This is how it would be with most magazines, bit with Wired, the difference is much less subtle than that. The online version is basically just a franchise operation, run by a completely different company.
That seems pretty stupid, I know: Most publications care enough about their reputation to have the Web site bear some relation to the print version, and you'd think that would be particularly important to one whose subject matter is so tied up with the Web. But I guess Wired has some reason for it, probably involving the people who run the Web site paying a large amount of money for the rights to the brand name.
Tthe main reason for a company to have an IPO is simply that it gives the owners a chance to sell their share on the open market. For example, Microsoft has never needed to raise money from the stock market, but Bill Gates needed the IPO so that he could spend his billions. The same applies to Google, and many other companies.
This works especially well (for the original owners, that is --- not for the people who buy shares on the open market) when there's a stock market bubble. But even if there wasn't, the VCs who invest in startups would still want their chance to cash out.
It's good when a company does some good things. We should thank and congratulate them. As far as the company is cocnerned, the whole point of doing the right thing is to get good PR, so we should encourage them by actually giving them do the right thing more often by actually giving them good PR.
The problems occur when a company lies about its philanthropy, covers up its misdeeds, or grossly exaggerates. Some corporations (Philip Morris is the one that springs to mind immediately) spend a few thousand on philanthropy, then many millions on commercials that boast about how generous they are.
Then there's companies that take credit for the efforts or donations of their staff (on their own time) and customers. Supermarkets are the worst: The checkout people at my local Albertsons are always asking if I want to donate some money to Tsunami relief (which the company will later brag about raising), or worse, buy a bag of groceries (on which it makes a large profit) to donate to a food bank.
If we keep backup copies of major Internet sites, people in thousands of years will still be able to read what we wrote on places like Slashdot. So they may not remember us personally, but they'll at least see our online pseudonyms, laugh at our stupidity, and wonder what kind of life that 20th/21st Century person lived.
Of course, it's unlikely that sites will survive for millennia. There's liekly to be an apocalypse at some point that will destroy civilization, for example. And even if there isn't, you've got to migrate them to new storage media every few years, and avoid restrictive copyrights laws and DRM.
Wow. Wished I hadn't burned all my mod points about the spammer. I've seen Bill Gates make presentations that are less enthusiastic about Microsoft or hostile to Linux.
The open-source community's basic problem, as far as Didio et al are concerned, is that it doesn't give the Yankee Group enough money. It really is that simple.
He's not denying the crime, just challenging the law against it isn't fair. (It's the spammers' familiar argument that the First Ammendment gives them the right to DoS your Internet connection.) So
The main aggravating factor seems to be that he wasn't just sending out ads: He was actually defrauding people who replied, to the tune of $millions. This suggests that some charges might stick even if the Supreme Court does find that spam is a constitutional right.
The whole point of DRM is that it prevents interoperability. Apple doesn't just use DRM to placate the music industry. It makes money on hardware, not downloads, so it wants to lock customers into its proprietary player. (And thanks to the non-replaceable battery, that's even a recurring revenue stream.)
If you've bought tracks from iTunes, you can't play them on a non-Apple mp3 player without either breaking the DRM (iOpener, which might be illegal) or going round it (CD burning and reripping, which is awkward). All this benefits Apple, not the RIAA, and intentionally so.
Of course, the music industry doesn't want interoperability either, because it would mean the end of DRM. The nature of open standards is simply that they don't include DRM-like restrictions. I think what Apple's rivals really want is compulsory licensing, which is something a bit different. (The main difference being that Apple would be forced to provide its encryption keys to Microsoft, but not to you and me.)
I find the most useful feature of an mp3/radio combo is the ability to record from the radio. You can use that for time-shifting actual programs, or for getting free music in the rare case that the stuff the RIAA has paid the radio station to promote is actually worth listening to.
