The issue here is not that dynamic pricing is good or bad, but, how to implement it in markets where it has not previously been used.
The idea here is for companies to be able to sell to customers they would not otherwise have rached, by selling their product at a price the customer is willing to pay. For example, Dell sells a particular model of computer at $1500. At that price they may have 20,000 customers. Now, how about the next customer? There has cot to be a customer willing to buy the computer if only it was sold for $1,499. How many customers who would not otherwise have bought this model of computer, are now buying at the new price? This might bring in another 150 customers. Now, would it have been cost effective for dell to sell all 20,150 computers at $1,499? No They would have been losing almost a quarter of a million dollars in potential revenue ($244,850 to be exact). You can not reasonably expect a company to willfully choose to forego that revenue, and in order to generate that revenue when selling at the lower price, they would have to sell to another 163 customers - where in our example there are only 150 customers who will buy at the $14,99 price. In fact, that quarter of a million dollars in projected revenue might be the deciding factor in weather or not to produce this model of computer. This is an example of marginal revenue - which would have been simplified with graphs, but ayway...)
Now, lets look as the consumer/social value in this proposition. 150 users who would not have bought a Dell computer (of a certain quality) now have done so, thus enhancing their lives (to whatever degree having a Dell computer enhances your life).
I realize the numbers in the above example are way off, but it serves to demonstrate my point about marginal revenue. If the company could not make a predetermined percentage of proffit from the sale of this model of computer, they simply would not bother to sell it. This would negatively impact 20,150 consumers who would not have the opportunity to buy this Dell computer.
Marginal pricing and marginal revenue have been counted on for years in numerous industries, for example, when pricing gasoline. Oil companies charge different prices to gas stations in different parts of the country, and even different parts of a city. YOu can go to a bad neiborhood and get gas more cheeply than if you go to the good neiborhood. Interestingly, the net proffit made on the sale, by the independant gas station owners in this case might actually be exactly the same. Oil companies use a complex dynamic pricing model to determine the price at which gas is sold to various different gas stations. This has been the case for 50 years.It's only when dynamic pricing becomes visible to consumers on a one to one basis, are there any objections.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we have been conditioned to believe that we have the right to be charged the same price as the next guy, for goods and services that we buy. This is simply not the case.
Both you and the earlier poster are correct. Add-on modules do sell less units than the game itself; and they are the easiest part of the game to create. I was not comparing the sales of expansion modules to the sales of a game. I was comparing those sales, to the sales of expansion modules or their counterparts in other software markets, for other types of software.
I further agree that building the game engine is the most labor intensive andtechnically difficult part of the project. I propose to gather a group of highly skilled OSS developers to put it together, with some oversight, thus defraying the costs associated with such development. Once the engine is released, move on to the development of expansion modules. As you've stated, expansion modules are simpler to create, and require less development time, for the money.
It's important also, to keep in mind that sales of expansion modules will always be smaller than sales of the game itself. For this reason, GPLing the game engine is the best choice also because it allows for penetration to the widest audience - hose of us who don't have $50 to spend on a game (from which you derive 20 hours of enjoyment), but do have $15 to spend on an expansion pack (from which you might derive 10 hours enjoyment).
By GPLing the game, you cause it to reach a potentially wider audience, thus increasing the potential audience for the commercial expansion pack, which is more cost effective for the developers, for technical and manpower reasons, and more cost effective for the consumer who wants to get the most for his money.
You're correct. A bunch of emails from random users isn't evidence, however, look at what's being presented as the counter-argument "This entire class of technology has only been used for unlawful purposes, so this tehnology is evil". That isn't logic (in the legal sense).
When non-evident and non-logic clash, who wins?
There ae entirely useful technologies who's first application has been quite unsavory, for example, the Multi-angle video feature of DVDs. As far as I know, the most prevelent use of the really neat capability of DVD players has been in porn movies. Does that make the technology inherently bad? No, it demonstrates that the porn industry is vary inovative [link to/. article on a copyright case].
