I'm sure a lot of/.ers think it's great that you are doing this for your staffers, and glad that you're sharing the feed. There's just no karma-whoring bonus in saying so.
Blodget's calls were hardly "self-fulfilling." The advent of the Internet as a "money engine" was a peculiar circumstance which would have inevitably made rich men and paupers even without the Greek chorus of analysts. If anything, the Blodgets sped up the process, and by doing so may have actually limited the damage incurred when it was found that simply throwing money at the Internet did not make you rich. It was a discovery that would have been necessary in any circumstance.
As the parabola of Internet growth reached its zenith -- that point where everything seems weightless -- Blodget acknowledged the dangers, as shown by the quotes in the Forbes piece. There's no evidence that anyone else with his job at that point in time would have made better calls.
I love it. Amazon and Victoria's Secret are THE MAN. I can't wait till one of you geniuses notice the JP Morgan Chase involvement.
I suppose every one of you has a $7-an-hour "activist" job. If I must endure more self-righteous priggishness about Dylan taking money from big corporations, I'd like to see full disclosure of each critic's sources of income.
How many "essential" customer databases do you suppose there are in the USA?
The more redundant backups that are made, the safer the data is from loss that would disrupt the businesses, so more and more backups are made and shipped off to be buried under a mountain somewhere.
As these thousands of databases spawn thousands and thousands of backups destined for remote storage, guess what? Backups will be lost!
The odds that a lost backup will be found by somone with the hardware and software needed to access the info are mighty slim. I would like to think that businesses, particularly banks, use at least some lightweight encryption, if not proprietary formats, to prevent access to backups by unauthorized parties. But even without such protections, identity thieves don't thrive on these mishaps, they have plenty of other methods.
Most people here seem to be ignoring Cringely's complaint that the ISP's VOIP will get its own dedicated VLAN. If done right, this means that "best effort" services will be negligably affected by the presence of the ISP's VOIP traffic.
To my experience, VOIP works pretty well on most levels of broadband service, the "best effort" currently provided is good enough to compete with POTS.
If "best effort" services degenerate to the point where VOIP is affected, the first complaints will be from gamers, as you point out. The second wave will be from media streamers, then newsgroup users and distro downloaders...somewhere way down the line VOIP users.
It seems a big fat non-issue to me. "Best effort" will remain "best effort," and therefore competitive. Bundled services will have an added level of reliability, and perhaps an open door for future telephony services not viable in POTS on non-QOS-enhanced VOIP. But this is bringing a value-add to the table, and does not necessitate removing anything from standard VOIP.
Trade secrets? BS! Marketing Secrets is what it is.
Does anyone think that leaking news of Apple's latest silly doo-dad is going to cause a competitor to reverse engineer the item and compete with Apple?
Any non-disclosure agreements are civil contracts. In order to "prosecute" the violators of these civil contracts, Apple wants to claim that bloggers aren't journalists and have gone so far as to claim that Constitutional free speech doesn't apply to these bloggers!
Apple maintains that California's Shield Law, which protects journalists from being forced to reveal sources, should not apply to Internet sites. In addition, the firm stated in court filings that free speech protections likewise should not apply to the three Internet sites.
Information Week
This will bite Apple on the ass if they don't back off.
I know I am influenced. The aim of irritant ads is, above all else, brand recognition.
I know who Orbitz and X-10 are, and so do all of our "I'm-not-stupid-like-the-guy-at-Macdonalds" companions.
Do you suppose none of them include those brands in their comparison shopping, when the need comes up? Certainly more than would if they had never heard of the brand...
Some very good points, particularly the restricted ability for a buyer to repurpose the DirectTV hardware. However, even if it's only a million pure TiVo boxes (and I believe there are more than that), that's a better user base than 0.
TiVo is working on its own VoD service with Netflix as a partner; the interface that TiVo customers love, with integrated VoD? Sounds like something that may actually work. Perhaps it won't be available to DirectTV customers, but apparently they still find it worth doing.
I don't believe the Apple rumor, but somebody should buy them out, if only as a defensive measure.
I agree that TiVo's only technical assets of significance are a handful of patents on user interface. But 3 million subscribers, and their viewing data, could also be of value.
It may be that portable video devices face a limited market, but turning ITunes into a video-on-demand service is a logical step. The problems of establishing a user base, working out a DRM scheme, and user interface would all be jump-started if Apple bought TiVo...Apple's "ITiVo" could launch with 3 million users. Seems to cut the risk, doesn't it?
Of course, Apple may not want to go that way. In which case I hope some other player in the VoD space could well realize that "just building it" will not cause people to come, and recognize the value of the 3 million who know the TiVo interface, and use it happily.
If you wish to create an ITunes-style service for film and video, you need scale. You can't just build it and hope those with the hardware will come.
