Err, I may be wrong, but didn't Honda "Outsource" their labor to the United States (as it was cheaper to hire American workers to build cars for sale in the US than to build 'em overseas then ship the things via ocean freight?)
It seems that this outsourcing thing can and does work both ways, no?
(err, cue massive down-modding by disgruntled outsourced IT workers...)
"which part of your ass did you pull this 80% out of?"
This part, my dear AC (.pdf file)...and I was being very charitable about it by fudging down from a 30% US total to only 20% broadband world-wide, since very few places outside of Western Europe, Select parts of Asia, and North America can even afford the infrastructure, let alone have an actual customer base for it.
"every city has an internet cafe with a burner at least... i would probably guess 95% of internet users have access to broadband IN SOME WAY. work, school, cafe..."
Perhaps in Southern California or wherever you're fortunate enough to live that may be true, but even within the US, I defy you to point out where "95%" of Montana's population has access to broadband (or Alaska, or Utah, or Mississippi, or North Dakota, or...?)
"I really don't see the market unless you are stuck on a 56K modem"
...considering that 80% of the users online are stuck on a 56K modem (usually running at a way slower speed), I'd readily call this a nice-sized market.
The only real problem is that the one thing that would benefit the most from patching (OSes) will most likely be missing from the selection.
Actually, el-spectre covered one aspect, that being presentation. OTOH, there is also the goodies that help a newbie along, like HardDrake.
For example, mdk had one of the earliest setups that let you change monitor resolution without having to shut X off, go digging around in XF86Config, then crossing your fingers and hoping the modelines were put in correctly.
Yep, SuSE has YaST (and Sax before that), but it wasn't anywhere near as easy or as intuitive (IMHO) for a newbie who was too used to Windows and how MSFT did things. HTH explain things a bit better,
I still have my distro preferences more towards the RH side of things (though it is drifting towards SuSE more and mroe), and the Franco-American antipathy over Iraq may cloud the political arena darkly...
However, Mandrake is one of the absolute best newbie/intro distros of all time, IMHO, and it's damned good to see them come back from the dead.
No matter what US folks may think of French things, and no matter how disdainful one may be, when it comes to Linux at least, we're all family.
...and how many of those would've been purchased if P2P didn't exist?
I'm not one to advocate theft in any form, but I do find it funny that one can legally record and share copies of music from the radio, XM Radio, Television (via, say, cable or sat TV's non-MTV music channels), etc... and many of these sources are digital quality to boot.
...but for some odd reason it is suddenly illegal to do it via the Internet?
Like I said, theft isn't cool in any form, but what makes one digital format (say, recordings off of DirecTV's Music Choice(tm) ) blessed when compared to another (The Internet)
I suspect that in legality, it is a matter of the RIAA getting a 'vig' from tape sales, broadcasters, et al, but in moral or technical principle there really isn;t all that much difference.
Actually, I agree to a point; Windows does offer a fairly standardized desktop format that has existed for eons (at least since Win95), as does Mac (which retains the dock and top-oriented menubar of OSes-past.) Both also go out of their way to make changes incremental and/or rare (Win3.11 to Win95 was the last big paradigm shove as far as Windows desktop behavior)
OTOH, there is a lot of modifcation and customization in Windows XP nowadays, and tucows is chock-full of proggies that will make the XP desktop look and feel like anything you want it to. Windows in effect already has what I asked about in the parent, save for the fact that you have to go get a third-party registry-tweaker to get the more extreme LAN-party flavored desktop customizations done.
Linux OTOH has a unique opportunity... we've already got the zillion tools and flexibility to make it look and smell like whatever a user wants. The Linux OEM's job is easier... they just have to agree on and produce a standardized and common "Joe Sixpack" desktop, with a common suite of wizards and such, then hide the tweaker features just deep enough (say, activated by a command-line?) so that you have to really go looking for them.
Last Monday, Miguel de Icaza (at Novell's BRainshare here in Salt Lake City) mentioned Novell's push for the Linux desktop, and covered a lot of the same ground, but he presented it quite intelligently...
