If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.
The fact that Oracle didn't do exactly that is really the strongest indication that Oracle really did have some anticompetitive intent with the acquisition. I can't really see what (nefarious schemes to kill it off would most likely be unsuccessful, as would locking it in, etc), but then I could never really see what Oracle could get out of the acquisition.
They're taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Oracle/Sun's coffers
Would Sun magically stop bleeding if the merger completed? Maybe if Ellison went 'k thanks oh btw you're all fired' on the first day. But really, in the short term I don't see the schedule of the merger really affecting the scale of the losses. The uncertainty of Suns customers wouldn't be ameliorated by having Oracle finalized as an owner, so pretty much the only thing that'd change would perhaps be the interest rate on some loans.
It simply isn't the EU that's causing the losses and they'd be there either way.
In a free market competition will drive margins towards zero. As software costs near zero to reproduce, the price of any mass-duplicated software in a free market (ie, barring any monopoly rights) will fall to near zero.
That is competing. That Microsoft fails to (or does not want to) keep it's own prices down to the free market price says more about Microsoft and what monopoly rights do to the efficiency of companies than anything else.
While one can feel sorry for the citizens of the Maldives, the simple fact is that it isn't very good long term planning to build permanent domiciles in a place which is 1.5 meters above what the water surface is at the moment. In many places that might leave you with your house submerged after a heavy rainfall. It's not an uncommon mistake, places from London through New Orleans and the Netherlands have been flooded and put partially under water from time to time.
In that light I'm not sure it's appropriate to regard it as lost revenue, but rather a limited time opportunity which can and has been exploited. If the long term viability of the investment beyond the short term opportunity was desired, then steps should be taken to protect the investment, as has been done elsewhere, but simply hoping for stable long term water levels does not constitute protecting your investment. Not there, nor anywhere else.
the designers of IPv6 would agree with Kapersky at least on a machine level
You may be misunderstanding the functionality of IPv6. NAT doesn't really affect the anonymity issue at all; for example, you could think of 6to4 as a more modern kind of NAT where the machines behind the gateway simply receive an extra number tag. This does not identify the specific machine; IPv6 addresses may often be based on MAC address, but that's just for convenience and autoconf, you can basically assign any number you feel like at any time. That means that a 6to4 address would be 2002:YourGates:IPv4address:user chosen subnet:any number you feel like and more:s. Which means you're not really giving away either more or less information than you were with NAT.
Personally I'd tend to agree with those peoples assessment; the only security gain you get from NAT is basically the equivalent of having a firewall blocking inbound connections by default. That should and would usually be the default either way, which means the practical effect of exchanging NAT for separate addressability would be a reduction in firewall rule complexity. Fewer things that can go wrong when you want to do anything more than just block everything.
Of course, from an economic view, IP legislation is very similar to taxation, except the tax rates on the specific monopoly products are set by private interests. (And with 5-20% efficiency, it's also a whole lot less efficient than most government run tax-financed programs).
IP isn't free. The wider it's applied and the harder it's enforced the more it costs the economy and IP is one of the reasons the west has difficulty competing with low-cost countries.
Just calling a taxation form 'property' doesn't make it so. So where's the representatives for those who will see their taxation burden increased even more?
The hardware and software responsible for controlling the emissions can't be trusted to ensure that on it's own. You need a separate system capable of verifying and aborting the radiation if it exceeds the (preferably separately entered and sanity-checked) parameters with a certain margin.
Of course, as the Therac-25 incident amply demonstrates, even if you've pushed all the right buttons and the machine says it's going to do exactly what you want it may instead proceed and do something entirely different. Probably better to irradiate the guy who decided not to have redundant independent shut-offs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, that's just the x-ray machine emitting unsigned int (-1) rads at you...
That's nowhere near enough, and might not have made any difference at all in either of these cases (at least in the Therac-25 case). Just because the software thinks it's giving a certain dose, it should be painfully obvious that what the the software thinks and claims is not reality. Which is pretty much how the Therac-25 failed and in multiple ways.
The minimum needed safety when dealing with machines or substances capable of emitting deadly doses of invisible radiation is that you have a second independent instrument verifying actual radiation levels and displaying those to the operator responsible (and preferably the patient as well, so at least one of them keeps track of what's actually the correct dosage), and preferably independently and automatically interrupting the process if the (separately entered) threshold is exceeded.
