"Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?"
I think the question companies are asking themselves is "Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when fees paid to the CRIA make it impossible to make a profit from such a service"?
It's the lack of decent cost-effective services (we're already paying lots for our music with fees on media) that drives everyone in Canada to use file sharing services in the first place.
I second this. I do remote support for friends and family in a number of different countries running Windows and Mac. It used to be a pain supporting both platforms but the latest version of Skype has been brilliant.
Doesn't Segway have a patent on something like this? Maybe that's why it wont come out till 2025 - wait for the patents to expire. Of course, by then, Segway would prolly just use the DMCA as a defense...;-)
I don't buy this. The Eulos patent specifically talks about embedding within a document. Documents don't just magically appear out of nowhere - someone has to create them. So for them to demonstrate the functionality that they claim in the patent, they would have to go to the same effort as Ozzie did.
In the article, it specifically states that there was no 'code' written to demonstrate what he showed - this is out of the box functionality. It's what Notes was designed to do from the ground up - embedding of rich mutlimedia within documents explicitly as stated in the patent.
Of course, IANAL and haven't worked at the patent office, and I understand things are strange in the way things work there. But I think what you're saying is like somebody claiming to have a patent on a method of putting numbers in a docmument in cells that add up or do whatever with some mathematical formulae and then someone opening up a copy of Excel and creating a document that does exactly that and the patent office stating "well you had to create that document to do what was described in the patent, and therefore, it can't be considered". How could it possibly not be considered the same thing? Just because Ozzie has some training in "how" to use the tools? You don't need creativty to use Excel by any means, but I'm surprised at how many people lack the skills to be able to put a simple formula into a spreadsheet.
That is all pretty true. But it applies to PCs just as much as Macs. According to the article, parents are the ones complaining and saying "my little johnny has to use a PC at school coz that's what he's going to use when he gets out". But it's not the parents who are making the decision.
The superintendent making the decision says that he's doing this to provide uniformity of platform across their network - likely for support. This is the same approach that many IT managers in large corporations take and given the number of desktops.
So given the super's argument, suggesting that it matters more what you teach the student than the O/S the computer runs is likely to receive the response from him/her of "exactly - which is why we're choosing the least costly platform out there".
The fact of the matter is that in the end it's largely an argument around cost. There are many places that prove that Macs cost lest in the long run, but in a world that always seems to focus on short term, PCs are likely to always win out. Of course, given that argument tho, the school should really be using Linux.
I think the problem is largely to do with the traditional sales channel and geographic regions than anything to do with politics (although fraud does enter the equation significantly). The cost structure in each country is different - there is a price to be paid for the welfare state of most European countries and that cost is bourne by the consumer at the end of the channel. When a manufacturer sets up distribution sales channels, the local reseller will typically win a geographic exclusion zone that says within a given area, they have the exclusive right to that market.
So, while the WORLD wide web might allow you to see what is being offered in other locations, just because you can see it doesn't mean that resellers are ALLOWED to sell it to you. Early on, before most manufacturers had figured this out, they probably didn't care - a sale to them was a sale regardless. But whem local sales channels start to lose all their business to someone outside the country that doesn't have their cost structure, they will complain to the manufacturer or whoever gave them the exclusive geographic zone saying that competitors are unfairly eating into their territory. Those companies are then going to have to start going after resellers that are selling outside their territory. On the Internet, that means companies like Amazon or any other big name seller.
Companies like Dell, which have no 'channel', have slightly different but related problems. In their case, at some point they will do enough sales that they essentially are considered to have a local presence. At that point, the local govt is going to come talking wanting their share of the tax dollars and / or enforcing laws governing requirements for manuals in the local language or meeting local regulations, etc. This leads them to offering only specific items for those local markets because the volumes would not be significant enough to make all their products meet local market conditions.
So in the end, while it's frustrating, it's not going to get better. The only reason it was allowed at all was simply that the volumes on the net were not originally big enough that local channels were concerned at loss of market to online resellers. But those days are long gone and local resellers are definitely vocal about it. So while you continue to live in a welfare state, don't expect to get products that don't help pay for the privileges afforded by living in that state.
The threat to sue Linus is over patent infringemnt. If (big if as Novell claims that SCO doesn't own the patents) SCO has software patents that cover portions of UNIX that Linux copies or emulates, even if it is not the same source code, there could still be patent infringement. This is, more or less, one of the reasons that GIF files were dropped as file formats from open source graphics programs - there was a patent that was being defended (valid or not it doesn't really make a difference) for the compression method used in GIF files. Rather than continue using the file format and end up in muddy patent law, it was dropped and PNG files became the defacto replacement. IIRC, none of the open source software used any code from the original compression libraries - just the methodology - but that could still infringe on the (stupid) patent.
