The cathederal of the media industry is falling as we speak. The onetime gatekeepers of content distribution, be it music, movies, television, radio, are no longer needed.
Artists used to need these gatekeepers, for only the financial muscle of a large company could finance the widespread distribution of these types of media. No individual could afford the upfront expense of mastering and duplicating millions of DVD's, or negotiationg distibution deals with thousands of media outlets, or fiancing a license for a slice of RF bandwidth.
But the final barriers to entry are falling, the last barrier, the cost to the producer for electronic distribution, has just been eliminated this year. Now thanks to technologies such as BitTorrent, the consumers of the content foot the bandwidth bill for distribution.
The multi-million dollar barrier to entry to create a movie for instance has now been reduced to a minidv camera, a half-decent PC, and a broadband connection. Someone with talent and time could spend a few thousand in up-front costs and produce and distribute movies to their heart's desire; and anyone (or everyone!) can have access to that content for the cost of downloading it.
Yeah, those evil open-source software companies are wrecking the industry. Companies should learn from Microsoft, and use the product bundling & dumping model instead. Look at all the jobs it created at Netscape.
Strangely enough my 'partner' came from a customer support request from one of my trial users. He loved the idea and wished he'd thought of it first. I asked if he had sales/marketing background and it turned out he was an expert in the area.
Some other avenues to try are your 'social network' (i.e. friends and friends of friends), a posting on craig's list; or just start up business and sink a few bucks into google adwords and put a little blurb on your website that you are looking for someone with those skills.
With the state of things and what CPU cycles, open source software, and co-location costs these days, who needs venture capital if you are starting an online business. If you are sharp and have decent sysadmin and coding skills you can do it yourself.. Find yourself a partner that's got complementary sales and marketing skills and you're set. I've done this with my own startup KnowTraffic and am doing rather nicely without selling my virtual soul to the the VC's.
No way, its the best job ever. I just sit around and talk into my mouse all day. I tell upper management that we'll do all the stuff they want the development team to do; totally disregarding the developers said it's phyiscally impossible. Hey, of course we can do it; I don't understand it and if I don't understand it it must be easy.
I have learned great people leadership skills too. If we are falling behind my development schedule and the developers are complaining about the long hours I just tell the developers to 'type faster'.
It's hard work but the bonuses for cutting costs while increasing productivity make it all worthwhile.
-- Greg (not really a dysfunctional asshole manager)
Perhaps if you knew how to properly use a decimal place and a comma there'd be a website outside of the United States worth a damn that someone might want to visit.
I find the best to do list manager is a yellow legal pad. You never have to worry about the batteries running down on it; it won't lose your data due to a system crash; accessable even when you don't have internet access; it features an intuitive user interface (dubbed a 'pen'); it's ease-of-use is well documented; and best of all it is compatable with open standards such as english, french, and japanese.
One caveat, it's not freeware; it could be as expensive as a dollar, but you'll recoup that quickly with the electricity savings.
In related news, the Mesquite Sheriff's department took a report from Little Billy Shumacker who's model rocket was stolen by a man with glasses who tried to offer him the cheat codes for 'god mode' for doom 3 in exchange.
Coincidentally we are launching a blog backup service shortly. We'll back up blogs so that users won't have to worry about their content if their service goes down or *gasp* goes out of business!
Yeah, he sounds really sorry.. "I'm so sorry I got caught, uh, I mean I'm sorry I spammed you guys". I get 2K spam emails a day, and I'm sure this walking filth was able to buy himself some nice guitars, swanky rockstar swag, and perhaps even some meth with the proceeds from selling my email address over and over again.
Poor guy had to give up some fraction of his ill-gotten gains from spamming. I'd prefer extradition and I'd love to see this guy in the federal pen with a cellmate named Bubba who does to him what he's done to my email all these years.
The commodization of any new technology and the moving of the labor force from innovators to less expensive maintainers is a natural cycle of any new industry.
Take for example textiles. Not many of our clothes are made here in the US anymore. Because the technology for textiles has become standardized and there's no need for sharp innovators to be involved in the process anymore. The job can be done by a less expensive, less skilled labor force in a place with an inferior national infrustructure. The textile industry has been for a large-part 'offshored'.
