Why do so many tech guys not get the world doesn't run on tech alone? Business need to have a good business reason to move to OSS.
Why do so many business guys not get the world doesn't function the way vendor promises say it does? Businesses need to have a good reason to stick with something that they're getting shafted on.
Not that I don't think OSS is overhyped right now, but I see the problem being more using overpriced propritary crap than using too much open source software.
No, this is not being done to allow production of compatible *computers*, just compatible peripherals. Apple has always done this for all their computers. Why is this news?
They randomly screwed up and sent my younger sister a year subscription, despite me protesting that she had never signed up. I flipped through a couple of them. Granted, PC World is pretty full of holes and inaccuracies, but AFAI could tell, it's aimed at the home market, not execs.
Letting the customers control the bits is the only long-term stable solution.
Maybe, but the question of whether the cost in lost sales will be higher because of the growing closeness in services to what illegal P2P services provide than the gain in sales because of improved appeal is not a settled question, which is what I have a problem with people assuming.
As for the consumer controlling the bits -- I tend to agree that it's very difficult in the long term to do so at all, but I would have though the same about, say, sheet music and books, yet they managed to be reasonably controlled.
The music industry is people too, and they "want it", just in this case something different: DRM.
The music industry would love nothing better than to not have to deal with DRM. The music industry wants to make money. The only reason they flirt with DRM is because people fail to pay if they can pirate.
The irony is music was a public good until the entertainment industry used technology to make it a commodity
No, I disagree. Sheet music or phonograph records are at *least* as much of a commodity as a CD-ROM.
You mean before international IP agreements existed? Sure, and that's where the phrase "starving artist" came from. People regularly stole stuff and screwed the artist over.
Allowing such a trivial, disposal industry to set global guidelines on storage capacities and data transfers borders on comical.
What, precisely, are you referring to? I don't seem to recall the RIAA complaining about the size of my hard drive...
Looked at dispassionately, it's probably the Chinese music industry which strikes the right balance and Hollywood's obscene excess that's out of whack.
And yet how much music originating in China do you listen to versus how much from the United States?
I'm going to ignore arguments about whether the metaphor is accurate, and point to a real world example -- people buy music. They're willing to do so. Zillions of CDs are sold each year. They may prefer to simply download and hand around music, but if the providing company can't make money from doing so, it's not going provide this as a service.
Actually, all any commercial company does is attempt to find out what people want, and provide it to them.
No, it attempts to leverage that to make itself money. Usually, that *does* involve giving them what they want. If what people want involves an impractical business model for the company, though, the business will not provide the product or service -- the case here.
I think the proper course of action is to find a hole in the webserver, plop an actual P2P server on it, and then send lots of bogus complaints about workstations in.
The record companies never learn. People want portable music. People want to choose which songs to listen to, instead of carrying an entire CD with 80% crap. So, of course, the industry will try and destroy it. If the record companies were to allow, nay, even financially support this kind of work, they would make much more of that green stuff they so desperately desire. Stop living in the dark ages, damnit...
Lots of people might want to have massive orgies, too. If you can look at only the upsides of something, and not the consequences, lots of things can come off as quite attractive.
I don't know how the numbers wind up. I don't know whether it's actually the case that record companies supporting this would be good or bad for them. However, I do know that saying that CD companies would make money doing something just because people want it doesn't mean that it's a good idea, if it puts people in a game-theoretic position where music is a public good -- and stealing it is better for any individual, though it screws everyone over long run.
So you can't claim that "people want it" is a good reason for a company to do something (particularly as people don't have perfect information, and tend to be short-sighted about the consequences of this). Think about the article that was run on Slashdot a while ago about what happened to the Chinese music industry because of mass piracy. It's not dead, no, but it's nowhere near as productive as the US industry, either.
Heck, if people didn't want to do things that were stupid ideas, you wouldn't see people doping up.
I seem to remember software breaking when the extra eight bits were used, and Apple having a "32 bit clean" flag in the Memory control panel to kick the system into compatibility mode.
