Also, this won't affect the most annoying spam I get, the junk email from companies that I have an account with.
If this is the most annoying spam for you, then you really can't truly understand or appreciate the nature of the problem. Without spam filters, my wife's email account gets at least 80 spam messages daily from "businesses" with which we have had absolutely no prior contact. About half of them are pornographic in nature. One quarter of them are for pharmaceutical supplies (including Viagra). The remaining quarter is divided between financial scams and genuine advertising for products that would have been interesting had the companies involved not sent unsolicited email.
Yeah, except if Microsoft tried to use the name "Winux" in any product they would immediately be sued by the owner of a trademark on which that name infringes: a certain Mr. Linus Torvalds who owns the trademark for a software product named "Linux".
Actually, I bet if SCO bit the dust completely and Microsoft decided to build and market an OS that was some sort of hybrid between Unix and Windows, Win-UX (or WinUX) would be considered a perfectly fine name and nobody would bother to sue.
But what kinds of "legitimate" unsolicited commercial email are you thinking of? I for one would consider any unsolicited advertisements in my inbox are spam, whether they're from Viagra Spammer #89723490, or whether they're from Sierra Entertainment, AOL or Microsoft or...
If I had actually wanted the email, I would have asked for it, and then it's not unsolicited, is it?
That's what people who are afraid of a total SPAM ban don't really understand. The junk mail you get in your postal mailbox doesn't cost you anything to receive. That's not true with unwanted email. Ultimately, it's the users who pay for the extra disk space and bandwidth needed for this junk. And for dialup users on ISPs with no filtering enabled, it's a nightmare because they have to download all the messages before they can run client-side filters. I cannot think of any reason why unsolicited commercial email should ever be considered legitimate.
Most people don't have their PC's hooked up to their TV's.
Can you make any comment on the relative quality of bittorrent downloads vs. what's stored on the DVD? I'm just curious. Maybe they are the same; I can get 500 MB in less than thirty minutes, so I guess 4 GB would take less than 4 hours.
Like I said. That's simply shifting the "cost burden" around.
Their distributors:=Broadband your paying for.
Their Case,Notes,CD:=Your case,notes, and cd.
Their advertisement:=Displayed on your computer.
Darl, perhaps you should stick with your lawsuit against IBM. You really don't want to be dividing your efforts right now. From the RIAA standpoint, please note that the vast majority of the costs you listed above are being transferred to the consumer without them realizing it. That means savings all over the place for RIAA. So going back to the original premise, the RIAA missed a golden opportunity.
You're right in that they will "grab it". How that translates to your bottom line, verses theirs remains to be seen, but history points the way towards a likely outcome.
From their standpoint, who cares? Maybe in the long run I end up paying the same amount (or more). Either way, they end up making more money by selling the same product with a different model.
About the only thing I can see changing are reduced release times, lowering cost as even more people jump on the DVD bandwagon, and a reduction in box office sales and TV revenue as people change their viewing habits. In fact, that will affect the MPAA industry far more than downloading of movies.
You have a good point. My personal viewing habits will probably change dramatically once I finish off my basement and install a home theater. The dropping costs of high definition large screen devices and rising costs of watching movies in theaters will probably push more people to do this. Once I have a home theater, I'll probably stop going out to movies altogether.
Anonymous Cowards and their severe lack of wits....
First the "middle men" existed long before there was broadband.... Third do some research. You'll find that distribution costs isn't the biggest cost of producing music, so "broadband for everyone" isn't going to do more than shift costs around....
Never did I state that middle men didn't exist before broadband. The opportunity the RIAA companies had was to eliminate the middleman that was already part of the legacy business model. At present, the retailer markup on a music CD is between 30 and 50 percent (yes, I did my research here). While that's actually a pretty low markup, online distribution would get rid of this cost and actually allow RIAA members to grab some of it for themselves. If you look at the per-song costs for something like iTunes, you can see that your typical "customized" CD exceeds the wholesale price of a CD. (Per-album costs seem to be only slightly above wholesale costs.) In addition, the cost of shipping CDs to warehouses and retailers goes away and is only partly replaced by the cost of maintaining the computing infrastructure necessary to house and sell online content. Furthermore, according to the RIAA, the biggest portion of the cost of a CD is marketing and promotion. While this cost could never go away, it can be somewhat reduced by providing online content and per-song pricing. If a customer can download a single tune for only 99 cents, they are far more likely to take a risk on new artists. After all, 99 cents isn't much to lose to determine that Boy Band X is just as bad as all the others. Finally, there is currently some experimentation going on by independent artists to reduce production costs by using more commoditized recording equipment and directly targeting the online format. If the recording, mixing and editing processes are all done digitally on a computer, the total cost of production goes down.