Whatever you are making (or not making) right now would you rather have the textile system as it is today? Or would you rather Americans be making textiles and your clothes cost three times as much?
Let the offshore folks handle tech support calls and maintaining all the ugly code we've written way-too-rapidly in the boom. Nether of those jobs appeal to me anyway. And lets get on with what us americans are good at doing... Innovating and creating the 'NEXT BIG THING'!
So Microsoft can get refurbishers to pay again for an operating system that was licensed and installed on the system in the first place, since 99+% of PC's ship with windows when originally sold? Nice deal.
The real goal of the program isn't gifts, it's the tried-and-true microsoft crowbar they use to get into any organization. One key 'early adopter' or in this case recipient of the software starts using the system. Then everyone who works with this person is forced to upgrade as the old versions are incompatable with the new version.
Government employees are a great target for this because it forces all the non-governmental organizations that work with the government to get licensed for the software or face not being able to exchange documents.
Systems to detect traffic jams are already widely deployed throughout most metro areas, at least in the US. They simply embed a pair of magnetic sensors in the road and count how long it takes the car passing over the first to pass over the second, deducting the speed of the vehicle as well as counting the cars per minute. Most of the raw data is even available on the internet; I use it to run my cellphone traffic notification service KnowTraffic and most traffic reports (radio and internet) use the same data.
The first amendment on religion Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
As for this slashdot comentary, I think if a student recited the pledge out of the blue in the middle of a lesson they'd be disrupting the class. I mean if we are going to stop doing the pledge because it's got the words 'under god', then should we change the pledge? Should we remove 'in god we trust' from our currency? Do we stop swearing in government officials with a bible?
The argument could be made that by banning the pledge from schools and the words 'god' from we are making a law respecting the establishment of the religion of athiesm.
I think we will see a lot more of this type of technology in the future, where PDA's and other personal devices can provide more information on your surroundings. I think we'll see more of this sort of thing perhaps with sporting events. Imagine being able to look up a players stats at a football game; or recieving evacuation instructions on your cellphone when hurricane warnings go into effect.
I really like this idea and I've been implementing it myself with California traffic Information. It makes you PDA or cellphone much more useful to get you context'ed information in real-time.
Who would determine what's fineable or not? The 'Identification Authority' panel of industry experts? Anti-Virus experts? The same ones who make money selling software to prevent viruses/worms? Sounds like a good scheme to sell more antivirus software. More good ole' scare-tactics from the antivirus folks; 'Buy our product or you could be fined'. The determination of a 'fineable' event strikes me as very subjective! What's next, manditory antivirus software? Wouldn't the antivirus companies love that!
Continue catching and jailing the people who create these viruses, thats the best method.
It's a much better system now where instead of one lawyer we have three politicians/beuracrats (most of which have/law/ degrees) for the equivilent amount of work.
Yes I do think layers get too much money in our society. We could do with a lot less folks with the law degrees that are currently politicians, beurecrats, and government employees.
You don't need a lawyer for a basic contract, and you paid legal fees anyway when you were married (marrage license).
Given the number of married people blue cross services, I would say you and your fellow married customers would have pretty good negotiating leverage for coverage. And if not I am sure you'd find another insurer who would welcome that business.
The right to be covered under their spouse's medical insurance (especially important for us contractors).
Contract issue (between you and your insurer)
The right to inherit from a spouse without explictly stating so in a will.
Contract issue, lazybones. You just spent 6 months and $30K planning a wedding, spend an afternoon writing a will.
The right to joint custody of children.
Contract issue/power-of-attorney
The right to make medical decisions for their spouse when they are unable to do so themselves
power-of-attorney
The right to joint ownership of assets
contract / power-of-attorney
I covered everything you asked about in my original post. sheesh, read more than the first two sentences before replying next time.
What I did not say is that married people should not have the right to these things, I said the government does not need to nor should mandate these rights when they all fall under contract law between two people.
And what about my right to free bread and circuses???
I don't believe in special privileges for gay marrage; matter of fact I don't believe in special privileges for straight marrage either. Pretty much I believe the government should get out of defining people's relationships and giving them special consideration based on that.
