...if they do not, folks who do not like the changes can simply abandon Hulu.com for other avenues.
Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find anything worth the hassle on the site anyway, though tastes obviously differ.
It's obvious that (unlike the music industry) the TV industry is at least trying to adapt to the web. That said, the time is pretty ripe for a hungry start-up or a bored zillionaire to start providing Internet-only broadcasting in a way that appeals, with shows that entertain.
The economy doesn't have to get in the way either - FOX got its start back during the last recession (late '80s, early '90s), no? Why can't the same thing happen now? (Hell, if it's entertaining enough, who needs cable/satellite? That would be enough to both push the traditional media along, and at the same time show if/how it can be profitable).
If my kid installs it, the kid isn't of legal age to agree to any contract - what does $MEGACORP do in the face of that?
EULAs themselves are rather brittle and fragile anyway, even legally. I suspect that once challenged head-on in court (notice that no corporation is really willing to do that), it'll come apart like a house of tissue paper in hurricane-force winds.
I can turn your shiny Linux box into a bot zombie by sending you a Perl script in a tarfile with the execute bit set and asking you to extract and run it.
(emphasis added)
Sure - and I can wipe your home directory with this little script and ask you to run it:
#!/bin/sh rm -rf $HOME/* exit 0
...there comes a point where the argument gets reduced to even academic silliness (e.g. here, please, run my malware because I need to prove my argument!), and I think you've blazed a trail well into that territory...
Most folks that get hold of Linux and install it are probably going to be smart enough to open an e-mailed media file with a media player, and won't touch anything they don't know the extension to. Now there you might be able to do some damage (if you manage to modify the player or find an exploitable hole in it), but otherwise c'mon - this is getting stupid.
Say what you like, but somehow I don't see the Republican Party being Big Media's champion anytime soon...
Seriously - have you actually heard the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity speaking on the subject of "Hollywood", "pop music", and "The Liberal News Media"?
It's possible... but the odds are about as likely as my winning the Powerball Jackpot tomorrow night... e.g. 'not frickin likely'.
It isn't that the shareholders are pissed about R&D in general, it's that they're pissed about other companies getting more useful R&D done on smaller budgets.
Every lab you mentioned up there turned out products that usually saw some sort of profit and potential within 5-10 years of its inception, and usually involved something that had the potential from the start to radically change things as they were at the time. While no one can guess at just how much potential, or count the number of failed projects, a project usually did one of two things: furthered science, or had an immediate forward-thinking potential to be something useful to the world at large. Somehow I don't see patents for things like 'identify some object that sits on a horizontal touchscreen by its tag so we can pimp $10,000 kiosks' as being the Next Transistor, UNIX, Ethernet, or "GUI", you know?
It seems (merely IMHO) that judging by a large chunk of the patents filed, Microsoft's R&D is too often just as myopic as the shareholders you point at with the finger of blame...
I'm certainly not saying that all of MSFT's R&D is crap, but that I can certainly sympathize with shareholders who watch as a demonstrable majority of their investments go up in a puff of esoteric-patent-tinged smoke.
Well, there's always dividends... If Apple can do it on half the budget, and Linux can do it on what, 1/100th the budget (veeeery rough estimation, folks)?
Maybe what they need to do is to point their R&D in better directions, shake up its staff hard (starting at the top), and roll the rest into dividends.
This way the shareholders will be less sue-happy, they don't fall afoul of monopoly concerns, and they might even get a bit of profit out of all that innovation they keep talking about. We also get better and/or decent new products as a side-benefit.
I know, too much to ask and all, but they're going to have to do something, what with their marketshare shrinking and all...
Depends - a yearly CS classroom budget of ~$10k/year (which includes equipment repair and replacement costs), and suddenly it gets a lot pricier than you realize.
'course, I said nothing about "rape" - and if you extrapolate it to a larger campus with thousands of CS students, it comes out to a metric shitload of money... I daresay that 15% of an average budget is a hell of a lot when we're talking academic budgets.
Nope - as a former prof myself, I can tell you that the little college campus I worked at paid Microsoft $1500 per year for the privilege of MSDNAA covering approximately 150-200 students. They kept perfect accounting for it as well, and if the numbers went up, your yearly fees went up.
Meanwhile I was handing out copies of RedHat, Mandrake, Gentoo, and SuSE as fast as my CD burner could spit them out. RedHat themselves sent me a stack of pre-burned CDs when the Linux classes first began in early 2000, and they practically evaporated. The cool part was, I didn't have to give a damn if you were using them for academics or not, and I usually (and gently) extracted a promise that you would share it with someone else if you had a burner at home.
Seriously - back then, Asimov's, Omni Magazine(pity it was too short-lived), Heavy Metal, Analog... I devoured them with the appetite of a starving man in a fully-stocked pantry.
