Clearly, Prince gets it. Digital Content is no longer an object to sell itself, as it has no value anymore, but is merely an attraction to attract consumers to purchase other things.
Wait a minute. The article says that Prince will be "giving away" copies of his CD to subscribers of the newspaper. Nowhere did it say he was giving his music away to the newspaper. Who's to say they didn't pay him a handsome sum for the privilege of being able to distribute this CD? It's a great promotion for the newspaper itself, copies of which will surely fly off the shelves in a way that print newspapers haven't been doing in a long time.
Try buying a digital SLR camera online. You'll find lots of rock-bottom deals, but when you start to Google search the retailers who are advertising them, you will find countless tales of bait-and-switch, orders never shipped, orders fulfilled with overseas product with nonstandard firmware and no warranty, high-pressure sales tactics bullying you into buying more than you initially ordered, etc. Most people I know who are in the market for professional camera equipment don't even bother to go bargain hunting; they stick to a few well-known and widely respected retailers (a certain large retailer in NYC comes to mind). They get some discount, but more importantly they get what they ask/pay for.
If the camera manufacturers were allowed to enforce a minimum price floor, on the other hand, the well-known retailers who offer modest discounts would not be affected, but all these "deals" might disappear. Camera retailers would be forced to compete on service and would be more accountable to the manufacturer for the product they shipped -- so it seems to me, at least. This seems like an improvement on the current state of the market, where customers who expect online deals to work just like buying cheap computer equipment are getting burned.
I like a good deal as much as the next guy, but you'll always find some outside cases where the customer is losing out.
I imagine it would also make it an attractive target for Microsoft patent lawyers.
I see. So tell me, what open source projects have been the target of Microsoft patent lawsuits to date? And exactly which patents are you talking about? Microsoft doesn't seem to want to disclose this information, so if you have any insight I'm sure we'd be all ears.
Except that, in the long run, the platform of choice for the HPC/high-availability/high-high-peformance market is turning out to be Linux, thanks to IBM and it's HPC business.
Ha, well, yes, there is that. Only I wouldn't lie it completely at IBM's feet. After all, IBM is pretty much the only mainframe vendor still around. They have a vested interest in selling that kind of supercomputer, even though they've obviously seen the writing on the wall for their mainframe business.
Outside the commercial sector, though, I think a lot of the HPC stuff is happening on Linux because a lot of the breakthroughs in this area are coming from universities and government-sponsored research, rather than private companies. A closed, proprietary OS isn't going to cut it here. (Interesting how Sun recently open sourced Solaris, isn't it?)
What is strange here is the fact that Reiser went to his "disappeared" car a few days later and drove it to a wooden area. The front passenger seat missing. Tape, heavy duty garbage bags in the car.
That, and they supposedly found Nina's blood in the car and in Reiser's home. Doesn't prove anything more than that she was prone to nosebleeds. But... y'know.
The more I hear about this case, the more I'm really starting to suspect some kind of organized crime thing. Nothing about this relationship sounds like it's one the up-and-up, beginning with that miraculous child they conceived on their first night together. "Conceived a child" has 20/20 hindsight written all over it. When these things are really happening, you know how it works... late at night, frantic phone call, woman in tears, "I'm pregnant"... who knows what else she might have said? "I'm so upset, I might harm myself"... this is a classic rope-a-dope. Any kid who's grown up in any podunk town in the U.S. full of poor people looking for a ticket out has heard a variation on the same theme.
I think when Sun talks about supercomputing it's really talking about HPC/grid-type systems.
FWIW, that's where Sun sees its future. Which makes sense. There's no point trying to compete with Linux for low-end applications (and by "low-end" I mean everything from desktops to simple Web-app servers). Sun has always been good at crafting products for that top 2% of customers who really, really need that high-availability or high-performance component that isn't going to make a difference for the other 98%. And Sun can charge for them.
So Bechtolsheim says Sun has been "somewhat absent" from the supercomputer market in the last few years. OK, I'll bite. Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999?
Still, kudos to Sun, for real. Investors may get mad that Sun is full of terrific technology and solid R&D but can't seem to build the business model that will let Sun capitalize on it all. But from my perspective... God, that sounds almost refreshing, doesn't it?
I once shared an office with one other developer, a good friend of mine. We told stupid jokes and laughed all day long. I thought it was a cool compromise.
I agree with what you're saying for the most part, but I, too, have worked in both types of environments. You've captured the downsides of the start-up type company pretty accurately. The downside of the other type of environment is a tendency toward under-achieving.