Don't get me wrong. I'm not promoting the porn industry. My point is, there are flimsy arguments all around. The key is to make your argument the least flimsy one presented.
Actually, Games seem to be a perfect fit for OpenSource. Open the code for the game engine, then sell add-on modules. The gaming market is one of the strongest for commercially dold upgrades. In fact it's one of the only markets where the customer base doesn't scream bloddy murder when a company offers to SELL them an extension pack for a game. It really is a perfect fit.
Gracenote is claiming that the data is not the intelectual property, the DB engine, and infastructure around it is. First, I'm not sure how infastructure can be considered Intelectual Property. Second, Roxio was provided with Data under license, not the infastructure to store and deliver that data. How then can they claim that Roxio stole their Intelectual property? (Did Roxio employees walk into their data center and steal a server?).
IN all seriousness, perhaps a developer who has licensed the CDDB data can explain this to me. DO they provide as part of the license, some proprietary client or indexing algorythem to be used and embedded into the media application? If this is the case, did Roxio remove such a client, libraries, algorythem or whatever from their application when they switched vendors? Is this what they're sueing for?
A culture based on ideology is more dangerous than a culture based on greed. Greed makes people act predictably, and in a manner consistant with the logic around such things as self-preservation.
Ah. You are correct. The mistake I've made here seems to be the same one made by meany of those here discussing this topic. It's a sad comentary that Americans (myself included of course) seem to have an inability to discuss other cultures inteligently, without making such blunders.
I dumped cable TV when a new sleezier cable operator took over in my area. I was dismayed to find that the quality of broadcast programming has really gone down hill. Particularly local news. I'm in a major technology mecca where all the local network affiliates are large and well financed. The ration of human interest stories, to, real news has increased ten fold since the last time I watched local news (rather than CNN).
I refuse to believe that there isn't enough legitimate news to fill the half hour from 11:00pm to 11:30pm. It's pathetic. the local NBC affiliate even has a segment where they will allow you to vote on their website for the news stry you want to see that night. What they do is give viewers the option of watching one half baked news story or one purely human interest story. I guess this is how they justify it. People are constantly voting for the human interest story, so I suppose that's what they assume peopl want more of.
It seems that nowadays people can create their own view of the world through the news sources they make use of. Thanks to int Internet, the sheer number of news sources has increased to the point where you don't have a choice between the liberal newspaper and the conservative newspaper, but now have the choice to select anything inbetween as well as numerous fringe publications.
People now can become completely disconnected from reality because there is always a 'news' publisher/broadcaster who is willing to cater to the whims ofthat customer. I guess in a sense feeding the fringe lunatic in all of us. We all percieve the world different.y, and it is important to have differing perspectives, but we the news consumers of the world, now have the choice of through what colored glasses we view the world, where previously we only had the option to choose rose colored glasses, or not.
Now the population at large has the 'opportunity' to suffer from what the Romans called the Imperial Diease, the condition of becoming acustomed to having every desire fulfilled, every whim satisfied and every gross pleasure gratified. It has the characteristic of serving to promote your own opinions and world view to a level where fact and opinion become synonymous. Emperors were surrounded with yes-men who gratified every opinion and every wish. The modern news media caters in the same way to their audiences. It's really a dangerous prescident to be setting and I'm saddened that this is what the information revolution has wrought.
India has a number of pressing issues they should be handling as a priority rather than this, however I can understand the social forces driving this initiative.
They are based on the nature of religion. In western europe and the United States, religion has taken a back seat to politival motivations. In countries with far more history, and cultures that have developed over many thousands of years, religion remains at equal footing with politics, thus, religous goals are achieved through political acts and setting of social policy. This is not nessecerily a bad thing, but a DIFFERENT thing than one would epect in the United States where seperation of Church and State is a fundemental principle woven into our social fabric at almost an unconcious level.
There are those ufortunates who bought low quality drives, who will have the msot problems. DVD-RAM seems vary (more so than CD-RW) sensitive to Drive quality. I'm not certain what aspect of drive quality is most important though. It's not just write speed anymore, that's for sure.
