When marketing folks sit around a price a product, they know it is better to err on the side of "too high" than "too low". Why? Well, it is much easier to lower prices and look like you are doing right by the consumer than it is to raise the price of something the consumer was used to buying cheap.
These prices could be a case of erring on the side of "too high". I wouldn't be surprised to see them start coming down when no one signs up.
Actually right now the guild agreements do not cover downloads meaning companies do not owe residuals on internet distribution. Of course this will change, but if the rights are cleared away you go.
And lastly, it's something that *can not* be stopped. P2P progs and their development act as organisms that follow the darwinian rules of survival.
You can argue the same thing about bacteria. Bacteria is evolving to become resistant to drugs, however it is under control as long as the medical community stays one step ahead.
I see the same thing happening with P2P apps. If Hollywood stays ahead of the curve, they can rid themselves of most P2P activity. Clearly they will neve eliminate it altogether but if they make it difficult enough people may prefer to pay. I guess time will tell.
I think Don Evans was not talking about people downloading music. I think he was speaking about companies in China who pirate software, movies, machine part designs, etc... and then sell them.
It is selling it that makes it different than downloading music.
Ha. I don't deny it. Its clear on my webpage that that is the case.
However, where I work has nothing to with this. I'm not posting on behalf of my employer. I can say that I never once heard anything about us using DRM until music companies all started going down the tubes in part due to file sharing.
I also think if it were not for the BitTorrents of this world, we would never have even considered it.
Is this simply the nerd version of the ages-old cosmo quiz?
I fail to see how "The one-minute risk assessment" is any more comprehensive or meaningful than the "Does he think you are fat"-type quizes that make their way through women's magazines.
I work at a fortune 500 company and give input into products we buy. Whenever a sales person gives me a "white paper" I smirk. 95% of them are from "independent" evaluators who are paid by the person selling you something. They also tend to make claims that are so outrageous, you know they are not true going in. Microsoft is the worst when it comes to this. (.Net is 900% faster than J2EE) I don't even know why they still sponsor these "independent studies" as no one in industry takes them seriously.
I don't blame companies for acting this way, as it is a sales force's job to sell. I just ignore all of these white papers. I do however pay a great deal of attention to what companies like Gartner say about various products. They are paid by us (the consumers) as opposed to the producer and are not quite as susceptible to false analysis.
It seems to me that the steps in the Natural Programming approach are not at all novel and certainly not as useful as they appear. The authors seemed to have forgotten the train wreck that was AppleScript.
The authors state that syntax in program languages are too complex. I would argue that the syntax of a programming language needs to be more complex then the syntax of a natural language. The sad fact is that English (and other natural languages) were not designed with enough precision for things like programming languages.
For example:
If in some natural programming someone were to state
"if x or y do z"
Does this statement mean that x and y need different values or can they both be true? One can't tell from looking at the statement.
I love that the networks are putting down someone for calling Florida too early. They would never do a thing like that:)
Talk about throwing stones from a glass house.....
yes. But if you could stop getting physical DVDs from Netflix and just watch everything through your Tivo would you do it for the same price? Thats the 1,000,000 question. If that is a yes there is a benefit to all parties involved.
Ford wants 10,000 for a new car. That is too much. I am entitled to a new car on my terms. Not only will I steal one off the lot, but I will be self-righteous about it. How dare they charge that much for their cars.
Now s/car/movie/g, and you see how stupid your argument. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Not liking the price does not make stealing ok.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by
"And it would help if there was native Java support for the most popular computing platforms"
There is of course the JRE runtime which runs on just about any platform, and there are compilers available if you want to complie all the way down to native.
>> Am I way off base with my thinking in this matter ??
Yes. A company can offer its goods and services with whatever rules and restrictions it wishes. You, as a consumer, have the right to agree or not to agree.
No one can force DRM on you. If you only want to purchase content with no restrictions, find content providers willing to give it to you or don't purchase the content. In any transcation, both parties must consent to have the rules be enforced. No one is forcing you to pay for anything.
