I think it's very interesting to see the type of responses that have been posted here. The general thread is that there are lots of business models based on a "Pay what you want" scale. And these are generally fringe elements of business with minor budgets compared to the more normal business models. I almost said classic business models, but even the newest and most progressive companies are not a "Pay what you want" business model and they are still making many more digits than PBS, community theaters, and other things that fall under "The Arts".
The Arts are always the first to take a hit when things get difficult financially. Michigan has effectively closed the door on anything related to Art and Culture for the forseeable future because the state has no money to sponsor. Anything that gets done here will have to be by other means.
Once you step away from the relatively small industry of Art and Culture and look at other business models you will quickly find that there really is not viable example of "Pay what you want". And it should be noted that the music industry is not a small business and as such will be more likely to follow the more common business models in a more formal and rational sense of the word.
Once you discard these fringe exceptions you arrive back at the original point. "Pay what you want" is not a business model. But the new business model is one where the middle-man goes from a 50-90% cost center to a 5-10% cost center because that is exactly what the internet has allowed to happen.
And in my town they spend almost as much time telling you who sponsored the show as they might if they were doing commercials. Then they spend a week at a time telling you how much money you have to give them. It's not free. It's not even close. It's a variation on commercial radio with an ever increasing amount of time spent identifying the sponsors.
This is the difference from pan-handling or begging and a business model.
A business model has to show a process by which you can assure your investors that you have a plan for making money. And you can't do the music business without some level of investment -- even if it's a music studio for the CD's
Rather than blasting Simmons as being an irrelevant wanker, I think there's a more useful observation.
The business model of music distribution is changing. It's not really a debateable issue anymore. It's just a fact. But changing to what?
I think Radiohead went overboard. There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want". If you disagree with this conclusion than consider how you will respond when your employer or customers decide they will start paying you whatever they want to and if that's not enough for rent, too bad for you. It's no way to make a living.
But what is important here is the Radiohead has demonstrated that you can make a lot of money selling CD's for really cheap once you manage to get rid of the pimp-ish middleman known as the record industry. The record industry used to have a stranglehold on all things related to radio play, music sales, concert promotions, and other product sales (shirts and posters). But so far, the internet has demonstrated a means for the bands, with a little effort on their part or someone far less expensive than the RIAA, to provide music sales and product sales via the internet. Now all they need to do is set up a means of doing concert promotions and (most importantly) radio play. Without the radio play, they have a hard time getting anything else going.
The Recording Industry must realize by now that their original business model is a bust. This is supported by their efforts to sue rather than change or adopt. But they are also losing a lot of the legal battles. You can analogize this to Monopoly busting or even Union busting.
The future of the Recording Industry may look something like this: A much smaller industry in terms of people employed with a more passive role of providing the framework for bands to connect to concert halls, stores, and radio stations and allow the radio stations, concert halls, and stores to determine their own purchase volumes and schedules. More like the NYSE in that people bid/buy resources based on demand in their geophraphic and demographic areas.
According to the theory of evolution it's fairly likely that such a mouse has already been seen in the pathways of evolution. Unfortunately him and his entire family where eaten by a neighboring cat.
Considering the net effect this would have on the survivability of the mouse, I don't know that this was an experiment in the mouses best interest. What's next? A dog that fears cats?
I think I've already arrived at some of what you describe. I have only notebooks for my interface. Each person in the house has one notebook. Everything is wireless. Printers are running in the basement off a small server. I also have email, web, database, and file servers but I'm about the only real user on any of them since I'm the guy who plays the most. Big projects are written on the notebook and tested on the servers.
In part I agree, but I think there's another facet of the issue that they are overlooking.
The PC market is effectively saturated.
The need to upgrade your PC every 2 years to keep up with the software is passed. The only exception today is Vista and it's poorer than expected market penetration to date bears witness to the fact that people don't see the features available in Vista as merit for a new machine. We've reached a phase of good enough where computers can easily last 4-5 years in the technology curve without being painfully obsolete.
