What is broken in the US is the fact that we only get 20-35% turnout of eligable voters. Maybe if people actually voted in the US we'd know the will of the voters a little better.
$G
PS. To all you slashdotters: VOTE DAMN IT! Don't just whine that your candidate lost after you didn't go to the polls. Don't lament that RIAA/MPAA/SPA/Microsoft/GREEN MEN FROM MARS is/are taking over the universe because they own the congress when you didn't bother to vote against their shill FROM YOUR DISTRICT!
I've been selling technology for a while and four things really have bothered me about software:
1) It's almost always overpriced. 2) It generally is oversold and doesn't deliver. 3) There's no consumer recourse if it doesn't work. 4) The license "agreement" is usually total unfair to the customer.
Say what you will, but why do I want to pay too much for broken software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do that ties me up with strings like Gulliver? This is just another example where KMART/BLUELIGHT/Whoever:
1) Paid too much for their software 2) It was oversold 3) It underdelivered 4) The license is hosing the buyer
Enough already. Don't these people know the number one rule for a parasite is not to kill the host!?
It's good to see the industry shaman/guru/fortune tellers at Gartner stick to their comfortable pattern of stating the obvious:
* Desktop computers cost a wad of cash to support * Servers cost a wad of cash to support * Companies want their computer stuff for cheap (TCO or Total Cost of Ownership) * Losing cusotmers is expensive (Customer relationship management) * Huge databases will be the norm in a few years (I love how this one is always true)
and joining Gartner's other brilliant flashes of the obvious:
* Consumers want to be able to use the software/music/movies/whatever they buy!
Maybe I should write a few cheesy white papers like "Controling the transaction cost of email" or "Why having an accounting system is important" and put on a few webinars... the boom, I could hire a bunch of marketing flunk outs and sell seats in "executive briefings" or cobranded reports for big $$$...
I suppose I should lighten up on Gartner - they do serve a purpose: they make people want to spend inordinate ammounts of money on trendy software and therefore keep a lot of us slashdot types employed.
It's great to see that the internet has succeeded to the point that government wants to tax it. What's too bad is that many ecommerce businesses see their only advantage to be price. And if 4.5-9% in sales tax will cut into your orders that much, you are already among the living dead. Those that live by price, die by price. You can't make money selling $.99 for $1.00. For that matter, it's damn hard to make profit selling $1.00 for $1.10.
I really like Cringley's article. That said there's something important that was left out:
The wealth of a business owner does not come from income but from the value of his or her stake in the business. Ultimately this wealth is "paper" wealth untill the company is sold.
That means if it is best for owners to sell, they'll "package" the company for sale (this often involves actually reducing the value of the company to a level that someone will buy it). What's more, a lot of the actions that appear shortsighted are acutally long term maneuvers to sell out. Closing down R&D to make your books look attractive is one way to do this. With businesses, "let the buyer beware" is the rule, not the exception.
One condition that universally sucks is when something happens that makes it appear that the owners of a company's wealth is at risk. Then owners pressure managers to make shortsighted decisions to protect their wealth and often attempt to prematurely sell the company. The results are often mass layoffs and the buyer gets a firm that is cancerous and consumes their company or personal wealth as well.
At present I own a company. I know my employees will not like it when I decide to sell it. I can't guarantee that they will all come out ahead, but I'll try my best. The reason I started this company was to build it up, and then sell it so that I and my fellow investors could get rich. My employees benefit by having great jobs and some, through ownership options, will be rewarded when the sale happens.
There is no way to "moderate" freedom of speech. The moment that laws curtail a citizen's right to speak - ESPECIALLY about political topics (race, religion, abortion, etc...), that nation begins down a very slippery slope.
True freedom means you have to allow those whose views are unpopular, disgusting or even dangerous to speak of them. Freedom for some and a gag for others is called oppression.
You would think that man would have learned by now...
Lots of technology has been promised to fix this, but where are the commercial products
I don't think it's the technology so much as the application of technology. My PDA and my laptop both have very easy to read screens and are very portable and convient. But they both are vey expensive. I could buy a hundred books for the price of my PDA, and twice that in books plus an oak bookcase, a couple of nice lamps, a case of good brandy and a very nice arm chair and footstool for the price of the laptop.