I own my own company in a highly competitive IT field. Our company is surrounded in our regional market alone by many other small businesses who provide a similar service, at a cost that we've found is typically more expensive to the end customer than us. Given that I'm the owner of my company, I suspect you might take the following with a grain of salt - I'm biased... =)
Still, we have recently hired a number of employees and many of the potential candidates were from those same competitors. Often, they were being paid less than we were offering, and worked long hours without much reward for those hours. Two of our first employees were from a direct competitor who sounded almost identical to the environment you describe.
In our company, staff get all stat holidays, one full week from Dec 24th to Jan 1st, with regular hours (regular being approximately 8 hours with most people starting anywhere between 8am and 10pm and finishing anywhere from 3pm to 6pm) and usually a couple of weeks holiday through the year.
So what makes our company able to do this when theoretically our competitors are twice as productive because of the extra hours they work employees? Our employees LIKE coming to work. We're a community and people want to be there. We involve people in decisions about how they do their work, and we insist that people take time off. Yes, occasionally we ask staff to work long hours - and a long day for us is 10 hours - but I then insist they take a long weekend or some other time immediately to reflect that extra effort. Not six months down the line when the manager has forgotten the extra time and gives it out begrudgingly, but when it will be felt and appreciated most.
We also practice continuous improvement. If we do the same thing over and over, we look for ways to improve the process so that we can do it in half the time so that those who are working don't get bored, and can finish off monotonous tasks more quickly. We encourage staff to take courses to further their skills and allow them to move around in their jobs.
By no means do I think we're perfect - there are lots of things that we do poorly. But for the most part, we know what they are and we focus on them. And I don't think we're alone in our business philosophy. There are companies out there that don't treat employees like cattle but they're not always easy to find as so many companies sound perfect during the interview. See if you can interview the company employees before you're hired and ask them to be frank with you. Sometimes even that doesn't help if the company preps their employees, but it might give you some idea of the mentality of the company. If possible, always get to your interview at least 10 minutes early so you can watch the dynamic of the office that you're looking at. It will tell you a lot. I still do this when sizing up potential clients because it will help me determine what kind of client I'll be dealing with.
Anyway, good luck with your job, whatever you decide to do! But whatever you look for, to me the best way to a good comfort zone is always creating the right balance both mentally and physically. Without balance, something invariably begins to break down.
I've had this theory for a long way on a technique that could be used to defeat spam once and for all. Despite what the author of this article states, trying to fight spam by analyzing the content is not going to defeat it, and as has been pointed out, there are many ways to work around that solution.
Targetting the sending addresses, and most other techniques like that simply lead to wars of one-up-manship as the spammer and spam fighter struggle to find better techniques to hide and detect spam, respectively.
So what's the theory? Fairly simple, really, and the technology is already available, but not widely implemented. Spam largely suffers from an identity problem. Consider that junk mail that arrives in the post box can easily be identified and/or blocked through legal means if necessary, largely because we know where it comes from. The reason spam has proliferated is because SMTP traffic is largely anonymous - mail servers basically trust the mail they receive and have no real way to verify the information being presented to them. Yes, they can check From: and To: headers to verify that the email is local / remote / relay attempt, whatever. But with the number of open relays on the net, it's easy to forge and bypass these checks.
By using SSMTP (SMTP over SSL), all email can be logged with identifying information from the original sender. If enough servers on the net start to support SSMTP, and increasingly mandated its use, eventually I'd be able to block all regular SMTP traffic. This has the added advantage of making email more secure.
But how does this stop spam? Well, it doesn't directly stop spam, but it means that we would legitimately be able to identify who originally sent the email. Once that happens, the spammer can no longer hide behind anonymous gateways. It probably wouldn't even matter too much if open relays were accidently left open - so long as the open relay didn't support SMTP but only supported SSMTP.
Ideally, every user would require their own secure certs to properly identify the sender, but this would probably add too much cost for the average user, and may be rejected for privacy reasons. But so long as the mail servers themselves were configured this way, we would always be able to identify very quickly where the email was originally sourced, thus giving a recipient an easy place to target (and hence sue if it comes to that).
As this takes off, it may actually be a way to make spam legitimate. The secure cert attached to the email could have an incentive allowing users to opt-in or opt-out automatically. A user could set their mail to say "yes, I'm willing to put up with ads if you're willing to pay me for it" putting the cost back on the person responsible for the spam in the first place - the advertiser.
Anyway, it seems to me like a fairly simple way to solve this - but it does take a lot of co-operation to get there. Something that hasn't happened yet for IPv6, another new protocol that doesn't really seem to be getting off the ground. So what am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
Will they finally stop sending spam after banning me, too? Seems like an excellent reason to list KODI boxes on Facebook.
"Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?"
