Ah, yes, but it's not just the entertainment industry that you have to deal with. They have lots of ties. There's a good summary here (the fruits of a Google search). Entertainment and the major TV networks are tied in with power (GE, Westinghouse), AOL, and Philip Morris (already a massive company).
For example, Disney's ties (from the document linked above):
DISNEY / ABC / CAP
Television Holdings:
ABC: includes 10 stations, 24% of US households. ABC Network News: Prime Time Live, Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America. ESPN, Lifetime Television (50%), as well as minority holdings in A&E, History Channel and E! Disney Channel/Disney Television, Touchtone Television.
Media Holdings:
Miramax, Touchtone Pictures. Magazines: Jane, Los Angeles Magazine, W, Discover. 3 music labels, 11 major local newspapers. Hyperion book publishers. Infoseek Internet search engine (43%).
Other Holdings:
Sid R. Bass (major shares) crude oil and gas. All Disney Theme Parks, Walt Disney Cruise Lines.
The fact that computers can be used illegally does not mean those companies are facilitating it, whereas CNN broadcasting MS code IS facilitating illegal activity.
The problem is not that "CNN broadcasting MS code" would be "facilitating" illegal activity. In fact, it would BE illegal activity. That's just the point. Actually committing an illegal act (i.e. giving away someone else's "IP") is different from simply providing tools that could be used to do so.
When treated individually, people are not sheep at all. However, when you consider mass trends, it becomes much easier to generalize them in this way. While people's individual decisions may be made thoughtfully, most people are not interested enough to make any decision at all about many things. Thus, the most natural thing to do is to just follow along with mass opinion on that issue. This is not hard to observe on a large scale. The statement "people are sheep" is not an insult, it's simply an observation about mass psychology.
Whoa! I just got a new "Slashdot" graphic for the page when I clicked "reply" -- I must have just caught a 2:00 AM changeover. Anyway...
Wow - what the hell are you doing on that computer? What kind of 'development' are you doing?
Probably that new-fangled "C" language, which tends to make MS Windows die a horrible death whenever you get a few segfaults while you're testing your code.
Let's face it, segfaults make Windows cough up blood. OK, maybe Win2K is better, but do you really think an OS should be at all vulnerable to errors in programs written in C/C++, especially when they've always been the most popular languages for serious software on that platform? I've *never* had a buffer overflow force me to reboot in Linux.
See, my girlfriend is always complaining because I keep the blinds pulled all the time. My computer is right next to the window, and the glare gets to me. Plus, I sleep on the side of the bed that's toward the window. (Small apartment, same room.) So, now I have a good excuse: it's to protect me from government scrutiny. It's better than the old excuse, which is that I'm a vampire.
This is a matter for state governments, though. The state that has chartered Microsoft (probably either Washington, where they're based, or Delaware, where many, many corporations get their charters because they're the most lenient) could decide, with an act of the legislature, to revoke the corporation's charter.
Being such a large corporation, however, Microsoft might be able to hop to another state, or even country, before that happened. I don't really know how that would work.
A PC can be but is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves.
A good point except for the above quote. A PC is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves? You might as well say that an Intel machine "often" runs Linux (or GNU/Linux, according to your preference).
A large part of the MS antitrust trial revolves around default settings precisely because most people will never open up the box to mess with it, physically or in software terms. If the machine tells them they can't do something, most people don't think that it could be lying to them, even though in reality the software is just repeating what the company told it to say. (I doubt that intelligent people in our society have trouble understanding that a company could lie to them.)
ADMISSION: This post is the result of original ideas added to shameless [plagiarism | merciful summation] of other posts on this topic.
From the article:
I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days.
How about email?
As so many people have said, the whole problem comes from an over-reliance of HTTP. If you need the request in 5 days, you probably need some other kind of service.
However, his complaint about the time-frame of HTTP requests has deeper implications than he perhaps realizes. For example, if your request takes 5 days, you'd better be ready to compensate your content provider for machine usage, because it must be extremely resource intensive. (Maybe MS passport could help out..)