Heck, would these people step into Chernobyl without a dosimeter if they read on the internet that it was radiation free?
Piracy may be specifically hurting IP industries, but it's a net win for the economy. The dead weight loss caused by monopoly rights damages the economy as a whole, probably by amounts that dwarf the whole revenue of those industries, and only piracy mitigates that damage.
but it's not a good model to sustain the development and producment.
At the efficiency levels seen in the monopoly industries it's obvious that neither is monopoly a good model to sustain development and production. At about 5% efficiency, as in the music industry, it's even worse than the worst of government run programs. Others, like productivity software, have a level of fungibility which has at least had some competitive effect. None, however, demonstrate anything remotely like what an acceptable overhead should look like in a competitive industry and together the IP industries are an albatross around the neck of todays western economy.
Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.
This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something,
They do obviously have enough money to 'buy' it, as it costs nothing to reproduce. It's actually about people who want to keep prices up, and non-scarce goods scarce, to prevent some people from getting it. Keeping non-scarce goods scarce means you're damaging the economy and costing it wealth as a whole, which is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly economics, possibly costing the economy several times the entire revenue of the IP industries (every transaction that doesn't happen because consumer value is less than sales price means a loss to the economy of consumer value minus marginal cost (which is zero)).
decently priced sources
If they ever manage to reduce uncontrolled copying (which I don't think they will), you'll find that without piracy as the only actual competition, those decently priced sources will quickly become much more expensive.
I really doubt this service was ran without backups.
Knowing 'enterprise' backups I'd bet there was at least a backup client installed and running. However, I'm equally sure that the backups were, at best, tested once in a disaster recovery exercise and were otherwise never verified.
Further, responsibility would probably be shared between a storage department, a server operations department and an application management department, neatly ensuring that no single person or function is in the position to even know what data is supposed to be backed up, what limitations there are to ensure consistency (cold/hot/inc/etc), to monitor that that's actually what does happen and that it keeps happening as the application and server configuration evolves.
Backups of dubious value do not seem to be a rarity in enterprise settings.
As newspapers go out of business the value of the remaining ones will increase. It will mean more valuable advertising space, more readers, perhaps even a desire to pay for some more specialized news.
Professional reporting takes time and money, but there's a vast overproduction of it. In a world where everything is available everywhere, the scarcity is no longer in the available information, it's in the readers time to read such information.
The fact is, there isn't enough demand for hundreds of thousands of newspapers laying out AP feeds, putting a different logo on top and adding a local blurb about the diner fire. We don't need entire hotels filled with journalists covering large events. We can't read it all anyway.
So 'it's not going to happen' is exactly what we do need. When the Olympics are covered by a couple of dozen reporters and local translators, when the White House PR conference has five reporters, when 'local interest' items are covered by local interest, out of local interest, then we may be approaching a sustainable economic model in the newspaper business. The vast redundancies simply have to go.
And who knows, maybe once that capital is freed up, maybe someone could afford to hire one or two investigative reporters.
Yes, CICS and other mainframe-only software would fall under the GP's vendor lockin; my comment refers only to the hardware class and running generic software on Z series machines.
Today's mainframe isn't much different from your average tightly coupled HPC cluster, architecturally it's very similar to blades coupled with Infiniband connections. High end, but nowhere near special any more. IBM tries to keep the actual naming of components differentiated from what things are called in the rest of the industry, and appears to hammer down hard on any benchmarks that reach the world to avoid the risk of their customers accidentally making comparisons with commodity hardware, but most of it actually is commodity hardware.
So, for the actual customers that remain on the Z machines, the definition of a 'mainframe' is always a Z machine, and IBM is pretty much in a monopoly situation. If they weren't caught in the lock in those lock in issues you mention, and did actual in-depth comparisons, there are certainly vastly cheaper alternatives that outperform on every aspect today (virtualization being the last one, but paravirt Xen pretty much nailed that).
True, but the argument I'm making goes beside those points: morals aside, is profiling the person ever really useful for marketing? Or does the miss in temporal profiling mean you're always better off targeting the medium, which by its very nature hits both personal and temporal profile?
I'm not saying it's of no worth at all to target persons, but I suspect you'll always get a better ROI from temporal medium targeting, to the point where 'generic' advertisements are a waste of money that you could be spending on relevant forums instead. Is it ever valuable to know that someone bought a car, or has an interest in flowers and showing them cars or flowers when they're doing something else? Or is it always better to concentrate on the moments they're engaging in that particular interest?
