One reason that parallel programming is hard is simple: lots of things can't be parallelized effectively. The computer is really doing one thing, namely, waiting for input (ie: the app is user-bound). If your app isn't user bound, then parallelism is possible.
If your app isn't user bound, it should be pretty easy to parallelize, assuming that your processing stream isn't serialized (ie: the does a result depends on the previous result?). The problem then becomes contention. For some reason, lots of developers can't wrap their heads around threading and contention issues. Maybe it's been presented incorrectly in textbooks, or something like that. People have problems programming asynchronously as well. Maybe that's the problem?
Anyhow, once you figure out the contention issue, then there are all kinds of other things you have to deal with, like asynchronous status notification. Timeouts. Data that never comes back. Unexpected termination. Data coherency. Read and write locking. Synchronization.
In the end, sometimes it's easier to break your data set up into chunks and spawn a couple of processes in the background, then use cat to aggregate the data sets. It's definitely easier to do it that way (ie: not a lot of mental lifting involved).
Most developers don't care about scalability. The ones that do parallelize. The ones that don't don't.
There's a big outsourcer located right outside of Dallas. Anyway, they had just installed this fancy GUI to manage their LPARs. These LPARs, BTW, were the running ridiculously important financial things (that's a technical term).
So the senior tech needed to take down an LPAR for maintenance. He goes to the GUI, clicks the shutdown button, and clicks a bunch of buttons that say 'OK'.
Of course, each one of those 'OK' buttons is asking him whether to shut down an LPAR...which means that he just shuts down all the LPARs on their 360.
Needless to say, he was scheduled for more training ASAP.
Some companies learn lessons the hard way - by failing. Apple's had a number of large failures, but has managed to learn from those failures and make better things with higher margins.
Most companies in the tech industry can't handle more than one or two failures; they tend to go bankrupt. Those companies that survive product failures tend to try and forget about them instead of learn from them. For example, Microsoft could have learned a lot from Micrsoft Bob, if they so desired. Instead, they buried old Bob in the back and abandoned all attempts to do any radical user interface changes for Windows.
Apple, on the other hand, has a large number of failures to draw from, all of which are extensively documented. Apple also has a large number of successes, most of which probably haven't been documented enough. Why has the iPod really succeeded? Why and how has Mac OS X (and the Mac) been an unstoppable locomotive of progress?
The Enterprise market is smaller than you think, and requires substantial investments with questionable returns. Allowing developers onto your platform incurrs substantial support and infrastructure costs. Enterprise demands also tend to warp your perspective, as large accounts exert greater leverage on the development process than thousands of individuals. They also don't pay retail, and tend to demand substantial up-front and back-end discounts.
Apple has bypassed this in a simple manner, with a simple question: why have your enterprise apps on the phone when you have a live browser connection? If you can get to salesforce.com, google apps, and your custom web-enabled apps, who cares whether you can install a binary or not? In fact, not having to install anything is much better - no management issues. It's the freaking web, already. Everything that's important has been webified. Anything that isn't yet will be in 5 years. Everything that isn't nobody cares about.
The only "enterprise" feature of the iPhone would be the ability to hard-wire it to your corporate network instead of using the public network. That's it. If the iPhone can do that, then the internal IT guys can do the rest.
Just buy yourself a freaking monitor and bring it to work. A good widescreen monitor is only about $200. If you're lucky, you'll have an extra video out on your machine. If not, then pick up a crappy video card.
If it'll make your life that much easier, don't wait for your employer to do it; just do it yourself. Why are you waiting for your boss to approve of it?
Buried in the article was an interesting idea from the record companies themselves: instead of being the channel, they'd morph into more of a fan club model.
That's a great idea, but they should go one step further.
The main problem for record companies is that the record company, for the most part, is not the brand - the artist is. The artist is what's promoted, etc. What would be better, from the record company point of view, is if they had a whole bunch of sub-labels, all of which have their own genre/style/sound/whatever.
Then, you'd know that you like the stuff coming out of a label, because all their stuff was the style you like.
It used to be like this in the old days, where a label like Blue Note would have a whole lot of good jazz, or Elektra Nonesuch had good classical. I knew people that would buy everything that EN put out.
Combine that with a subscription service (or music club, cd-by-mail thing I guess) and suddenly you not only have a business model, you have a core group of consumers that are committed to your label - not your artitst. That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
Will it lead to the homogenization of the music industry? Who cares? It's already freaking homogenized!
It might make smaller players more viable because as a botique subscription music company you have a guaranteed revenue stream with no distribution overhead (except for the overhead you want). You can budget, plan, and not worry as much about the next payroll.
Ideally you'd have a third-party doing the fulfillment, so all you have to do is find acts that your subscribers might like.
It's interesting to think about, but finding that much talent would be difficult. No matter what people say, there isn't that much talent out there.
This is the first time I've ever read a news report that shows Greenpeace doing something besides political grandstanding. They actually went out and hired someone to do an analysis of the data. Maybe this is the start of a new trend - results-oriented activism, as opposed to the feel-good activism of the past.
