Of course, if this is one of those "we've patented the world" claims, then any program that produces an encrypted file that is smaller than the original would be in violation of the patent.
There is still room for encryption programs that make files bigger. I've been thinking of making a program that would automatically pad a document with additional legal verbiage and routinely add one billable hour, and see if I could sell it to the legal community.
I wouldn't give it the best model award...but it is moving in the right direction. The model is trying to find a way to fund the creation of music, while making downloadable music on the net possible.
In some ways the proposal of selling worthless stock to fund public wreaks of the failed dot com model. The problem is that the money is likely to be wasted on some stupid feat like the MP3.com Beam it Up program, or the corporation would spend millions on the gazoo tunes of the CEOs younger brother.
Rather than one initiative that tries to own all music in a semi public domain mode. Another approach might be to have multiple funding mechanism where fans of a certain artist would get together and raise funds for a the recording and release of an album into the public domain. If there was a very clear public domain full of music, that repository of public domain material is likely to grow into the popular music of the next generation.
Hmmm, instead of generation-y the people after generation-x should start calling themselves "Generation-Sued."
The break up of AT&T and the development of the internet seems to show that what we thought had to be a monopoly didn't have to be one.
The problem is that companies to date have approached the issue with monopolistic thinking. One company owns the transaction from consumer through to the site. The idea that one company owns the entire transaction creates the apparent need for a monopoly. To bust the monopoly, you need simply create a mechanism where different companies can own parts of the transaction.
If you create a system where the consumer is separate from the content provider then you would create a playing field where different companies are competing for the cosumer and for the web owners.
There are other obstacles on the net that get in the way of micropayments for content. For example:
If your web site requires micropayments, or subscription fees, then your content doesn't get indexed by the search engines. This means that you don't get the web traffic you desire.
Likewise, people will stop linking to your web site. You won't get slashdotted, etc.. Notice how you rarely see/.ed articles from the WSJ.
The resistence to your work caused by asking for a micropayment is far greater than the pennies you gain.
Let's say you ask for a dime to read your novel. Well, in the wild and crazy world of the net, a enlightened Robin Hood will see the plight of all the people who want to read your novel without paying the dime, and publish it on a P2P server.
The even bigger obstacle to micropayments is the absurd notion that everything on the net is free. Paying even a nickel to listen to a song is an act of oppression. A band asking its fans to paypal a dollarto help cover the download costs for an album seems to create more indignation than dollars.
Unfortunately, the idea that everything must be free leads us to the less than desirable situation where only the politically connected or the idle rich will be in the position to provide high quality info on the net.
Monopolies are not the answer. This exact same argument was made in the OS market that there needed to be one monopoly that controlled the operating system, so that all the different software vendors would be able to have a common platform for their programs.
In general, competition creates an environment where products get better. The problem at this point is that there is not enough companies working on micropayment models.
The long delay in establishing micropayments was created in part by monopolistic thinking. Companies like cybercash went into the business with the contemptuous notion that they would first spend hundreds of millions of dollars of investors capital to create a monopoly, then when they had a monopoly, they would be able to bring in the paradise of micropayments.
These large investor capital fed monopoly dreams undermined other more promising approaches to the problem, then exploded in dot com fashion.
There is a lot of merit to what you say about the consumer being confused by multiple solutions.
I suspect the ultimate solution would be for a standards committee to define an interface. With an established interface you could then have competition among smaller companies that plug into that interface.
The monopoly recipe, however, is a guaranteed path to failure.
It would be amazing if their stock was at $100, since that would mean a $20 hike. But since their stock was only about $10 a share, it's not a big deal.
The share price is pretty much meaningless. A 20% hike in a $10.00 stock gives as much money to the stock manipulators as a 20% increase in a $100 stock.
The actual share price is really just arbitrary. The share price is the total market capitalization of a stock divided by the number of shares on the open market.
The market capitalization is pretty much determined by how well investors think a particular company will perform in the long run.
So, lets say you had a stable company in a stable market returning $100M a year in profit. The market might give the company a 1:10 PE ratio...which would be a market capitalization of $1B.
If there were 100M shares on the market, the price of the shares would be $10 a piece. If there were 10M shares on the market, the price would be $100 per share.