Also: Electrons lack the archival quality of paper. I only wish that big old leather bound Bible on the shelf was as easy to search as the electronic verison is (actually, I wish I'd read it more often). The average book I buy will probably be around after I die... I can't read the 5.25" floppy I bought in 1989.
I'm not surprised by the success of free electronic books at all. Libraries have been making access to books something that everyone can afford for years. Publishers of copyrighted works should remember that the library has been one of their best sources of publicity for their products AND a great consumer of their products. I have probably 40-50 books that I've bought because I was first exposed to them at the library.
Please remember to do your part to support your local public library. They serve a very important role in our society.
Getting end users to comply with HIPAA is tough because getting the average person to understand HIPAA isn't easy. Getting people to actually do the things they'll have to do is going to be about as easy as boiling the ocean. Something about old dogs, new tricks...
The Maginot Line was a strategic defensive system with defensive weapons systems (fixed placement guns). Stealth is a very tactical defensive system, and is used on highly offensive weapons systems...
I love AOL for keeping the price of first class snail mail low... Thank you for picking up the slack for all of us that quit sending letters by snail mail. Now all I have to worry about is the USPS spending 2 Billion on changing their logo from a "stylized eagle" to a "stylized eagle"...
Oh, yeah, if you give the CD's back, if AOL has any creativity, they'll just mail them out again and cut production costs!
Intellectual property is a silly idea when you really think about it. Since it's such a silly idea, I'm more sure than ever that humans will not figure it out until they have a big war about it.
Of course, I shouldn't say anything... I make my money selling intellectual property - software. I suppose it's a simmilar business to prostitution: I sell my stuff, and I still have it! What a racket. What a crock.
The thing that scares me about DCMA is the fact that we're not saying you can't think about certain things (like cracking encryption)... The slope is slippery... and covered with green paper with pictures of dead presidents.
This is going to hurt a little for all of us that make our living off of software, particularly system software, but:
* The OS is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly. * Networking software is a commodity and should be priced accordingly. * The relational database is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly. * Basic productivity applications are a commodity, and should be priced accordingly.
Why do you think MS is moving into the enterprise software market by purchasing Great Plains (Accounting/ERP) and developing a CRM package? Why is.NET important? Hint: it differentiates the MS Windows platform from open source OSes. MS understands very clearly that developers write software, sofware dictates platform, platform determines hardware infrastructure and therefore they are gunning for the only real points of control. First, software developers then business owners. If the business owner demands.NET, the developers develop for it. If the developers develop.NET software, business owners will buy it.
MS's lone hope is that their "bookend" strategy of generating end user demand and developer affinity will keep the market from seeing that there's nothing that you CAN do with Windows that you CANNOT do with another less expensive OS/development tool/platform.
I think MS will loose long term: the enterprise software market is very, very specialized and therefore there are smaller segments. There are no "universal" markets like desktop and server OSes that everyone needs. Interoperability is happens fine without.NET or the.NET tools.
Whenever my company pulls out of a tradeshow, I have to field calls for customers asking if I'm having financial problems. In Apple's case, they are the show... In other news, Apple is now looking for a new VP of Marketing...
1) Many of us can't afford a huge home theater. I watch movies on a 27" TV with two external speakers. It's good enough for most movies, but huge movies like Braveheart or Lord of the Rings really deserve the big screen.
I just sit closer to the TV. It's amazing how big that 27 inch TV is from three feet. For earth shaking sound, just put the powered sub on your surround sound under the couch (or laz-y-boy if your over twentysomething). The best reason to not go the the theater is simple: they usually don't serve beer or have food I actually want to eat (come on, where else sell Raisinettes)?
I fear I am a member of the last generation that has something that resembles equality of opportunity. Genetic screening will end that forever. And getting health insurance? If you think it's hard now, just wait until 50 years from now.
"I'm sorry, we can't cover you Mr. Smith. We only insure people who are genetically disposed not to die or ever get sick."
"I thought insurance was in case I do get sick?"
"That was 25 years ago. Now we just take peoples money. We've found it's more profitable not to have any claims to pay."
Software companies need to figure it out: they are selling a license but the end user is buying a product they can use. And customers spend a lot on on software, weather it's a $40 game, a $200 productivity application or a thousand dollar professional tool. Protecting an investment in software by making a backup in whatever form is appropriate be it an iso image or a cd rom or a stack of punch cards.