Music bought from iTunes can only be used on iTunes compatible hardware.
How different is this from Pay-Per-View or premium movie channels? How different is FairPlay from, say, Macrovision?
With PPV, you bought the movie. But that doesn't mean you can watch it forever. In fact, due to Macrovision, you may not be able to record it at all (assuming your VHS, DVR, or recording device honors Macrovision).
Whether this is right or wrong is irrelevant. The principle exists. You can only watch your PPV movie on a device with the PPV hardware. Just because that PPV hardware is from different vendors doesn't matter - the spec is controlled by PPV (and the STB client is most likely written by PPV).
This DRM lock-in stuff is silly; DRM type lock-ins have been around forever in one form or another. "Why doesn't this damn CD fit in my 8-track player?"
How big is the high-end of the cellphone market? If you don't live in Asia or Europe, you might be surprised that the high-end is a lot bigger than you think.
Have you ever been in a Virtu store? Do you have any idea how many of these phones they sell? You probably don't. Why not? Because you're not the market. You don't hear about it because, frankly, you don't have enough money to buy one. And if you did have enough money, you wouldn't think it was worth it.
The fact is, the high end is filled with people who think, live, act, and make decisions differently than you do. There is no tradeoff between cost and anything else. In fact, cost doesn't exist - at that level, it's time that matters, not cost. You can always make money; it's time that you can't get back.
For this market, $600 is nothing. Does it make your live easier or better? If so, then it's worth it. Life is too short to use crappy products that aggravate you.
The only question, really is: is there enough of a high-end market out there? The answer is simple: yes. People bought iPods because they were easy, simple, and did the job. The iPhone won't be any different.
Again, this question isn't the right question. DRM is not interoperable. Using the word "interoperable" is deliberately confusing, because DRM by definition isn't interoperable. It's a method of restriction, not an operatable thing per se.
The operative word is "third party licensed."
Audible.com is licensed to multiple vendors. How have those vendors done? Besides the iPod, Audible.com's DRM is licensed to a number of other players. Has it been a major factor in anyone's purchase? Possibly, if they want to listen to audible.com content.
WMA/Plays for Sure is licensed to multiple vendors. How have those vendors done? The market has spoken.
Zune WMA isn't licensed. The market is in the process of working out how the Zune is doing, but the prognosis isn't good.
FairPlay isn't licensed. The iPod is doing great.
The iPod is reallly a good example of what's called a "Network Effect Monopoly." People buy iPods because it has the most accessories. The iPod has the most accessories because people buy iPods. Etc etc etc. eBay is the same: people sell on eBay because the buyers are there. The buyers are there because everyone sells on eBay. Ad infinitum.
Will licensing FairPlay change this? No. If Apple licenses FairPlay to hardware makers, it'll make the iTMS even more dominant. If Apple licenses FairPlay to other stores, it'll make the iPod even more dominant in hardware. If it licenses FairPlay to everyone, then Apple will sit on the dominant DRM system, period.
As I said before, there isn't one thing that makes the iPod successful. But of those things, DRM is definitely not one of them.
Everyone in this debate, including the European governments in question, assumes that the reason the iPod was successful was its tie (or, as critics would say, lock-in) to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) via FairPlay. Open iTMS or Fairplay, and you reduce the iPod's dominance. That's the theory.
This, however, isn't necessarily the case.
While the iPod and iTunes Music Store are promoted hand-in-hand, the technical (ie: you and me) know that you don't need to buy music from iTMS. The iPod is a wonderful music player; you can rip and/or load your music onto your pod in lossless or lossy formats, without DRM, if you so desire. The iTMS makes it easier to load music onto your iPod, but the iPod will play a whole bunch of formats, most of which are DRM-free.
So why the focus on FairPlay and iTMS? Because Steve Jobs is a sneaky guy.
The conventional wisdom is that the iTMS is a loss leader for iPods; its only reason for existence is to "trap" people into buying and keeping their iPods. It follows that if the people weren't locked into iTMS and Fairplay, they'd be free to buy other players. That's why everyone wants to force Apple to license FairPlay.
But what if the iTMS sold music in the WMA format? What if Apple licensed FairPlay? What if Apple supported WMA on the iPod? Would that increase the sales of other music players? Would that increase the traffic to alternative music stores?
When it's spelled out like this, the fallacy, and the answer is obvious: probably not.
By keeping the focus on DRM, Jobs is keeping the iPod safe. The iPod isn't successful because of its tie to iTMS. It's successful because it's a good product that people want to buy. DRM is a red herring, a bargaining chip that can be pulled or offered when the need arises. By keeping the focus on FairPlay, Apple is making sure that nobody in the business is focusing on what they should be doing, namely, making a device that's better than an iPod. It's unbelievable that after 5 years, there are no players that are qualitatively equal to or better than the iPod. Likewise, in 3 years there are no music stores that are qualitatively as good as or better than iTMS.
