You go into a store. Software Product A is sitting on the shelf for $10.
You decide that Product A isn't worth $10 to you. (The step you missed)
You go around to your friend's house. Software Product A is copied to you for free.
Producer of Software Product A has now lost a $10 sale.
Oops, except that the producer wouldn't have had that sale anyway. So while the revenue lost to unauthorized redistribution is probably non-zero, it is ceratinly not the total retail value of the number of unauthorized copies.
"I'm not an extremist," said Robert Regular, vice president of sales and marketing at New York-based digital advertising firm Cydoor. "But all this talk of spyware is the equivalent of elevating one bad seed, and it's having negative consequences on the good software. The public doesn't have time to investigate if it's negative software; they'll just stop downloading...
I would hate to think we could reach a point that, whenever a dialog box comes up and says, 'Do you want to do this,' bells go off and people become worried." (My emphasis)
Personally, I wish that is exactly what would happen. Popups dialogs and confirmation boxes should only appear when there is something you need to think about. If you're not supposed to think about it, then why are they bothering you with the popup in the first place?
If you already have broadband, then $20 or $40 per month doesn't sound too bad for phone service. But I don't already have it. So let's see, what would this really cost me?
Power Link service plans* start as low as $34.50/month for customers who own a DOCSIS compliant, Adelphia approved cable modem. For customers who prefer to have Adelphia provide the modem, service plans start as low as $42.95/month. All service plans include up to 4 email accounts and 10 Mb of personal web space.
Hmm, that's not too bad. But then add the $25 setup fee and the $20/month minimum for the phone, and I'm up to $62.95/month. Amortize the installation over the first year and make it $65. Suddenly sounding not-so-good. Oh, and can I even use it? From here:
=== 1)Generally Prohibited Conduct.
(a) You agree not to use the Service or any equipment or software provided by Adelphia:
...
(iv) so as to improperly interfere with, inhibit, degrade or restrict the use and enjoyment of the Service by others or Adelphias ability to deliver the Service to users and to monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes and/or other aspects of network servicing, including, without limitation, by: (A) excessive use of bandwidth (e.g. exceeding 2.5GB of traffic in a given month); (B) sending excessive data transfers; ... (H) failing to comply with any bandwidth, data storage or other use limitations imposed on your use of the Service
(v) to run a server of any type in connection with the Service, nor may you provide network or host services to others via the Service. Prohibited uses include, without limitation, running servers for PPP, FTP, HTTP, DNS, POP, SMTP, NNTP, PROXY, DHCP, IRC, TELNET, TFTP, SNMP and multi-user interactive forums, or remapping of ports for the purpose of operating a server on the network.
... 5) "Camping on the system". When you are not actively using the Service for any duration of at least fifteen minutes or more, you agree to disconnect it so that other active users will not encounter difficulty logging on. Adelphia does utilize detection programs to ensure that our customers are not keeping the connection open for prolonged periods when not in active use. In the event that such detection programs discover an open connection with no activity for thirty minutes, the connection will be automatically shut down. Active use is user-directed utilization of the connection for activities such as web browsing, e-mail, chat and file transfer. You must be physically at your computer to engage in active use. Use of automated programs to keep your connection open without your active involvement is prohibited. In the event of active involvement for twelve continuous hours, your connection will be automatically shut off. ===
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Parents are required by law to send their children to school. (Home-schooling is the exception, and the National Educators' Association is trying to get it outlawed.) School boards pass "regulations" under which teachers are required to report certain offenses to the police. The police are required by law to investigate the complaints. Seems like "law" to me.
Detrick Washington, 25, was at his business partner's San Francisco, Calif., home office when two men forced their way in... "I'll go and kill the kids and that girl if you don't give me the rest of the money," one of the robbers said. While they ransacked the home, Washington saw his chance: one robber put his gun down, and Washington grabbed it... "He took a chance. I believe we could call him a hero," police Inspector Armand Gordon said. Washington "basically saved five people's lives, including his own" by grabbing the gun. Police ruled the shooting justified, yet Washington is in jail: he is on parole from a previous drug conviction, and parole rules say parolees cannot "possess" a firearm. Because Washington grabbed the robber's gun, he was in "possession" of the weapon and violated his parole.