I think the question companies are asking themselves is "Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when fees paid to the CRIA make it impossible to make a profit from such a service"?
It's the lack of decent cost-effective services (we're already paying lots for our music with fees on media) that drives everyone in Canada to use file sharing services in the first place.
....scientists have identified that people who live eventually die.
I second this. I do remote support for friends and family in a number of different countries running Windows and Mac. It used to be a pain supporting both platforms but the latest version of Skype has been brilliant.
... for clinical trials? ;-) Would be great to live to 120!
I mean, seriously!
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/night_sky_040702.h tml
Doesn't Segway have a patent on something like this? Maybe that's why it wont come out till 2025 - wait for the patents to expire. Of course, by then, Segway would prolly just use the DMCA as a defense... ;-)
I don't buy this. The Eulos patent specifically talks about embedding within a document. Documents don't just magically appear out of nowhere - someone has to create them. So for them to demonstrate the functionality that they claim in the patent, they would have to go to the same effort as Ozzie did.
In the article, it specifically states that there was no 'code' written to demonstrate what he showed - this is out of the box functionality. It's what Notes was designed to do from the ground up - embedding of rich mutlimedia within documents explicitly as stated in the patent.
Of course, IANAL and haven't worked at the patent office, and I understand things are strange in the way things work there. But I think what you're saying is like somebody claiming to have a patent on a method of putting numbers in a docmument in cells that add up or do whatever with some mathematical formulae and then someone opening up a copy of Excel and creating a document that does exactly that and the patent office stating "well you had to create that document to do what was described in the patent, and therefore, it can't be considered". How could it possibly not be considered the same thing? Just because Ozzie has some training in "how" to use the tools? You don't need creativty to use Excel by any means, but I'm surprised at how many people lack the skills to be able to put a simple formula into a spreadsheet.
That is all pretty true. But it applies to PCs just as much as Macs. According to the article, parents are the ones complaining and saying "my little johnny has to use a PC at school coz that's what he's going to use when he gets out". But it's not the parents who are making the decision.
The superintendent making the decision says that he's doing this to provide uniformity of platform across their network - likely for support. This is the same approach that many IT managers in large corporations take and given the number of desktops.
So given the super's argument, suggesting that it matters more what you teach the student than the O/S the computer runs is likely to receive the response from him/her of "exactly - which is why we're choosing the least costly platform out there".
The fact of the matter is that in the end it's largely an argument around cost. There are many places that prove that Macs cost lest in the long run, but in a world that always seems to focus on short term, PCs are likely to always win out. Of course, given that argument tho, the school should really be using Linux.
I think the problem is largely to do with the traditional sales channel and geographic regions than anything to do with politics (although fraud does enter the equation significantly). The cost structure in each country is different - there is a price to be paid for the welfare state of most European countries and that cost is bourne by the consumer at the end of the channel. When a manufacturer sets up distribution sales channels, the local reseller will typically win a geographic exclusion zone that says within a given area, they have the exclusive right to that market.
So, while the WORLD wide web might allow you to see what is being offered in other locations, just because you can see it doesn't mean that resellers are ALLOWED to sell it to you. Early on, before most manufacturers had figured this out, they probably didn't care - a sale to them was a sale regardless. But whem local sales channels start to lose all their business to someone outside the country that doesn't have their cost structure, they will complain to the manufacturer or whoever gave them the exclusive geographic zone saying that competitors are unfairly eating into their territory. Those companies are then going to have to start going after resellers that are selling outside their territory. On the Internet, that means companies like Amazon or any other big name seller.
Companies like Dell, which have no 'channel', have slightly different but related problems. In their case, at some point they will do enough sales that they essentially are considered to have a local presence. At that point, the local govt is going to come talking wanting their share of the tax dollars and / or enforcing laws governing requirements for manuals in the local language or meeting local regulations, etc. This leads them to offering only specific items for those local markets because the volumes would not be significant enough to make all their products meet local market conditions.
So in the end, while it's frustrating, it's not going to get better. The only reason it was allowed at all was simply that the volumes on the net were not originally big enough that local channels were concerned at loss of market to online resellers. But those days are long gone and local resellers are definitely vocal about it. So while you continue to live in a welfare state, don't expect to get products that don't help pay for the privileges afforded by living in that state.
The threat to sue Linus is over patent infringemnt. If (big if as Novell claims that SCO doesn't own the patents) SCO has software patents that cover portions of UNIX that Linux copies or emulates, even if it is not the same source code, there could still be patent infringement. This is, more or less, one of the reasons that GIF files were dropped as file formats from open source graphics programs - there was a patent that was being defended (valid or not it doesn't really make a difference) for the compression method used in GIF files. Rather than continue using the file format and end up in muddy patent law, it was dropped and PNG files became the defacto replacement. IIRC, none of the open source software used any code from the original compression libraries - just the methodology - but that could still infringe on the (stupid) patent.
