"...the president set in his first months in office after he pulled out of a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
I agree with him in one aspect of this, in that we'd be stupid to sign Kyoto and become involved in making transfer payments to other nations because we polute more than they do. Better to simply vow to reduce our own CO2 emissions, and spend the dollars here doing so.
"Are these big companies with thousands of users? Because that's where the market is..."
No, but there are thousands of companies with dozens to hundreds of users. And that, my dear sir, is a market of equal size.
Your comment really illustrates my biggest problem with Linux folk. Point out an issue and they'll do a song and dance about how that issue really isn't an issue because no one who's "intelligent" really needs to do it that way anyway.
Can't print to your printer? Well who'd want to! And besides, it's not our problem, go talk to the printer people, or buy another printer, or write your own damn driver.
Now go away. I'm adding 50 more Yiddish translation functions to PHP....
"...but you are assuming that most people search google for online products or services (in that case you are right)."
Perhaps, but I could easily see a scenario where, say, the New York Times pays for better placement for its articles, thus increasing traffic to the NYT site.
Google could also design the system such that you could go into your preferences and turn off paid placements, should you want a purely 'natural' search. Then again, as I pointed out earlier, placements 'might' actually pull up desired content out of the muck.
They could also give newer sites a weapon to use against the more established, entrenched sites sitting in the middle of a web of moldy links...
"... that in the majority of cases is irrelevant to your search."
I'm not sure this assumption is warrented. First, the advertiser thinks it's relevant, and they're putting their money where their mouth is. Second, it's highly likely that a paid product or service is more relevant to my search than, say, Fred's Families' Home Page.
Third, if it worked like, say, AdWords, then irrelevant placements would get modded down over time as users failed to click on them. Yes, you can pay more to get higher ranking, but that process tends to be self-correcting. How many dollars are you going to waste paying for a placement that doens't perform?
Fourth, any such system would probably, at least from my standpoint, would just be another factor that combines to give you a boost in relevance. So while you may place higher, your site, page, content, keywords, title, etc., would still need to actually be relevant to the query at hand.
All that said, however, I'm not sure that such a system fulfills a genuine need. After all, you can already use paid AdWords to get a prominent place on the page...
I agree, we'd be stupid to sign Kyoto and become involved in making transfer payments to other nations because we polute more than they do. Better to simply vow to reduce our own CO2 emissions, and spend the dollars here doing so.
You just said "Commercials and conventional advertising is going to die." Now, the advertising people are paying for their content to be Tivo skipped. Which is it?
Oh, I get it. In Serenity II they stop at a space station to fill up on Pepsi, and Mal discusses at length the advantages of the new 5,000 blade disposable Gillette. On CSI they discuss at length why all of their analysis equipment is running Windows Vista. Whereas in the next Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow stops at a... ah... heck. No tie-in's, no movie I guess.
And that's worth free?
Sorry, but I'll vote with my dollars, as I've always done, and reward those who create entertainment WORTH paying for...
concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders' computers
Because in most cases people have ripped their existing CD collections to disk. Better question to ask is what percentage of their current playlist is P2P? And I agree with some of the other comments here, in that if I thought that a third of the people out there were ripping me off, I'd freak too.
that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic
In other words, the people with the most interest in music do both. Surprise, surprise.
reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services
Agree here. Though while decent content is an issue, I also think that other entertainment options (games, dvds) have an impact, as well as reduced salaries, rising gas and oil prices, and other economic factors leading to less disposible income.
In the long run, content is going to be paid. Why? Because the people who make music and movies and write books have to eat. Because all of them require significant upfront investments in time and energy and money. Because for most of them selling t-shirts at personal performances doesn't pay the rent.
A "Firefly" episode cost a million dollars a pop to make. Serenity $45 million. If you're not going to pay for it, and you don't want advertising, then who will pay for it? Or are you saying that you want "your" content to be free, and that everyone else should subsidize you?