The industry has tried copy protection in several forms in the past, and at the end of the day three things happen:
* Customers crack the protection to avoid re-buying software (ever try to get new media for a game? good luck) if their media is damaged or to avoid the inconvenience of putting the key disk in the drive.
* Customers get shafted by software publishers when they need new media. Why pay $35 for new media for a program that cost $59? Because of this, I distinctly remember that "no copy protection" was listed as a feature on competing products to Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase back in the day.
* Software companies spend more money on copy protection than the cost of loss due to piricy, and even with the protection the pirates will pirate anyway (so cost goes up, but the piracy loss remains the same).
Sorry to my peers who sell copy protection tools... but I think you are the software equivelent to patent medicine or snake-liver oil salesmen...
"Independent Review" boards have never been all that independent. Sometimes I think people believe that independence means the board has "people that agree with me" and not "this person will make just decisions." Just ask anyone who has applied for a grant or worked with a regulatory agency if the independent review board was political...
I'm laughing at this whole thing... How many times in the past have hair-brained copy protection schemes been tried? How many groups have tried to take over the internet? People will just do what they always do - buy what they want. DRM will be customer service hell or hardware manaufacturers, software manufacturers, and especially retailers where people will take this shit back, probably nothing that resembles resellable condition.
Sales people, for the most part, ignore IT and do what they think is right anyway (even is it's completely wrong).
Give them a reason to listen other that I'm an expert and you're not -- and they do listen. Salespeople are particularly sensitive to anything that can take time they could spend in front of customers away. Salespeople don't like don'ts and nevers -- they do like do's and sometimes... Hope this helps.
I never thought in my lifetime that nations would be preparing to engage in a big game of "I thought of it first!" I wonder how long it will take before we realize how juvenile this is, and will come up with a reasonable way to encourage innovation without taking away people's right to think.
Slashdot Mirror
What is broken in the US is the fact that we only get 20-35% turnout of eligable voters. Maybe if people actually voted in the US we'd know the will of the voters a little better.
$G
PS. To all you slashdotters: VOTE DAMN IT! Don't just whine that your candidate lost after you didn't go to the polls. Don't lament that RIAA/MPAA/SPA/Microsoft/GREEN MEN FROM MARS is/are taking over the universe because they own the congress when you didn't bother to vote against their shill FROM YOUR DISTRICT!
I've been selling technology for a while and four things really have bothered me about software:
1) It's almost always overpriced.
2) It generally is oversold and doesn't deliver.
3) There's no consumer recourse if it doesn't work.
4) The license "agreement" is usually total unfair to the customer.
Say what you will, but why do I want to pay too much for broken software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do that ties me up with strings like Gulliver? This is just another example where KMART/BLUELIGHT/Whoever:
1) Paid too much for their software
2) It was oversold
3) It underdelivered
4) The license is hosing the buyer
Enough already. Don't these people know the number one rule for a parasite is not to kill the host!?
$G
It's good to see the industry shaman/guru/fortune tellers at Gartner stick to their comfortable pattern of stating the obvious:
* Desktop computers cost a wad of cash to support
* Servers cost a wad of cash to support
* Companies want their computer stuff for cheap (TCO or Total Cost of Ownership)
* Losing cusotmers is expensive (Customer relationship management)
* Huge databases will be the norm in a few years (I love how this one is always true)
and joining Gartner's other brilliant flashes of the obvious:
* Consumers want to be able to use the software/music/movies/whatever they buy!
Maybe I should write a few cheesy white papers like "Controling the transaction cost of email" or "Why having an accounting system is important" and put on a few webinars... the boom, I could hire a bunch of marketing flunk outs and sell seats in "executive briefings" or cobranded reports for big $$$...
I suppose I should lighten up on Gartner - they do serve a purpose: they make people want to spend inordinate ammounts of money on trendy software and therefore keep a lot of us slashdot types employed.
$G
It's great to see that the internet has succeeded to the point that government wants to tax it. What's too bad is that many ecommerce businesses see their only advantage to be price. And if 4.5-9% in sales tax will cut into your orders that much, you are already among the living dead. Those that live by price, die by price. You can't make money selling $.99 for $1.00. For that matter, it's damn hard to make profit selling $1.00 for $1.10.