I build business applications for a large media company. I would say at this point I spend roughly 20% of my time actually coding. At least 40% is dedicated to analysis and design. The other 40% is split between testing and deployment (including user training etc...).
All of the requirments as well as much of the design springs from one on one contact, meetings and interviews with the people who are actually going to use these systems. Dealing with users one on one gives you a tremendous insight into their business process and I don't think you can do that long distance.
Now, to be fair let's say all coding can be moved overseas with no quality loss. This is a best case senario, but lets say it is true. If you outsourced some of this stuff you could save some money on that 20%, and maybe more if you were willing to try design overseas as well. I think doing that would greatly increase risk, but lets say that is viable as well.
So overall, lets say 40% of the process can be moved overseas. Lets also presume an 50% savings for doing this over in house talent. That leads to a savings of at most 20% on the entire project.
A 20% savings seems pretty good at first, expect when you consider that someone like me both gathers requirments and implements them. There is a zero percent loss of information between me and me. If you move the coder overseas and keep requirments local, no matter how detailed you make requirments the loss will be much greater. Furthermore I currently make specifications without full details of implementation of everything. I don't need to make a how-to document because I will be implementing this. This means to send requirments overseas, you need to send something far more detailed then you would use internally. Lets say this adds 50% to the requirments phase. That brings your savings down to 10%.
Now lets look at the time difference. A bug found ion the morning will not be fixed until the next day due to time-zone issues. I'd say that will add another 50% onto the testing phase. Now your savings is gone, and you don't have people in house who really understand your system.
I don't think offshore coders are any better or worse then US ones, but I can't see how they can be viable for small-medium size projects without actually being here. And that given that all my assumptions were very generous in their favor. I think the people jumping on the bandwagon for big savings are going to be very disappointed in the next 2-3 years.
This "report" seems more like an anti-American propaganda piece then insightful journalism. Every story there revolves around how the US is part of some secret conspiracy to rule the world.
While I would concede that we are into global hegemony and are little to quick to use force to solve our problems, this list a bit ridiculous. Take the following quote:
Recently, Rwandan troops burnt down thousands of homes in the eastern Congo. Uganda has armed two ethnic groups, the Hema and Lendu in Ituri province and encouraged them to fight resulting in 11,400 deaths so far; the two groups have laid siege to the provincial capital, Bunia, where bloody massacres continue. This shows the extent to which the U.S. will go to plunder Africa.
Excuse me, the US has zero to do with any of the civil wars in Africa. Zero. There are problems that can't be blamed on the US and the war in the Congo is one of them.
The author of this article says:
Over the past fifteen years, thirty-two of the fifty-three African countries experienced violent conflict. During the cold war years (1950-1989), the U.S. sent $1.5 billion in arms and training to Africa thus setting the stage for the current round of conflicts.
Come on. That is outrageous. Africans are not babies, and we are not their irresponsible parents. I find talk like that extremely insulting to Africans as it suggests they are not as "advanced" as Western civilizations and cannot control themselves when presented with military technology.
I don't think so. The first line of the Introduction says:
This document details the difficulties that keep our Solaris Java implementation from being practical for the development of common software applications.
It has problems ON SOLARIS. These engineers do not complain about Java being broken as a language. They have a big problem with implementation of the JRE on one platform. They mention nothing about the linux dist, or the win32 dist.
I think the varying degree of control over the physical machine a developer can now choose when writing a program is the single most important factor in increased productivity. In assembler the programmer must worry about everything. C was the first truly abstract programming language where the programmer could call a routine like printf and not need to worry about the details of printing a string to the screen. Because the language was more abstract, the programmer could do far more complicated things (have you every tried to write a red/black tree in assembler)?
