We have a Dell Poweredge 2450 server including RAID 5 disks, running Win2K & SQL Server. We discovered mysterious anomolies (Control Panel not working and some other wacky stuff). Microsoft support recommends a full restore from tape. OK, we have tapes, let's go. We attempt to boot from CD and we know we need to supply a driver disk for the RAID card. Each time we attempt to boot, things look okay for a while and then BAM! cryptic register dump -- game over. This goes on for THREE DAYS of fumbing & bumbling. My sysadmin is a very knowledgable MCSE, not some newbie who uses the CD-ROM as a cupholder. Microsoft support was puzzled, so was Dell. Eventually, the Dell folks determine that we were given the wrong driver disk for our Dell RAID controller. Evidently our RAID controller had newer firmware than our driver disk (not that Win2K told us anything useful at boot time to suggest this). We download a new driver, and the restore eventually works. This series of events started out as a standard Microsoft response (reinstall the OS) to a standard Microsoft problem (anomolies with no useful clues in the event log). Dell gets some of the blame, but we expect the OS to either boot up or tell us why not.
By the time we had this little crisis under control, I gave the server in question the nickname "Atta" and wrote it on the paper label we stick on the server that shows name & IP address.
In my shop we have Microsoft and Linux boxes running side by side. I am the IT manager, so if some Microsoft salesman wants to talk about how their products can improve our uptime and reduce support costs, they will first have to listen to the story of how one of their products motivated us to name a Microsoft server after a middle east terrorist. Then they will have to explain how our costs will decline by paying for licenses/support/upgrades, and how our uptime will improve as we respond to mysterious anomolies by doing full restores on servers that can't even boot properly from CD/floppy.
Years ago, I worked at a DEC shop. Everything was damn expensive, but it was rock-solid. When things didn't work, we saw messages and error log entries that provided clues. DEC had tech. support that would investigate any crash dump and determine what happened. All of this was very pricey, and DEC got slaughtered by commoditized x86 hardware and Microsoft software. Sure, today's Wintel servers are cheaper and faster, but stability, recoverability, and support are worse now than 20 yrs. ago.
I worked in government for many years, now I work in private industry.
There is "big" government, where you work in a centralized bureaucracy, and "little" government, where you work in a tiny little outpost that nobody cares about. A large city might have some agencies that are "big", and the Feds have some agencies that are "small". Private industry has the same concept. For the IT worker, you want "big".
In most (but not all) cases, private industry salaries are better than government. This can be used advantageously by young people who want to build experience. For any given skill level, you can get a "better" job in government because the salary structure locks out most of the highly-skilled competitors. So you work in the public sector and establish yourself in a job you wouldn't have otherwise, then switch to private industry to make real money.
Government work can be enjoyable, but supervisory positions are to be avoided at all costs. It's hard to motivate anyone when you can't do anything good for the good people or do anything bad to the bad people. Since the good and bad get treated pretty much the same, mediocrity is par for the course.
All the other things (training, advancement, benefits, stability of employment, toys to play with), are really functions of big/little more than private/public.
This problem goes way beyond WiFi PDAs. See this dated but still relevant description of RF-based attack. We're really stupid to rely on avionics systems that can be so easily disrupted. Its only a matter of time before this becomes big trouble.
Obviously, not everyone likes the opportunity presented in the buyout. I can understand how they would rather take their $3.41/share and seek opportunities elsewhere.
The investors are under no obligation to support a sale/merger to a third party, and it's not hard to understand the resistance if the terms and conditions are less attractive than a flat-out liquidation. Why would the investors accept anything less than $3.41 per share, since they get that much with 0% risk???
To me, any substitution of stock for cash would have to compensate the investors for the risk involved. As I see it, Liquid's business model is bankrupt. Nobody is going to buy that company and make any money with it, and everybody knows it. The only thing Liquid has is a pile of cash, so why sell the cash for anything less than face value?
If I was a Liquid Audio investor (thank god I'm not), my attitude would be, "OK, I want Alliance Entertainment to pay me $3.41/share in cash. They can have 100% ownership of Liquid Audio, and can do whatever they want with it. If there is some way for them to make money with Liquid Audio, go for it. If they just want to buy a pile of cash for less than face value, then they can take a hike."
You have to consider the hobby question in context. The point of asking it is to weed out certain candidates who may not exhibit the motivation to maintain a current skill set. Coding as a hobby is not the only way to do this, and it doesn't conclusively prove that a hobbyist will maintain up-to-date skills over time, but it is a clue. If the candidate is NOT a hobbyist, then I'm looking for some other plausible evidence that this person is a good investment in the long run.
If a person has 35+ years of programming, and can show me how they upgraded their skills from Assembler to Perl over that time, then the hobby issue is moot. For those candidates who have 1 or 2 years of VB, I need some evidence that makes me feel confident about this person's skills over time.
I have met a few people whose hobby was the pursuit of degrees and/or certs. They were perfectly willing to attend class after class, and fork over some of their own money to do it. They needed a "goal" to feel motivated. This is not such a bad thing, but I still want to see some evidence that they can take this knowledge and apply it in the real world. There is nothing so frustrating as a person with an abundance of book knowledge who can't use it effectively.