Most of the laws pertaining to marrage should be in the relm of contractual law anyway and the government should stay out of that, execept to enforce contracts.
For example, the rules pertaining to one partner dying / becoming disabled / etc and who should have rights of inheritance, power-of-attorney, or adoption of childeren should be defined by legaly binding contract between the two partners. If the deseased partner willed that the surviving partner should handle the funeral or be deeded all their possesions then where's the problem in that?
As for tax considerations, why should two people who live together but are not married have a different tax scheme then two people who are married? Why should two folks who went through a special cerimony be given preference over those who did not. If we want to have income-pooling consideration (as is done with marrage tax) then make it available to anyone! Why shouldn't I be able to income-pool with my roomates for example? Our situation is very similar fiscally to a marrage (shared housing, food, entertainment expenses)??
This sounds great, could be a great source of energy for space exploration without worrying about radioactivity/fallout problems of using nuclear power for propultion.
This technology also sounds like it could be the breakthrough for electrical storage, think laptops and electric vehicles! It could kill the whole 'hydrogen economy' stuff that was a bad idea to begin with.
This raises a good question though. I mean in the strictest legal interpretation _every_ datacenter, office, or small business is violating copyright. After all, copyright and most license agreements grant the right to make ONE backup of the software. But any sane backup system keeps multiple backups through a rotation. Example, we do a full backup of servers weekly and retain the backups for a year. so along with our data, we keep not one but fifty two copies of licensed software (solaris in our case).
If nuclear is bad, and fossil-fuel is bad...
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps we can harness the potential kinetic energy of people hugging trees.
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
Solar panels create toxic waste as a byproduct of their manufacture; endangered birds fly into the blades of wind turbines (yes, this has been raised as an issue!).
Slashdot Mirror
The cathederal of the media industry is falling as we speak. The onetime gatekeepers of content distribution, be it music, movies, television, radio, are no longer needed.
Artists used to need these gatekeepers, for only the financial muscle of a large company could finance the widespread distribution of these types of media. No individual could afford the upfront expense of mastering and duplicating millions of DVD's, or negotiationg distibution deals with thousands of media outlets, or fiancing a license for a slice of RF bandwidth.
But the final barriers to entry are falling, the last barrier, the cost to the producer for electronic distribution, has just been eliminated this year. Now thanks to technologies such as BitTorrent, the consumers of the content foot the bandwidth bill for distribution.
The multi-million dollar barrier to entry to create a movie for instance has now been reduced to a minidv camera, a half-decent PC, and a broadband connection. Someone with talent and time could spend a few thousand in up-front costs and produce and distribute movies to their heart's desire; and anyone (or everyone!) can have access to that content for the cost of downloading it.
-- Greg
Yeah, those evil open-source software companies are wrecking the industry. Companies should learn from Microsoft, and use the product bundling & dumping model instead. Look at all the jobs it created at Netscape.
-- Greg
Strangely enough my 'partner' came from a customer support request from one of my trial users. He loved the idea and wished he'd thought of it first. I asked if he had sales/marketing background and it turned out he was an expert in the area.
Some other avenues to try are your 'social network' (i.e. friends and friends of friends), a posting on craig's list; or just start up business and sink a few bucks into google adwords and put a little blurb on your website that you are looking for someone with those skills.
-- Greg
With the state of things and what CPU cycles, open source software, and co-location costs these days, who needs venture capital if you are starting an online business. If you are sharp and have decent sysadmin and coding skills you can do it yourself.. Find yourself a partner that's got complementary sales and marketing skills and you're set. I've done this with my own startup KnowTraffic and am doing rather nicely without selling my virtual soul to the the VC's.
-- Greg
No way, its the best job ever. I just sit around and talk into my mouse all day. I tell upper management that we'll do all the stuff they want the development team to do; totally disregarding the developers said it's phyiscally impossible. Hey, of course we can do it; I don't understand it and if I don't understand it it must be easy.
I have learned great people leadership skills too. If we are falling behind my development schedule and the developers are complaining about the long hours I just tell the developers to 'type faster'.
It's hard work but the bonuses for cutting costs while increasing productivity make it all worthwhile.
-- Greg (not really a dysfunctional asshole manager)
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG ...
