What happens to competition.
on
When Pigs Wifi
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· Score: 1
"-what happens to all those companies now offering pay-for wi-fi services? Do they simply throw up their hands and let it happen?"
Did you notice that the FCC just made DSL an information service rather than common-carrier service? Now your phone company will not have to let any other ISPs use their phone line to your house to deliver the internet to you. Earthlink and hundreds of other ISPs simply threw up their hands and let it happen, and I don't see how they are possibly going to stay in business.
Now WiFi is a different matter, and the parties who want to sell you internet access are going to be doing everything they can to influence lawmakers to stop municiple wifi. Which is why experiments like Portland's and Hermiston's are so vitally important. If they can prove to the voters that it works and it isn't expensive, it is going to be a lot more difficult for politicians to hold forth that it won't work and it is too expensive. Not impossible, but more difficult.
It is not accurate to call it THE lightsaber. It is ONE OF the prop lightsabers used in the movie. The certificate of authenticity is very clear. I'm sure Lucas has at least one also. No telling exactly how many there are. I hope the person who bid $200,000 realized that.
I must be dense, but I'm totally missing your point.
Are you saying that Apple would continue to sell as much or more hardware if they sold OSX for the PC because...IBM uses Linux? Are you saying that OSX doesn't help sell hardware? Are you saying Apple shouldn't try to be a hardware company because IBM tried that and they only made $36 billion in gross profit last year?
I think IBM and Apple are both successfully using non-microsoft software to sell hardware. But I don't see how anything IBM has done would lead me to the conclusion that Apple should sell their OS for regular, open-arcitecture PCs.
The article even points out that the Nerdcore rivalry is like the LL Cool J/Canibus rivalry, which was fabricated by Canibus for...wait for it...publicity. Go listen to Indier Than Thou by Frontalot or something by MC Hawking and tell me they take themselves too seriously.
That all depends on the kind of product and the kind of ad.
Yes, there is a school that believes in picking a simple message and repeating it over and over and over again for years, i.e.: it does a body good, it's what's for dinner, it gets grease out of your way, Trix are for kids. And that works great for commodity things that you'll be selling for decades, like dish soap and cereal.
It doesn't work very well for a movie or a cd that has a very short shelf life, or hype life if you will. And I don't think video games are the place to sell dish soap. 15 second movies inside video games are the place to sell theatre movies, DVDs, CDs, maybe image pieces for cars, fast food, soda. But you're asking the audience to interrupt their game to watch your ad, so you're going to have to be entertaining. An ad whose focus is repeating "the ultimate driving machine" isn't going to work as well as something like those download-only mini-movies that BMW did a while back that were done by famous directors. Those are image pieces and most of their work is done on the first viewing. If you choose to watch it again, it is because it is a good ad that made an impression on you, not because the video game publisher presented it well. I'm paying my ad agency for the second and third viewing, not the video-game publisher. And after the 7 viewings, I think the ad has done all the work it is going to do. You either associate BMW with cool, James-Bondian things or you don't. 3 more viewings aren't going to help. Movie trailers and song clips and such are the same way.
If I were an advertiser I would insist that I only pay for an audience watching my moving-billboard from a designated area the proper distance away, and that each member keep the entire billboard in view for the entire 15 seconds to count as a "viewing." And I would pay a declining scale, so 3 cents for the first view, 2 cents for the second, 1 cent each for the next 5, for a max of 10 cents per unique viewer. I'm not paying for a bot to watch my ad 1000 times. If the game maker wants to reward the players for watching my ad, thats okay with me, I might reduce my pay per view though since a self-selecting audience is more receptive than a bribed one.
But I'm not an advertiser, I've only studied it a bit, so what do I know.
The US has strange attitudes about sex and violence. GTA:SA has (appropriately in my opinion) an M rating. The game allows you, if you choose, to:kill other gang members, cops and innocent bystanders in lots of gruesome ways (including setting them on fire or beating them to death with a big purple dildo); become a pimp; have sex with hookers; visit a strip club and get private dances; and lots of other mayhem. As part of the plot you need to kill or seduce a waitress at a casino who is into bondage.
But all of that is done without any nudity. Oh, but now it is revealed that if you hack the game you can see a blocky, pixellated bare boobie. Quick, somebody whip up some righteous indignation and start a fedral investigation! 17-year-olds need to be protected from boobies!