WARNING: Slight, but abrupt topic change:
Hey, doe anyone know when SUN is coming out with support for booting off of DVDs? All their new systems ship with DVD drives now, and yet, their OS is still shipped on large quantities of CDs. Aparently it would require a firmwate update. Does anyone know the timeframe sfor such an update?
--CTH
--
Re:Open source vs Closed Source vs Shared Source
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
People complain about Microsoft not providing the source to their OS, well if they did, what would we do with it? From what I've heard from the Ex-Microsoft'ers I've spoken to, is that the source is so poorly managed that the company would be laughed out of the market if ISVs and or the OSS comunity were able to get ahold of the source.
Also, the drive to provide source to the OS must be driven by market power, or a reduction in it. For all the reasons mentioned in the above comment, MS has no incentive to provide source, or even fully documented APIs. This will change over time with the modification of Microsoft's corporate structure, that is coming down the pike. We will most likely see more fully documented APIs and we'll start to see a massive code cleanup effott, which is a nessecery step before the code could ever be made available on a large scale.
On the other hand, if microsoft is ever broken up into OS and APP vendor segments, the incentive to open the source might completely disappear, since the OS would then be that new smaller company's only revenue stream, which could be squeezed for every dime, only by maintaininng trade secrets with regard to it's operation. The problem with this is the level of sophistication of the ISV comunity is so high at this point that any trade secret Microsoft attempts to maintain, doesn't remain a secret for long, either due to reverse engineering, or imediate obsolescence based on the introduction of a superior competing product
It's good to see a modern, fresh perspective...
on
The Humane Interface
·
· Score: 2
It's good to see a frwsh perspective on this issue. I'm tired of reading stodgy texts from 30 years ago about how it would be a great advance to use a 'mouse'.
Over the past 20 years though, interface design has been pretty much dictated by OS vendors such as Apple and Microsoft. This trend is going full circle with the proliferation of applications to which various 'skins' can be applied, producing an entirely new look. This trend has appeared, I believe as a direct result of the advent of dynamic layout methodologies similar to HTML. Let's all remember it wasn't always so.
Apple was the first to implement draconian interface specifications for 3rd party applications (since 1984). Microsoft has generally left it more to the compiler vendors, although all design seemed to sprout from Microsoft anyway...
It's thrilled to see new thought in this vary important area of the field.
You'd never have seen proposed legislation like this a couple of years ago when storage media and technology was significantly more expensive. Technology changes and governments move to take advantage of it, rather than asking HOW SHOULD we make use of this technology?, They as CAN we make use of this technology?
It creates a larger burocracy and many more jobs. Weather it's useful - who's to say... It might be valuable to go back, 6 years from now and re-evaluate a communivation make by an indevidual who has risen to a position where they are a threat to someone else. Wait a minute? Didn't the FBI do this back in the 1950s? This is just on a somewhat larget scale...
Scientology has had critics online for a long long time. They routinely pursue them more vigorously than any other organization in modern times. The msot notable of online criticisms of Scientology is called Operation Clambake and has been around for many years. The proprietor of this collection of information has helped several people high in the Scientology organization 'escape' the clutches of that organization. It's a vary interesting read, and it gives insight into why it's in the vested interest of the organization, not to tolerate descenters.
OK, so it could be argues that it was the advent of the graphical web browser, but that doesn't seem to fit with the usage spikes in the timeline. The NCSA Mosaic browser was around for years before the public got wind of the web. Was it the netscape IPO, I don't think so. Perhaps it was the inclusion of a TCP stack in Windows 95 (as much as it pains me to give Microsoft credit...)
Were they really the first? What? to cluster OS X, or to use MAC Hardware in a cluster? I agree it's a neat deal, buy I'd also have to agree they probably did it for the press.
Although it may have been concieved of and deployed in academia in 1991, the public at large had not truly begun to adopt the technology until perhaps 1996. Since then, the technolohy has leap-frogged along in it's development but what would you say was the defining moment that facilitated public consumption of the technology? Was it a particular IPO, a particular announcement by a specific company? Any suggestions?
