We can use this in a bunch of situations. For example:
We know that not all people who sit in Congress are stealing from their constituents and taking money in exchange for political influence, but we're very sure that many are.
So lets take, say, one Congressman and make a real example of him by putting him in jail. That should be a real wake-up call to the rest of them.
"Microsoft is 'inching closer -- at least in spirit -- to the GNU GPL'"
They have this exactly backwards. If anything, Microsoft has inched closer to the letter of the GNU GPL. Nearly every other action they have taken as a company has shown contempt for the spirit of the GPL.
If you've read James Burke's columns in Scientific American you realize that he is an insightful *television* writer. That's his medium. In contrast his written columns are an incoherent jumble of odd organization, asides, and unresolved thoughts. You really need to read them three or four times to figure out what he's trying to get across.
Understand, I love his television programs, but he's a perfect example of how interesting, readable prose is an art in itself. Her skills are not about just waking up in the morning and saying "Hey, how about taking an historical approach," but also being able to organize it, edit it, and write it in such a way that it slots into kids' brains and stays there.
They could, but with the nature of Tivo (which logs your every move and sends it back to home base) they could know those figures exactly.
I think it's more likely that the self-serving slop will come in when they try to project that data set to the rest of the population. You'll hear things like:
Stockholders: "Tivo users are fast-forwarding through all our ads! You told us to spend $30 million on those ads!"
Marketing Dept: "Sure, but keep in mind that our proprietary in-house research says that the current crop of Tivo users are early adopters, and early adopters are button fetishists who would fast-forward through the video of their first child being born. They just aren't representative. Our research also shows that VCR users, although traditionally unmeasurable, lovingly watch our ads over and over, often getting up early on a Saturday just to watch a mix tape of our ads. There are a lot more VCRs than Tivos, so keep those dollars rolling!"
What you are seeing here are merely volleys in a price negotiation. Don't mistake it for reality. The last thing *anybody* - advertisers, networks, clients - wants is for media delivery to be accurately measured.
(rant on)
All advertising rates are based on The Big Lie, and anything that interferes with this shared revenue-producing delusion is summarily dropped or compromised out of existance.
Audit bureaus came up with the idea of actually counting the number of magazines shipped and then publishing the reports. Magazines then came up with what they called "pass along readership" where they make arbitrary guesses that more than one person reads a single issue. Agencies went along with it, because if clients knew the truth they wouldn't know what the hell to do, and when they don't know what to do they stop spending money.
If I recall correctly, 'People Magazine' was saying that they had a pass-along readership of 18. As in 18 people read every issue because, by their logic, 'People' sat in a lot of doctor's office waiting rooms.
There have been many innovations in television measurement, including Nielsen boxes that measure whose watching a set based on their heat signature, but they've been quietly retired with mumbles about cost or privacy or whatever. They then continue to wildly massage the numbers in the process of projecting truly aweful diary and box data to national viewership.
The fact is that the livelyhood of networks, magazines, outdoor ads, agencies, and the marketing departments at clients is supported by wasted dollars, and your safe bet is on any technology that allows this waste to continue. Anything that threatens to be both accurate an ubiquitous will never see the light of day.
(rant off)
So I read the story like this:
"Researchers in the marketing department of the largest advertising spender in the world have recently declared that despite incontrovertable evidence that people are fast-forwarding through the commercials it took them quite a long time to think up, they actually remember them despite the lack of sound and their carefully-crafted characters running around like time-lapse ants. So despite this incontrovertable evidence, there is fortunately no reason to cut their budgets, fire their agency and lay them all off. When reached for comment, their advertising agency agreed with them a full fifteen percent, which coincidentaly was the amount of their fee."
Maybe I'm not getting this. I don't know what you do for a living, but let's say you're a web designer.
I get your name from Bob, a former client, and I want you to design my web site. I send you e-mail to that effect and you never see it because I'm not on the white list? If that's the case it would be unworkable for 90% of business e-mail, since most of what you're trying to do is make contact with prospects you've never met before.
Sorry if I misunderstood, but it seems as though for business e-mail accounts I'd spend more time manageing my white list that deleting spam.
About 18 percent of the traffic carried by the US Postal Service is bulk mailing, but USPS studies say that postal employees spend 25 percent of their time sorting it. All a waste? Keep in mind that the DMA asserts the $50 billion was raised as a result of bulk mailings by charities.
