The only other common option is Solaris/Netscape, so where does Apache fit in?
BB came to meet with our company's developers and server jocks and discuss collab.net as an outsourcing model, and had some interesting things to say about his former employer, C2net.. He basically said that when Stronghold came out there was really no useful, viable SSL for Apache (he's right: SSL support at the time was difficult and tenuous IMHO). Then mod_ssl came along and out of the gate it was (his words) like 60% of Stronghold's speed/reliability/usability, and it increased rapidly, then surpassed Stronghold. The only reason to buy Stronghold/RedHat/Raven is for the US privilege of a licensed copy of R$A. C2 started deluding itself regarding the value of its proprietary software/features, and BB (rightly) bailed.
BTW, I had a chance to ask a couple of Qs to Dr. Eugene Spafford of Tripwire (he cowrote COPS, Tripwire, Practical Unix and Internet Security) yesterday, at a demo/pitch for Tripwire and some related security software (think MetaDirectory for ISS/FW-1/Nessus, etc). He was pretty down on OSS as a security solution, stating that the most secure software comes from small teams of competent designers and coders. While this may be true, I then asked him that given that almost any system can be penetrated, which system provides the best response (open or closed)? He said that it was dependent on the vendor, then proceeded to tell us that we should only select software vendors that implement high-quality security designs. I then also mentioned that, as a die-hard cynic, UCITA would probably become the best asset Open Source ever had, should it pass, since OSS provides the source and concrete licensing terms that are user and developer friendly, and corporate IT would then need to take EULAs extremely seriously. He said (to the effect) that I was being a bit glib, which is correct.;)
The upshot: putting aside the whole issue of objectivity (his bread is partially buttered by closed-source security solutions) I think our disagreement basically fell down along academic/engineering lines. He basically said that, in an ideal world, closed-source software would provide the most secure solutions. I'm not qualified to really argue that point, but I _am_ qualified to say that in the _real_ world, there are enough issues with availability, accountability and talent in the closed-source world that open-source moves ahead in terms of rapid response fixes and peer/quality review. When I asked him about the patch issue, he said, essentially, that responsible software companies can have patches out faster than OSS projects. My one word rebuttal: Microsoft. He really didn't have any further comment;)
I respect his opinions and expertise, but I feel that where the rubber meets the road, some of his preconceptions are off-base.
Now the question is since it was just described and not built does it count as prior art?
When has not having a working prototype ever stopped a patent filer?
Ah... but even if not, then we only need to look to the Stanford Research Institute from the 60's when Englebart et al. showed off their system that included the mouse, and the "gui" with features that were very hypertext like. Now if I could only find the damn link to a description of it. Anyone?
Searching google, I came up with this... Your Working Boy,
In fact, I'd be surprised in Windows didn't have any code either from GPLed programs or heavily inspired by them.
Maybe this is why they're so scared of opening the source now? Maybe they want a year to vet the code and make sure any OSS release is not in violation of various OSS licenses...
Misconception. Sun now only charges for Sol2.8 on servers running >= 8 CPUs. So your E2, E2x0, E4x0, your Netra T1 (with the sleek 1U shell and most excellent LOM console), and IIRC your Sparc10/Sparc20 can run a beer OS..
Whether you'd want to run 2.8 now or hold off for a few patchlevels is up to you as an admin.
Microsoft is not a monopoly. It might have been closer to a monopoly when it assaulted Netscape, but it's obviously not so now. Linux (okay, okay, GNU/Linux), is prospering happily alongside Windows, and the movement has spawned its own little industry.
You seem to forget a few points: Microsoft needs to be punished for past behavior, regardless of their position now (and I disagree: business structures and attitudes in place unfairly favor M$ precisely because of their monopolist behavior. Since that behavior damages consumer choice, the monopoly is illegal). Also, I think M$'s past conduct and history of not abiding by promises / good faith agreements preclude any punishment less harsh than structural remediation. If M$ had not engaged in predatory behavior after the consent decree, and had proven itself to be an honest player in the eyes of the Justice department and the American people, Judge Jackson probably wouldn't have had the need to pursue the breakup.
Also, while there's a great deal of attention being paid to Linux and M$ competitors, the truth really is that M$ continues to hold a significant majority of market share through illegal machinations. This must be remedied.
