MS may change this. Don't believe me? Think back to early AOL days. Do you remember how AOL completely clueless people invading 2600 because it was the first few groups on the list? Oh, the horror.
Thankfully the web exploded and the horrible AOLers were gone to troll elsewhere... like Slashdot. Please don't come back. Thanks.
I think iRate is a great idea. Hey, people laughed at Linux in 1991, too. But not many people criticized Linux back then... Well, the free software consumers are getting overly picky for nothing these days.
Questions:
1. How do you solve the problem of cross genre rating? Say, I hate all Rock and Roll so I rate all noise music really low. This will distort the rating, right?
2. How do you deal with intentional/unintentional distortion? If I have a crap song, I want people to listen to mine and I write a script to rate myself up.
I believe Rhapsody service is attached to DirectTV. There is one good thing about on-demand internet radio compared to streaming. You can skip whatever you don't like and move to the next song.
I know that the RIAA has distroyed its image to a degree that anything about it is taken with a grain of salt. But I'm a dead poor college student and I like this idea.
The universities will offer this as a perk to attract new students, so I doubt if they will charge more than normal subscription. The RIAA is desperately hoping to get students "hooked" on their subscription service so they will sure offer a great deal.
All students pay for computing services, whether they use it or not. Cest la vie.
I am a happy subscriber of Rhapsody, it has a humongous selection for me to explore. For example, today I found Benny Goodman's work. I perform shows, so it really helps that I get fresh music all the time. but I would like more songs. If I can get Rhapsody+pressplay+whatever for $10 a month in my dorm, I'll be very happy.
My university, (uiuc.edu) charges more than $7 per meal in the dorm for thier terrible food. It's horrible that dormed undergrads are required to buy the terrible meal plan. So $10 for a huge music service is a good deal. Consider the disk space and catalogue trouble you will save.
The RIAA will be pressured to offer most songs, because if the Beatles are not for download, the old sneakernet isn't much slower in a dorm.
There will still be a need for music I can't get from Rhapsody, such as Christopher Parkening's classical guitar, or Paris Lounge CD set. But I'm much less tempted to trainspot for more music on the 'net. In terms of education, I think it's great that young people get to be exposed to something other than rap/pop/R&B/Rock&Roll. It broadens thier musical knowledge, and I bet many people will find something they actually like, not because every radio station is playing it.
"The problem with your pricing analogy is that it is for REAL GOODS with REAL MARGINAL COSTS. In IP markets, the marginal costs of production are essentially irrelevant (because each artist is not a substitute, in the economic sense, for every other artist, and so forth), so DEMAND is all that matters."
Oh right, so that's why Microsoft charges minimum for thier IP products. Oh yeah, I got a degree in economics too. This "look at demand but not look at market structure" idea is laughable.
To the clown user id 569987: I'm a CS research programmer at a national research lab. You work for the loser music industry as a manager? What are you doing here?
The pricing scheme of cheatless oligopolies is the same as monopoly, which is related to the demand. All pricing is related to demand, but a monopolized market can charge more than a commoditized one.
It's funny how you talk about "demand" all day long, but argue pricing on supply side pricing. The music industry has not been using supply side pricing, otherwise thier ass wouldn't have been sued. If demand side pricing is used, than there will be no difference between a physical CD and a download. I'm still waiting for my settlement check.
The RIAA is not going after the settlement to make a profit; the execs are dead sure that sales will shoot up dramatically once the trading ceases. Anyone thinking the RIAA is a non-for-profit organization is not worthy of a debate.
So you believe that a 45 year old would be just as likely to listen to Britney Spears' than an 18 year old. You also believe that NSync is "cutting edge" music? You also believe that RIAA is the world organization for justice to send messages to immoral pirates, and that RIAA has no intention of making money, I rest my case.
"we'd RIGHT NOW have 50c music dowloads as far as the eye could see. "
Bullshit. Obviously you have no clue how pricing works. Historical pricing of CDs (as agreed by the judge in class action suit) indicates that the pop music market is a Oligopoly working as a cartel. Cartels, without a way to cheat others, price like monopoly.
