If you actually wanted to make money, you would go with simple, text based ads
If only that were true, believe me we would be doing it.
Have you tried it? Spend a few weeks getting in contact with people who advertise through Google, get some numbers from them. Take those numbers and show them to your current advertisers. Heck, just do it for a week. Tell them, "We'll try this text based thing for a week, completely free of charge to you, and if you find yourself getting more sales and hits in that week, then let's talk about expanding that..."
Heck, post an Ask Slashdot about it and you might find Google advertisers who read this site who can tell you the success stories.
Worst case scenario, you lose a week of ad impressions, best case, you have tiny ads that your readers actually go ga-ga for, how could you lose?
Re:They will find a way.. if it's worth it
on
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Now, if the same IP didn't come with 4 pounds of land-fillable packaging and permanently scribed onto its own read-only media and was made available online for say $5... then it might be more convenient for those same individuals to just chuck out the $5 and download the thing. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.
Um.... So tell me again, why, exactly, do you think you'll be able to download movies for $5? Look at the price of CD's. Is it cheaper or MORE expensive to buy a CD today than 15 years ago? Without piracy, there is *no* competition for the movie industry. they could charge $1000 a download, and there is not one dang thing you can do about it, no alternatives, not even illegal ones.
Hey! A Suicide Booth! So long suckers...
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
Now I can understand why suicide booths are so popular in the future... the SSSCA must have been upheld.
As I said, I'd like to do filtering based on subscriptions (thats what I mean by the Gold Star for posting). Operating under the assumption that a troll wouldn't want to give us his credit card number (half of them post through anonymizing proxy servers, so I seriously doubt that they'll be giving us their CC num;)
That isn't logical. If somone is viewing slashdot with ads turned on, then they are "paying" via ads just as much as somone who is giving you $5. Punishing those users will just make them less inclined to participate, which will mean FEWER impressions of the ads they were viewing, which in turn will cause them to grow bigger and bigger.
If you actually wanted to make money, you would go with simple, text based ads. If your *current* advertisers don't like that, then find some who actually have heads on thier shoulders and understand that they actually make *more* money than the seizure inducing variety. Come on guy, you are posting stories about how successful the Google ad system works at *least* once a week, you can't tell me that none of that has rubbed off on you?
Not that you couldn't implement an "anti-troll" system as well, just don't base it on subscriptions. I mean you can already block out AC's, so why not just make a threshhold for poster's karma too. The chance of a troll getting 40-50 karma points is slim, and even if he does, he'll lose it within a couple of troll posts.
Yes, you can, and that's the point. No matter how big or intrusive the ad gets, the human mind can block it out completely.
But simple, informative text ads that get right to the point and offer neat deals or interesting services are often the kind of thing you don't *want* to ignore. That's why they work.
If you are not in the mood to buy anything at all, you will click on nothing. But if you are interested in getting a new wireless card, then an one line add offering them for $44 will get you to click, but a stobe-flashing "Hot tech deals!" will not.
Current marketing theory seems to dictate that actual "real" customers should be ignored but "impulse buy" customers, you know, the kind that like shiny, flashing things, are the way to go.
Not only is this just plain illogical (not to mention outright stupid), it also has the effect of *disinteresting* your base of "real" customers.
People do NOT BUY $600 palmtops on impulse. They buy gum and musical Santa Claus keychains on impulse. There is a REASON why you don't see lobster tails next to the People magazines when you check out.
The end result of having bigger, flashier ads will be fewer people clicking, which will just make the marketroids to clamor for even BIGGER ads.
Mark my words, a single *informative* line: P4 1.5ghz 100G 256M 19" $780 will garner more clicks than fifty pages worth of flashing "Click on the monkey and win!!!!!". And becuase a single line is so small, you can include five of them for every ONE big ad. How can that go wrong?
To understand why the system works like it does, you need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer. But we want to give you an option to see Slashdot without these ads. Second, you need to understand that Slashdot readers fall into a variety of types, and charging the same flat fee just isn't possible.
If advertisers would prefer that you post stories about thier products because "that's what the want" would you do it? I should hope not! Give the advertisers a smack across the head and tell them: "We will put text ads, you know, the kind that annoy no one and actually provide enough information for people to click on. The kind that Google uses to stay in business AND keep it's integrity."