During the 1990's by the time the new computer you ordered was shipped to your house it was already being superceded by a newer model. And the software was moving almost as fast. Quickly what ran Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 couldn't hack Office 97 or Windows 98. It definitely couldn't manage Windows NT 4. The gaming video scene was even worse. Today there really isn't sufficient customer-facing change in the software to merit all the hardware changes.
Add to this the advent of computer gaming consoles like Playstation, XBox, Wii. When I bought my first computer I spend $3,000 to buy it and another $1,500 in the first 12 months for hardware upgrades in order for me to play the latest computer games. Contrast this with current computer use. Games are on the gamestation and my computers are reaching 5+ years of age and still more than sufficient in terms of performance, drive space (easy to add more) and stability/security. There just isn't a need to get a new computer.
The even more interesting change is that in the past five years I have spent more money on game stations then computers and in the next five years will continue this trend, augemented by new TV, DVD, DVR...
Computers are still essential. But the consumer spending isn't in that direction any more. There will be few consumers without a computer entirely, but they are more inclined to upgrade their phone then their computer.
The tolerance level in the Bar Association is far higher than the tolerance level of the rest of society. After all, you can't get disbarred for making clients sleep with you even though it's reported from time to time.
It's far more valuable as a marketing analysis tool than a PATRIOT tool. If the government wants to track a vehicle than use a plane and four cars. Works great.
But for marketing, this is invaluable. Imagine being able to tie marketing demographics into detailed behavioral information regarding: speed, jack-rabbit, tendencies to seek alternative routes, and sequences of locations visited. Examples might be 20-28 year old single males leave Golds Gym and go to: liqour store, restaurant, home, friends. the ability to identify group gathering points based on from/to analysis -- Where are the blue collor hot spots versus white collar hot spots versus single/married/divorced or gay/straight. It goes on forever...
The interesting aspect to spam that these silly spammers don't seem to realize is that they still can't get around a well designed bayesian spam filter. All you have to do is filter on the tokens and the match/mp3/ will naturally rise to the top with sex, viagra, and other spew. It might take a while to get the filtering to work if you have a history of accepting mp3 files. Otherwise it will take only a dozen.
I have been using bayesian spam filters as the only means of filtering spam and they always behave the same:
New spam shows up and blows through all the filters.
I train the filter on these errors.
New spam now gets filtered into the great bit bucket.
I think the longest I've had a specific flavor of spam run through the filters was about 3 days.
So they have a copyright on the word META? Or the use of META in HTML? Or what?
This stuff is getting out of hand. Imagine what would happen if lawyers were limited to a maximum total income of $100,000 per annum. The only ones left would be lawyers who actually enjoyed what they did enough to not be an asshole. They might actually be better at practicing law too.
On the contrary. Being forced into a position where you can't use the F-bomb as your only adjective forces you to think more carefully about selecting your words and improve or refine your means of communication. Otherwise it becomes confusing if you mean it's effing good or effing bad or you're effing the secretary.
I think this is some rather flawed research. Perhaps the people who find they have to restrain their speech, because they don't know any better options, find work to be more stressful. That's a failing of the individual and not the work environment.
I recently got a new replacement computer at work -- 100% Windows. The differences from this one and the last one (same core Windows OS - XP) are: Most of the integration features that people like , integration features like email & Office, either don't work are do annoyingly bad default behaviours. I'm spending hours a day trying to find out where the little checkbox is to undo most of this behaviour. Overall, I think they are both a little flakey in that all this integration makes virus transmission all the easier.
So I'm a candidate of not making the mother of all applications to replace all the other applications. It's not a very good design concept because it loses the advantages that modular programing can offer. It be would be nice if we could figure out how to do this by plugging in through standardized interfaces the various applications that you want to use.
But that requires people to share and everyone is too busy trying to be their own Big Dog. I'm sure KDE has something that works nice for office tools, as does OO and many others. I would prefer it if they could be standardized into common interfaces so that I could simultaneously use either kmail, thunderbird, or pine as my convenience to pass application data to an email application. Similarly, use a common data interface for passing something from either OO or Excel into a table in Word, OO, KWord, et al...