Some companies like to keep their share price below $100. If their share price goes above $100, they will go through a stock split. The stock split simply gives all investors two shares for their one share. Investors then have twice as many shares as they did before.
SCO Group seems to have a market capitalization of 173M dollars. That sounds like a lot of money to me.
the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money.
I no it is a futile point to stress, but spending money on software is not necessarily a waste of money. Software developers, IT staff, network technicians, Linux gurus all look to the layman like a big fat waste of money.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
There is a good argument that it would be better for Australia to go the OSS route. It would help encourage the local development of software, etc.. The problem is not that people working on or developing software get paid.
There is a second extremely powerful implied argument in the article in that people don't really know how much MS gets from the government. If the government tallied up their bill, they would be shocked. As it stands, MS is able to hide its take in the cost of hardware, or other parts of the ledger.
The rules are that you own the copyright as the words flow from your pen (keyboard, or whatever). To defend your copyright, however, you have to file with the copyright office.
Although you have a copyright, you cannot "use it" until you've filed with the copyright office.
It is amazing that the news resulted in a 20% jump in the stock. If I am not mistaken, the Copyright office awards a copyright registration just about anytime someone sends them an envelope with $30 and an attached piece of paper.
Registering a copyright is pretty much like a cat pissing on a couch to say "this is mine" and I will scratch cats who say otherwise. Actual ownership is a different question that gets resolved in courts.
If anyone else has a documented claim to any of the work that SCO just filed, then SCO's filing for a copyright puts them in a difficult position.
I have to admit the SCO news report is amazing. Basically with the investment of half hours work on the part of lawyer ($180), a days work for a filing clerk ($80), an envelope ($1), a express mail stamp ($3.70) and a $30.00 filing fee, they got a 20% boost in their stock. You gotta love the stock market.
We should get the SEC to look at the insider trading for the stock, if there were any insider purchases before this phenomenal scam and any insider selling after the scam, maybe we could get their theiving arses hauled before the judge.
Not anyone can master the art of manipulative fraud... that takes a college degree.
You've done a good job showing the world view of the embittered college professors that pollute students' mind. These professors teach marketers to deceive, then the students go out and deceive.
The truth of the matter though, is that the best sales people are generally those without a college education and who do their utmost best to be upstanding in their dealings.
The embittered professor that denounces society is also a strange beast. They basically say that everyone out there is out to deceive.
Guess what? They are a person? They are out their? The truth of the matter is that the people who accept the world view that all is based on deception are more likely to deceive.
I personally, say that advertising and deception are independent ideas. I also state that ads run degrees from being informative to being deceptive. I also state that the goal of a large segment of advertising is simple accurate portrayal of a product. This is all verifiable. Look at the different catalogs, news paper ads and the like and see how much if it is just about conveying information.
A few minutes ago, I looked at the arts section of the paper. It told me the different shows in town, where they are playing. Some had pictures from the show, most just had dates.
The really sad truth is that far too many people have fallen for kaltkalt's negative world view and we see company after company wasting tons of money on deceptive advertising, not realizing that informative ads are generally more effective.
I hope you are not as naive as to think marketers do not know about word of mouth. There is a whole field called viral marketing which is designed to embed itself into conversations or other routine communications. Some of the most sleazy advertisers actually work to find ways to inject their brand name into your daily dealings. There are also things like MLMs and share with a friend programs that "incent" people to pollute their word of mouth communications with ads.
However, I believe that you have a false premise in stating that "all advertising is deception." Advestising and deception are logially independent. Advertising is simply the act of making information available. Deception is the act of making a person think A when you are doing B. One idea does not follow from the other. Hence there can be both deceptive and non-deceptive advertising.
The very fact that you mentioned word of mouth as legitimate indicates an understanding that the premises are independent.
Accepting that advertising and deception are independent, you will then see that some ads are meant simply to inform people about different possibilities. For example, I help local bands make web sites. The primary goal of these sites is to give people a sample of the music and to tell audiences where the band is playing. The goal is to let people know what the band sounds like, and the bars where they will play. The goal is to inform.
From what I know of ecommerce, the advertising efforts that seem to work the best are those that concentrate on accurate descriptions.
Rejecting the premise that all advertising is deceptive, creates a world where ads run the gamut from those designed to informed to those whicha are designed to deceive.
