It's nice to see our intuition quantified, with regard to Napster use and CD sales, but to address the previous posters' comment about cause and effect, Napster allows users exposure to new music they would not have been exposed to otherwise (and would never have even considered buying for the simple reason that they didn't know about it). This suggests an alternative reason for the RIAA suit. Because these organizations determine residuals paid to artists based on Radio Airtime, the popularity of Napsterand other such services would cause those payments to become more skiewed than they already are. This would threaten the vary existance of the RIAA and other such organizations, because if the membership felt they were not being served (read: paid) fairly, the organization would fall apart completely. Cornered animals fight back even more firecely when you're swinging a spiked clup over their head. As I suggested, these organizations use outdated techniques to measure listenership, and pay those residuals as described in this extremely good essay. Napster threatened to bring this to light and expose it to scrutiny.
With regard to MediaBay, the afore mentioned survey results do not refute their argument, since they are making a detailed and precise argument rather than the wild generalizations made by the RIAA. Aside from the extremely ambiguous copyright status if the content they claim ownership of, they seem to have a decent case, as much as it pains me to say so.
There's a more important question than who would the buyers be. That is, Who would the underwriter be? From a business standpoint, there must be an underwriter that handles the transaction to the extent that Mandrake gets it's money in one lump sum and can then use it to continue to build it's business. Bringing in a couple dollars here and a couple dollars there wouldn't do it.
The underwriter would have to be reasonably confident in the company to begin with, to essentially the same if not a greater extent than the market as a whole. I suppose their could be an alternative underwriting agreement, similar to what you see in boilerroom trading outfits, although that would put a major stigma on the company, above and beyond that currently attached to the word 'linux'. It's a tough sell any way you cut it, but there are certainly enough new outlets to make IPOs available to the public at large. Well, good luck to them.
the issues of how they dub I think are secondary to the cost necessary in re-rendering those areas of the film for the other version.
I would disagree. The technology used to do the dubbing and rendering has a direct and significant impact on the cost of the process (obviously). The more pertinent question (to which I do not have the answer) is, given the comments of the previous poster, when will the technology become available to make it cost effective to do multi-language versioning for such animation? and Who is closest to developing such technology?
OK. Am I the only one confused about this? It looks like the judge decided that the FBI could have their cake and eat it too. Good deal for the FBI but certainly grounds for appeal.
On the one hand:
[T]he Fourth Amendment applied neither to the computers "because they are the property of a non-resident and located outside the United States" nor the data--at least until it was transmitted to the United States.
But then also:
[Judge] Coughenour rejected defense arguments that the FBI's actions "were unreasonable and illegal because they failed to comply with Russian law," saying that Russian law does not apply to the agents' actions.
So then what? Perhaps Martian law applies? Certainly there is some set of laws that cover access to this property of a Russian national that existed on Russian soil... Well perhaps not... This is some scary stuff...Remind me never to get on the bad side of the FBI...
It's interesting that the US military has decided to take cues from Ian Flemming. You'd think it would be more useful to seek guidance from someone like Peter Wright who was one of the real life developers of the spy gadgets attributed to Q in the Bond movies. You'd think they would have sought out the real thing rather than intentionally imitating art. Somehow, I'd expect the systems to work better if the source material wasn't hollywood fantesy. Oh, well. These are your tax $$$ at work...
Katz is a vary good writer. That doesn't make what he's saying any more logical, but it was certainly an interesting read. The heart of his essay is contained in the final paragraphs, the most telling is this:
The relentless corporatization of retailing, farming, publishing and
entertainment, to name only a few, have swung the balance much too far,
at least in the United States. Corporations are now the primary
contributors to the American election system. They fund the
overwhelming majority of lobbyists who prey on Washington. They block
regulation that would promote competition, offer the public more choices
in areas like Internet access, and fend off governmental and other
supervision. They promote conformity and uniformity. Since corporations
have acquired virtually all of the popular media, they are rarely criticized
or challenged.