If I'm requesting a reply over a 5-day time frame, ideally I would not need to have my machine powered up to receive the replay, as most machines are turned off daily. So, some kind of asynchronous protocol with intermediate storage -- like email -- would be required.
So, we need a service that checks for the latest server responses whenever you start it up, and automatically keeps track of how much you should be charged for each transaction. Actually, I think an HTTP/SMTP implementation would not be poorly suited, at least with a Free Software application server doing the heavy lifting. (See another posting on MS and intellectual "property" sharing.)
A new PHP function: do_5_day_request_and_charge_for_it($user, $args) {
do_lots_of_stuff($args);
charge_lots_of_money($user); }
I'll write that function if you promise royalties off each function call:)
Of course, if you wanted a seriously secure system, you would either require credit card info beforehand or require payment before issuing the response (at least for new users) to discourage fraud.
You can call me a troll, but I'm serious: does Sun really think that people will continue using Star Office if they have to pay? The only time I can recall people recommending it is to someone who was looking for a free alternative to MS Office.
Personally, I've only used older versions of Star Office on an older machine (200 MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM), but the startup time was horrendous -- I literally had to wait 5 minutes to start it in KDE 1, and it was worse with Gnome. (No other app was this bad, except maybe Netscape 6.) The same went for Windows before I wiped it off and installed Red Hat. Star Office is about last on my list of applications that I'm eager to go back and give another whirl, especially now that there's a free version.
Well, I think we can predict that unless there's a change in this policy, we'll see a fairly rapid death of Star Office on platforms other than Solaris. Sun must be confused: do they really think that there's some compelling reason to use Star Office other than the fact that it's free? It would be interesting to see whether the resulting decline of Star Office on non-Solaris platforms actually leads to a decline in its use on Solaris as well... I would expect it to happen, actually.
If I were management and I wanted to pay for an office suite, I'd use MS Office -- why bother with this silly Star Office thing, especially after seeing those past versions that took over the whole desktop?
That comes from the large Scottish heritage in Canada -- many Scottish immigrants brought that pronunciation. Actually, I had a Canadian history teacher in college who said "aboot," he's the one that explained that to us.
I work for a non-profit right now. While I don't see us having problems due to greed, poor planning at the top definitely seems to be putting the squeeze on employees. For example, an office boss quit and, rather than hiring a replacement, they simply split up her responsibilities between the other employees -- with no increase in pay, of course. Many non-profits will consistently increase the load they put on you until you can't shoulder any more, simply because they're always strapped for cash and are trying to get more bang for their buck.
That's not to say that for-profit business won't do the same thing, of course. I'm just saying that a different motive to minimize expenses -- limited revenue with non-profit, maximizing profit with for-profit -- doesn't necessarily change the effects of this penny pinching on employees.
Balls. The U.S. was more or less a third world country when it got started, and it succeeded.
The U.S. was nothing of the sort. First of all, the U.S. got its independence before the Industrial Revolution, which is what made the modern world's economic divisions. (In fact, the U.S. was a full participant in the Industrial Revolution when it happened.) Also, we were a solid part of the transatlantic trade, not as producers of raw materials (although we did that too -- cotton), but as traders. We had much more in common with small trading nations of Europe (like Holland) than we did with other European colonies, which became the modern third world.
the less efficient supplier will go out of business
Cutthroat pricing has absolutely nothing to do with efficiency. Walmart is selling at cost, not charging less because they've reduced their costs through efficiency. Then, when the neighboring stations go out of business they can jack up the price higher than before and gouge consumers, who will have nowhere left to turn. It's a technique that Standard Oil perfected before they were split up for being filthy stinking criminals, just like Walmart.
Too many people lose too much money and too many jobs, etc, etc.
Yeah, when a company fires all its workers and moves someplace cheaper or decides to outsource, it's tough shit, but if rich people are going to lose their jobs then we can't possibly allow it.
"If I patented a flying machine the patent could equally apply to helicopters and aeroplanes even though they are completely different," explains Stephen Probert deputy director of the Patent Office.
Except that if the patent were for "a flying machine," every court in the world would see through it and realize what a farce it was. In the realm of computers, unfortunately, even such broad idea proposals are taken as some kind of intellectual accomplishment.
