Parent post is a troll? That's disappointing. Granted, it's not the most apples to apples rebuttal, he does bring up a point that simply telling one to ingore the content they don't want to read is unreasonable. If you're annoyed by the SCO stuff, then you can't help but see SCO SCO SCO SCO SCO all over the place.
I think what NG was trying to say was that if somebody was following you around calling you names, the persistance of it would start to annoy you. The last thing you'd want to hear is "simply ignore them".
Again, not exactly an equal comparison, but I can certainly understand NG's response to somebody saying "don't read it" and getting a +5 for it.
" 1. Created the first OS? Far from it. Not much of an innovation. 2. Created the first GUI? Also not true, the Apple Lisa was the first true"
Microsoft has never made this claim. What they did do, though, was combine a GUI with off the shelf hardware and make an OS that a wider market of people can use. Sort of like what Apple did, only you didn't need to buy AppleTM hardware.
"Microsoft's innovations are limited to trying something someone else does, and hoping it works."
Close. Microsoft made it work, or at least made it work 'satisfactorally'. Windows 95 was painful to use in many ways, but it was still much much better than dos. You can't credit another OS with fulfilling that on PC hardware until Linux came along. Even now, it's still playing catch up to MS in certain respects.
"If you have to choose between paying $15 for a CD or waiting 20 minutes to download from kazaa... what are you going to pick?"
Albums do not come down reliably, especially in 15 minutes. However, one day that'll all get sorted out, so I'll accept that argument.
Yes, that'll happen sometimes. (Can't really happen today, not on a large scale.) However, this is a major fuckup on the RIAA's part. They should be providing this service. $10 and you can download the whole album in a minute the moment its released. P2P will always be a fraction of what a webserver can do. If you really like the band, you'll put the money down.
The RIAA has put themselves in that position. They've had YEARS to put up a pay service that's better than P2P trading, and they still ignore it, instead changing the laws so that people have to buy their old CDs to listen to music.
Sorry to bring this up, but 'free' isn't everything.
I just watched LOTR 2 last night. There's a scene in it where a child must pick up a sword to defend himself. This is fiction, but from what I understand from history there were times on this planet where kids did have to worry for their lives. Did they have incidents like these?
I remember when Doom was blamed for Columbine. I read the journal that got that line of thought going. Nope, it didn't cause it. It was an outlet for them. To be perfectly frank, I think if those kids had played more Doom, then more of their anger would have melted away. Who knows? Enough activities like that (laser tag?) might have prevented them from carrying it out.
It's really hard for me to accept that video games cause violence while I and many others were raised on them. I've never raised my fists in anger. My friends and I never started fights. Never did the "stand toe to toe with you because I'm a bad dude" maneuver. None of us live in rage or anger.
As interested as we were in these games, you'd think we'd have been anything like those kids that shot up Columbine. None of us even had an interest in guns.
" We can always go somewhere else for our music--but if we take what they're selling, we should still pay for it."
Um, no. You don't get the same thing. You get an alternative. A very different alternative. A 'sorry this doesn't suit me' alternative.
We're not talking about burgers here, we're talking about individualistic content. Just because you have alternatives doesn't mean they should be allowed to get away with price fixing.
"Whether you agree with them or not, the RIAA has determined that file "sharing"(stealing/copyright infringement) has negatively impacted their "industry"(ripping off artists and preventing others from competing, or even distributing, fairly). You have to admit, they have some compelling evidence that justifies their claim. "
I see compelling evidence that the the RIAA's loss in sales are a direct result off their own actions.
1.) They don't respond to supply and demand. Thus customers are no longer getting what they want.
2.) By attacking Mp3s, they've made people start floating the word boycott around. Two early examples immediately pop into mind. "By downloading Mp3s, you're downloading communism". And Eisner's attack on Apple for their rip/mix/and burn campaign, claiming it was all about piracy, thus naming Apple customers as thieves.
3.) Downloading music != loss in music sales. There's no accurate way to say that music sales were lost due to downloading, only anecdotal evidence at best. Yet, while people were downloading music, they were exploring new bands to get involved with. Since the RIAA attacked this so heavy-handedly causing people to boycott them, we'll never know if they would have ended up ahead or not.
I won't ignore the idea that there are people who were downloading Mp3s so they didn't have to buy the albums. But consider this, though, what about the 56k days? It was not convenient to download a single album. A single MP3 could take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to download. A whole album? Oh my. No. Somebody doing that was either can't pay the rent broke, or they only wanted one song from that album. Thanks to the RIAA's oligopoly/monpoly/cartel, you can't go buy that one song. So, you get to pay $17.99 for that song you hear for free on the radio all the time.