Granted here we're taking this out of contect, but it's a testimet to the quality of his writing that we was able to lead us down this path without us giving up and moving on. His claims in the above, are quite extremist, but he manages to convince us they're reasonable through his earlier less extreme arguments. Well done.
And now to the facts of the matter. While I can't argue the validity of most of what was said, I seriously doubt that fast food can be blamed for the breakdown of regional cultural diversity within the united states, or the re-introduction of a class seperation within the country. I have to admit though, it does make for an interesting metaphor...
So far the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself
This may be true, and as he clains, there is a business incentive to protect the privacy of your customers, in order to retain them as customers. The problem with this is that as technology progresses, it becomes increasingly more difficult for customers to take steps to insure they are only doing business with reputable companies that institute tuch practices. Self-regulation of online privacy practices will probably work as well as self-regulation in the Direct Mail Marketing industry. The Direct Mail Association, and industry trade group walks the thin line of doing the absolute minimum to protect consumers rights while at the same time, going to lawmakers saying 'Look what we're doing to protect consumers!'.
While it's true there's a business incentive to self-regulate, this only works in industries where there are high bariers to entry (ie: there is market concentration). In cases where there are such high bariers to entry, the chances, the costs associated with market entry will deter unscrupulous indeviduals and companies because the amrket is not one where they could cut and run if their practices were discovered to be too questionable.
Online business has torn down the bariers to entry for many businesses and markets where previously, the high bariers to entry, made thode markets condusive to self-regulation.
A great deal more care needs to be taken before making blanket statements like McNealy has here...
It's interesting to see hardware manufacturers speculare on the direction techonology will take, and on top of that, watch columnists speculate on the intent of the hardware manufacturers. This is why thr whole thing is rather vague. It's quite possible that software developers might completely ignore the new featured offered in the hardware and go an entirely different way. That's one of the built-in risks in the hardware industry...
So, what happened tothe Dvorak Keyboard layout, where the keys were positioned based on frequency of use within words in the english language. Granted this is only useful for englsih language usage, but why wasn't this keyboard layout more popular. I haven't seen this layout on keyboards since maybe 1987, on an old appleIIGS keyboard that a friend of mine modified, along with a software keymap.
Does anyone have any idea why this keyboard layout didn't catch on? Is the previous poster correct? Are we predisposed to making our life more difficult than it has to be? What's wrong with us...?
There definately is something to that; that DSL companies as a whole aren't doing much to try to keep their customers. There are two issues that come to mind here. I'm not sure if either explain the behavior of ISPs that provide DSL service, rather than the Telcos that provide their end of the service.
DSL is an overly expensive stop-gap technology rolled out to bring broad-band to the masses upon demanr, rather than waiting until a more appropriate technology is produced. DSL relies on two ancient technologies, from a Telco perspective. Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do. This is why a lot of modern developments can't utilize DSL service, leaving their residents at the mercy of Cable providers, which represent thr 3rd or 4th most evil set om monopolies out there.
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service. This is why DSL isn't truly cost effective. There is the cost of the frame-relay circut and the cost of an upgraded line card (which is what the other end of your phone line is connected to) that allows for the splitting out of the data portion of the DSL service, to be routed through the frame-relay circut.
To summarize, DSL makes use of two vary old technologies, a non-cost-effective manner.
DSL companies are probably realizing that their cost of customer aquisition was too high and to make up the difference, they cut down on the post aquisition technical support. From a business standpoint, there is something to be said for this strategy. For the moment most customers have only one of the two broadband options (DSL/Cable) and even at that, the regional market concentration is extremely high. The corporate think might go like this: "We don't need to spend money retaining customers because once we get them hooked on broadband, where else are they going to go?". Since they spend so liberally on customer aquisition, they need to make cuts in other areas in order to keep their business viable. It really is a bad deal all around. Customers aren't the only ones getting screwed here, Telcos are hurting becaause they don't have a more robust and/or cost effective broadband solution, and the ISPs that got into DSL were conned into it by the lure of a vast untapped market, which it turns out isn't nearly as forgiving as that of dialup network service.