If the same model were given to a bunch of Linux zealots and a bunch of Microsoft suits, though both based on the same foundation, I think we can agree that our prized zealots would pull through with a better implementation.
But the MS version would have pretty GUIs and the Linux version would have command-line programs and conf files.
Seriously, though, the suits at MS aren't the ones who write the software, the programmers do. If they are pushed in the wrong direction by management's priorities it doesn't perforce mean that they're bad coders.
I seem to recall that an article had to contain untrue or highly misleading statements before it would be called 'biased'. Now, if you have a pre-existing point of view you are 'biased'. Very strange, how the language changes.
Actually, 'biased' does mean having a pre-existing point of view. If you make highly misleading or untrue statement you are not biased, you are a liar.
Heh, it wasn't the game that had the ugly interface, it was your CGI graphics card. Early IBM-compatible graphics sucked pretty hard compared to the competitors (C64 + Apple 2).
Yes, "Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War." I played it on the Apple//c. It actually wasn't RTS, though, because combat was not resolved in real time -- rather, when a conflict occurred you had to zoom in and command the troops while time stopped everywhere else. It was probably the first great war strategy game for the computer, unless there's another I haven't heard of.
There was also "Ancient Art of War at Sea," which can still be downloaded to play in the Apple 2 emulator.
Although it's not mentioned in the Slashdot writeup, I think that probably the most important part of this interview was the discussion of Google's business model and future. It's good to see that they're committed to not getting in over their heads with extraneous services. They've found a business model that works and they're sticking to it, rather than getting greedy and adding dumb new services that have nothing to do with searching, or "search," as he put it.
A lot of technology companies would do very well to follow Google's example, it seems to me. They're proving that Internet services are a perfectly sound venture if the company has a sensible business model and always keeps focused on providing quality technology and services in the area that they know best.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes, but it's not just the entertainment industry that you have to deal with. They have lots of ties. There's a good summary here (the fruits of a Google search). Entertainment and the major TV networks are tied in with power (GE, Westinghouse), AOL, and Philip Morris (already a massive company).
For example, Disney's ties (from the document linked above):
DISNEY / ABC / CAP
Television Holdings:
ABC: includes 10 stations, 24% of US households.
ABC Network News: Prime Time Live, Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America.
ESPN, Lifetime Television (50%), as well as minority holdings in A&E, History Channel and E!
Disney Channel/Disney Television, Touchtone Television.
Media Holdings:
Miramax, Touchtone Pictures.
Magazines: Jane, Los Angeles Magazine, W, Discover.
3 music labels, 11 major local newspapers.
Hyperion book publishers.
Infoseek Internet search engine (43%).
Other Holdings:
Sid R. Bass (major shares) crude oil and gas.
All Disney Theme Parks, Walt Disney Cruise Lines.
The problem is not that "CNN broadcasting MS code" would be "facilitating" illegal activity. In fact, it would BE illegal activity. That's just the point. Actually committing an illegal act (i.e. giving away someone else's "IP") is different from simply providing tools that could be used to do so.
When treated individually, people are not sheep at all. However, when you consider mass trends, it becomes much easier to generalize them in this way. While people's individual decisions may be made thoughtfully, most people are not interested enough to make any decision at all about many things. Thus, the most natural thing to do is to just follow along with mass opinion on that issue. This is not hard to observe on a large scale. The statement "people are sheep" is not an insult, it's simply an observation about mass psychology.
No, that would be RMS, not Linus.
Whoa! I just got a new "Slashdot" graphic for the page when I clicked "reply" -- I must have just caught a 2:00 AM changeover. Anyway...
Wow - what the hell are you doing on that computer? What kind of 'development' are you doing?
Probably that new-fangled "C" language, which tends to make MS Windows die a horrible death whenever you get a few segfaults while you're testing your code.
Let's face it, segfaults make Windows cough up blood. OK, maybe Win2K is better, but do you really think an OS should be at all vulnerable to errors in programs written in C/C++, especially when they've always been the most popular languages for serious software on that platform? I've *never* had a buffer overflow force me to reboot in Linux.
