Take a look at how much you think the cost of defining the project in great detail will be. And I mean great detail -- "a database with customers and stuff" will not get you what you want.
Then take a look at the cost of you managing the project. It's basically going to take all of your time for the whole project.
Add in the cost of QA-ing the results as they come in from overseas and sending bug reports back to India.
IMHO, as a professional consultant, the overhead of these tasks is much higher than the savings you can obtain. For example, a detailed requirements definition probably takes at least 50% of the cost of the project. Your management time is probably another 10% and the QA time is another (if you're lucky) 15%. That's 75% of time that the Indian's can't effectively help you with.
Even if you save 90% on the remaining 25% of the cost, you're only getting a 22.5% overall cost reduction. Maybe your requirements are already perfect so that 50% is really 25%. But you can't get any better than a 50% savings in that case.
If the actual programming is massive, it might be effective but most projects are much more about requirement definition than programming. So don't forget you're really only saving on the costs that can be outsourced.
This is the kind of crap that will alienate the comfortable majority of IT employees enough to start or join a union.
Why should IT workers accept less than their moron bosses?
Why should this person accept a 50% pay cut? Do you think public school teachers or Teamsters would?
One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless.
If there were a union, this company would be shut down right now.
Companies should be paying attention (and paying) the people with their hand on the switch. How long could a company last with a marketing work stoppage?
How long do you think they'd operate with an IT work stoppage?
It's time to stop abuses like these before you become "too old to be retrained", replaced by an indentured H1-B visa worker, or have your salary reduced to pay for the CEOs new manor house.
One thing I learned as a techie in business school is to think to the future in a different way. There's a classic story about Conrail or somesuch company:
B-school types asked Conrail: "What do you do?"
Conrail answered: "We run a train system."
The "correct" answer really was "We provide a service to move goods from one location to another." They doomed themselves by competing with train systems when they were competing with trucks and air freight as well.
What business are you in? Is it "programming", is it "collecting and codifying business rules", I don't know what the answer is but I'm pretty sure the bulk of the business of "conversion of business ideas into source code" is going overseas.
It's one of those "seeing the forest for the trees" problems. My point is that next year you'll have a job, the year after that you will, probably for the next 10 years you will.
But the Indians and Chinese are getting better and better at outsourced work. There's a huge information/cultural/communication gap now but don't think that will stand in the way 20 years from now.
"Programming" as a job is as dead as being a cobbler (that's a shoemaker for the verbally challenged).
On the other hand, there are a lot of idiots in business-land with a lack of analytic skills. Transitivity is where Dracula comes from to most pointy-heads. There are jobs utilizing the same analytic and logical skills -- your business is not "programming", it's "analysis" or "rule-based business structuring."
At first I was impressed with the speed Charter moved everyone onto their network (in Wisconsin) but I was just thinking that it's probably not all that difficult. But really it's pathetic that the expectation level for cable TV/telecom customer service makes us actually "impressed" when it simply works like it should.
Charter seems to have gotten its ducks in order far more quickly than I could imagine a cable company doing anything. Most Charter subscribers in our area have the option of "Charter Pipeline" -- another cable-based broadband service. Pipeline offers different prices for different speeds.
Most Charter @Home subscribers have received a CD with mysterious contents and been told to "install it." Looks like it has Outlook and a Charter-branded IE and some other mysterious software. A guy at Charter called me to make sure I received it and knew what to do -- he said my IPs shouldn't change so I'm not going to install anything until my connection gets bungled up.
Kudos to Charter if everything actually works tonight (and I'll be issuing a Buy recommendation on CHTR as well).
One of the best games for balanced strategy, IMHO, is Risk (the old board game). This site: Dominate had the best and most obsession-forming on-line version of the game. Unfortunately, some jerk made him take it off-line.
Many strategies in Risk are valid and can work. The on-line version had interesting options that even created new strategies.
It seems like when people try to design games that are too complex they become unbalanced. Why do you think chess has lasted so long? Not because people didn't try creating different games but because it's well-balanced.
I'm really surprised that nobody has pointed out the obvious security problems besides the potential for your information to be leaked.
.NET exposes programming APIs through HTTP.
Does anyone think this INCREASES security? This increases the complexity of the exposed interface by quite a bit. Instead of having code that handles GET and PUT requests, you now have arbitrary functions exposed.
Not only that but it's easy to create SOAP objects and "publish" them. Any monkey with a VB book can do it.