This raises an interesting question. Is AOL going to handle internet filtering which was mandated by the chinese government? The filtering practices in China were discussed many times here before, Here, and Here. Will AOL move to provide the filtering services or will they become a mouthpiece for progressive thought on the issue. I think we all know the answer to that one, but it'll certainly be interesting to watch it take shape.
Not only does it suck that there's no way to decide not to accept the privacy policy changes, as far as I know it's blatently illegal. I'm not a lawyer and aparently the FTC disagrees with me, but how is it that such policies can be changed in such a way as to make it impossible for existing customers to take action which will cause the policy not to apply to them.
For example, credit card companies always reserve the right to change their policies at any time, with wtitten notice, however in the policy change notice, there is a required statement to the effect that "Customers who choose not to accept the updated policies, may cancel their service within 30 days, provided written notice, durring which time the policy will not take effect for them". Amazon has gotten around that entirely. There appears to be no way to compel Amazon to remove your customer data from their database even if you disagree with their policies to the point that you hoose to no longer do business with them. Amazon has one thing working in their favor (and I'm not certain about the details of this, but...) unlike in a court of law, the policy ruling of the FTC can not be appealed in the legal sense. There are appeal procedured but they are all internal to the FTC and as far as I can tell, rather stilted in favor of the corporate entity who's policy was under review.
All the attention that has been givel privacy policies of late, has had the profoundly negitive impact of prompting corporate lawyers to see what they can actually get away with without being smacked by the FTC. There are now companies who have chosen to initiate sales (to previous or existing customers) wherre those customers must take positive action to prevent the transaction, unlike treditional sales malings where an offer is made and the customer must act in order to initiate the transaction. This too was deemed legal, so long as the practive was outlined in that company's privacy policy / terms of service. This stuff is really getting way out of hand, but nothing will be done to correct it until a high profile case is found, that can serve as a PR statement for privacy and fair business practices advocates.
First of all, it would be trivial to present users with a simplistic interface having 6 or 7 icons for basic applications, then another for "Full System Access" which would grant the user the as complete a level of access as JWZ sees fit. As the previous poster mentioned, most kiosk users are inclined to check stocks, perhaps send an email or two using the webmail system of their preference, and that's about it.
This functionality will exist for that market ssegment however there will be additional functionality agailable for the geeks who someone else pointed out will be frequenting the club. The system will probably work quite well and those of us who are routinely annoyed by the lack of funtionality of treditional kiosks will have more flexibility.
One minor and trivial issue that I didn't see mentioned (I may have just missed it) was a system state reset on a period of inactivity. This may not include a reboot, but simply a reset to a standard opening state, like the afore mentioned simplified interface, such that when a geek leaves the kiosk without resetting it (like that would ever happen) the next user wouldn't be thrown into an enviroment which would be confusing or not useful to that less technical person. This could be setup as a screensaver, perhaps it would work as an extension of XScreenSaver, but there would have to be such a mechanism, or an easy hardware reset, but as I said before such a hardware reset would probably take a while (especially booting a kernel and mounting everything over the network (On a P200, I don't know how much time that would take...)
I guess there's no big suprise here... In fact it's kind of sad it had to affect such a publicly visible project in order for there to be a discussion on the issue. OSS developers need to eat too. Linus and Larry Wall have good deals because people are signing paychecks for them to do OSS work. Most of us are not so lucky. We need paying jobs in order to allow us the freedom (financial and time-wise) to contribute to OSS. As much as we hate to admit it, Microsoft might be right on one issue, OSS and commercial software development are joined at the hip. Where one goes, the other will follow.
I completely agree. the only way this software could work is if the user being identified, agrees to run the software locally on the machine. If they do that, then why bother trying to guess who they are. No user will agree to download software with the stated purpose this software has, AND NOR AFREE to be tracked and identified through some simpler mechanism such as a Userid/cookie/IP/session based tracking methodology. Although it is a theoretically neat idea, it seems like a waste of time to have actually developed it, in that I really can't see any real application where the above user conditions would not apply.