You see it more in larger companies, and especially as companies get closer and closer to government... i.e. big HMOs, university staffs... any job where it's really difficult to get fired or laid off once you're in. These jobs attract people who have families, outside lives, want the healthcare and the work/life balance, precisely because they offer so much security.
The problem is, once you have a preponderance of people with that mindset on staff, it becomes difficult to act like the smaller company. When your whole staff is seeking security in their employment, it makes sense that the organization naturally becomes more and more risk-averse. You stop taking chances. There's nobody to rock the boat.
When that really starts to suck is when upper management starts looking at the numbers and they say, "Hey, it's a different market, your department isn't pulling its weight anymore. We need change." In a company full of ambitious over-achievers who have learned to be just a little bit afraid for their jobs, this situation is an opportunity. It's time for new ideas to surface, for the underdog to make his bid for success. New projects get launched. People move offices, start reporting to different bosses. You try stuff.
In a staid, safe, secure work environment, however, this is how it happens: Upper management says "we need change," and the head of your department says, "Yes sir, will do, sir"... and the buck stops there. Your manager diddles the numbers a bit. Everybody's told they need to "work a little harder." And that's it.
And maybe you were at the same meeting that the head of your department was, and maybe you heard that upper management guy saying "we need change," and now you're just sitting there. Twiddling your thumbs. Waiting for the axe to fall. And you go to your boss and you say, "Shouldn't we really be doing this or that?" But he's thinking about his kid's braces and his car payment and his wife's last biopsy, and he doesn't want to rock the boat. So he sends you back to your desk. To wait.
Sure we can. "Black Hawk Down." Say what you want about it being a propaganda tool of the military-industrial complex or whatever, but that is one awesome film. Demonstrates Scott's eye for stunning visuals as well as any other movie, has a great soundtrack, good cast, gripping pacing... a tour de force, IMHO.
And then he did Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley, what is it with you??
* There's a scene in his apartment where Deckard has that weird glare in his eyes like you see with other replicants.
I read an interview with Ridley Scott where he says that, of all the things that point to Deckard being a replicant, this isn't one of them. It's just an artifact of the camera and lighting that he was using that he thought looked cool. It's not meant to imply anything.
But then again, I figure if it fits the interpretation, throw it in there. That's what makes film criticism fun.
The film adaptation looked nice, and it was certainly dark and miserable enough to be taken 'seriously' by film critics at large, but honestly, I got the same message out of Terminator II. "Humans are paradoxical and life sucks after nuclear war."
Not meaning to flame, but... if you're too dense to get it, you can't very well blame the filmmakers.
I mean seriously -- we all know that physical access to the hardware == compromised security. Most datacenters exist inside a building, with card keys, reinforced walls, etc. etc. It seems like all you'd need to gain physical access to the servers in one of these things is a blowtorch.
If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices.
This assertion sounds like total hogwash to me, just on the face of it. And yet I do hear it all the time. "We're not progressing"... "there's nothing more to discover with science"... "only the trivial details remain to be figured out." I can't help but think that these attitudes contribute a lot toward the general antipathy toward science that we often observe in modern American society. Science needs a lot of work in the PR department if we are going to remain competitive.
I once dropped a water balloon onto the keyboard of my Apple ][+. That keyboard isn't just powered, it's attached to the computer. Water was all over the motherboard and everything else. And, being a little kid, I was bright enough to switch it on "to see if it still worked." It didn't.
But you know what? It lived. Dried it out as best as I could with a hair dryer and left it overnight, and it worked fine.
A few pages in, and it's obvious that the loss in size and thickness has not come at the price of production quality. The entire tome is full color glossy paper throughout.
Am I the only one who looks at modern role-playing game manuals and gets a headache? This obsession with four-color printing on every page needs to go. The stupid doo-dads around every page number and obnoxious icons do nothing to improve the readability of the book. They probably do, however, help to justify charging $30 for a book that tells you how to play a game. Give me a 1980s-era AD&D manual any day.
Well see? There's kind of my point, right there. They could just go the ClearChannel route. But they chose not to. Admittedly, ClearChannel has become the Microsoft of radio (along with a couple other huge conglomerates), so I'm sure it's pretty difficult to make this business decision, but it's there to be made. If good radio is really something people care about, then your station will probably be pretty successful.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all trying to say that the current state of radio is good. The biggies of the radio business, like most big corporations today, are shortsighted and shallow and overly fixated on short-term profits at the expense of longterm viability. But that's not in and of itself "immoral" -- it merely sucks.
Corporate America determining the selections of music that is played on limited public airwaves is a good thing??