The critical point here was that the research, in this case, was being funded by commercial strawberry growers. The patents that are already in place would prevent them from deriving profit from their research investment so they said, 'Why Bother?'.
I think the issue is much bigger than that though. Since this kind of research is built on top of previous (possibly patented) research in the field, there comes a point where all future research might cease, because enything they would achieve would be a derivitive of patented rearlier research results. This is a slippery slope. There needs to be much more stringent requirements implemented in the USPTO to prevent the issuance of patents for inappropriately broad (results of) areas of this type of research
So, someone actually did it. They wrote a worm that did good rather than bad. Cool, but it still trespasses onto my box, uses my CPU cycles and bandwidth to propogate itself.
This may be a white hat release, or it could be some odd sort of new Antivirus software prototype (laugh!) but in reality it's just a virus/worm like any other. The payload is just some wierd combination of benign and melignant (but not militious per se). I still object to any software that modifies my system configuration for me, regardless of it's moralistic approach.
So, under the DMCA we can not reverse engineer even the most basic encryption, so, as pirate cable decryption boxes became populat in the 1980s, hardware to decrypt and store digital TV signals will begin to pop up over the next decade. The question is, will it be cost effective to pursue those who make use of such technology?
You will notice that I am certain that these sorts of decryption devices will become available in short order. There was one interesting question posed in an earlier comment. "Does this sort of encryption infringe on fair use?", Well, As far as I can tell, fair use does not relate at all to the ability to make use of the copyrited material. It is available in it's encrypted form, so fair use would dictate that it should not be an infringement of copyright to make use of the data in it's encrypted form. I'm not sure what someone might do under fair use with this data, perhaps create an artistic expression made up of the digital wave forms or something... Perhaps convert the data into an MP3? (that was a joke - think conversion of DeCSS source code into a musical composition). The next logicl question though is, Does fair use include decrypting the data for personal archival use such as is allowed for audio recordings? I don't have the andwers, just questions...
In all seriousness, electromechanical prosthetic limbs have been around for years. Patients learn to control them through flexing muscles in the remaining limb, for example, a prosthetic hand can be controlled by fleximg muscles in the patients upper arm. This is relitively old technology.
This is a new application (at least for the consumer market) with the exception of a few poorly recieved gaming devices like afore mentioned power glove.
It seems unlikely that you'll get any more money from a lawsuit thatn you would by signing the release UGO wnats you to sign, but certainly consult several atourneys before signing. This may seem repetitive, but vary simply, this is the only advice that could reliably be provided by/. readers. Sure there may be a few lawyers who read/. that can provide more cogent advice, but as someone else pointed out. The advice you get here is worth what you pay for it. No lawyer would publish here, a complete action plan for you if he knew he could contact you directly and charge you his normal rates. That being said, good luck in your efforts to squeeze money from this stone.
Currently the alternatives to NSI/ICANN leadership are too numerous to count. Becore an alternative can be selected, there needs to be a shakeout in this part of the industry. Right now it's too much like the wild west. There are two metaphors that come to mind here, There are too many gunslingers out there right now, and the cliche 'too many chiefs and too few indians'. Both actually do apply here. There needs to be come consolidation in the alternative DNS market segment before any one provider can grow to sufficient prominance to effectively chalenge NSI/ICANN.
This may be slightly counter-intuitive, given the goal of a more democratic and free TLD management solution, but inreality there is a minimum efficient scale for providers of TLD service. The scale is quite large (where size is measured in that if the customer base), and to expect any smaller provider to effectively deviver the service is unrealistic.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue here is not that dynamic pricing is good or bad, but, how to implement it in markets where it has not previously been used.