You forget that the RIAA exists to make a profit. Legal action is not "the right thing to do", it's "the (hopefully) profitable thing to do." This is why Microsoft don't sue college students. Piracy has helped Microsoft gain Monopoly.
The truth is, RIAA can only sue college students and young adults because it's thier "target segment" (a marketing term) and they can only catch these people trading thier stuff. It's not because students cannot afford the settlement.
As an MBA, I don't think of these supoenas in terms of right or wrong; rather, it's a business strategy and a stupid thing to do. I'm in the opinion that everybody stop trading and listening to thier music, becuase this is what they fear most: losing money and going out of business.
IANAL but this seems to be a perfect chance to DDos the court system. Imagine 300 geeks go to seek supoenas each day, asking for a damage of $1 for thier random yakking mp3 with filename begining "XYZ." Nobody will ever get a criminal record out of it, only a settlement of $1. The point is not winning the $1 infringement, but to show that DMCA allows ruthless supoenas.
If I and my buddy next door settle each other's mp3, then we're even. now it's up to the court system to serve the supoenas up and down the ISPs. How fun! we need to write a How-To.
The problem with your senario is that it is precisely why RIAA wants to accomplish by lawsuits.
Good music has always been produced, just not promoted by the MTV and radio station. But who needs those? We have a new medium to spread music!
The RIAA doesn't care about right or wrong. The big 5 record labels is in it for the money. They actually believe that shuting down P2P network will increase sales.
Remember: every penny for the lobbists, the lawyers, the private investigator to capture IP addresses and the salaries of RIAA execs comes from the consumers. That's you and I. Every time we pay for an RIAA CD album, we are funding for the persecution of ourselves.
The RIAA model:
1. Johnny hears a song on the radio 2. Johnny tries to download the song but found none. 3. After hearing the song 500 times on the radio, Johnny race to the store and pay $20 for the CD. 4. 5% of the CD sales goes to the artist. 80% to the recording labels and marketing expense. 15% to the RIAA. 5. The RIAA gets more funding. Big 5 labels start to make loads of money.
Remember, the RIAA is counting on people to go out and purchase CDs after P2P network no longer carry their songs. It's the only reason they sue users. They do not expect to get $100,000 from college students; they want $20 from 100,000 college students.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of suckers that will buy into the crap ass music offered by the RIAA. But I seriously doubt that everybody will rush to the store to buy a $20 CD for every song they try to download on the 'net. I suppose they will sell 2 copies per dorm and the old sneakernet will take over P2P. Remember that any computer with a TV-tuner and FM-tuner can capture songs easy.
I hope the reality will be like this:
1. RIAA sues P2P users, and soon there will be no posters of thier music. 2. Big 5 labels watch the sales chart and wonder why there isn't any rush to buy CDs after the evaporation of file trading. 3. Big 5 and RIAA keeps paying lawyers, marketing execs, radio stations, while CD sales drop. 4. Big 5's parent companies decide to spin off due to the serious loss. 5. Big 5 go out of business, leaving the lesson for the industry to learn - threatening customers is a bad idea in entertainment. 6. New recording labels replace RIAA and will never fuck with customers again.
"This is just going to keep going until a group finds a common defense and can start making this more costly for them."
I know EXACTLY how to do it: Cut off their funding.
Everybody STOP posting and downloading music from P2P networks, and pledge not to buy a single CD from RIAA artists.
The RIAA will still have to pay the lawyers, the media, the outsourcing detectors, the ISP staffs, the cost of making MTVs, Chrystal Channels, etc. And we will not buy a single CD to fund it.
Then we sit back to watch the big 5 bleed to a painful death in a year or two. RIAA will run out of funding - remember, WE the customers funded the RIAA. In the end, whichever record labels that takes over will remember the lesson - that the customers are buying entertainment, not lawsuits.
Oh, believe me, you havn't read more manuals than I. It's not that trivial. There are many other problems covered in other posts. But we'll talk when you become blind enough. If you aren't sitting more than 2 feet from the monitor, it will happen to you sooner than you expect.