The Tivo boxes out there, and Tivo's 3 million subscribers (6x the half-million they had at the beginning of 2003) can provide that scale. The Tivo is a linux box, so compatability with Apple devices will not be a problem.
Mind you, I believe the rumor is only a rumor, but Tivo does have a lot to offer Apple if it comes about.
At 12:21 pm someone calling himself "philipswann" posted the following on the Yahoo board:
TiVo Sale Rumors -- link
by: phillipswann 02/23/05 12:21 pm
Msg: 239226 of 239994
http://www.swannisez.com/tivorumor022305.html
(If you look at that link now, it's a rehash of Reuters news concerning the rumor, with no hint that Swann -- who has probably scared himself half to death by singlehandedly moving the market -- started this rumor himself)
At 3:11 pm, Marketwatch issued a sloppy story that credited an entity called "Inside Digital Media" for cracking the apple buyout story. However, if you visit the site, you will find a blog entry that presents a well-reasoned rationale as to why Apple should buy Tivo, but no hard news at all.
Subsequently, analyst Steven Kroll, Jr. (whose dad is a senior partner at the same firm) provided the "what we hear on the street" quote that Reuters served up.
No one seems to have bothered at all to trace this garbage to its specious sources.
I own some Tivo, and was watching all of this today because I was considering cutting my losses (this dog had lost one-third of its value in a month). Instead, I'm holding on and hoping for a short squeeze, or even the possibility that the rumors will alert video-on-demand competitors to what a bargain TIVO's 3 million subscribers would be for anyone seeking a toehold on the living room.
So, while it looks to me that the rumor is only that, I wouldn't be too surprised if it became reality.
Then come the artifacts, the quirky behavior, then you have to shell for a new DVD player to get it all sorted out, suddenly your old DVDs are now flaky so you have to keep 2 DVD players.
RipGuard supposedly works on your present dvd player (RTFA), and Uncle George Lucas says, through THX, that it doesn't create artifacts.
If this thing stops 97% of rippers, it just means that the other 3% just gained total share of the market. Imagine the insider trading going on...
Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it. I'd pay a few extra dollars on top of a cd's usual cost for that, and I think any big fan of a band would too...
I know that in Help! and in "The Monkees" you saw rock bands that live all together in one big house. But it's really not like that.
Given the practical considerations that the world brings with it, I could not expect a better service for my needs to emerge than Emusic.
Two of the chief positives for the service consist of what it does NOT have:
No overblown overproduced overhyped releases from the corporation-grown performers that have been cultivated by the music industry for 70 years (exceptions made for has-beens interesting enough to be remembered).
No DRM.
What it does have is tons of music that I've never heard of, a worthy percentage of which agrees with me tremendously.
They just added a label, "Saregama," which apparently owns the rights to thousands (4,179 to be exact) of soundtracks to Indian musicals...I can choose between the 1950, 1965 and 1999 soundtracks for three films named "Arzoo" for chrissake!
(note: the following links are.m3u playlist items for streaming media)
Most people don't think this (a sample from 1999's Arzoo) is good music, so I guess it's not for everyone, but I'm happy as a pig in shit. And stop thinking that Bombay musicals all sound alike! Here's the title theme from Dream Girl A search for Lata Mangeshkar brings 539 album and single results!
I just wish they could bring back the "all you can eat" policy.
The section of the film in which the statement appears is in the 2001 time period, a time during which, it is Moore's thesis, Bush was minimizing the Al Quaeda threat.
The focus on Al Quaeda did not occur until the WTC bombing, and the quote appears in the pre-WTC segment, so obviously Bush was intended to be perceived as talking about terrorists in general, not about Al Quaeda at all.
Have you seen the film, or are you just aping what you have read?
Relatively little effort has been made to examine Kopel's work for veracity. Kopel himself has made many changes in the document, softening some of the charges.
One of the most glaring errors was a false charge that a charity engaged in distributing wheelchairs to war casualties was a money launderer for HAMAS. I pointed this error out on my web page months ago, but it remained in Kopel's document uncorrected until I finally write to him about it.
He promptly deleted the accusation. But how did such a grievous error stand for so long?
See my.sig for Kopel's own view of his errors versus Moore's.
The evidence of MS puppetry here has been in plain sight of all who have followed this issue.
If you haven't been following the issue, it might have been reasonable for you to expend a small effort on research before opening your pie-hole for purposes other than pie.
How are they to equitably enforce a ban on porn, for instance? Okay, so you can't join EroticPreSchoolers.com, but can you stream Deep Inside Laura's Bush from the DIVX site? Can you buy an unrated video from Amazon?
To fine me for certain transactions -- doesn't that mean they will be monitoring ALL my transactions? Is that a message they need to send to users?
Ah...couldn't remember the title, but Sandman was it, pressed to my hand by a friend. Since you were able to single it out, perhaps his other works are worth a look...