Re:Cost of media vs. "cost" of piracy
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CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 2
You may very well be right; it looks like an expensive concept that would only be useful for specialty markets, where a data CD would cost enough to make it worthwhile.
From the website... "...it requires neither additional hardware nor setup and is FULLY TRANSPARENT to the consumer (as long as he or she keeps the user agreement). "
The more I look at it, the less I believe the claims that it's "transparent" and that it works with existing CD and DVD readers. I think it would have to rely on some kind of client software, so as to communicate with the smart card and possibly to facilitate decryption. If it didn't work that way, the optical drive would "see" a regular CD and there would be no "protection" at all.
Re:Cost of media vs. "cost" of piracy
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CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 2
Personally, I'm more of a "don't buy it" person. Cost being one of the factors, I have really lost interest in [new] recorded music. I listen to old stuff, and have purchased 0 CDs in the past year. My interest could be restored if they had better material (songs I like), and could be restored even further with more reasonable prices. Copy protection that interferes with my fair use rights scores a zero in my book and will result in no sale -- period. I can easily live without the RIAA's product -- watch me.
Admittedly, there are "people who steal music act as though they're taking the moral high ground..." but we also have the music industry clouding the issue by misrepresenting fair use as theft, trying to legalize their own plans to commit computer crimes, not to mention price fixing. It's hard to tell which side is sleazier. If we didn't have the piracy issue, some of the industry's sleazy tactics would go away, but then again some of those sleazy tactics motivated the pirates in the first place.
Giving the music industry everything it wants will not help anyone in the long run (not even the music industry itself). However, it will allow a few key executives to earn bonuses for another couple of years. During this time, the investors will quietly seek an exit strategy from an industry that will soon be rocked by competition -- one way or another. The music industry is so paranoid about piracy ^h^h^h^h^h^h competition, they have lost sight of the customer. From this point forward, it's just one desperate money-grab after another, until online distribution sends the RIAA to the same fate as the home-delivery milk man.
Funny thing about this -- all of the RIAA's favorite "solutions" to the piracy problem have the side effect of locking out low-cost/online/non-RIAA distribution of music. Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
I thought the dumb-as-dirt coding style was a perfect match for the logic. I deliberately downgraded my coding style and choice of language to suit the task at hand.
I predict that sitting on a bookshelf at RIAA headquarters is a big-time consultant study that cost about 100 kilobucks and takes about 200 pages to describe and recommend a strategy that can be represented in less than 10 lines of BASIC code.
The irony of a price increase is that it provides the incentive to break the protection. Audio CDs are seriously overpriced as it is (compared to DVD, at least). I think they are dangerously close to the point of diminshing returns.
Am I the only one who sees this as a viscious cycle?
5 rem RIAA strategy as a BASIC program 6 rem written in BASIC to illustrate 7 rem how truly silly these people can be 10 print "Complain about piracy" 20 print "Purchase laws, scream for enforcement" 30 print "Spend money on protection technology" 40 print "Raise prices" 50 print "Oh no! protection is defeated!" 60 goto 10
For those who want to see this on paper, feel free to change print to lprint. I am not responsible for printer damage or consumption of supplies (ribbons,toner,ink cartridge,paper,etc.)
Cost of media vs. "cost" of piracy
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CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I guess this is where we find out if piracy has any real cost associated with it. If piracy really does cause the massive losses that RIAA says it does, then it would be worth their while to try a media-based solution, even if it raises their cost. The retail price of CDs is set by what the market will bear, not by the cost of production. If I can buy a blank for 25 cents, I know the music industry is getting a better deal in bulk.
If RIAA members still want to get $18 per CD and this hardware/media hybrid protects the ability to do that, then they will absorb the cost. On the other hand, if piracy "problem" is merely a smoke screen to attack low-cost/online/non-RIAA distribution, then this technology is dead-on-arrival. Time will tell.
Based on your comments and NAI's marketing, it appears NAI agreed with your position -- look where it got them! If the price is over $100 per seat, the market is very small. Under $50, it's huge. Somewhere between $1 and $100 per seat is the optimum price that will produce the most revenue.
I checked out the price list on pgp.com, and the "promotional" prices are all in the neighborhood of $50 per seat! If they can keep the silly user handholding under control, there is no reason why they won't crank up the volume and make far more than NAI ever did.
If M$ can sell "XP home edition" for $99, there is no reason why an encryption package has to cost more than that. Does M$ sell the OS as a loss leader? I doubt it. How does the cost of supporting PGP compare to what M$ spends to support millions of idiotic users, and the endless parade of critical updates & service packs?
The PGP encryption algorithms are already developed -- it's just a matter of applying them to data sources and providing a reasonable plug-in interface to a variety of apps. Remember -- the original (pre-NAI) PGP was distributed at a cost of $0.
I agree that there is a huge market for encryption, and it will continue to grow as people realize the need for defense against a whole new category of threats.