There are several free (as in beer) or very cheap add-ons to Windows that will install a virtual printer driver to make PDFS. These work with any Windows app, not just MS OFfice. OO.org also has excellent PDF-creation functions, and understands the Office formats very well.
The thing you need Acrobat (or a similar program) for is editing existing PDFs. That's a much harder capability to implement, but it doesn't involve Office at all (unless you don't have Acrobat and need to use a workaround, like turning the PDF into a giant GIF and pasting text boxes over it).
If you watch DVDs, you're already accepting DRM (unless you're using DeCSS or a hacked player). Personally, I'm not too bothered about this, because I don't want to watch most movies more than once and so only rent (not buy) DVDs. But I'd never accept DRM on CDs, for example.
DVDs shows us that DRM has three purposes:
1. Preventing copying. This is what the industry focuses on. It limits both "piracy" and some kinds of fair use.
2. Preventing interoperability. This is the really bad thing about DRM. If you want to watch any DVD at all, you need to pay the DVD consortium a license fee or use DeCSS. This license fee is included in the cost of DVD players, but not always PCs: If you buy a new PC with a DVD drive, you can't actually watch DVDs unless you also pay the DVD consortium's license fee.
3. Reducing functionality. This is the thing that motivates people to break DRM. DVDs have several annoying examples, including region coding and unskippable commercials.
The DRM isn't just there to keep the RIAA happy. Apple uses it to ensure that iTunes customers use the iPod (and vice-versa).
But the RIAA members are making too much money out of iTunes to force radical changes on it now, and so is Apple. It's money for nothing, and they're not going to give that up just because a few customers now have a slightly easier way to exercise their fair-use rights. (Remember, Hymn and iOpener have been around for about a year, and Apple hasn't made any technical changes aimed at thwarting them.)
You don't have to burn and re-rip. You can still remove the DRM using tools like i-Opener and hymn. That's still a hassle (and perhaps illegal), but it's faster and easier than going via CD if all you want is an unencumbered music file.
Froogle is still in beta, and it doesn't work too well. (Retailers can add arbitrary shipping charges, for example, making price comparisons impossible.) Still, that ought to be fixed eventually. I hope that Google will take e-commerce sites out of the main Web search once Froogle is officially launched, or at least give people an easy way to filter them. (They could do the same with blogs.)
Preventing sales pages from spamming search reuslts is is also in Google's interest: As well as driving people away, it also has a direct financial impact on them, because the money paid to the "optimizers" might otherwise be spent on buying text ads.
The problem is that you're not tried by your peers: Lawyers like to disqualify anyone who knows anything about the case, and anyone who wants to can make an excuse and get out of jury service.
Juries werent a great idea anyway: If you put twelve people in a room, a lot of them will just agree out of groupthink. It would be better to separate the 12 into smaller groups (say, 3 of 4) and declare a mistrial if they don't come up with the same verdict.
I like the Win key. (Its absence is the one thing I don't like about IBM ThinkPads. I've had to remap my keboard to create one from caps lock.) It's used to access OS features, while the other function keys are for app-specific features. The most useful are Win+R (run dialog, ie. a command prompt) and Win+L (locks the machine in XP)
But I agree with you about the context key. It's about as useful as SysRq.
That's debatable. (In fact, it's so uncertain that lawyers do debate it in front of judges and juries). When the GPL was written, it explicitly said that you didn't need to accept it in order to use software. Stallman's philosophy was that you don't need a license to read a book or listen to music, so you shouldn't need it to run a program. Copyright law covers copying, not use.
Unfortunately, lawyers for companies like Microsoft diagreed with the FSF, and EULAs have become common. Even without UCITA, the software companies have been quite succesful in court, leading a lot of Free software to treat the GPL as a EULA and ask people to click through it during installation. (This is mostly because of the "no warranty" clause.) The next version of the GPL might officially be a EULA, because (like the Afero license) it wants to ensure that code is available to every client who accesses a Web server.