I'm curious when they will start to sale videos in online stores?
I'm assuming you mean downloadable videos that you can burn yourself. This will probably happen when your average person's bandwidth gets high enough that downloading an entire movie is no more of a hassle than downloading a CD worth of music is now. Why? Because at that point the online trading of videos will truly begin and the MPAA will have to start looking at a different business model, just as the RIAA is now. Personally, I think the whole of the RIAA are idiots because they really missed an incredible opportunity to drastically reduce their distribution costs. They seem to be just now coming to their senses, but because they waited so long they have to deal with lots of "middle men" and competition.
Just wait and see. When you can download 2GB of data in about 2 hours, you'll start seeing the market open up. And before anybody jumps all over me, yes, I'm aware that there are already "stores" where you can watch streaming video or download and watch, but I don't think these are the same quality as what you would get on a DVD. Somebody correct me (and provide info) if I'm wrong.
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
I'll grant that the registry editing may not be trivial to everyone. But have you ever actually used Ad-Aware?
Yeah. I use both that and Spybot Search and Destroy. However, I stopped using Internet Explorer for anything but our corporate intranet, and neither of the spyware scanners every really finds anything. I think you said you were using Firebird (correct me if I don't remember correctly), so you probably experience similar results. I honestly can't figure out why anybody would put up with such spyware nonsense when they don't have to.:-)
I personally think that within the next three years, you'll see a major Linux desktop distribution that provides users with an experience very much like Windows. However, it'll probably be from a major vendor, will contain some proprietary code, and will probably bear a cost not much below MS Windows.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
I don't have the time and money to dick around with Linux shit,...
Time is a good argument. Money isn't, unless you're referring to the age-old axiom "time is money." But I get your drift. The parent post was a little on the arrogant side.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
You've posted 9 comments in an hour and a half here. How freakin' productive could you possibly be?
This from somebody who takes the time to research hourly statistics on somebody's posting record?:-) Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where, exactly, did I say or imply that?
Read your post!
- being able to enjoy those cute "I love you" and "Anna Kurovina" messages automatically forwarded from your best friends, co-workers, and total strangers.
Anyone with half a brain and/or access to someone that can take the time to teach them a bit will be perfectly safe from such things.
The same person with half a brain or someone to teach them can use Linux.
Funny, I don't see any ad pop-ups at all while i'm browsing with Firebird's blocking on, and everyone I know that's still using IE (even my computer-cluelesss grandma) has a pop-up blocker installed. I'll let you in on a little secret, too - those ads and porn pop-ups aren't limited to only Windows.
Never been bit by the Windows Messenger Popups? You must have a firewall or you know enough to disable the Messenger service. Starting to look like a Linux candidate to me.
This is a legitimate gripe. Again, however, anyone with half a brain or access to a help desk minion/techie friend or family member will be able to remove such software through programs like Ad-Aware or Spybot. I'm sorry, but if someone thinks the only way to get rid of ad/spyware is a complete wipe of the drive, then they're an idiot. Even for the stuff that can't be auto-removed somehow, there's almost always a fairly easy way to fix it in the registry, found through Google.
Again, anybody with the brains and energy to go through this ritual could easily handle the "fun" of installing Linux.
Way to generalize. And settings spread out in Windows? I think not. 99.9% of anything you need to change can be accessed through the Control Panels or a simple file search for something to edit.
Let's see, in Windows, settings can be changed by using the control panel, customizing the start menu, using the registry editor or searching for files to edit. In modern Linux distributions, settings can be changed by using the desktop manager's control panel, using the DM menu builder or searching for config files to edit. Guess which one sounds easier.
- A wide swath of available content, all provided to your trusted platform ensuring that your purchased programs will run forever... Until you lose the disk, upgrade your system, ban the program from spying on your browsing habits, or the producer decides to turn the software off remotely.
True for some software, not true for the vast majority....
Not yet, but it's becoming more and more prevalent. When the OS manufacturer starts heading down this path, others follow.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying Windows is perfect, i'm just saying that your perceptions seem to be a bit off as well.
Nor am I a Linux zealot. But I wanted you to see that your post does a much better job of arguing in favor of Linux than you might have thought.
But, in my area TWC is going to be offering VOIP in early next year, but they want to charge 39.95/mo for service that I can get for 25 bucks from vonage and they won't even be offering voice mail initially!
Interestingly enough, my provider is offering VoIP in a PARTNERSHIP with Vonage for $25/month (500 LD minutes) or $35/month unlimited. Personally, I think this is the way ALL providers should do it -- partner with a third party company.
I suspect that for the sake of reasonable enforcement (i.e. the same reason that the owner of the car is responsible for the parking ticket), they might end up deciding that the owner of the broadband connection is responsible for everything done on it, because it's impossible to prove who was sitting in front of a computer, but it's easy to prove who is paying the ISP bill.