Note as well that there is no regulation in the software industry. Would you rather have a US Department of Computing or a series of unorganized Justice decrees? Personally, I think our freedom to compute lies not in government regulation but in the correct and apropos application of meatspace law towards the 'net (or at least the US portions), keeping in mind the ways in which the 'net is different than the environment that formed the laws in the first place.
The more I work in the IT industry, the more I come to appreciate the DOJ's opinion on the M$ matter. M$'s hijinx with Kerberos, its security probs with IIS/IE, etc. only help justify my rather unfriendly attitude towards it..
... And they're OK, but our 2Us don't have hot-swap drives and the redundant powersupplies are fed by a single power cord instead of one cord per supply like Compaq's 1850R.. Kinda important if your datacenter has 2 separate power mains running into each rack and you want to remove a SPOF... Kinda pricey to blow those options IMHO, and for 1 extra U I'm quite tempted to stick with Compaq and its 6 hotswap drives..
btw: telenet won't play nice with our financing dept (lease terms) so we're switching linux/bsd server vendors. Our purchaser wants us to go with Dell but I refuse because of questionable RAID drivers (and an aversion to Dell by nature), so I've got them down to selecting a preferred linux/bsd server vendor.. Any experience outside of VA? (apparently penguin can't do the terms we want either:p ) I'm leaning towards IBM, Compaq or VA (or HP's LPr, but I think they're kinda, uh, ugly).. Any other suggestions for an enterprise buyer?
Companies love the kids. They're the best blend of brains and youthful stupidity, so you get geniuses who don't know any better when you pay them squat.
It is also naive to think that the big ISPs and the universities will resist any demands by the RIAA to monitor data traffic and take action against users who are pirating music.
The universities perhaps, but ISPs have a long and moderately successful history of fighting for their status as 'common carriers', which immunize them against crimes caused on their networks without their knowledge, but only as long as they refrain from the very behavior you are postulating.
All you need is to run a new *ster/*tella variant on port 80. Then you're asking ISPs to create huge filter tables to please the RIAA. If you've any familiarity with the ISP business, you know that this is laughably impossible.
Fighting this is strategically like grinding your troops on the front to delay the inevitable. Metallica is grist for the credibility mill here, and the only people benefitting are the A&R people, janitors, and others employed in non-creative capacities by the record companies.. These are also the people with discretion over the money..
Granted, the AOL/Time Warner thing means that AOL will be very tempted to meddle with their filter rules and restrictions (particularly in its TOS).. This might even matter if Time Warner cable starts providing high-speed internet access over cable...
If you had to live the life of a musician, I doubt you would be so keen on giving discounts.
If the alternative is to thumb my nose at poor college students and sow dissention in the fanbase, I'd consider educating myself in the new technology and the irrevocable changes that technology caused right quick.
It's a _tough_business_ and the fact that Metallica has had remarkable _longevity_ is a credit to both their intelligence (not "book learning") and their talent.
It's also a business that has, as its primary profit model, the control and sale of media. That profit model is now, with a keystroke, stiflingly obsolete. They did great in the past by playing by those rules, no doubt, and big respect for that. However, those rules are absolutely and completely demolished by the Internet. The question is: what are the new rules? How do I win the new game?
I don't recall Lars making any suggestions as to how you should do _your_ job or how you should be compensated for it.
Yes, but a large percentage of his income is now dominated by the rules of _my_ game, and I've been playing this game for decades. I don't presume to tell him or anyone else how to do their jobs (except for my lackeys;);) but I _do_ offer insights into the nature of my game that are hard-won over years. I do so hoping that they can reconcile themselves with as little damage to their livelihoods and my community as possible. It's an 'intervention'.
It was obvious to me that he stuck to talking about what he knows, and where his knowledge was lacking he made an effort to become informed.
Very true, but it should be clear by now that his knowledge is now obsolete. His efforts to become informed are laudable, and my efforts are aimed at offering food for thought, and peaceful ways of migrating his expectations and business model to the new era by applying lessons learned in a similar field with decades of experience facing the same issues.
Perhaps you should quit your job and become a musician, tell you what, just do it for 5 years (should be enough time for someone as savvy as yourself to master an instrument and build a following) and then see if you feel the same way.