I'd be interested in knowing what the total load on our economy is from the two forms, inluding manpower, network load, inconvenience etc. My suspicion is that the hyperventilation over spams growth is driving up the percieved cost, especially when you consider the cheapness of bandwidth, and that spam control is an automation battle leaving the real expensive resource, humans, to design the filters and clean up what they miss.
"The spammers are evil folks," Evil? Like Hitler evil?
Opportunists, yes. Using mildly unethical means to further themselves in business venture, often. But I wonder how many people who are apoplectic about the "evilness" of spammers cheat on their wives, cheat on their taxes, park in handicapped zones, etc. ..All no more evil than faking a return address, and certainly no less.
This article is the biggest mess of extended metaphor I've read in a while.
"But the quickest paths in outer space are all toll roads (it costs a lot of rocket fuel to use them), while you can ride the Interplanetary Superhighway almost for free. Gravity does the driving, so the system is really more like an elaborate set of Hot Wheels tracks. All you have to do is let go of the car at the right place."
Enough already! Hot wheels tracks, Interplanetary Superhighway, toll roads - unless this article was written for nickelodeon.com it's ridiculous, and even then kids would have to do the same thing I did, wade through the crap for the content.
"Though this may be the first instance of a cypherpunk filing a defensive patent to prevent software anti-piracy efforts, it's a relatively common tactic in the area of industrial patents. "
...is that Wired is still using terms like cypherpunk.
Sorry, but as a musician allow me to respond to one point in this write-up (without, of course, disagreeing with the anti-cabalist pitchfork waving).
You want people to download your music for free, I can only assume, because you have either what is called a "TRUST FUND" or a "DAY JOB." Once you have had some success, and rely (even in small part) on record sales to pay for supplies, like say, food, then you become not against free music, but a little more conservative on the subject.
I and most of the musicians I know really do want people to be able to download tracks, spread the gospel, etc., but start getting nervous when a paid cd can actually seem *more* inconvenient than Kazaa Lite.
What do I want in a label? I want them to get their heads out of their asses and be creative about finding new and better ways to market my music -- finding a good blend between locking up people who would rip us off, letting people share music they love, but most of all making the *purchase* of music the most convenient and satisfying way of obtaining it.
The general perception among the working stiff musicians I know is that the one area that free P2P services has killed us is in "buy the hit" sales. It used to be that if someone heard your tune on the radio and liked it enough to want it, a certain proportion would tape it off the radio, netting you nothing. Another proportion would buy the single, and then another proportion would buy the entire cd for that tune and to hear what else was on it. My current possesion of an entire Kittie CD proves that I can fall into that category. The concern now is that Kazaa is the new radio-taping, but the ranks of people who fall into the net-you-nothing category have swollen exponentially. Keep in mind that for smaller-time musicians (lets take a lot of jazz musician as an example) solid airplay doesn't really net you much until it *translates* into something - better gigs, tours, or record sales.
You can quote statistics all you want about the growth of the industry, but there's a very large contingent of musicians who are not super famous, but are known and making a living, for whom the sale of 100 cd's is meaningful in making the rent. If even a few download a single radio song off Kazaa and are satisfied enough to not bother with the cd, then that performer may have just lost someone who could have become a lifelong cd-buying fan if they'd committed to the whole thing.
Soooo. ..I am not pretending to write a treatise on industry economics here, just trying to sum up some of the concerns (biases, myths, whatever) that I've heard from real people trying to make a living in music. People not beholden to record companies, but even more nervous about seeing 30 tracks and entire albums of their music show up on a service where they are free for the taking.
August 2002: "The Root encryption deserves to be called fourth-generation encryption. It is different from existing, so-called third-generation encryption, [in that] the encryption keys can not be located easily," said a spokesman for Hudson Soft"
September 2002: "My Root encryption crack deserves to be called a fourth-generation crack. It is different from existing, so-called third-generation cracks, [in that] the encryption keys can be published on IRC easily" said a spokesman for Cracketon The Decryptor from the steps of his junior high school.
Dr. Bellows
Funk/Soul/Jazz drbellows.net for gigs, music & more.
. ..file formats. My proposition is that the only real advantage that mp3 has in the face of Ogg and such is in hostagizing the installed base of existing encoded files. But in terms of the day-to-day encoding and playing process of disks yet-to-be-copyright-violated all but the most anal of users will give a crank about the actual encoding format.
There will certainly be a hitch at first as Winamp won't play your 1.21 jigabytes of mp3 files, but as soon as mainstream encoders and players come out using a quality open file format as a default then users will just as quickly adopt that.