Different media lend themselves to different degrees of deception and information. A false premise that tries to equate the two independent ideas will either create a situation where there is no possibility except deception.
Personally, I always mod up posts where someone calls other people stupid. That way people won't think I am stupid. Like the person posting the article, I am driven by what other people think of me.
Anyway, I agree that the smartest people I know don't spend that much time with computers, or watching television for that matter.
I don't own a TV, but when I see a TV, I notice that I am more impacted by the commercials than people who've been anesthesized by the machine.
With computers, the marketing data seems to show that when advertisers introduce a new type or shape of ad, the click rates will go up, until people get used to them. I suspect that if you measured the activity of new Internet users, you would see them clicking on the 468x60 ads at the same pace as the new Google/adsense ads. Conversely, as the market is anesthized to the adsense format, its rates will drop.
But back to calling people names. I haven't heard any disparaging remarks about Iceland for awhile; so, I would like to say that anyone who lives in Iceland is stupid...and get some mod points.
PS: if you live in Iceland, I apologize for the crude, and blatantly false remark, but, hey, we do what we can for mod points.
all advertising is fraudulent. There is no such thing as an unfraudulent ad.
Unfortunately, this is the type of absolutist argument that gets taken up by the academia. A social theorist might see one or two deceptive ads, then conclude that all ads are fraudulent.
The truth of the matter is that most ads are not fraudulent. For example, an ad might say, "We are selling the new Harry Potter book for $xx.xx."
The ad is telling a verifiable fact.
A list of products with the price next to the product is the most successful form of advertising. Specification sheets also help sell products.
Unfortunately, the academic elite harps on the deceptive ads to the point where they end up convincing marketers and the world that advertising is based on deception. When in reality, most successful advertising is fact based, and simply tells people that your organization exists and what it does.
I admit being dumbfounded to hear Microsoft worries about the economy and lists it as the number one threat to MS. The only concern of a monopoly is their relative amount of power, and extending that power into other areas of business to grow more monolopies.
Monopoly politics always improverishes the society.
The current OSS movement exists largely because Microsoft has single handedly destroyed most the promising avenues for creating money with software development.
OSS exists and P2P is collapsing the music industry because people are fed up with being impoverished by the power politics of monopolies.
Since politicians are scared shitless about the recession, I would think MS would be delighting in it since the recession creates a climate where it will be easy to prosecute people who share music files and rule against OSS in court cases.
The recession means more and more power in Bill Gate's hands.
The whole idea in the current market is to sell cheap printers that become mechanisms to sell expensive ink jet cartridges. The goal is to sell as many expensive cartridges as possible; so you find marketers playing stupid games like not filling the cartridges to capacity, etc..
The result of this is simply a great deal of garbage that consumers have to pay to haul away.
I doubt that toner and ink cartridges are really the most environmentally friendly things in the landfills. I suspect the fewer we toss out the better.
My brain fart du jour is that it would be great if industries had to pick up the tab for the garbage they create. Lenmark and other competitors in the industry would have to pay a disposal fee that could be distributed to landfills to cover costs.
If industry had to pay for the waste up front, there would be a hope that they would design products that create less waste product.
As you point out, the industry is really about putting ink (which is relatively inexpensive) on paper. All the extra packaging, cartridge parts, etc., that get produced and sold in this game are waste.
You are correct, email handles long latency and disconnected lines better the HTTP. What happened in the US is that companies made a tremendous effort to invest in technologies to handle the latency problem, but faster internet came around before there was a postive return on the investment.
The third world might benefit from using database replication technologies.
Ultimately, however, the real gains will come from building the true infrastructure in the third world. For example, an area with bad telephone service would do better to start with higher speed wireless networks.
Oops, sorry I was thrown by the last header "CDs in libraries." I thought the article said that they were putting the result sets in the library...not just the program. Mechanized ways of publishing result sets gets people in trouble.
The article still seems fishy because a great deal of the TCP/IP infrastructure has been optimized to handle the problems of slow connections, precompressing data isn't more efficient than compression in transit. There are as many IP collisions when sending e-mail as with http requests.
Having a program that crawls the web and sends a lot of pages for a search engine request will increase, not decrease download times, but I misread the bottom section and apologize.