For example, if I were reading about stirling engines and I saw an ad on the page for a cheap stirling engine kit,
Yep, but then they're profiling the page (I mentally lumped trade-rags, such as a site about stirling engines, into consumer info), which means that you'll have an interest in that at that particular moment. Profiling the activity rather than the person is pretty much targeting purchase related activities.
USB might not have to get genericized tho, as the words 'universal serial bus' are a pretty generic description from start. Merely using a TLA might not change that either.
The specific logos themselves would certainly be out of bound, but personally I can't say I've ever noted them; first thing I thought of as a logo was the USB trident, which I can't find any specific info on if it's actually trademarked (can't find one with (tm) on it, so I'd guess not).
So with universal serial bus probably available as a descriptive term, perhaps even TLA'd to USB, and possibly the trident, I suspect the actual USB logos may not be necessary. Certainly, with the way the USB-IF seems to have acted in this case, it appears that having their trademark may actually mean devices are less likely to interoperate with each other.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. I can generate ideas all day; formulate a problem, put a few people with relevant knowledge in a brainstorm, and you'll have more ideas for solution than you can shake a stick at.
The only value in allowing patents at all would be if nobody, confronted with the same problem, would publicise or distribute a solution to that problem within the duration of today's patents. With the speed and ease of information distribution today, it's becoming painfully obvious that this basically never happens; it might have seemed to work that way in times when exchanges of information took months or even years, yet even that would have been barely the case, considering the 'collisions' of simultaneous but unrelated duplicate inventions even back in the pre-electric era.
If it were perfectly targeted. yes. The trouble is, a system that can figure out what the viewer wants would figure out that what the viewer wants is to continue doing whatever they were doing, which, in many cases, was not watching ads or shopping.
Of course, that means that the only place it actually makes sense (for most companies) to place advertisements are price comparison, consumer info and shopping sites, which in turn creates somewhat of a problem for newspapers, TV, radio, billboards and similar non-purchase related advertising outlets.
His whole rant is based on the "fact" (assumed) that Hyper-V doesn't meet Nissan's needs.
While I'd normally doubt that a Microsoft solution meets anyones needs, I have to agree in this case. The article sounds mostly like a sales rant from VmWare.
To quote the article: "If you've never implemented virtualization, all the concepts, management tools, and interfaces will be unfamiliar. Whether it's Hyper-V or VMware, they're all wildly different from nonvirtualized computing."
Right. The concepts are about as new as 'processes', 'virtual memory' and 'management tools'; for anyone who's been around for more than a decade it's just another trip around the wheel. To hear VmWare talk about it one could imagine that there have been no tools that manage multiple machines before VIC.
don't spend $50 million on a virtualization solution,
A more insightful article should, indeed, have gone from there. It's not like it's hard to find clueless managers stuck in 2002 shoving VmWare down the throat of IT, despite there being far cheaper and more efficient virtualization products available by now.
so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
In my experience quality correlates much less with price than with recommendations, and I certainly cant say pay-for news is among the areas where the players have created such expectations.
we're going to get crappy, slanted news
Two crappy slanted articles disagreeing with one another often leave you with a better understanding of reality than one high quality (less obviously slanted) article. And anyone with an agenda can publish anything they want; that doesn't mean anyone will actually read or care about what they publish.
"Today an eight car pileup"
Today, going by the average numbers, 136 people were killed in traffic in the US. Does putting those accidents in the news actually add anything of interest or is that a typical example of excessive creation and dissemination of information in a distributed world? Does anyone not personally affected care at all? About one of them, about all of them? Is it so important that we should, as a society, use artificial economic barriers to promote the production and distribution of such information?
Information is no longer a scarce product in almost any sector, in fact, the readers time is most often much more scarce. News media needs a huge, massive die-off (or people need vast amounts of more free time), or there simply won't be anywhere near the demand levels needed to motivate any kind of beyond-market incentive for news production.
In the entertainment industry we often see an effect where the biggest productions often seem to struggle to break even
It's called Hollywood accounting and has very little to do with actual 'profits'. Small productions might also seem 'unprofitable', once they learn to have their Cayman Island subsidiary charge the project $500k for the producers porta-potty rental. Actual profits are simply funnelled to the desired destination by way of semi-internal charges for rents, distribution, marketing, consulting, etc, etc. As long as your costs are to yourself, nothing really has to make a profit...