I just find this as hype. Which ususally means that OO is going to start sucking really badly.
I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone who will openly claim that this is a justified killing.
However, considering the ruthless, invasive, and often times offensive and disturbing methods makes it unlikely that you will hear much public outrage. The products being pushed are base in nature and completely indiscriminant in the tact.
"advertisement" means to speak towards another person. This is not to be interpreted repeatedly sending 100's of emails a day to the same address on the same subject. It's way past being impolite. And since they have absolutely no regard for use as humans we aren't likely to return the favor.
I for one am glad to be rid of another spammer. How that came about is something I would rather not concern myself with that much right now. It's the aggressive nature that the employ that expects an equally(?) aggressive response. I have no problem with spam kings getting beaten in the street. They hide behind others and are too chicken to come out and admit to what they are doing, yet they insist it's OK to do.
If it was really OK to send spam like this, would there really be a reason to fear retribution from so many people? This isn't a debate about religious suppression or freedom of speech. This is a matter of getting their teeth kicked in because they have absolutely no respect or regard for their fellow human beings.
No, actually I've been reading the engineering literature. Even if it is GM there are reasons why they want to have the unit disabled such that you can't call back, eavesdrop, or anything else. It's a dead brick.
Tell you what. Why don't you get an OnStar unit, have it disabled by OnStar, and see for yourself if there is any way to communicate over the air to that unit.
Well, if the advertisements were not effective, they wouldn't be using them. Perhaps they are appealing to a different crowd. Typically the people who are more likely to respond to such Fear ads are older people or the suburban soccer mom types. So the ad doesn't appeal to you. Odds are, you aren't one to buy OnStar no matter what they say. Fact is, young single men are the last group to consider getting OnStar.
Abuse of power is always going to be a tug of war and it won't go away.
But in these specific cases of people claiming a big brother feature exists with OnStar and therefore OnStar must be evil they are missing the point that their phone is even more evil. For OnStar to be used in an evil manner someone used to require a warrant (not so much these days, thanks to the new KGB of America). But to track someone by their cell phone doesn't require any kind of warrant.
The ignorance lies in the ideas that in order to protect your privacy you have to take some action to physically disable the hardware (pull the fuse, pull the plug, whatever) when in fact you can have the unit disabled by OnStar thereby rendering is non-functional. The only difference is that you will still be able to place a very limited type of call from the vehicle (like when you hit a tree).
The other point of ignorance is that this features slams on the brakes. That's just dumb.
These are not social issues. But there continues to be a backlash against this information in terms of, "Of course you would say that, you work for them." Well, I can't do much about that so I'm going to just skip that one and leave it to the Marketing Department to decide how to handle that one.
Re:It doesn't "remotely shut down vehicles"
on
Stalling Cars Via OnStar
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That is not the case with OnStar. Unless you break it yourself, it is always on. Even if you don't subscribe, the functionality is left on and operational. That way, you can just give them a call and they'll turn it on and bill you, no need to take it in to a dealership to take your money from you.
Not quite there... It's on when you purchase the vehicle. But if you call and request that it be disabled then it is physically disabled and cannot be remotely enabled.
If you are that worried about it, get rid of your cell phone.
Even before the PATRIOT act came along it was pretty easy to track someone using their cell phone, of any technology and any settings. All you have to do is leave it on.
And it's entirely legal, even by 1970's standards.
The trick is to track the registration of your phone through each cellular segment. I can't place you exactly but I know which segment you are in and at exactly what time you hand off from one segment to another. In some cases this puts you within a mile. I have a pretty good idea where you are going. Good enough to be there when you arrive. You don't even have to place a call. All you have to do is have it on.
But then even without the phone it's pretty easy to track someone. Planes work great for this.
I'm surprised at how little people know about surveillance and how easy it is to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's very interesting to see the type of responses that have been posted here. The general thread is that there are lots of business models based on a "Pay what you want" scale. And these are generally fringe elements of business with minor budgets compared to the more normal business models. I almost said classic business models, but even the newest and most progressive companies are not a "Pay what you want" business model and they are still making many more digits than PBS, community theaters, and other things that fall under "The Arts".