I can't help but point out that while the title of the auction says "screen-used" the Certificate of Authenticity says that it is an item for which he has a duplicate, and that he certifies that it is from his collection, and that it was a prop from Star Wars, not that it was on-screen, nor even that Mark Hamill ever touched it, or that it was ever on the set.
Not to be a wet blanket, but this isn't The Lightsabre, because there isn't any one lightsabre. It is still pretty cool though. I'd like to hold it once.
I think I agree with you on the what and the why, just not the how. I think you've got two contradictory goals you've put forward here. 1) Get prolonged observation of a particular comet, OR 2) get up-close observation of as many comets as possible. You can't have both. Rendezvousing with a comet is incredibly more difficult and expensive than intercepting it.
And regarding propulsion: Ion propulsion is very efficient for a small amount of thrust from a very small amount of propellant for a long period of time. It uses electricity from the sun to shoot the propellant out the back one particle at a time. It is great for a long-running probe. It is no good for making a 29,000 mph delta-vee over the course of a few days or weeks
Regarding nuclear propulsion: In theory, it could be a great way to get enormous amounts of energy from small amounts of mass. In practice...well, nobody has put it into practice. And one of the reasons is that when lifting a reactor into orbit or beyond, you've got the potential of spreading highly poisonous and radioactive materials into the atmosphere and/or into populated areas if you have a catastrophic failure during the lift. People outside the US actually get pretty upset even when we are just lifting a nuclear battery on one of our probes, and those are pretty small amounts of radioactive materials. So a nuclear rocket assembled on the surface has a whole host of political and environmental issues associated with it.
One last point, as you've said NASA had problems just intercepting the comet with cameras that were in focus, so attempting the much more difficult and expensive task of a rendezvous might not be a good idea.
The suggestion that the mother ship do a 29,000 mph velocity change and match the trajectory of the comet to continue observing it is such a contrast with the other, reasonable suggestions that I took it for a troll at first. It is just so patently foolish that he MUST be trying to get a reaction. But looking at jmichalg's other posts I see no clear evidence of other trollery. Oh he likes to argue but is it a troll?
You're right that no one can promote like the major labels. And if a major label paid the radio stations to play your music, it is likely that more CD of your music would be sold.
But it is not at all clear that you would make any more money. After all, all the expenses of that promotion (and expenses they just make up) come out of your end, and increasingly they're taking the profits from your t-shirt and concerts too. So you could work for years for them and only get those advances they hand over when you sign.
"from a business point of view, well, the other player manufacturers can see their trends, and they're trending downwards."
They are? But the DAP market is still growing, and fast. Even if all you do is hold on to market share you will be growing revenue.
A quick look at the Income Statement for Creative Technologies shows that they had more revenue in '04 than they did in '03. Now that was just the first place I looked, and it doesn't prove they sold more DAP units. But until you show me some data to back up your assertion that all the competitors trends are downward and there is no room in the market for them, I'm not going to believe you.
I thought the most entertaining denial of reality came from the Archos guy, who basically said that since they had been doing audio players for 3 years when the iPod came out, they had been there, done that, and have moved on to cooler stuff, like A/V players. I guess the implication is that the customers are all wrong and his stuff is much better than the iPod and is really what people want if only they weren't insane.
"Sour Grapes" as you have described it surely fits at least some of the competitors' rants. I think it is entirely appropriate. But thanks for the lesson.
"Sony lost footing because they couldn't anticipate portable CD players."
Nonsense. Sony came out with the Discman in 1984. They certainly anticipated the market and led it. What they didn't do was get into the MP3 player market because of the worries of the content divisions of Sony. Their executives have admitted as much on record, saying that they "gave away" the DAP market in their foolishness.
1)Spend their time and money going after SCO for copyright violation.
2)Focus on their own business
Since IBM seems to have the will and means to win the fight that they started quite some time ago, I think MySql should opt for #2. There just doesn't seem like much to gain in option #1. SCO is already dead, it is just a matter of time now, and I don't think there is anything MySql can do to speed it up.
Now if there are some cheap, easy ways to fight SCO, well, maybe. I mean, I sure would enjoy the irony of using the DMCA against SCO. But it is probably better to just stay out of the fray and let IBM handle it. Attacking SCO now just gives them more publicity.
I believe the arguement that they put forth once was that if you released your software under the unconstitutional and completely bogus GPL, then you accidentally made it public domain.
Yes, of course that is completely without merit, one can't accidentally lose one's copyright (it was here just a moment ago, now where did I put it?) But that was the garbage they were spewing for a while.