Or that we should do without, and hope that enough people playing around with $500 video cameras and Final Cut will fill up all of that screen and air time with something worth watching? When they're not working at Walmart, that is.
Or that we should return to the days of patronage, where our best and brightest writers, singers, directors, and actors spend most of their days running around, hat in hand, begging for handouts from the rich?
You may be right, however, in that "eventually" content will be free... of course, by that time food, clothing, medicine, housing, and transportation will be free as well.
"In contrast, proprietary software would be a failure because it does not stand the test of time... as opposed to open source which continues living and growing."
Ah. Of course. That explains the tens of thousands of living and growing and... abandoned projects on SourceForge.
Sorry, but the same "market" forces apply to both OS (open) and CS (closed-source) software. People no longer buy (CS), or download (OS), they find it no longer serves a need, or it becomes "feature-complete" and new versions are no longer needed, or it becomes obsolete, or they simply find alternatives.
In CS, the company can fold. In OS, the lead developer(s) can leave or stop working on a project. Both can fold due to internal problems, bickering, strife, or lack of direction. If this happens to a popular OS project, it may attract new developers, or be picked up later on. Conversely, a "popular" CS project can afford to hire new developers, or it may be aquired by another company.
But ultimately, both die from the same cause: Lack of interest.
"They keep a massive amount of data, and not particularly because they are concerned about your data recovery needs, but because the massive amount of data that they can collect and associate with you allows them to better design targeted marketing (ads) directly to you. "
I suspect that's being just a little parnoid. If I were them, I'd have a good backup system simply to ensure I didn't have a PR nightmare when a server went down and millions of people lost their email.
"This article is so slanted, it's positively perpendicular."
And so you decided that we need the opposite slant? Or are you saying customers need to be able to buy Windows software with loggers and viruses pre-installed, or that they're demanding software that can't be upgraded and patched?
If some guy is trying to sell me "new" "never-out-of-the-box" software that's not, he deserves to be caught and punished. Infected and pirated software, doubly so.
"If you play enough, you will ALWAYS lose exactly the percentage they say you will lose. "Gambling" is a tax on those who don't understand the mathematics of statistics."
While the odds on a game like blackjack or roulette are biased in favor of the house (usually the best you can do in BJ is 49%/51%), online games like Texas Hold'em are in fact "gambling". Unlike the other games where the odds are manipulated in the house's favor, in poker the house simply takes a rake (small percentage of each pot), or a fixed percentage of the buy-in, or a fixed ante during the game.
Poker is not simply a game of statistics, but strategy, tactics, skill, psychology, and observation. Play a great player and a bad player in enough games, and the great player will nearly always dominate the poorer one. Or in other words, both players will not, over time, statistically lose the same number (or fixed percentage) of games.
So you think the federal government should be able, at any time, to ask any business to drop what they're doing and provide them with whatever information they want, free of charge?
Personally, if allowed by the court this sounds as if it could be another way for the government to punish "uncooperative" businesses and industries by burying them under a deluge of information "requests".
First, Apple would close iTMS in France because its contracts require it to distribute music with FairPlay. Second, saying it's illegal to redistribute is one thing. Enforcement is something else entirely.
Personally, given its past pattern of behavior, I suspect that the French government is doing this not "for the consumer", but to drive Apple and iTMS and its foreign cultural influences out of France, opening the doorway for its own music and hardware industries.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the post. If management is refusing to fund new hardware, software, and services, then they're saddling up the posse and chasing after the wrong bad guy.
Your mention of quarterly reports is also a good one. Too many of the clueless think that their demands are somehow reality, not realizing that dollars have to come from somewhere.
Third, the question ignores their own responsibility. One question they should be asking is: What can we do to help? Or better, what can "I" do to help?
If half the people in the company are streaming music and torrents and downloading porn over the companies net, and storing those files and three years worth of (your favorite list) newsgroup lists in their email boxes, and opening every attachment that comes down the pike, then it's no wonder the system is hosed.