Microsoft can't even keep IIS secure. How in hell are they going secure gazoodles of.NET services? The whole.NET is, IMHO, a security clusterf--k waiting to happen.
Handy for when you have your PDA in your shirt pocket and bend over the john to pull your pants off -- plop.
Re:Another big brother checking in.
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 1
This does not, of course verify that you have the phone in your posession. Dial your answering machine, tape your phone to the bottom of a bus going to Chicago (unless you're in Chicago in which case if you tape it to that bus, you're an idiot), and go on a killing spree.
"I was on a bus to Chicago talking with my roommate for hours. Check the cell phone locator records."
My wife and I "subscribe" to a Community Supported Farm which, for about $25 or $50 per month spread throughout the year, you receive a box of organic produce biweekly or weekly, respectively. Said box contains whatever they plant and whatever's in season at the moment.
Having been a normal supermarket shopper until a few years ago, these boxes contain spectacular produce. Nobody usually remembers that tomatoes aren't supposed to be hard, bright red and crunchy (or pasty).
Anyway the point is, they've had blue/purple potatoes in that box for years -- probably not the resistant kind. They're good and kind of fun to eat.
Beyond that, there are all kinds of funky tomatoes you've never seen. Last week we got these green tomatoes that were striped kind of like a watermelon. They were tart yet ripe -- really neat. There's yellow ones all gnarled up that are really good, orange, red, of all shapes and sizes.
All kinds of other funky foods come. Did you know there are many types of garlic some of which really are better than the standard grocery store Italian? Ever had a ground cherry (a bit like a tomatillo but sweet)?
The point is, there's a lot of "odd" foods out there that really aren't odd at all. We've just never seen them because it's so much easier to grow a field of identical, drought-resistant, disease-resistant, shipping-friendly idaho spuds than anything else. I encourage people to support their local farmer's markets and try Community Supported Agriculture -- not only is it earth-friendly but you get cool vegetables as well!
The coil is some kind of induction coil under your skin that you stick an outside "inducer" onto which has wires to a battery you wear or carry around.
There's some kind of backup battery inside your body that lasts like 10-15 minutes and beeps if you remove the inducer.
The heart has been tested in a lab to beat for the equivalent of something like 35 years but don't forget your battery!
Microsoft's strategy in the past couple of years has gone like this over time:
First, deny that Linux and open source is useful or of acceptable quality
A bit later, begin to show how MS is really more cost effective and better software by doing direct comparisons.
Now attack open source directly.
MS is running scared right now. If they're openly attacking, that's pretty much the last resort of a marketing campaign. The first two strategies didn't work and this is all that's left. It's like negative campaigns for candidates that happen right before the election.
I think their internal estimates and thoughts show they're in trouble from open source.
There are still places in the country where unemployment is so low that ANYONE gets hired. I happen to live in such a place and one result is that customer service absolutely sucks.
Not only is unemployment low in these places but so is the cost of living. Not only that, they still pay high salaries to IT folks because there just aren't enough to go around.
My point is that San Francisco is really great (unless like 95% of folks there you live by a mini-mall outside of the city proper) but go where the jobs are. Awww it's not a big city and it's cold in the winter. Too bad.
If you are a good programmer with 2 years experience in Java/C++, there are jobs going begging. I know because I try to fill them with consultants but they want FTEs. If you are the aforementioned programmer, you'll probably start at $60k. A house in a good neighborhood starts at $140k.
You might be not be working on the sexiest of software but you'll be working. This stuff is no big secret -- look on Monster or Hotjobs. Duh!
States to think about: Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota.
Send me an email if you're good and want to find out more.
I think many techies do indeed fit the bill of being introverted folks who never say anything at meetings but then later constantly bitch about how insanely stupid that decision was.
Being in my last few weeks of an evening MBA program and having an M.S. in C.S. and going on 10 years of experience working, my opinion is that it builds "Emotional I.Q." And yes it's a recent and questionable measurement (and why isn't the acronym E.I.Q. not E.Q?)
Anyway, it has helped me understand the perspective of others in business. Why is the marking person making what appears to be a stupid decision? Maybe it is and maybe it isn't but at least I can understand why they're thinking that.
By understanding what business-ey folks are thinking about, you can wield your analytic skills combined with business to move projects and people where you think they should be. It's also fun to relate to people in terms of things they're interested in.
An MBA for me is a tool that helps me know more and empathize with people rather than grouse about the irritating projects coming out of sales.