I don't think of Ballard as being of the current crop; Priest I haven't read, but hasn't he been around quite a long while as well?
I've avoided Gaiman since I found his early comic work cloying; his characters seemed self-involved brats, designed to appeal to narcisistic youth obsessed by the tragedy of their own inevitable demise.
I don't know if this would apply to subsequent works, but my distaste for Gaiman was strong enough to prevent further exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
You also seem to be unaware that it was the prosecutor in the case who expressed this benign view of hacking.
I'm sure a lot of
Oh no?
Blodget's calls were hardly "self-fulfilling." The advent of the Internet as a "money engine" was a peculiar circumstance which would have inevitably made rich men and paupers even without the Greek chorus of analysts. If anything, the Blodgets sped up the process, and by doing so may have actually limited the damage incurred when it was found that simply throwing money at the Internet did not make you rich. It was a discovery that would have been necessary in any circumstance. As the parabola of Internet growth reached its zenith -- that point where everything seems weightless -- Blodget acknowledged the dangers, as shown by the quotes in the Forbes piece. There's no evidence that anyone else with his job at that point in time would have made better calls.
I love it. Amazon and Victoria's Secret are THE MAN. I can't wait till one of you geniuses notice the JP Morgan Chase involvement. I suppose every one of you has a $7-an-hour "activist" job. If I must endure more self-righteous priggishness about Dylan taking money from big corporations, I'd like to see full disclosure of each critic's sources of income.
How many "essential" customer databases do you suppose there are in the USA?
The more redundant backups that are made, the safer the data is from loss that would disrupt the businesses, so more and more backups are made and shipped off to be buried under a mountain somewhere.
As these thousands of databases spawn thousands and thousands of backups destined for remote storage, guess what? Backups will be lost!
The odds that a lost backup will be found by somone with the hardware and software needed to access the info are mighty slim. I would like to think that businesses, particularly banks, use at least some lightweight encryption, if not proprietary formats, to prevent access to backups by unauthorized parties. But even without such protections, identity thieves don't thrive on these mishaps, they have plenty of other methods.
This just doesn't seem much of an issue to me.
Most people here seem to be ignoring Cringely's complaint that the ISP's VOIP will get its own dedicated VLAN. If done right, this means that "best effort" services will be negligably affected by the presence of the ISP's VOIP traffic.
To my experience, VOIP works pretty well on most levels of broadband service, the "best effort" currently provided is good enough to compete with POTS.
If "best effort" services degenerate to the point where VOIP is affected, the first complaints will be from gamers, as you point out. The second wave will be from media streamers, then newsgroup users and distro downloaders...somewhere way down the line VOIP users.
It seems a big fat non-issue to me. "Best effort" will remain "best effort," and therefore competitive. Bundled services will have an added level of reliability, and perhaps an open door for future telephony services not viable in POTS on non-QOS-enhanced VOIP. But this is bringing a value-add to the table, and does not necessitate removing anything from standard VOIP.
You've paid for the content by paying the Cable company for ISP and TV service?
Does that mean that I can buy a car from the guy who trucks it to the showroom?
Does anyone think that leaking news of Apple's latest silly doo-dad is going to cause a competitor to reverse engineer the item and compete with Apple?
Any non-disclosure agreements are civil contracts. In order to "prosecute" the violators of these civil contracts, Apple wants to claim that bloggers aren't journalists and have gone so far as to claim that Constitutional free speech doesn't apply to these bloggers!
This will bite Apple on the ass if they don't back off.
I know who Orbitz and X-10 are, and so do all of our "I'm-not-stupid-like-the-guy-at-Macdonalds" companions.
Do you suppose none of them include those brands in their comparison shopping, when the need comes up? Certainly more than would if they had never heard of the brand...
Some very good points, particularly the restricted ability for a buyer to repurpose the DirectTV hardware. However, even if it's only a million pure TiVo boxes (and I believe there are more than that), that's a better user base than 0. TiVo is working on its own VoD service with Netflix as a partner; the interface that TiVo customers love, with integrated VoD? Sounds like something that may actually work. Perhaps it won't be available to DirectTV customers, but apparently they still find it worth doing. I don't believe the Apple rumor, but somebody should buy them out, if only as a defensive measure.
I agree that TiVo's only technical assets of significance are a handful of patents on user interface. But 3 million subscribers, and their viewing data, could also be of value. It may be that portable video devices face a limited market, but turning ITunes into a video-on-demand service is a logical step. The problems of establishing a user base, working out a DRM scheme, and user interface would all be jump-started if Apple bought TiVo...Apple's "ITiVo" could launch with 3 million users. Seems to cut the risk, doesn't it? Of course, Apple may not want to go that way. In which case I hope some other player in the VoD space could well realize that "just building it" will not cause people to come, and recognize the value of the 3 million who know the TiVo interface, and use it happily.