Laws are supposed to be specific in order to restrict police activity, not to require it.
There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances <snip inflammatory example> which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
What do you think "judge" means? It is to exercise judgement. Opinions like yours are why:
14-year-olds are suspended from school for taking a knife away from a suicidal classmate -- "He was in posession of it."
10-year-old girls are suspended for sexual harassment for asking boys on the playground, "Do you like me?"
6-year-olds are suspended from school for giving a friend a lemon drop -- "It looked like a drug!"
The courts are the last check against the enforcement of bad laws. (This should be the place of a jury, but appeals courts have taken the activity on for themselves.)
He compared the situation to "proprietary operating systems that run only on specific hardware designed and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. "Microsoft's Windows operating systems run on computers manufactured by thousands of different companies," he stated.
While you rightly make the point that the central bios and Intel's ubiquity may deserve more of the credit for that, you can't deny Microsoft did change the business model for computer manufacturers. Before them, everyone wanted to sell hardware. The OS was just what you had to include to make the hardware work. They were one of the first companies to base their success on selling the OS and let someone else deal with the hardware.
Through a combination of lucky breaks, good timing, shrewd long-range planning and incredibly effective marketing (okay, and a few good products thrown in along the way) they succeeded in commoditizing the developing PC hardware market. IBM had still planned on making the money from the hardware.
Now, despite immense natural barriers to entry, ever higher-range systems becoming commodities. As there are comparatively low barriers to entry in the software business, the only reasonable explanation for Microsoft's continued high margins is that they somehow artificially maintain high barriers. (Hmm, didn't a judge recently rule that this is exactly the case?)
Technology firms did not want to testify in the hearing, did not offer input while the bill was being drafted, and have offered plenty of criticism but little helpful suggestions since, a Hollings aide said.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
How much evidence does he need that we don't want it to work? It is a law designed to prevent people from engaging in legal activities, at the sole discretion of corporate interests with no oversight. That's why no, we're most definitely not trying to make it work.
We all hate the RIAA and MPAA, right? We always make the argument that they are trying to prohibit the first-sale doctrine, right? Why is it suddenly a bad thing when Amazon makes it more efficient to exercise your first-sale rights with books?
As with digital media, the real problem is that initial production and distribution in the current model presents too high a barrier to entry. The producers (record companies, publishers, etc.) end up making the lion's share of the money. We constantly make the argument that if musicians were able to cut out the record companies they would be able to make money even selling at a much lower price -- a price that more people would be willing to pay rather than filesharing.
It's time to apply that theory to book publishing. If authors were able to go to low volume, on-demand micropublishers instead of the large publishing houses, they could sell their books for a tenth the price and still make money. The market for used books would be much less, because at $3 for a new book, who wants to waste the money on shipping a used one?
So where are you located, and where do I submit my resume?
They only listen to each other
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Didn't seebs write something about managing hackers (and/or herding cats) that has much the same advice, has been around longer, and is more "truer to the cause" since it was written by one of us instead of a bunch of management professionals who claim to understand us?
Managment types don't listen to geeks. If they did, we wouldn't need books like this in the first place.
Let's assume we believe in the existence of a supreme being in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. What is His nature? To create the world and set the rules by which it functions, and then leave its inhabitants to exercise their free will within it.
And what is the nature of man? To strive to understand the rules by which nature works, and do everything in his power to exploit those rules to his own ends.
In short, it is the very nature of God to allow events to happen without his direct intervention. It is the very nature of man to attempt to control events.
"Playing God" would be letting someone die even though we can save him.
Let's say sattelite systems are allowed to carry whatever local channel feeds they want, wherever they want. Now you can get Des Moines news in New York and vice versa. Isn't that great?