See, my girlfriend is always complaining because I keep the blinds pulled all the time. My computer is right next to the window, and the glare gets to me. Plus, I sleep on the side of the bed that's toward the window. (Small apartment, same room.) So, now I have a good excuse: it's to protect me from government scrutiny. It's better than the old excuse, which is that I'm a vampire.
--
I gave up my +1 bonus, don't mod me down!
This is a matter for state governments, though. The state that has chartered Microsoft (probably either Washington, where they're based, or Delaware, where many, many corporations get their charters because they're the most lenient) could decide, with an act of the legislature, to revoke the corporation's charter.
Being such a large corporation, however, Microsoft might be able to hop to another state, or even country, before that happened. I don't really know how that would work.
A PC can be but is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves.
A good point except for the above quote. A PC is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves? You might as well say that an Intel machine "often" runs Linux (or GNU/Linux, according to your preference).
A large part of the MS antitrust trial revolves around default settings precisely because most people will never open up the box to mess with it, physically or in software terms. If the machine tells them they can't do something, most people don't think that it could be lying to them, even though in reality the software is just repeating what the company told it to say. (I doubt that intelligent people in our society have trouble understanding that a company could lie to them.)
I'll bet you've always enjoyed that joke, since you are only 9 years old.
Get it? Hah hah!
It's a joke about Linux not being as old as you!
Hah... hah...
Oh well...
ADMISSION: This post is the result of original ideas added to shameless [plagiarism | merciful summation] of other posts on this topic.
.)
:)
From the article:
I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days.
How about email?
As so many people have said, the whole problem comes from an over-reliance of HTTP. If you need the request in 5 days, you probably need some other kind of service.
However, his complaint about the time-frame of HTTP requests has deeper implications than he perhaps realizes. For example, if your request takes 5 days, you'd better be ready to compensate your content provider for machine usage, because it must be extremely resource intensive. (Maybe MS passport could help out.
If I'm requesting a reply over a 5-day time frame, ideally I would not need to have my machine powered up to receive the replay, as most machines are turned off daily. So, some kind of asynchronous protocol with intermediate storage -- like email -- would be required.
So, we need a service that checks for the latest server responses whenever you start it up, and automatically keeps track of how much you should be charged for each transaction. Actually, I think an HTTP/SMTP implementation would not be poorly suited, at least with a Free Software application server doing the heavy lifting. (See another posting on MS and intellectual "property" sharing.)
A new PHP function: do_5_day_request_and_charge_for_it($user, $args)
{
do_lots_of_stuff($args);
charge_lots_of_money($user);
}
I'll write that function if you promise royalties off each function call
Of course, if you wanted a seriously secure system, you would either require credit card info beforehand or require payment before issuing the response (at least for new users) to discourage fraud.
You can call me a troll, but I'm serious: does Sun really think that people will continue using Star Office if they have to pay? The only time I can recall people recommending it is to someone who was looking for a free alternative to MS Office.
Personally, I've only used older versions of Star Office on an older machine (200 MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM), but the startup time was horrendous -- I literally had to wait 5 minutes to start it in KDE 1, and it was worse with Gnome. (No other app was this bad, except maybe Netscape 6.) The same went for Windows before I wiped it off and installed Red Hat. Star Office is about last on my list of applications that I'm eager to go back and give another whirl, especially now that there's a free version.
Well, I think we can predict that unless there's a change in this policy, we'll see a fairly rapid death of Star Office on platforms other than Solaris. Sun must be confused: do they really think that there's some compelling reason to use Star Office other than the fact that it's free? It would be interesting to see whether the resulting decline of Star Office on non-Solaris platforms actually leads to a decline in its use on Solaris as well... I would expect it to happen, actually.
If I were management and I wanted to pay for an office suite, I'd use MS Office -- why bother with this silly Star Office thing, especially after seeing those past versions that took over the whole desktop?
That comes from the large Scottish heritage in Canada -- many Scottish immigrants brought that pronunciation. Actually, I had a Canadian history teacher in college who said "aboot," he's the one that explained that to us.