While PC encryption has a huge potential market, NAI ignored most of it. To me, the problem was that they concentrated on the tiny market segment that was willing to pay top dollar for an all-inclusive encryption package. I found it quite difficult to buy just the basic file encryption or e-mail encryption. Why should encryption cost more than the entire OS?
Less than 1% of all my documents and e-mail needs to be encrypted. I think that's fairly typical for users in general. If NAI concentrated on getting something from everyone ($50?) who needed to send/receive encrypted e-mail or wanted better encryption than the feebleware features of MS Office, PGP would have been a big winner. Let's hope the new owners can capitalize on the untapped market for this product.
Elwood:"State, County, Municiple Offender Data System."
Jake:"Shit!"
[ Cops remain in cruiser for 5 minutes, waiting for Windoze to reboot...]
[ Camera pans to Police Data Display, as the MS logo changes to white characters on a blue background. ]
Cop: "Shit! It's the blue screen of death! Again!"
[ Cop steps out of car, approached Jake & Elwood ]
Cop: "Well Elwood, I would run a more thorough search, but our computers are down, I'll have to let you off with just a warning."
Elwood: "Have you guys ever heard of Linux?
Cop: What's that? Does it link to my GPS database of doughnut shops?
Elwood: Never mind.
Revenge of the Librarians
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Borrowing ROMs
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· Score: 2
This might be a great idea if there was an open source app that the libraries could deploy via their Internet connections. Then they could P2P share all their multimedia content and it would be nothing more than the "home version" of what they do anyway -- share things.
Although the security of such a system might be crackable, the mere existance of security would make such exploits a major DMCA no-no. As a result, it would be hard to accuse the libraries of "piracy".
The key to making this work is (a) development of an open source app that manages the files and distribution, and (b) deployment of such an app via State or University libararies. A local/municipal library would surely be a lightning rod for RIAA/MPAA retaliation, but the states have enough lawyers on payroll to make life difficult for the evildoers. We have 50 chances to find a state attorney general who is not afraid of a fight. This would put the libraries back into the driver's seat of content sharing. A very cool concept, IMHO.
Last year, our pitiful ISP discontinued frame relay service in our area, along with our T1 (probably a violation of our contract). So we signed up with UUnet, thinking they were "too big to fail". Oops.
When we signed up for a T1, Worldcom/UUnet was also pitching all kinds of value-added services (managed VPN, website hosting, etc.) I'm generally paranoid about outsourcing, especially outsourced telecomm. services. As a result, we bought only raw bandwidth from them, just in case we had to switch carriers again. At the time, I was concerned about UUnet's attitude toward spam and the possibility of a massive blacklisting operation against them -- as you see against the Chinese ISPs today.
Well, here we are. I feel stupid about choosing Worldcom, but I feel like a genius when I kept the corporate website and corporate VPN "in house".
At this point, why would anyone buy "value-added" services from their ISP? For a long time, Worldcom/UUnet was really hyping this stuff, as if VPNs and website hosting was some kind of rocket science that only a big ISP can do properly. They have single-handedly destroyed the entire "ISP value added" service industry. Who would be crazy enough to depend on ISP-managed services now?
Given the collapse of banner ad revenue and the websites that depended on it, I wonder who is going to buy the desktop ad space.
Maybe it's not so much a shortage of advertising customers as it is an oversupplied commodity market for the space. I see no shortage of advertising on the web, but everyone complains about the lack of money they get from banner ads. Evidently the banner ad companies offered less and less money, looking for the price point where the supply became a problem. The website owners accepted less and less money until they started going out of business. However the continuous expansion of the Internet means a never-ending supply of people who will sell space for whatever they can get, which is now approaching $0.
This was a situation where the marketing dept. was really itching to upgrade the corporate website. I saw this as a political hand grenade, so I was perfectly willing to let them pull the pin and observe from a distance. Sure enough, they located a web designer that was weak on coding, but they were OK as graphic artists. Let's just say they were a little artsy-fartsy for my taste.
My software development staff could easily build a website, but I hired programmers & analysts, not graphic artists. Besides, I wanted some other department to bear the burden of endless whining and cosmetic change requests. I don't have 3 man-months per year to referee the fight over whose icon goes where.
I have a five-year-old who knows that smoking is bad. I didn't plan it this way, but she's a militant anti-smoker. When she sees someone smoking, she says, "You need to quit smoking or else you won't live very long." Then we have my co-workers, many of whom are smokers. Go figure.
Now we have a self-described high school webmaster wannabe who knows enough to adhere to standards while the so-called professionals are flipping through their MS certification study guides, so they can lookup which JavaScript hacks work with which versions of IE. Meanwhile, we're all chuckling about prosecution exhibit A.
Seriously, if you are really as described, check out the following:
Every once in a while I stumble across a little piece of evidence that suggests we're not all doomed to lifetime of watching the results of other people's bad code. I hope your approach to coding is matched by a healthy appreciation for Linux and all the other Open Source goodies.