Yeah, I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from you. I can't imagine that with the what, 2 billion songs getting traded every month, that the RIAA would only see a few percentage points of a drop in sales. Frankly, I think most of that dip in sales has more to do with people saying 'screw you, its not worth it' than people saying 'oh I can save money by downloading these.' I believe that if the RIAA hadn't pulled these stunts, the music trading would have made the music scene far more active and interesting to people. There'd be some getting music without paying, but there'd be a lot more who were waiting in line for their favorite band's next release.
A few months ago, there was an article on Slashdot about Magna comics in Japan. Lots of people were doing fan-fics that would technically qualify as trademark/copyright infringement. They'd have these conventions where they'd sell them to each other etc. Here in the USA, they'd be shot down in no time. But over in Japan, the comic book companies love this 'infringment' because it keeps rejuvinated interest in their content, compltely free of expense to them!
So no, I cannot determine that file-sharing has had an impact on the RIAA. They drove people away when they could have attracted them.
" And this is the power of this type of advertising - you don't bore people with facts, rather, you make them both interested and extremely curious and wanting to know more."
I just don't think it'll accomplish that. Frankly, it sounds like some new dot-com startup. They should have done something more like Apple did with the 1984 commercial. At the end say "Today there's an Operating System alternative that will truely make you free", or some other nauseating marketing line.
It's not interesting if they haven't the faintest idea what it's about. It sounds like another stupid little batch of wallet evacuating empty promises.
Then you're stuck with the bill. That 'fix' protects the individual and not the guy who provides the service. Who'd want to be stuck holding that stick of dynamite?
.. is the RIAA would sue whoever pays the bills, and that person would look over the router logs and sue who got him sued.
Sorry, this won't work. The best way I can think of right now to twhart the RIAA is to force people to upload if they're downloading. That way, the RIAA has to provide its own content in order to find ppl doing it.
Well that's not the greatest way ever, but it would be damned amusing.
"No kidding. I'd put that on par with the Apple 1984 commercial. That's not just a good commercial, it's a good short film."
Only if you already know what the commercial's talking about. Apple's ad was much better in the sense that it got you hyped about something you haven't seen before. IBM's ad gets you hyped about something you already love.
"This isn't the 1950s. Big businesses use commercials nowadays to build brands, not sell products. Consider the most well-known commercials, like Apple's "1984" ad and Coca-Cola's "Mean Joe Green" spot from the '70s. Memorable campaigns don't drill product data into your head."
Apple's 1984 ad said "we're introducing a computer."
Mean Joe Green's ad showed you an athlete drinking a bottle of coke.
IBM's ad showed you a kid getting babbled at and... well... that's about it.
Your examples are great ads, but even they were smart enough to at least let you know what it was they wanted you to buy. IBM's ad just doesn't mean anything to the uninformed.
"Or they could patch their fucking systems. Really fucking pisses me off that I was without the network for four days because of all the dumbasses with their pirated copies of xp can't update their shit."
Get used to it. When you graduate and get out into the real world, you'll find all kinds of cases where ignorant people have sucked the fun out of some aspects of life. You can complain about it or just get used to it now and learn patience. 4 days of no connectivity = excuse to pursue other interests.
"No really, can you imagine explaining it in an hour, let alone 30 seconds?"
So they should say nothing? They can't say "It's an alternative to Windows."? They can't say "It's Free."? They can't say "It's more reliable."? They can't say "It's a community effort not held by one monopolistic corporation."?
Sorry, but your answer's not good enough for me. My dad gets on the net and fiddles with Windows all the time. (He always has problems with it too.) I can't imagine him watching this commercial and giving a rat's ass about Linux. Anecdotal I realize, but I can't imagine this appealing to anybody but those who are already informed.
"I found navigating it was awkward and non-intuitive. It just reeked of "desktop computer" crammed into the PDA."
I had similar problems with the first Linux based Zaurus. So many things broken with it. I will say, though, that the idea of doing some scripting etc with it was pretty interesting. That's one thing that drove me nuts about my PocketPC. I want to write little apps for it but the dev environment kept crashing.
"Well, it might at least make inroads toward legitimizing Linux in the eyes of PHBs who've heard of it, but just don't trust it."