NOTE TO SLASHDOT: BIG ADS DO NOT WORK! In fact, they actually do the opposite, which will make your advetisers even MORE desperate, and foolishly request even bigger ads! Use small, text based ads. They work!
...because it means that the ONLY recourse for these money hungry bastards in the "content industry" (is legal prostitution considered and "industry"?) is legislation. As long as they can be fooled into thinking that Mr. Wizbang's new ROT-14 encryption scheme is uncrackable by all but the most devious of minds, they will relax and let themselves sink slowly into the mire of contentment that will someday be thier graves. But when people come around spouting off how impossible it is to have DRM on "untrusted" machines, the only solution is legislate trust into all the machines in the most draconian and Brotherly way possible.
PLEASE somone start publishing papers on how all digital content can be protected by XORing it with the number 0x42 and will be secure as such for decadeds to come.
Just admit it, you are a terrorist looking for information on how the "good guys" catch people like you. You couldn't possibly want information like that just out of "curiosity". I say "Bah!" to you, terrorist!
How long until the laws of (current) economics catch up with Google, and they can no longer afford to do the right thing?
Never. The question you SHOULD be asking is how long Yahoo and friends can continue to display false positives before they are forced out of business by consumer backlash.
IF we lived in a world where all search engines followed the same practices, then sure, the most dispicable one would be king. But all it takes is *one* do-gooder, like Google, to turn the tables on the bad guys. I haven't used any search engine *but* Google for over three years now, and I don't feel the need to. I think more and more people see Google as the "good guys", and that goes a *long* way.
I know of people clicking on Googles ad links *just becuase they want to give something back*. When was the last time you EVER clicked on an ad link over at Yahoo?
The end result of Google's Good Idea is that they end up making *more* money by being the lone good guy than they ever could being just one of scores of bad guys.
Oh dear, I hope you spell-checked it first, ha ha!
Why is it that people dont understand this.
Honestly, I think it's becuase people are so used to brick and mortar jobs that they can't bridge the gap to software. In a typical position, you either know the skill of you don't. If you are only a master carpenter then you aren't qualified to lay electrical wires. If you are an accountant, then you probably shouldn't be hired to write marketing slogans. People in the hiring roles don't have enough expierence with software development (or systems administration, for that matter) to teach them that anyone who understands the concepts behind programming can do it just as easly in Java as in ADA. Sure the syntax is different, and there are slightly different functionalities, but as long as you are not programming in INTERCAL, a loop is a loop is a loop.
Telling somone that they don't qualify for a job becuase they don't have any expierence with DCOM is like trying to define mathematicians as either doing "polynomial" math or "differential" math, and saying that one type of mathematician doesn't have the skills to do the job of the other...
Think about it in this way, which kind of response would you be more comfortable hearing:
1) As Chief Departmental Specialist of Bold Fonts, I find it impossible to comply with your request for me to alter your web page text as it is completely written in italic fonts.
2) Well, I've been doing only Perl development for the last five years, and haven't really seen a lot of Python... but sure, I'll take a look at your Python script and see if I can figure out why it's pulling info from the old database.
The more specific you make a job title, the more often you'll see people steering clear of work that they are perfectly able to do, but isn't covered by thier job description.
In the software world, specialization is not a very good thing. If I am proficent in ONLY Oracle 7.0.2.831b, and nothing else, then I am a very very poor DBA. The same is true in as aspects of software engineering. You want to hire poeple who undersand CONCEPTS, *not* who have a particular skill.
Too often these days you'll see cluelees recruiters and companies who think that, despite your 10 years in software development, you are unqualified becase you don't posess fad skill X. They don't think for a second that the guy who DOES know X probably knows ONLY X, so in 5 months when your business plans change and you cease to use X, he won't be able to adapt,a nd there you are out looking for somone with skill Y. The rejected applicant with the 10 years of expierence would have taken a week or two to get accustomed to X, but after that, he would be as good as the other guy, and when it came time to switch directions, he would be just as comfortable with learning Y.