And, of course, the monopoly rights industries are nothing like a competitive free market.
Either way I think it's premature to analyse the long tail to any extent. Copyright in itself drives the distortion of the market by encouraging excessive marketing and inordinate market control, creating an economic situation where it's better for the major players that people buy fewer products for more, than more products for less, and they do all they can, with a fair level of success, to push that market shape.
Eh, no. The primary purpose of copyright was to reward the friends of the crown in exchange for support in censorship and control. The English people needed protection from cheap and potentially dangerous books printed by the Scots. And paying friends through awarding monopolies confuses people more than outright taxing them and handing to proceeds to your buddies.
The fact that the creators get a miniscule percentage of the revenue is not a mistake; copyright is, and has always been designed that way on purpose. Had anyone of the involved parties actually given a damn about encouraging creators it would have been trivial to formulate a system with levies on sales where the majority of the revenue went directly to the creator.
And the general public doesn't really care anyway.
And filesharing will just move over to out-of-country VPN points of presence and/or f2f darknets. The enforcement capacity will quickly disappear if it ever goes all the way into actual law.
As a general rule, I'd suggest they're useful when you're not planning on inputting major amounts of data. Situations where you're better off without mouse and keyboard, tasks where you have only a few selections to make.
My kitchen table terminal (used mostly as a jukebox) could probably use it.
But for general desktop work it'd be mostly a step back. The display is often further from the keyboard than the mouse, you occlude the objects you touch, touch lacks the precision of a mouse, and even if you could enhance it by temporary zooms or such things, that's a solution looking for a problem. Etc. Added input tablets with display backgrounds might have some use in some professions, but it's not like tablets are a common part of the average desktop setup.
So I agree; there's a reason we haven't seen these kinds of sweeping changes to the desktop setup, and mainly it's because there hasn't been anything that'd actually work better in the common usage situation.
Slashdot Mirror
If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.
The fact that Oracle didn't do exactly that is really the strongest indication that Oracle really did have some anticompetitive intent with the acquisition. I can't really see what (nefarious schemes to kill it off would most likely be unsuccessful, as would locking it in, etc), but then I could never really see what Oracle could get out of the acquisition.
They're taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Oracle/Sun's coffers
Would Sun magically stop bleeding if the merger completed? Maybe if Ellison went 'k thanks oh btw you're all fired' on the first day. But really, in the short term I don't see the schedule of the merger really affecting the scale of the losses. The uncertainty of Suns customers wouldn't be ameliorated by having Oracle finalized as an owner, so pretty much the only thing that'd change would perhaps be the interest rate on some loans.
It simply isn't the EU that's causing the losses and they'd be there either way.
In a free market competition will drive margins towards zero. As software costs near zero to reproduce, the price of any mass-duplicated software in a free market (ie, barring any monopoly rights) will fall to near zero.
That is competing. That Microsoft fails to (or does not want to) keep it's own prices down to the free market price says more about Microsoft and what monopoly rights do to the efficiency of companies than anything else.
While one can feel sorry for the citizens of the Maldives, the simple fact is that it isn't very good long term planning to build permanent domiciles in a place which is 1.5 meters above what the water surface is at the moment. In many places that might leave you with your house submerged after a heavy rainfall. It's not an uncommon mistake, places from London through New Orleans and the Netherlands have been flooded and put partially under water from time to time.
In that light I'm not sure it's appropriate to regard it as lost revenue, but rather a limited time opportunity which can and has been exploited. If the long term viability of the investment beyond the short term opportunity was desired, then steps should be taken to protect the investment, as has been done elsewhere, but simply hoping for stable long term water levels does not constitute protecting your investment. Not there, nor anywhere else.
the designers of IPv6 would agree with Kapersky at least on a machine level
You may be misunderstanding the functionality of IPv6. NAT doesn't really affect the anonymity issue at all; for example, you could think of 6to4 as a more modern kind of NAT where the machines behind the gateway simply receive an extra number tag. This does not identify the specific machine; IPv6 addresses may often be based on MAC address, but that's just for convenience and autoconf, you can basically assign any number you feel like at any time. That means that a 6to4 address would be 2002:YourGates:IPv4address:user chosen subnet:any number you feel like and more:s. Which means you're not really giving away either more or less information than you were with NAT.