That said, I prefer the online copies - though downloadable would be nice as opposed to strictly online (hint hint). This way I don't have to worry about big stacks of paper, I can carry them all in one go without breaking my back, and being digital, I can search 'em in very short order instead of having to rely on crappy brain cells to hunt down a story that had piqued my interest, but not enough to remember what/where it was in the stack.
Just remember to bring the artwork with you into the digital realm, guys. The artwork makes the whole thing worth the trip.:)
BillG's response might be "OK, I'm outsourcing half of Redmond to China, India, and Vietnam, and laying off 20000 in the US. Care to give me a different answer?"
Sure - MSFT pays tariff and import taxes atop their corporate income tax, and the US Government mandates an immediate switch to Open Source and ODF as their file format standard for all gov't agencies and departments.
That's the problem with gamesmanship against the gov't (any government)... the gov't has the means to really screw your day when you start issuing ultimatums. Just ask MSFT how it's going with the EU right now if you want a comparison.
Windows sales (or at least revenue) shrank by 8% (CNN blames Vista sales in particular). Since PC/Server sales in the industry overall didn't drop (let alone by that much), and netbooks only count for 5% of the whole market (with Windows + Linux netbooks combined in that figure), it stands to reason that there are other factors besides economic malaise that contributed to the losses.
So the ISP can wait for a small piece of the eventual "settlement fees" and go without money in the interim, or instead continue making regular money right now from a continuing customer...
The sad part is, I think you struck a nerve. If Bush had done it, oh hell yes we'd hear all about how that eeevil Booosh is taking one more step towards total world domination.
I do wonder how this one is gonna get spun, though...
Slashdot Mirror
...if they do not, folks who do not like the changes can simply abandon Hulu.com for other avenues.
Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find anything worth the hassle on the site anyway, though tastes obviously differ.
It's obvious that (unlike the music industry) the TV industry is at least trying to adapt to the web. That said, the time is pretty ripe for a hungry start-up or a bored zillionaire to start providing Internet-only broadcasting in a way that appeals, with shows that entertain.
The economy doesn't have to get in the way either - FOX got its start back during the last recession (late '80s, early '90s), no? Why can't the same thing happen now? (Hell, if it's entertaining enough, who needs cable/satellite? That would be enough to both push the traditional media along, and at the same time show if/how it can be profitable).
So the concept of the EULA (exactly as it exists nowadays) has been challenged and carried through? Where? I'd genuinely like to see it.
If my kid installs it, the kid isn't of legal age to agree to any contract - what does $MEGACORP do in the face of that?
EULAs themselves are rather brittle and fragile anyway, even legally. I suspect that once challenged head-on in court (notice that no corporation is really willing to do that), it'll come apart like a house of tissue paper in hurricane-force winds.
I can turn your shiny Linux box into a bot zombie by sending you a Perl script in a tarfile with the execute bit set and asking you to extract and run it.
(emphasis added)
Sure - and I can wipe your home directory with this little script and ask you to run it:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf $HOME/*
exit 0
Most folks that get hold of Linux and install it are probably going to be smart enough to open an e-mailed media file with a media player, and won't touch anything they don't know the extension to. Now there you might be able to do some damage (if you manage to modify the player or find an exploitable hole in it), but otherwise c'mon - this is getting stupid.
And most importantly, they embrace the god damn two-button mouse.
Eh? Why all that anger at Amiga?
(hint: OSX has supported multi-button mice the whole time).
Say what you like, but somehow I don't see the Republican Party being Big Media's champion anytime soon...
Seriously - have you actually heard the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity speaking on the subject of "Hollywood", "pop music", and "The Liberal News Media"?
It's possible... but the odds are about as likely as my winning the Powerball Jackpot tomorrow night... e.g. 'not frickin likely'.
...considering that we all have 127.0.0.1 for an IP addy, this may get a bit ugly if we change 'em all at once...
If you can't beat 'em, litigate or prosecute the unholy frig outta them.
*sigh*
It isn't that the shareholders are pissed about R&D in general, it's that they're pissed about other companies getting more useful R&D done on smaller budgets.
Every lab you mentioned up there turned out products that usually saw some sort of profit and potential within 5-10 years of its inception, and usually involved something that had the potential from the start to radically change things as they were at the time. While no one can guess at just how much potential, or count the number of failed projects, a project usually did one of two things: furthered science, or had an immediate forward-thinking potential to be something useful to the world at large. Somehow I don't see patents for things like 'identify some object that sits on a horizontal touchscreen by its tag so we can pimp $10,000 kiosks' as being the Next Transistor, UNIX, Ethernet, or "GUI", you know?
It seems (merely IMHO) that judging by a large chunk of the patents filed, Microsoft's R&D is too often just as myopic as the shareholders you point at with the finger of blame...