Instead they are thinking of sending CDs to libraries so that people can borrow and install the software on their machines.
I guess I should first mention the obvious that putting a bunch of other people's copyrighted work on a CD Rom, is the type of thing that gets people hauled before courts.
As for compression, if you are using compression on the modem connection, then you don't really save any time by trying to compress the data again. You might save some space, but my experience is that a zip file full of jpgs isn't that much smaller than a directory of compressed images.
The one area where the program has benefits is in time management. A program like Lotus Notes that replicates data sets over slow connections lets you use idle time on a network for data transfer.
You don't need to develop new technology here. Just find all the technology that was used to replicate data when phone connections ruled corporate America.
I could see some benefit to in having a better client side database for web pages. I can't see how the email layer in the application is making any contribution to the effort.
Unfortunately, to be frank, this particular project sounds more like useless posturing from self righteous grant writers who are wanting to get taxpayers money by simply claiming to be doing something for the poor.
The World Bank (et. al) have been very good about funding projects that make claims that they will help people, that simply enrich the grant writers.
I think the only reason for such a program would because the compression used by the modem isn't good enough, but it is an incredibly inefficent means for a small improvement in compression. I suspect that by the time you finished adding the overhead of email, that you wouldn't really get that much more speed. I mean, really, how much more room are you going to be able to squeeze out of MP3s and JPGs.
I guess you could optimize your time a little better if you had a program that downloaded all of the pages from a particular search request. You could then view all of the downloaded pages on your local machine quickly. However such programs would create a ton of white noise, and would wreak havoc with all dynamic sites.
This sounds more like a technology without a cause.
I think funding can come from a mix of proprietary extensions sitting atop open platforms.
The challenge is to put limits on the proprietary applications to assure robust environments. OSS projects that require a great deal of work and support might have multitiered licensing component, and the community should demand that if you use this component in a business setting, then you must buy the license.
If I am selling a product to a law firm or realty agents, I am more than happy transfer some of their wealth into the programming community. I want to work on programs that have enough value in the world that they do sell.
I guess I will add the to troll and take another karma hit.
The very nature of an investment means that you are buying an asset that has a positive financial return.
A software project magically becomes a good investment when it starts returning money. The idea of asking for investment before you have a financial plan is guaranteed loss. It is no different than asking for alms.
I hate it, but those stupid affiliate web sites that clutter cyberspace have investment value, even though they really don't add much value to the net, while good OSS projects don't have investment value. This happens even despite the fact that the OSS project is adding a great deal of value to the planet.
Unfortunately, the economic thing is too often hidden from the IT staff. Yet, the whole investment thingy has driven software and IT development since its inception. The IT jobs existed because we were all building a capital asset, not because we were making interesting things happen on a screen.
The last tech boom, where people no longer had to show a return on investment messed up our minds, and we have to get the financial end back intact to thrive. That means programs that actually produce financial transactions.
I am a troll because I believe the value of OSS is in its being open, and not in its being free.
I believe with all my heart that software should be creating a capital asset.
When programming, I ask myself both about what I am adding to the technology as well as the financial assets of my employer.
This does not necessarily mean that we need to work for the productization of all computer code, but I really wish the OSS community would spend a little more time thinking about getting cash piped through its pipes.
As such, I found the shareware ideal much more appealing than pure OSS. The shareware concept essentially lets people learn from software, but demands payment when the software is used in a business setting.
I always felt proud when I managed to convince a company to buy a shareware program, because I was contributing to the software economy.
The Oracle approach has been quite successful. Students and schools can get the software for free, but businesses must pay for it.
In some ways, my ideal would be that the code is open for review and tweaking, but there is a license to use the material.
One possible mechanism for funding technology would to include a licensing layer in the technology. Basically each object in a build would record its source. Imagine a database filled with the names of individuals that contributed objects to a code. The company could then pay a license through a mechanism that distributes cash to the object owners.
With such a mechanism, OSS developers would have a cash flow. They would then find that they could invest in more code to increase that cash flow.
It really seems to me that the goal of a community should be the enrichment of the people in the community. It's never bothered me when a company has to pay for a computer license as that money goes into the community.