AI is a complex subject but in order to retrieve and bookmark multiple articles and academic papers on the subject, but IE crashes randomly when run on Windows98
See, Microsoft has contributed to computer science by making otherwise deterministic systems completely non-deterministic. Wait, Isn't that a requirement for true artificial inteligence. See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded.
--
And their Enterprise solution...
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 2
I'd love to see their entrprise solution. Would it be larger or smaller than the computer room it was designed to power...
I'd expect though that you could be a happy energy concious 21st century citizen by reading the Mother Earth news which would recommend scrapping the computer instead of getting a flywheel to power it.
I have to say though, It's certainly an interesting concept.
Aparently Echelon ranks up there with CPRM-like systems for SCSI and DVD-RAM drives. People just don't want to talk about it until it's dumped in their lap.
Vary strange. I wonder what characteristics a (critical) issue has to have in order to be so frequently ignored...
Is there any consensus on who will serve as the refuge for the displaced list subscribers?
I assume that the list subscribers wish to continue the discussions which that list served to foster, regardless of ICANN or NSI corporate maneuvering.
I would offer to host the list myself except I expect that dozens of other have already made such an offer and I wouldn't want to contribute to the mess that usually results when trying to migrate a service.
IOMEGA has a proven market penetration strategy. Their methodology works identically to the strategy used by msot manufacturers of InkJet Printers. Sell the device at or below cost, thereby developing a potentially infinate revenue stream associated with the sales of the proprietary (or licensed and oursourced) ink cartriges or media (depending which product we're talking about). I really can't find fault with this strategy, as much as I'd like to. It's good business. And the product itself is reasonably useful too. It's not like they're unloading poor quality products on the market. Let the buyer beware though. Do the math before you get one
--CTH
PS: the first fault people will find with this posting is that they feel the IPMEGA drives are over-priced. It's not that they're over-priced. It's simply that they aren't price-optimized with regard to internal componant quality/price and so fourth. The company could increase their profit margin and reach a larger customer base by making such optimizations, but it's a testiment to the popularity of their products (and the fact that they filll a critical market niche) that the company isn't motivated to do this.
They skipped over Gnutella because they couldn't figure out how to go after it. How do you destroy a decentralized system? You can't crush it head beneath your boot like they did with Napster. BTW: I just started up napster again this evening and found that it has tread marks from the jackboots of the RIAA lawyers all over it now. They're promoting the hell out of their beta trial of the subscription service. I love how this is supposed to brovide a 'better quality service' to users. I don't know weather to laugh or cry.
Timorhy refers to CPRM, the Content Protection for Recordable Media standards initiative. This would in effect prevent the transfer of certain content on particular media. The proposal it to implement the 'protection' in hardware with a software interupt, which means probably software could simply bypass the system. It's not entirely clear, as the spec isn't fully defined. This is a vary scary deal which hasn't gotten much press in the United States. Read up. This is important stuff.
Agreed. It's great to see companies worthy of patents getting them. It is amazing though how the entertainment industry doesn't get it. They lost when they tried to prevent the sale of the VCR, back in the early 1980s. What made them think they could make the same content licensing infringement claims with regard to Tivo and UltimateTV? Will they never learn?
--CTH
--
Re:what can you do about it?
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 2
It was not my intent to debate the accuracy of the statement in the observers.net article, only weather it advisable to include it (using the specific condecending wording that was used).
There are two issues here. One problem for the sellers of the ads, and then there's the moral problem everyone wants to talk about.
So, the problem for the sellers of these sponsored placements is, the placements aren't a limited comodity like standard commercials are. You can only have X number of minutes of commercials in a television program before the audience tunes out. Advertisers pay big bucks for those minutes on hit programs like 'Survivor' BECAUSE they're buying a scarce product (the attention of a large audience). What heppens if that product is no longer scarce? It's value decreases. For example, 'Law & Order' has many scenes involving people sitting at desks and tables. Will each and every table have a can of Coke or Pepsi on it? Will the advertiser pay for each and every placement? Will they pay by the minute or by the placement? Or will they buy the category 'every table scene, so that every scene that has a table in it will have a Coke can on the table?