In the end, Apple may make more money from licensing FairPlay than from the iTMS. By being licensing FairPlay and charging a royalty per song and per device sold, Apple could take a piece of every device and song sold for the next decade or more...and they'd effectively be forced to do that by the music industry and the various misguided European governments. And as a bonus, there would be little to no impact on iPod sales. A serious win-win for Apple.
Look for third-party Fairplay licensees after the upcoming negotiations, and watch Apple get thrown right into the briar patch.
The iTunes store -is- open to Indies. It could be that (1) you're not looking in the right place, or (2) the labels in question are too lazy to sign up. It's not that hard to do, apparently.
Fairplay doesn't lock you into audio. Just burn your tracks to CD, then re-rip them. No big deal. Oh wait, the iPod plays mp3,.wav,.aiff, and generic mpeg4 and h.264 videos. And you don't have to buy iTunes, it's free.
So do I have to buy Apple stuff "Forever and Ever?" As long as they keep doing what they are doing, they're my first preference.
I buy Apple stuff because it really does just work. That's not vendor lock-in, that's superior design. When that changes, well, I'll change vendors. That's called the free market.
Starting to write a piece of software, especially an application used by end users (or, horrors, the public) is incredibly difficult. They don't teach it in school because the number of written-from-scratch applications is small. It's complicated, error-prone, and you don't know if you made the right decisions until weeks, or months, later.
It's exacerbated by the fact that you actually need to ship your product. You don't have the luxury, usually, of sitting around arguing the finer points of various architecures and algorithms. What toolset should you use? What framework? Libraries? Product dependencies? OS?
All of those require tradeoffs, and incur costs that may not be known for weeks, months, or years.
In fact, there are no right answers. There are things that make life easier or harder down the road. Unfortunately, those of us that have written multiple apps from scratch have a hard time explaining what the design choices were or even how to do it. Some things work, some things don't, and depending on your application, budget, and timeline you choose differently. If you're good, you keep up with the various technologies (on at least a passing basis) so you can learn new stuff/ideas/concepts that may help.
What are some of the factors to consider? Some simple ones are: deployment - how do you deploy it? Maintenance - how do you maintain the applcation? How do you updates? Are there enough people who know what you're using to hire? If not, is it easy to learn? What features are requested, but not in this release? You can architect today for functionality tomorrow. Toolset: are there too many moving parts? How many moving parts is too many? Certain technologies, like J2EE,.NET, LAMP lock you in to a way of doing things. Is that OK? If you use new stuff, is it stable enough to actually use in real life?
Then when you start writing your app, what do you start with? Again, it depends. Some people design and write from the inside out (internals to GUI), and some write from the outside in (GUI to internals). A user app should do the latter, since the capabilities of the UI have to be supported by the back-end. Blah blah blah.
In short, you have to learn by doing, making mistakes, and doing it again. Learn from other programs, etc, by asking: why do they do things that way? You can see design decisions and how they impact the application everywhere.
Microsoft Home & Entertainment has lost over $5 billion dollars from 2002-2005. That's not thinking different, that's spending your competition into the ground.
Now, as a strategy, they're bribing content providers by allocating product revenue to those providers [MS is giving a record company a cut of Zune hardware revenues].
How is that competition? Only a monopoly with large cross-subsidies could afford to do anything like that.
If MS H&E were a private comapny, they'd be six feet under years ago.
Even if two genomes are 100% the same, that doesn't mean that the products of each will be the same.
Why? Gene expression can differ depending on environmental factors.
As a simple analogy, your DNA = a cookbook. While many recipies are cooked automatically by the systems in your body, other recipies are cooked or not cooked depending on the environment in which the organism finds itself.
I haven't read a good article on gene expression, really. Various mechanisms are alluded to in the literature, but it seems to be unclear how gene expression is or is not triggered. More specifically, researchers seem to know that this particular mechanism turns a given gene on or off, but how that mechanism is triggered is unknown (or not the focus of the article/research).
Also, I'd guess that environmental gene expression stars in the womb - that the fetus gets clues to the external environment from the nutrients and chemicals coming from the mother and adjusts itself accordingly. You could test that by somehow getting ahold of some in-vitro twins and implanting them at different times, I guess? But there probably still would be too many variables.
Because climate scientists can't predict the weather. A theory is only as good as its predictive ability. How do you test climate theories? These days, you create a computer model.
However, the model is only as good as the designer and the data you put into it. And as all mutual funds say, "past performance is not indicitive of future performance."
What if the models are wrong? Are you willing to spend money to fix something that may not happen (or may not be fixable), taking money away from people and projects that need it today? Would you take cancer research, welfare payments, and public transportation subsidies to fund...what would they fund, exactly? More climate research? That sounds a bit self-serving. That's like the poor saying that they want more money from the government.
How well do the models predict things? Economic models, with a ridiculous amount of real, measurable data, are no better than 50% right. In fact, the financial models used on Wall Street, which are the best that money can buy, are no better than 50% right (give or take a few basis points). Why do climate scientists think that they can do a better job?