Or possibly they will use this to shove DRM down our throats and mandate that all computers connecting to the internet have some built-in hardware that broadcast something uniquely identifying it and its owner (like the Intel serial number thing that had people up in arms some years ago). Not that a good hacker couldn't get around that kind of thing, though.
What they need to do is decide whether a person is responsible for what is done with a computer, or whether the computer itself is held responsible (hence, the registered owner).
Even that isn't accurate. In the case of the son-in-law, I'm sure he took the computer with him. So, they need to determine whether a person is responsible for what was done on THEIR broadband connection.
Firewalls are an insanely stupid idea, or at least using them to protect shitty-ass computers that can be tricked into executing programs over a network is an insanely stupid idea.
No, the people who rely entirely on firewalls for their protection are insanely stupid. Firewalls should only be a small part of your security system. You start with well-patched, secure operating systems. You run secure applications. You disable all unnecessary network traffic. And then you put in a firewall just in case. This is just like relying on the "safety" on a gun. Anybody who does this is an idiot. To make a gun as safe as possible, you unload it, turn the safety on, and then make sure it doesn't get pointed at anybody.
IIRC Whenever someone says the word "Chou" (Italian for slave)...
My Italian really stinks, but I think the word for slave is "schiavo", and the word for "hello" is "ciao." Maybe similar derivations, but I don't think they are the same thing. Any Italians out there available to give the real story?
Slashdot Mirror
Now this is interesting. Could my caffeine intake really be responsible for my 2 o'clock downs? If so, I'll switch to tea today.
I think you've been watching too many movies. :-) Well, either that or you've experienced a holiday in Texas.
If this is the most annoying spam for you, then you really can't truly understand or appreciate the nature of the problem. Without spam filters, my wife's email account gets at least 80 spam messages daily from "businesses" with which we have had absolutely no prior contact. About half of them are pornographic in nature. One quarter of them are for pharmaceutical supplies (including Viagra). The remaining quarter is divided between financial scams and genuine advertising for products that would have been interesting had the companies involved not sent unsolicited email.
I recently viewed non-taxpayer supported radio, but I got bored after it just sat there doing nothing for a while.
Actually, I bet if SCO bit the dust completely and Microsoft decided to build and market an OS that was some sort of hybrid between Unix and Windows, Win-UX (or WinUX) would be considered a perfectly fine name and nobody would bother to sue.
That's what people who are afraid of a total SPAM ban don't really understand. The junk mail you get in your postal mailbox doesn't cost you anything to receive. That's not true with unwanted email. Ultimately, it's the users who pay for the extra disk space and bandwidth needed for this junk. And for dialup users on ISPs with no filtering enabled, it's a nightmare because they have to download all the messages before they can run client-side filters. I cannot think of any reason why unsolicited commercial email should ever be considered legitimate.
Can you make any comment on the relative quality of bittorrent downloads vs. what's stored on the DVD? I'm just curious. Maybe they are the same; I can get 500 MB in less than thirty minutes, so I guess 4 GB would take less than 4 hours.
Darl, perhaps you should stick with your lawsuit against IBM. You really don't want to be dividing your efforts right now. From the RIAA standpoint, please note that the vast majority of the costs you listed above are being transferred to the consumer without them realizing it. That means savings all over the place for RIAA. So going back to the original premise, the RIAA missed a golden opportunity.
You're right in that they will "grab it". How that translates to your bottom line, verses theirs remains to be seen, but history points the way towards a likely outcome.
From their standpoint, who cares? Maybe in the long run I end up paying the same amount (or more). Either way, they end up making more money by selling the same product with a different model.
How is your experience at your friends home theater as compared to "the big screen?"
You have a good point. My personal viewing habits will probably change dramatically once I finish off my basement and install a home theater. The dropping costs of high definition large screen devices and rising costs of watching movies in theaters will probably push more people to do this. Once I have a home theater, I'll probably stop going out to movies altogether.
Anonymous Cowards and their severe lack of wits....
First the "middle men" existed long before there was broadband.... Third do some research. You'll find that distribution costs isn't the biggest cost of producing music, so "broadband for everyone" isn't going to do more than shift costs around....