That's certainly a possibility, and I do hope you're right. I'm just concerned that this particular commercial is really only interesting to the people who already know all about Linux. The commercials they did a while back with server racks using Linux did a much better job of making it interesting to PHBs.
" This is a great move by IBM, just to get the mindset to the masses."
It ain't that great. The ad doesn't even say what Linux is.
Call me cynical but an 'ad' that doesn't tell you what it's advertising isn't an ad. The people who already know about Linux are the only ones who are going to get anything from it.
(Note: I'd agree with your point if simply the commercial was better at getting the idea across.)
"My god, man. If "Everybody Loves Raymond" (lies! The title is a LIE! I hate that fucking show) can go on for how long now?, then Firefly deserves a run at least as long as Buffy."
The difference between Everybody Loves Raymond and Firefly is the cost of producing. Firefly probably had an expensive budget for all the sets costumes etc, but Raymond is what, a couple of hack actors and a redress of the Married with Children set?
"...don't start suing the crap out of your largest group of customers (college / high school students) and then expect sales to go up."
Unfortunately, the RIAA's causing events to happen in their favor. They start suing customers, customers start boycotting them, RIAA blames Kazaa for slipped sales.
I've said all along that a boycott will not help, and this article substantiates that thought. You all wanna send a message to the RIAA? Buy a CD and then return it.
"Sorry, the best you can say is near VHS quality. And I don't even agree with that. A fresh, first generation tape in a good machine blows 320x240 away any day. "
Actually if you run 320 by 240 video, even compressed, to a TV it is hard to tell the difference. I used to have a setup like this at home.
"20 minutes to download and burn will always be cheaper than paying full retail."
Somehow I doubt pirates are updloading at 3 megabits a second.
This is such a tired argument. Price doesn't mean everything. If that were true, who'd pay $3.50 for a 21 oz latte? Service and quality are things people pay for too. $10 to download a dreamcast ISO legitimately in 30 minutes is a better deal than 24 hours to maybe download an illegit.ISO that may or may not work.
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Parent post is a troll? That's disappointing. Granted, it's not the most apples to apples rebuttal, he does bring up a point that simply telling one to ingore the content they don't want to read is unreasonable. If you're annoyed by the SCO stuff, then you can't help but see SCO SCO SCO SCO SCO all over the place.
I think what NG was trying to say was that if somebody was following you around calling you names, the persistance of it would start to annoy you. The last thing you'd want to hear is "simply ignore them".
Again, not exactly an equal comparison, but I can certainly understand NG's response to somebody saying "don't read it" and getting a +5 for it.
... because I don't think I would have clicked on an article called "The Innovator's Balls".
"Hmmm, steal someone else's ideas and pawn them off as original. Sounds like Microsoft to me!"
If it's as simple as that, then how come the original didn't enjoy success? How did MS edge ahead?
" 1. Created the first OS? Far from it. Not much of an innovation. 2. Created the first GUI? Also not true, the Apple Lisa was the first true"
Microsoft has never made this claim. What they did do, though, was combine a GUI with off the shelf hardware and make an OS that a wider market of people can use. Sort of like what Apple did, only you didn't need to buy AppleTM hardware.
"Microsoft's innovations are limited to trying something someone else does, and hoping it works."
Close. Microsoft made it work, or at least made it work 'satisfactorally'. Windows 95 was painful to use in many ways, but it was still much much better than dos. You can't credit another OS with fulfilling that on PC hardware until Linux came along. Even now, it's still playing catch up to MS in certain respects.
"If you have to choose between paying $15 for a CD or waiting 20 minutes to download from kazaa... what are you going to pick?"
Albums do not come down reliably, especially in 15 minutes. However, one day that'll all get sorted out, so I'll accept that argument.
Yes, that'll happen sometimes. (Can't really happen today, not on a large scale.) However, this is a major fuckup on the RIAA's part. They should be providing this service. $10 and you can download the whole album in a minute the moment its released. P2P will always be a fraction of what a webserver can do. If you really like the band, you'll put the money down.
The RIAA has put themselves in that position. They've had YEARS to put up a pay service that's better than P2P trading, and they still ignore it, instead changing the laws so that people have to buy their old CDs to listen to music.
Sorry to bring this up, but 'free' isn't everything.
I just watched LOTR 2 last night. There's a scene in it where a child must pick up a sword to defend himself. This is fiction, but from what I understand from history there were times on this planet where kids did have to worry for their lives. Did they have incidents like these?