"It's actually not such a bad idea, because it's more hassle than most casual music pirates are willing to tolerate."
Wait, they admit that this will do nothing to prevent the availability of the songs on P2P networks. But it will be harder for a person to buy the CD and put the music on an MP3 player. So they are giving potential customers LESS reason to buy the CD, while doing nothing to prevent actual piracy. How is that not a bad idea?
" Children under 18 are not allowed to purchase this game."
Yes, they are.
The current ESRB is completely voluntary. There is no penalty, other then potential bad publicity, for a store that sells M rated games to 10 year olds. So in practice stores have little incentive to forgo a sale refuse to accept money from people too young. And in practice kids are able to buy games they shouldn't in significant numbers.
I'm not sure if a new fedral law is the answer, but lets not pretend that the current system works perfectly.
BTW, I'm playing through GTA:SA and I think it is a great deal of fun, but I don't play it until the kids go to bed because I wouldn't even want them to watch. GTA is not appropriate for the easily impressionable nor for people who have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. But for responsible adults, its fun to get away with anything for a while in a safe little fantasy world. The GTA world is amoral, maybe even immoral, but its just a game, no actual prositutes were harmed in the making of it. And nobody had sex. No cops were bribed. No mob hitmen were tied to the roof of my car. I didn't take an ambulance the drive injured people to the hospital. I didn't take a firetruck and run around putting out fires. I didn't take a police motorcycle and stop maniacs on rampages in acts of vigilantism.
It sounds to me like you believe that the only possible reason to use P2P instead of iTMS is because people want something for nothing, is that right?
That assumes that iTMS is perfect, doesn't it? And that there is no reason anyone would want an alternate distribution channel? You see the problem with that don't you?
"Tronson argued that Coastguard would be a better solution for secure Internet banking because it provided "a totally locked-down, secure operating system and applications from non-modifiable media, with DNS-lookup configurations hardwired to secured servers provided by the banks themselves".
I love the knoppix idea, but I have a different definition of "hardwired to secured servers" than this guy does.
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"-what happens to all those companies now offering pay-for wi-fi services? Do they simply throw up their hands and let it happen?"
Did you notice that the FCC just made DSL an information service rather than common-carrier service? Now your phone company will not have to let any other ISPs use their phone line to your house to deliver the internet to you. Earthlink and hundreds of other ISPs simply threw up their hands and let it happen, and I don't see how they are possibly going to stay in business.
Now WiFi is a different matter, and the parties who want to sell you internet access are going to be doing everything they can to influence lawmakers to stop municiple wifi. Which is why experiments like Portland's and Hermiston's are so vitally important. If they can prove to the voters that it works and it isn't expensive, it is going to be a lot more difficult for politicians to hold forth that it won't work and it is too expensive. Not impossible, but more difficult.
It is not accurate to call it THE lightsaber. It is ONE OF the prop lightsabers used in the movie. The certificate of authenticity is very clear. I'm sure Lucas has at least one also. No telling exactly how many there are. I hope the person who bid $200,000 realized that.
I must be dense, but I'm totally missing your point.
Are you saying that Apple would continue to sell as much or more hardware if they sold OSX for the PC because...IBM uses Linux? Are you saying that OSX doesn't help sell hardware? Are you saying Apple shouldn't try to be a hardware company because IBM tried that and they only made $36 billion in gross profit last year?
I think IBM and Apple are both successfully using non-microsoft software to sell hardware. But I don't see how anything IBM has done would lead me to the conclusion that Apple should sell their OS for regular, open-arcitecture PCs.
YHBT YHL HAND
The article even points out that the Nerdcore rivalry is like the LL Cool J/Canibus rivalry, which was fabricated by Canibus for...wait for it...publicity. Go listen to Indier Than Thou by Frontalot or something by MC Hawking and tell me they take themselves too seriously.
That all depends on the kind of product and the kind of ad.
Yes, there is a school that believes in picking a simple message and repeating it over and over and over again for years, i.e.: it does a body good, it's what's for dinner, it gets grease out of your way, Trix are for kids. And that works great for commodity things that you'll be selling for decades, like dish soap and cereal.