The biggest credibility problem, though, is simple: weathermen can't predict the weather next week. Climate != weather, but really - why would anyone think that people could predict the weather in the next 200 years when they can't see through to next week?
As to people that argue that it's a complex phenomenon, etc, etc - exactly.
I'm sure Zune is not a Plays for Sure product so Microsoft could convince their partners that Zune doesn't compete with them. Any PfS user would be unlikely to move to Zune due to the cost of refilling the library. Of course, PfS subscription users would be OK - assming Zune has a subscription feature of its own (does it? I'm not sure).
The thing is, the same could be said for iPod users: they're unlikely to switch to Zune if they can't move their purchased songs...assuming that they actually bought their songs.
However, the third party device makers (and DRM'd music stores) are probably looking at the writing on the wall right now, and not liking what they're reading. There are only three DRM formats in widespread use: Apple's, Microsoft's, and Audible's. As a third-party licensee, why would I license my DRM from a competitor? Especially a competitor like Microsoft, who has a long history of being anti-social...and the ability to blow $5.4 billion dollar for years on products with no thought of return (MS home & entertainment cumulative losses, FY 2002-2005).
Apple doesn't license its DRM, and even if it did it's unclear if it would do any of the other device makers any good. Audible, well, it's unclear if audible would license its DRM or not. It actually is supported on pretty much every device, including iPods. It could be that its distribution agreement with everyone precludes licensing, but if not, audible could actually stand to make some money as the Switzerland of DRM.
As for the PfS crowd, it must be lonely when your competitors are Apple and Microsoft. I suppose that means that everyone will be herded into their little niches, and turn into iPod and Zune accessory makers?
Polar bears have survived worse. In fact, Polar Bears have survived for a ridiculously long time, through multiple climate changes.
The environmentalist quoted isn't helping. He believes that climate is a steady-state phenomenon, which is true - for certain periods of time. For other periods of time, climate is far from steady-state. It just so happened that from sometime in the 1800s to sometime to the late 1900s the climate was in a steady-state period.
For example: in the 1800s, large parts of the midwest of the US were basically deserts, if you believe the railroad surveyors. Now those areas are rich farmland. That change occurred in less than a generation.
That's no to say that climate change isn't happening. It does, all the time. The question these days is if that change is due to human activity, but that's probably the wrong question. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that climate change is ridiculously politicized, given that it was co-opted by groups that have a tendency to be anti-business, anti-development, or professional Cassandras.
So what can you believe? That parts of the globe are warming, and parts of the earth are cooling. Science can't predict next week's weather with any accuracy, so why would anyone think science could predict the weather 100 years from now?
There are three key things that you need to do when you want to manage an IT shop (for anyone):
#1. Have a ticketing system in place or built. This is probably the most crucial thing you can do, because it will become the core of your job. Nothing gets done without a ticket, period. The ticketing system will also allow you to document (1) the problem, (2) the time spent on the problem, and (3) your interaction with the customers.
#2. You need to do an audit, so you know what services are being used (and required) by your customers. That means you need to be able to capture, at a minimum, (1) the machine configurations, (2) users & permissions for each user on each machine, (3) services provided for the network, (4) the network topology, (5) all the vendors of all systems and their support numbers, (6) the applications (including custom ones) that are used by all the users, and (7) whatever processes or requirements there are, even if they're informal.
#3. You must attempt to normalize the systems as much as possible. That means every system, as much as possible, should be exactly the same. This also implies a remote control system and, possibly, a software distribution/configuration management solution. You must gain control over the machines. If everything is the same, you spend less time thinking. Thinking is the one thing you don't want to do when something happens.
#4. Document everything. You'll need to figure out a way to document all this. ITIL may help, but there isn't any real documentation tool for the IT industry. This is unfortunate, and a real market opportunity for someone. I've been inside Global 500 shops and small shops, and nobody really has a good way to document their infrastructure. They have tools, and the documentation on the infrastructure is to an extent embedded in the toolset (ie: dashboards, impact diagrams, etc), but real documentation is pretty scarce. There is no single tool that can really represent the multidimensional nature of the IT infrastructure.
Oh, and #5. Customer expectations. You need to be able to manage customer expectations. If you get two more clients you may be OK - depending on how you handle your new customers. If their infrastructure is tight, you may not have much more work at all. If it's organic, then you may have small problems. Most organic IT shops function most of the time. Hire the smartest guy out of the org and boot the rest, then implement the above.
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One reason that parallel programming is hard is simple: lots of things can't be parallelized effectively. The computer is really doing one thing, namely, waiting for input (ie: the app is user-bound). If your app isn't user bound, then parallelism is possible.
If your app isn't user bound, it should be pretty easy to parallelize, assuming that your processing stream isn't serialized (ie: the does a result depends on the previous result?). The problem then becomes contention. For some reason, lots of developers can't wrap their heads around threading and contention issues. Maybe it's been presented incorrectly in textbooks, or something like that. People have problems programming asynchronously as well. Maybe that's the problem?