You can have a simple desktop that Joe Sixpack can play with, and at the same time set up a dialogue that allows the tweaker in some of us to have free reign over what each little widget and bit of desktop does.
I just don't get why it has to be such an "either or" choice here...
Not to troll or anything (honest!), but given recent scandals, I'm kind of leery about letting the UN run the Internet root servers.
Otherwise I agree with your premise, and wouldn't mind an independant third-party organization basically running the 'net. Finding one without an agenda or finding one that is relatively corruption-proof is another story entirely.
"Poor talentless underdogs, my heart bleeds. If they can't afford DRM, they either shouldn't use it or they should start sucking less so they actually turn a profit."
Not so sure about that... Consider it this way: If a start-up or niche indie company wants to get their music out there, but can't get past the DRM hurdle...?
It may not be a question of them "sucking", IOW. Also, one can turn a profit but still be too small to afford a fat DRM licensing fee.
As for Dell and the rest of it, yours was the only intelligent and witty response thus far, esp. once one gets done reading the overly-sensitive among us, clutching their i-pods 'til their knucles turn white and and shrieking in semi-coherent anger. You OTH have skillfully avoided the barbs quite well, which was cool indeed.:)
This may sound bad, and I'll prolly get modded down even further because of it, but in a way, IMHO it was well worth the Karma-point loss to see the zealots rise to the baited portions of the post so damned easily.
...but what would the fees be? Out of the reach of the small indie shops, or reasonable?
Then again, why bother with DRM at all? My Dell Jukebox cost me less per GB, has a longer battery life, doesn't have any DRM, at least none that I'm aware of, it lets you use it for data storage if you want, and I don't get my sexuality questioned every time someone sees me use it.
Sorta... but they went from a full commitment to OSS, to a company desperately trying to keep UnixWare alive. We all know what happened from there...:)
(PS: does this mean I can buy a laptop w/ SuSE preloaded on it now, here in the US? Or does that global thing mean what most "global" corporate initiatives do - "everywhere outside of the US")?
"When the supplier goes out of business walmart creates its own store brand and sells that"
Actually, Wal-Mart themselves don't make the in-store brand, they either contract the in-house "brand" out (Sam's Choice, etc) to a third-party competitor, or (perhaps?) they'd go into partnership with someone who makes a competing product.
Also, they often create their own in-store brand anyway and sell it next to the name brand stuff (check out the pharmacy dep't sometime... next to each kind of pill or cream, you see the same thing with the "equate" brand on it - same active ingredient (usually because the patent expired on the chemical) and all.
Wal-Mart is still the 800-ton gorilla in marketing, however. That I won't dare argue after seeing what they're capable of. Only the other biggie megastores, like Target, Venture, etc. dare compete on the same footing.
After all, Wal-Mart does have a habit of "editing" certain CD's for language content and such... did they do the same to their online versions as well?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that this outsourcing thing can and does work both ways, no?
(err, cue massive down-modding by disgruntled outsourced IT workers...)
This part, my dear AC (.pdf file) ...and I was being very charitable about it by fudging down from a 30% US total to only 20% broadband world-wide, since very few places outside of Western Europe, Select parts of Asia, and North America can even afford the infrastructure, let alone have an actual customer base for it.
"every city has an internet cafe with a burner at least... i would probably guess 95% of internet users have access to broadband IN SOME WAY. work, school, cafe..."
Perhaps in Southern California or wherever you're fortunate enough to live that may be true, but even within the US, I defy you to point out where "95%" of Montana's population has access to broadband (or Alaska, or Utah, or Mississippi, or North Dakota, or...?)
HTH, dear. And get out more often...
The only real problem is that the one thing that would benefit the most from patching (OSes) will most likely be missing from the selection.
For example, mdk had one of the earliest setups that let you change monitor resolution without having to shut X off, go digging around in XF86Config, then crossing your fingers and hoping the modelines were put in correctly.
Yep, SuSE has YaST (and Sax before that), but it wasn't anywhere near as easy or as intuitive (IMHO) for a newbie who was too used to Windows and how MSFT did things. HTH explain things a bit better,
However, Mandrake is one of the absolute best newbie/intro distros of all time, IMHO, and it's damned good to see them come back from the dead.