I would turn that around and offer Lars the opportunity to become a junior sysadmin and master _my_ instruments (Cisco routers, 3Com/Bay/Cisco switches, Solaris/Linux/HP-UX/Tru64/*BSD, sendmail, bind, apache, bugzilla, XFree, etc...) in order to inform his mindset regarding the internet and its effects on his field of endeavor.
At least then maybe you be somewhat qualified to have an informed opinion.
Not to sound too egotistical (egotistical sysadmin? Moi?) but I'm thinking that at some point, maybe Lars needs to worry about how informed _his_ opinion is?
Remember, and keep this in mind first: the old media pricing model is thoroughly smashed. All other constructive discourse can only start with that as the primary underlying assumption.
what's to prevent passing along the (say) unique serial number on your CD
Good question! The easy answer is to make it the kernel of a proper registration system (requiring full name, real email address, maybe some optional demographic info) and make the added content/community valuable enough (such as an online chat 'rep') or smart enough (to only assign benefits once, so if you give your uid to someone else and they use the benefit you lose access to it: one shot deal kinda thing) to make you want to keep strict control over your userid. Another poster suggested including credit card info, which I think might help but it should be the basis of some 'expanded/Gold' services as not all purchasers are going to have a credit card or want to provide a CC# (or be big enough fans to care, even if it's 'free' like providing Shlockbuster with a CC# for rentals).
There will always be circumventions and cheats possible in any system, the key here is to reclaim as much value as possible by using new tools and systems, and to reduce the difficulty of staying legal to the point that only hardcore criminals and the terminally childish continue to break copyright.
Yeah, my friends' band is on there and they seem pretty happ with it (I was the one who encoded the MP3s on my UltraSPARC and uploaded them to the artist site).. They've been playing together for 6-7 years or so and are as good or better than STP or Rob 'Smooth' 's band IMHO;)
Subject: Metallica is right to sue copyright infringers...
... but truthfully, you're cutting off their nose to spite your face here. As a software nerd I believe in copyright (for it's copyright which protects open-source software licensed under the GPL, but that's a techie issue) and I think piracy is morally wrong, but at a certain point reality has to be faced. The internet, higher bandwidth, MP3, Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/etc have all essentially dropped a large atomic bomb on the existing music business model. Like dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist act or natural disaster, people can experience denial (it didn't happen, life goes on as always), rage (those bastards! let's get them), and other strong emotions, but in the end the only useful thing to do is pick up the pieces and start again.
The medium that music is distributed on has essentially reduced the 'product' itself to software: a product which is easily and cheaply copied and distributed for essentially zero cost to the consumer. That's the atomic bomb I wrote about, when your business model is entirely media-cost based. So, this strange new world is baffling and scary, where do you look for guidance?
The software industry. That industry has dealt with the piracy problem for decades, and has evolved some interesting ways to continue to profit (hansomely!) in the face of piracy. The fundamental question to ask is, how do you keep people buying media which is easy to obtain and distribute for free?
Software companies have solved that problem by applying a concept called 'Value-Add', which means that their profits are not pinned just on the sale of the media, but on the sale of service and support based on the operation of the software contained on that media. For example, technical support and upgrades, as well as software consulting services (for installation and 'integration' into existing software systems) provide reliable profit over and above the actual cost of software. In addition, to qualify for those services, you need to prove that you obtained a legal copy of the software media, so that drives legal ownership and prevents piracy as well.
Now, you might ask, how does this apply to musicians and the music 'product'? Clearly, one cannot expect to derive value from providing technical support when it comes to packaged music, but consider what you have when you use physical media here: you can include a unique identifier on each distributed disk, which the media buyer can use to unlock additional content available to legal music owners. Some examples of content might be:
discounted concert tickets
discounted products (t-shirts, other records, endorsement arrangements like phone cards or consumer goods)
access to 'members only' goods and services (such as websites, 'subscriptions', remixes, 'draft' recordings, lyrics/tabs, backstage pass raffles, etc)
These things comprise what I feel are the most obvious 'Value-Adds' to your licensed media products, and are ways which you can use to both reduce piracy and involve fans further in your world. There are many more (like pay-for-play, corporate/private 'commissioning' of work, etc) that wouldn't even apply to the traditional software business! Metallica.com could be the site that provides the value-add community (you already have a 'members-only' section, why not restrict full access to those who have a compact-disc with a 'key' on the label?) so you can continue to record and derive legitimate profit while reducing your exposure to piracy (and fan hostility)?