That site is the best example of gratuitous Javascript at the expense of basic functionality I've ever seen. At first glance, I thought it was one of those Flash abominations, but it was JavaScript all the way. Did you stumble across that or did you find it here?
I guess that's what happens when you hire someone who just finished reading "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 3 Easy Lessons Using Self-Hypnosis While Sleeping". It's an easy enough language to learn, the trick is knowing when not to use it.
I'm assuming enough of the site would work that you could view enough of the "contact us" page to get a mail contact. Most of the IE "innovations" result in poor/inaccurate rendering, not a total failure to show the page content.
On the other hand, if they have the contact info as part of some hare-brained Javascript mouseover or popup that relies on IE's implementation of Javascript, then I guess you're screwed.
Reasonable compatibility is all I expect. Most of the IE-only issues are stupid things that slip through the development process only because the offending code isn't an immediate show-stopper with IE. I guess it depends on how much confidence you have that today's IE features will work the same way in future versions of IE. Go ahead, trust Microsoft.
If your vistors are 90%+ IE and you provide workable-but-not-perfect interaction for the other 10%, that's your choice. I guess you have to estimate the dollar value of compatibility. If by some chance IE loses market share (or MSFT changes the product), how big a task will it be to bring your code into standards compliance?
Personal counter-rant: You should have more respect for the Open Source developer community. Although they tend to get religious about things like Mozilla compatibility, there would be no Internet without Open Source. Without the publicly funded DOD/NSF project, there would be no TCP/IP. Without Mosiac, there would be no browsers. If the free market was left to it's own devices, MSFT would have ignored TCP/IP, and all of us would be paying a premium price for the privilege of using some hacked-up way to route NETBEUI or maybe Appletalk over corporate WANs. Home users would be dialing into MSN, which would be a centralized content delivery service, along the lines of ancient Compuserve & Prodigy.
I'm not sure that it's possible to build a business or a career out of Open Source developing/consulting. Profit and employment were not the original goals of Open Source. Maybe it can be done, maybe not. It's a tough market to operate in, but not every business model can be as simple as running a doughnut shop next to the police station. I think the worst choice is to develop a Windows app, where your product either dies of natural causes or MSFT emulates it and gives it away [WMP, IE, File/Print services, Terminal Services, Compressed filesystems]. Heads you lose, tails they win. What kind of a choice is that? Is it really so bad to beat MSFT to the punch and give the product away before they can clone it and give it away?
BTW, everyday I get sales pitches from increasingly desperate "business-like" consulting companies, none of which are Open Source. The development/consulting business is tough, no matter whose technology you use.
I agree that complaining is the way to go. Without any feedback, what is to prevent the web designers from taking shortcuts and ignoring browser compatibility? In the case of corporate sites with the IE-only defects, the good-old "contact us" generic mailto might be worth a shot. The trick is to get the site owner to start whining to the web developer, "Why do people complain about our website being incompatible with their computer?"
Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.
We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.
The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.
A simple boycott of the Overpeer'ed songs would be a good start. If you had a website that listed the songs in question, along with the suggestion to boycott, that's just plain old freedom of speech, right? It's not like anyone really needs to have these files anyway.
IMHO, the key to making this Overpeer crap go away is to make it economically counterproductive. "Anti-crap" technical countermeasures are necessary also. The RIAA folks aren't the brights bulbs in the box; it may take them a while to realize how dumb Overpeer really is.
Do you have telephone service via conventional landline? Does your rate include unlimited local service? The teenyboppers spend alot more time on the phone than you do, yet everyone pays the same rate. I might spend more time watching basic cable TV than you do, but that isn't metered either. If basic cable was all pay-per-view, I wouldn't be viewing OR paying. Even cell phone plans (unlimited long distance/roaming/night/weekend) are slowly becoming flat-rate. Sure, you can buy a pay-as-you-go cell phone, but it's not a bargain for most people. Would you buy software that was pay-per-click?
If there were such a thing as pay-per-download service, it would have to co-exist with the flat-rate plan. By the time you downloaded some miniscule number of files, your cost would exceed the flat-rate cost. It's like visiting a fast food restaraunt and spending the extra 10 cents to upgrade your medium soda to a "big gulp". Such a thing would be by design, because the people selling the service would like to see a steady stream of monthly income, without having to worry about the sporadic fluctuations in revenue caused by seasons, weather, news, etc. They still have to count the downloads to calculate the royalty distributions, but the customer should perceive the service as a buffet. Otherwise, the download service would have about as much appeal as pay-per-view CNN.
The music industry waited far too long to sieze the high ground in this battle. The fight against Napster (instead of buying it or making a deal) was a hall-of-shame strategic blunder. At this point, they need to settle for something that generates revenue from the broadest possible audience. To accomplish this, they need an "ultra-simple" business model -- something that is universally perceived as a bargain. As soon as they try to determine who should pay more, the game reverts back to piracy.
I don't care if the teenyboppers download 10x as many files as I do. I don't care how much they pay, either. As a customer, it's all about my cost and my benefits. At $5/month, the only people who would opt out are the ones who don't buy or download much of anything.