Except that unless you have friends or family in Des Moines, you really don't have much reason to watch it. In fact, even if you are in Des Moines, there's a good chance you'll opt for the higher-quality news from somewhere else. The small, stations will probably lose more local viewers this way than they gain in distant viewers. Soon the national ad dollars will flow even more to the larger stations, and the resources (and quality) of the small ones will deteriorate even more.
This is just for news. How about the impact on local broadcasts of network feeds? No one will have any reason to watch those channels at all, and local ad dollars will dry up. Besides what this does for your local TV station, think about what it does for the mom-and-pop shops. They don't have the money to advertise on a national station -- which is what we'll end up with, one primary carrier of each network in each time zone -- and no one watches the local ones. The only companies with the resources to effectively advertise will be large national chains.
Just another step in the homogenization of America.
You really need to get out more
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Linking to the kde.org ftp site before they've had a chance to mirror and announce it first is like bombing a hospital.
No it's not. It's not even close. If I really have to explain why, it wouldn't do you any good anyway.
This just cracks down on something that was already illegal--it really doesn't have anything to do with spam.
Even if that's true, what's wrong with the feds finally enforcing laws that have been skirted for years? The only thing wrong with the stories about this is the headlines. They should read: Feds finally creack down on long-running crime
As much as rolling this out will cost, it's still going to be less than rolling out high speed land lines. In places where local conditions (terrain, politics, the whims of Time Warner) make DSL or cable unavailable, this may be the way brodband finally comes to the consumer market in big numbers.
The most compelling reason to suspect this may happen is that you can do an incremental buildout. Put up a few cell towers in an area and sell service. As enough people sign up to demand more bandwidth, you can add towers. You can't do that with land lines.
You may terminate this Agreement at any time by ceasing use of the Software and Services and destroying or removing from all hard drives, networks, and other storage media all copies of the Software.
From a post above:
The program hides itself in different locations all over your hard drive, including copies of itself in your OS root and/system32 folders (if you're running Windoze)
It's a bitch and a half to purge. There's no unistaller, and it's got dozens of registry entries to manually erase.
So in order to terminate the agreement, you have to purge the program and all associated files from your system. Then they don't provide an uninstaller that makes it reasonably possible to actually do that. Perfect.
Not just an online problem
on
Carnivore Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A mail cover consists of recording the information on the outside of all the mail delivered to the target home or business. It is done by the post office at the request of a local, state or federal law enforcement agency and lasts for one or more 30-day periods.
<snip>
... a mail cover doesn't need a judge's approval. Nor, as in wiretaps, are the targets of a mail cover eventually notified of the practice. The only way to learn about it is through discovery in a legal proceeding, if the lawyer asks the right questions.
And of course:
Its use has risen by more than half since the mid-1980s.
It's time people realized that surveillence isn't just about Carnivore and face recognition.
You'd be amazed the number of free-registration-required sites you'll be able to get into using billg@microsoft.com and the zipcode in Redmond as a password.
Did yahoo send out an email telling everyone this had occured?
You got an email saying that their privacy policy had been changed and to click a link to go review your personal settings. I just happened to notice the marketing ones. So they can plausibly argue (in court) if they have to that they did tell users to go review the settings.
The internet serves as a convenience in many ways, but I dont think this almost 10 year old (less in the corporate mind) bit of infrastructure has become crucial to us yet.
Think about any business that uses a PBX phone system. You may have 2,000 internal phone numbers, but only 500 outside lines. Suddenly the PBX goes down. Most likely your entire company loses communications. Within a couple of days you could have those 500 lines distributed to your workers, giving 1/4 of them direct lines. Then you have to worry about getting those hundreds of phone numbers out to every client and potential client.
Business use this scheme because it is much cheaper than having as many outside lines as employees. And it's more convenient to administer. Could businesses go on without it? Sure. But the short-term dislocation would be horrendous. It's the same with the internet. Those businesses that rely on it use it for cost and convenience. They could do without it, but the transition would be painful.