Now, this might just sound like one of those zany, out from left field ideas, but "what if" we decided to hold the actual criminals who are breaking in through security holes liable? I know, I know, I must sound like a kook, but hey, you never know what might work!
$65 Million... let's say the average taxi driver salary for a year is $30,000. In the same two year period, you could provide the city with 1,000 free taxis for two years and have a cool $5Mil for gas and repairs left over... Brillant.
Or better yet, you can walk the extra block to the place that was advertized and throw a mad hissy fit complete with top-of-the-lungs yelling and screaming (don't forget sailor cursing!) about how much you hate spam and how angry and pissed off you get when you get it sent to your phone. Make a habit out of it. They can't really expect to keep you out with tresspass laws since they are *specifically* targeting you with an invitation to come to thier store. (IANAL, but I don't see how you could invite somone over to you house and then arrest him for trespassing when he steps through the door. Correct me if I'm wrong.) If you, and all your friends, do this loud enough and long enough, perhaps within earshot of a news reporter on a slow news day, pretty soon there will be a huge stigma against spamming passersby.
And as cable modem operators start trying to say things like "you can't run servers," "you can't run a VPN," and "you can't criticize us on your website," they stop being common carriers.
Ha ha, and at the same time Morpheus, which DOESN'T regulate things IS a common carrier. So the end result is the cable providers are guilty, but Morpheus not.
Replacing a position because some guy back in '83 decided to use the odd-ball programming language : $120k
Maintaining 17 different operating system at once : $225k
Answering calls from 200 end users with slightly different desktops : $57k
Having your entire network, the networks of all your end users, and your entire array of backup systems turned into incomprehensible mush overnight due to an advanced virus that could easily target and replicate in your undiversified computer systems : Priceless
They didn't make the song, somebody else did, but they spun it in a new way that's really cool.
Oh you are absoutely right. my friend, but it goes even deeper than that. ALL creations are based on the work that came before them. There is no new idea under the sun. Maybe you are listening to some really awesome lyrics and think, yeah, this guy should be paid for these rymes. But where did he get them from? He was talking to his friend at a party and somone came in wearing a lampshade on his head, and his friend remarked, "Ha ha ha, xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx." And the idea just popped into his head, hey, "xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx" would make a great line for a song! Or else he was walking to the store and he passed by a "Men Working" sign, andhe misready it as "Men Rocking", and he though, oh, what an awesome album cover.
These examples are silly, of course, but the point I was trying to make is that no idea is ever truly magical or revolutionary. Go do a little research on all the "great ideas" throught history and you will find, without fail, that the person who gets credit for it is just one of many who had similar ideas at the same time. Even Albert Einstein's theories of relativity were not alone. At the same time that he was working on them, there were others who were following similar realms of thought.
People will base thier moral perogative on YOURS. What does this mean? It means if you are morally right 99% of the time in your own business dealing, you will find that 99% of your customers will play fair with you.
People, unlike corporations, don't steal from the weak just because they can. If that were the case, *every* church collection plate would come back empty. But they don't, ever. Becuase a church is morally just, and so the people who contribute feel that they need to live in the same moral framework.
If you are worried about piracy, take the moral high road. If you take the low road, all the legislation, copy protection and strongarming in the world won't save you, but if you are morally justified in everything taht you do, you could give you music away for 100% free and find people donating money to you out of thier own good will.
According to our favorite media mogul, Jack Valenti (as stated in this letter in the Washington Post, all money should be deposited in his bank account. 'People of all ages need to sit at the table with the movie industry. Together, in good-faith talks, they must agree on the ingredients for depositing money directly into my accounts and then swiftly implement that agreement to make the dream of making me rich, rich, rich a reality.' Way to go, guy."
My personal opinion is that the vast majority of users have no use for that kind of speed and they are not served by paying the overhead for optical repeaters, multiplexors, and high-speed routers.
Rule number one about anything that has a capacity, be it bandwidth, HD space, memory, CPU caches, local busses, anything: The Demand for capacity will always be greater than Supply+1. Always.
The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail
Just so that you and everyone else is perfectly clear on this... if your email is unencrypted and left on a machine that you, personally, do not own and admin, it's a pretty safe bet to say that your mail can be read at any time.