You're right about their disorganization and tendency to disagree. Yet they do a remarkable job of keeping the prices in line across-the-board. If their members are so disorganized, how is it that they get nailed for price fixing every so often? The answer is simple: they can cooperate when they want to.
Flat-fee service would be the only way to go. A pay-per-download service would get clobbered by the same P2P "aftermarket" that exists today. Kids (who don't have credit cards or other online payment options available) would trade files amongst themselves, UNLESS their families were "download club" members and could get whatever they want, pretty much whenever they want it. My theory is that it is more profitable to get some revenue from everyone than it is to make sure that each track is paid for.
It would not be all that hard to make a flat-fee service work. All they have to do is take the RIAA portion of profits and distribute to the labels and artists, proportional to the total downloads, artist by artist, label by label. Such a method would be equitable and would produce a hell of a lot more revenue that what they do now. Current thinking in the music industry seems to be fixated at the high end of the price vs. volume curve. Their pricing (partially assisted by P2P) has reached the point of diminishing returns, but they aren't ready to admit it.
Note that copy protection is meaningless, no matter what the industry does. "Harry Potter" was released on DVD, allegedly without Macrovision. It won't be pirated all that much because the price does not really encourage piracy. If it were priced at $300, Macrovison wouldn't help -- the hackers would get the job done and the pirate copies would be everywhere. It's the same story with all the hare-brained DRM audio file formats. If the music industry fixed the underlying business problem, the piracy problem would be small enough to be ignored.
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We have a Dell Poweredge 2450 server including RAID 5 disks, running Win2K & SQL Server. We discovered mysterious anomolies (Control Panel not working and some other wacky stuff). Microsoft support recommends a full restore from tape. OK, we have tapes, let's go. We attempt to boot from CD and we know we need to supply a driver disk for the RAID card. Each time we attempt to boot, things look okay for a while and then BAM! cryptic register dump -- game over. This goes on for THREE DAYS of fumbing & bumbling. My sysadmin is a very knowledgable MCSE, not some newbie who uses the CD-ROM as a cupholder. Microsoft support was puzzled, so was Dell. Eventually, the Dell folks determine that we were given the wrong driver disk for our Dell RAID controller. Evidently our RAID controller had newer firmware than our driver disk (not that Win2K told us anything useful at boot time to suggest this). We download a new driver, and the restore eventually works. This series of events started out as a standard Microsoft response (reinstall the OS) to a standard Microsoft problem (anomolies with no useful clues in the event log). Dell gets some of the blame, but we expect the OS to either boot up or tell us why not.
By the time we had this little crisis under control, I gave the server in question the nickname "Atta" and wrote it on the paper label we stick on the server that shows name & IP address.
In my shop we have Microsoft and Linux boxes running side by side. I am the IT manager, so if some Microsoft salesman wants to talk about how their products can improve our uptime and reduce support costs, they will first have to listen to the story of how one of their products motivated us to name a Microsoft server after a middle east terrorist. Then they will have to explain how our costs will decline by paying for licenses/support/upgrades, and how our uptime will improve as we respond to mysterious anomolies by doing full restores on servers that can't even boot properly from CD/floppy.
Years ago, I worked at a DEC shop. Everything was damn expensive, but it was rock-solid. When things didn't work, we saw messages and error log entries that provided clues. DEC had tech. support that would investigate any crash dump and determine what happened. All of this was very pricey, and DEC got slaughtered by commoditized x86 hardware and Microsoft software. Sure, today's Wintel servers are cheaper and faster, but stability, recoverability, and support are worse now than 20 yrs. ago.
I worked in government for many years, now I work in private industry.
There is "big" government, where you work in a centralized bureaucracy, and "little" government, where you work in a tiny little outpost that nobody cares about. A large city might have some agencies that are "big", and the Feds have some agencies that are "small". Private industry has the same concept. For the IT worker, you want "big".
In most (but not all) cases, private industry salaries are better than government. This can be used advantageously by young people who want to build experience. For any given skill level, you can get a "better" job in government because the salary structure locks out most of the highly-skilled competitors. So you work in the public sector and establish yourself in a job you wouldn't have otherwise, then switch to private industry to make real money.
Government work can be enjoyable, but supervisory positions are to be avoided at all costs. It's hard to motivate anyone when you can't do anything good for the good people or do anything bad to the bad people. Since the good and bad get treated pretty much the same, mediocrity is par for the course.
All the other things (training, advancement, benefits, stability of employment, toys to play with), are really functions of big/little more than private/public.
This problem goes way beyond WiFi PDAs. See this dated but still relevant description of RF-based attack. We're really stupid to rely on avionics systems that can be so easily disrupted. Its only a matter of time before this becomes big trouble.
Obviously, not everyone likes the opportunity presented in the buyout. I can understand how they would rather take their $3.41/share and seek opportunities elsewhere.
The investors are under no obligation to support a sale/merger to a third party, and it's not hard to understand the resistance if the terms and conditions are less attractive than a flat-out liquidation. Why would the investors accept anything less than $3.41 per share, since they get that much with 0% risk???