My question is, is it possible to write an mp3 to ogg conversion tool that evades definition as a "decoder" under the license? If so they're in even bigger trouble. If the next version of WinAmp is Ogg only with a nifty conversion tool, then their patent won't have very much relevance in a short amount of time.
***** Dr. Bellows *****
Funk// Soul// Jazz
for gigs, music & more!
In an insidious trend, Yahoo and Slashdot began leveraging what is commonly known as the "Slashdot Effect" to generate revenue-producing pageviews on the popular directory service. An anonymous source, who we will call Cmdr Tapas commented; "It's really very easy - we post an inflammatory article about Yahoo on our service, our readers flock over there with torches and pitchforks, and Yahoo pockets the pageviews. Then I get a fat check sent to my home a month later."
I think this "I can hammer my line as much as I want" take on things is a misunderstanding born of a misreprentation. The cable companies advertise high bandwidth services, so those of us who are bandwidth hoars sign up with mainlining Kazaa in mind. In reality, what the cable companies are offering (hence the misrepresentation) is low-to-moderate speed bandwidth *burstable* to high speed.
So your actual out-of-pocket in a cable modem economy is probably close to fair for the bandwidth you actually would end up using in a metered economy. My cable-modem hookup is *completely* dark 95% of the time. The other 5%, however, is spent with the expectation that a DVD-Rip of Planet of the Apes will slam into my computer so fast it dents the case.
So cable modem users should complain that yes, cable companies aren't being entirely honest with them. But they should also realize that if they expect to get a $1,000 per month T1 line for $40, they are being either unintentionally or (as I suspect is the case among our infrastructure-savvy/. readers) intentionally naive.
Slashdot Mirror
We can use this in a bunch of situations. For example:
We know that not all people who sit in Congress are stealing from their constituents and taking money in exchange for political influence, but we're very sure that many are.
So lets take, say, one Congressman and make a real example of him by putting him in jail. That should be a real wake-up call to the rest of them.
Any nominees?
--------
"they explain some the logic behind the often confused and confusing rhetoric of DRM advocates"
Confusing rhetoric like, say, "inquestation" and "implications of the schematization?"
------
Well, it's about 11.803 pico-seconds per light year.
Oh, maybe I missed your point.
---------
"Microsoft is 'inching closer -- at least in spirit -- to the GNU GPL'"
They have this exactly backwards. If anything, Microsoft has inched closer to the letter of the GNU GPL. Nearly every other action they have taken as a company has shown contempt for the spirit of the GPL.
---------
Except...
If you've read James Burke's columns in Scientific American you realize that he is an insightful *television* writer. That's his medium. In contrast his written columns are an incoherent jumble of odd organization, asides, and unresolved thoughts. You really need to read them three or four times to figure out what he's trying to get across.
Understand, I love his television programs, but he's a perfect example of how interesting, readable prose is an art in itself. Her skills are not about just waking up in the morning and saying "Hey, how about taking an historical approach," but also being able to organize it, edit it, and write it in such a way that it slots into kids' brains and stays there.
--------
Aww, their's no real difference is they're? I think your just splitting hares.
Thanks man, I never would have noticed.
-------
They could, but with the nature of Tivo (which logs your every move and sends it back to home base) they could know those figures exactly.
I think it's more likely that the self-serving slop will come in when they try to project that data set to the rest of the population. You'll hear things like:
Stockholders: "Tivo users are fast-forwarding through all our ads! You told us to spend $30 million on those ads!"
Marketing Dept: "Sure, but keep in mind that our proprietary in-house research says that the current crop of Tivo users are early adopters, and early adopters are button fetishists who would fast-forward through the video of their first child being born. They just aren't representative. Our research also shows that VCR users, although traditionally unmeasurable, lovingly watch our ads over and over, often getting up early on a Saturday just to watch a mix tape of our ads. There are a lot more VCRs than Tivos, so keep those dollars rolling!"
--------
Can range from $5-6 for late-night spot TV, even cheaper for outdoor, to $120 for sooper-groovy magazines that think they're the shiznit.
Of course you can't just buy a thousand. . .
-------
What you are seeing here are merely volleys in a price negotiation. Don't mistake it for reality. The last thing *anybody* - advertisers, networks, clients - wants is for media delivery to be accurately measured.
(rant on)
All advertising rates are based on The Big Lie, and anything that interferes with this shared revenue-producing delusion is summarily dropped or compromised out of existance.