Steps 1-4 are the main justification for a software company to open-source its code. (I mean the main business case, not ethical reasons or side benfits like good PR.) The whole point of opening up Netscape was to attract a lot of developers to work on it for free. (They were upfront about this, and the same license is open to everyone.)
Step 5 originally had something to do with selling Web servers, but they found a better way to profit: Get bought by AOL, then Time-Warner. It worked out quite well (but not for Time-Warner...)
The obvious strategy is to go after the small guys, establish precedent, then go after the big guys.
But some patent outfits do go after the big guys straightaway. They know it will get them publicity, and perhaps investment: Just follow SCO's strategy of PR/FUD, but combine it with actually having a case.
Once you strip away the official MS hype, Bill Gates is anything but self-made. Yes, he's a very shrewd businessman who understands software, but he got two helpful head-starts:
1. His parents were millionaires. He wasn't some ordinary middle-class geek kid. His parents were able to send him to private school and buy him computer hardware that (back then) cost thousands of dollars.
2. Microsoft got the DOS contract through nepotism. Bill's mother was a friend of IBM's CEO, on many of the same charity and corporate boards. That's why IBM bought the OS from Microsoft, not the company that actually developed it.
Orbitz's popup ads always struck me as completely insane. It's understandable (albeit annoying) that media companies might want to use popups, but Orbitz is supposed to be an e-commerce site. People who go there are already looking to spend money with Orbitz. The first time I saw one, I assumed I'd been infected with spyware. (This was back when i used IE). But no: Orbitz really is that stupid.
The craziness doesnt' end there. Orbitz also makes people register and sign up for spam simply to use the site. That just drives customers away. Sensible e-commerce sites don't ask you to register until after they've got your money.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how it would be with most magazines, bit with Wired, the difference is much less subtle than that. The online version is basically just a franchise operation, run by a completely different company.
That seems pretty stupid, I know: Most publications care enough about their reputation to have the Web site bear some relation to the print version, and you'd think that would be particularly important to one whose subject matter is so tied up with the Web. But I guess Wired has some reason for it, probably involving the people who run the Web site paying a large amount of money for the rights to the brand name.
Tthe main reason for a company to have an IPO is simply that it gives the owners a chance to sell their share on the open market. For example, Microsoft has never needed to raise money from the stock market, but Bill Gates needed the IPO so that he could spend his billions. The same applies to Google, and many other companies.
This works especially well (for the original owners, that is --- not for the people who buy shares on the open market) when there's a stock market bubble. But even if there wasn't, the VCs who invest in startups would still want their chance to cash out.
It's good when a company does some good things. We should thank and congratulate them. As far as the company is cocnerned, the whole point of doing the right thing is to get good PR, so we should encourage them by actually giving them do the right thing more often by actually giving them good PR.
The problems occur when a company lies about its philanthropy, covers up its misdeeds, or grossly exaggerates. Some corporations (Philip Morris is the one that springs to mind immediately) spend a few thousand on philanthropy, then many millions on commercials that boast about how generous they are.
Then there's companies that take credit for the efforts or donations of their staff (on their own time) and customers. Supermarkets are the worst: The checkout people at my local Albertsons are always asking if I want to donate some money to Tsunami relief (which the company will later brag about raising), or worse, buy a bag of groceries (on which it makes a large profit) to donate to a food bank.
If we keep backup copies of major Internet sites, people in thousands of years will still be able to read what we wrote on places like Slashdot. So they may not remember us personally, but they'll at least see our online pseudonyms, laugh at our stupidity, and wonder what kind of life that 20th/21st Century person lived.
Of course, it's unlikely that sites will survive for millennia. There's liekly to be an apocalypse at some point that will destroy civilization, for example. And even if there isn't, you've got to migrate them to new storage media every few years, and avoid restrictive copyrights laws and DRM.
And in this case, it wasn't just the person in the low-level retail job who was stupid. It was the store manager and then the cops.