I realize this address is the fanclub address, but I'm concerned about this issue, and I hope that if my message has some useful points and is not entirely incoherent it might make its way to Metallica and hopefully provide some guidance on how to pursue the whole Internet/MP3/Napster issue. I feel that coming to terms with the internet in a way that faces reality in a creative way can provide opportunities that will end up proving more profitable, fan-friendly, and sustainable than the current system, at the expense of the 'middlemen' and non-creative members of the recording industry that absorb most of the margin in the business.
Hoping that your suit is on the merits of copyright and not some duping concotion by your lawyers to generate fat fees, Your Working Boy,
... that in the ratings, which tracked music sellers near college campuses, the decline of music sales near campuses that did not ban napster was 4%. The decline of music sales near campuses that did ban napster was 7%!
What does this say? Napster helped preserve 3% of those lost record sales!!!!
So, the napster straw man is officially dead. The true cause of the decline among (financially challenged) college students is plain to see: price gouging by record companies..
My take on Metallica, Dre, etc.: They have every right to pursue the individual copyright infringers. However, the fans are being gouged on pricing, and these artists are legitimately losing fan support because they are not standing up for the fans regarding CD prices. They seem to fail to see that, and are not seen as fighting the labels pricing structure (as Tom Petty did) for the sake of their fans. The suits are not wrong on legal or even moral grounds IMHO. I just think they're missing the point, and doing so with great acrimony.
A band that is silent on this issue (as well as the issue of label exploitation of artists, internal bloated middlemanism, etc) is part of the problem, and this problem's been around for decades, it's only now with napster that this issue is cast in sharp relief.
Sun's systems consistently underperform when matched up against similar systems from almost all of their competitors.
Depends on the jobs, benchmarks, etc, blah blah. In the market the EXX00 systems reside, they offer some damned good scalability and redundancy (predictive failure modeling on CPU/RAM and hot-spare CPU/RAM without system reboot.. Add new CPU/RAM as hot-plugs and activate without system reboot... How many Intel systems can do that?) as well as memory capacity and the 64-bit OS to support it.. I'm looking into refurb 3x00/4x00s for several system upgrades, and while some of the SPOFs are annoying (primary CPU/RAM planar errors require reboot, no alternate-pathing of PCI boards) I'm still interested in the overall improvement they offer.
Sun offers the best scalable unix systems for business use IMHO. Between CPU/RAM options, software availability, driver support, and OS features I'm pretty happy with it...
Now if Sun'd ever backport DSDs to the XX00 series like they did with Starfire's DR/AP... one can dream...
If you want to see where this is heading, just turn once again to the car industry: once American companies got their asses kicked by the Japanese, they adopted their techniques, and Surprise! Cars now come out of their factories with higher quality, in less time, and at less cost (adjusted for inflation and new features:-)
A good book on this (from 1986-8, so it leaves off when the US auto industry was in pretty much the nadir of its decline) is David Halberstam's The Reckoning... I'd go into further detail, but you have to read the book. It goes into Ford & Nissan overall, but it's very rich with both history and personality (particularly Mr. K of Datsun 240Z fame) and an excellent read.
There are definitely some lessons to learn, particularly regarding American hubris during fat economic times..
.. Would involve empire-building RPG ala Stars! but integrated into the space-sim so you the results of the empire building would affect the space-sim model..
Kind of like a simulated galaxy with different playable components.. Your Working Boy,
Slashdot Mirror
The only other common option is Solaris/Netscape, so where does Apache fit in?
;)
;)
BB came to meet with our company's developers and server jocks and discuss collab.net as an outsourcing model, and had some interesting things to say about his former employer, C2net.. He basically said that when Stronghold came out there was really no useful, viable SSL for Apache (he's right: SSL support at the time was difficult and tenuous IMHO). Then mod_ssl came along and out of the gate it was (his words) like 60% of Stronghold's speed/reliability/usability, and it increased rapidly, then surpassed Stronghold. The only reason to buy Stronghold/RedHat/Raven is for the US privilege of a licensed copy of R$A. C2 started deluding itself regarding the value of its proprietary software/features, and BB (rightly) bailed.