The need to ensure uptime was one reason Winnebago chose to run Linux on its mainframe. Last year, faced with an expensive upgrade to Exchange 2000, IT managers at the motor home and recreation vehicle manufacturer decided against the move and instead proposed running their e-mail system on Linux on the company's mainframe.
The company had success using Linux for domain name servers, Web serving and file sharing on its IBM S/390 mainframe running the Virtual Machine/Enterprise System Architecture operating system. After Winnebago officials decided they wanted their e-mail system on a reliable system, they chose to upgrade the company's mainframe, adding a second processor using IBM's virtualization technology, zVM, to run several Linux servers on a single mainframe.
They had the frame already, and just moved a new app onto it.
And the other side of that coin is, "If you get an MCSE, we're busy telling your boss that you should work cheap." How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?
Slashdot Mirror
You go into a store. Software Product A is sitting on the shelf for $10.
You decide that Product A isn't worth $10 to you. (The step you missed)
You go around to your friend's house. Software Product A is copied to you for free.
Producer of Software Product A has now lost a $10 sale.
Oops, except that the producer wouldn't have had that sale anyway. So while the revenue lost to unauthorized redistribution is probably non-zero, it is ceratinly not the total retail value of the number of unauthorized copies.
Or shall we patent/copyright "a method for cleaning windows?"
I believe Linus holds the trademark on "Linux," and I've used it to clean Windows off of several systems.
Personally, I wish that is exactly what would happen. Popups dialogs and confirmation boxes should only appear when there is something you need to think about. If you're not supposed to think about it, then why are they bothering you with the popup in the first place?
If you already have broadband, then $20 or $40 per month doesn't sound too bad for phone service. But I don't already have it. So let's see, what would this really cost me?
From here:
Hmm, that's not too bad. But then add the $25 setup fee and the $20/month minimum for the phone, and I'm up to $62.95/month. Amortize the installation over the first year and make it $65. Suddenly sounding not-so-good. Oh, and can I even use it? From here:
===
1)Generally Prohibited Conduct.
...
5) "Camping on the system". When you are not actively using the Service for any duration of at least fifteen minutes or more, you agree to disconnect it so that other active users will not encounter difficulty logging on. Adelphia does utilize detection programs to ensure that our customers are not keeping the connection open for prolonged periods when not in active use. In the event that such detection programs discover an open connection with no activity for thirty minutes, the connection will be automatically shut down. Active use is user-directed utilization of the connection for activities such as web browsing, e-mail, chat and file transfer. You must be physically at your computer to engage in active use. Use of automated programs to keep your connection open without your active involvement is prohibited. In the event of active involvement for twelve continuous hours, your connection will be automatically shut off.
===
So when they say No getting booted off and You get flat-rate unlimited Internet access they don't really mean it. This service would be totally unusable for a phone.
Schools are not laws.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Parents are required by law to send their children to school. (Home-schooling is the exception, and the National Educators' Association is trying to get it outlawed.) School boards pass "regulations" under which teachers are required to report certain offenses to the police. The police are required by law to investigate the complaints. Seems like "law" to me.
But in any case, here's your non-school example:
Laws are supposed to be specific in order to restrict police activity, not to require it.
There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances <snip inflammatory example> which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
What do you think "judge" means? It is to exercise judgement. Opinions like yours are why:
The courts are the last check against the enforcement of bad laws. (This should be the place of a jury, but appeals courts have taken the activity on for themselves.)
He compared the situation to "proprietary operating systems that run only on specific hardware designed and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. "Microsoft's Windows operating systems run on computers manufactured by thousands of different companies," he stated.
While you rightly make the point that the central bios and Intel's ubiquity may deserve more of the credit for that, you can't deny Microsoft did change the business model for computer manufacturers. Before them, everyone wanted to sell hardware. The OS was just what you had to include to make the hardware work. They were one of the first companies to base their success on selling the OS and let someone else deal with the hardware.