Over the last several years languages have gotten more and more abstract, languages like Java isolated the developer from pretty much everything except the logic they are trying to capture. Developers can now choose the level of abstraction they wish to work with based on the problem domain. (low level library vs. script for renaming files)
Higher level (more abstract) programs are usually much easier to write but it is worth noting that there is a price to pay for, generally these programs are not as powerful as their low level cousins. Some languages like VB still try to abstract development out even more, so that it is accessible to everyone. Abstraction has brought the ability to program to a much wider audience and has greatly reduced the time it takes to write basic applications and for that it is the most important change in programming.
Slashdot Mirror
When marketing folks sit around a price a product, they know it is better to err on the side of "too high" than "too low". Why? Well, it is much easier to lower prices and look like you are doing right by the consumer than it is to raise the price of something the consumer was used to buying cheap.
These prices could be a case of erring on the side of "too high". I wouldn't be surprised to see them start coming down when no one signs up.
Yeah, why would they ever think of implementing an application in a technology that YOU have found personally useful?
If it were an old lady who was arrested baking a pie for police officers who caught a burglar we would all laugh at how dumb our legal system was.
The MPAA gave these guys a couple free DVDs, it is not like these gifts were large sums of money.
Actually right now the guild agreements do not cover downloads meaning companies do not owe residuals on internet distribution. Of course this will change, but if the rights are cleared away you go.
and they are still slashdotted.
I see the same thing happening with P2P apps. If Hollywood stays ahead of the curve, they can rid themselves of most P2P activity. Clearly they will neve eliminate it altogether but if they make it difficult enough people may prefer to pay. I guess time will tell.
I think Don Evans was not talking about people downloading music. I think he was speaking about companies in China who pirate software, movies, machine part designs, etc... and then sell them.
It is selling it that makes it different than downloading music.
Ha. I don't deny it. Its clear on my webpage that that is the case.
However, where I work has nothing to with this. I'm not posting on behalf of my employer. I can say that I never once heard anything about us using DRM until music companies all started going down the tubes in part due to file sharing.
I also think if it were not for the BitTorrents of this world, we would never have even considered it.
The fact that my comment got modded down proves my point.
The giant irony here:
/.ers who brought DRM into the mainstream. , not the media companies.
1) The majority of people "outraged" by this are the file swappers.
2) If it were not for these same people, media companies would never have DRMed their content.
It is the
Is this simply the nerd version of the ages-old cosmo quiz? I fail to see how "The one-minute risk assessment" is any more comprehensive or meaningful than the "Does he think you are fat"-type quizes that make their way through women's magazines.
I don't blame companies for acting this way, as it is a sales force's job to sell. I just ignore all of these white papers. I do however pay a great deal of attention to what companies like Gartner say about various products. They are paid by us (the consumers) as opposed to the producer and are not quite as susceptible to false analysis.
It seems to me that the steps in the Natural Programming approach are not at all novel and certainly not as useful as they appear. The authors seemed to have forgotten the train wreck that was AppleScript. The authors state that syntax in program languages are too complex. I would argue that the syntax of a programming language needs to be more complex then the syntax of a natural language. The sad fact is that English (and other natural languages) were not designed with enough precision for things like programming languages. For example: If in some natural programming someone were to state "if x or y do z" Does this statement mean that x and y need different values or can they both be true? One can't tell from looking at the statement.
I love that the networks are putting down someone for calling Florida too early. They would never do a thing like that :)
Talk about throwing stones from a glass house.....
yes. But if you could stop getting physical DVDs from Netflix and just watch everything through your Tivo would you do it for the same price? Thats the 1,000,000 question. If that is a yes there is a benefit to all parties involved.
Ford wants 10,000 for a new car. That is too much. I am entitled to a new car on my terms. Not only will I steal one off the lot, but I will be self-righteous about it. How dare they charge that much for their cars. Now s/car/movie/g, and you see how stupid your argument. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Not liking the price does not make stealing ok.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "And it would help if there was native Java support for the most popular computing platforms" There is of course the JRE runtime which runs on just about any platform, and there are compilers available if you want to complie all the way down to native.
No offense, but why is this interesting. A JSR being submitted is no big deal and this is not exactly earth shattering stuff.