If the producers are not careful, all they'll achieve with these new advertising slots is to drive down the cost of advertising, and it may get to the point where their total revene from product placement is less than their total revenue from the higher priced advertising slots (which they'd probably have to phase out or risk some kind of viewer backlash.
The second issue relates to viewer response to product placement, and as the atticle states, some tests have already been performed, but the risk advertisers run of alienating consumers with poor product placements is far greater than the risk they ran of producing poor quality or unapealing treditional ads. This issue would also affect the production company being paid for the placement, because the product and the programming content would be tied closer together, and associated in the viewers mind, since they can't simply get up and go to the kitchen for another beer, durring an ad.
Theres also the more moralistic issue of 'currupting' quality programming content, for example, what would happen if 'Seinfeld' in reruns, started drinking Gatorade instead of YooHoo? What about if Drew Carey started drinking Lebatt Blue instead of Buzz Beer? Would the audience object? I guess only time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to see our intuition quantified, with regard to Napster use and CD sales, but to address the previous posters' comment about cause and effect, Napster allows users exposure to new music they would not have been exposed to otherwise (and would never have even considered buying for the simple reason that they didn't know about it). This suggests an alternative reason for the RIAA suit. Because these organizations determine residuals paid to artists based on Radio Airtime, the popularity of Napsterand other such services would cause those payments to become more skiewed than they already are. This would threaten the vary existance of the RIAA and other such organizations, because if the membership felt they were not being served (read: paid) fairly, the organization would fall apart completely. Cornered animals fight back even more firecely when you're swinging a spiked clup over their head. As I suggested, these organizations use outdated techniques to measure listenership, and pay those residuals as described in this extremely good essay. Napster threatened to bring this to light and expose it to scrutiny.
With regard to MediaBay, the afore mentioned survey results do not refute their argument, since they are making a detailed and precise argument rather than the wild generalizations made by the RIAA. Aside from the extremely ambiguous copyright status if the content they claim ownership of, they seem to have a decent case, as much as it pains me to say so.
--CTH
There's a more important question than who would the buyers be. That is, Who would the underwriter be? From a business standpoint, there must be an underwriter that handles the transaction to the extent that Mandrake gets it's money in one lump sum and can then use it to continue to build it's business. Bringing in a couple dollars here and a couple dollars there wouldn't do it.
The underwriter would have to be reasonably confident in the company to begin with, to essentially the same if not a greater extent than the market as a whole. I suppose their could be an alternative underwriting agreement, similar to what you see in boilerroom trading outfits, although that would put a major stigma on the company, above and beyond that currently attached to the word 'linux'. It's a tough sell any way you cut it, but there are certainly enough new outlets to make IPOs available to the public at large. Well, good luck to them.
--CTH
--CTH
On the one hand: But then also: So then what? Perhaps Martian law applies? Certainly there is some set of laws that cover access to this property of a Russian national that existed on Russian soil... Well perhaps not... This is some scary stuff...Remind me never to get on the bad side of the FBI...
--CTH
It's interesting that the US military has decided to take cues from Ian Flemming. You'd think it would be more useful to seek guidance from someone like Peter Wright who was one of the real life developers of the spy gadgets attributed to Q in the Bond movies. You'd think they would have sought out the real thing rather than intentionally imitating art. Somehow, I'd expect the systems to work better if the source material wasn't hollywood fantesy. Oh, well. These are your tax $$$ at work...
--CTH
And now to the facts of the matter. While I can't argue the validity of most of what was said, I seriously doubt that fast food can be blamed for the breakdown of regional cultural diversity within the united states, or the re-introduction of a class seperation within the country. I have to admit though, it does make for an interesting metaphor...
--CTH
While it's true there's a business incentive to self-regulate, this only works in industries where there are high bariers to entry (ie: there is market concentration). In cases where there are such high bariers to entry, the chances, the costs associated with market entry will deter unscrupulous indeviduals and companies because the amrket is not one where they could cut and run if their practices were discovered to be too questionable.