BTW, I had a chance to ask a couple of Qs to Dr. Eugene Spafford of Tripwire (he cowrote COPS, Tripwire, Practical Unix and Internet Security) yesterday, at a demo/pitch for Tripwire and some related security software (think MetaDirectory for ISS/FW-1/Nessus, etc). He was pretty down on OSS as a security solution, stating that the most secure software comes from small teams of competent designers and coders. While this may be true, I then asked him that given that almost any system can be penetrated, which system provides the best response (open or closed)? He said that it was dependent on the vendor, then proceeded to tell us that we should only select software vendors that implement high-quality security designs. I then also mentioned that, as a die-hard cynic, UCITA would probably become the best asset Open Source ever had, should it pass, since OSS provides the source and concrete licensing terms that are user and developer friendly, and corporate IT would then need to take EULAs extremely seriously. He said (to the effect) that I was being a bit glib, which is correct.
The upshot: putting aside the whole issue of objectivity (his bread is partially buttered by closed-source security solutions) I think our disagreement basically fell down along academic/engineering lines. He basically said that, in an ideal world, closed-source software would provide the most secure solutions. I'm not qualified to really argue that point, but I _am_ qualified to say that in the _real_ world, there are enough issues with availability, accountability and talent in the closed-source world that open-source moves ahead in terms of rapid response fixes and peer/quality review. When I asked him about the patch issue, he said, essentially, that responsible software companies can have patches out faster than OSS projects. My one word rebuttal: Microsoft. He really didn't have any further comment
I respect his opinions and expertise, but I feel that where the rubber meets the road, some of his preconceptions are off-base.
Your Working Boy,
I haven't seen much significant life in the netatalk code, apart from the asun patches (and when was the last one of those? :( )
Your Working Boy,
Now the question is since it was just described and not built does it count as prior art?
When has not having a working prototype ever stopped a patent filer?
Ah... but even if not, then we only need to look to the Stanford Research Institute from the 60's when Englebart et al. showed off their system that included the mouse, and the "gui" with features that were very hypertext like. Now if I could only find the damn link to a description of it. Anyone?
Searching google, I came up with this...
Your Working Boy,
In fact, I'd be surprised in Windows didn't have any code either from GPLed programs or heavily inspired by them.
;)
Maybe this is why they're so scared of opening the source now? Maybe they want a year to vet the code and make sure any OSS release is not in violation of various OSS licenses...
And maybe pigs can fly..
Your Working Boy,
Solaris for servers is expensive.
Misconception. Sun now only charges for Sol2.8 on servers running >= 8 CPUs. So your E2, E2x0, E4x0, your Netra T1 (with the sleek 1U shell and most excellent LOM console), and IIRC your Sparc10/Sparc20 can run a beer OS..
Whether you'd want to run 2.8 now or hold off for a few patchlevels is up to you as an admin.
Your Working Boy,
Microsoft is not a monopoly. It might have been closer to a monopoly when it assaulted Netscape, but it's obviously not so now. Linux (okay, okay, GNU/Linux), is prospering happily alongside Windows, and the movement has spawned its own little industry.
You seem to forget a few points: Microsoft needs to be punished for past behavior, regardless of their position now (and I disagree: business structures and attitudes in place unfairly favor M$ precisely because of their monopolist behavior. Since that behavior damages consumer choice, the monopoly is illegal). Also, I think M$'s past conduct and history of not abiding by promises / good faith agreements preclude any punishment less harsh than structural remediation. If M$ had not engaged in predatory behavior after the consent decree, and had proven itself to be an honest player in the eyes of the Justice department and the American people, Judge Jackson probably wouldn't have had the need to pursue the breakup.
Also, while there's a great deal of attention being paid to Linux and M$ competitors, the truth really is that M$ continues to hold a significant majority of market share through illegal machinations. This must be remedied.
Note as well that there is no regulation in the software industry. Would you rather have a US Department of Computing or a series of unorganized Justice decrees? Personally, I think our freedom to compute lies not in government regulation but in the correct and apropos application of meatspace law towards the 'net (or at least the US portions), keeping in mind the ways in which the 'net is different than the environment that formed the laws in the first place.