Those businesses made the choice to "stay afloat" by OEMing Windows on Microsofts terms, just as I make the choice to pay taxes to stay out of jail and for no other reason.
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
Your arguments may sound nice from an acedemic standpoint but the don't hold up in the real world. It's like saying that just because somoneone was holding a gun to your head, you weren't "forced" to do X, becuase you could have just chosen to die. While technically true, it is not a practical argument.
Simply saying that I don't "have" to use MS products just becuase my boss tells me to is like saying I don't "have" to eat or feed my family. I mean, we could all just become street people and live out of garbage cans, right?
Microsoft was able to force companies to do thier bidding because most of the pople you deal with, and you'll learn this as you grow older Bob, aren't willing to sacrifice thier careers, thier families and the betterment of the human race simply to make a tiny moral point. Just like most people who are getting mugged at gunpoint won't push the gun into thier forehead and say "I chose my own death over the $20 in my pocket, because I believe thats stealing is wrong, and holding true to that principle is more important than the burden my death will place on my wife and children and on society as a whole."
By this I mean, if a company had decided to just "go under", the executives of that company would be facing punishment from thier investors (and a tainted reputation from those who may otherwise have been willing to invest in the future) for allowing it to happen. Thier employees would be out of work and subsequently be forced to look for more work or face starvation. And, IF that company believed that they were actually doing something worthwhile and contributing to society (yes, there are a couple of companies tht actually believe this), they would basically have to be willing to, from thier point of view, hurt society for all future humanity.
Yes, you can argue that Microsoft did not "force" anyone to do anything, just like you can argue that the bullet itself didn't kill anyone (It was the internal bleeding that ended up killing him sir, so it wasn't technically murder, it was the victim's body comitting suicide), but to do so would relegate you into the realm of monkeys and lawyers, where common sense takes a back seat to meaningless hairsplitting and feces flinging.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I've got a few karma points to throw away:
Q. How do Canadians spell Canada?
A. C, eh? N, eh? D, eh?
/me bows.
Ok, now continue with the real conversation.
If you actually wanted to make money, you would go with simple, text based ads
If only that were true, believe me we would be doing it.
Have you tried it? Spend a few weeks getting in contact with people who advertise through Google, get some numbers from them. Take those numbers and show them to your current advertisers. Heck, just do it for a week. Tell them, "We'll try this text based thing for a week, completely free of charge to you, and if you find yourself getting more sales and hits in that week, then let's talk about expanding that..."
Heck, post an Ask Slashdot about it and you might find Google advertisers who read this site who can tell you the success stories.
Worst case scenario, you lose a week of ad impressions, best case, you have tiny ads that your readers actually go ga-ga for, how could you lose?
Now, if the same IP didn't come with 4 pounds of land-fillable packaging and permanently scribed onto its own read-only media and was made available online for say $5... then it might be more convenient for those same individuals to just chuck out the $5 and download the thing. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.
Um.... So tell me again, why, exactly, do you think you'll be able to download movies for $5? Look at the price of CD's. Is it cheaper or MORE expensive to buy a CD today than 15 years ago? Without piracy, there is *no* competition for the movie industry. they could charge $1000 a download, and there is not one dang thing you can do about it, no alternatives, not even illegal ones.
Now I can understand why suicide booths are so popular in the future... the SSSCA must have been upheld.
"The Green Eye"
Does that refer to the green of the environment, or the "Green Eyed Monster", aka, Envisat?
As I said, I'd like to do filtering based on subscriptions (thats what I mean by the Gold Star for posting). Operating under the assumption that a troll wouldn't want to give us his credit card number (half of them post through anonymizing proxy servers, so I seriously doubt that they'll be giving us their CC num ;)
That isn't logical. If somone is viewing slashdot with ads turned on, then they are "paying" via ads just as much as somone who is giving you $5. Punishing those users will just make them less inclined to participate, which will mean FEWER impressions of the ads they were viewing, which in turn will cause them to grow bigger and bigger.
If you actually wanted to make money, you would go with simple, text based ads. If your *current* advertisers don't like that, then find some who actually have heads on thier shoulders and understand that they actually make *more* money than the seizure inducing variety. Come on guy, you are posting stories about how successful the Google ad system works at *least* once a week, you can't tell me that none of that has rubbed off on you?