The Arts are always the first to take a hit when things get difficult financially. Michigan has effectively closed the door on anything related to Art and Culture for the forseeable future because the state has no money to sponsor. Anything that gets done here will have to be by other means.
Once you step away from the relatively small industry of Art and Culture and look at other business models you will quickly find that there really is not viable example of "Pay what you want". And it should be noted that the music industry is not a small business and as such will be more likely to follow the more common business models in a more formal and rational sense of the word.
Once you discard these fringe exceptions you arrive back at the original point. "Pay what you want" is not a business model. But the new business model is one where the middle-man goes from a 50-90% cost center to a 5-10% cost center because that is exactly what the internet has allowed to happen.
And in my town they spend almost as much time telling you who sponsored the show as they might if they were doing commercials. Then they spend a week at a time telling you how much money you have to give them. It's not free. It's not even close. It's a variation on commercial radio with an ever increasing amount of time spent identifying the sponsors.
This is the difference from pan-handling or begging and a business model.
A business model has to show a process by which you can assure your investors that you have a plan for making money. And you can't do the music business without some level of investment -- even if it's a music studio for the CD's
Rather than blasting Simmons as being an irrelevant wanker, I think there's a more useful observation.
The business model of music distribution is changing. It's not really a debateable issue anymore. It's just a fact. But changing to what?
I think Radiohead went overboard. There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want". If you disagree with this conclusion than consider how you will respond when your employer or customers decide they will start paying you whatever they want to and if that's not enough for rent, too bad for you. It's no way to make a living.
But what is important here is the Radiohead has demonstrated that you can make a lot of money selling CD's for really cheap once you manage to get rid of the pimp-ish middleman known as the record industry. The record industry used to have a stranglehold on all things related to radio play, music sales, concert promotions, and other product sales (shirts and posters). But so far, the internet has demonstrated a means for the bands, with a little effort on their part or someone far less expensive than the RIAA, to provide music sales and product sales via the internet. Now all they need to do is set up a means of doing concert promotions and (most importantly) radio play. Without the radio play, they have a hard time getting anything else going.
The Recording Industry must realize by now that their original business model is a bust. This is supported by their efforts to sue rather than change or adopt. But they are also losing a lot of the legal battles. You can analogize this to Monopoly busting or even Union busting.
The future of the Recording Industry may look something like this: A much smaller industry in terms of people employed with a more passive role of providing the framework for bands to connect to concert halls, stores, and radio stations and allow the radio stations, concert halls, and stores to determine their own purchase volumes and schedules. More like the NYSE in that people bid/buy resources based on demand in their geophraphic and demographic areas.
I was thinking more like .. Now I can finally get my very own Angelina Jolie, Rachael Welch, Ingred Bergman.. Whatever suits my fancy
According to the theory of evolution it's fairly likely that such a mouse has already been seen in the pathways of evolution. Unfortunately him and his entire family where eaten by a neighboring cat.
Considering the net effect this would have on the survivability of the mouse, I don't know that this was an experiment in the mouses best interest. What's next? A dog that fears cats?
This is nothing new. We all know that the real answer is a Rabbit. Hippitus Hoppitus domini
Right, computing power is increasing. But consumer command for that increase is not. Effective saturation.
I think I've already arrived at some of what you describe. I have only notebooks for my interface. Each person in the house has one notebook. Everything is wireless. Printers are running in the basement off a small server. I also have email, web, database, and file servers but I'm about the only real user on any of them since I'm the guy who plays the most. Big projects are written on the notebook and tested on the servers.
In part I agree, but I think there's another facet of the issue that they are overlooking.
The PC market is effectively saturated.
The need to upgrade your PC every 2 years to keep up with the software is passed. The only exception today is Vista and it's poorer than expected market penetration to date bears witness to the fact that people don't see the features available in Vista as merit for a new machine. We've reached a phase of good enough where computers can easily last 4-5 years in the technology curve without being painfully obsolete.