To me, any substitution of stock for cash would have to compensate the investors for the risk involved. As I see it, Liquid's business model is bankrupt. Nobody is going to buy that company and make any money with it, and everybody knows it. The only thing Liquid has is a pile of cash, so why sell the cash for anything less than face value?
If I was a Liquid Audio investor (thank god I'm not), my attitude would be, "OK, I want Alliance Entertainment to pay me $3.41/share in cash. They can have 100% ownership of Liquid Audio, and can do whatever they want with it. If there is some way for them to make money with Liquid Audio, go for it. If they just want to buy a pile of cash for less than face value, then they can take a hike."
You have to consider the hobby question in context. The point of asking it is to weed out certain candidates who may not exhibit the motivation to maintain a current skill set. Coding as a hobby is not the only way to do this, and it doesn't conclusively prove that a hobbyist will maintain up-to-date skills over time, but it is a clue. If the candidate is NOT a hobbyist, then I'm looking for some other plausible evidence that this person is a good investment in the long run.
If a person has 35+ years of programming, and can show me how they upgraded their skills from Assembler to Perl over that time, then the hobby issue is moot. For those candidates who have 1 or 2 years of VB, I need some evidence that makes me feel confident about this person's skills over time.
I have met a few people whose hobby was the pursuit of degrees and/or certs. They were perfectly willing to attend class after class, and fork over some of their own money to do it. They needed a "goal" to feel motivated. This is not such a bad thing, but I still want to see some evidence that they can take this knowledge and apply it in the real world. There is nothing so frustrating as a person with an abundance of book knowledge who can't use it effectively.
You may very well be right; it looks like an expensive concept that would only be useful for specialty markets, where a data CD would cost enough to make it worthwhile.
From the website... "...it requires neither additional hardware nor setup and is FULLY TRANSPARENT to the consumer (as long as he or she keeps the user agreement). "
The more I look at it, the less I believe the claims that it's "transparent" and that it works with existing CD and DVD readers. I think it would have to rely on some kind of client software, so as to communicate with the smart card and possibly to facilitate decryption. If it didn't work that way, the optical drive would "see" a regular CD and there would be no "protection" at all.
Personally, I'm more of a "don't buy it" person. Cost being one of the factors, I have really lost interest in [new] recorded music. I listen to old stuff, and have purchased 0 CDs in the past year. My interest could be restored if they had better material (songs I like), and could be restored even further with more reasonable prices. Copy protection that interferes with my fair use rights scores a zero in my book and will result in no sale -- period. I can easily live without the RIAA's product -- watch me.
Admittedly, there are "people who steal music act as though they're taking the moral high ground..." but we also have the music industry clouding the issue by misrepresenting fair use as theft, trying to legalize their own plans to commit computer crimes, not to mention price fixing. It's hard to tell which side is sleazier. If we didn't have the piracy issue, some of the industry's sleazy tactics would go away, but then again some of those sleazy tactics motivated the pirates in the first place.
Giving the music industry everything it wants will not help anyone in the long run (not even the music industry itself). However, it will allow a few key executives to earn bonuses for another couple of years. During this time, the investors will quietly seek an exit strategy from an industry that will soon be rocked by competition -- one way or another. The music industry is so paranoid about piracy ^h^h^h^h^h^h competition, they have lost sight of the customer. From this point forward, it's just one desperate money-grab after another, until online distribution sends the RIAA to the same fate as the home-delivery milk man.
Funny thing about this -- all of the RIAA's favorite "solutions" to the piracy problem have the side effect of locking out low-cost/online/non-RIAA distribution of music. Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
I thought the dumb-as-dirt coding style was a perfect match for the logic. I deliberately downgraded my coding style and choice of language to suit the task at hand.
I predict that sitting on a bookshelf at RIAA headquarters is a big-time consultant study that cost about 100 kilobucks and takes about 200 pages to describe and recommend a strategy that can be represented in less than 10 lines of BASIC code.
The irony of a price increase is that it provides the incentive to break the protection. Audio CDs are seriously overpriced as it is (compared to DVD, at least). I think they are dangerously close to the point of diminshing returns.
Am I the only one who sees this as a viscious cycle?
5 rem RIAA strategy as a BASIC program
6 rem written in BASIC to illustrate
7 rem how truly silly these people can be
10 print "Complain about piracy"
20 print "Purchase laws, scream for enforcement"
30 print "Spend money on protection technology"
40 print "Raise prices"
50 print "Oh no! protection is defeated!"
60 goto 10
For those who want to see this on paper, feel free to change print to lprint. I am not responsible for printer damage or consumption of supplies (ribbons,toner,ink cartridge,paper,etc.)
I guess this is where we find out if piracy has any real cost associated with it. If piracy really does cause the massive losses that RIAA says it does, then it would be worth their while to try a media-based solution, even if it raises their cost. The retail price of CDs is set by what the market will bear, not by the cost of production. If I can buy a blank for 25 cents, I know the music industry is getting a better deal in bulk.