Further, I agree much of it is about networking. I do not believe, however that you can pick up a book and learn it all in a couple of months.
When laws such as copyright and patent become misused in idiotic ways, the masses will simply ignore them in what amounts to large scale civil disobedience.
The danger of patents like these is not, IMHO, that someone is going to ask you to pay a license fee for your two line Perl program that uses checksumming but that when you really invent something original and worthwhile, patent protection will have been rendered meaningless by people simply ignoring it.
This posting is Copyright (C) 2001 Mr November Enterprises.
By viewing this posting you are agreeing to abide by the following license terms. For each copy you make of this posting including those in buffers used by TCP/IP, video ram, web browser caches, printed material, and dynamic ram, you agree to pay $.20 per copy to Mr November Enterprises. For the duration of the time copies of this remain in any form in your possession (including the time any parts of this posting are digitally encoded on any telephone or telecommunication line in your control) you agree to pay $.0025 per minute per distinct copy to Mr November Enterprises. If you provide access to this posting via a web page "link" or another type of reference you agree to pay a fee of $1.50 per distinct link or reference to Mr November Enterprises. Should you choose to create works derived from this posting including any work utilizing letters, words, phrases, concepts or any other aspect of this posting you agree to pay a license fee of $.05 per copy of your derivative work. You agree to accept responsibility for the tracking of and billing for derived copies. You further agree to maintain detailed records of any and all copies or derivative works and useage thereof of this posting and submit those records on a weekly basis to Mr November Enterprises along with payment as described. You further agree to accept unlimited liability with respect to violation of this agreement and understand that a single violation of this agreement may have significant adverse financial impact on Mr November Enterpises.
Note that we are only "halfway" through the revolution. IMHO, we're through the part that could be considered technological evolution. The second half may be socio-political.
No other technology has enabled so many to publish and connect with so many others. The net is a technological revolution on the order of the printing press. The printing press was a powerful tool in revolutions by allowing ideas to be widely disseminated. The net is similar but also allows interaction between thousands or millions of individuals.
The government/corporate oligarchy rightly fears this new techology because it allows truly free discussion and organization unfettered by physical constraints such as a public meeting area. Obviously the net is owned but should it be? Should corporations be able to use courts to shut undesireable web sites down? Should the goverment have the right to restrict digital speech?
The answers to these questions should be based on natural rights of people and not the profit rights of corporations and their pseudo-elected government lackeys. The U.S. is our country and the government is there to do our will. When the government ceases to represent the people as it seems to have in terms of the net, there will be a revolution.
Hasn't something the government has done recently infringe on your net freedom? Hasn't it bothered you? Think about at what point government regulations restricting your net freedom will anger you enough to write your senator; at what point they will anger you enough to wear a "freedom" t-shirt to a state-house rally; at what point will they anger you enough to throw rocks? What happens when you can discuss your feelings and thoughts with thousands of others disenfranchised by our current corporate oligarchy?
It sounds paranoid but the government/corporations fear (consciously or not) the new freedom granted by the net and may not stop their mild regulation until what was mild becomes full-scale repression of people like us. Then might not the consequence of invention of the net be a revolution?
It seems to me that the furor of the music/video industry over copyrights is no different from that of earlier innovations (as Lessig refers to). IMHO, the music/video industry is making a mountain out of a molehill.
About thirty years ago it became possible and easily accessible for anyone to copy an entire book on a copier. They could then bind it and voila, a "free" book. This did not herald the end of the publishing industry. My opinion is that, although easy to do, it's not worth the time/cost of doing. It may be that this ability reduced the cost of books to consumers; if a book cost $34,000 one might consider copying and binding it.
Twenty years ago it became fairly simple for someone to copy software using cracking utilities or just a disk copy. Did this begin the downfall of the software industry? At that time, the software industry believed it would but ultimately people continue to buy software. Most readers of Slashdot can find a crack for a demo program and use it. But your cracked demo usually is somehow not quite as good as the purchased version -- there might be stray lines in some graphics or some driver is not supported. It's usually easier and cheaper in terms of time to buy the CD, stick it in and hit install than modify some DLL with a hex editor. Again it is likely that the ability to copy puts downward pressure on software prices which is good for consumers.