During the 1990's by the time the new computer you ordered was shipped to your house it was already being superceded by a newer model. And the software was moving almost as fast. Quickly what ran Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 couldn't hack Office 97 or Windows 98. It definitely couldn't manage Windows NT 4. The gaming video scene was even worse. Today there really isn't sufficient customer-facing change in the software to merit all the hardware changes.
Add to this the advent of computer gaming consoles like Playstation, XBox, Wii. When I bought my first computer I spend $3,000 to buy it and another $1,500 in the first 12 months for hardware upgrades in order for me to play the latest computer games. Contrast this with current computer use. Games are on the gamestation and my computers are reaching 5+ years of age and still more than sufficient in terms of performance, drive space (easy to add more) and stability/security. There just isn't a need to get a new computer.
The even more interesting change is that in the past five years I have spent more money on game stations then computers and in the next five years will continue this trend, augemented by new TV, DVD, DVR...
Computers are still essential. But the consumer spending isn't in that direction any more. There will be few consumers without a computer entirely, but they are more inclined to upgrade their phone then their computer.
No body can afford constant tracking and logging of vehicle movements.
It's all cellular communications. At $0.08 a minute, you looking at $115 per car per day and that's an unrealistically cheap rate.
The tolerance level in the Bar Association is far higher than the tolerance level of the rest of society. After all, you can't get disbarred for making clients sleep with you even though it's reported from time to time.
It's far more valuable as a marketing analysis tool than a PATRIOT tool. If the government wants to track a vehicle than use a plane and four cars. Works great.
But for marketing, this is invaluable. Imagine being able to tie marketing demographics into detailed behavioral information regarding: speed, jack-rabbit, tendencies to seek alternative routes, and sequences of locations visited. Examples might be 20-28 year old single males leave Golds Gym and go to: liqour store, restaurant, home, friends. the ability to identify group gathering points based on from/to analysis -- Where are the blue collor hot spots versus white collar hot spots versus single/married/divorced or gay/straight. It goes on forever...
The interesting aspect to spam that these silly spammers don't seem to realize is that they still can't get around a well designed bayesian spam filter. All you have to do is filter on the tokens and the match /mp3/ will naturally rise to the top with sex, viagra, and other spew. It might take a while to get the filtering to work if you have a history of accepting mp3 files. Otherwise it will take only a dozen.
I have been using bayesian spam filters as the only means of filtering spam and they always behave the same:
- New spam shows up and blows through all the filters.
- I train the filter on these errors.
- New spam now gets filtered into the great bit bucket.
I think the longest I've had a specific flavor of spam run through the filters was about 3 days.So they have a copyright on the word META? Or the use of META in HTML? Or what?
This stuff is getting out of hand. Imagine what would happen if lawyers were limited to a maximum total income of $100,000 per annum. The only ones left would be lawyers who actually enjoyed what they did enough to not be an asshole. They might actually be better at practicing law too.
On the contrary. Being forced into a position where you can't use the F-bomb as your only adjective forces you to think more carefully about selecting your words and improve or refine your means of communication. Otherwise it becomes confusing if you mean it's effing good or effing bad or you're effing the secretary.
I think this is some rather flawed research. Perhaps the people who find they have to restrain their speech, because they don't know any better options, find work to be more stressful. That's a failing of the individual and not the work environment.
I recently got a new replacement computer at work -- 100% Windows. The differences from this one and the last one (same core Windows OS - XP) are: Most of the integration features that people like , integration features like email & Office, either don't work are do annoyingly bad default behaviours. I'm spending hours a day trying to find out where the little checkbox is to undo most of this behaviour. Overall, I think they are both a little flakey in that all this integration makes virus transmission all the easier.
So I'm a candidate of not making the mother of all applications to replace all the other applications. It's not a very good design concept because it loses the advantages that modular programing can offer. It be would be nice if we could figure out how to do this by plugging in through standardized interfaces the various applications that you want to use.