Obviously this naive person has never set the fonts to "largest" and used it for a long period of time. Two problems with this:
0. Many menu and dialog boxes have a fixed width widget, resulting a chopped off text and widgets.
1. The text is still too small for "largest" if you use a high resolution display. Do you have any idea how small the strip of task bar looks like at high resolution? I believe many UNIX windows managers have the same problem: fixed size menu bars. So a change of display fonts will only "flow out" of their widgets.
When you set the windows display font text, many things will be broken, including some basic installation stuffs.
I thought this article is very depressing until I realized that this guy is NOT qualified for anything else.
I'd like to make a point that "household tech support" is a bearable job for someone who knows no more than how to fix a printing problem, because it is "slightly" challenging for him.
I'm not trying to be snobby, but I know for sure that good talents are still high in demand. But there's not a lot of ways to distinguish those from clueless people. Microsoft tries hard to do that in thier job interview, but people still have a database of thier questions. This, my friend, is the biggest problem I see in the industry.
There are too many clueless people with a "tech" title whinning about not getting a job. (HTML programmers, anyone? The writer does not have any credentials.) They should do freeland tech support. I also know really skilled people without a job, but it will be a waste of talent to do this.
One more thing: please don't vote for Bush next time. For one, the corporate tax break did nothing more than sending tech jobs overseas.
Please everybody listen to me. We should play to our strengths. We're good coders, not lawyers. Linux is made by hackers, not lawyers. Lawyers won't save Linux; hackers will.
I say we rewrite the entire block of code (I believe it is SMP?) from the version they have identified to be contaminated. We will be able to rewrite things and merge the rest much FASTER than the court system.
Heck, maybe we can even borrow the code from BSDs. Let's just put some effort to rewrite the whole lot and let SCO rot in hell.
SCO already stated which version of Linux is "contaminated" I forgot which version, but not an ancient one.
But won't it be faster if we hire a hacker to rewrite SMP and whatever SCO accused of us from that particular version? As long as we stick to the same API, it should not be too bad to compile it and fix it to merge into other later codes.
If we provide a "100% cleaned/rewritten" version, we won't be weighed down by the legal problems. Believe me, the business world is very concerned about this, since they don't have a clue what is going on.
Think about it, a good hacker will work much faster than the court system.
You do have a point: highly controversial movie "Kent Park" is probably never going to show in America, so people traded the movie files.
To show some counter examples to counter your thoughts on profitability,
"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" This film's screener was traded everywhere because it was showing for months and it didn't reach many rural areas when the words got out. It still trumps other big budget films for months. It's a dating movie. Anyone who is too cheap to buy tix don't deserve a date anyway.
"Blair Witch Project" workprint was traded over one month before it went into the theater but still made a huge hit. Frankly I'd rather watch it at home cuz it gave me motion sickness watching big screen.
Small budget has small burdens to break even. For example, "Clerks" was a big hit made on a $3000 budget, black and white low quality film. and there are many people out there who are willing to pay less than $10 for a good movie, action or not. People don't calculate cost-benefit before going to movies; it's entertainment.
"(piracy issue) well I don't believe it affects the producers. I mean it does affect them but it's miniscure to the way it affects me.... because we are not million dollar employees, at all. We are lucky if we can put together 12 straight months..."
So the movie producers admit they are ripping off the workers? The workers get the leftover, which is nothing.
The article says this ad will be in movie theaters as 65 second theatrical PSA in nationwide mainstream theaters daily from this Friday.
Implecation: You might just download a version of Tomb Raider (After rushing out of the movie theater) with this commercial on it!
Also, tomorrow night during prime time TV, it doesn't matter which channel you watch, you will see this ad during the first commercial break. All TV stations "donate" that quarter million time slot.
I think the MPAA learned from the PR failure of RIAA and try not to piss off the customers. That's a good thing.
Try The power of Ten. This latest trend is for the laziest and busy people, based on the new theory that weight training at VERY SLOW speeds until total muscle failure and you rest one whole week in front of the monitor for about 20 minutes of workout.