My iTMS songs will degrade in quality over time? Oh my!
First, CDs may have been "hyped" that way, but any intelligent person soon realized that you had to handle them with care as not to scratch them, not leave them in the car in direct sunlight, and so on.
Second, why are we always posing worst-case scenarios? Yes, it's "possible" that Apple will fold as a company tomorrow, though I doubt it. Personally, I think it's demostrated its hardiness as a company, and as such more likely to outlast me, making the question moot. It's also equally possible that even if Apple folds, they will have licensed FairPlay and/or the iTMS by that time anyway.
As to relicensing, don't count them out. They may, for example, look at all of the home theaters now out there with 5.1 surround sound, and decide the next "format" is ultra-high sampled 5-channel music that let's you hear the position of each singer and band member. Should it catch on, people will repurchase many of their favorite songs, much as they've done in the VHS to DVD transition.
Plus it's not very descriptive. Nor, for that matter, is the summary, which was pretty much a bunch of non-informative buzzwords. I did learn, however, that Ekiga supports h323/sip, whatever that is, and that there's an Ekiga forum/site that supports Ekiga, which, remember, supports h323/sip.
This must be the open-source answer to marketing-speak: "Ekiga, a world-class provider of world-class solutions to world-class problems, has..."
Another factor is "buy in", because once you've bought into the pod and iTMS, changing systems is a major PITA. Get a pod, get some music, get a bigger pod, get more music. Endless cycle. So once you've been pod'ed, you tend to stay pod'ed.
"And if company X goes out of buisness or just decides not to support that format anymore you may be unable to play those files ever again."
So true. In fact, just yesterday I was trying cram my vast collection of 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes, LPs, and cassettes into that thin little slot on the front of my car stereo. Not only did it not work, but now I need a new car stereo.
The point being, of course, that we bought into all of those different types of media knowing their limitations, and also knowing full well that they were not going to last forever. Same with everyone's favorite example, iTMS. I know the limitations, have yet to come close to hitting them, and always have the CD-burning "out" if need be.
As long as my notebook and mini run in their existing configuration, I can play my music. Should Apple look like it's about to die, I'll snap up a spare. Which is much as it it was with my turntable, reel-to-reel, and cassette player. My 8-track player, however, is dead, Jim....
He has a point. There's a quote that fundamentally says that a person will change only when the pain of things staying as they are becomes greater than the pain of making the change. So applied to business, when infringing software patents starts to cost companies more than they make from having them in the first place, then--and only then--will we begin to see reform.
The idea of "defensive" patents used soley for trading purposes works well... as long as the other company wants or needs to trade. When the other company is merely a patent shell (holding company) and simply wants dollars, then the level of "pain" begins to increase.
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I agree with him in one aspect of this, in that we'd be stupid to sign Kyoto and become involved in making transfer payments to other nations because we polute more than they do. Better to simply vow to reduce our own CO2 emissions, and spend the dollars here doing so.
Of course, we didn't do that, either.
The birth rate is below the replacement rate, i.e., negative.
No, but there are thousands of companies with dozens to hundreds of users. And that, my dear sir, is a market of equal size.
Your comment really illustrates my biggest problem with Linux folk. Point out an issue and they'll do a song and dance about how that issue really isn't an issue because no one who's "intelligent" really needs to do it that way anyway.
Can't print to your printer? Well who'd want to! And besides, it's not our problem, go talk to the printer people, or buy another printer, or write your own damn driver.
Now go away. I'm adding 50 more Yiddish translation functions to PHP....
Work has never been simply about time for money. It's about "work" for money. Employers don't just want your time, they want results.
Perhaps, but I could easily see a scenario where, say, the New York Times pays for better placement for its articles, thus increasing traffic to the NYT site.
Google could also design the system such that you could go into your preferences and turn off paid placements, should you want a purely 'natural' search. Then again, as I pointed out earlier, placements 'might' actually pull up desired content out of the muck.
