Or maybe the same role that military contractors have to ensure that dodgy countries can't buy state-of-the-art weapons. It's not just a matter of principle, it's a matter of threat assessment. WPA-PSK today... tomorrow SSL? Yes, there are several orders of magnitude in difficulty between them, but EC2 is all about massive scalability, right?
The trouble is that these media companies have paid lots of money for the 'rights' to these media, for which they expect a return.
The other trouble is that for every 'true' artist, like Neil Young, there will always be 100 artists who want all the riches for their 20 mins of inspiration.
To my mind, the simplest approach is that all rights should be legally bound (non-transferable) to the creator. So artists *cannot* sell their souls, even if they wanted to.
In this modern age, where media is cheap and distribution is easy (and traceable), there is no reason why merit & reward cannot remain with the originator. This way the big studios are reduced to their real role: marketing and PR. Which artists may choose to hire, if they have the resources. Exposure, in its fullest, most transparent sense.
Aren't there enough issues with space debris, without 1000 amateurs chucking miniature debris into space? It's tantamount to throwing rocks at satellites and NASA shuttles, isn't it?
What is this, space guerilla warfare??
What Google were trying to influence were the creators of content. If you don't want your content mis-represented or ripped off, then post first.
All they need to do is give content owners first dibs on content creation and presentation (and possibly quality options) on GooTube. It's just a giant moving billboard, and the content owners want more influence on how their content is presented, and how their revenues are derived.
For the guys suing them this is just negotiation by other means.
The issue is not the distribution mechanism, it's where the production costs are incurred. Record labels (and movie studios) spend a ton of money promoting their artists' work, and that's why they want the revenue.
The trouble is that these costs don't benefit the customer, so the customer doesn't feel that the costs are justified - we don't want to pay for Britney Speirs to be played at us 4 times an hour. So, without DRM revenue, the labels/studios will have to reduce these costs and, hopefully, refocus on making better products that people notice based on their merits rather than bludgeoning the market with crass adverts.
This doesn't address the issue of redistribution: be it piracy or just public playing. But then no medium ever has addressed this adequately. I can still photocopy my book, record my CD/DVD and play it in public. It still needs protecting from flagrant abuse, but it does not need locking down to the annoyance of every consumer.
Open source is great for the tinkerer, but what about the customer?
The success fo the ipod wasn't just the aesthetics per se, but the fact that it just played music. It didn't try to play movies (originally), open office documents, be a TV remote or anything else that tinkerers would love and consumers hate.
Would you prefer your washing machine to be open source, or just do its job and be easy to use?
Technology smarts are great for pioneers & self-starters. Where the big G falls down is in marketing. Their reputation is excellent, but it's not because of good marketing. While innovative business models keep it ahead of the pack, they dont necessarily help to sustain the culture.
Where Microsoft displaced good products for marketing, Google risk displacing marketing for good products - that never fulfil their potential because the mode of getting them to market was weak.
My product/service impression of Google is of an awesome search company attached to a giant web 2.0 lab. As an everyday consumer (non-techie, non-slashdot, barely internet-savvy), what are these extra lab things doing for me? Where's the portal for all this stuff? The glue that binds my gmail to my goffice to my gbookmarks and greader - all into one seamless user experience.
That's stock hype, not marketing hype. As long as they stay profitable, they'll keep the analysts happy. The harder market to please is the purchaser of your products. In this case, there's no purchase.
I agree with your sentiments. One additional observation:-
Where is the marketing? The big launches and endless press about how they are making our lives better & easier?
The truly great innovation of Google is their faith in their software. Rather than release half-arsed products, and expecting people to pay for the R & D to complete those products, they rely on consumers' innate desire to improve the products they use. Here's a good, free tool, with a handy set of APIs... now let's see what happens. Nobody can really complain because there was no marketing hype for it to live up to, and no sale. So the only critics are constructive critics - just what any software producer wants.
Skimming through these threads I see the jist: it's either slow & buggy, with poor, expensive dev community (WinCE/Pocket), or great, cheap dev community but lacking sophistication (palm).
So don't support them. Why don't Apple just leave the door open, and make it clear that they will only directly support the OS on their own hardware?
I suspect a large secondary market would open up to support OSX hacks (umm, Linux, anyone?). It could be the best of both worlds: a professionally managed & developed OS on a reliable (but limited) hardware platform; yet if you want to trick it out, you can, and optionally take on 3rd party support.
To all Jar Jar haters out there, I have one word: Ewoks.
We didn't mind/quite liked ewoks in the original because they were funny and we were 7.