Of course, nothing will help if you overeat... But you got Hacker's Diet for that, right?
Do you really think buy.com is after that 5% Apple audience? or the other 95%+ of the PC users? There's nothing wrong with competition driving the cost down.
The truth is, look and feel is free for copying. Big deal. I'll buy from the cheapest source if I have to endure the look and feel.
In terms of cost. I'm sure Apple isn't making much money with iTune. Apple offer this service to sell BOXES, not music. The make dough on the Boxes, not the outsourced music.
I'm sure buy.com isn't making much dough from selling music, either. Their business model is to spam you to death while you browse thier site for music.
Buy.com search will list songs that they do not offer saying it is "not available for sale" Shame that the artists I'm after are not listed on Apple or any other sites for online resale.
(repost: cookie was lost so previous post became anon.) I have developed specifically in C#.Net for 5 months until our funding ran out. My group did just about everything: Com Interop, XML, SOAP, WinForms, MSHTML, Web connectivity stuffs. Now I have no job but i don't feel any bad about never having to code in.Net again. Let me tell ya, it's very frustrating. Anyone who raves about.Net probably havn't coded extensively with it.
First of all. Why is everybody raving about.Net being used in multiple languages? because most of the time we C# developer have to read documentation/postings/tips from VB.Net code. What kind of advantage is that?? I'm sure VB.Net people find it irritating to read C# code, too. And why is a primitive non-OO language like VB anything to do with the OOP style structure of the.Net framework anyway? cross development is supposedly supported in god-aweful COM.
The most terrifying thing by far is the fact that.Net framework is very incomplete and poorly documented if at all. A lot of things(such as setting TCP timeouts) are simply not possible. you need to use the COM Interop and know COM. And COM interop is a terrible thing. In fact, COM is terribly complicated thing and.Net developers are forced to read cryptive COM related postings.
And then you have the bugs and lack of documentation. When developing with MSHTML lib, there's ZERO documentation in.Net framework. So basically we have to guess our way through what the wrapper does. This happens to just about everything we tried to develop with perhaps one exception of Winform.
Now Winform is nice and fast but not without problems. For example, MS insisted that the damn transparancy bug is a "intended feature." (a transparent form shows it's parent, but not other things that might be stacked under it.) And refresh problems, too.
"The wonderful Visual Studio.Net" that we subscribed thru MSDN is giving us lots of griefs with bugs, too. Once the binary project file is broken, it's a flipping mess.
To conclude, I believe that Microsoft have made a mistake for marketing hype of a technology that is simply not ready for prime time. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for many developers. If you consider how fast MS dumped COM+, it's pretty scary to think that maybe.Net will be wiped out all of a sudden and we are again hijacked to learn another brand new broken system.
Why MS doesn't just flat out tell us that.Net is an effort to imitate/beat Java is beyond me. I guess the great thing about.Net is that you don't have to deal with MS's horrible COM interfaces. But.Net cannot stand on its own without COM, and.Net itself is simply not done yet.
That would be Canon printers. I purchased an i320 from Office Depot for $50 and bought dollar ink cartridges on ebay. After I explained to another customer shopping for a printer, she also went home happy with that same printer.
My Canon digital cameras also have very cheap third-party replacement batteries. It's awesome compared to my Sharp digital camcorder.
My Lexmark Optra 40, which was a high end color bubble jet with a postscript interpreter, cost $25 for a cartridge because of the print head. And the stock ink NEVER dries!!! So much for a $400 printer. Well I only paid $70 for it, but I will never buy a Lexmark again.
I don't understand why Canon does not advertise this cost of ownership advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
MS may change this. Don't believe me? Think back to early AOL days. Do you remember how AOL completely clueless people invading 2600 because it was the first few groups on the list? Oh, the horror.
Thankfully the web exploded and the horrible AOLers were gone to troll elsewhere... like Slashdot. Please don't come back. Thanks.