Never did I state that middle men didn't exist before broadband. The opportunity the RIAA companies had was to eliminate the middleman that was already part of the legacy business model. At present, the retailer markup on a music CD is between 30 and 50 percent (yes, I did my research here). While that's actually a pretty low markup, online distribution would get rid of this cost and actually allow RIAA members to grab some of it for themselves. If you look at the per-song costs for something like iTunes, you can see that your typical "customized" CD exceeds the wholesale price of a CD. (Per-album costs seem to be only slightly above wholesale costs.) In addition, the cost of shipping CDs to warehouses and retailers goes away and is only partly replaced by the cost of maintaining the computing infrastructure necessary to house and sell online content. Furthermore, according to the RIAA, the biggest portion of the cost of a CD is marketing and promotion. While this cost could never go away, it can be somewhat reduced by providing online content and per-song pricing. If a customer can download a single tune for only 99 cents, they are far more likely to take a risk on new artists. After all, 99 cents isn't much to lose to determine that Boy Band X is just as bad as all the others. Finally, there is currently some experimentation going on by independent artists to reduce production costs by using more commoditized recording equipment and directly targeting the online format. If the recording, mixing and editing processes are all done digitally on a computer, the total cost of production goes down.
I'm assuming you mean downloadable videos that you can burn yourself. This will probably happen when your average person's bandwidth gets high enough that downloading an entire movie is no more of a hassle than downloading a CD worth of music is now. Why? Because at that point the online trading of videos will truly begin and the MPAA will have to start looking at a different business model, just as the RIAA is now. Personally, I think the whole of the RIAA are idiots because they really missed an incredible opportunity to drastically reduce their distribution costs. They seem to be just now coming to their senses, but because they waited so long they have to deal with lots of "middle men" and competition.
Just wait and see. When you can download 2GB of data in about 2 hours, you'll start seeing the market open up. And before anybody jumps all over me, yes, I'm aware that there are already "stores" where you can watch streaming video or download and watch, but I don't think these are the same quality as what you would get on a DVD. Somebody correct me (and provide info) if I'm wrong.
Yeah. I use both that and Spybot Search and Destroy. However, I stopped using Internet Explorer for anything but our corporate intranet, and neither of the spyware scanners every really finds anything. I think you said you were using Firebird (correct me if I don't remember correctly), so you probably experience similar results. I honestly can't figure out why anybody would put up with such spyware nonsense when they don't have to. :-)
I personally think that within the next three years, you'll see a major Linux desktop distribution that provides users with an experience very much like Windows. However, it'll probably be from a major vendor, will contain some proprietary code, and will probably bear a cost not much below MS Windows.
Time is a good argument. Money isn't, unless you're referring to the age-old axiom "time is money." But I get your drift. The parent post was a little on the arrogant side.
This from somebody who takes the time to research hourly statistics on somebody's posting record? :-) Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Read your post!
The same person with half a brain or someone to teach them can use Linux.
Never been bit by the Windows Messenger Popups? You must have a firewall or you know enough to disable the Messenger service. Starting to look like a Linux candidate to me.
Again, anybody with the brains and energy to go through this ritual could easily handle the "fun" of installing Linux.
Let's see, in Windows, settings can be changed by using the control panel, customizing the start menu, using the registry editor or searching for files to edit. In modern Linux distributions, settings can be changed by using the desktop manager's control panel, using the DM menu builder or searching for config files to edit. Guess which one sounds easier.
Not yet, but it's becoming more and more prevalent. When the OS manufacturer starts heading down this path, others follow.
Nor am I a Linux zealot. But I wanted you to see that your post does a much better job of arguing in favor of Linux than you might have thought.Interestingly enough, my provider is offering VoIP in a PARTNERSHIP with Vonage for $25/month (500 LD minutes) or $35/month unlimited. Personally, I think this is the way ALL providers should do it -- partner with a third party company.
Or for anybody who has a WaWa around, they don't charge a fee for their ATM.
Or possibly they will use this to shove DRM down our throats and mandate that all computers connecting to the internet have some built-in hardware that broadcast something uniquely identifying it and its owner (like the Intel serial number thing that had people up in arms some years ago). Not that a good hacker couldn't get around that kind of thing, though.
Even that isn't accurate. In the case of the son-in-law, I'm sure he took the computer with him. So, they need to determine whether a person is responsible for what was done on THEIR broadband connection.
Yeah, if only we had a TIVO for corporate litigation....
Or a win by RedHat in their suit against SCO....
No, the people who rely entirely on firewalls for their protection are insanely stupid. Firewalls should only be a small part of your security system. You start with well-patched, secure operating systems. You run secure applications. You disable all unnecessary network traffic. And then you put in a firewall just in case. This is just like relying on the "safety" on a gun. Anybody who does this is an idiot. To make a gun as safe as possible, you unload it, turn the safety on, and then make sure it doesn't get pointed at anybody.
My Italian really stinks, but I think the word for slave is "schiavo", and the word for "hello" is "ciao." Maybe similar derivations, but I don't think they are the same thing. Any Italians out there available to give the real story?
More importantly, when we stop using the word, will people forget what slavery is and just make all the same mistakes?
Of other interest, I believe The Guvinator should now see his first target for cutting the budget...