They could also give newer sites a weapon to use against the more established, entrenched sites sitting in the middle of a web of moldy links...
I'm not sure this assumption is warrented. First, the advertiser thinks it's relevant, and they're putting their money where their mouth is. Second, it's highly likely that a paid product or service is more relevant to my search than, say, Fred's Families' Home Page.
Third, if it worked like, say, AdWords, then irrelevant placements would get modded down over time as users failed to click on them. Yes, you can pay more to get higher ranking, but that process tends to be self-correcting. How many dollars are you going to waste paying for a placement that doens't perform?
Fourth, any such system would probably, at least from my standpoint, would just be another factor that combines to give you a boost in relevance. So while you may place higher, your site, page, content, keywords, title, etc., would still need to actually be relevant to the query at hand.
All that said, however, I'm not sure that such a system fulfills a genuine need. After all, you can already use paid AdWords to get a prominent place on the page...
I agree, we'd be stupid to sign Kyoto and become involved in making transfer payments to other nations because we polute more than they do. Better to simply vow to reduce our own CO2 emissions, and spend the dollars here doing so.
Oh, I get it. In Serenity II they stop at a space station to fill up on Pepsi, and Mal discusses at length the advantages of the new 5,000 blade disposable Gillette. On CSI they discuss at length why all of their analysis equipment is running Windows Vista. Whereas in the next Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow stops at a... ah... heck. No tie-in's, no movie I guess.
And that's worth free?
Sorry, but I'll vote with my dollars, as I've always done, and reward those who create entertainment WORTH paying for...
Because in most cases people have ripped their existing CD collections to disk. Better question to ask is what percentage of their current playlist is P2P? And I agree with some of the other comments here, in that if I thought that a third of the people out there were ripping me off, I'd freak too.
that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic
In other words, the people with the most interest in music do both. Surprise, surprise.
reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services
Agree here. Though while decent content is an issue, I also think that other entertainment options (games, dvds) have an impact, as well as reduced salaries, rising gas and oil prices, and other economic factors leading to less disposible income.
In the long run, content is going to be paid. Why? Because the people who make music and movies and write books have to eat. Because all of them require significant upfront investments in time and energy and money. Because for most of them selling t-shirts at personal performances doesn't pay the rent.
A "Firefly" episode cost a million dollars a pop to make. Serenity $45 million. If you're not going to pay for it, and you don't want advertising, then who will pay for it? Or are you saying that you want "your" content to be free, and that everyone else should subsidize you?
Or that we should do without, and hope that enough people playing around with $500 video cameras and Final Cut will fill up all of that screen and air time with something worth watching? When they're not working at Walmart, that is.
Or that we should return to the days of patronage, where our best and brightest writers, singers, directors, and actors spend most of their days running around, hat in hand, begging for handouts from the rich?
You may be right, however, in that "eventually" content will be free... of course, by that time food, clothing, medicine, housing, and transportation will be free as well.
Ah. Of course. That explains the tens of thousands of living and growing and... abandoned projects on SourceForge.
Sorry, but the same "market" forces apply to both OS (open) and CS (closed-source) software. People no longer buy (CS), or download (OS), they find it no longer serves a need, or it becomes "feature-complete" and new versions are no longer needed, or it becomes obsolete, or they simply find alternatives.
In CS, the company can fold. In OS, the lead developer(s) can leave or stop working on a project. Both can fold due to internal problems, bickering, strife, or lack of direction. If this happens to a popular OS project, it may attract new developers, or be picked up later on. Conversely, a "popular" CS project can afford to hire new developers, or it may be aquired by another company.
But ultimately, both die from the same cause: Lack of interest.
$20 Billion bozo. With a "B". $20 billion, $500 million.
I suspect that's being just a little parnoid. If I were them, I'd have a good backup system simply to ensure I didn't have a PR nightmare when a server went down and millions of people lost their email.