Anyhow, once you figure out the contention issue, then there are all kinds of other things you have to deal with, like asynchronous status notification. Timeouts. Data that never comes back. Unexpected termination. Data coherency. Read and write locking. Synchronization.
In the end, sometimes it's easier to break your data set up into chunks and spawn a couple of processes in the background, then use cat to aggregate the data sets. It's definitely easier to do it that way (ie: not a lot of mental lifting involved).
Most developers don't care about scalability. The ones that do parallelize. The ones that don't don't.
The empire lasted for quite a while longer than 369:
_ the_Roman_Empire.28395.E2.80.93476.29
"Excluding these states claiming its heritage, the Roman state lasted (in some form) from the founding of Rome in 753 BC to the fall in 1461"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#Fall_of
There's a big outsourcer located right outside of Dallas. Anyway, they had just installed this fancy GUI to manage their LPARs. These LPARs, BTW, were the running ridiculously important financial things (that's a technical term).
So the senior tech needed to take down an LPAR for maintenance. He goes to the GUI, clicks the shutdown button, and clicks a bunch of buttons that say 'OK'.
Of course, each one of those 'OK' buttons is asking him whether to shut down an LPAR...which means that he just shuts down all the LPARs on their 360.
Needless to say, he was scheduled for more training ASAP.
Some companies learn lessons the hard way - by failing. Apple's had a number of large failures, but has managed to learn from those failures and make better things with higher margins.
Most companies in the tech industry can't handle more than one or two failures; they tend to go bankrupt. Those companies that survive product failures tend to try and forget about them instead of learn from them. For example, Microsoft could have learned a lot from Micrsoft Bob, if they so desired. Instead, they buried old Bob in the back and abandoned all attempts to do any radical user interface changes for Windows.
Apple, on the other hand, has a large number of failures to draw from, all of which are extensively documented. Apple also has a large number of successes, most of which probably haven't been documented enough. Why has the iPod really succeeded? Why and how has Mac OS X (and the Mac) been an unstoppable locomotive of progress?
The Enterprise market is smaller than you think, and requires substantial investments with questionable returns. Allowing developers onto your platform incurrs substantial support and infrastructure costs. Enterprise demands also tend to warp your perspective, as large accounts exert greater leverage on the development process than thousands of individuals. They also don't pay retail, and tend to demand substantial up-front and back-end discounts.
Apple has bypassed this in a simple manner, with a simple question: why have your enterprise apps on the phone when you have a live browser connection? If you can get to salesforce.com, google apps, and your custom web-enabled apps, who cares whether you can install a binary or not? In fact, not having to install anything is much better - no management issues. It's the freaking web, already. Everything that's important has been webified. Anything that isn't yet will be in 5 years. Everything that isn't nobody cares about.
The only "enterprise" feature of the iPhone would be the ability to hard-wire it to your corporate network instead of using the public network. That's it. If the iPhone can do that, then the internal IT guys can do the rest.
You can drive a truck through a hole that big.
There's obviously nothing wrong with the model, but people tend to forget that multiple models can exist (and be applicable) simultaneously.
Validated to 1% isn't validated at all.
If my solution is only 99% correct and it's used by billions of people, well, that's not very good. It's mostly good, but that's hardly validation.
Just buy yourself a freaking monitor and bring it to work. A good widescreen monitor is only about $200. If you're lucky, you'll have an extra video out on your machine. If not, then pick up a crappy video card.
If it'll make your life that much easier, don't wait for your employer to do it; just do it yourself. Why are you waiting for your boss to approve of it?
Buried in the article was an interesting idea from the record companies themselves: instead of being the channel, they'd morph into more of a fan club model.
That's a great idea, but they should go one step further.
The main problem for record companies is that the record company, for the most part, is not the brand - the artist is. The artist is what's promoted, etc. What would be better, from the record company point of view, is if they had a whole bunch of sub-labels, all of which have their own genre/style/sound/whatever.
Then, you'd know that you like the stuff coming out of a label, because all their stuff was the style you like.
It used to be like this in the old days, where a label like Blue Note would have a whole lot of good jazz, or Elektra Nonesuch had good classical. I knew people that would buy everything that EN put out.
Combine that with a subscription service (or music club, cd-by-mail thing I guess) and suddenly you not only have a business model, you have a core group of consumers that are committed to your label - not your artitst. That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
Will it lead to the homogenization of the music industry? Who cares? It's already freaking homogenized!
It might make smaller players more viable because as a botique subscription music company you have a guaranteed revenue stream with no distribution overhead (except for the overhead you want). You can budget, plan, and not worry as much about the next payroll.
Ideally you'd have a third-party doing the fulfillment, so all you have to do is find acts that your subscribers might like.
It's interesting to think about, but finding that much talent would be difficult. No matter what people say, there isn't that much talent out there.