I remember when Doom was blamed for Columbine. I read the journal that got that line of thought going. Nope, it didn't cause it. It was an outlet for them. To be perfectly frank, I think if those kids had played more Doom, then more of their anger would have melted away. Who knows? Enough activities like that (laser tag?) might have prevented them from carrying it out.
It's really hard for me to accept that video games cause violence while I and many others were raised on them. I've never raised my fists in anger. My friends and I never started fights. Never did the "stand toe to toe with you because I'm a bad dude" maneuver. None of us live in rage or anger.
As interested as we were in these games, you'd think we'd have been anything like those kids that shot up Columbine. None of us even had an interest in guns.
" We can always go somewhere else for our music--but if we take what they're selling, we should still pay for it."
Um, no. You don't get the same thing. You get an alternative. A very different alternative. A 'sorry this doesn't suit me' alternative.
We're not talking about burgers here, we're talking about individualistic content. Just because you have alternatives doesn't mean they should be allowed to get away with price fixing.
"Fsck off and Die."
Wait a sec. Should he die if the file system is in tact, or if it's damaged? Clarify?
"Whether you agree with them or not, the RIAA has determined that file "sharing"(stealing/copyright infringement) has negatively impacted their "industry"(ripping off artists and preventing others from competing, or even distributing, fairly). You have to admit, they have some compelling evidence that justifies their claim. "
I see compelling evidence that the the RIAA's loss in sales are a direct result off their own actions.
1.) They don't respond to supply and demand. Thus customers are no longer getting what they want.
2.) By attacking Mp3s, they've made people start floating the word boycott around. Two early examples immediately pop into mind. "By downloading Mp3s, you're downloading communism". And Eisner's attack on Apple for their rip/mix/and burn campaign, claiming it was all about piracy, thus naming Apple customers as thieves.
3.) Downloading music != loss in music sales. There's no accurate way to say that music sales were lost due to downloading, only anecdotal evidence at best. Yet, while people were downloading music, they were exploring new bands to get involved with. Since the RIAA attacked this so heavy-handedly causing people to boycott them, we'll never know if they would have ended up ahead or not.
I won't ignore the idea that there are people who were downloading Mp3s so they didn't have to buy the albums. But consider this, though, what about the 56k days? It was not convenient to download a single album. A single MP3 could take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to download. A whole album? Oh my. No. Somebody doing that was either can't pay the rent broke, or they only wanted one song from that album. Thanks to the RIAA's oligopoly/monpoly/cartel, you can't go buy that one song. So, you get to pay $17.99 for that song you hear for free on the radio all the time.
Yeah, I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from you. I can't imagine that with the what, 2 billion songs getting traded every month, that the RIAA would only see a few percentage points of a drop in sales. Frankly, I think most of that dip in sales has more to do with people saying 'screw you, its not worth it' than people saying 'oh I can save money by downloading these.' I believe that if the RIAA hadn't pulled these stunts, the music trading would have made the music scene far more active and interesting to people. There'd be some getting music without paying, but there'd be a lot more who were waiting in line for their favorite band's next release.
A few months ago, there was an article on Slashdot about Magna comics in Japan. Lots of people were doing fan-fics that would technically qualify as trademark/copyright infringement. They'd have these conventions where they'd sell them to each other etc. Here in the USA, they'd be shot down in no time. But over in Japan, the comic book companies love this 'infringment' because it keeps rejuvinated interest in their content, compltely free of expense to them!
So no, I cannot determine that file-sharing has had an impact on the RIAA. They drove people away when they could have attracted them.
" And this is the power of this type of advertising - you don't bore people with facts, rather, you make them both interested and extremely curious and wanting to know more."
I just don't think it'll accomplish that. Frankly, it sounds like some new dot-com startup. They should have done something more like Apple did with the 1984 commercial. At the end say "Today there's an Operating System alternative that will truely make you free", or some other nauseating marketing line.
It's not interesting if they haven't the faintest idea what it's about. It sounds like another stupid little batch of wallet evacuating empty promises.
Then you're stuck with the bill. That 'fix' protects the individual and not the guy who provides the service. Who'd want to be stuck holding that stick of dynamite?
.. is the RIAA would sue whoever pays the bills, and that person would look over the router logs and sue who got him sued.
Sorry, this won't work. The best way I can think of right now to twhart the RIAA is to force people to upload if they're downloading. That way, the RIAA has to provide its own content in order to find ppl doing it.
Well that's not the greatest way ever, but it would be damned amusing.
"No kidding. I'd put that on par with the Apple 1984 commercial. That's not just a good commercial, it's a good short film."