I think iRate is a great idea. Hey, people laughed at Linux in 1991, too. But not many people criticized Linux back then... Well, the free software consumers are getting overly picky for nothing these days.
Questions:
1. How do you solve the problem of cross genre rating? Say, I hate all Rock and Roll so I rate all noise music really low. This will distort the rating, right?
2. How do you deal with intentional/unintentional distortion? If I have a crap song, I want people to listen to mine and I write a script to rate myself up.
I believe Rhapsody service is attached to DirectTV. There is one good thing about on-demand internet radio compared to streaming. You can skip whatever you don't like and move to the next song.
I know that the RIAA has distroyed its image to a degree that anything about it is taken with a grain of salt. But I'm a dead poor college student and I like this idea.
The universities will offer this as a perk to attract new students, so I doubt if they will charge more than normal subscription. The RIAA is desperately hoping to get students "hooked" on their subscription service so they will sure offer a great deal.
All students pay for computing services, whether they use it or not. Cest la vie.
I am a happy subscriber of Rhapsody, it has a humongous selection for me to explore. For example, today I found Benny Goodman's work. I perform shows, so it really helps that I get fresh music all the time. but I would like more songs. If I can get Rhapsody+pressplay+whatever for $10 a month in my dorm, I'll be very happy.
My university, (uiuc.edu) charges more than $7 per meal in the dorm for thier terrible food. It's horrible that dormed undergrads are required to buy the terrible meal plan. So $10 for a huge music service is a good deal. Consider the disk space and catalogue trouble you will save.
The RIAA will be pressured to offer most songs, because if the Beatles are not for download, the old sneakernet isn't much slower in a dorm.
There will still be a need for music I can't get from Rhapsody, such as Christopher Parkening's classical guitar, or Paris Lounge CD set. But I'm much less tempted to trainspot for more music on the 'net. In terms of education, I think it's great that young people get to be exposed to something other than rap/pop/R&B/Rock&Roll. It broadens thier musical knowledge, and I bet many people will find something they actually like, not because every radio station is playing it.
I think piracy is a good idea just to piss off hypocrits like you.
"The problem with your pricing analogy is that it is for REAL GOODS with REAL MARGINAL COSTS. In IP markets, the marginal costs of production are essentially irrelevant (because each artist is not a substitute, in the economic sense, for every other artist, and so forth), so DEMAND is all that matters."
Oh right, so that's why Microsoft charges minimum for thier IP products.
Oh yeah, I got a degree in economics too. This "look at demand but not look at market structure" idea is laughable.
To the clown user id 569987:
I'm a CS research programmer at a national research lab. You work for the loser music industry as a manager? What are you doing here?
The pricing scheme of cheatless oligopolies is the same as monopoly, which is related to the demand. All pricing is related to demand, but a monopolized market can charge more than a commoditized one.
It's funny how you talk about "demand" all day long, but argue pricing on supply side pricing. The music industry has not been using supply side pricing, otherwise thier ass wouldn't have been sued. If demand side pricing is used, than there will be no difference between a physical CD and a download. I'm still waiting for my settlement check.
The RIAA is not going after the settlement to make a profit; the execs are dead sure that sales will shoot up dramatically once the trading ceases. Anyone thinking the RIAA is a non-for-profit organization is not worthy of a debate.
So you believe that a 45 year old would be just as likely to listen to Britney Spears' than an 18 year old. You also believe that NSync is "cutting edge" music? You also believe that RIAA is the world organization for justice to send messages to immoral pirates, and that RIAA has no intention of making money, I rest my case.
As a Rhapsody subscriber, I don't have much sympathy for those NSync traders. .
Here's the rebuttle,
"THE RIAA SUING COLLEGE KIDS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO BECAUSE THE KIDS HAVE NO ASSETS."
Is that why they are after the kids' parents, too?
"we'd RIGHT NOW have 50c music dowloads as far as the eye could see. "
Bullshit. Obviously you have no clue how pricing works. Historical pricing of CDs (as agreed by the judge in class action suit) indicates that the pop music market is a Oligopoly working as a cartel. Cartels, without a way to cheat others, price like monopoly.