I just keep thinking of hard drives and all their backwards compatibility issues...
I'd say start charging after ten years. $1, and keep doubling each year.
After 25 years or so, most unprofitable copyrights wouldn't be worth keeping around, as the fee would be $32k. After 40 years or so, even the biggest companies would have to start giving up copyrights.
need qualified systems analysts to drive these decisions.
I'd say they need not only qualified system analysis, but qualified *unbiased* system analysis, which is an even harder problem.
There would also ideally be bans on the kind of relationships that existed in places like the Oracle/California debacle, where the analyst has a relationship with the vendor whose software is a candidate for recommendation. Of course, the logistics of how to "ban" something like this would be pretty hairy...
OK, so if I run that on my email inbox, I guess it'll tell me I have some long-running business relationships with penis enlargement companies, herbal viagra distributors, and various shady people in Nigeria...
If a tool like this is intended to be anywhere remotely useful, it would look at incoming and outgoing emails. Two people that have no two-way communication would, I imagine, be rather unconnected.
Finally, running this on the email inbox of a single person would be quite useless. You'd get a hub with spokes coming out. Whee. The real purpose of something like this is when you can run it on a massive collection of everyone's email throughout an organization. At this point, it starts to become a bit of a privacy issue. I mean, people on Slashdot scream horribly when the FBI thinks about doing something like this, but the moment the local network admin (someone who I in general would far *less* rather have digging through my email, and who I personally feel has much less right to do so) starts running social analysis software, it's okay because it's "neat". Sigh.
Our economic models of free markets that show free markets always working for the consumer depend very much on the assumption that the consumer has perfect information about the product. The more you diverge from that, the less free markets tend to produce better products and services.
Delta was reporting less extreme but similar cases, Pan AM, Eastern, Piedmont, and lots of other airlines got shut down by greedy union workers and nationalization would help put an end to this.
Yeah. And companies that cave in to unions go out of business. Yay free market.
The problem, if anything, is the federal protection of unions. More federal intervention and our airlines would be like AmTrak, subsidized to hell. Then it costs a lot *and* you get to pay whether you ride or not.
Granted, smaller airlines are loving every minute of this since they don't have the same scontracts and don't have that kind of overhead
Maybe smaller airlines are the ones that should be running around. No huge margins, no massive overhead.
but we need to shore up the jobs already in existence to prevent the current recession from getting any worse.
That's ridiculous. The money to do so comes from *somewhere*. You want to tax someone else and reduce their spending power?
You've confused keeping people in jobs with what the Feds love doing -- convince people to spend some of their savings, and the economy goes up short term. Looks wonderful, at least in the short run. Long term, you improve efficiency and technology to improve the economy. Keeping a small segment of the population stuffed in jobs doesn't do much for anyone.
Look at what the mostly non-college educated members of the longshoreman's union did out in the West Coast with their union: they make well over $100k/year and nearly choked stores for good over Christmas
Really? I'd love to see a link showing where these longshoremen, a manual labor job if there ever was one, are making "well over $100k/year".
If this happens to airlines, businesses would take a serious hit from the inability to travel.
Sure. If the smaller, regional airlines weren't there to have a field day and take all their customers if the big ones really *did* go down.
The CDC looks for similar stuff like this -- spikes in reported illnesses, blah, blah, blah.
The way they really have any idea what's going on is massive correllation of many databases. School absenteeism jumps in an area combined with a local increase in NyQuil purchases or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, conversely:
Why do so many tech guys not get the world doesn't run on tech alone? Business need to have a good business reason to move to OSS.
Why do so many business guys not get the world doesn't function the way vendor promises say it does? Businesses need to have a good reason to stick with something that they're getting shafted on.
Not that I don't think OSS is overhyped right now, but I see the problem being more using overpriced propritary crap than using too much open source software.
No, this is not being done to allow production of compatible *computers*, just compatible peripherals. Apple has always done this for all their computers. Why is this news?