Online business has torn down the bariers to entry for many businesses and markets where previously, the high bariers to entry, made thode markets condusive to self-regulation.
A great deal more care needs to be taken before making blanket statements like McNealy has here...
--CTH
It's interesting to see hardware manufacturers speculare on the direction techonology will take, and on top of that, watch columnists speculate on the intent of the hardware manufacturers. This is why thr whole thing is rather vague. It's quite possible that software developers might completely ignore the new featured offered in the hardware and go an entirely different way. That's one of the built-in risks in the hardware industry...
So, what happened tothe Dvorak Keyboard layout, where the keys were positioned based on frequency of use within words in the english language. Granted this is only useful for englsih language usage, but why wasn't this keyboard layout more popular. I haven't seen this layout on keyboards since maybe 1987, on an old appleIIGS keyboard that a friend of mine modified, along with a software keymap.
Does anyone have any idea why this keyboard layout didn't catch on? Is the previous poster correct? Are we predisposed to making our life more difficult than it has to be? What's wrong with us...?
--
There definately is something to that; that DSL companies as a whole aren't doing much to try to keep their customers. There are two issues that come to mind here. I'm not sure if either explain the behavior of ISPs that provide DSL service, rather than the Telcos that provide their end of the service.
DSL is an overly expensive stop-gap technology rolled out to bring broad-band to the masses upon demanr, rather than waiting until a more appropriate technology is produced. DSL relies on two ancient technologies, from a Telco perspective. Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do. This is why a lot of modern developments can't utilize DSL service, leaving their residents at the mercy of Cable providers, which represent thr 3rd or 4th most evil set om monopolies out there.
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service. This is why DSL isn't truly cost effective. There is the cost of the frame-relay circut and the cost of an upgraded line card (which is what the other end of your phone line is connected to) that allows for the splitting out of the data portion of the DSL service, to be routed through the frame-relay circut.
To summarize, DSL makes use of two vary old technologies, a non-cost-effective manner.
DSL companies are probably realizing that their cost of customer aquisition was too high and to make up the difference, they cut down on the post aquisition technical support. From a business standpoint, there is something to be said for this strategy. For the moment most customers have only one of the two broadband options (DSL/Cable) and even at that, the regional market concentration is extremely high. The corporate think might go like this: "We don't need to spend money retaining customers because once we get them hooked on broadband, where else are they going to go?". Since they spend so liberally on customer aquisition, they need to make cuts in other areas in order to keep their business viable. It really is a bad deal all around. Customers aren't the only ones getting screwed here, Telcos are hurting becaause they don't have a more robust and/or cost effective broadband solution, and the ISPs that got into DSL were conned into it by the lure of a vast untapped market, which it turns out isn't nearly as forgiving as that of dialup network service.
--CTH
--
This raises an interesting question. Is AOL going to handle internet filtering which was mandated by the chinese government? The filtering practices in China were discussed many times here before, Here, and Here. Will AOL move to provide the filtering services or will they become a mouthpiece for progressive thought on the issue. I think we all know the answer to that one, but it'll certainly be interesting to watch it take shape.
--CTH
--
Not only does it suck that there's no way to decide not to accept the privacy policy changes, as far as I know it's blatently illegal. I'm not a lawyer and aparently the FTC disagrees with me, but how is it that such policies can be changed in such a way as to make it impossible for existing customers to take action which will cause the policy not to apply to them.
For example, credit card companies always reserve the right to change their policies at any time, with wtitten notice, however in the policy change notice, there is a required statement to the effect that "Customers who choose not to accept the updated policies, may cancel their service within 30 days, provided written notice, durring which time the policy will not take effect for them". Amazon has gotten around that entirely. There appears to be no way to compel Amazon to remove your customer data from their database even if you disagree with their policies to the point that you hoose to no longer do business with them. Amazon has one thing working in their favor (and I'm not certain about the details of this, but...) unlike in a court of law, the policy ruling of the FTC can not be appealed in the legal sense. There are appeal procedured but they are all internal to the FTC and as far as I can tell, rather stilted in favor of the corporate entity who's policy was under review.