Lucas managed the old trick of telling an epic story in the wrong order and making it a hit. Tarantino used the same trick in Pulp Fiction. Come to think of it, Sophocles did the same in Oedipus. It's called dramatic irony, and is based on playing with your sense of inevitability. You know Oedipus kills his dad & marries his mum, but you're still curious about what makes him do it.
Lucas could have just produced utter shite and got the same cash, but the result showed much effort and some genuine ingenuity.
Extending your initial point further, ANY server is hard to configure if you don't know much about the underlying technology.
The worrying thing about MS servers is that the wizards and tick boxes enable any old joker to think they understand (eg.)webserver configuration.
A seasoned Linux user has to know about the technology in order to fiddle with it, and once they do, they don't need all the crappy wizards and checkboxes. And since they understand the technology, it's a much smaller step towards understanding how to harden it.
Microsoft-certified Professional is an oxymoron. (I should know, I have a certificate!)
Surely it's not about the storing of archives, but about the use they are put to?
The Internet Archive is an excellent concept - a library of congress for the internet. Just because it retains some controversial material does that give us a right to burn the whole thing down?
The evidence that was unearthed was clearly important and timely to the case, and it did exist in the public domain. It's not as though the Internet Archive had metaphorically rummaged through the shredder trash. What if the law firm got hold of a marketing leaflet from the time that had the same information? Should they sue the law firm and the person who had 'reproduced' the leaflet?
At the worst, this should indicate to the IA that they should seriously consider subscription access, with additional terms of use.
Not only is it useful, but it's the future-past of computing. Think about what computers were originally designed to do: calculate things, and sort things.
With massive storage being so prevalent these days, I get tired of having to do filing on my computer. Plus, with more collaborative software, you find that different people have different filing methods (numeric, phased, alphabetic, dewey-decimal etc.). Why should I have to care about where my files are? I just want to know what they relate to. Goodbye file manager/finder/explorer. I'll have Spotlight search, and smart folders (stored, self-updating search results, effectively) that show me the info in the way that I like to see it, without compromising anyone else's filing structure.
This also completes Apple's interface metaphor for data search/store - as used in iPhoto and iTunes. And consistency & simplicity of UI metaphor are what make Apple systems easy to use, and Windows relatively more complex to the layman.
Another analogy: artists were originally paid to perform. Mozart toured the royal palaces of Europe with his dad, to earn money. They would also get commissioned (= paid up front) to do specific pieces of work. This is how performance and art worked for centuries before the technology to record and replay performances came out.
After this point, up until the internet, the distributors ran the market because no one artist could afford to create the media and distribute it. The distributors increased the barriers to entry by adding dollops of promotion and reducing artists' rights to their work.
Now there is no need for expensive distribution. The powerbrokers have no leverage other than relentless, expensive promotion. Much cost to recoup, little revenue to be had. No wonder they're p!ssed off, but it serves them right for keeping up prices when costs were dropping fast (as cost of production dropped - think LPs to CDs).
For performers, the old model is back - you have the opportunity to have control. You might earn some money for no additional effort (ie. recording sales, broadcast royalties), but you'll earn the most through the tried & tested method: getting out there and performing. After all, that's what athletes have to do.
My future prediction: concert tickets sold by auction only. TicketMaster, I'll have those royalties up front, please - commission only!
Security should be on a par with safety, in terms of the responsibilities and precautions required of companies. Microsoft are replacing 14 million xbox cables. Why not 100 million service pack CDs for their largest customer base?
It's all well and good to say 'patch your machines', but that's hardly a consumer-friendly approach in any industry. The way to teach security is to show people the locks, not the doors.
Windows is more than just drivers, and Linux is more than just a free OS. There's nothing new here - it's a variation of what Apple have done. It's just more entertaining, contentious FUD from Dvorak.
First, he doesn't mention the impact on XP and potential Longhorn users. What are they supposed to think? Technically, it might make sense, but if these people were technically clever (ie. not requiring some MS marketing to make a decision) they'd have Linux already. If they had Linux, chances are they got it for a) pricing reasons, or b) independence from Microsoft, neither of which would be dented by this move.
Drivers may be a strong consumer argument (ever weakening with more universal standards), but a trivial enterprise argument.
Final point: why would M$ want to kill Linux? Sure, it threatens their market dominance, but what's bad about a competitor who reveals all their secrets? It sure beats any alternatives.
The key is the M$ have lost their competitive edge. They no longer compete, they react. It's the edge that is important, not the market share(eg. Apple).
Microsoft's definition of OS is the mainstay of their market position, and the definition grows every year, trying to encompass the internet. [Just wait, next year will be the year of mstp:// !!]. Remember the old definition of OS: software that enables dialogue between applications and hardware. A kernel, basically. Not a GUI, or a development platform. Linux is much closer to this definition than Windows - with Linux you choose your GUI and a plethora of dev environments.