Through a combination of lucky breaks, good timing, shrewd long-range planning and incredibly effective marketing (okay, and a few good products thrown in along the way) they succeeded in commoditizing the developing PC hardware market. IBM had still planned on making the money from the hardware.
Now, despite immense natural barriers to entry, ever higher-range systems becoming commodities. As there are comparatively low barriers to entry in the software business, the only reasonable explanation for Microsoft's continued high margins is that they somehow artificially maintain high barriers. (Hmm, didn't a judge recently rule that this is exactly the case?)
Technology firms did not want to testify in the hearing, did not offer input while the bill was being drafted, and have offered plenty of criticism but little helpful suggestions since, a Hollings aide said.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
How much evidence does he need that we don't want it to work? It is a law designed to prevent people from engaging in legal activities, at the sole discretion of corporate interests with no oversight. That's why no, we're most definitely not trying to make it work.
We all hate the RIAA and MPAA, right? We always make the argument that they are trying to prohibit the first-sale doctrine, right? Why is it suddenly a bad thing when Amazon makes it more efficient to exercise your first-sale rights with books?
As with digital media, the real problem is that initial production and distribution in the current model presents too high a barrier to entry. The producers (record companies, publishers, etc.) end up making the lion's share of the money. We constantly make the argument that if musicians were able to cut out the record companies they would be able to make money even selling at a much lower price -- a price that more people would be willing to pay rather than filesharing.
It's time to apply that theory to book publishing. If authors were able to go to low volume, on-demand micropublishers instead of the large publishing houses, they could sell their books for a tenth the price and still make money. The market for used books would be much less, because at $3 for a new book, who wants to waste the money on shipping a used one?
I predict falling sales revenues for this guy. Wonder who he'll sue next to make up for that?
According to the article:
Novak, meanwhile, said he has further legal targets. One is the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York.
Who the hell is recruiting anybody anymore?
We are!
So where are you located, and where do I submit my resume?
Didn't seebs write something about managing hackers (and/or herding cats) that has much the same advice, has been around longer, and is more "truer to the cause" since it was written by one of us instead of a bunch of management professionals who claim to understand us?
Managment types don't listen to geeks. If they did, we wouldn't need books like this in the first place.
Let's assume we believe in the existence of a supreme being in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. What is His nature? To create the world and set the rules by which it functions, and then leave its inhabitants to exercise their free will within it.
And what is the nature of man? To strive to understand the rules by which nature works, and do everything in his power to exploit those rules to his own ends.
In short, it is the very nature of God to allow events to happen without his direct intervention. It is the very nature of man to attempt to control events.
"Playing God" would be letting someone die even though we can save him.
Let's say sattelite systems are allowed to carry whatever local channel feeds they want, wherever they want. Now you can get Des Moines news in New York and vice versa. Isn't that great?
Except that unless you have friends or family in Des Moines, you really don't have much reason to watch it. In fact, even if you are in Des Moines, there's a good chance you'll opt for the higher-quality news from somewhere else. The small, stations will probably lose more local viewers this way than they gain in distant viewers. Soon the national ad dollars will flow even more to the larger stations, and the resources (and quality) of the small ones will deteriorate even more.
This is just for news. How about the impact on local broadcasts of network feeds? No one will have any reason to watch those channels at all, and local ad dollars will dry up. Besides what this does for your local TV station, think about what it does for the mom-and-pop shops. They don't have the money to advertise on a national station -- which is what we'll end up with, one primary carrier of each network in each time zone -- and no one watches the local ones. The only companies with the resources to effectively advertise will be large national chains.
Just another step in the homogenization of America.
Linking to the kde.org ftp site before they've had a chance to mirror and announce it first is like bombing a hospital.
No it's not. It's not even close. If I really have to explain why, it wouldn't do you any good anyway.