It doesn't work very well for a movie or a cd that has a very short shelf life, or hype life if you will. And I don't think video games are the place to sell dish soap. 15 second movies inside video games are the place to sell theatre movies, DVDs, CDs, maybe image pieces for cars, fast food, soda. But you're asking the audience to interrupt their game to watch your ad, so you're going to have to be entertaining. An ad whose focus is repeating "the ultimate driving machine" isn't going to work as well as something like those download-only mini-movies that BMW did a while back that were done by famous directors. Those are image pieces and most of their work is done on the first viewing. If you choose to watch it again, it is because it is a good ad that made an impression on you, not because the video game publisher presented it well. I'm paying my ad agency for the second and third viewing, not the video-game publisher. And after the 7 viewings, I think the ad has done all the work it is going to do. You either associate BMW with cool, James-Bondian things or you don't. 3 more viewings aren't going to help. Movie trailers and song clips and such are the same way.
Take a couple more classes and get back to me.
If I were an advertiser I would insist that I only pay for an audience watching my moving-billboard from a designated area the proper distance away, and that each member keep the entire billboard in view for the entire 15 seconds to count as a "viewing." And I would pay a declining scale, so 3 cents for the first view, 2 cents for the second, 1 cent each for the next 5, for a max of 10 cents per unique viewer. I'm not paying for a bot to watch my ad 1000 times. If the game maker wants to reward the players for watching my ad, thats okay with me, I might reduce my pay per view though since a self-selecting audience is more receptive than a bribed one.
But I'm not an advertiser, I've only studied it a bit, so what do I know.
Who can you return opened software to? The store surely won't take it back.
So why exactly did you even read past the headline, much less the article and then the comments?
Oh, come on. You have to admit this is one of the most extreme examples of "sex and violence are one thing, but nudity crosses the line" ever.
The US has strange attitudes about sex and violence. GTA:SA has (appropriately in my opinion) an M rating. The game allows you, if you choose, to:kill other gang members, cops and innocent bystanders in lots of gruesome ways (including setting them on fire or beating them to death with a big purple dildo); become a pimp; have sex with hookers; visit a strip club and get private dances; and lots of other mayhem. As part of the plot you need to kill or seduce a waitress at a casino who is into bondage.
But all of that is done without any nudity. Oh, but now it is revealed that if you hack the game you can see a blocky, pixellated bare boobie. Quick, somebody whip up some righteous indignation and start a fedral investigation! 17-year-olds need to be protected from boobies!
I can't help but point out that while the title of the auction says "screen-used" the Certificate of Authenticity says that it is an item for which he has a duplicate, and that he certifies that it is from his collection, and that it was a prop from Star Wars, not that it was on-screen, nor even that Mark Hamill ever touched it, or that it was ever on the set.
Not to be a wet blanket, but this isn't The Lightsabre, because there isn't any one lightsabre. It is still pretty cool though. I'd like to hold it once.
I think I agree with you on the what and the why, just not the how. I think you've got two contradictory goals you've put forward here. 1) Get prolonged observation of a particular comet, OR 2) get up-close observation of as many comets as possible. You can't have both. Rendezvousing with a comet is incredibly more difficult and expensive than intercepting it.
And regarding propulsion: Ion propulsion is very efficient for a small amount of thrust from a very small amount of propellant for a long period of time. It uses electricity from the sun to shoot the propellant out the back one particle at a time. It is great for a long-running probe. It is no good for making a 29,000 mph delta-vee over the course of a few days or weeks
Regarding nuclear propulsion: In theory, it could be a great way to get enormous amounts of energy from small amounts of mass. In practice...well, nobody has put it into practice. And one of the reasons is that when lifting a reactor into orbit or beyond, you've got the potential of spreading highly poisonous and radioactive materials into the atmosphere and/or into populated areas if you have a catastrophic failure during the lift. People outside the US actually get pretty upset even when we are just lifting a nuclear battery on one of our probes, and those are pretty small amounts of radioactive materials. So a nuclear rocket assembled on the surface has a whole host of political and environmental issues associated with it.
One last point, as you've said NASA had problems just intercepting the comet with cameras that were in focus, so attempting the much more difficult and expensive task of a rendezvous might not be a good idea.
The suggestion that the mother ship do a 29,000 mph velocity change and match the trajectory of the comet to continue observing it is such a contrast with the other, reasonable suggestions that I took it for a troll at first. It is just so patently foolish that he MUST be trying to get a reaction. But looking at jmichalg's other posts I see no clear evidence of other trollery. Oh he likes to argue but is it a troll?
So which is it? Are you ignorant or obnoxious?
You're right that no one can promote like the major labels. And if a major label paid the radio stations to play your music, it is likely that more CD of your music would be sold.