The idea here is for companies to be able to sell to customers they would not otherwise have rached, by selling their product at a price the customer is willing to pay. For example, Dell sells a particular model of computer at $1500. At that price they may have 20,000 customers. Now, how about the next customer? There has cot to be a customer willing to buy the computer if only it was sold for $1,499. How many customers who would not otherwise have bought this model of computer, are now buying at the new price? This might bring in another 150 customers. Now, would it have been cost effective for dell to sell all 20,150 computers at $1,499? No They would have been losing almost a quarter of a million dollars in potential revenue ($244,850 to be exact). You can not reasonably expect a company to willfully choose to forego that revenue, and in order to generate that revenue when selling at the lower price, they would have to sell to another 163 customers - where in our example there are only 150 customers who will buy at the $14,99 price. In fact, that quarter of a million dollars in projected revenue might be the deciding factor in weather or not to produce this model of computer. This is an example of marginal revenue - which would have been simplified with graphs, but ayway...)
Now, lets look as the consumer/social value in this proposition. 150 users who would not have bought a Dell computer (of a certain quality) now have done so, thus enhancing their lives (to whatever degree having a Dell computer enhances your life).
I realize the numbers in the above example are way off, but it serves to demonstrate my point about marginal revenue. If the company could not make a predetermined percentage of proffit from the sale of this model of computer, they simply would not bother to sell it. This would negatively impact 20,150 consumers who would not have the opportunity to buy this Dell computer.
Marginal pricing and marginal revenue have been counted on for years in numerous industries, for example, when pricing gasoline. Oil companies charge different prices to gas stations in different parts of the country, and even different parts of a city. YOu can go to a bad neiborhood and get gas more cheeply than if you go to the good neiborhood. Interestingly, the net proffit made on the sale, by the independant gas station owners in this case might actually be exactly the same. Oil companies use a complex dynamic pricing model to determine the price at which gas is sold to various different gas stations. This has been the case for 50 years.It's only when dynamic pricing becomes visible to consumers on a one to one basis, are there any objections.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we have been conditioned to believe that we have the right to be charged the same price as the next guy, for goods and services that we buy. This is simply not the case.
--CTH
--
Both you and the earlier poster are correct. Add-on modules do sell less units than the game itself; and they are the easiest part of the game to create. I was not comparing the sales of expansion modules to the sales of a game. I was comparing those sales, to the sales of expansion modules or their counterparts in other software markets, for other types of software.
I further agree that building the game engine is the most labor intensive andtechnically difficult part of the project. I propose to gather a group of highly skilled OSS developers to put it together, with some oversight, thus defraying the costs associated with such development. Once the engine is released, move on to the development of expansion modules. As you've stated, expansion modules are simpler to create, and require less development time, for the money.
It's important also, to keep in mind that sales of expansion modules will always be smaller than sales of the game itself. For this reason, GPLing the game engine is the best choice also because it allows for penetration to the widest audience - hose of us who don't have $50 to spend on a game (from which you derive 20 hours of enjoyment), but do have $15 to spend on an expansion pack (from which you might derive 10 hours enjoyment).
By GPLing the game, you cause it to reach a potentially wider audience, thus increasing the potential audience for the commercial expansion pack, which is more cost effective for the developers, for technical and manpower reasons, and more cost effective for the consumer who wants to get the most for his money.
--CTH
--
You're correct. A bunch of emails from random users isn't evidence, however, look at what's being presented as the counter-argument "This entire class of technology has only been used for unlawful purposes, so this tehnology is evil". That isn't logic (in the legal sense).
/. article on a copyright case].
When non-evident and non-logic clash, who wins?
There ae entirely useful technologies who's first application has been quite unsavory, for example, the Multi-angle video feature of DVDs. As far as I know, the most prevelent use of the really neat capability of DVD players has been in porn movies. Does that make the technology inherently bad? No, it demonstrates that the porn industry is vary inovative [link to
Don't get me wrong. I'm not promoting the porn industry. My point is, there are flimsy arguments all around. The key is to make your argument the least flimsy one presented.
--CTH
--
Actually, Games seem to be a perfect fit for OpenSource. Open the code for the game engine, then sell add-on modules. The gaming market is one of the strongest for commercially dold upgrades. In fact it's one of the only markets where the customer base doesn't scream bloddy murder when a company offers to SELL them an extension pack for a game. It really is a perfect fit.