Personally I'd tend to agree with those peoples assessment; the only security gain you get from NAT is basically the equivalent of having a firewall blocking inbound connections by default. That should and would usually be the default either way, which means the practical effect of exchanging NAT for separate addressability would be a reduction in firewall rule complexity. Fewer things that can go wrong when you want to do anything more than just block everything.
Of course, from an economic view, IP legislation is very similar to taxation, except the tax rates on the specific monopoly products are set by private interests. (And with 5-20% efficiency, it's also a whole lot less efficient than most government run tax-financed programs).
IP isn't free. The wider it's applied and the harder it's enforced the more it costs the economy and IP is one of the reasons the west has difficulty competing with low-cost countries.
Just calling a taxation form 'property' doesn't make it so. So where's the representatives for those who will see their taxation burden increased even more?
If it breaks, it should emit zero.
The hardware and software responsible for controlling the emissions can't be trusted to ensure that on it's own. You need a separate system capable of verifying and aborting the radiation if it exceeds the (preferably separately entered and sanity-checked) parameters with a certain margin.
Of course, as the Therac-25 incident amply demonstrates, even if you've pushed all the right buttons and the machine says it's going to do exactly what you want it may instead proceed and do something entirely different. Probably better to irradiate the guy who decided not to have redundant independent shut-offs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, that's just the x-ray machine emitting unsigned int (-1) rads at you...
It should always start out low
That's nowhere near enough, and might not have made any difference at all in either of these cases (at least in the Therac-25 case). Just because the software thinks it's giving a certain dose, it should be painfully obvious that what the the software thinks and claims is not reality. Which is pretty much how the Therac-25 failed and in multiple ways.
The minimum needed safety when dealing with machines or substances capable of emitting deadly doses of invisible radiation is that you have a second independent instrument verifying actual radiation levels and displaying those to the operator responsible (and preferably the patient as well, so at least one of them keeps track of what's actually the correct dosage), and preferably independently and automatically interrupting the process if the (separately entered) threshold is exceeded.
Heck, would these people step into Chernobyl without a dosimeter if they read on the internet that it was radiation free?
But it's true that piracy is hurting the industry
Piracy may be specifically hurting IP industries, but it's a net win for the economy. The dead weight loss caused by monopoly rights damages the economy as a whole, probably by amounts that dwarf the whole revenue of those industries, and only piracy mitigates that damage.
but it's not a good model to sustain the development and producment.
At the efficiency levels seen in the monopoly industries it's obvious that neither is monopoly a good model to sustain development and production. At about 5% efficiency, as in the music industry, it's even worse than the worst of government run programs. Others, like productivity software, have a level of fungibility which has at least had some competitive effect. None, however, demonstrate anything remotely like what an acceptable overhead should look like in a competitive industry and together the IP industries are an albatross around the neck of todays western economy.
the legal right to produce
Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.
This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something,
They do obviously have enough money to 'buy' it, as it costs nothing to reproduce. It's actually about people who want to keep prices up, and non-scarce goods scarce, to prevent some people from getting it. Keeping non-scarce goods scarce means you're damaging the economy and costing it wealth as a whole, which is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly economics, possibly costing the economy several times the entire revenue of the IP industries (every transaction that doesn't happen because consumer value is less than sales price means a loss to the economy of consumer value minus marginal cost (which is zero)).
decently priced sources
If they ever manage to reduce uncontrolled copying (which I don't think they will), you'll find that without piracy as the only actual competition, those decently priced sources will quickly become much more expensive.
I really doubt this service was ran without backups.
Knowing 'enterprise' backups I'd bet there was at least a backup client installed and running. However, I'm equally sure that the backups were, at best, tested once in a disaster recovery exercise and were otherwise never verified.
Further, responsibility would probably be shared between a storage department, a server operations department and an application management department, neatly ensuring that no single person or function is in the position to even know what data is supposed to be backed up, what limitations there are to ensure consistency (cold/hot/inc/etc), to monitor that that's actually what does happen and that it keeps happening as the application and server configuration evolves.
Backups of dubious value do not seem to be a rarity in enterprise settings.
As newspapers go out of business the value of the remaining ones will increase. It will mean more valuable advertising space, more readers, perhaps even a desire to pay for some more specialized news.