Audit bureaus came up with the idea of actually counting the number of magazines shipped and then publishing the reports. Magazines then came up with what they called "pass along readership" where they make arbitrary guesses that more than one person reads a single issue. Agencies went along with it, because if clients knew the truth they wouldn't know what the hell to do, and when they don't know what to do they stop spending money.
If I recall correctly, 'People Magazine' was saying that they had a pass-along readership of 18. As in 18 people read every issue because, by their logic, 'People' sat in a lot of doctor's office waiting rooms.
There have been many innovations in television measurement, including Nielsen boxes that measure whose watching a set based on their heat signature, but they've been quietly retired with mumbles about cost or privacy or whatever. They then continue to wildly massage the numbers in the process of projecting truly aweful diary and box data to national viewership.
The fact is that the livelyhood of networks, magazines, outdoor ads, agencies, and the marketing departments at clients is supported by wasted dollars, and your safe bet is on any technology that allows this waste to continue. Anything that threatens to be both accurate an ubiquitous will never see the light of day.
(rant off)
So I read the story like this:
"Researchers in the marketing department of the largest advertising spender in the world have recently declared that despite incontrovertable evidence that people are fast-forwarding through the commercials it took them quite a long time to think up, they actually remember them despite the lack of sound and their carefully-crafted characters running around like time-lapse ants. So despite this incontrovertable evidence, there is fortunately no reason to cut their budgets, fire their agency and lay them all off. When reached for comment, their advertising agency agreed with them a full fifteen percent, which coincidentaly was the amount of their fee."
--------
Get out of your house and find a girlfriend. She has things to show you that
will permanently distract you from projects like this.
If it helps, she will grow more pinkish if things are going well.
----------
"Let's just hope it likes your cooking."
"Visualize world records."
"Now that's a wrap."
Nice to see Fozzie Bear has gotten into technology writing.
I'd like a world where more thought is put into the content of an article than the barf-inducing cutesy closers to every squib.
--------
Maybe I'm not getting this. I don't know what you do for a living, but let's say you're a web designer.
I get your name from Bob, a former client, and I want you to design my web site. I send you e-mail to that effect and you never see it because I'm not on the white list? If that's the case it would be unworkable for 90% of business e-mail, since most of what you're trying to do is make contact with prospects you've never met before.
Sorry if I misunderstood, but it seems as though for business e-mail accounts I'd spend more time manageing my white list that deleting spam.
-----
About 18 percent of the traffic carried by the US Postal Service is bulk mailing, but USPS studies say that postal employees spend 25 percent of their time sorting it. All a waste? Keep in mind that the DMA asserts the $50 billion was raised as a result of bulk mailings by charities.
I'd be interested in knowing what the total load on our economy is from the two forms, inluding manpower, network load, inconvenience etc. My suspicion is that the hyperventilation over spams growth is driving up the percieved cost, especially when you consider the cheapness of bandwidth, and that spam control is an automation battle leaving the real expensive resource, humans, to design the filters and clean up what they miss.
"The spammers are evil folks," Evil? Like Hitler evil?
Opportunists, yes. Using mildly unethical means to further themselves in business venture, often. But I wonder how many people who are apoplectic about the "evilness" of spammers cheat on their wives, cheat on their taxes, park in handicapped zones, etc. . .All no more evil than faking a return address, and certainly no less.
-----
"But the quickest paths in outer space are all toll roads (it costs a lot of rocket fuel to use them), while you can ride the Interplanetary Superhighway almost for free. Gravity does the driving, so the system is really more like an elaborate set of Hot Wheels tracks. All you have to do is let go of the car at the right place."
Enough already! Hot wheels tracks, Interplanetary Superhighway, toll roads - unless this article was written for nickelodeon.com it's ridiculous, and even then kids would have to do the same thing I did, wade through the crap for the content.
Sorry, got a little frustrated.
and Sammy Davis Jr.? Wow! Never saw that coming, but my hat's off to the committee.
And I was rooting for Sherilyn Fenn for Chemistry and David Brenner for Medicine too.
What a great year!
You want people to download your music for free, I can only assume, because you have either what is called a "TRUST FUND" or a "DAY JOB." Once you have had some success, and rely (even in small part) on record sales to pay for supplies, like say, food, then you become not against free music, but a little more conservative on the subject.
I and most of the musicians I know really do want people to be able to download tracks, spread the gospel, etc., but start getting nervous when a paid cd can actually seem *more* inconvenient than Kazaa Lite.