Kewl, it could be come a tradition that sys admins have to swim across a river before installing a new system. Now, say with your best Cheech and Chong accent: "We don't need no stinkin' license"
Overture is basically a PPC (Pay Per Click) element that you can tack on to any page or search result set (don't they currently use Inktomi?) but I agree that Yahoo seems to be accumulating an odd assortment of other search engines.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if this is one of those "we've patented the world" claims, then any program that produces an encrypted file that is smaller than the original would be in violation of the patent.
There is still room for encryption programs that make files bigger. I've been thinking of making a program that would automatically pad a document with additional legal verbiage and routinely add one billable hour, and see if I could sell it to the legal community.
I wouldn't give it the best model award...but it is moving in the right direction. The model is trying to find a way to fund the creation of music, while making downloadable music on the net possible.
In some ways the proposal of selling worthless stock to fund public wreaks of the failed dot com model. The problem is that the money is likely to be wasted on some stupid feat like the MP3.com Beam it Up program, or the corporation would spend millions on the gazoo tunes of the CEOs younger brother.
Rather than one initiative that tries to own all music in a semi public domain mode. Another approach might be to have multiple funding mechanism where fans of a certain artist would get together and raise funds for a the recording and release of an album into the public domain. If there was a very clear public domain full of music, that repository of public domain material is likely to grow into the popular music of the next generation.
Hmmm, instead of generation-y the people after generation-x should start calling themselves "Generation-Sued."
I don't know if it will matter. The people likely to boycott are not currently buying music.
The break up of AT&T and the development of the internet seems to show that what we thought had to be a monopoly didn't have to be one.
The problem is that companies to date have approached the issue with monopolistic thinking. One company owns the transaction from consumer through to the site. The idea that one company owns the entire transaction creates the apparent need for a monopoly. To bust the monopoly, you need simply create a mechanism where different companies can own parts of the transaction.
If you create a system where the consumer is separate from the content provider then you would create a playing field where different companies are competing for the cosumer and for the web owners.
There are other obstacles on the net that get in the way of micropayments for content. For example:
/.ed articles from the WSJ.
If your web site requires micropayments, or subscription fees, then your content doesn't get indexed by the search engines. This means that you don't get the web traffic you desire.
Likewise, people will stop linking to your web site. You won't get slashdotted, etc.. Notice how you rarely see
The resistence to your work caused by asking for a micropayment is far greater than the pennies you gain.
Let's say you ask for a dime to read your novel. Well, in the wild and crazy world of the net, a enlightened Robin Hood will see the plight of all the people who want to read your novel without paying the dime, and publish it on a P2P server.
The even bigger obstacle to micropayments is the absurd notion that everything on the net is free. Paying even a nickel to listen to a song is an act of oppression. A band asking its fans to paypal a dollarto help cover the download costs for an album seems to create more indignation than dollars.
Unfortunately, the idea that everything must be free leads us to the less than desirable situation where only the politically connected or the idle rich will be in the position to provide high quality info on the net.
Monopolies are not the answer. This exact same argument was made in the OS market that there needed to be one monopoly that controlled the operating system, so that all the different software vendors would be able to have a common platform for their programs.
In general, competition creates an environment where products get better. The problem at this point is that there is not enough companies working on micropayment models.
The long delay in establishing micropayments was created in part by monopolistic thinking. Companies like cybercash went into the business with the contemptuous notion that they would first spend hundreds of millions of dollars of investors capital to create a monopoly, then when they had a monopoly, they would be able to bring in the paradise of micropayments.
These large investor capital fed monopoly dreams undermined other more promising approaches to the problem, then exploded in dot com fashion.
There is a lot of merit to what you say about the consumer being confused by multiple solutions.
I suspect the ultimate solution would be for a standards committee to define an interface. With an established interface you could then have competition among smaller companies that plug into that interface.
The monopoly recipe, however, is a guaranteed path to failure.
The actual share price is really just arbitrary. The share price is the total market capitalization of a stock divided by the number of shares on the open market.
The market capitalization is pretty much determined by how well investors think a particular company will perform in the long run.
So, lets say you had a stable company in a stable market returning $100M a year in profit. The market might give the company a 1:10 PE ratio...which would be a market capitalization of $1B.
If there were 100M shares on the market, the price of the shares would be $10 a piece. If there were 10M shares on the market, the price would be $100 per share.