This just cracks down on something that was already illegal--it really doesn't have anything to do with spam.
Even if that's true, what's wrong with the feds finally enforcing laws that have been skirted for years? The only thing wrong with the stories about this is the headlines. They should read: Feds finally creack down on long-running crime
As much as rolling this out will cost, it's still going to be less than rolling out high speed land lines. In places where local conditions (terrain, politics, the whims of Time Warner) make DSL or cable unavailable, this may be the way brodband finally comes to the consumer market in big numbers.
The most compelling reason to suspect this may happen is that you can do an incremental buildout. Put up a few cell towers in an area and sell service. As enough people sign up to demand more bandwidth, you can add towers. You can't do that with land lines.
From the EULA:
/system32 folders (if you're running Windoze)
You may terminate this Agreement at any time by ceasing use of the Software and Services and destroying or removing from all hard drives, networks, and other storage media all copies of the Software.
From a post above:
The program hides itself in different locations all over your hard drive, including copies of itself in your OS root and
It's a bitch and a half to purge. There's no unistaller, and it's got dozens of registry entries to manually erase.
So in order to terminate the agreement, you have to purge the program and all associated files from your system. Then they don't provide an uninstaller that makes it reasonably possible to actually do that. Perfect.
Ever heard of a mail cover? According to Law.com:
A mail cover consists of recording the information on the outside of all the mail delivered to the target home or business. It is done by the post office at the request of a local, state or federal law enforcement agency and lasts for one or more 30-day periods.
<snip>
... a mail cover doesn't need a judge's approval. Nor, as in wiretaps, are the targets of a mail cover eventually notified of the practice. The only way to learn about it is through discovery in a legal proceeding, if the lawyer asks the right questions.
And of course:
Its use has risen by more than half since the mid-1980s.
It's time people realized that surveillence isn't just about Carnivore and face recognition.
That guy has developed some kick-ass kernels.
You'd be amazed the number of free-registration-required sites you'll be able to get into using billg@microsoft.com and the zipcode in Redmond as a password.
Did yahoo send out an email telling everyone this had occured?
You got an email saying that their privacy policy had been changed and to click a link to go review your personal settings. I just happened to notice the marketing ones. So they can plausibly argue (in court) if they have to that they did tell users to go review the settings.
Or is this a marketing ploy of some sort?
Well of course it is.
The internet serves as a convenience in many ways, but I dont think this almost 10 year old (less in the corporate mind) bit of infrastructure has become crucial to us yet.
Think about any business that uses a PBX phone system. You may have 2,000 internal phone numbers, but only 500 outside lines. Suddenly the PBX goes down. Most likely your entire company loses communications. Within a couple of days you could have those 500 lines distributed to your workers, giving 1/4 of them direct lines. Then you have to worry about getting those hundreds of phone numbers out to every client and potential client.
Business use this scheme because it is much cheaper than having as many outside lines as employees. And it's more convenient to administer. Could businesses go on without it? Sure. But the short-term dislocation would be horrendous. It's the same with the internet. Those businesses that rely on it use it for cost and convenience. They could do without it, but the transition would be painful.
The need to ensure uptime was one reason Winnebago chose to run Linux on its mainframe. Last year, faced with an expensive upgrade to Exchange 2000, IT managers at the motor home and recreation vehicle manufacturer decided against the move and instead proposed running their e-mail system on Linux on the company's mainframe.
The company had success using Linux for domain name servers, Web serving and file sharing on its IBM S/390 mainframe running the Virtual Machine/Enterprise System Architecture operating system. After Winnebago officials decided they wanted their e-mail system on a reliable system, they chose to upgrade the company's mainframe, adding a second processor using IBM's virtualization technology, zVM, to run several Linux servers on a single mainframe.
They had the frame already, and just moved a new app onto it.
It requires you to pay for expensive experts.
And the other side of that coin is, "If you get an MCSE, we're busy telling your boss that you should work cheap." How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?