--CTH
--
Gracenote is claiming that the data is not the intelectual property, the DB engine, and infastructure around it is. First, I'm not sure how infastructure can be considered Intelectual Property. Second, Roxio was provided with Data under license, not the infastructure to store and deliver that data. How then can they claim that Roxio stole their Intelectual property? (Did Roxio employees walk into their data center and steal a server?).
IN all seriousness, perhaps a developer who has licensed the CDDB data can explain this to me. DO they provide as part of the license, some proprietary client or indexing algorythem to be used and embedded into the media application? If this is the case, did Roxio remove such a client, libraries, algorythem or whatever from their application when they switched vendors? Is this what they're sueing for?
Then why didn't they say that in the letter?
--CTH
--
A culture based on ideology is more dangerous than a culture based on greed. Greed makes people act predictably, and in a manner consistant with the logic around such things as self-preservation.
Ideology drives people to do many strange and unpredictable things, or are they only unpredictable from my perspective because I may not share the ideology? Well, no that can't be right, because Ideology is often open to indevidual interpretation. Greed is greed, and to quote one of my favorite movies of all time, 'Ladies and gentlemen, [...] greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.'.
--CTH
--
Ah. You are correct. The mistake I've made here seems to be the same one made by meany of those here discussing this topic. It's a sad comentary that Americans (myself included of course) seem to have an inability to discuss other cultures inteligently, without making such blunders.
--
I dumped cable TV when a new sleezier cable operator took over in my area. I was dismayed to find that the quality of broadcast programming has really gone down hill. Particularly local news. I'm in a major technology mecca where all the local network affiliates are large and well financed. The ration of human interest stories, to, real news has increased ten fold since the last time I watched local news (rather than CNN).
I refuse to believe that there isn't enough legitimate news to fill the half hour from 11:00pm to 11:30pm. It's pathetic. the local NBC affiliate even has a segment where they will allow you to vote on their website for the news stry you want to see that night. What they do is give viewers the option of watching one half baked news story or one purely human interest story. I guess this is how they justify it. People are constantly voting for the human interest story, so I suppose that's what they assume peopl want more of.
It seems that nowadays people can create their own view of the world through the news sources they make use of. Thanks to int Internet, the sheer number of news sources has increased to the point where you don't have a choice between the liberal newspaper and the conservative newspaper, but now have the choice to select anything inbetween as well as numerous fringe publications.
People now can become completely disconnected from reality because there is always a 'news' publisher/broadcaster who is willing to cater to the whims ofthat customer. I guess in a sense feeding the fringe lunatic in all of us. We all percieve the world different.y, and it is important to have differing perspectives, but we the news consumers of the world, now have the choice of through what colored glasses we view the world, where previously we only had the option to choose rose colored glasses, or not.
Now the population at large has the 'opportunity' to suffer from what the Romans called the Imperial Diease, the condition of becoming acustomed to having every desire fulfilled, every whim satisfied and every gross pleasure gratified. It has the characteristic of serving to promote your own opinions and world view to a level where fact and opinion become synonymous. Emperors were surrounded with yes-men who gratified every opinion and every wish. The modern news media caters in the same way to their audiences. It's really a dangerous prescident to be setting and I'm saddened that this is what the information revolution has wrought.
--CTH
--
India has a number of pressing issues they should be handling as a priority rather than this, however I can understand the social forces driving this initiative.
They are based on the nature of religion. In western europe and the United States, religion has taken a back seat to politival motivations. In countries with far more history, and cultures that have developed over many thousands of years, religion remains at equal footing with politics, thus, religous goals are achieved through political acts and setting of social policy. This is not nessecerily a bad thing, but a DIFFERENT thing than one would epect in the United States where seperation of Church and State is a fundemental principle woven into our social fabric at almost an unconcious level.