$G
The cable providers better cash out while they can because the future doesn't have cables and will be carrier free.
$G
I really like Cringley's article. That said there's something important that was left out:
The wealth of a business owner does not come from income but from the value of his or her stake in the business. Ultimately this wealth is "paper" wealth untill the company is sold.
That means if it is best for owners to sell, they'll "package" the company for sale (this often involves actually reducing the value of the company to a level that someone will buy it). What's more, a lot of the actions that appear shortsighted are acutally long term maneuvers to sell out. Closing down R&D to make your books look attractive is one way to do this. With businesses, "let the buyer beware" is the rule, not the exception.
One condition that universally sucks is when something happens that makes it appear that the owners of a company's wealth is at risk. Then owners pressure managers to make shortsighted decisions to protect their wealth and often attempt to prematurely sell the company. The results are often mass layoffs and the buyer gets a firm that is cancerous and consumes their company or personal wealth as well.
At present I own a company. I know my employees will not like it when I decide to sell it. I can't guarantee that they will all come out ahead, but I'll try my best. The reason I started this company was to build it up, and then sell it so that I and my fellow investors could get rich. My employees benefit by having great jobs and some, through ownership options, will be rewarded when the sale happens.
$G
There is no way to "moderate" freedom of speech. The moment that laws curtail a citizen's right to speak - ESPECIALLY about political topics (race, religion, abortion, etc...), that nation begins down a very slippery slope.
True freedom means you have to allow those whose views are unpopular, disgusting or even dangerous to speak of them. Freedom for some and a gag for others is called oppression.
You would think that man would have learned by now...
$G
I don't think it's the technology so much as the application of technology. My PDA and my laptop both have very easy to read screens and are very portable and convient. But they both are vey expensive. I could buy a hundred books for the price of my PDA, and twice that in books plus an oak bookcase, a couple of nice lamps, a case of good brandy and a very nice arm chair and footstool for the price of the laptop.
Also: Electrons lack the archival quality of paper. I only wish that big old leather bound Bible on the shelf was as easy to search as the electronic verison is (actually, I wish I'd read it more often). The average book I buy will probably be around after I die... I can't read the 5.25" floppy I bought in 1989.
$G
I'm not surprised by the success of free electronic books at all. Libraries have been making access to books something that everyone can afford for years. Publishers of copyrighted works should remember that the library has been one of their best sources of publicity for their products AND a great consumer of their products. I have probably 40-50 books that I've bought because I was first exposed to them at the library.
Please remember to do your part to support your local public library. They serve a very important role in our society.
$G
Getting end users to comply with HIPAA is tough because getting the average person to understand HIPAA isn't easy. Getting people to actually do the things they'll have to do is going to be about as easy as boiling the ocean. Something about old dogs, new tricks...
Spread Spectrum has a great future... It has the potential to break the need for lots of towers and paying for minutes.
$G
The Maginot Line was a strategic defensive system with defensive weapons systems (fixed placement guns). Stealth is a very tactical defensive system, and is used on highly offensive weapons systems...
Huge difference.
$G
I love AOL for keeping the price of first class snail mail low... Thank you for picking up the slack for all of us that quit sending letters by snail mail. Now all I have to worry about is the USPS spending 2 Billion on changing their logo from a "stylized eagle" to a "stylized eagle"...
Oh, yeah, if you give the CD's back, if AOL has any creativity, they'll just mail them out again and cut production costs!
$G
How can you own an idea? Really...
Intellectual property is a silly idea when you really think about it. Since it's such a silly idea, I'm more sure than ever that humans will not figure it out until they have a big war about it.
Of course, I shouldn't say anything... I make my money selling intellectual property - software. I suppose it's a simmilar business to prostitution: I sell my stuff, and I still have it! What a racket. What a crock.
The thing that scares me about DCMA is the fact that we're not saying you can't think about certain things (like cracking encryption)... The slope is slippery... and covered with green paper with pictures of dead presidents.