You forget that the RIAA exists to make a profit. Legal action is not "the right thing to do", it's "the (hopefully) profitable thing to do." This is why Microsoft don't sue college students. Piracy has helped Microsoft gain Monopoly.
The truth is, RIAA can only sue college students and young adults because it's thier "target segment" (a marketing term) and they can only catch these people trading thier stuff. It's not because students cannot afford the settlement.
As an MBA, I don't think of these supoenas in terms of right or wrong; rather, it's a business strategy and a stupid thing to do. I'm in the opinion that everybody stop trading and listening to thier music, becuase this is what they fear most: losing money and going out of business.
IANAL but this seems to be a perfect chance to DDos the court system. Imagine 300 geeks go to seek supoenas each day, asking for a damage of $1 for thier random yakking mp3 with filename begining "XYZ." Nobody will ever get a criminal record out of it, only a settlement of $1. The point is not winning the $1 infringement, but to show that DMCA allows ruthless supoenas.
If I and my buddy next door settle each other's mp3, then we're even. now it's up to the court system to serve the supoenas up and down the ISPs. How fun! we need to write a How-To.
Check out
http://irate.sourceforge.net/
I actually found a lot of good ones on public radio. We need, and we are building, digital "words of mouth" system to weed out crap music.
The problem with your senario is that it is precisely why RIAA wants to accomplish by lawsuits.
Good music has always been produced, just not promoted by the MTV and radio station. But who needs those? We have a new medium to spread music!
The RIAA doesn't care about right or wrong. The big 5 record labels is in it for the money. They actually believe that shuting down P2P network will increase sales.
Remember: every penny for the lobbists, the lawyers, the private investigator to capture IP addresses and the salaries of RIAA execs comes from the consumers. That's you and I. Every time we pay for an RIAA CD album, we are funding for the persecution of ourselves.
The RIAA model:
1. Johnny hears a song on the radio
2. Johnny tries to download the song but found none.
3. After hearing the song 500 times on the radio, Johnny race to the store and pay $20 for the CD.
4. 5% of the CD sales goes to the artist. 80% to the recording labels and marketing expense. 15% to the RIAA.
5. The RIAA gets more funding. Big 5 labels start to make loads of money.
Remember, the RIAA is counting on people to go out and purchase CDs after P2P network no longer carry their songs. It's the only reason they sue users. They do not expect to get $100,000 from college students; they want $20 from 100,000 college students.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of suckers that will buy into the crap ass music offered by the RIAA. But I seriously doubt that everybody will rush to the store to buy a $20 CD for every song they try to download on the 'net. I suppose they will sell 2 copies per dorm and the old sneakernet will take over P2P. Remember that any computer with a TV-tuner and FM-tuner can capture songs easy.
I hope the reality will be like this:
1. RIAA sues P2P users, and soon there will be no posters of thier music.
2. Big 5 labels watch the sales chart and wonder why there isn't any rush to buy CDs after the evaporation of file trading.
3. Big 5 and RIAA keeps paying lawyers, marketing execs, radio stations, while CD sales drop.
4. Big 5's parent companies decide to spin off due to the serious loss.
5. Big 5 go out of business, leaving the lesson for the industry to learn - threatening customers is a bad idea in entertainment.
6. New recording labels replace RIAA and will never fuck with customers again.
"This is just going to keep going until a group finds a common defense and can start making this more costly for them."
I know EXACTLY how to do it: Cut off their funding.
Everybody STOP posting and downloading music from P2P networks, and pledge not to buy a single CD from RIAA artists.
The RIAA will still have to pay the lawyers, the media, the outsourcing detectors, the ISP staffs, the cost of making MTVs, Chrystal Channels, etc. And we will not buy a single CD to fund it.
Then we sit back to watch the big 5 bleed to a painful death in a year or two. RIAA will run out of funding - remember, WE the customers funded the RIAA. In the end, whichever record labels that takes over will remember the lesson - that the customers are buying entertainment, not lawsuits.