Wow. Wished I hadn't burned all my mod points about the spammer. I've seen Bill Gates make presentations that are less enthusiastic about Microsoft or hostile to Linux.
The open-source community's basic problem, as far as Didio et al are concerned, is that it doesn't give the Yankee Group enough money. It really is that simple.
He's not denying the crime, just challenging the law against it isn't fair. (It's the spammers' familiar argument that the First Ammendment gives them the right to DoS your Internet connection.) So
The main aggravating factor seems to be that he wasn't just sending out ads: He was actually defrauding people who replied, to the tune of $millions. This suggests that some charges might stick even if the Supreme Court does find that spam is a constitutional right.
I wonder is he considering skipping bail.
You're unlikely to get sued. John Major has since admitted that he really was having an affair, though not with his cook.
The whole point of DRM is that it prevents interoperability. Apple doesn't just use DRM to placate the music industry. It makes money on hardware, not downloads, so it wants to lock customers into its proprietary player. (And thanks to the non-replaceable battery, that's even a recurring revenue stream.)
If you've bought tracks from iTunes, you can't play them on a non-Apple mp3 player without either breaking the DRM (iOpener, which might be illegal) or going round it (CD burning and reripping, which is awkward). All this benefits Apple, not the RIAA, and intentionally so.
Of course, the music industry doesn't want interoperability either, because it would mean the end of DRM. The nature of open standards is simply that they don't include DRM-like restrictions. I think what Apple's rivals really want is compulsory licensing, which is something a bit different. (The main difference being that Apple would be forced to provide its encryption keys to Microsoft, but not to you and me.)
I find the most useful feature of an mp3/radio combo is the ability to record from the radio. You can use that for time-shifting actual programs, or for getting free music in the rare case that the stuff the RIAA has paid the radio station to promote is actually worth listening to.
There are several free (as in beer) or very cheap add-ons to Windows that will install a virtual printer driver to make PDFS. These work with any Windows app, not just MS OFfice. OO.org also has excellent PDF-creation functions, and understands the Office formats very well.
The thing you need Acrobat (or a similar program) for is editing existing PDFs. That's a much harder capability to implement, but it doesn't involve Office at all (unless you don't have Acrobat and need to use a workaround, like turning the PDF into a giant GIF and pasting text boxes over it).
If you watch DVDs, you're already accepting DRM (unless you're using DeCSS or a hacked player). Personally, I'm not too bothered about this, because I don't want to watch most movies more than once and so only rent (not buy) DVDs. But I'd never accept DRM on CDs, for example.
DVDs shows us that DRM has three purposes:
1. Preventing copying. This is what the industry focuses on. It limits both "piracy" and some kinds of fair use.
2. Preventing interoperability. This is the really bad thing about DRM. If you want to watch any DVD at all, you need to pay the DVD consortium a license fee or use DeCSS. This license fee is included in the cost of DVD players, but not always PCs: If you buy a new PC with a DVD drive, you can't actually watch DVDs unless you also pay the DVD consortium's license fee.
3. Reducing functionality. This is the thing that motivates people to break DRM. DVDs have several annoying examples, including region coding and unskippable commercials.
The DRM isn't just there to keep the RIAA happy. Apple uses it to ensure that iTunes customers use the iPod (and vice-versa).
But the RIAA members are making too much money out of iTunes to force radical changes on it now, and so is Apple. It's money for nothing, and they're not going to give that up just because a few customers now have a slightly easier way to exercise their fair-use rights. (Remember, Hymn and iOpener have been around for about a year, and Apple hasn't made any technical changes aimed at thwarting them.)
You don't have to burn and re-rip. You can still remove the DRM using tools like i-Opener and hymn. That's still a hassle (and perhaps illegal), but it's faster and easier than going via CD if all you want is an unencumbered music file.
When George Bush was governor of Texas, he signed a law that allowed hospitals to pull the plug on brain-damaged patients who couldn't afford to pay for treatment, even if the family wanted them kept alive.