All the attention that has been givel privacy policies of late, has had the profoundly negitive impact of prompting corporate lawyers to see what they can actually get away with without being smacked by the FTC. There are now companies who have chosen to initiate sales (to previous or existing customers) wherre those customers must take positive action to prevent the transaction, unlike treditional sales malings where an offer is made and the customer must act in order to initiate the transaction. This too was deemed legal, so long as the practive was outlined in that company's privacy policy / terms of service. This stuff is really getting way out of hand, but nothing will be done to correct it until a high profile case is found, that can serve as a PR statement for privacy and fair business practices advocates.
--CTH
--
First of all, it would be trivial to present users with a simplistic interface having 6 or 7 icons for basic applications, then another for "Full System Access" which would grant the user the as complete a level of access as JWZ sees fit. As the previous poster mentioned, most kiosk users are inclined to check stocks, perhaps send an email or two using the webmail system of their preference, and that's about it.
This functionality will exist for that market ssegment however there will be additional functionality agailable for the geeks who someone else pointed out will be frequenting the club. The system will probably work quite well and those of us who are routinely annoyed by the lack of funtionality of treditional kiosks will have more flexibility.
One minor and trivial issue that I didn't see mentioned (I may have just missed it) was a system state reset on a period of inactivity. This may not include a reboot, but simply a reset to a standard opening state, like the afore mentioned simplified interface, such that when a geek leaves the kiosk without resetting it (like that would ever happen) the next user wouldn't be thrown into an enviroment which would be confusing or not useful to that less technical person. This could be setup as a screensaver, perhaps it would work as an extension of XScreenSaver, but there would have to be such a mechanism, or an easy hardware reset, but as I said before such a hardware reset would probably take a while (especially booting a kernel and mounting everything over the network (On a P200, I don't know how much time that would take...)
--CTH
--
I guess there's no big suprise here... In fact it's kind of sad it had to affect such a publicly visible project in order for there to be a discussion on the issue. OSS developers need to eat too. Linus and Larry Wall have good deals because people are signing paychecks for them to do OSS work. Most of us are not so lucky. We need paying jobs in order to allow us the freedom (financial and time-wise) to contribute to OSS. As much as we hate to admit it, Microsoft might be right on one issue, OSS and commercial software development are joined at the hip. Where one goes, the other will follow.
--CTH
--
I completely agree. the only way this software could work is if the user being identified, agrees to run the software locally on the machine. If they do that, then why bother trying to guess who they are. No user will agree to download software with the stated purpose this software has, AND NOR AFREE to be tracked and identified through some simpler mechanism such as a Userid/cookie/IP/session based tracking methodology. Although it is a theoretically neat idea, it seems like a waste of time to have actually developed it, in that I really can't see any real application where the above user conditions would not apply.
--CTH
--
AI is a complex subject but in order to retrieve and bookmark multiple articles and academic papers on the subject, but IE crashes randomly when run on Windows98
See, Microsoft has contributed to computer science by making otherwise deterministic systems completely non-deterministic. Wait, Isn't that a requirement for true artificial inteligence. See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded.
--
I'd love to see their entrprise solution. Would it be larger or smaller than the computer room it was designed to power...
I'd expect though that you could be a happy energy concious 21st century citizen by reading the Mother Earth news which would recommend scrapping the computer instead of getting a flywheel to power it.
I have to say though, It's certainly an interesting concept.
--CTH
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Aparently Echelon ranks up there with CPRM-like systems for SCSI and DVD-RAM drives. People just don't want to talk about it until it's dumped in their lap.
Vary strange. I wonder what characteristics a (critical) issue has to have in order to be so frequently ignored...
--CTH
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Is there any consensus on who will serve as the refuge for the displaced list subscribers?
I assume that the list subscribers wish to continue the discussions which that list served to foster, regardless of ICANN or NSI corporate maneuvering.