I work for a non-profit right now. While I don't see us having problems due to greed, poor planning at the top definitely seems to be putting the squeeze on employees. For example, an office boss quit and, rather than hiring a replacement, they simply split up her responsibilities between the other employees -- with no increase in pay, of course. Many non-profits will consistently increase the load they put on you until you can't shoulder any more, simply because they're always strapped for cash and are trying to get more bang for their buck.
That's not to say that for-profit business won't do the same thing, of course. I'm just saying that a different motive to minimize expenses -- limited revenue with non-profit, maximizing profit with for-profit -- doesn't necessarily change the effects of this penny pinching on employees.
Balls. The U.S. was more or less a third world country when it got started, and it succeeded.
The U.S. was nothing of the sort. First of all, the U.S. got its independence before the Industrial Revolution, which is what made the modern world's economic divisions. (In fact, the U.S. was a full participant in the Industrial Revolution when it happened.) Also, we were a solid part of the transatlantic trade, not as producers of raw materials (although we did that too -- cotton), but as traders. We had much more in common with small trading nations of Europe (like Holland) than we did with other European colonies, which became the modern third world.
the less efficient supplier will go out of business
Cutthroat pricing has absolutely nothing to do with efficiency. Walmart is selling at cost, not charging less because they've reduced their costs through efficiency. Then, when the neighboring stations go out of business they can jack up the price higher than before and gouge consumers, who will have nowhere left to turn. It's a technique that Standard Oil perfected before they were split up for being filthy stinking criminals, just like Walmart.
it's difficult to compare the two without either belittling humanity
:)
I mean, really, humans are just wildly complex computers, which is why our data-exchange set is so much more advanced.
If humans were just wildly complex computers, why would beer and pornography be so popular?
Too many people lose too much money and too many jobs, etc, etc.
Yeah, when a company fires all its workers and moves someplace cheaper or decides to outsource, it's tough shit, but if rich people are going to lose their jobs then we can't possibly allow it.
"If I patented a flying machine the patent could equally apply to helicopters and aeroplanes even though they are completely different," explains Stephen Probert deputy director of the Patent Office.
Except that if the patent were for "a flying machine," every court in the world would see through it and realize what a farce it was. In the realm of computers, unfortunately, even such broad idea proposals are taken as some kind of intellectual accomplishment.
If the same model were given to a bunch of Linux zealots and a bunch of Microsoft suits, though both based on the same foundation, I think we can agree that our prized zealots would pull through with a better implementation.
But the MS version would have pretty GUIs and the Linux version would have command-line programs and conf files.
Seriously, though, the suits at MS aren't the ones who write the software, the programmers do. If they are pushed in the wrong direction by management's priorities it doesn't perforce mean that they're bad coders.
I seem to recall that an article had to contain untrue or highly misleading statements before it would be called 'biased'. Now, if you have a pre-existing point of view you are 'biased'. Very strange, how the language changes.
Actually, 'biased' does mean having a pre-existing point of view. If you make highly misleading or untrue statement you are not biased, you are a liar.
Heh, it wasn't the game that had the ugly interface, it was your CGI graphics card. Early IBM-compatible graphics sucked pretty hard compared to the competitors (C64 + Apple 2).
Yes, "Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War." I played it on the Apple //c. It actually wasn't RTS, though, because combat was not resolved in real time -- rather, when a conflict occurred you had to zoom in and command the troops while time stopped everywhere else. It was probably the first great war strategy game for the computer, unless there's another I haven't heard of.
There was also "Ancient Art of War at Sea," which can still be downloaded to play in the Apple 2 emulator.
I'd hate to see us all evolve toward better basketball players just because that's the job with the highest salary.
Ah, but think of the entertainment we would get... of course, they might eventually have to raise the rim another foot or so.
Although it's not mentioned in the Slashdot writeup, I think that probably the most important part of this interview was the discussion of Google's business model and future. It's good to see that they're committed to not getting in over their heads with extraneous services. They've found a business model that works and they're sticking to it, rather than getting greedy and adding dumb new services that have nothing to do with searching, or "search," as he put it.
A lot of technology companies would do very well to follow Google's example, it seems to me. They're proving that Internet services are a perfectly sound venture if the company has a sensible business model and always keeps focused on providing quality technology and services in the area that they know best.