Professional reporting takes time and money, but there's a vast overproduction of it. In a world where everything is available everywhere, the scarcity is no longer in the available information, it's in the readers time to read such information.
The fact is, there isn't enough demand for hundreds of thousands of newspapers laying out AP feeds, putting a different logo on top and adding a local blurb about the diner fire. We don't need entire hotels filled with journalists covering large events. We can't read it all anyway.
So 'it's not going to happen' is exactly what we do need. When the Olympics are covered by a couple of dozen reporters and local translators, when the White House PR conference has five reporters, when 'local interest' items are covered by local interest, out of local interest, then we may be approaching a sustainable economic model in the newspaper business. The vast redundancies simply have to go.
And who knows, maybe once that capital is freed up, maybe someone could afford to hire one or two investigative reporters.
Yes, CICS and other mainframe-only software would fall under the GP's vendor lockin; my comment refers only to the hardware class and running generic software on Z series machines.
Today's mainframe isn't much different from your average tightly coupled HPC cluster, architecturally it's very similar to blades coupled with Infiniband connections. High end, but nowhere near special any more. IBM tries to keep the actual naming of components differentiated from what things are called in the rest of the industry, and appears to hammer down hard on any benchmarks that reach the world to avoid the risk of their customers accidentally making comparisons with commodity hardware, but most of it actually is commodity hardware.
So, for the actual customers that remain on the Z machines, the definition of a 'mainframe' is always a Z machine, and IBM is pretty much in a monopoly situation. If they weren't caught in the lock in those lock in issues you mention, and did actual in-depth comparisons, there are certainly vastly cheaper alternatives that outperform on every aspect today (virtualization being the last one, but paravirt Xen pretty much nailed that).
True, but the argument I'm making goes beside those points: morals aside, is profiling the person ever really useful for marketing? Or does the miss in temporal profiling mean you're always better off targeting the medium, which by its very nature hits both personal and temporal profile?
I'm not saying it's of no worth at all to target persons, but I suspect you'll always get a better ROI from temporal medium targeting, to the point where 'generic' advertisements are a waste of money that you could be spending on relevant forums instead. Is it ever valuable to know that someone bought a car, or has an interest in flowers and showing them cars or flowers when they're doing something else? Or is it always better to concentrate on the moments they're engaging in that particular interest?
For example, if I were reading about stirling engines and I saw an ad on the page for a cheap stirling engine kit,
Yep, but then they're profiling the page (I mentally lumped trade-rags, such as a site about stirling engines, into consumer info), which means that you'll have an interest in that at that particular moment. Profiling the activity rather than the person is pretty much targeting purchase related activities.
USB might not have to get genericized tho, as the words 'universal serial bus' are a pretty generic description from start. Merely using a TLA might not change that either.
The specific logos themselves would certainly be out of bound, but personally I can't say I've ever noted them; first thing I thought of as a logo was the USB trident, which I can't find any specific info on if it's actually trademarked (can't find one with (tm) on it, so I'd guess not).
So with universal serial bus probably available as a descriptive term, perhaps even TLA'd to USB, and possibly the trident, I suspect the actual USB logos may not be necessary. Certainly, with the way the USB-IF seems to have acted in this case, it appears that having their trademark may actually mean devices are less likely to interoperate with each other.
The value of a novel idea is in the idea itself.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. I can generate ideas all day; formulate a problem, put a few people with relevant knowledge in a brainstorm, and you'll have more ideas for solution than you can shake a stick at.
The only value in allowing patents at all would be if nobody, confronted with the same problem, would publicise or distribute a solution to that problem within the duration of today's patents. With the speed and ease of information distribution today, it's becoming painfully obvious that this basically never happens; it might have seemed to work that way in times when exchanges of information took months or even years, yet even that would have been barely the case, considering the 'collisions' of simultaneous but unrelated duplicate inventions even back in the pre-electric era.
atleast its some interest to them then.
If it were perfectly targeted. yes. The trouble is, a system that can figure out what the viewer wants would figure out that what the viewer wants is to continue doing whatever they were doing, which, in many cases, was not watching ads or shopping.
Of course, that means that the only place it actually makes sense (for most companies) to place advertisements are price comparison, consumer info and shopping sites, which in turn creates somewhat of a problem for newspapers, TV, radio, billboards and similar non-purchase related advertising outlets.