Some companies like to keep their share price below $100. If their share price goes above $100, they will go through a stock split. The stock split simply gives all investors two shares for their one share. Investors then have twice as many shares as they did before.
SCO Group seems to have a market capitalization of 173M dollars. That sounds like a lot of money to me.
I no it is a futile point to stress, but spending money on software is not necessarily a waste of money. Software developers, IT staff, network technicians, Linux gurus all look to the layman like a big fat waste of money.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
There is a good argument that it would be better for Australia to go the OSS route. It would help encourage the local development of software, etc.. The problem is not that people working on or developing software get paid.
There is a second extremely powerful implied argument in the article in that people don't really know how much MS gets from the government. If the government tallied up their bill, they would be shocked. As it stands, MS is able to hide its take in the cost of hardware, or other parts of the ledger.
The rules are that you own the copyright as the words flow from your pen (keyboard, or whatever). To defend your copyright, however, you have to file with the copyright office.
Although you have a copyright, you cannot "use it" until you've filed with the copyright office.
It is amazing that the news resulted in a 20% jump in the stock. If I am not mistaken, the Copyright office awards a copyright registration just about anytime someone sends them an envelope with $30 and an attached piece of paper.
Registering a copyright is pretty much like a cat pissing on a couch to say "this is mine" and I will scratch cats who say otherwise. Actual ownership is a different question that gets resolved in courts.
If anyone else has a documented claim to any of the work that SCO just filed, then SCO's filing for a copyright puts them in a difficult position.
I have to admit the SCO news report is amazing. Basically with the investment of half hours work on the part of lawyer ($180), a days work for a filing clerk ($80), an envelope ($1), a express mail stamp ($3.70) and a $30.00 filing fee, they got a 20% boost in their stock. You gotta love the stock market.
We should get the SEC to look at the insider trading for the stock, if there were any insider purchases before this phenomenal scam and any insider selling after the scam, maybe we could get their theiving arses hauled before the judge.
You've done a good job showing the world view of the embittered college professors that pollute students' mind. These professors teach marketers to deceive, then the students go out and deceive.
The truth of the matter though, is that the best sales people are generally those without a college education and who do their utmost best to be upstanding in their dealings.
The embittered professor that denounces society is also a strange beast. They basically say that everyone out there is out to deceive. Guess what? They are a person? They are out their? The truth of the matter is that the people who accept the world view that all is based on deception are more likely to deceive.
I personally, say that advertising and deception are independent ideas. I also state that ads run degrees from being informative to being deceptive. I also state that the goal of a large segment of advertising is simple accurate portrayal of a product. This is all verifiable. Look at the different catalogs, news paper ads and the like and see how much if it is just about conveying information.
A few minutes ago, I looked at the arts section of the paper. It told me the different shows in town, where they are playing. Some had pictures from the show, most just had dates.
The really sad truth is that far too many people have fallen for kaltkalt's negative world view and we see company after company wasting tons of money on deceptive advertising, not realizing that informative ads are generally more effective.
I hope you are not as naive as to think marketers do not know about word of mouth. There is a whole field called viral marketing which is designed to embed itself into conversations or other routine communications. Some of the most sleazy advertisers actually work to find ways to inject their brand name into your daily dealings. There are also things like MLMs and share with a friend programs that "incent" people to pollute their word of mouth communications with ads.
However, I believe that you have a false premise in stating that "all advertising is deception." Advestising and deception are logially independent. Advertising is simply the act of making information available. Deception is the act of making a person think A when you are doing B. One idea does not follow from the other. Hence there can be both deceptive and non-deceptive advertising.
The very fact that you mentioned word of mouth as legitimate indicates an understanding that the premises are independent.
Accepting that advertising and deception are independent, you will then see that some ads are meant simply to inform people about different possibilities. For example, I help local bands make web sites. The primary goal of these sites is to give people a sample of the music and to tell audiences where the band is playing. The goal is to let people know what the band sounds like, and the bars where they will play. The goal is to inform.
From what I know of ecommerce, the advertising efforts that seem to work the best are those that concentrate on accurate descriptions.
Rejecting the premise that all advertising is deceptive, creates a world where ads run the gamut from those designed to informed to those whicha are designed to deceive.
Different media lend themselves to different degrees of deception and information. A false premise that tries to equate the two independent ideas will either create a situation where there is no possibility except deception.