The more I work in the IT industry, the more I come to appreciate the DOJ's opinion on the M$ matter. M$'s hijinx with Kerberos, its security probs with IIS/IE, etc. only help justify my rather unfriendly attitude towards it..
Your Working Boy,
Hell, why not genetically engineer pigs to grow useful ivory tusks?
New from Electronic Arts: Bill Budge's 'Endangered Species Construction Set'...
(ooh yeah, I forgot that Loverboy song...)
Your Working Boy,
We found a jeweller in California that did some custom work and someday soon I hope the superpowers will kick in.
Yeah, but you gotta play outside in a lightning storm to get the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to activate them...
Your Working Boy,
Someone already invented a no-button mouse about 2 years ago... Wonder if it's already patented?
;)
Your Working Boy,
... And they're OK, but our 2Us don't have hot-swap drives and the redundant powersupplies are fed by a single power cord instead of one cord per supply like Compaq's 1850R.. Kinda important if your datacenter has 2 separate power mains running into each rack and you want to remove a SPOF... Kinda pricey to blow those options IMHO, and for 1 extra U I'm quite tempted to stick with Compaq and its 6 hotswap drives..
:p ) I'm leaning towards IBM, Compaq or VA (or HP's LPr, but I think they're kinda, uh, ugly).. Any other suggestions for an enterprise buyer?
btw: telenet won't play nice with our financing dept (lease terms) so we're switching linux/bsd server vendors. Our purchaser wants us to go with Dell but I refuse because of questionable RAID drivers (and an aversion to Dell by nature), so I've got them down to selecting a preferred linux/bsd server vendor.. Any experience outside of VA? (apparently penguin can't do the terms we want either
Your Working Boy,
Your Working Boy,
Hidden away in the woods of deep East Texas lies the 24th and 63rd fastest growing tech cities in the country, Tyler and Longview.
;)
Just watch out for weaving chevys 'round Arnette..
Your Working Boy,
IF DDR-SDRAM WAS A SLAM DUNK EASY THING, SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT.
You mean, like GeForce cards?
(what's the difference between SDRAM and SGRAM anyways?)
Your Working Boy,
Companies love the kids. They're the best blend of brains and youthful stupidity, so you get geniuses who don't know any better when you pay them squat.
push @tech_corps, ("Micro\$oft"); #add as required
foreach $CORP (@tech_corps)
{
print STDOUT "*cough* *cough* *${CORP}* *cough*\n";
}
Your Working Boy,
It is also naive to think that the big ISPs and the universities will resist any demands by the RIAA to monitor data traffic and take action against users who are pirating music.
The universities perhaps, but ISPs have a long and moderately successful history of fighting for their status as 'common carriers', which immunize them against crimes caused on their networks without their knowledge, but only as long as they refrain from the very behavior you are postulating.
All you need is to run a new *ster/*tella variant on port 80. Then you're asking ISPs to create huge filter tables to please the RIAA. If you've any familiarity with the ISP business, you know that this is laughably impossible.
Fighting this is strategically like grinding your troops on the front to delay the inevitable. Metallica is grist for the credibility mill here, and the only people benefitting are the A&R people, janitors, and others employed in non-creative capacities by the record companies.. These are also the people with discretion over the money..
Granted, the AOL/Time Warner thing means that AOL will be very tempted to meddle with their filter rules and restrictions (particularly in its TOS).. This might even matter if Time Warner cable starts providing high-speed internet access over cable...
Your Working Boy,
If you had to live the life of a musician, I doubt you would be so keen on giving discounts.
;) ;) but I _do_ offer insights into the nature of my game that are hard-won over years. I do so hoping that they can reconcile themselves with as little damage to their livelihoods and my community as possible. It's an 'intervention'.
If the alternative is to thumb my nose at poor college students and sow dissention in the fanbase, I'd consider educating myself in the new technology and the irrevocable changes that technology caused right quick.
It's a _tough_business_ and the fact that Metallica has had remarkable _longevity_ is a credit to both their intelligence (not "book learning") and their talent.
It's also a business that has, as its primary profit model, the control and sale of media. That profit model is now, with a keystroke, stiflingly obsolete. They did great in the past by playing by those rules, no doubt, and big respect for that. However, those rules are absolutely and completely demolished by the Internet. The question is: what are the new rules? How do I win the new game?