His whole rant is based on the "fact" (assumed) that Hyper-V doesn't meet Nissan's needs.
While I'd normally doubt that a Microsoft solution meets anyones needs, I have to agree in this case. The article sounds mostly like a sales rant from VmWare.
To quote the article: "If you've never implemented virtualization, all the concepts, management tools, and interfaces will be unfamiliar. Whether it's Hyper-V or VMware, they're all wildly different from nonvirtualized computing."
Right. The concepts are about as new as 'processes', 'virtual memory' and 'management tools'; for anyone who's been around for more than a decade it's just another trip around the wheel. To hear VmWare talk about it one could imagine that there have been no tools that manage multiple machines before VIC.
don't spend $50 million on a virtualization solution,
A more insightful article should, indeed, have gone from there. It's not like it's hard to find clueless managers stuck in 2002 shoving VmWare down the throat of IT, despite there being far cheaper and more efficient virtualization products available by now.
so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
In my experience quality correlates much less with price than with recommendations, and I certainly cant say pay-for news is among the areas where the players have created such expectations.
we're going to get crappy, slanted news
Two crappy slanted articles disagreeing with one another often leave you with a better understanding of reality than one high quality (less obviously slanted) article. And anyone with an agenda can publish anything they want; that doesn't mean anyone will actually read or care about what they publish.
"Today an eight car pileup"
Today, going by the average numbers, 136 people were killed in traffic in the US. Does putting those accidents in the news actually add anything of interest or is that a typical example of excessive creation and dissemination of information in a distributed world? Does anyone not personally affected care at all? About one of them, about all of them? Is it so important that we should, as a society, use artificial economic barriers to promote the production and distribution of such information?
Information is no longer a scarce product in almost any sector, in fact, the readers time is most often much more scarce. News media needs a huge, massive die-off (or people need vast amounts of more free time), or there simply won't be anywhere near the demand levels needed to motivate any kind of beyond-market incentive for news production.
In the entertainment industry we often see an effect where the biggest productions often seem to struggle to break even
It's called Hollywood accounting and has very little to do with actual 'profits'. Small productions might also seem 'unprofitable', once they learn to have their Cayman Island subsidiary charge the project $500k for the producers porta-potty rental. Actual profits are simply funnelled to the desired destination by way of semi-internal charges for rents, distribution, marketing, consulting, etc, etc. As long as your costs are to yourself, nothing really has to make a profit...
And, of course, the monopoly rights industries are nothing like a competitive free market.
Either way I think it's premature to analyse the long tail to any extent. Copyright in itself drives the distortion of the market by encouraging excessive marketing and inordinate market control, creating an economic situation where it's better for the major players that people buy fewer products for more, than more products for less, and they do all they can, with a fair level of success, to push that market shape.
Eh, no. The primary purpose of copyright was to reward the friends of the crown in exchange for support in censorship and control. The English people needed protection from cheap and potentially dangerous books printed by the Scots. And paying friends through awarding monopolies confuses people more than outright taxing them and handing to proceeds to your buddies.
The fact that the creators get a miniscule percentage of the revenue is not a mistake; copyright is, and has always been designed that way on purpose. Had anyone of the involved parties actually given a damn about encouraging creators it would have been trivial to formulate a system with levies on sales where the majority of the revenue went directly to the creator.
And the general public doesn't really care anyway.
And filesharing will just move over to out-of-country VPN points of presence and/or f2f darknets. The enforcement capacity will quickly disappear if it ever goes all the way into actual law.
Yeah, I can see it for like Kiosks
As a general rule, I'd suggest they're useful when you're not planning on inputting major amounts of data. Situations where you're better off without mouse and keyboard, tasks where you have only a few selections to make.
My kitchen table terminal (used mostly as a jukebox) could probably use it.
But for general desktop work it'd be mostly a step back. The display is often further from the keyboard than the mouse, you occlude the objects you touch, touch lacks the precision of a mouse, and even if you could enhance it by temporary zooms or such things, that's a solution looking for a problem. Etc. Added input tablets with display backgrounds might have some use in some professions, but it's not like tablets are a common part of the average desktop setup.
So I agree; there's a reason we haven't seen these kinds of sweeping changes to the desktop setup, and mainly it's because there hasn't been anything that'd actually work better in the common usage situation.