If RIAA members still want to get $18 per CD and this hardware/media hybrid protects the ability to do that, then they will absorb the cost. On the other hand, if piracy "problem" is merely a smoke screen to attack low-cost/online/non-RIAA distribution, then this technology is dead-on-arrival. Time will tell.
Based on your comments and NAI's marketing, it appears NAI agreed with your position -- look where it got them! If the price is over $100 per seat, the market is very small. Under $50, it's huge. Somewhere between $1 and $100 per seat is the optimum price that will produce the most revenue.
I checked out the price list on pgp.com, and the "promotional" prices are all in the neighborhood of $50 per seat! If they can keep the silly user handholding under control, there is no reason why they won't crank up the volume and make far more than NAI ever did.
If M$ can sell "XP home edition" for $99, there is no reason why an encryption package has to cost more than that. Does M$ sell the OS as a loss leader? I doubt it. How does the cost of supporting PGP compare to what M$ spends to support millions of idiotic users, and the endless parade of critical updates & service packs?
The PGP encryption algorithms are already developed -- it's just a matter of applying them to data sources and providing a reasonable plug-in interface to a variety of apps. Remember -- the original (pre-NAI) PGP was distributed at a cost of $0.
I agree that there is a huge market for encryption, and it will continue to grow as people realize the need for defense against a whole new category of threats.
While PC encryption has a huge potential market, NAI ignored most of it. To me, the problem was that they concentrated on the tiny market segment that was willing to pay top dollar for an all-inclusive encryption package. I found it quite difficult to buy just the basic file encryption or e-mail encryption. Why should encryption cost more than the entire OS?
Less than 1% of all my documents and e-mail needs to be encrypted. I think that's fairly typical for users in general. If NAI concentrated on getting something from everyone ($50?) who needed to send/receive encrypted e-mail or wanted better encryption than the feebleware features of MS Office, PGP would have been a big winner. Let's hope the new owners can capitalize on the untapped market for this product.
Elwood:"I bet these cops got SCMODS."
Jake:"SCMODS?"
Elwood:"State, County, Municiple Offender Data System."
Jake:"Shit!"
[ Cops remain in cruiser for 5 minutes, waiting for Windoze to reboot...]
[ Camera pans to Police Data Display, as the MS logo changes to white characters on a blue background. ]
Cop: "Shit! It's the blue screen of death! Again!"
[ Cop steps out of car, approached Jake & Elwood ]
Cop: "Well Elwood, I would run a more thorough search, but our computers are down, I'll have to let you off with just a warning."
Elwood: "Have you guys ever heard of Linux?
Cop: What's that? Does it link to my GPS database of doughnut shops?
Elwood: Never mind.
Although the security of such a system might be crackable, the mere existance of security would make such exploits a major DMCA no-no. As a result, it would be hard to accuse the libraries of "piracy".
The key to making this work is (a) development of an open source app that manages the files and distribution, and (b) deployment of such an app via State or University libararies. A local/municipal library would surely be a lightning rod for RIAA/MPAA retaliation, but the states have enough lawyers on payroll to make life difficult for the evildoers. We have 50 chances to find a state attorney general who is not afraid of a fight. This would put the libraries back into the driver's seat of content sharing. A very cool concept, IMHO.
When we signed up for a T1, Worldcom/UUnet was also pitching all kinds of value-added services (managed VPN, website hosting, etc.) I'm generally paranoid about outsourcing, especially outsourced telecomm. services. As a result, we bought only raw bandwidth from them, just in case we had to switch carriers again. At the time, I was concerned about UUnet's attitude toward spam and the possibility of a massive blacklisting operation against them -- as you see against the Chinese ISPs today.
Well, here we are. I feel stupid about choosing Worldcom, but I feel like a genius when I kept the corporate website and corporate VPN "in house".
At this point, why would anyone buy "value-added" services from their ISP? For a long time, Worldcom/UUnet was really hyping this stuff, as if VPNs and website hosting was some kind of rocket science that only a big ISP can do properly. They have single-handedly destroyed the entire "ISP value added" service industry. Who would be crazy enough to depend on ISP-managed services now?
Maybe it's not so much a shortage of advertising customers as it is an oversupplied commodity market for the space. I see no shortage of advertising on the web, but everyone complains about the lack of money they get from banner ads. Evidently the banner ad companies offered less and less money, looking for the price point where the supply became a problem. The website owners accepted less and less money until they started going out of business. However the continuous expansion of the Internet means a never-ending supply of people who will sell space for whatever they can get, which is now approaching $0.
Now we have ads that are bigger than ever, as well as the highly annoying pop-ups, pop-unders, and "Shoshkeles". Not that I see many of them, of course.
I see no reason why an ad-supported desktop or other software product would fare any better than the ad-supported websites.
My software development staff could easily build a website, but I hired programmers & analysts, not graphic artists. Besides, I wanted some other department to bear the burden of endless whining and cosmetic change requests. I don't have 3 man-months per year to referee the fight over whose icon goes where.