I don't recall Lars making any suggestions as to how you should do _your_ job or how you should be compensated for it.
Yes, but a large percentage of his income is now dominated by the rules of _my_ game, and I've been playing this game for decades. I don't presume to tell him or anyone else how to do their jobs (except for my lackeys
It was obvious to me that he stuck to talking about what he knows, and where his knowledge was lacking he made an effort to become informed.
Very true, but it should be clear by now that his knowledge is now obsolete. His efforts to become informed are laudable, and my efforts are aimed at offering food for thought, and peaceful ways of migrating his expectations and business model to the new era by applying lessons learned in a similar field with decades of experience facing the same issues.
Perhaps you should quit your job and become a musician, tell you what, just do it for 5 years (should be enough time for someone as savvy as yourself to master an instrument and build a following) and then see if you feel the same way.
I would turn that around and offer Lars the opportunity to become a junior sysadmin and master _my_ instruments (Cisco routers, 3Com/Bay/Cisco switches, Solaris/Linux/HP-UX/Tru64/*BSD, sendmail, bind, apache, bugzilla, XFree, etc...) in order to inform his mindset regarding the internet and its effects on his field of endeavor.
At least then maybe you be somewhat qualified to have an informed opinion.
Not to sound too egotistical (egotistical sysadmin? Moi?) but I'm thinking that at some point, maybe Lars needs to worry about how informed _his_ opinion is?
Remember, and keep this in mind first: the old media pricing model is thoroughly smashed. All other constructive discourse can only start with that as the primary underlying assumption.
Your Working Boy,
what's to prevent passing along the (say) unique serial number on your CD
Good question! The easy answer is to make it the kernel of a proper registration system (requiring full name, real email address, maybe some optional demographic info) and make the added content/community valuable enough (such as an online chat 'rep') or smart enough (to only assign benefits once, so if you give your uid to someone else and they use the benefit you lose access to it: one shot deal kinda thing) to make you want to keep strict control over your userid. Another poster suggested including credit card info, which I think might help but it should be the basis of some 'expanded/Gold' services as not all purchasers are going to have a credit card or want to provide a CC# (or be big enough fans to care, even if it's 'free' like providing Shlockbuster with a CC# for rentals).
There will always be circumventions and cheats possible in any system, the key here is to reclaim as much value as possible by using new tools and systems, and to reduce the difficulty of staying legal to the point that only hardcore criminals and the terminally childish continue to break copyright.
Your Working Boy,
Yeah, my friends' band is on there and they seem pretty happ with it (I was the one who encoded the MP3s on my UltraSPARC and uploaded them to the artist site).. They've been playing together for 6-7 years or so and are as good or better than STP or Rob 'Smooth' 's band IMHO ;)
There are ways...
Your Working Boy,
The medium that music is distributed on has essentially reduced the 'product' itself to software: a product which is easily and cheaply copied and distributed for essentially zero cost to the consumer. That's the atomic bomb I wrote about, when your business model is entirely media-cost based. So, this strange new world is baffling and scary, where do you look for guidance?
The software industry. That industry has dealt with the piracy problem for decades, and has evolved some interesting ways to continue to profit (hansomely!) in the face of piracy. The fundamental question to ask is, how do you keep people buying media which is easy to obtain and distribute for free?
Software companies have solved that problem by applying a concept called 'Value-Add', which means that their profits are not pinned just on the sale of the media, but on the sale of service and support based on the operation of the software contained on that media. For example, technical support and upgrades, as well as software consulting services (for installation and 'integration' into existing software systems) provide reliable profit over and above the actual cost of software. In addition, to qualify for those services, you need to prove that you obtained a legal copy of the software media, so that drives legal ownership and prevents piracy as well.
Now, you might ask, how does this apply to musicians and the music 'product'? Clearly, one cannot expect to derive value from providing technical support when it comes to packaged music, but consider what you have when you use physical media here: you can include a unique identifier on each distributed disk, which the media buyer can use to unlock additional content available to legal music owners. Some examples of content might be:
These things comprise what I feel are the most obvious 'Value-Adds' to your licensed media products, and are ways which you can use to both reduce piracy and involve fans further in your world. There are many more (like pay-for-play, corporate/private 'commissioning' of work, etc) that wouldn't even apply to the traditional software business! Metallica.com could be the site that provides the value-add community (you already have a 'members-only' section, why not restrict full access to those who have a compact-disc with a 'key' on the label?) so you can continue to record and derive legitimate profit while reducing your exposure to piracy (and fan hostility)?