$G
This is going to hurt a little for all of us that make our living off of software, particularly system software, but:
.NET important? Hint: it differentiates the MS Windows platform from open source OSes. MS understands very clearly that developers write software, sofware dictates platform, platform determines hardware infrastructure and therefore they are gunning for the only real points of control. First, software developers then business owners. If the business owner demands .NET, the developers develop for it. If the developers develop .NET software, business owners will buy it.
.NET or the .NET tools.
* The OS is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly.
* Networking software is a commodity and should be priced accordingly.
* The relational database is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly.
* Basic productivity applications are a commodity, and should be priced accordingly.
Why do you think MS is moving into the enterprise software market by purchasing Great Plains (Accounting/ERP) and developing a CRM package? Why is
MS's lone hope is that their "bookend" strategy of generating end user demand and developer affinity will keep the market from seeing that there's nothing that you CAN do with Windows that you CANNOT do with another less expensive OS/development tool/platform.
I think MS will loose long term: the enterprise software market is very, very specialized and therefore there are smaller segments. There are no "universal" markets like desktop and server OSes that everyone needs. Interoperability is happens fine without
Can't wait for the market to sort it out.
$G
Whenever my company pulls out of a tradeshow, I have to field calls for customers asking if I'm having financial problems. In Apple's case, they are the show... In other news, Apple is now looking for a new VP of Marketing...
I just sit closer to the TV. It's amazing how big that 27 inch TV is from three feet. For earth shaking sound, just put the powered sub on your surround sound under the couch (or laz-y-boy if your over twentysomething). The best reason to not go the the theater is simple: they usually don't serve beer or have food I actually want to eat (come on, where else sell Raisinettes)?
I fear I am a member of the last generation that has something that resembles equality of opportunity. Genetic screening will end that forever. And getting health insurance? If you think it's hard now, just wait until 50 years from now.
"I'm sorry, we can't cover you Mr. Smith. We only insure people who are genetically disposed not to die or ever get sick."
"I thought insurance was in case I do get sick?"
"That was 25 years ago. Now we just take peoples money. We've found it's more profitable not to have any claims to pay."
Software companies need to figure it out: they are selling a license but the end user is buying a product they can use. And customers spend a lot on on software, weather it's a $40 game, a $200 productivity application or a thousand dollar professional tool. Protecting an investment in software by making a backup in whatever form is appropriate be it an iso image or a cd rom or a stack of punch cards.
The industry has tried copy protection in several forms in the past, and at the end of the day three things happen:
* Customers crack the protection to avoid re-buying software (ever try to get new media for a game? good luck) if their media is damaged or to avoid the inconvenience of putting the key disk in the drive.
* Customers get shafted by software publishers when they need new media. Why pay $35 for new media for a program that cost $59? Because of this, I distinctly remember that "no copy protection" was listed as a feature on competing products to Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase back in the day.
* Software companies spend more money on copy protection than the cost of loss due to piricy, and even with the protection the pirates will pirate anyway (so cost goes up, but the piracy loss remains the same).
Sorry to my peers who sell copy protection tools... but I think you are the software equivelent to patent medicine or snake-liver oil salesmen...
"Independent Review" boards have never been all that independent. Sometimes I think people believe that independence means the board has "people that agree with me" and not "this person will make just decisions." Just ask anyone who has applied for a grant or worked with a regulatory agency if the independent review board was political...
I'm laughing at this whole thing... How many times in the past have hair-brained copy protection schemes been tried? How many groups have tried to take over the internet? People will just do what they always do - buy what they want. DRM will be customer service hell or hardware manaufacturers, software manufacturers, and especially retailers where people will take this shit back, probably nothing that resembles resellable condition.
Sales people, for the most part, ignore IT and do what they think is right anyway (even is it's completely wrong).
Give them a reason to listen other that I'm an expert and you're not -- and they do listen. Salespeople are particularly sensitive to anything that can take time they could spend in front of customers away. Salespeople don't like don'ts and nevers -- they do like do's and sometimes... Hope this helps.
How long would your local McDonalds be in business if they fired all their cashiers?
Hmmm.... Funny thing. The cashier at McDonalds is their salesman! "Would you like fries with that?"
I never thought in my lifetime that nations would be preparing to engage in a big game of "I thought of it first!" I wonder how long it will take before we realize how juvenile this is, and will come up with a reasonable way to encourage innovation without taking away people's right to think.
But half of tEaM is ME.