being in contradiction to real-world observable facts.
I've sold shareware. Damn cheap. And no, not low quality. I can assure you, most people are freeloaders even when given the chance to pay a very small price.
You're obviously not a shareware author. Given the choice between free and cheap, people will choose free.
It's not just being cheap or free that's at issue. It's the whole "relationship." It's easier and "safer" to hop online and grab the song anonymously from someone you don't know (and who doesn't know you, and doesn't care) than it is to log on, identify yourself, probably provide your credit card number, etc.
Selling music, even online in MP3 format, can't compete with free music on price nor on ease-of-use and on privacy points. The only possible benefit is quality, and that can be resolved by looking for a high BPS version of the track you want. I normally download 128k which is sufficient for most pop music; but I almost always see the same track in 160, 192, and even 256k versions--for those that really need to hear every minute frequency of Britney Spears.
The music industry is a losing proposition as it stands now. They can't just "move" to an online model. They are obsolete. The current music market is history.
As someone else said, it used to be artists went on tour to promote their CDs. Now the music will be given away free to promote themselves so people will go to see them in concert. The tours and live concerts is where the money is going to be made in music in the future--not in the digital or analog representations of the music itself.
Again, as someone else said, it was a market fluke that allowed people to become rich distributing music. They made billions of dollars providing a service and product that was necessary in its time. But they are no longer necessary. Laws, bitching and moaning, lawsuits may delay the inevitable for a few years--but it cannot change what is inevitable: Music will be free, and those artists wishing to make a living in music will have to tour. God forbid they actually have to "work" on an ongoing basis...
If we get to that point we can either stop stripping so much CO2 out of the atmosphere, or we can just increase greenhouse gas, ehr, CO2 production. Imagine that... increasing pollution to help the plants. Wait, that already makes sense. :)
Consider it like this, chop off a tree and burn it and the CO2 you create will at some point be the "food" of another tree. Chop it down and store the CO2 away and that tree won't have any food
But we don't normally burn trees, at least not on purpose or on a global scale.
Oil reserves are only trees chopped down a long time ago
And, since they've been oil so long, the environment's "cycle" assumes that a certain amount of CO2 will be out of that cycle. Whether it's stored in oil or consumed by our machine is not important.
Just for instance, at flying level, the H2O the planes create (out of Kerosine and O2) is just as damaging to the athmosphere as the CO2.
Sssh. Don't tell an environmnetalist that |gasp| clouds probably have a bigger affect on the whole show than all the CO2 produced by man and nature combined...
I, as a user, almost always close the browser window if I arrive at a site that uses Flash.
1. I've found that most sites that use Flash do so to provide pretty colors and glitter to easily dazzled end-users, but usually don't have much in the way of real content.
2. Even on my DSL line, I can often click on "Back" and select the next website at google before the previous website was done loading and doing their silly animations.
3. I think Flash was developed near the end of the dot com boom when people were all thrilled about anything that looked cool on the Internet. Now, as mentioned by previous articles here and on CNN, the novelty of Internet is starting to wear off and it's becoming a tool to get a job done. Flash doesn't do anything to help you get the job done. It slows you down. Rather than waste my time I'll just move on to the next site.
the problem with flash is that it's a _functional_ nightmare
In other words, it's a nightmare for the visitors that will be using your site. Good idea.
if you find that certain sites rendered using flash are unusable, don't blame the hammer. blame the carpenter.
Right. The carpenter (web developer) is using the wrong tool (Flash). He should be using the right tool--HTML.
I can't think of many appropriate applications for Flash. HTML provides content, Java applets provide interactivity, when necessary. Flash is unnecessary bulk and fluf.
Why not? I thought the whole global warming problem was that we were pumping too much of it into the atmosphere. If we use this method, aren't we just counteracting our own CO2 production? (assuming we don't take out more than we put into the system).
Or is our CO2 production now considered "natural" and we should just let it run its course? I would personally agree with that, but it doesn't jive with the environmentalist platform...
Uh, what is the "smartness" approach you would suggest?