Companies like Mozilla and Google are taking the opposite approach by taking application dependency away from the desktop OS. M$ can't do that without clipping its golden goose - Windows.
Another example: Outlook is better at handling dodgy scripts than, say, Notes or Thunderbird.
If you think that's a good thing, I'm guessing you're either a) a script kiddie, or b) one of those low-paid, 2-weeks Microsoft-certified code cowboys that push down the wages of decent MS software engineers. (I have met some).
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe the same role that military contractors have to ensure that dodgy countries can't buy state-of-the-art weapons. It's not just a matter of principle, it's a matter of threat assessment. WPA-PSK today... tomorrow SSL? Yes, there are several orders of magnitude in difficulty between them, but EC2 is all about massive scalability, right?
The trouble is that these media companies have paid lots of money for the 'rights' to these media, for which they expect a return. The other trouble is that for every 'true' artist, like Neil Young, there will always be 100 artists who want all the riches for their 20 mins of inspiration. To my mind, the simplest approach is that all rights should be legally bound (non-transferable) to the creator. So artists *cannot* sell their souls, even if they wanted to. In this modern age, where media is cheap and distribution is easy (and traceable), there is no reason why merit & reward cannot remain with the originator. This way the big studios are reduced to their real role: marketing and PR. Which artists may choose to hire, if they have the resources. Exposure, in its fullest, most transparent sense.
Aren't there enough issues with space debris, without 1000 amateurs chucking miniature debris into space? It's tantamount to throwing rocks at satellites and NASA shuttles, isn't it? What is this, space guerilla warfare??
All they need to do is give content owners first dibs on content creation and presentation (and possibly quality options) on GooTube. It's just a giant moving billboard, and the content owners want more influence on how their content is presented, and how their revenues are derived.
For the guys suing them this is just negotiation by other means.
The trouble is that these costs don't benefit the customer, so the customer doesn't feel that the costs are justified - we don't want to pay for Britney Speirs to be played at us 4 times an hour. So, without DRM revenue, the labels/studios will have to reduce these costs and, hopefully, refocus on making better products that people notice based on their merits rather than bludgeoning the market with crass adverts.
This doesn't address the issue of redistribution: be it piracy or just public playing. But then no medium ever has addressed this adequately. I can still photocopy my book, record my CD/DVD and play it in public. It still needs protecting from flagrant abuse, but it does not need locking down to the annoyance of every consumer.
Open source is great for the tinkerer, but what about the customer?
The success fo the ipod wasn't just the aesthetics per se, but the fact that it just played music. It didn't try to play movies (originally), open office documents, be a TV remote or anything else that tinkerers would love and consumers hate.
Would you prefer your washing machine to be open source, or just do its job and be easy to use?
Where Microsoft displaced good products for marketing, Google risk displacing marketing for good products - that never fulfil their potential because the mode of getting them to market was weak.
My product/service impression of Google is of an awesome search company attached to a giant web 2.0 lab. As an everyday consumer (non-techie, non-slashdot, barely internet-savvy), what are these extra lab things doing for me? Where's the portal for all this stuff? The glue that binds my gmail to my goffice to my gbookmarks and greader - all into one seamless user experience.
That's stock hype, not marketing hype. As long as they stay profitable, they'll keep the analysts happy. The harder market to please is the purchaser of your products. In this case, there's no purchase.
Where is the marketing? The big launches and endless press about how they are making our lives better & easier?
The truly great innovation of Google is their faith in their software. Rather than release half-arsed products, and expecting people to pay for the R & D to complete those products, they rely on consumers' innate desire to improve the products they use. Here's a good, free tool, with a handy set of APIs... now let's see what happens. Nobody can really complain because there was no marketing hype for it to live up to, and no sale. So the only critics are constructive critics - just what any software producer wants.
Sounds like a cue for Apple to me...
I suspect a large secondary market would open up to support OSX hacks (umm, Linux, anyone?). It could be the best of both worlds: a professionally managed & developed OS on a reliable (but limited) hardware platform; yet if you want to trick it out, you can, and optionally take on 3rd party support.
Lucas managed the old trick of telling an epic story in the wrong order and making it a hit. Tarantino used the same trick in Pulp Fiction. Come to think of it, Sophocles did the same in Oedipus. It's called dramatic irony, and is based on playing with your sense of inevitability. You know Oedipus kills his dad & marries his mum, but you're still curious about what makes him do it.
Lucas could have just produced utter shite and got the same cash, but the result showed much effort and some genuine ingenuity.