This is the first time I've ever read a news report that shows Greenpeace doing something besides political grandstanding. They actually went out and hired someone to do an analysis of the data. Maybe this is the start of a new trend - results-oriented activism, as opposed to the feel-good activism of the past.
Music bought from iTunes can only be used on iTunes compatible hardware.
How different is this from Pay-Per-View or premium movie channels? How different is FairPlay from, say, Macrovision?
With PPV, you bought the movie. But that doesn't mean you can watch it forever. In fact, due to Macrovision, you may not be able to record it at all (assuming your VHS, DVR, or recording device honors Macrovision).
Whether this is right or wrong is irrelevant. The principle exists. You can only watch your PPV movie on a device with the PPV hardware. Just because that PPV hardware is from different vendors doesn't matter - the spec is controlled by PPV (and the STB client is most likely written by PPV).
This DRM lock-in stuff is silly; DRM type lock-ins have been around forever in one form or another. "Why doesn't this damn CD fit in my 8-track player?"
How big is the high-end of the cellphone market? If you don't live in Asia or Europe, you might be surprised that the high-end is a lot bigger than you think.
Have you ever been in a Virtu store? Do you have any idea how many of these phones they sell? You probably don't. Why not? Because you're not the market. You don't hear about it because, frankly, you don't have enough money to buy one. And if you did have enough money, you wouldn't think it was worth it.
The fact is, the high end is filled with people who think, live, act, and make decisions differently than you do. There is no tradeoff between cost and anything else. In fact, cost doesn't exist - at that level, it's time that matters, not cost. You can always make money; it's time that you can't get back.
For this market, $600 is nothing. Does it make your live easier or better? If so, then it's worth it. Life is too short to use crappy products that aggravate you.
The only question, really is: is there enough of a high-end market out there? The answer is simple: yes. People bought iPods because they were easy, simple, and did the job. The iPhone won't be any different.
Again, this question isn't the right question. DRM is not interoperable. Using the word "interoperable" is deliberately confusing, because DRM by definition isn't interoperable. It's a method of restriction, not an operatable thing per se.
The operative word is "third party licensed."
Audible.com is licensed to multiple vendors. How have those vendors done? Besides the iPod, Audible.com's DRM is licensed to a number of other players. Has it been a major factor in anyone's purchase? Possibly, if they want to listen to audible.com content.
WMA/Plays for Sure is licensed to multiple vendors. How have those vendors done? The market has spoken.
Zune WMA isn't licensed. The market is in the process of working out how the Zune is doing, but the prognosis isn't good.
FairPlay isn't licensed. The iPod is doing great.
The iPod is reallly a good example of what's called a "Network Effect Monopoly." People buy iPods because it has the most accessories. The iPod has the most accessories because people buy iPods. Etc etc etc. eBay is the same: people sell on eBay because the buyers are there. The buyers are there because everyone sells on eBay. Ad infinitum.
Will licensing FairPlay change this? No. If Apple licenses FairPlay to hardware makers, it'll make the iTMS even more dominant. If Apple licenses FairPlay to other stores, it'll make the iPod even more dominant in hardware. If it licenses FairPlay to everyone, then Apple will sit on the dominant DRM system, period.
As I said before, there isn't one thing that makes the iPod successful. But of those things, DRM is definitely not one of them.
Everyone in this debate, including the European governments in question, assumes that the reason the iPod was successful was its tie (or, as critics would say, lock-in) to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) via FairPlay. Open iTMS or Fairplay, and you reduce the iPod's dominance. That's the theory.
This, however, isn't necessarily the case.
While the iPod and iTunes Music Store are promoted hand-in-hand, the technical (ie: you and me) know that you don't need to buy music from iTMS. The iPod is a wonderful music player; you can rip and/or load your music onto your pod in lossless or lossy formats, without DRM, if you so desire. The iTMS makes it easier to load music onto your iPod, but the iPod will play a whole bunch of formats, most of which are DRM-free.
So why the focus on FairPlay and iTMS? Because Steve Jobs is a sneaky guy.
The conventional wisdom is that the iTMS is a loss leader for iPods; its only reason for existence is to "trap" people into buying and keeping their iPods. It follows that if the people weren't locked into iTMS and Fairplay, they'd be free to buy other players. That's why everyone wants to force Apple to license FairPlay.
But what if the iTMS sold music in the WMA format? What if Apple licensed FairPlay? What if Apple supported WMA on the iPod? Would that increase the sales of other music players? Would that increase the traffic to alternative music stores?
When it's spelled out like this, the fallacy, and the answer is obvious: probably not.
By keeping the focus on DRM, Jobs is keeping the iPod safe. The iPod isn't successful because of its tie to iTMS. It's successful because it's a good product that people want to buy. DRM is a red herring, a bargaining chip that can be pulled or offered when the need arises. By keeping the focus on FairPlay, Apple is making sure that nobody in the business is focusing on what they should be doing, namely, making a device that's better than an iPod. It's unbelievable that after 5 years, there are no players that are qualitatively equal to or better than the iPod. Likewise, in 3 years there are no music stores that are qualitatively as good as or better than iTMS.