The most recent developments make it possible, for example, to obtain almost any song and play it at near-CD quality. Woe to the music industry! Of course using Napster you have to find the song, wait in a queue for your download to begin, then hope that your song wasn't encoded by some ninny at 20kbps or stops before the last 20 seconds. If, on the other hand, you could say "Stairway to Heaven" into your remote control and 5 seconds later it downloads (and can be replayed ad infinitum) to your Sony MP3 Jukebox thanks to your gigabit connection to Columbia House wouldn't it just be easier to pay $.003?
My point is that the result of these new technologies has not and will not result in ruination of an industry. Instead it will result in lower consumer prices and _possibly_ lowered profits for some copyright-based industries. The RIAA and Hollywood have no right to force profit-protection legislation on consumers. They simply need to make it easier for consumers to buy music/video than to copy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at how much you think the cost of defining the project in great detail will be. And I mean great detail -- "a database with customers and stuff" will not get you what you want.
Then take a look at the cost of you managing the project. It's basically going to take all of your time for the whole project.
Add in the cost of QA-ing the results as they come in from overseas and sending bug reports back to India.
IMHO, as a professional consultant, the overhead of these tasks is much higher than the savings you can obtain. For example, a detailed requirements definition probably takes at least 50% of the cost of the project. Your management time is probably another 10% and the QA time is another (if you're lucky) 15%. That's 75% of time that the Indian's can't effectively help you with.
Even if you save 90% on the remaining 25% of the cost, you're only getting a 22.5% overall cost reduction. Maybe your requirements are already perfect so that 50% is really 25%. But you can't get any better than a 50% savings in that case.
If the actual programming is massive, it might be effective but most projects are much more about requirement definition than programming. So don't forget you're really only saving on the costs that can be outsourced.
Why should IT workers accept less than their moron bosses?
Why should this person accept a 50% pay cut? Do you think public school teachers or Teamsters would?
One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless.
If there were a union, this company would be shut down right now.
Companies should be paying attention (and paying) the people with their hand on the switch. How long could a company last with a marketing work stoppage?
How long do you think they'd operate with an IT work stoppage?
It's time to stop abuses like these before you become "too old to be retrained", replaced by an indentured H1-B visa worker, or have your salary reduced to pay for the CEOs new manor house.
B-school types asked Conrail: "What do you do?"
Conrail answered: "We run a train system."
The "correct" answer really was "We provide a service to move goods from one location to another." They doomed themselves by competing with train systems when they were competing with trucks and air freight as well.
What business are you in? Is it "programming", is it "collecting and codifying business rules", I don't know what the answer is but I'm pretty sure the bulk of the business of "conversion of business ideas into source code" is going overseas.
It's one of those "seeing the forest for the trees" problems. My point is that next year you'll have a job, the year after that you will, probably for the next 10 years you will.
But the Indians and Chinese are getting better and better at outsourced work. There's a huge information/cultural/communication gap now but don't think that will stand in the way 20 years from now.
"Programming" as a job is as dead as being a cobbler (that's a shoemaker for the verbally challenged).
On the other hand, there are a lot of idiots in business-land with a lack of analytic skills. Transitivity is where Dracula comes from to most pointy-heads. There are jobs utilizing the same analytic and logical skills -- your business is not "programming", it's "analysis" or "rule-based business structuring."
Change now or become a cobbler.
At first I was impressed with the speed Charter moved everyone onto their network (in Wisconsin) but I was just thinking that it's probably not all that difficult. But really it's pathetic that the expectation level for cable TV/telecom customer service makes us actually "impressed" when it simply works like it should.
Most Charter @Home subscribers have received a CD with mysterious contents and been told to "install it." Looks like it has Outlook and a Charter-branded IE and some other mysterious software. A guy at Charter called me to make sure I received it and knew what to do -- he said my IPs shouldn't change so I'm not going to install anything until my connection gets bungled up.
Kudos to Charter if everything actually works tonight (and I'll be issuing a Buy recommendation on CHTR as well).
Will someone please help me? I am trying to install Linux in VMWare on Windows running in VMWare on Linux runnin in VMWare on Windows running...
I just can't get anything done -- when do I stop? Someone please reset me.
had the best and most obsession-forming on-line version of the game. Unfortunately, some jerk made him take it off-line.
Many strategies in Risk are valid and can work. The on-line version had interesting options that even created new strategies.
It seems like when people try to design games that are too complex they become unbalanced. Why do you think chess has lasted so long? Not because people didn't try creating different games but because it's well-balanced.
Does anyone think this INCREASES security? This increases the complexity of the exposed interface by quite a bit. Instead of having code that handles GET and PUT requests, you now have arbitrary functions exposed.