One arm of corporate America putting money into another arm of corporate America... and around and around it goes. When's the last time you discovered a really awesome artist because they were played on the radio? If radio sucks it's radio's own fault. I don't see anything immoral about it, though... unless you're a rabid objectivist, I guess, and equate bad business decisions with the Catholic concept of sin.
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Wait a minute. The article says that Prince will be "giving away" copies of his CD to subscribers of the newspaper. Nowhere did it say he was giving his music away to the newspaper. Who's to say they didn't pay him a handsome sum for the privilege of being able to distribute this CD? It's a great promotion for the newspaper itself, copies of which will surely fly off the shelves in a way that print newspapers haven't been doing in a long time.
Try buying a digital SLR camera online. You'll find lots of rock-bottom deals, but when you start to Google search the retailers who are advertising them, you will find countless tales of bait-and-switch, orders never shipped, orders fulfilled with overseas product with nonstandard firmware and no warranty, high-pressure sales tactics bullying you into buying more than you initially ordered, etc. Most people I know who are in the market for professional camera equipment don't even bother to go bargain hunting; they stick to a few well-known and widely respected retailers (a certain large retailer in NYC comes to mind). They get some discount, but more importantly they get what they ask/pay for.
If the camera manufacturers were allowed to enforce a minimum price floor, on the other hand, the well-known retailers who offer modest discounts would not be affected, but all these "deals" might disappear. Camera retailers would be forced to compete on service and would be more accountable to the manufacturer for the product they shipped -- so it seems to me, at least. This seems like an improvement on the current state of the market, where customers who expect online deals to work just like buying cheap computer equipment are getting burned.
I like a good deal as much as the next guy, but you'll always find some outside cases where the customer is losing out.
I see. So tell me, what open source projects have been the target of Microsoft patent lawsuits to date? And exactly which patents are you talking about? Microsoft doesn't seem to want to disclose this information, so if you have any insight I'm sure we'd be all ears.
Ha, well, yes, there is that. Only I wouldn't lie it completely at IBM's feet. After all, IBM is pretty much the only mainframe vendor still around. They have a vested interest in selling that kind of supercomputer, even though they've obviously seen the writing on the wall for their mainframe business.
Outside the commercial sector, though, I think a lot of the HPC stuff is happening on Linux because a lot of the breakthroughs in this area are coming from universities and government-sponsored research, rather than private companies. A closed, proprietary OS isn't going to cut it here. (Interesting how Sun recently open sourced Solaris, isn't it?)
That, and they supposedly found Nina's blood in the car and in Reiser's home. Doesn't prove anything more than that she was prone to nosebleeds. But... y'know.
The more I hear about this case, the more I'm really starting to suspect some kind of organized crime thing. Nothing about this relationship sounds like it's one the up-and-up, beginning with that miraculous child they conceived on their first night together. "Conceived a child" has 20/20 hindsight written all over it. When these things are really happening, you know how it works ... late at night, frantic phone call, woman in tears, "I'm pregnant" ... who knows what else she might have said? "I'm so upset, I might harm myself" ... this is a classic rope-a-dope. Any kid who's grown up in any podunk town in the U.S. full of poor people looking for a ticket out has heard a variation on the same theme.
You got it ... one Sun High-Performance Enterprise Cluster, coming up!
I think when Sun talks about supercomputing it's really talking about HPC/grid-type systems.
FWIW, that's where Sun sees its future. Which makes sense. There's no point trying to compete with Linux for low-end applications (and by "low-end" I mean everything from desktops to simple Web-app servers). Sun has always been good at crafting products for that top 2% of customers who really, really need that high-availability or high-performance component that isn't going to make a difference for the other 98%. And Sun can charge for them.
Actually, this topic is a unique case. As it turns out, there are people on Slashdot with multiple degrees in autism.
So Bechtolsheim says Sun has been "somewhat absent" from the supercomputer market in the last few years. OK, I'll bite. Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999?
Still, kudos to Sun, for real. Investors may get mad that Sun is full of terrific technology and solid R&D but can't seem to build the business model that will let Sun capitalize on it all. But from my perspective... God, that sounds almost refreshing, doesn't it?
I once shared an office with one other developer, a good friend of mine. We told stupid jokes and laughed all day long. I thought it was a cool compromise.
I agree with what you're saying for the most part, but I, too, have worked in both types of environments. You've captured the downsides of the start-up type company pretty accurately. The downside of the other type of environment is a tendency toward under-achieving.
... i.e. big HMOs, university staffs ... any job where it's really difficult to get fired or laid off once you're in. These jobs attract people who have families, outside lives, want the healthcare and the work/life balance, precisely because they offer so much security.