In the end, Apple may make more money from licensing FairPlay than from the iTMS. By being licensing FairPlay and charging a royalty per song and per device sold, Apple could take a piece of every device and song sold for the next decade or more...and they'd effectively be forced to do that by the music industry and the various misguided European governments. And as a bonus, there would be little to no impact on iPod sales. A serious win-win for Apple.
Look for third-party Fairplay licensees after the upcoming negotiations, and watch Apple get thrown right into the briar patch.
Submit away!
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https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZLabel.woa/w
The iTunes store -is- open to Indies. It could be that (1) you're not looking in the right place, or (2) the labels in question are too lazy to sign up. It's not that hard to do, apparently.
Fairplay doesn't lock you into audio. Just burn your tracks to CD, then re-rip them. No big deal. Oh wait, the iPod plays mp3, .wav, .aiff, and generic mpeg4 and h.264 videos. And you don't have to buy iTunes, it's free.
So do I have to buy Apple stuff "Forever and Ever?" As long as they keep doing what they are doing, they're my first preference.
I buy Apple stuff because it really does just work. That's not vendor lock-in, that's superior design. When that changes, well, I'll change vendors. That's called the free market.
Starting to write a piece of software, especially an application used by end users (or, horrors, the public) is incredibly difficult. They don't teach it in school because the number of written-from-scratch applications is small. It's complicated, error-prone, and you don't know if you made the right decisions until weeks, or months, later.
.NET, LAMP lock you in to a way of doing things. Is that OK?
It's exacerbated by the fact that you actually need to ship your product. You don't have the luxury, usually, of sitting around arguing the finer points of various architecures and algorithms. What toolset should you use? What framework? Libraries? Product dependencies? OS?
All of those require tradeoffs, and incur costs that may not be known for weeks, months, or years.
In fact, there are no right answers. There are things that make life easier or harder down the road. Unfortunately, those of us that have written multiple apps from scratch have a hard time explaining what the design choices were or even how to do it. Some things work, some things don't, and depending on your application, budget, and timeline you choose differently. If you're good, you keep up with the various technologies (on at least a passing basis) so you can learn new stuff/ideas/concepts that may help.
What are some of the factors to consider? Some simple ones are:
deployment - how do you deploy it?
Maintenance - how do you maintain the applcation?
How do you updates?
Are there enough people who know what you're using to hire? If not, is it easy to learn?
What features are requested, but not in this release? You can architect today for functionality tomorrow.
Toolset: are there too many moving parts? How many moving parts is too many?
Certain technologies, like J2EE,
If you use new stuff, is it stable enough to actually use in real life?
Then when you start writing your app, what do you start with? Again, it depends. Some people design and write from the inside out (internals to GUI), and some write from the outside in (GUI to internals). A user app should do the latter, since the capabilities of the UI have to be supported by the back-end. Blah blah blah.
In short, you have to learn by doing, making mistakes, and doing it again. Learn from other programs, etc, by asking: why do they do things that way? You can see design decisions and how they impact the application everywhere.
Yeah, it's rambling, but it's late for me.
Microsoft Home & Entertainment has lost over $5 billion dollars from 2002-2005. That's not thinking different, that's spending your competition into the ground.
Now, as a strategy, they're bribing content providers by allocating product revenue to those providers [MS is giving a record company a cut of Zune hardware revenues].
How is that competition? Only a monopoly with large cross-subsidies could afford to do anything like that.
If MS H&E were a private comapny, they'd be six feet under years ago.
Even if two genomes are 100% the same, that doesn't mean that the products of each will be the same.
Why? Gene expression can differ depending on environmental factors.
As a simple analogy, your DNA = a cookbook. While many recipies are cooked automatically by the systems in your body, other recipies are cooked or not cooked depending on the environment in which the organism finds itself.
I haven't read a good article on gene expression, really. Various mechanisms are alluded to in the literature, but it seems to be unclear how gene expression is or is not triggered. More specifically, researchers seem to know that this particular mechanism turns a given gene on or off, but how that mechanism is triggered is unknown (or not the focus of the article/research).
Also, I'd guess that environmental gene expression stars in the womb - that the fetus gets clues to the external environment from the nutrients and chemicals coming from the mother and adjusts itself accordingly. You could test that by somehow getting ahold of some in-vitro twins and implanting them at different times, I guess? But there probably still would be too many variables.
Because climate scientists can't predict the weather. A theory is only as good as its predictive ability. How do you test climate theories? These days, you create a computer model.
However, the model is only as good as the designer and the data you put into it. And as all mutual funds say, "past performance is not indicitive of future performance."
What if the models are wrong? Are you willing to spend money to fix something that may not happen (or may not be fixable), taking money away from people and projects that need it today? Would you take cancer research, welfare payments, and public transportation subsidies to fund...what would they fund, exactly? More climate research? That sounds a bit self-serving. That's like the poor saying that they want more money from the government.