What do I want in a label? I want them to get their heads out of their asses and be creative about finding new and better ways to market my music -- finding a good blend between locking up people who would rip us off, letting people share music they love, but most of all making the *purchase* of music the most convenient and satisfying way of obtaining it.
The general perception among the working stiff musicians I know is that the one area that free P2P services has killed us is in "buy the hit" sales. It used to be that if someone heard your tune on the radio and liked it enough to want it, a certain proportion would tape it off the radio, netting you nothing. Another proportion would buy the single, and then another proportion would buy the entire cd for that tune and to hear what else was on it. My current possesion of an entire Kittie CD proves that I can fall into that category. The concern now is that Kazaa is the new radio-taping, but the ranks of people who fall into the net-you-nothing category have swollen exponentially. Keep in mind that for smaller-time musicians (lets take a lot of jazz musician as an example) solid airplay doesn't really net you much until it *translates* into something - better gigs, tours, or record sales.
You can quote statistics all you want about the growth of the industry, but there's a very large contingent of musicians who are not super famous, but are known and making a living, for whom the sale of 100 cd's is meaningful in making the rent. If even a few download a single radio song off Kazaa and are satisfied enough to not bother with the cd, then that performer may have just lost someone who could have become a lifelong cd-buying fan if they'd committed to the whole thing.
Soooo. . .I am not pretending to write a treatise on industry economics here, just trying to sum up some of the concerns (biases, myths, whatever) that I've heard from real people trying to make a living in music. People not beholden to record companies, but even more nervous about seeing 30 tracks and entire albums of their music show up on a service where they are free for the taking.
Let the anti-cabalist orange-pelting resume. . .
http://download.com.com/3000-2099-857427.html?tag= lst-0-1
**** Dr. Bellows ****
Funk/Soul/Jazz
drbellows.net
for gigs, music & more
http://www.angelfire.com/ar/SAMNMAX/grafjueg.html
**** Dr. Bellows ****
Funk/Soul/Jazz
drbellows.net
for gigs, music & more.
"The Root encryption deserves to be called fourth-generation encryption. It is different from existing, so-called third-generation encryption, [in that] the encryption keys can not be located easily," said a spokesman for Hudson Soft"
September 2002:
"My Root encryption crack deserves to be called a fourth-generation crack. It is different from existing, so-called third-generation cracks, [in that] the encryption keys can be published on IRC easily" said a spokesman for Cracketon The Decryptor from the steps of his junior high school.
Dr. Bellows
Funk/Soul/Jazz
drbellows.net
for gigs, music & more.
There will certainly be a hitch at first as Winamp won't play your 1.21 jigabytes of mp3 files, but as soon as mainstream encoders and players come out using a quality open file format as a default then users will just as quickly adopt that.
My question is, is it possible to write an mp3 to ogg conversion tool that evades definition as a "decoder" under the license? If so they're in even bigger trouble. If the next version of WinAmp is Ogg only with a nifty conversion tool, then their patent won't have very much relevance in a short amount of time.
***** Dr. Bellows ***** // Soul // Jazz
Funk
for gigs, music & more!
. .
In an insidious trend, Yahoo and Slashdot began leveraging what is commonly known as the "Slashdot Effect" to generate revenue-producing pageviews on the popular directory service. An anonymous source, who we will call Cmdr Tapas commented; "It's really very easy - we post an inflammatory article about Yahoo on our service, our readers flock over there with torches and pitchforks, and Yahoo pockets the pageviews. Then I get a fat check sent to my home a month later."
I think this "I can hammer my line as much as I want" take on things is a misunderstanding born of a misreprentation. The cable companies advertise high bandwidth services, so those of us who are bandwidth hoars sign up with mainlining Kazaa in mind. In reality, what the cable companies are offering (hence the misrepresentation) is low-to-moderate speed bandwidth *burstable* to high speed.
/. readers) intentionally naive.
So your actual out-of-pocket in a cable modem economy is probably close to fair for the bandwidth you actually would end up using in a metered economy. My cable-modem hookup is *completely* dark 95% of the time. The other 5%, however, is spent with the expectation that a DVD-Rip of Planet of the Apes will slam into my computer so fast it dents the case.
So cable modem users should complain that yes, cable companies aren't being entirely honest with them. But they should also realize that if they expect to get a $1,000 per month T1 line for $40, they are being either unintentionally or (as I suspect is the case among our infrastructure-savvy