I would offer to host the list myself except I expect that dozens of other have already made such an offer and I wouldn't want to contribute to the mess that usually results when trying to migrate a service.
--CTH
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IOMEGA has a proven market penetration strategy. Their methodology works identically to the strategy used by msot manufacturers of InkJet Printers. Sell the device at or below cost, thereby developing a potentially infinate revenue stream associated with the sales of the proprietary (or licensed and oursourced) ink cartriges or media (depending which product we're talking about). I really can't find fault with this strategy, as much as I'd like to. It's good business. And the product itself is reasonably useful too. It's not like they're unloading poor quality products on the market. Let the buyer beware though. Do the math before you get one
--CTH
PS: the first fault people will find with this posting is that they feel the IPMEGA drives are over-priced. It's not that they're over-priced. It's simply that they aren't price-optimized with regard to internal componant quality/price and so fourth. The company could increase their profit margin and reach a larger customer base by making such optimizations, but it's a testiment to the popularity of their products (and the fact that they filll a critical market niche) that the company isn't motivated to do this.
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They skipped over Gnutella because they couldn't figure out how to go after it. How do you destroy a decentralized system? You can't crush it head beneath your boot like they did with Napster. BTW: I just started up napster again this evening and found that it has tread marks from the jackboots of the RIAA lawyers all over it now. They're promoting the hell out of their beta trial of the subscription service. I love how this is supposed to brovide a 'better quality service' to users. I don't know weather to laugh or cry.
--CTH
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Timorhy refers to CPRM, the Content Protection for Recordable Media standards initiative. This would in effect prevent the transfer of certain content on particular media. The proposal it to implement the 'protection' in hardware with a software interupt, which means probably software could simply bypass the system. It's not entirely clear, as the spec isn't fully defined. This is a vary scary deal which hasn't gotten much press in the United States. Read up. This is important stuff.
--CTH
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Agreed. It's great to see companies worthy of patents getting them. It is amazing though how the entertainment industry doesn't get it. They lost when they tried to prevent the sale of the VCR, back in the early 1980s. What made them think they could make the same content licensing infringement claims with regard to Tivo and UltimateTV? Will they never learn?
--CTH
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It was not my intent to debate the accuracy of the statement in the observers.net article, only weather it advisable to include it (using the specific condecending wording that was used).
--CTH
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There are two issues here. One problem for the sellers of the ads, and then there's the moral problem everyone wants to talk about.
So, the problem for the sellers of these sponsored placements is, the placements aren't a limited comodity like standard commercials are. You can only have X number of minutes of commercials in a television program before the audience tunes out. Advertisers pay big bucks for those minutes on hit programs like 'Survivor' BECAUSE they're buying a scarce product (the attention of a large audience). What heppens if that product is no longer scarce? It's value decreases. For example, 'Law & Order' has many scenes involving people sitting at desks and tables. Will each and every table have a can of Coke or Pepsi on it? Will the advertiser pay for each and every placement? Will they pay by the minute or by the placement? Or will they buy the category 'every table scene, so that every scene that has a table in it will have a Coke can on the table?
If the producers are not careful, all they'll achieve with these new advertising slots is to drive down the cost of advertising, and it may get to the point where their total revene from product placement is less than their total revenue from the higher priced advertising slots (which they'd probably have to phase out or risk some kind of viewer backlash.
The second issue relates to viewer response to product placement, and as the atticle states, some tests have already been performed, but the risk advertisers run of alienating consumers with poor product placements is far greater than the risk they ran of producing poor quality or unapealing treditional ads. This issue would also affect the production company being paid for the placement, because the product and the programming content would be tied closer together, and associated in the viewers mind, since they can't simply get up and go to the kitchen for another beer, durring an ad.
Theres also the more moralistic issue of 'currupting' quality programming content, for example, what would happen if 'Seinfeld' in reruns, started drinking Gatorade instead of YooHoo? What about if Drew Carey started drinking Lebatt Blue instead of Buzz Beer? Would the audience object? I guess only time will tell.
--CTH
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