Absolute thinking is _NEVER_ acceptable.
Personally, I always mod up posts where someone calls other people stupid. That way people won't think I am stupid. Like the person posting the article, I am driven by what other people think of me.
Anyway, I agree that the smartest people I know don't spend that much time with computers, or watching television for that matter.
I don't own a TV, but when I see a TV, I notice that I am more impacted by the commercials than people who've been anesthesized by the machine.
With computers, the marketing data seems to show that when advertisers introduce a new type or shape of ad, the click rates will go up, until people get used to them. I suspect that if you measured the activity of new Internet users, you would see them clicking on the 468x60 ads at the same pace as the new Google/adsense ads. Conversely, as the market is anesthized to the adsense format, its rates will drop.
But back to calling people names. I haven't heard any disparaging remarks about Iceland for awhile; so, I would like to say that anyone who lives in Iceland is stupid...and get some mod points.
PS: if you live in Iceland, I apologize for the crude, and blatantly false remark, but, hey, we do what we can for mod points.
Unfortunately, this is the type of absolutist argument that gets taken up by the academia. A social theorist might see one or two deceptive ads, then conclude that all ads are fraudulent.
The truth of the matter is that most ads are not fraudulent. For example, an ad might say, "We are selling the new Harry Potter book for $xx.xx."
The ad is telling a verifiable fact.
A list of products with the price next to the product is the most successful form of advertising. Specification sheets also help sell products.
Unfortunately, the academic elite harps on the deceptive ads to the point where they end up convincing marketers and the world that advertising is based on deception. When in reality, most successful advertising is fact based, and simply tells people that your organization exists and what it does.
I admit being dumbfounded to hear Microsoft worries about the economy and lists it as the number one threat to MS. The only concern of a monopoly is their relative amount of power, and extending that power into other areas of business to grow more monolopies.
Monopoly politics always improverishes the society.
The current OSS movement exists largely because Microsoft has single handedly destroyed most the promising avenues for creating money with software development.
OSS exists and P2P is collapsing the music industry because people are fed up with being impoverished by the power politics of monopolies.
Since politicians are scared shitless about the recession, I would think MS would be delighting in it since the recession creates a climate where it will be easy to prosecute people who share music files and rule against OSS in court cases.
The recession means more and more power in Bill Gate's hands.
The whole idea in the current market is to sell cheap printers that become mechanisms to sell expensive ink jet cartridges. The goal is to sell as many expensive cartridges as possible; so you find marketers playing stupid games like not filling the cartridges to capacity, etc..
The result of this is simply a great deal of garbage that consumers have to pay to haul away.
I doubt that toner and ink cartridges are really the most environmentally friendly things in the landfills. I suspect the fewer we toss out the better.
My brain fart du jour is that it would be great if industries had to pick up the tab for the garbage they create. Lenmark and other competitors in the industry would have to pay a disposal fee that could be distributed to landfills to cover costs.
If industry had to pay for the waste up front, there would be a hope that they would design products that create less waste product.
As you point out, the industry is really about putting ink (which is relatively inexpensive) on paper. All the extra packaging, cartridge parts, etc., that get produced and sold in this game are waste.
You are correct, email handles long latency and disconnected lines better the HTTP. What happened in the US is that companies made a tremendous effort to invest in technologies to handle the latency problem, but faster internet came around before there was a postive return on the investment.
The third world might benefit from using database replication technologies.
Ultimately, however, the real gains will come from building the true infrastructure in the third world. For example, an area with bad telephone service would do better to start with higher speed wireless networks.
Oops, sorry I was thrown by the last header "CDs in libraries." I thought the article said that they were putting the result sets in the library...not just the program. Mechanized ways of publishing result sets gets people in trouble.
The article still seems fishy because a great deal of the TCP/IP infrastructure has been optimized to handle the problems of slow connections, precompressing data isn't more efficient than compression in transit. There are as many IP collisions when sending e-mail as with http requests.
Having a program that crawls the web and sends a lot of pages for a search engine request will increase, not decrease download times, but I misread the bottom section and apologize.
I guess I should first mention the obvious that putting a bunch of other people's copyrighted work on a CD Rom, is the type of thing that gets people hauled before courts.