Only if you already know what the commercial's talking about. Apple's ad was much better in the sense that it got you hyped about something you haven't seen before. IBM's ad gets you hyped about something you already love.
"This isn't the 1950s. Big businesses use commercials nowadays to build brands, not sell products. Consider the most well-known commercials, like Apple's "1984" ad and Coca-Cola's "Mean Joe Green" spot from the '70s. Memorable campaigns don't drill product data into your head."
Apple's 1984 ad said "we're introducing a computer."
Mean Joe Green's ad showed you an athlete drinking a bottle of coke.
IBM's ad showed you a kid getting babbled at and... well... that's about it.
Your examples are great ads, but even they were smart enough to at least let you know what it was they wanted you to buy. IBM's ad just doesn't mean anything to the uninformed.
"Or they could patch their fucking systems. Really fucking pisses me off that I was without the network for four days because of all the dumbasses with their pirated copies of xp can't update their shit."
Get used to it. When you graduate and get out into the real world, you'll find all kinds of cases where ignorant people have sucked the fun out of some aspects of life. You can complain about it or just get used to it now and learn patience. 4 days of no connectivity = excuse to pursue other interests.
"No really, can you imagine explaining it in an hour, let alone 30 seconds?"
So they should say nothing? They can't say "It's an alternative to Windows."? They can't say "It's Free."? They can't say "It's more reliable."? They can't say "It's a community effort not held by one monopolistic corporation."?
Sorry, but your answer's not good enough for me. My dad gets on the net and fiddles with Windows all the time. (He always has problems with it too.) I can't imagine him watching this commercial and giving a rat's ass about Linux. Anecdotal I realize, but I can't imagine this appealing to anybody but those who are already informed.
"I found navigating it was awkward and non-intuitive. It just reeked of "desktop computer" crammed into the PDA."
I had similar problems with the first Linux based Zaurus. So many things broken with it. I will say, though, that the idea of doing some scripting etc with it was pretty interesting. That's one thing that drove me nuts about my PocketPC. I want to write little apps for it but the dev environment kept crashing.
"Well, it might at least make inroads toward legitimizing Linux in the eyes of PHBs who've heard of it, but just don't trust it."
That's certainly a possibility, and I do hope you're right. I'm just concerned that this particular commercial is really only interesting to the people who already know all about Linux. The commercials they did a while back with server racks using Linux did a much better job of making it interesting to PHBs.
... why'd that kid's parents name him Linux?
" This is a great move by IBM, just to get the mindset to the masses."
It ain't that great. The ad doesn't even say what Linux is.
Call me cynical but an 'ad' that doesn't tell you what it's advertising isn't an ad. The people who already know about Linux are the only ones who are going to get anything from it.
(Note: I'd agree with your point if simply the commercial was better at getting the idea across.)
"My god, man. If "Everybody Loves Raymond" (lies! The title is a LIE! I hate that fucking show) can go on for how long now?, then Firefly deserves a run at least as long as Buffy."
The difference between Everybody Loves Raymond and Firefly is the cost of producing. Firefly probably had an expensive budget for all the sets costumes etc, but Raymond is what, a couple of hack actors and a redress of the Married with Children set?
"If it's crappy music, why are people downloading it?"
Music store = new music. (mostly)
P2P = all music ever made. (mostly)
If I'm downloading music, I'm not necessarily downloading the latest hits.
"...don't start suing the crap out of your largest group of customers (college / high school students) and then expect sales to go up."
Unfortunately, the RIAA's causing events to happen in their favor. They start suing customers, customers start boycotting them, RIAA blames Kazaa for slipped sales.
I've said all along that a boycott will not help, and this article substantiates that thought. You all wanna send a message to the RIAA? Buy a CD and then return it.
"Sorry, the best you can say is near VHS quality. And I don't even agree with that. A fresh, first generation tape in a good machine blows 320x240 away any day. "
Actually if you run 320 by 240 video, even compressed, to a TV it is hard to tell the difference. I used to have a setup like this at home.
"20 minutes to download and burn will always be cheaper than paying full retail."
.ISO that may or may not work.
Somehow I doubt pirates are updloading at 3 megabits a second.
This is such a tired argument. Price doesn't mean everything. If that were true, who'd pay $3.50 for a 21 oz latte? Service and quality are things people pay for too. $10 to download a dreamcast ISO legitimately in 30 minutes is a better deal than 24 hours to maybe download an illegit