They randomly screwed up and sent my younger sister a year subscription, despite me protesting that she had never signed up. I flipped through a couple of them. Granted, PC World is pretty full of holes and inaccuracies, but AFAI could tell, it's aimed at the home market, not execs.
Now, Forbes is another story...
The magazine and the article itself are intended for executives, so the technical aspect is at a beginners level."
Why is it that the people making sweeping technology choices at companies don't understand the technology?
Letting the customers control the bits is the only long-term stable solution.
Maybe, but the question of whether the cost in lost sales will be higher because of the growing closeness in services to what illegal P2P services provide than the gain in sales because of improved appeal is not a settled question, which is what I have a problem with people assuming.
As for the consumer controlling the bits -- I tend to agree that it's very difficult in the long term to do so at all, but I would have though the same about, say, sheet music and books, yet they managed to be reasonably controlled.
This may be the funniest thing I've seen in months.
The music industry is people too, and they "want it", just in this case something different: DRM.
The music industry would love nothing better than to not have to deal with DRM. The music industry wants to make money. The only reason they flirt with DRM is because people fail to pay if they can pirate.
The irony is music was a public good until the entertainment industry used technology to make it a commodity
No, I disagree. Sheet music or phonograph records are at *least* as much of a commodity as a CD-ROM.
You mean before international IP agreements existed? Sure, and that's where the phrase "starving artist" came from. People regularly stole stuff and screwed the artist over.
Allowing such a trivial, disposal industry to set global guidelines on storage capacities and data transfers borders on comical.
What, precisely, are you referring to? I don't seem to recall the RIAA complaining about the size of my hard drive...
Looked at dispassionately, it's probably the Chinese music industry which strikes the right balance and Hollywood's obscene excess that's out of whack.
And yet how much music originating in China do you listen to versus how much from the United States?
Tell me, honestly, would you eat there?
I'm going to ignore arguments about whether the metaphor is accurate, and point to a real world example -- people buy music. They're willing to do so. Zillions of CDs are sold each year. They may prefer to simply download and hand around music, but if the providing company can't make money from doing so, it's not going provide this as a service.
Actually, all any commercial company does is attempt to find out what people want, and provide it to them.
No, it attempts to leverage that to make itself money. Usually, that *does* involve giving them what they want. If what people want involves an impractical business model for the company, though, the business will not provide the product or service -- the case here.
Let me rephrase. What percentage of the music that you listen to originates in China, and what percentage in the United States?
I meant in quality -- from a few comments here, it doesn't seem that ATRAC3 is nearly as technically good as vorbis.
I think the proper course of action is to find a hole in the webserver, plop an actual P2P server on it, and then send lots of bogus complaints about workstations in.
Yup. The Slashdot article is here, and links to the actual article.
Anyone know whether this is remotely competitive with ogg vorbis? I really don't see it as likely, but one never knows...
The record companies never learn. People want portable music. People want to choose which songs to listen to, instead of carrying an entire CD with 80% crap. So, of course, the industry will try and destroy it. If the record companies were to allow, nay, even financially support this kind of work, they would make much more of that green stuff they so desperately desire. Stop living in the dark ages, damnit...
Lots of people might want to have massive orgies, too. If you can look at only the upsides of something, and not the consequences, lots of things can come off as quite attractive.
I don't know how the numbers wind up. I don't know whether it's actually the case that record companies supporting this would be good or bad for them. However, I do know that saying that CD companies would make money doing something just because people want it doesn't mean that it's a good idea, if it puts people in a game-theoretic position where music is a public good -- and stealing it is better for any individual, though it screws everyone over long run.
So you can't claim that "people want it" is a good reason for a company to do something (particularly as people don't have perfect information, and tend to be short-sighted about the consequences of this). Think about the article that was run on Slashdot a while ago about what happened to the Chinese music industry because of mass piracy. It's not dead, no, but it's nowhere near as productive as the US industry, either.
Heck, if people didn't want to do things that were stupid ideas, you wouldn't see people doping up.
I seem to remember software breaking when the extra eight bits were used, and Apple having a "32 bit clean" flag in the Memory control panel to kick the system into compatibility mode.