--CTH
--
There are those ufortunates who bought low quality drives, who will have the msot problems. DVD-RAM seems vary (more so than CD-RW) sensitive to Drive quality. I'm not certain what aspect of drive quality is most important though. It's not just write speed anymore, that's for sure.
WARNING: Slight, but abrupt topic change:
Hey, doe anyone know when SUN is coming out with support for booting off of DVDs? All their new systems ship with DVD drives now, and yet, their OS is still shipped on large quantities of CDs. Aparently it would require a firmwate update. Does anyone know the timeframe sfor such an update?
--CTH
--
People complain about Microsoft not providing the source to their OS, well if they did, what would we do with it? From what I've heard from the Ex-Microsoft'ers I've spoken to, is that the source is so poorly managed that the company would be laughed out of the market if ISVs and or the OSS comunity were able to get ahold of the source.
Also, the drive to provide source to the OS must be driven by market power, or a reduction in it. For all the reasons mentioned in the above comment, MS has no incentive to provide source, or even fully documented APIs. This will change over time with the modification of Microsoft's corporate structure, that is coming down the pike. We will most likely see more fully documented APIs and we'll start to see a massive code cleanup effott, which is a nessecery step before the code could ever be made available on a large scale.
On the other hand, if microsoft is ever broken up into OS and APP vendor segments, the incentive to open the source might completely disappear, since the OS would then be that new smaller company's only revenue stream, which could be squeezed for every dime, only by maintaininng trade secrets with regard to it's operation. The problem with this is the level of sophistication of the ISV comunity is so high at this point that any trade secret Microsoft attempts to maintain, doesn't remain a secret for long, either due to reverse engineering, or imediate obsolescence based on the introduction of a superior competing product
--CTH
--
Now I can take up the respected trade of David Niven in all those wonderful movies about the French Rivierra.
--CTH
--
Yah, my bad.
--
It's good to see a frwsh perspective on this issue. I'm tired of reading stodgy texts from 30 years ago about how it would be a great advance to use a 'mouse'.
Over the past 20 years though, interface design has been pretty much dictated by OS vendors such as Apple and Microsoft. This trend is going full circle with the proliferation of applications to which various 'skins' can be applied, producing an entirely new look. This trend has appeared, I believe as a direct result of the advent of dynamic layout methodologies similar to HTML. Let's all remember it wasn't always so.
Apple was the first to implement draconian interface specifications for 3rd party applications (since 1984). Microsoft has generally left it more to the compiler vendors, although all design seemed to sprout from Microsoft anyway...
It's thrilled to see new thought in this vary important area of the field.
--CTH
--
You'd never have seen proposed legislation like this a couple of years ago when storage media and technology was significantly more expensive. Technology changes and governments move to take advantage of it, rather than asking HOW SHOULD we make use of this technology?, They as CAN we make use of this technology?
It creates a larger burocracy and many more jobs. Weather it's useful - who's to say... It might be valuable to go back, 6 years from now and re-evaluate a communivation make by an indevidual who has risen to a position where they are a threat to someone else. Wait a minute? Didn't the FBI do this back in the 1950s? This is just on a somewhat larget scale...
--CTH
--
Scientology has had critics online for a long long time. They routinely pursue them more vigorously than any other organization in modern times. The msot notable of online criticisms of Scientology is called Operation Clambake and has been around for many years. The proprietor of this collection of information has helped several people high in the Scientology organization 'escape' the clutches of that organization. It's a vary interesting read, and it gives insight into why it's in the vested interest of the organization, not to tolerate descenters.
--CTH
--
OK, so it could be argues that it was the advent of the graphical web browser, but that doesn't seem to fit with the usage spikes in the timeline. The NCSA Mosaic browser was around for years before the public got wind of the web. Was it the netscape IPO, I don't think so. Perhaps it was the inclusion of a TCP stack in Windows 95 (as much as it pains me to give Microsoft credit...)
--
Were they really the first? What? to cluster OS X, or to use MAC Hardware in a cluster? I agree it's a neat deal, buy I'd also have to agree they probably did it for the press.