But it is not at all clear that you would make any more money. After all, all the expenses of that promotion (and expenses they just make up) come out of your end, and increasingly they're taking the profits from your t-shirt and concerts too. So you could work for years for them and only get those advances they hand over when you sign.
"from a business point of view, well, the other player manufacturers can see their trends, and they're trending downwards."
They are? But the DAP market is still growing, and fast. Even if all you do is hold on to market share you will be growing revenue. A quick look at the Income Statement for Creative Technologies shows that they had more revenue in '04 than they did in '03. Now that was just the first place I looked, and it doesn't prove they sold more DAP units. But until you show me some data to back up your assertion that all the competitors trends are downward and there is no room in the market for them, I'm not going to believe you.
I thought the most entertaining denial of reality came from the Archos guy, who basically said that since they had been doing audio players for 3 years when the iPod came out, they had been there, done that, and have moved on to cooler stuff, like A/V players. I guess the implication is that the customers are all wrong and his stuff is much better than the iPod and is really what people want if only they weren't insane.
"Sour Grapes" as you have described it surely fits at least some of the competitors' rants. I think it is entirely appropriate. But thanks for the lesson.
"Sony lost footing because they couldn't anticipate portable CD players."
Nonsense. Sony came out with the Discman in 1984. They certainly anticipated the market and led it. What they didn't do was get into the MP3 player market because of the worries of the content divisions of Sony. Their executives have admitted as much on record, saying that they "gave away" the DAP market in their foolishness.
The way I see it, MySql can either
1)Spend their time and money going after SCO for copyright violation.
2)Focus on their own business
Since IBM seems to have the will and means to win the fight that they started quite some time ago, I think MySql should opt for #2. There just doesn't seem like much to gain in option #1. SCO is already dead, it is just a matter of time now, and I don't think there is anything MySql can do to speed it up.
Now if there are some cheap, easy ways to fight SCO, well, maybe. I mean, I sure would enjoy the irony of using the DMCA against SCO. But it is probably better to just stay out of the fray and let IBM handle it. Attacking SCO now just gives them more publicity.
I believe the arguement that they put forth once was that if you released your software under the unconstitutional and completely bogus GPL, then you accidentally made it public domain.
Yes, of course that is completely without merit, one can't accidentally lose one's copyright (it was here just a moment ago, now where did I put it?) But that was the garbage they were spewing for a while.
"It's actually not such a bad idea, because it's more hassle than most casual music pirates are willing to tolerate."
Wait, they admit that this will do nothing to prevent the availability of the songs on P2P networks. But it will be harder for a person to buy the CD and put the music on an MP3 player. So they are giving potential customers LESS reason to buy the CD, while doing nothing to prevent actual piracy. How is that not a bad idea?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
" Children under 18 are not allowed to purchase this game."
Yes, they are.
The current ESRB is completely voluntary. There is no penalty, other then potential bad publicity, for a store that sells M rated games to 10 year olds. So in practice stores have little incentive to forgo a sale refuse to accept money from people too young. And in practice kids are able to buy games they shouldn't in significant numbers.
I'm not sure if a new fedral law is the answer, but lets not pretend that the current system works perfectly.
BTW, I'm playing through GTA:SA and I think it is a great deal of fun, but I don't play it until the kids go to bed because I wouldn't even want them to watch. GTA is not appropriate for the easily impressionable nor for people who have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. But for responsible adults, its fun to get away with anything for a while in a safe little fantasy world. The GTA world is amoral, maybe even immoral, but its just a game, no actual prositutes were harmed in the making of it. And nobody had sex. No cops were bribed. No mob hitmen were tied to the roof of my car. I didn't take an ambulance the drive injured people to the hospital. I didn't take a firetruck and run around putting out fires. I didn't take a police motorcycle and stop maniacs on rampages in acts of vigilantism.
It sounds to me like you believe that the only possible reason to use P2P instead of iTMS is because people want something for nothing, is that right?
That assumes that iTMS is perfect, doesn't it? And that there is no reason anyone would want an alternate distribution channel? You see the problem with that don't you?
"Tronson argued that Coastguard would be a better solution for secure Internet banking because it provided "a totally locked-down, secure operating system and applications from non-modifiable media, with DNS-lookup configurations hardwired to secured servers provided by the banks themselves".
I love the knoppix idea, but I have a different definition of "hardwired to secured servers" than this guy does.