As for compression, if you are using compression on the modem connection, then you don't really save any time by trying to compress the data again. You might save some space, but my experience is that a zip file full of jpgs isn't that much smaller than a directory of compressed images.
The one area where the program has benefits is in time management. A program like Lotus Notes that replicates data sets over slow connections lets you use idle time on a network for data transfer.
You don't need to develop new technology here. Just find all the technology that was used to replicate data when phone connections ruled corporate America.
I could see some benefit to in having a better client side database for web pages. I can't see how the email layer in the application is making any contribution to the effort.
Unfortunately, to be frank, this particular project sounds more like useless posturing from self righteous grant writers who are wanting to get taxpayers money by simply claiming to be doing something for the poor.
The World Bank (et. al) have been very good about funding projects that make claims that they will help people, that simply enrich the grant writers.
I think the only reason for such a program would because the compression used by the modem isn't good enough, but it is an incredibly inefficent means for a small improvement in compression. I suspect that by the time you finished adding the overhead of email, that you wouldn't really get that much more speed. I mean, really, how much more room are you going to be able to squeeze out of MP3s and JPGs.
I guess you could optimize your time a little better if you had a program that downloaded all of the pages from a particular search request. You could then view all of the downloaded pages on your local machine quickly. However such programs would create a ton of white noise, and would wreak havoc with all dynamic sites.
This sounds more like a technology without a cause.
I think funding can come from a mix of proprietary extensions sitting atop open platforms.
The challenge is to put limits on the proprietary applications to assure robust environments. OSS projects that require a great deal of work and support might have multitiered licensing component, and the community should demand that if you use this component in a business setting, then you must buy the license.
If I am selling a product to a law firm or realty agents, I am more than happy transfer some of their wealth into the programming community. I want to work on programs that have enough value in the world that they do sell.
I guess I will add the to troll and take another karma hit.
The very nature of an investment means that you are buying an asset that has a positive financial return.
A software project magically becomes a good investment when it starts returning money. The idea of asking for investment before you have a financial plan is guaranteed loss. It is no different than asking for alms.
I hate it, but those stupid affiliate web sites that clutter cyberspace have investment value, even though they really don't add much value to the net, while good OSS projects don't have investment value. This happens even despite the fact that the OSS project is adding a great deal of value to the planet.
Unfortunately, the economic thing is too often hidden from the IT staff. Yet, the whole investment thingy has driven software and IT development since its inception. The IT jobs existed because we were all building a capital asset, not because we were making interesting things happen on a screen.
The last tech boom, where people no longer had to show a return on investment messed up our minds, and we have to get the financial end back intact to thrive. That means programs that actually produce financial transactions.
I am a troll because I believe the value of OSS is in its being open, and not in its being free.
I believe with all my heart that software should be creating a capital asset.
When programming, I ask myself both about what I am adding to the technology as well as the financial assets of my employer.
This does not necessarily mean that we need to work for the productization of all computer code, but I really wish the OSS community would spend a little more time thinking about getting cash piped through its pipes.
As such, I found the shareware ideal much more appealing than pure OSS. The shareware concept essentially lets people learn from software, but demands payment when the software is used in a business setting.
I always felt proud when I managed to convince a company to buy a shareware program, because I was contributing to the software economy.
The Oracle approach has been quite successful. Students and schools can get the software for free, but businesses must pay for it.
In some ways, my ideal would be that the code is open for review and tweaking, but there is a license to use the material.
One possible mechanism for funding technology would to include a licensing layer in the technology. Basically each object in a build would record its source. Imagine a database filled with the names of individuals that contributed objects to a code. The company could then pay a license through a mechanism that distributes cash to the object owners.
With such a mechanism, OSS developers would have a cash flow. They would then find that they could invest in more code to increase that cash flow.
It really seems to me that the goal of a community should be the enrichment of the people in the community. It's never bothered me when a company has to pay for a computer license as that money goes into the community.
Kewl, it could be come a tradition that sys admins have to swim across a river before installing a new system. Now, say with your best Cheech and Chong accent: "We don't need no stinkin' license"
Overture is basically a PPC (Pay Per Click) element that you can tack on to any page or search result set (don't they currently use Inktomi?) but I agree that Yahoo seems to be accumulating an odd assortment of other search engines.