The worrying thing about MS servers is that the wizards and tick boxes enable any old joker to think they understand (eg.)webserver configuration.
A seasoned Linux user has to know about the technology in order to fiddle with it, and once they do, they don't need all the crappy wizards and checkboxes. And since they understand the technology, it's a much smaller step towards understanding how to harden it.
Microsoft-certified Professional is an oxymoron. (I should know, I have a certificate!)
The Internet Archive is an excellent concept - a library of congress for the internet. Just because it retains some controversial material does that give us a right to burn the whole thing down?
The evidence that was unearthed was clearly important and timely to the case, and it did exist in the public domain. It's not as though the Internet Archive had metaphorically rummaged through the shredder trash. What if the law firm got hold of a marketing leaflet from the time that had the same information? Should they sue the law firm and the person who had 'reproduced' the leaflet?
At the worst, this should indicate to the IA that they should seriously consider subscription access, with additional terms of use.
It's just such a shame that (s)he doesn't appear to bequeath such smarts to his/her most ardent followers...
Ah no, that would be "Definitely in 2003, no 2004, I mean 2005, no 2006" etc.
Another benefit of open source is that it doesn't need marketing spin, because often the underlying gist is 'whenever we can'.
With massive storage being so prevalent these days, I get tired of having to do filing on my computer. Plus, with more collaborative software, you find that different people have different filing methods (numeric, phased, alphabetic, dewey-decimal etc.). Why should I have to care about where my files are? I just want to know what they relate to. Goodbye file manager/finder/explorer. I'll have Spotlight search, and smart folders (stored, self-updating search results, effectively) that show me the info in the way that I like to see it, without compromising anyone else's filing structure.
This also completes Apple's interface metaphor for data search/store - as used in iPhoto and iTunes. And consistency & simplicity of UI metaphor are what make Apple systems easy to use, and Windows relatively more complex to the layman.
After this point, up until the internet, the distributors ran the market because no one artist could afford to create the media and distribute it. The distributors increased the barriers to entry by adding dollops of promotion and reducing artists' rights to their work.
Now there is no need for expensive distribution. The powerbrokers have no leverage other than relentless, expensive promotion. Much cost to recoup, little revenue to be had. No wonder they're p!ssed off, but it serves them right for keeping up prices when costs were dropping fast (as cost of production dropped - think LPs to CDs).
For performers, the old model is back - you have the opportunity to have control. You might earn some money for no additional effort (ie. recording sales, broadcast royalties), but you'll earn the most through the tried & tested method: getting out there and performing. After all, that's what athletes have to do.
My future prediction: concert tickets sold by auction only. TicketMaster, I'll have those royalties up front, please - commission only!
It's all well and good to say 'patch your machines', but that's hardly a consumer-friendly approach in any industry. The way to teach security is to show people the locks, not the doors.
First, he doesn't mention the impact on XP and potential Longhorn users. What are they supposed to think? Technically, it might make sense, but if these people were technically clever (ie. not requiring some MS marketing to make a decision) they'd have Linux already. If they had Linux, chances are they got it for a) pricing reasons, or b) independence from Microsoft, neither of which would be dented by this move.
Drivers may be a strong consumer argument (ever weakening with more universal standards), but a trivial enterprise argument.
Final point: why would M$ want to kill Linux? Sure, it threatens their market dominance, but what's bad about a competitor who reveals all their secrets? It sure beats any alternatives.
Microsoft's definition of OS is the mainstay of their market position, and the definition grows every year, trying to encompass the internet. [Just wait, next year will be the year of mstp:// !!]. Remember the old definition of OS: software that enables dialogue between applications and hardware. A kernel, basically. Not a GUI, or a development platform. Linux is much closer to this definition than Windows - with Linux you choose your GUI and a plethora of dev environments.
Companies like Mozilla and Google are taking the opposite approach by taking application dependency away from the desktop OS. M$ can't do that without clipping its golden goose - Windows.
If you think that's a good thing, I'm guessing you're either a) a script kiddie, or b) one of those low-paid, 2-weeks Microsoft-certified code cowboys that push down the wages of decent MS software engineers. (I have met some).
A: (Evasive action! Evade!) Actually, the DoJ was ages before, and they wimped out at the punishment. So that doesn't really count.
Q: Take 2, Did you ever pause for a moment and think: 'are we being anti-competitive?'. (Translation: did you break the law?)
A: The PC industry has done an amazing job. (Translation: we ARE the industry, I AM the law!!)
Back to topic: they should change the error page to "We are sorry, the leader of the free world is currently offline. Please try again later."
I hope he's got his 'Out of Office' message ready...