I own my own company in a highly competitive IT field. Our company is surrounded in our regional market alone by many other small businesses who provide a similar service, at a cost that we've found is typically more expensive to the end customer than us. Given that I'm the owner of my company, I suspect you might take the following with a grain of salt - I'm biased... =)
Still, we have recently hired a number of employees and many of the potential candidates were from those same competitors. Often, they were being paid less than we were offering, and worked long hours without much reward for those hours. Two of our first employees were from a direct competitor who sounded almost identical to the environment you describe.
In our company, staff get all stat holidays, one full week from Dec 24th to Jan 1st, with regular hours (regular being approximately 8 hours with most people starting anywhere between 8am and 10pm and finishing anywhere from 3pm to 6pm) and usually a couple of weeks holiday through the year.
So what makes our company able to do this when theoretically our competitors are twice as productive because of the extra hours they work employees? Our employees LIKE coming to work. We're a community and people want to be there. We involve people in decisions about how they do their work, and we insist that people take time off. Yes, occasionally we ask staff to work long hours - and a long day for us is 10 hours - but I then insist they take a long weekend or some other time immediately to reflect that extra effort. Not six months down the line when the manager has forgotten the extra time and gives it out begrudgingly, but when it will be felt and appreciated most.
We also practice continuous improvement. If we do the same thing over and over, we look for ways to improve the process so that we can do it in half the time so that those who are working don't get bored, and can finish off monotonous tasks more quickly. We encourage staff to take courses to further their skills and allow them to move around in their jobs.
By no means do I think we're perfect - there are lots of things that we do poorly. But for the most part, we know what they are and we focus on them. And I don't think we're alone in our business philosophy. There are companies out there that don't treat employees like cattle but they're not always easy to find as so many companies sound perfect during the interview. See if you can interview the company employees before you're hired and ask them to be frank with you. Sometimes even that doesn't help if the company preps their employees, but it might give you some idea of the mentality of the company. If possible, always get to your interview at least 10 minutes early so you can watch the dynamic of the office that you're looking at. It will tell you a lot. I still do this when sizing up potential clients because it will help me determine what kind of client I'll be dealing with.
Anyway, good luck with your job, whatever you decide to do! But whatever you look for, to me the best way to a good comfort zone is always creating the right balance both mentally and physically. Without balance, something invariably begins to break down.
I've had this theory for a long way on a technique that could be used to defeat spam once and for all. Despite what the author of this article states, trying to fight spam by analyzing the content is not going to defeat it, and as has been pointed out, there are many ways to work around that solution.
Targetting the sending addresses, and most other techniques like that simply lead to wars of one-up-manship as the spammer and spam fighter struggle to find better techniques to hide and detect spam, respectively.
So what's the theory? Fairly simple, really, and the technology is already available, but not widely implemented. Spam largely suffers from an identity problem. Consider that junk mail that arrives in the post box can easily be identified and/or blocked through legal means if necessary, largely because we know where it comes from. The reason spam has proliferated is because SMTP traffic is largely anonymous - mail servers basically trust the mail they receive and have no real way to verify the information being presented to them. Yes, they can check From: and To: headers to verify that the email is local / remote / relay attempt, whatever. But with the number of open relays on the net, it's easy to forge and bypass these checks.
By using SSMTP (SMTP over SSL), all email can be logged with identifying information from the original sender. If enough servers on the net start to support SSMTP, and increasingly mandated its use, eventually I'd be able to block all regular SMTP traffic. This has the added advantage of making email more secure.
But how does this stop spam? Well, it doesn't directly stop spam, but it means that we would legitimately be able to identify who originally sent the email. Once that happens, the spammer can no longer hide behind anonymous gateways. It probably wouldn't even matter too much if open relays were accidently left open - so long as the open relay didn't support SMTP but only supported SSMTP.
Ideally, every user would require their own secure certs to properly identify the sender, but this would probably add too much cost for the average user, and may be rejected for privacy reasons. But so long as the mail servers themselves were configured this way, we would always be able to identify very quickly where the email was originally sourced, thus giving a recipient an easy place to target (and hence sue if it comes to that).
As this takes off, it may actually be a way to make spam legitimate. The secure cert attached to the email could have an incentive allowing users to opt-in or opt-out automatically. A user could set their mail to say "yes, I'm willing to put up with ads if you're willing to pay me for it" putting the cost back on the person responsible for the spam in the first place - the advertiser.
Anyway, it seems to me like a fairly simple way to solve this - but it does take a lot of co-operation to get there. Something that hasn't happened yet for IPv6, another new protocol that doesn't really seem to be getting off the ground. So what am I missing?