How well do the models predict things? Economic models, with a ridiculous amount of real, measurable data, are no better than 50% right. In fact, the financial models used on Wall Street, which are the best that money can buy, are no better than 50% right (give or take a few basis points). Why do climate scientists think that they can do a better job?
The biggest credibility problem, though, is simple: weathermen can't predict the weather next week. Climate != weather, but really - why would anyone think that people could predict the weather in the next 200 years when they can't see through to next week?
As to people that argue that it's a complex phenomenon, etc, etc - exactly.
Yep, his 7 year old will use it...as an Encarta station. Without an Internet hookup, the PC is perfectly safe...with any Microsoft OS.
I'm sure Zune is not a Plays for Sure product so Microsoft could convince their partners that Zune doesn't compete with them. Any PfS user would be unlikely to move to Zune due to the cost of refilling the library. Of course, PfS subscription users would be OK - assming Zune has a subscription feature of its own (does it? I'm not sure).
The thing is, the same could be said for iPod users: they're unlikely to switch to Zune if they can't move their purchased songs...assuming that they actually bought their songs.
However, the third party device makers (and DRM'd music stores) are probably looking at the writing on the wall right now, and not liking what they're reading. There are only three DRM formats in widespread use: Apple's, Microsoft's, and Audible's. As a third-party licensee, why would I license my DRM from a competitor? Especially a competitor like Microsoft, who has a long history of being anti-social...and the ability to blow $5.4 billion dollar for years on products with no thought of return (MS home & entertainment cumulative losses, FY 2002-2005).
Apple doesn't license its DRM, and even if it did it's unclear if it would do any of the other device makers any good. Audible, well, it's unclear if audible would license its DRM or not. It actually is supported on pretty much every device, including iPods. It could be that its distribution agreement with everyone precludes licensing, but if not, audible could actually stand to make some money as the Switzerland of DRM.
As for the PfS crowd, it must be lonely when your competitors are Apple and Microsoft. I suppose that means that everyone will be herded into their little niches, and turn into iPod and Zune accessory makers?
Polar bears have survived worse. In fact, Polar Bears have survived for a ridiculously long time, through multiple climate changes.
The environmentalist quoted isn't helping. He believes that climate is a steady-state phenomenon, which is true - for certain periods of time. For other periods of time, climate is far from steady-state. It just so happened that from sometime in the 1800s to sometime to the late 1900s the climate was in a steady-state period.
For example: in the 1800s, large parts of the midwest of the US were basically deserts, if you believe the railroad surveyors. Now those areas are rich farmland. That change occurred in less than a generation.
That's no to say that climate change isn't happening. It does, all the time. The question these days is if that change is due to human activity, but that's probably the wrong question. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that climate change is ridiculously politicized, given that it was co-opted by groups that have a tendency to be anti-business, anti-development, or professional Cassandras.
So what can you believe? That parts of the globe are warming, and parts of the earth are cooling. Science can't predict next week's weather with any accuracy, so why would anyone think science could predict the weather 100 years from now?
Oh, that's five things, not three! Doh!
There are three key things that you need to do when you want to manage an IT shop (for anyone):
#1. Have a ticketing system in place or built. This is probably the most crucial thing you can do, because it will become the core of your job. Nothing gets done without a ticket, period. The ticketing system will also allow you to document (1) the problem, (2) the time spent on the problem, and (3) your interaction with the customers.
#2. You need to do an audit, so you know what services are being used (and required) by your customers. That means you need to be able to capture, at a minimum, (1) the machine configurations, (2) users & permissions for each user on each machine, (3) services provided for the network, (4) the network topology, (5) all the vendors of all systems and their support numbers, (6) the applications (including custom ones) that are used by all the users, and (7) whatever processes or requirements there are, even if they're informal.
#3. You must attempt to normalize the systems as much as possible. That means every system, as much as possible, should be exactly the same. This also implies a remote control system and, possibly, a software distribution/configuration management solution. You must gain control over the machines. If everything is the same, you spend less time thinking. Thinking is the one thing you don't want to do when something happens.
#4. Document everything. You'll need to figure out a way to document all this. ITIL may help, but there isn't any real documentation tool for the IT industry. This is unfortunate, and a real market opportunity for someone. I've been inside Global 500 shops and small shops, and nobody really has a good way to document their infrastructure. They have tools, and the documentation on the infrastructure is to an extent embedded in the toolset (ie: dashboards, impact diagrams, etc), but real documentation is pretty scarce. There is no single tool that can really represent the multidimensional nature of the IT infrastructure.
Oh, and #5. Customer expectations. You need to be able to manage customer expectations. If you get two more clients you may be OK - depending on how you handle your new customers. If their infrastructure is tight, you may not have much more work at all. If it's organic, then you may have small problems. Most organic IT shops function most of the time. Hire the smartest guy out of the org and boot the rest, then implement the above.
Good luck! Sounds exciting!