Now we have a self-described high school webmaster wannabe who knows enough to adhere to standards while the so-called professionals are flipping through their MS certification study guides, so they can lookup which JavaScript hacks work with which versions of IE. Meanwhile, we're all chuckling about prosecution exhibit A.
Seriously, if you are really as described, check out the following:
Every once in a while I stumble across a little piece of evidence that suggests we're not all doomed to lifetime of watching the results of other people's bad code. I hope your approach to coding is matched by a healthy appreciation for Linux and all the other Open Source goodies.
I guess that's what happens when you hire someone who just finished reading "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 3 Easy Lessons Using Self-Hypnosis While Sleeping". It's an easy enough language to learn, the trick is knowing when not to use it.
On the other hand, if they have the contact info as part of some hare-brained Javascript mouseover or popup that relies on IE's implementation of Javascript, then I guess you're screwed.
If your vistors are 90%+ IE and you provide workable-but-not-perfect interaction for the other 10%, that's your choice. I guess you have to estimate the dollar value of compatibility. If by some chance IE loses market share (or MSFT changes the product), how big a task will it be to bring your code into standards compliance?
Personal counter-rant: You should have more respect for the Open Source developer community. Although they tend to get religious about things like Mozilla compatibility, there would be no Internet without Open Source. Without the publicly funded DOD/NSF project, there would be no TCP/IP. Without Mosiac, there would be no browsers. If the free market was left to it's own devices, MSFT would have ignored TCP/IP, and all of us would be paying a premium price for the privilege of using some hacked-up way to route NETBEUI or maybe Appletalk over corporate WANs. Home users would be dialing into MSN, which would be a centralized content delivery service, along the lines of ancient Compuserve & Prodigy.
I'm not sure that it's possible to build a business or a career out of Open Source developing/consulting. Profit and employment were not the original goals of Open Source. Maybe it can be done, maybe not. It's a tough market to operate in, but not every business model can be as simple as running a doughnut shop next to the police station. I think the worst choice is to develop a Windows app, where your product either dies of natural causes or MSFT emulates it and gives it away [WMP, IE, File/Print services, Terminal Services, Compressed filesystems]. Heads you lose, tails they win. What kind of a choice is that? Is it really so bad to beat MSFT to the punch and give the product away before they can clone it and give it away?
BTW, everyday I get sales pitches from increasingly desperate "business-like" consulting companies, none of which are Open Source. The development/consulting business is tough, no matter whose technology you use.
Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.
We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.
The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.
IMHO, the key to making this Overpeer crap go away is to make it economically counterproductive. "Anti-crap" technical countermeasures are necessary also. The RIAA folks aren't the brights bulbs in the box; it may take them a while to realize how dumb Overpeer really is.
If there were such a thing as pay-per-download service, it would have to co-exist with the flat-rate plan. By the time you downloaded some miniscule number of files, your cost would exceed the flat-rate cost. It's like visiting a fast food restaraunt and spending the extra 10 cents to upgrade your medium soda to a "big gulp". Such a thing would be by design, because the people selling the service would like to see a steady stream of monthly income, without having to worry about the sporadic fluctuations in revenue caused by seasons, weather, news, etc. They still have to count the downloads to calculate the royalty distributions, but the customer should perceive the service as a buffet. Otherwise, the download service would have about as much appeal as pay-per-view CNN.
The music industry waited far too long to sieze the high ground in this battle. The fight against Napster (instead of buying it or making a deal) was a hall-of-shame strategic blunder. At this point, they need to settle for something that generates revenue from the broadest possible audience. To accomplish this, they need an "ultra-simple" business model -- something that is universally perceived as a bargain. As soon as they try to determine who should pay more, the game reverts back to piracy.
I don't care if the teenyboppers download 10x as many files as I do. I don't care how much they pay, either. As a customer, it's all about my cost and my benefits. At $5/month, the only people who would opt out are the ones who don't buy or download much of anything.
Flat-fee service would be the only way to go. A pay-per-download service would get clobbered by the same P2P "aftermarket" that exists today. Kids (who don't have credit cards or other online payment options available) would trade files amongst themselves, UNLESS their families were "download club" members and could get whatever they want, pretty much whenever they want it. My theory is that it is more profitable to get some revenue from everyone than it is to make sure that each track is paid for.
It would not be all that hard to make a flat-fee service work. All they have to do is take the RIAA portion of profits and distribute to the labels and artists, proportional to the total downloads, artist by artist, label by label. Such a method would be equitable and would produce a hell of a lot more revenue that what they do now. Current thinking in the music industry seems to be fixated at the high end of the price vs. volume curve. Their pricing (partially assisted by P2P) has reached the point of diminishing returns, but they aren't ready to admit it.
Note that copy protection is meaningless, no matter what the industry does. "Harry Potter" was released on DVD, allegedly without Macrovision. It won't be pirated all that much because the price does not really encourage piracy. If it were priced at $300, Macrovison wouldn't help -- the hackers would get the job done and the pirate copies would be everywhere. It's the same story with all the hare-brained DRM audio file formats. If the music industry fixed the underlying business problem, the piracy problem would be small enough to be ignored.