"In the last five years or so, the Internet has gone from being fairly calm and safe, to more and more of a virtual reality war zone."
I see you have never been to the IRC and Usenet in early 90's.
Oh, believe me, you havn't read more manuals than I. It's not that trivial. There are many other problems covered in other posts. But we'll talk when you become blind enough. If you aren't sitting more than 2 feet from the monitor, it will happen to you sooner than you expect.
Obviously this naive person has never set the fonts to "largest" and used it for a long period of time. Two problems with this:
0. Many menu and dialog boxes have a fixed width widget, resulting a chopped off text and widgets.
1. The text is still too small for "largest" if you use a high resolution display. Do you have any idea how small the strip of task bar looks like at high resolution? I believe many UNIX windows managers have the same problem: fixed size menu bars. So a change of display fonts will only "flow out" of their widgets.
When you set the windows display font text, many things will be broken, including some basic installation stuffs.
I thought this article is very depressing until I realized that this guy is NOT qualified for anything else.
I'd like to make a point that "household tech support" is a bearable job for someone who knows no more than how to fix a printing problem, because it is "slightly" challenging for him.
I'm not trying to be snobby, but I know for sure that good talents are still high in demand. But there's not a lot of ways to distinguish those from clueless people. Microsoft tries hard to do that in thier job interview, but people still have a database of thier questions. This, my friend, is the biggest problem I see in the industry.
There are too many clueless people with a "tech" title whinning about not getting a job. (HTML programmers, anyone? The writer does not have any credentials.) They should do freeland tech support. I also know really skilled people without a job, but it will be a waste of talent to do this.
One more thing: please don't vote for Bush next time. For one, the corporate tax break did nothing more than sending tech jobs overseas.
Please everybody listen to me. We should play to our strengths. We're good coders, not lawyers. Linux is made by hackers, not lawyers. Lawyers won't save Linux; hackers will.
I say we rewrite the entire block of code (I believe it is SMP?) from the version they have identified to be contaminated. We will be able to rewrite things and merge the rest much FASTER than the court system.
Heck, maybe we can even borrow the code from BSDs.
Let's just put some effort to rewrite the whole lot and let SCO rot in hell.
SCO already stated which version of Linux is "contaminated" I forgot which version, but not an ancient one.
But won't it be faster if we hire a hacker to rewrite SMP and whatever SCO accused of us from that particular version? As long as we stick to the same API, it should not be too bad to compile it and fix it to merge into other later codes.
If we provide a "100% cleaned/rewritten" version, we won't be weighed down by the legal problems. Believe me, the business world is very concerned about this, since they don't have a clue what is going on.
Think about it, a good hacker will work much faster than the court system.
You do have a point: highly controversial movie "Kent Park" is probably never going to show in America, so people traded the movie files.
To show some counter examples to counter your thoughts on profitability,
"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" This film's screener was traded everywhere because it was showing for months and it didn't reach many rural areas when the words got out. It still trumps other big budget films for months. It's a dating movie. Anyone who is too cheap to buy tix don't deserve a date anyway.
"Blair Witch Project" workprint was traded over one month before it went into the theater but still made a huge hit. Frankly I'd rather watch it at home cuz it gave me motion sickness watching big screen.
Small budget has small burdens to break even. For example, "Clerks" was a big hit made on a $3000 budget, black and white low quality film. and there are many people out there who are willing to pay less than $10 for a good movie, action or not.
People don't calculate cost-benefit before going to movies; it's entertainment.
Quote from the set painter in the ad:
... because we are not million dollar employees, at all. We are lucky if we can put together 12 straight months..."
"(piracy issue) well I don't believe it affects the producers. I mean it does affect them but it's miniscure to the way it affects me.
So the movie producers admit they are ripping off the workers? The workers get the leftover, which is nothing.
(Nice orange mustache, though. )
The article says this ad will be in movie theaters as 65 second theatrical PSA in nationwide mainstream theaters daily from this Friday.
Implecation: You might just download a version of Tomb Raider (After rushing out of the movie theater) with this commercial on it!