Not only that but it's easy to create SOAP objects and "publish" them. Any monkey with a VB book can do it.
Microsoft can't even keep IIS secure. How in hell are they going secure gazoodles of
I move we petition for disallowing use of IE on Slashdot.
Won't Microsoft be crying when Slashdot allows only VMS Lynx and HP/UX Mosaic?
Handy for when you have your PDA in your shirt pocket and bend over the john to pull your pants off -- plop.
This does not, of course verify that you have the phone in your posession. Dial your answering machine, tape your phone to the bottom of a bus going to Chicago (unless you're in Chicago in which case if you tape it to that bus, you're an idiot), and go on a killing spree.
"I was on a bus to Chicago talking with my roommate for hours. Check the cell phone locator records."
My wife and I "subscribe" to a Community Supported Farm which, for about $25 or $50 per month spread throughout the year, you receive a box of organic produce biweekly or weekly, respectively. Said box contains whatever they plant and whatever's in season at the moment.
Having been a normal supermarket shopper until a few years ago, these boxes contain spectacular produce. Nobody usually remembers that tomatoes aren't supposed to be hard, bright red and crunchy (or pasty).
Anyway the point is, they've had blue/purple potatoes in that box for years -- probably not the resistant kind. They're good and kind of fun to eat.
Beyond that, there are all kinds of funky tomatoes you've never seen. Last week we got these green tomatoes that were striped kind of like a watermelon. They were tart yet ripe -- really neat. There's yellow ones all gnarled up that are really good, orange, red, of all shapes and sizes.
All kinds of other funky foods come. Did you know there are many types of garlic some of which really are better than the standard grocery store Italian? Ever had a ground cherry (a bit like a tomatillo but sweet)?
The point is, there's a lot of "odd" foods out there that really aren't odd at all. We've just never seen them because it's so much easier to grow a field of identical, drought-resistant, disease-resistant, shipping-friendly idaho spuds than anything else. I encourage people to support their local farmer's markets and try Community Supported Agriculture -- not only is it earth-friendly but you get cool vegetables as well!
There's some kind of backup battery inside your body that lasts like 10-15 minutes and beeps if you remove the inducer.
The heart has been tested in a lab to beat for the equivalent of something like 35 years but don't forget your battery!
First, deny that Linux and open source is useful or of acceptable quality
A bit later, begin to show how MS is really more cost effective and better software by doing direct comparisons.
Now attack open source directly.
MS is running scared right now. If they're openly attacking, that's pretty much the last resort of a marketing campaign. The first two strategies didn't work and this is all that's left. It's like negative campaigns for candidates that happen right before the election.
I think their internal estimates and thoughts show they're in trouble from open source.
Not only is unemployment low in these places but so is the cost of living. Not only that, they still pay high salaries to IT folks because there just aren't enough to go around.
My point is that San Francisco is really great (unless like 95% of folks there you live by a mini-mall outside of the city proper) but go where the jobs are. Awww it's not a big city and it's cold in the winter. Too bad.
If you are a good programmer with 2 years experience in Java/C++, there are jobs going begging. I know because I try to fill them with consultants but they want FTEs. If you are the aforementioned programmer, you'll probably start at $60k. A house in a good neighborhood starts at $140k.
You might be not be working on the sexiest of software but you'll be working. This stuff is no big secret -- look on Monster or Hotjobs. Duh!
States to think about: Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota.
Send me an email if you're good and want to find out more.
Being in my last few weeks of an evening MBA program and having an M.S. in C.S. and going on 10 years of experience working, my opinion is that it builds "Emotional I.Q." And yes it's a recent and questionable measurement (and why isn't the acronym E.I.Q. not E.Q?)
Anyway, it has helped me understand the perspective of others in business. Why is the marking person making what appears to be a stupid decision? Maybe it is and maybe it isn't but at least I can understand why they're thinking that.
By understanding what business-ey folks are thinking about, you can wield your analytic skills combined with business to move projects and people where you think they should be. It's also fun to relate to people in terms of things they're interested in.
An MBA for me is a tool that helps me know more and empathize with people rather than grouse about the irritating projects coming out of sales.
Further, I agree much of it is about networking. I do not believe, however that you can pick up a book and learn it all in a couple of months.