Froogle is still in beta, and it doesn't work too well. (Retailers can add arbitrary shipping charges, for example, making price comparisons impossible.) Still, that ought to be fixed eventually. I hope that Google will take e-commerce sites out of the main Web search once Froogle is officially launched, or at least give people an easy way to filter them. (They could do the same with blogs.)
Preventing sales pages from spamming search reuslts is is also in Google's interest: As well as driving people away, it also has a direct financial impact on them, because the money paid to the "optimizers" might otherwise be spent on buying text ads.
The problem is that you're not tried by your peers: Lawyers like to disqualify anyone who knows anything about the case, and anyone who wants to can make an excuse and get out of jury service.
Juries werent a great idea anyway: If you put twelve people in a room, a lot of them will just agree out of groupthink. It would be better to separate the 12 into smaller groups (say, 3 of 4) and declare a mistrial if they don't come up with the same verdict.
I like the Win key. (Its absence is the one thing I don't like about IBM ThinkPads. I've had to remap my keboard to create one from caps lock.) It's used to access OS features, while the other function keys are for app-specific features. The most useful are Win+R (run dialog, ie. a command prompt) and Win+L (locks the machine in XP)
But I agree with you about the context key. It's about as useful as SysRq.
That's debatable. (In fact, it's so uncertain that lawyers do debate it in front of judges and juries). When the GPL was written, it explicitly said that you didn't need to accept it in order to use software. Stallman's philosophy was that you don't need a license to read a book or listen to music, so you shouldn't need it to run a program. Copyright law covers copying, not use.
Unfortunately, lawyers for companies like Microsoft diagreed with the FSF, and EULAs have become common. Even without UCITA, the software companies have been quite succesful in court, leading a lot of Free software to treat the GPL as a EULA and ask people to click through it during installation. (This is mostly because of the "no warranty" clause.) The next version of the GPL might officially be a EULA, because (like the Afero license) it wants to ensure that code is available to every client who accesses a Web server.
Steps 1-4 are the main justification for a software company to open-source its code. (I mean the main business case, not ethical reasons or side benfits like good PR.) The whole point of opening up Netscape was to attract a lot of developers to work on it for free. (They were upfront about this, and the same license is open to everyone.)
Step 5 originally had something to do with selling Web servers, but they found a better way to profit: Get bought by AOL, then Time-Warner. It worked out quite well (but not for Time-Warner...)
The obvious strategy is to go after the small guys, establish precedent, then go after the big guys.
But some patent outfits do go after the big guys straightaway. They know it will get them publicity, and perhaps investment: Just follow SCO's strategy of PR/FUD, but combine it with actually having a case.
Once you strip away the official MS hype, Bill Gates is anything but self-made. Yes, he's a very shrewd businessman who understands software, but he got two helpful head-starts:
1. His parents were millionaires. He wasn't some ordinary middle-class geek kid. His parents were able to send him to private school and buy him computer hardware that (back then) cost thousands of dollars.
2. Microsoft got the DOS contract through nepotism. Bill's mother was a friend of IBM's CEO, on many of the same charity and corporate boards. That's why IBM bought the OS from Microsoft, not the company that actually developed it.
Who wants to take bets on how many SBC customers will be using MCI in five years, or how many Verizon customers will be using AT&T?
At the rate we're going, all of them, because Verizon will also have taken over SBC (or vice-versa).
Orbitz's popup ads always struck me as completely insane. It's understandable (albeit annoying) that media companies might want to use popups, but Orbitz is supposed to be an e-commerce site. People who go there are already looking to spend money with Orbitz. The first time I saw one, I assumed I'd been infected with spyware. (This was back when i used IE). But no: Orbitz really is that stupid.
The craziness doesnt' end there. Orbitz also makes people register and sign up for spam simply to use the site. That just drives customers away. Sensible e-commerce sites don't ask you to register until after they've got your money.