... and the buck stops there. Your manager diddles the numbers a bit. Everybody's told they need to "work a little harder." And that's it.
You see it more in larger companies, and especially as companies get closer and closer to government
The problem is, once you have a preponderance of people with that mindset on staff, it becomes difficult to act like the smaller company. When your whole staff is seeking security in their employment, it makes sense that the organization naturally becomes more and more risk-averse. You stop taking chances. There's nobody to rock the boat.
When that really starts to suck is when upper management starts looking at the numbers and they say, "Hey, it's a different market, your department isn't pulling its weight anymore. We need change." In a company full of ambitious over-achievers who have learned to be just a little bit afraid for their jobs, this situation is an opportunity. It's time for new ideas to surface, for the underdog to make his bid for success. New projects get launched. People move offices, start reporting to different bosses. You try stuff.
In a staid, safe, secure work environment, however, this is how it happens: Upper management says "we need change," and the head of your department says, "Yes sir, will do, sir"
And maybe you were at the same meeting that the head of your department was, and maybe you heard that upper management guy saying "we need change," and now you're just sitting there. Twiddling your thumbs. Waiting for the axe to fall. And you go to your boss and you say, "Shouldn't we really be doing this or that?" But he's thinking about his kid's braces and his car payment and his wife's last biopsy, and he doesn't want to rock the boat. So he sends you back to your desk. To wait.
Bitter much? Nah, not me.
What? You mean somebody cut him open and took pieces of his heart out, like something out of "Hostel"? That's wild!!
Or do you maybe mean aortic distension ... or some other word?
Sure we can. "Black Hawk Down." Say what you want about it being a propaganda tool of the military-industrial complex or whatever, but that is one awesome film. Demonstrates Scott's eye for stunning visuals as well as any other movie, has a great soundtrack, good cast, gripping pacing ... a tour de force, IMHO.
And then he did Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley, what is it with you??
I read an interview with Ridley Scott where he says that, of all the things that point to Deckard being a replicant, this isn't one of them. It's just an artifact of the camera and lighting that he was using that he thought looked cool. It's not meant to imply anything.
But then again, I figure if it fits the interpretation, throw it in there. That's what makes film criticism fun.
Not meaning to flame, but ... if you're too dense to get it, you can't very well blame the filmmakers.
If Flash is so terrible, why don't you do it now? I wouldn't mind having one.
You really, REALLY must be new here.
I mean seriously -- we all know that physical access to the hardware == compromised security. Most datacenters exist inside a building, with card keys, reinforced walls, etc. etc. It seems like all you'd need to gain physical access to the servers in one of these things is a blowtorch.
This assertion sounds like total hogwash to me, just on the face of it. And yet I do hear it all the time. "We're not progressing" ... "there's nothing more to discover with science" ... "only the trivial details remain to be figured out." I can't help but think that these attitudes contribute a lot toward the general antipathy toward science that we often observe in modern American society. Science needs a lot of work in the PR department if we are going to remain competitive.
I once dropped a water balloon onto the keyboard of my Apple ][+. That keyboard isn't just powered, it's attached to the computer. Water was all over the motherboard and everything else. And, being a little kid, I was bright enough to switch it on "to see if it still worked." It didn't.
But you know what? It lived. Dried it out as best as I could with a hair dryer and left it overnight, and it worked fine.
Am I the only one who looks at modern role-playing game manuals and gets a headache? This obsession with four-color printing on every page needs to go. The stupid doo-dads around every page number and obnoxious icons do nothing to improve the readability of the book. They probably do, however, help to justify charging $30 for a book that tells you how to play a game. Give me a 1980s-era AD&D manual any day.
You probably wouldn't be talking about a Mac, then, either.
Methinks you exaggerate a bit, but still ... have you looked into the cost of a terabyte lately?
Well see? There's kind of my point, right there. They could just go the ClearChannel route. But they chose not to. Admittedly, ClearChannel has become the Microsoft of radio (along with a couple other huge conglomerates), so I'm sure it's pretty difficult to make this business decision, but it's there to be made. If good radio is really something people care about, then your station will probably be pretty successful.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all trying to say that the current state of radio is good. The biggies of the radio business, like most big corporations today, are shortsighted and shallow and overly fixated on short-term profits at the expense of longterm viability. But that's not in and of itself "immoral" -- it merely sucks.
One arm of corporate America putting money into another arm of corporate America ... and around and around it goes. When's the last time you discovered a really awesome artist because they were played on the radio? If radio sucks it's radio's own fault. I don't see anything immoral about it, though ... unless you're a rabid objectivist, I guess, and equate bad business decisions with the Catholic concept of sin.