And my grandmother smoked until she was 80, thus smoking is not bad for you.
:)
I think your sample size is a bit small for making such a sweeping statement. Perhaps a stats class would have helped you see that
>> Am I way off base with my thinking in this matter ?? Yes. A company can offer its goods and services with whatever rules and restrictions it wishes. You, as a consumer, have the right to agree or not to agree. No one can force DRM on you. If you only want to purchase content with no restrictions, find content providers willing to give it to you or don't purchase the content. In any transcation, both parties must consent to have the rules be enforced. No one is forcing you to pay for anything.
I build business applications for a large media company. I would say at this point I spend roughly 20% of my time actually coding. At least 40% is dedicated to analysis and design. The other 40% is split between testing and deployment (including user training etc...). All of the requirments as well as much of the design springs from one on one contact, meetings and interviews with the people who are actually going to use these systems. Dealing with users one on one gives you a tremendous insight into their business process and I don't think you can do that long distance. Now, to be fair let's say all coding can be moved overseas with no quality loss. This is a best case senario, but lets say it is true. If you outsourced some of this stuff you could save some money on that 20%, and maybe more if you were willing to try design overseas as well. I think doing that would greatly increase risk, but lets say that is viable as well. So overall, lets say 40% of the process can be moved overseas. Lets also presume an 50% savings for doing this over in house talent. That leads to a savings of at most 20% on the entire project. A 20% savings seems pretty good at first, expect when you consider that someone like me both gathers requirments and implements them. There is a zero percent loss of information between me and me. If you move the coder overseas and keep requirments local, no matter how detailed you make requirments the loss will be much greater. Furthermore I currently make specifications without full details of implementation of everything. I don't need to make a how-to document because I will be implementing this. This means to send requirments overseas, you need to send something far more detailed then you would use internally. Lets say this adds 50% to the requirments phase. That brings your savings down to 10%. Now lets look at the time difference. A bug found ion the morning will not be fixed until the next day due to time-zone issues. I'd say that will add another 50% onto the testing phase. Now your savings is gone, and you don't have people in house who really understand your system. I don't think offshore coders are any better or worse then US ones, but I can't see how they can be viable for small-medium size projects without actually being here. And that given that all my assumptions were very generous in their favor. I think the people jumping on the bandwagon for big savings are going to be very disappointed in the next 2-3 years.
While I would concede that we are into global hegemony and are little to quick to use force to solve our problems, this list a bit ridiculous. Take the following quote:
Excuse me, the US has zero to do with any of the civil wars in Africa. Zero. There are problems that can't be blamed on the US and the war in the Congo is one of them.The author of this article says:
Come on. That is outrageous. Africans are not babies, and we are not their irresponsible parents. I find talk like that extremely insulting to Africans as it suggests they are not as "advanced" as Western civilizations and cannot control themselves when presented with military technology.
It has problems ON SOLARIS. These engineers do not complain about Java being broken as a language. They have a big problem with implementation of the JRE on one platform. They mention nothing about the linux dist, or the win32 dist.
I think the varying degree of control over the physical machine a developer can now choose when writing a program is the single most important factor in increased productivity. In assembler the programmer must worry about everything. C was the first truly abstract programming language where the programmer could call a routine like printf and not need to worry about the details of printing a string to the screen. Because the language was more abstract, the programmer could do far more complicated things (have you every tried to write a red/black tree in assembler)?
Over the last several years languages have gotten more and more abstract, languages like Java isolated the developer from pretty much everything except the logic they are trying to capture. Developers can now choose the level of abstraction they wish to work with based on the problem domain. (low level library vs. script for renaming files) Higher level (more abstract) programs are usually much easier to write but it is worth noting that there is a price to pay for, generally these programs are not as powerful as their low level cousins. Some languages like VB still try to abstract development out even more, so that it is accessible to everyone. Abstraction has brought the ability to program to a much wider audience and has greatly reduced the time it takes to write basic applications and for that it is the most important change in programming.