No matter what US folks may think of French things, and no matter how disdainful one may be, when it comes to Linux at least, we're all family.
Cheers,
I'm not one to advocate theft in any form, but I do find it funny that one can legally record and share copies of music from the radio, XM Radio, Television (via, say, cable or sat TV's non-MTV music channels), etc... and many of these sources are digital quality to boot.
Like I said, theft isn't cool in any form, but what makes one digital format (say, recordings off of DirecTV's Music Choice(tm) ) blessed when compared to another (The Internet)
I suspect that in legality, it is a matter of the RIAA getting a 'vig' from tape sales, broadcasters, et al, but in moral or technical principle there really isn;t all that much difference.
OTOH, there is a lot of modifcation and customization in Windows XP nowadays, and tucows is chock-full of proggies that will make the XP desktop look and feel like anything you want it to. Windows in effect already has what I asked about in the parent, save for the fact that you have to go get a third-party registry-tweaker to get the more extreme LAN-party flavored desktop customizations done.
Linux OTOH has a unique opportunity... we've already got the zillion tools and flexibility to make it look and smell like whatever a user wants. The Linux OEM's job is easier... they just have to agree on and produce a standardized and common "Joe Sixpack" desktop, with a common suite of wizards and such, then hide the tweaker features just deep enough (say, activated by a command-line?) so that you have to really go looking for them.
You can have a simple desktop that Joe Sixpack can play with, and at the same time set up a dialogue that allows the tweaker in some of us to have free reign over what each little widget and bit of desktop does.
I just don't get why it has to be such an "either or" choice here...
Otherwise I agree with your premise, and wouldn't mind an independant third-party organization basically running the 'net. Finding one without an agenda or finding one that is relatively corruption-proof is another story entirely.
"I think we can chalk this up to a well played all around :)"
Sounds good from here too :) /P
(waitaminute - did an April 1 story just get out of the barn a wee bit early?)
Thx in advance,
Not so sure about that... Consider it this way: If a start-up or niche indie company wants to get their music out there, but can't get past the DRM hurdle...?
It may not be a question of them "sucking", IOW. Also, one can turn a profit but still be too small to afford a fat DRM licensing fee.
As for Dell and the rest of it, yours was the only intelligent and witty response thus far, esp. once one gets done reading the overly-sensitive among us, clutching their i-pods 'til their knucles turn white and and shrieking in semi-coherent anger. You OTH have skillfully avoided the barbs quite well, which was cool indeed. :)
This may sound bad, and I'll prolly get modded down even further because of it, but in a way, IMHO it was well worth the Karma-point loss to see the zealots rise to the baited portions of the post so damned easily.
Then again, why bother with DRM at all? My Dell Jukebox cost me less per GB, has a longer battery life, doesn't have any DRM, at least none that I'm aware of, it lets you use it for data storage if you want, and I don't get my sexuality questioned every time someone sees me use it.
(that, or someone make an anime channel, dammit.)
(aww, frig! Now I'm showing my age!)
(Put it this way: If Slashdot had a "Short Bus" version, TechTV's "informative" broadcasts would definately qualify.)
(PS: does this mean I can buy a laptop w/ SuSE preloaded on it now, here in the US? Or does that global thing mean what most "global" corporate initiatives do - "everywhere outside of the US")?
Actually, Wal-Mart themselves don't make the in-store brand, they either contract the in-house "brand" out (Sam's Choice, etc) to a third-party competitor, or (perhaps?) they'd go into partnership with someone who makes a competing product.
Also, they often create their own in-store brand anyway and sell it next to the name brand stuff (check out the pharmacy dep't sometime... next to each kind of pill or cream, you see the same thing with the "equate" brand on it - same active ingredient (usually because the patent expired on the chemical) and all.
Wal-Mart is still the 800-ton gorilla in marketing, however. That I won't dare argue after seeing what they're capable of. Only the other biggie megastores, like Target, Venture, etc. dare compete on the same footing.