Not that you couldn't implement an "anti-troll" system as well, just don't base it on subscriptions. I mean you can already block out AC's, so why not just make a threshhold for poster's karma too. The chance of a troll getting 40-50 karma points is slim, and even if he does, he'll lose it within a couple of troll posts.
I don't know about you, but I can ignore any ad.
Yes, you can, and that's the point. No matter how big or intrusive the ad gets, the human mind can block it out completely.
But simple, informative text ads that get right to the point and offer neat deals or interesting services are often the kind of thing you don't *want* to ignore. That's why they work.
If you are not in the mood to buy anything at all, you will click on nothing. But if you are interested in getting a new wireless card, then an one line add offering them for $44 will get you to click, but a stobe-flashing "Hot tech deals!" will not.
All I have to say is 'ad filtering proxy'.
EXACTLY. Yet another reason why text ads work.
Current marketing theory seems to dictate that actual "real" customers should be ignored but "impulse buy" customers, you know, the kind that like shiny, flashing things, are the way to go.
Not only is this just plain illogical (not to mention outright stupid), it also has the effect of *disinteresting* your base of "real" customers.
People do NOT BUY $600 palmtops on impulse. They buy gum and musical Santa Claus keychains on impulse. There is a REASON why you don't see lobster tails next to the People magazines when you check out.
The end result of having bigger, flashier ads will be fewer people clicking, which will just make the marketroids to clamor for even BIGGER ads.
Mark my words, a single *informative* line: P4 1.5ghz 100G 256M 19" $780 will garner more clicks than fifty pages worth of flashing "Click on the monkey and win!!!!!". And becuase a single line is so small, you can include five of them for every ONE big ad. How can that go wrong?
To understand why the system works like it does, you need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer. But we want to give you an option to see Slashdot without these ads. Second, you need to understand that Slashdot readers fall into a variety of types, and charging the same flat fee just isn't possible.
If advertisers would prefer that you post stories about thier products because "that's what the want" would you do it? I should hope not! Give the advertisers a smack across the head and tell them: "We will put text ads, you know, the kind that annoy no one and actually provide enough information for people to click on. The kind that Google uses to stay in business AND keep it's integrity."
NOTE TO SLASHDOT: BIG ADS DO NOT WORK! In fact, they actually do the opposite, which will make your advetisers even MORE desperate, and foolishly request even bigger ads! Use small, text based ads. They work!
...because it means that the ONLY recourse for these money hungry bastards in the "content industry" (is legal prostitution considered and "industry"?) is legislation. As long as they can be fooled into thinking that Mr. Wizbang's new ROT-14 encryption scheme is uncrackable by all but the most devious of minds, they will relax and let themselves sink slowly into the mire of contentment that will someday be thier graves. But when people come around spouting off how impossible it is to have DRM on "untrusted" machines, the only solution is legislate trust into all the machines in the most draconian and Brotherly way possible.
PLEASE somone start publishing papers on how all digital content can be protected by XORing it with the number 0x42 and will be secure as such for decadeds to come.
Just admit it, you are a terrorist looking for information on how the "good guys" catch people like you. You couldn't possibly want information like that just out of "curiosity". I say "Bah!" to you, terrorist!
How long until the laws of (current) economics catch up with Google, and they can no longer afford to do the right thing?
Never. The question you SHOULD be asking is how long Yahoo and friends can continue to display false positives before they are forced out of business by consumer backlash.
IF we lived in a world where all search engines followed the same practices, then sure, the most dispicable one would be king. But all it takes is *one* do-gooder, like Google, to turn the tables on the bad guys. I haven't used any search engine *but* Google for over three years now, and I don't feel the need to. I think more and more people see Google as the "good guys", and that goes a *long* way.
I know of people clicking on Googles ad links *just becuase they want to give something back*. When was the last time you EVER clicked on an ad link over at Yahoo?
The end result of Google's Good Idea is that they end up making *more* money by being the lone good guy than they ever could being just one of scores of bad guys.
I cut, pasted and sent that to my boss.