--
Although it may have been concieved of and deployed in academia in 1991, the public at large had not truly begun to adopt the technology until perhaps 1996. Since then, the technolohy has leap-frogged along in it's development but what would you say was the defining moment that facilitated public consumption of the technology? Was it a particular IPO, a particular announcement by a specific company? Any suggestions?
--CTH
--
The critical point here was that the research, in this case, was being funded by commercial strawberry growers. The patents that are already in place would prevent them from deriving profit from their research investment so they said, 'Why Bother?'.
I think the issue is much bigger than that though. Since this kind of research is built on top of previous (possibly patented) research in the field, there comes a point where all future research might cease, because enything they would achieve would be a derivitive of patented rearlier research results. This is a slippery slope. There needs to be much more stringent requirements implemented in the USPTO to prevent the issuance of patents for inappropriately broad (results of) areas of this type of research
--CTH
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So, someone actually did it. They wrote a worm that did good rather than bad. Cool, but it still trespasses onto my box, uses my CPU cycles and bandwidth to propogate itself.
This may be a white hat release, or it could be some odd sort of new Antivirus software prototype (laugh!) but in reality it's just a virus/worm like any other. The payload is just some wierd combination of benign and melignant (but not militious per se). I still object to any software that modifies my system configuration for me, regardless of it's moralistic approach.
--CTH
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So, under the DMCA we can not reverse engineer even the most basic encryption, so, as pirate cable decryption boxes became populat in the 1980s, hardware to decrypt and store digital TV signals will begin to pop up over the next decade. The question is, will it be cost effective to pursue those who make use of such technology?
You will notice that I am certain that these sorts of decryption devices will become available in short order. There was one interesting question posed in an earlier comment. "Does this sort of encryption infringe on fair use?", Well, As far as I can tell, fair use does not relate at all to the ability to make use of the copyrited material. It is available in it's encrypted form, so fair use would dictate that it should not be an infringement of copyright to make use of the data in it's encrypted form. I'm not sure what someone might do under fair use with this data, perhaps create an artistic expression made up of the digital wave forms or something... Perhaps convert the data into an MP3? (that was a joke - think conversion of DeCSS source code into a musical composition). The next logicl question though is, Does fair use include decrypting the data for personal archival use such as is allowed for audio recordings? I don't have the andwers, just questions...
--CTH
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In all seriousness, electromechanical prosthetic limbs have been around for years. Patients learn to control them through flexing muscles in the remaining limb, for example, a prosthetic hand can be controlled by fleximg muscles in the patients upper arm. This is relitively old technology.
This is a new application (at least for the consumer market) with the exception of a few poorly recieved gaming devices like afore mentioned power glove.
--CTH
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It seems unlikely that you'll get any more money from a lawsuit thatn you would by signing the release UGO wnats you to sign, but certainly consult several atourneys before signing. This may seem repetitive, but vary simply, this is the only advice that could reliably be provided by /. readers. Sure there may be a few lawyers who read /. that can provide more cogent advice, but as someone else pointed out. The advice you get here is worth what you pay for it. No lawyer would publish here, a complete action plan for you if he knew he could contact you directly and charge you his normal rates. That being said, good luck in your efforts to squeeze money from this stone.
--CTH
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Currently the alternatives to NSI/ICANN leadership are too numerous to count. Becore an alternative can be selected, there needs to be a shakeout in this part of the industry. Right now it's too much like the wild west. There are two metaphors that come to mind here, There are too many gunslingers out there right now, and the cliche 'too many chiefs and too few indians'. Both actually do apply here. There needs to be come consolidation in the alternative DNS market segment before any one provider can grow to sufficient prominance to effectively chalenge NSI/ICANN.
This may be slightly counter-intuitive, given the goal of a more democratic and free TLD management solution, but inreality there is a minimum efficient scale for providers of TLD service. The scale is quite large (where size is measured in that if the customer base), and to expect any smaller provider to effectively deviver the service is unrealistic.
--CTH
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