Also, tomorrow night during prime time TV, it doesn't matter which channel you watch, you will see this ad during the first commercial break. All TV stations "donate" that quarter million time slot.
I think the MPAA learned from the PR failure of RIAA and try not to piss off the customers. That's a good thing.
Try The power of Ten. This latest trend is for the laziest and busy people, based on the new theory that weight training at VERY SLOW speeds until total muscle failure and you rest one whole week in front of the monitor for about 20 minutes of workout.
Of course, nothing will help if you overeat... But you got Hacker's Diet for that, right?
Do you really think buy.com is after that 5% Apple audience? or the other 95%+ of the PC users? There's nothing wrong with competition driving the cost down.
The truth is, look and feel is free for copying. Big deal. I'll buy from the cheapest source if I have to endure the look and feel.
In terms of cost. I'm sure Apple isn't making much money with iTune. Apple offer this service to sell BOXES, not music. The make dough on the Boxes, not the outsourced music.
I'm sure buy.com isn't making much dough from selling music, either. Their business model is to spam you to death while you browse thier site for music.
Buy.com search will list songs that they do not offer saying it is "not available for sale" Shame that the artists I'm after are not listed on Apple or any other sites for online resale.
(repost: cookie was lost so previous post became anon.) .Net again. Let me tell ya, it's very frustrating. Anyone who raves about .Net probably havn't coded extensively with it.
.Net being used in multiple languages? because most of the time we C# developer have to read documentation/postings/tips from VB.Net code. What kind of advantage is that?? I'm sure VB.Net people find it irritating to read C# code, too. And why is a primitive non-OO language like VB anything to do with the OOP style structure of the .Net framework anyway? cross development is supposedly supported in god-aweful COM.
.Net framework is very incomplete and poorly documented if at all. A lot of things(such as setting TCP timeouts) are simply not possible. you need to use the COM Interop and know COM. And COM interop is a terrible thing. In fact, COM is terribly complicated thing and .Net developers are forced to read cryptive COM related postings.
.Net framework. So basically we have to guess our way through what the wrapper does. This happens to just about everything we tried to develop with perhaps one exception of Winform.
.Net" that we subscribed thru MSDN is giving us lots of griefs with bugs, too. Once the binary project file is broken, it's a flipping mess.
.Net will be wiped out all of a sudden and we are again hijacked to learn another brand new broken system.
.Net is an effort to imitate/beat Java is beyond me. I guess the great thing about .Net is that you don't have to deal with MS's horrible COM interfaces. But .Net cannot stand on its own without COM, and .Net itself is simply not done yet.
I have developed specifically in C#.Net for 5 months until our funding ran out. My group did just about everything: Com Interop, XML, SOAP, WinForms, MSHTML, Web connectivity stuffs. Now I have no job but i don't feel any bad about never having to code in
First of all. Why is everybody raving about
The most terrifying thing by far is the fact that
And then you have the bugs and lack of documentation. When developing with MSHTML lib, there's ZERO documentation in
Now Winform is nice and fast but not without problems. For example, MS insisted that the damn transparancy bug is a "intended feature." (a transparent form shows it's parent, but not other things that might be stacked under it.) And refresh problems, too.
"The wonderful Visual Studio
To conclude, I believe that Microsoft have made a mistake for marketing hype of a technology that is simply not ready for prime time. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for many developers. If you consider how fast MS dumped COM+, it's pretty scary to think that maybe
Why MS doesn't just flat out tell us that
That would be Canon printers. I purchased an i320 from Office Depot for $50 and bought dollar ink cartridges on ebay. After I explained to another customer shopping for a printer, she also went home happy with that same printer.
My Canon digital cameras also have very cheap third-party replacement batteries. It's awesome compared to my Sharp digital camcorder.
My Lexmark Optra 40, which was a high end color bubble jet with a postscript interpreter, cost $25 for a cartridge because of the print head. And the stock ink NEVER dries!!! So much for a $400 printer. Well I only paid $70 for it, but I will never buy a Lexmark again.
I don't understand why Canon does not advertise this cost of ownership advantage.