Oh dear, I hope you spell-checked it first, ha ha!
Why is it that people dont understand this.
Honestly, I think it's becuase people are so used to brick and mortar jobs that they can't bridge the gap to software. In a typical position, you either know the skill of you don't. If you are only a master carpenter then you aren't qualified to lay electrical wires. If you are an accountant, then you probably shouldn't be hired to write marketing slogans. People in the hiring roles don't have enough expierence with software development (or systems administration, for that matter) to teach them that anyone who understands the concepts behind programming can do it just as easly in Java as in ADA. Sure the syntax is different, and there are slightly different functionalities, but as long as you are not programming in INTERCAL, a loop is a loop is a loop.
Telling somone that they don't qualify for a job becuase they don't have any expierence with DCOM is like trying to define mathematicians as either doing "polynomial" math or "differential" math, and saying that one type of mathematician doesn't have the skills to do the job of the other...
Think about it in this way, which kind of response would you be more comfortable hearing:
1) As Chief Departmental Specialist of Bold Fonts, I find it impossible to comply with your request for me to alter your web page text as it is completely written in italic fonts.
2) Well, I've been doing only Perl development for the last five years, and haven't really seen a lot of Python... but sure, I'll take a look at your Python script and see if I can figure out why it's pulling info from the old database.
The more specific you make a job title, the more often you'll see people steering clear of work that they are perfectly able to do, but isn't covered by thier job description.
In the software world, specialization is not a very good thing. If I am proficent in ONLY Oracle 7.0.2.831b, and nothing else, then I am a very very poor DBA. The same is true in as aspects of software engineering. You want to hire poeple who undersand CONCEPTS, *not* who have a particular skill.
Too often these days you'll see cluelees recruiters and companies who think that, despite your 10 years in software development, you are unqualified becase you don't posess fad skill X. They don't think for a second that the guy who DOES know X probably knows ONLY X, so in 5 months when your business plans change and you cease to use X, he won't be able to adapt,a nd there you are out looking for somone with skill Y. The rejected applicant with the 10 years of expierence would have taken a week or two to get accustomed to X, but after that, he would be as good as the other guy, and when it came time to switch directions, he would be just as comfortable with learning Y.
Now, this might just sound like one of those zany, out from left field ideas, but "what if" we decided to hold the actual criminals who are breaking in through security holes liable? I know, I know, I must sound like a kook, but hey, you never know what might work!
$65 Million... let's say the average taxi driver salary for a year is $30,000. In the same two year period, you could provide the city with 1,000 free taxis for two years and have a cool $5Mil for gas and repairs left over... Brillant.
Or better yet, you can walk the extra block to the place that was advertized and throw a mad hissy fit complete with top-of-the-lungs yelling and screaming (don't forget sailor cursing!) about how much you hate spam and how angry and pissed off you get when you get it sent to your phone. Make a habit out of it. They can't really expect to keep you out with tresspass laws since they are *specifically* targeting you with an invitation to come to thier store. (IANAL, but I don't see how you could invite somone over to you house and then arrest him for trespassing when he steps through the door. Correct me if I'm wrong.) If you, and all your friends, do this loud enough and long enough, perhaps within earshot of a news reporter on a slow news day, pretty soon there will be a huge stigma against spamming passersby.
And as cable modem operators start trying to say things like "you can't run servers," "you can't run a VPN," and "you can't criticize us on your website," they stop being common carriers.
Ha ha, and at the same time Morpheus, which DOESN'T regulate things IS a common carrier. So the end result is the cable providers are guilty, but Morpheus not.
Replacing a position because some guy back in '83 decided to use the odd-ball programming language : $120k
Maintaining 17 different operating system at once : $225k
Answering calls from 200 end users with slightly different desktops : $57k
Having your entire network, the networks of all your end users, and your entire array of backup systems turned into incomprehensible mush overnight due to an advanced virus that could easily target and replicate in your undiversified computer systems : Priceless
They didn't make the song, somebody else did, but they spun it in a new way that's really cool.