Registrant Organization:VA Software Corporation (OSDN)
Registrant Street1:46939 Bayside Parkway
Registrant City:Fremont
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:94538
Registrant Country:US
Perhaps if you knew how to properly use a decimal place and a comma there'd be a website outside of the United States worth a damn that someone might want to visit.
-- Greg
I find the best to do list manager is a yellow legal pad. You never have to worry about the batteries running down on it; it won't lose your data due to a system crash; accessable even when you don't have internet access; it features an intuitive user interface (dubbed a 'pen'); it's ease-of-use is well documented; and best of all it is compatable with open standards such as english, french, and japanese.
One caveat, it's not freeware; it could be as expensive as a dollar, but you'll recoup that quickly with the electricity savings.
-- Greg
In related news, the Mesquite Sheriff's department took a report from Little Billy Shumacker who's model rocket was stolen by a man with glasses who tried to offer him the cheat codes for 'god mode' for doom 3 in exchange.
-- Greg
Coincidentally we are launching a blog backup service shortly. We'll back up blogs so that users won't have to worry about their content if their service goes down or *gasp* goes out of business!
Blog Backup Program
-- Greg
Yeah, he sounds really sorry.. "I'm so sorry I got caught, uh, I mean I'm sorry I spammed you guys". I get 2K spam emails a day, and I'm sure this walking filth was able to buy himself some nice guitars, swanky rockstar swag, and perhaps even some meth with the proceeds from selling my email address over and over again.
Poor guy had to give up some fraction of his ill-gotten gains from spamming. I'd prefer extradition and I'd love to see this guy in the federal pen with a cellmate named Bubba who does to him what he's done to my email all these years.
-- Greg
The commodization of any new technology and the moving of the labor force from innovators to less expensive maintainers is a natural cycle of any new industry.
Take for example textiles. Not many of our clothes are made here in the US anymore. Because the technology for textiles has become standardized and there's no need for sharp innovators to be involved in the process anymore. The job can be done by a less expensive, less skilled labor force in a place with an inferior national infrustructure. The textile industry has been for a large-part 'offshored'.
Whatever you are making (or not making) right now would you rather have the textile system as it is today? Or would you rather Americans be making textiles and your clothes cost three times as much?
Let the offshore folks handle tech support calls and maintaining all the ugly code we've written way-too-rapidly in the boom. Nether of those jobs appeal to me anyway. And lets get on with what us americans are good at doing... Innovating and creating the 'NEXT BIG THING'!
-- Greg
So Microsoft can get refurbishers to pay again for an operating system that was licensed and installed on the system in the first place, since 99+% of PC's ship with windows when originally sold? Nice deal.
-- Greg
The real goal of the program isn't gifts, it's the tried-and-true microsoft crowbar they use to get into any organization. One key 'early adopter' or in this case recipient of the software starts using the system. Then everyone who works with this person is forced to upgrade as the old versions are incompatable with the new version.
Government employees are a great target for this because it forces all the non-governmental organizations that work with the government to get licensed for the software or face not being able to exchange documents.
-- Greg
Systems to detect traffic jams are already widely deployed throughout most metro areas, at least in the US. They simply embed a pair of magnetic sensors in the road and count how long it takes the car passing over the first to pass over the second, deducting the speed of the vehicle as well as counting the cars per minute. Most of the raw data is even available on the internet; I use it to run my cellphone traffic notification service KnowTraffic and most traffic reports (radio and internet) use the same data.
-- Greg
The first amendment on religion
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
As for this slashdot comentary, I think if a student recited the pledge out of the blue in the middle of a lesson they'd be disrupting the class. I mean if we are going to stop doing the pledge because it's got the words 'under god', then should we change the pledge? Should we remove 'in god we trust' from our currency? Do we stop swearing in government officials with a bible?
The argument could be made that by banning the pledge from schools and the words 'god' from we are making a law respecting the establishment of the religion of athiesm.
-- Greg ( -- agnostic )
So all those lame-brained users I worked with when I did tech support back in 1995 can be right now when they call and say "my netscape is down!"