The danger of patents like these is not, IMHO, that someone is going to ask you to pay a license fee for your two line Perl program that uses checksumming but that when you really invent something original and worthwhile, patent protection will have been rendered meaningless by people simply ignoring it.
By viewing this posting you are agreeing to abide by the following license terms. For each copy you make of this posting including those in buffers used by TCP/IP, video ram, web browser caches, printed material, and dynamic ram, you agree to pay $.20 per copy to Mr November Enterprises. For the duration of the time copies of this remain in any form in your possession (including the time any parts of this posting are digitally encoded on any telephone or telecommunication line in your control) you agree to pay $.0025 per minute per distinct copy to Mr November Enterprises. If you provide access to this posting via a web page "link" or another type of reference you agree to pay a fee of $1.50 per distinct link or reference to Mr November Enterprises. Should you choose to create works derived from this posting including any work utilizing letters, words, phrases, concepts or any other aspect of this posting you agree to pay a license fee of $.05 per copy of your derivative work. You agree to accept responsibility for the tracking of and billing for derived copies. You further agree to maintain detailed records of any and all copies or derivative works and useage thereof of this posting and submit those records on a weekly basis to Mr November Enterprises along with payment as described. You further agree to accept unlimited liability with respect to violation of this agreement and understand that a single violation of this agreement may have significant adverse financial impact on Mr November Enterpises.
Thank you!
Mr November Enterpises
Copyright (C) 2001 Mr November Enterprises
No other technology has enabled so many to publish and connect with so many others. The net is a technological revolution on the order of the printing press. The printing press was a powerful tool in revolutions by allowing ideas to be widely disseminated. The net is similar but also allows interaction between thousands or millions of individuals.
The government/corporate oligarchy rightly fears this new techology because it allows truly free discussion and organization unfettered by physical constraints such as a public meeting area. Obviously the net is owned but should it be? Should corporations be able to use courts to shut undesireable web sites down? Should the goverment have the right to restrict digital speech?
The answers to these questions should be based on natural rights of people and not the profit rights of corporations and their pseudo-elected government lackeys. The U.S. is our country and the government is there to do our will. When the government ceases to represent the people as it seems to have in terms of the net, there will be a revolution.
Hasn't something the government has done recently infringe on your net freedom? Hasn't it bothered you? Think about at what point government regulations restricting your net freedom will anger you enough to write your senator; at what point they will anger you enough to wear a "freedom" t-shirt to a state-house rally; at what point will they anger you enough to throw rocks? What happens when you can discuss your feelings and thoughts with thousands of others disenfranchised by our current corporate oligarchy?
It sounds paranoid but the government/corporations fear (consciously or not) the new freedom granted by the net and may not stop their mild regulation until what was mild becomes full-scale repression of people like us. Then might not the consequence of invention of the net be a revolution?
About thirty years ago it became possible and easily accessible for anyone to copy an entire book on a copier. They could then bind it and voila, a "free" book. This did not herald the end of the publishing industry. My opinion is that, although easy to do, it's not worth the time/cost of doing. It may be that this ability reduced the cost of books to consumers; if a book cost $34,000 one might consider copying and binding it.
Twenty years ago it became fairly simple for someone to copy software using cracking utilities or just a disk copy. Did this begin the downfall of the software industry? At that time, the software industry believed it would but ultimately people continue to buy software. Most readers of Slashdot can find a crack for a demo program and use it. But your cracked demo usually is somehow not quite as good as the purchased version -- there might be stray lines in some graphics or some driver is not supported. It's usually easier and cheaper in terms of time to buy the CD, stick it in and hit install than modify some DLL with a hex editor. Again it is likely that the ability to copy puts downward pressure on software prices which is good for consumers.
The most recent developments make it possible, for example, to obtain almost any song and play it at near-CD quality. Woe to the music industry! Of course using Napster you have to find the song, wait in a queue for your download to begin, then hope that your song wasn't encoded by some ninny at 20kbps or stops before the last 20 seconds. If, on the other hand, you could say "Stairway to Heaven" into your remote control and 5 seconds later it downloads (and can be replayed ad infinitum) to your Sony MP3 Jukebox thanks to your gigabit connection to Columbia House wouldn't it just be easier to pay $.003?
My point is that the result of these new technologies has not and will not result in ruination of an industry. Instead it will result in lower consumer prices and _possibly_ lowered profits for some copyright-based industries. The RIAA and Hollywood have no right to force profit-protection legislation on consumers. They simply need to make it easier for consumers to buy music/video than to copy it.