I'm certainly not saying that all of MSFT's R&D is crap, but that I can certainly sympathize with shareholders who watch as a demonstrable majority of their investments go up in a puff of esoteric-patent-tinged smoke.
Well, there's always dividends... If Apple can do it on half the budget, and Linux can do it on what, 1/100th the budget (veeeery rough estimation, folks)?
Maybe what they need to do is to point their R&D in better directions, shake up its staff hard (starting at the top), and roll the rest into dividends.
This way the shareholders will be less sue-happy, they don't fall afoul of monopoly concerns, and they might even get a bit of profit out of all that innovation they keep talking about. We also get better and/or decent new products as a side-benefit.
I know, too much to ask and all, but they're going to have to do something, what with their marketshare shrinking and all...
Odds are good that the statement would still hold (...as evidenced by the sheer lack of Linux-based malware floating around).
As to why that is I'll leave to the fanboys of either OS. But the fact still remains.
Depends - a yearly CS classroom budget of ~$10k/year (which includes equipment repair and replacement costs), and suddenly it gets a lot pricier than you realize.
'course, I said nothing about "rape" - and if you extrapolate it to a larger campus with thousands of CS students, it comes out to a metric shitload of money... I daresay that 15% of an average budget is a hell of a lot when we're talking academic budgets.
Nope - as a former prof myself, I can tell you that the little college campus I worked at paid Microsoft $1500 per year for the privilege of MSDNAA covering approximately 150-200 students. They kept perfect accounting for it as well, and if the numbers went up, your yearly fees went up.
Meanwhile I was handing out copies of RedHat, Mandrake, Gentoo, and SuSE as fast as my CD burner could spit them out. RedHat themselves sent me a stack of pre-burned CDs when the Linux classes first began in early 2000, and they practically evaporated. The cool part was, I didn't have to give a damn if you were using them for academics or not, and I usually (and gently) extracted a promise that you would share it with someone else if you had a burner at home.
Seriously - back then, Asimov's, Omni Magazine(pity it was too short-lived), Heavy Metal, Analog... I devoured them with the appetite of a starving man in a fully-stocked pantry.
That said, I prefer the online copies - though downloadable would be nice as opposed to strictly online (hint hint). This way I don't have to worry about big stacks of paper, I can carry them all in one go without breaking my back, and being digital, I can search 'em in very short order instead of having to rely on crappy brain cells to hunt down a story that had piqued my interest, but not enough to remember what/where it was in the stack.
Just remember to bring the artwork with you into the digital realm, guys. The artwork makes the whole thing worth the trip. :)
BillG's response might be "OK, I'm outsourcing half of Redmond to China, India, and Vietnam, and laying off 20000 in the US. Care to give me a different answer?"
Sure - MSFT pays tariff and import taxes atop their corporate income tax, and the US Government mandates an immediate switch to Open Source and ODF as their file format standard for all gov't agencies and departments.
That's the problem with gamesmanship against the gov't (any government)... the gov't has the means to really screw your day when you start issuing ultimatums. Just ask MSFT how it's going with the EU right now if you want a comparison.
Windows sales (or at least revenue) shrank by 8% (CNN blames Vista sales in particular). Since PC/Server sales in the industry overall didn't drop (let alone by that much), and netbooks only count for 5% of the whole market (with Windows + Linux netbooks combined in that figure), it stands to reason that there are other factors besides economic malaise that contributed to the losses.
IIRC, wasn't $2.1bn of that income from the recent (as in, early this week) sale of Comcast stock that MSFT held?
So the ISP can wait for a small piece of the eventual "settlement fees" and go without money in the interim, or instead continue making regular money right now from a continuing customer...
Did the RIAA really think this through?
The sad part is... as a former teacher myself, I cannot help but agree, but with one caveat:
...because the vast majority of teachers are clueless as to how to use it.
Surely in America you'd be able to start up a similar scheme for charitable donations?
Yep - we do.
Sure: Use the phone's default web browser to open Google's Mobile Page, and download Google Mobile App to your phone. Works like a charm.
What do they have against BSD...
They read Netcraft?
(/me ducks and runzlakhell...)
Well, so far, most of the comments have been about how evil Obama is for doing this, so what's the difference?
The relative lack of insulting nicknames thrown at Obama, for starters... not that I condone it, but it is an interesting thing to notice.
The sad part is, I think you struck a nerve. If Bush had done it, oh hell yes we'd hear all about how that eeevil Booosh is taking one more step towards total world domination.
I do wonder how this one is gonna get spun, though...
Having read through that piece, I can only come to one conclusion:
I have discovered through your cite just how much of a whiny, immature, self-loving, responsibility-avoiding asshat Rob Enderle really is...
Bleah.