I realize this address is the fanclub address, but I'm concerned about this issue, and I hope that if my message has some useful points and is not entirely incoherent it might make its way to Metallica and hopefully provide some guidance on how to pursue the whole Internet/MP3/Napster issue. I feel that coming to terms with the internet in a way that faces reality in a creative way can provide opportunities that will end up proving more profitable, fan-friendly, and sustainable than the current system, at the expense of the 'middlemen' and non-creative members of the recording industry that absorb most of the margin in the business.
Hoping that your suit is on the merits of copyright and not some duping concotion by your lawyers to generate fat fees,
Your Working Boy,
... that in the ratings, which tracked music sellers near college campuses, the decline of music sales near campuses that did not ban napster was 4%. The decline of music sales near campuses that did ban napster was 7%!
..
What does this say? Napster helped preserve 3% of those lost record sales!!!!
So, the napster straw man is officially dead. The true cause of the decline among (financially challenged) college students is plain to see: price gouging by record companies
My take on Metallica, Dre, etc.: They have every right to pursue the individual copyright infringers. However, the fans are being gouged on pricing, and these artists are legitimately losing fan support because they are not standing up for the fans regarding CD prices. They seem to fail to see that, and are not seen as fighting the labels pricing structure (as Tom Petty did) for the sake of their fans. The suits are not wrong on legal or even moral grounds IMHO. I just think they're missing the point, and doing so with great acrimony.
A band that is silent on this issue (as well as the issue of label exploitation of artists, internal bloated middlemanism, etc) is part of the problem, and this problem's been around for decades, it's only now with napster that this issue is cast in sharp relief.
Your Working Boy,
A CPU is not designed for higher or lower load. It always runs at 100%, regarless of whether there's load of 10 or nothing but the idle loop to run.
Semantics: some modern CPUs can go into powersaving idle modes..
Your Working Boy,
Sun's systems consistently underperform when matched up against similar systems from almost all of their competitors.
Depends on the jobs, benchmarks, etc, blah blah. In the market the EXX00 systems reside, they offer some damned good scalability and redundancy (predictive failure modeling on CPU/RAM and hot-spare CPU/RAM without system reboot.. Add new CPU/RAM as hot-plugs and activate without system reboot... How many Intel systems can do that?) as well as memory capacity and the 64-bit OS to support it.. I'm looking into refurb 3x00/4x00s for several system upgrades, and while some of the SPOFs are annoying (primary CPU/RAM planar errors require reboot, no alternate-pathing of PCI boards) I'm still interested in the overall improvement they offer.
Sun offers the best scalable unix systems for business use IMHO. Between CPU/RAM options, software availability, driver support, and OS features I'm pretty happy with it...
Now if Sun'd ever backport DSDs to the XX00 series like they did with Starfire's DR/AP... one can dream...
Your Working Boy,
If you want to see where this is heading, just turn once again to the car industry: once American companies got their asses kicked by the Japanese, they adopted their techniques, and Surprise! Cars now come out of their factories with higher quality, in less time, and at less cost (adjusted for inflation and new features :-)
A good book on this (from 1986-8, so it leaves off when the US auto industry was in pretty much the nadir of its decline) is David Halberstam's The Reckoning... I'd go into further detail, but you have to read the book. It goes into Ford & Nissan overall, but it's very rich with both history and personality (particularly Mr. K of Datsun 240Z fame) and an excellent read.
There are definitely some lessons to learn, particularly regarding American hubris during fat economic times..
Your Working Boy,
.. Would involve empire-building RPG ala Stars! but integrated into the space-sim so you the results of the empire building would affect the space-sim model..
Kind of like a simulated galaxy with different playable components..
Your Working Boy,
But of course the great old classic in this category of games is Elite...
God only knows how much I've wanted multiplayer Elite with modern grafix...
What's up with David Braben nowadays anyway?
Dunno, but IIRC he is kind of a prick. Check here and here for more prickery.. Or just check out Ian Bell's Elite pages...
Your Working Boy,