But that requires people to share and everyone is too busy trying to be their own Big Dog. I'm sure KDE has something that works nice for office tools, as does OO and many others. I would prefer it if they could be standardized into common interfaces so that I could simultaneously use either kmail, thunderbird, or pine as my convenience to pass application data to an email application. Similarly, use a common data interface for passing something from either OO or Excel into a table in Word, OO, KWord, et al...
I just find this as hype. Which ususally means that OO is going to start sucking really badly.
How many years do I have to be here to be considered not new?
Is five too few? Perhaps I've been lurking for 5 years before that and never created an account?
Troll...
I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone who will openly claim that this is a justified killing.
However, considering the ruthless, invasive, and often times offensive and disturbing methods makes it unlikely that you will hear much public outrage. The products being pushed are base in nature and completely indiscriminant in the tact.
"advertisement" means to speak towards another person. This is not to be interpreted repeatedly sending 100's of emails a day to the same address on the same subject. It's way past being impolite. And since they have absolutely no regard for use as humans we aren't likely to return the favor.
I for one am glad to be rid of another spammer. How that came about is something I would rather not concern myself with that much right now. It's the aggressive nature that the employ that expects an equally(?) aggressive response. I have no problem with spam kings getting beaten in the street. They hide behind others and are too chicken to come out and admit to what they are doing, yet they insist it's OK to do.
If it was really OK to send spam like this, would there really be a reason to fear retribution from so many people? This isn't a debate about religious suppression or freedom of speech. This is a matter of getting their teeth kicked in because they have absolutely no respect or regard for their fellow human beings.
No, actually I've been reading the engineering literature. Even if it is GM there are reasons why they want to have the unit disabled such that you can't call back, eavesdrop, or anything else. It's a dead brick.
Tell you what. Why don't you get an OnStar unit, have it disabled by OnStar, and see for yourself if there is any way to communicate over the air to that unit.
Well, if the advertisements were not effective, they wouldn't be using them. Perhaps they are appealing to a different crowd. Typically the people who are more likely to respond to such Fear ads are older people or the suburban soccer mom types. So the ad doesn't appeal to you. Odds are, you aren't one to buy OnStar no matter what they say. Fact is, young single men are the last group to consider getting OnStar.
For them, it's as bad as asking for directions.
Abuse of power is always going to be a tug of war and it won't go away.
But in these specific cases of people claiming a big brother feature exists with OnStar and therefore OnStar must be evil they are missing the point that their phone is even more evil. For OnStar to be used in an evil manner someone used to require a warrant (not so much these days, thanks to the new KGB of America). But to track someone by their cell phone doesn't require any kind of warrant.
The ignorance lies in the ideas that in order to protect your privacy you have to take some action to physically disable the hardware (pull the fuse, pull the plug, whatever) when in fact you can have the unit disabled by OnStar thereby rendering is non-functional. The only difference is that you will still be able to place a very limited type of call from the vehicle (like when you hit a tree).
The other point of ignorance is that this features slams on the brakes. That's just dumb.
These are not social issues. But there continues to be a backlash against this information in terms of, "Of course you would say that, you work for them." Well, I can't do much about that so I'm going to just skip that one and leave it to the Marketing Department to decide how to handle that one.
Not quite there... It's on when you purchase the vehicle. But if you call and request that it be disabled then it is physically disabled and cannot be remotely enabled.
If you are that worried about it, get rid of your cell phone.
Even before the PATRIOT act came along it was pretty easy to track someone using their cell phone, of any technology and any settings. All you have to do is leave it on.
And it's entirely legal, even by 1970's standards.
The trick is to track the registration of your phone through each cellular segment. I can't place you exactly but I know which segment you are in and at exactly what time you hand off from one segment to another. In some cases this puts you within a mile. I have a pretty good idea where you are going. Good enough to be there when you arrive. You don't even have to place a call. All you have to do is have it on.
But then even without the phone it's pretty easy to track someone. Planes work great for this.
I'm surprised at how little people know about surveillance and how easy it is to do.