-- Greg
I think we will see a lot more of this type of technology in the future, where PDA's and other personal devices can provide more information on your surroundings. I think we'll see more of this sort of thing perhaps with sporting events. Imagine being able to look up a players stats at a football game; or recieving evacuation instructions on your cellphone when hurricane warnings go into effect.
I really like this idea and I've been implementing it myself with California traffic Information. It makes you PDA or cellphone much more useful to get you context'ed information in real-time.
-- Greg
Who would determine what's fineable or not? The 'Identification Authority' panel of industry experts? Anti-Virus experts? The same ones who make money selling software to prevent viruses/worms? Sounds like a good scheme to sell more antivirus software. More good ole' scare-tactics from the antivirus folks; 'Buy our product or you could be fined'. The determination of a 'fineable' event strikes me as very subjective! What's next, manditory antivirus software? Wouldn't the antivirus companies love that!
Continue catching and jailing the people who create these viruses, thats the best method.
-- Greg
You are absolutely right!
/law/ degrees) for the equivilent amount of work.
It's a much better system now where instead of one lawyer we have three politicians/beuracrats (most of which have
Yes I do think layers get too much money in our society. We could do with a lot less folks with the law degrees that are currently politicians, beurecrats, and government employees.
You don't need a lawyer for a basic contract, and you paid legal fees anyway when you were married (marrage license).
Given the number of married people blue cross services, I would say you and your fellow married customers would have pretty good negotiating leverage for coverage. And if not I am sure you'd find another insurer who would welcome that business.
-- Greg
The right to be covered under their spouse's medical insurance (especially important for us contractors).
Contract issue (between you and your insurer)
The right to inherit from a spouse without explictly stating so in a will.
Contract issue, lazybones. You just spent 6 months and $30K planning a wedding, spend an afternoon writing a will.
The right to joint custody of children.
Contract issue/power-of-attorney
The right to make medical decisions for their spouse when they are unable to do so themselves
power-of-attorney
The right to joint ownership of assets
contract / power-of-attorney
I covered everything you asked about in my original post. sheesh, read more than the first two sentences before replying next time.
What I did not say is that married people should not have the right to these things, I said the government does not need to nor should mandate these rights when they all fall under contract law between two people.
And what about my right to free bread and circuses???
-- Greg
I don't believe in special privileges for gay marrage; matter of fact I don't believe in special privileges for straight marrage either. Pretty much I believe the government should get out of defining people's relationships and giving them special consideration based on that.
Most of the laws pertaining to marrage should be in the relm of contractual law anyway and the government should stay out of that, execept to enforce contracts.
For example, the rules pertaining to one partner dying / becoming disabled / etc and who should have rights of inheritance, power-of-attorney, or adoption of childeren should be defined by legaly binding contract between the two partners. If the deseased partner willed that the surviving partner should handle the funeral or be deeded all their possesions then where's the problem in that?
As for tax considerations, why should two people who live together but are not married have a different tax scheme then two people who are married? Why should two folks who went through a special cerimony be given preference over those who did not. If we want to have income-pooling consideration (as is done with marrage tax) then make it available to anyone! Why shouldn't I be able to income-pool with my roomates for example? Our situation is very similar fiscally to a marrage (shared housing, food, entertainment expenses)??
-- Greg
This sounds great, could be a great source of energy for space exploration without worrying about radioactivity/fallout problems of using nuclear power for propultion.
This technology also sounds like it could be the breakthrough for electrical storage, think laptops and electric vehicles! It could kill the whole 'hydrogen economy' stuff that was a bad idea to begin with.
-- Greg
This raises a good question though. I mean in the strictest legal interpretation _every_ datacenter, office, or small business is violating copyright. After all, copyright and most license agreements grant the right to make ONE backup of the software. But any sane backup system keeps multiple backups through a rotation. Example, we do a full backup of servers weekly and retain the backups for a year. so along with our data, we keep not one but fifty two copies of licensed software (solaris in our case).
-- Greg
This is my enterpretation of the SCO corporate logo
-- Greg
Perhaps we can harness the potential kinetic energy of people hugging trees.
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
Solar panels create toxic waste as a byproduct of their manufacture; endangered birds fly into the blades of wind turbines (yes, this has been raised as an issue!).
Blah.
-- Greg