I guess that lets Swann off the hook. Does anyone recall whether CNBC sourced this?
The Tivo boxes out there, and Tivo's 3 million subscribers (6x the half-million they had at the beginning of 2003) can provide that scale. The Tivo is a linux box, so compatability with Apple devices will not be a problem.
Mind you, I believe the rumor is only a rumor, but Tivo does have a lot to offer Apple if it comes about.
TiVo Sale Rumors -- link
by: phillipswann 02/23/05 12:21 pm
Msg: 239226 of 239994
http://www.swannisez.com/tivorumor022305.html
(If you look at that link now, it's a rehash of Reuters news concerning the rumor, with no hint that Swann -- who has probably scared himself half to death by singlehandedly moving the market -- started this rumor himself)
At 3:11 pm, Marketwatch issued a sloppy story that credited an entity called "Inside Digital Media" for cracking the apple buyout story. However, if you visit the site, you will find a blog entry that presents a well-reasoned rationale as to why Apple should buy Tivo, but no hard news at all.
Subsequently, analyst Steven Kroll, Jr. (whose dad is a senior partner at the same firm) provided the "what we hear on the street" quote that Reuters served up.
No one seems to have bothered at all to trace this garbage to its specious sources.
I own some Tivo, and was watching all of this today because I was considering cutting my losses (this dog had lost one-third of its value in a month). Instead, I'm holding on and hoping for a short squeeze, or even the possibility that the rumors will alert video-on-demand competitors to what a bargain TIVO's 3 million subscribers would be for anyone seeking a toehold on the living room.
So, while it looks to me that the rumor is only that, I wouldn't be too surprised if it became reality.
RipGuard supposedly works on your present dvd player (RTFA), and Uncle George Lucas says, through THX, that it doesn't create artifacts.
If this thing stops 97% of rippers, it just means that the other 3% just gained total share of the market. Imagine the insider trading going on...
I know that in Help! and in "The Monkees" you saw rock bands that live all together in one big house. But it's really not like that.
Given the practical considerations that the world brings with it, I could not expect a better service for my needs to emerge than Emusic. Two of the chief positives for the service consist of what it does NOT have: No overblown overproduced overhyped releases from the corporation-grown performers that have been cultivated by the music industry for 70 years (exceptions made for has-beens interesting enough to be remembered). No DRM. What it does have is tons of music that I've never heard of, a worthy percentage of which agrees with me tremendously. They just added a label, "Saregama," which apparently owns the rights to thousands (4,179 to be exact) of soundtracks to Indian musicals...I can choose between the 1950, 1965 and 1999 soundtracks for three films named "Arzoo" for chrissake! (note: the following links are .m3u playlist items for streaming media)
Most people don't think this (a sample from 1999's Arzoo) is good music, so I guess it's not for everyone, but I'm happy as a pig in shit. And stop thinking that Bombay musicals all sound alike! Here's the title theme from Dream Girl A search for Lata Mangeshkar brings 539 album and single results!
I just wish they could bring back the "all you can eat" policy.
The section of the film in which the statement appears is in the 2001 time period, a time during which, it is Moore's thesis, Bush was minimizing the Al Quaeda threat. The focus on Al Quaeda did not occur until the WTC bombing, and the quote appears in the pre-WTC segment, so obviously Bush was intended to be perceived as talking about terrorists in general, not about Al Quaeda at all. Have you seen the film, or are you just aping what you have read?
Relatively little effort has been made to examine Kopel's work for veracity. Kopel himself has made many changes in the document, softening some of the charges. One of the most glaring errors was a false charge that a charity engaged in distributing wheelchairs to war casualties was a money launderer for HAMAS. I pointed this error out on my web page months ago, but it remained in Kopel's document uncorrected until I finally write to him about it. He promptly deleted the accusation. But how did such a grievous error stand for so long? See my .sig for Kopel's own view of his errors versus Moore's.
The evidence of MS puppetry here has been in plain sight of all who have followed this issue. If you haven't been following the issue, it might have been reasonable for you to expend a small effort on research before opening your pie-hole for purposes other than pie.
How are they to equitably enforce a ban on porn, for instance? Okay, so you can't join EroticPreSchoolers.com, but can you stream Deep Inside Laura's Bush from the DIVX site? Can you buy an unrated video from Amazon? To fine me for certain transactions -- doesn't that mean they will be monitoring ALL my transactions? Is that a message they need to send to users?
The retro console is $45.
Next time, don;t read so fast in your rush to "fp"
I've avoided Gaiman since I found his early comic work cloying; his characters seemed self-involved brats, designed to appeal to narcisistic youth obsessed by the tragedy of their own inevitable demise.
I don't know if this would apply to subsequent works, but my distaste for Gaiman was strong enough to prevent further exploration.