And so you decided that we need the opposite slant? Or are you saying customers need to be able to buy Windows software with loggers and viruses pre-installed, or that they're demanding software that can't be upgraded and patched?
If some guy is trying to sell me "new" "never-out-of-the-box" software that's not, he deserves to be caught and punished. Infected and pirated software, doubly so.
And now an extra 15,000 script-kiddie-wanna-be's also know. Thanks.
While the odds on a game like blackjack or roulette are biased in favor of the house (usually the best you can do in BJ is 49%/51%), online games like Texas Hold'em are in fact "gambling". Unlike the other games where the odds are manipulated in the house's favor, in poker the house simply takes a rake (small percentage of each pot), or a fixed percentage of the buy-in, or a fixed ante during the game.
Poker is not simply a game of statistics, but strategy, tactics, skill, psychology, and observation. Play a great player and a bad player in enough games, and the great player will nearly always dominate the poorer one. Or in other words, both players will not, over time, statistically lose the same number (or fixed percentage) of games.
Personally, if allowed by the court this sounds as if it could be another way for the government to punish "uncooperative" businesses and industries by burying them under a deluge of information "requests".
And, apparently, a coward...
Personally, given its past pattern of behavior, I suspect that the French government is doing this not "for the consumer", but to drive Apple and iTMS and its foreign cultural influences out of France, opening the doorway for its own music and hardware industries.
Your mention of quarterly reports is also a good one. Too many of the clueless think that their demands are somehow reality, not realizing that dollars have to come from somewhere.
Third, the question ignores their own responsibility. One question they should be asking is: What can we do to help? Or better, what can "I" do to help?
If half the people in the company are streaming music and torrents and downloading porn over the companies net, and storing those files and three years worth of (your favorite list) newsgroup lists in their email boxes, and opening every attachment that comes down the pike, then it's no wonder the system is hosed.
First, CDs may have been "hyped" that way, but any intelligent person soon realized that you had to handle them with care as not to scratch them, not leave them in the car in direct sunlight, and so on.
Second, why are we always posing worst-case scenarios? Yes, it's "possible" that Apple will fold as a company tomorrow, though I doubt it. Personally, I think it's demostrated its hardiness as a company, and as such more likely to outlast me, making the question moot. It's also equally possible that even if Apple folds, they will have licensed FairPlay and/or the iTMS by that time anyway.
As to relicensing, don't count them out. They may, for example, look at all of the home theaters now out there with 5.1 surround sound, and decide the next "format" is ultra-high sampled 5-channel music that let's you hear the position of each singer and band member. Should it catch on, people will repurchase many of their favorite songs, much as they've done in the VHS to DVD transition.
This must be the open-source answer to marketing-speak: "Ekiga, a world-class provider of world-class solutions to world-class problems, has..."
Another factor is "buy in", because once you've bought into the pod and iTMS, changing systems is a major PITA. Get a pod, get some music, get a bigger pod, get more music. Endless cycle. So once you've been pod'ed, you tend to stay pod'ed.
So true. In fact, just yesterday I was trying cram my vast collection of 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes, LPs, and cassettes into that thin little slot on the front of my car stereo. Not only did it not work, but now I need a new car stereo.
The point being, of course, that we bought into all of those different types of media knowing their limitations, and also knowing full well that they were not going to last forever. Same with everyone's favorite example, iTMS. I know the limitations, have yet to come close to hitting them, and always have the CD-burning "out" if need be.
As long as my notebook and mini run in their existing configuration, I can play my music. Should Apple look like it's about to die, I'll snap up a spare. Which is much as it it was with my turntable, reel-to-reel, and cassette player. My 8-track player, however, is dead, Jim....
The idea of "defensive" patents used soley for trading purposes works well... as long as the other company wants or needs to trade. When the other company is merely a patent shell (holding company) and simply wants dollars, then the level of "pain" begins to increase.