I just keep thinking of hard drives and all their backwards compatibility issues...
I'd say start charging after ten years. $1, and keep doubling each year.
After 25 years or so, most unprofitable copyrights wouldn't be worth keeping around, as the fee would be $32k. After 40 years or so, even the biggest companies would have to start giving up copyrights.
The Internet under attack from the state governments, and the Direct Marketing Association riding to its rescue?
Yeesh.
need qualified systems analysts to drive these decisions.
I'd say they need not only qualified system analysis, but qualified *unbiased* system analysis, which is an even harder problem.
There would also ideally be bans on the kind of relationships that existed in places like the Oracle/California debacle, where the analyst has a relationship with the vendor whose software is a candidate for recommendation. Of course, the logistics of how to "ban" something like this would be pretty hairy...
OK, so if I run that on my email inbox, I guess it'll tell me I have some long-running business relationships with penis enlargement companies, herbal viagra distributors, and various shady people in Nigeria...
If a tool like this is intended to be anywhere remotely useful, it would look at incoming and outgoing emails. Two people that have no two-way communication would, I imagine, be rather unconnected.
Finally, running this on the email inbox of a single person would be quite useless. You'd get a hub with spokes coming out. Whee. The real purpose of something like this is when you can run it on a massive collection of everyone's email throughout an organization. At this point, it starts to become a bit of a privacy issue. I mean, people on Slashdot scream horribly when the FBI thinks about doing something like this, but the moment the local network admin (someone who I in general would far *less* rather have digging through my email, and who I personally feel has much less right to do so) starts running social analysis software, it's okay because it's "neat". Sigh.
You can get the same RedHat minus the Orcale and clustering from any of RedHat's mirrors, just without support, and only a year of updates
Admittedly, I bought RH way back in the day, but I've downloaded it now, and I just download updates whenever I want.
And I use yum instead of the icky up2date or the better but still not ideal apt-get.
I'm working at three companies...
:-)
One of them wouldn't be Mandrakesoft, would it?
Very well said.
Our economic models of free markets that show free markets always working for the consumer depend very much on the assumption that the consumer has perfect information about the product. The more you diverge from that, the less free markets tend to produce better products and services.
Delta was reporting less extreme but similar cases, Pan AM, Eastern, Piedmont, and lots of other airlines got shut down by greedy union workers and nationalization would help put an end to this.
/year and nearly choked stores for good over Christmas
Yeah. And companies that cave in to unions go out of business. Yay free market.
The problem, if anything, is the federal protection of unions. More federal intervention and our airlines would be like AmTrak, subsidized to hell. Then it costs a lot *and* you get to pay whether you ride or not.
Granted, smaller airlines are loving every minute of this since they don't have the same scontracts and don't have that kind of overhead
Maybe smaller airlines are the ones that should be running around. No huge margins, no massive overhead.
but we need to shore up the jobs already in existence to prevent the current recession from getting any worse.
That's ridiculous. The money to do so comes from *somewhere*. You want to tax someone else and reduce their spending power?
You've confused keeping people in jobs with what the Feds love doing -- convince people to spend some of their savings, and the economy goes up short term. Looks wonderful, at least in the short run. Long term, you improve efficiency and technology to improve the economy. Keeping a small segment of the population stuffed in jobs doesn't do much for anyone.
Look at what the mostly non-college educated members of the longshoreman's union did out in the West Coast with their union: they make well over $100k
Really? I'd love to see a link showing where these longshoremen, a manual labor job if there ever was one, are making "well over $100k/year".
If this happens to airlines, businesses would take a serious hit from the inability to travel.
Sure. If the smaller, regional airlines weren't there to have a field day and take all their customers if the big ones really *did* go down.
The CDC looks for similar stuff like this -- spikes in reported illnesses, blah, blah, blah.
The way they really have any idea what's going on is massive correllation of many databases. School absenteeism jumps in an area combined with a local increase in NyQuil purchases or something like that.