Oh you are absoutely right. my friend, but it goes even deeper than that. ALL creations are based on the work that came before them. There is no new idea under the sun. Maybe you are listening to some really awesome lyrics and think, yeah, this guy should be paid for these rymes. But where did he get them from? He was talking to his friend at a party and somone came in wearing a lampshade on his head, and his friend remarked, "Ha ha ha, xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx." And the idea just popped into his head, hey, "xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx" would make a great line for a song! Or else he was walking to the store and he passed by a "Men Working" sign, andhe misready it as "Men Rocking", and he though, oh, what an awesome album cover.
These examples are silly, of course, but the point I was trying to make is that no idea is ever truly magical or revolutionary. Go do a little research on all the "great ideas" throught history and you will find, without fail, that the person who gets credit for it is just one of many who had similar ideas at the same time. Even Albert Einstein's theories of relativity were not alone. At the same time that he was working on them, there were others who were following similar realms of thought.
People will base thier moral perogative on YOURS. What does this mean? It means if you are morally right 99% of the time in your own business dealing, you will find that 99% of your customers will play fair with you.
People, unlike corporations, don't steal from the weak just because they can. If that were the case, *every* church collection plate would come back empty. But they don't, ever. Becuase a church is morally just, and so the people who contribute feel that they need to live in the same moral framework.
If you are worried about piracy, take the moral high road. If you take the low road, all the legislation, copy protection and strongarming in the world won't save you, but if you are morally justified in everything taht you do, you could give you music away for 100% free and find people donating money to you out of thier own good will.
According to our favorite media mogul, Jack Valenti (as stated in this letter in the Washington Post, all money should be deposited in his bank account. 'People of all ages need to sit at the table with the movie industry. Together, in good-faith talks, they must agree on the ingredients for depositing money directly into my accounts and then swiftly implement that agreement to make the dream of making me rich, rich, rich a reality.' Way to go, guy."
My personal opinion is that the vast majority of users have no use for that kind of speed and they are not served by paying the overhead for optical repeaters, multiplexors, and high-speed routers.
Rule number one about anything that has a capacity, be it bandwidth, HD space, memory, CPU caches, local busses, anything: The Demand for capacity will always be greater than Supply+1. Always.
The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail
:)
Just so that you and everyone else is perfectly clear on this... if your email is unencrypted and left on a machine that you, personally, do not own and admin, it's a pretty safe bet to say that your mail can be read at any time.
*Don't* use that account to dis your sysadmin!
Those businesses made the choice to "stay afloat" by OEMing Windows on Microsofts terms, just as I make the choice to pay taxes to stay out of jail and for no other reason.
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
Your arguments may sound nice from an acedemic standpoint but the don't hold up in the real world. It's like saying that just because somoneone was holding a gun to your head, you weren't "forced" to do X, becuase you could have just chosen to die. While technically true, it is not a practical argument.
Simply saying that I don't "have" to use MS products just becuase my boss tells me to is like saying I don't "have" to eat or feed my family. I mean, we could all just become street people and live out of garbage cans, right?
Microsoft was able to force companies to do thier bidding because most of the pople you deal with, and you'll learn this as you grow older Bob, aren't willing to sacrifice thier careers, thier families and the betterment of the human race simply to make a tiny moral point. Just like most people who are getting mugged at gunpoint won't push the gun into thier forehead and say "I chose my own death over the $20 in my pocket, because I believe thats stealing is wrong, and holding true to that principle is more important than the burden my death will place on my wife and children and on society as a whole."
By this I mean, if a company had decided to just "go under", the executives of that company would be facing punishment from thier investors (and a tainted reputation from those who may otherwise have been willing to invest in the future) for allowing it to happen. Thier employees would be out of work and subsequently be forced to look for more work or face starvation. And, IF that company believed that they were actually doing something worthwhile and contributing to society (yes, there are a couple of companies tht actually believe this), they would basically have to be willing to, from thier point of view, hurt society for all future humanity.
Yes, you can argue that Microsoft did not "force" anyone to do anything, just like you can argue that the bullet itself didn't kill anyone (It was the internal bleeding that ended up killing him sir, so it wasn't technically murder, it was the victim's body comitting suicide), but to do so would relegate you into the realm of monkeys and lawyers, where common sense takes a back seat to meaningless hairsplitting and feces flinging.