Quality determines whether a product will be successful, and advertising and branding determine who successful it will be.
A good example of that would be the Toyota Camry. It is a very good car. For the most part Camry owners wouldn't even think about buying a different car. Toyota earned their brand loyalty by not compromising on quality.
But can you really say the same thing about Intel? My working boxes are all AMD's. To me they offer more bang for the buck. When I think of Intel what comes to mind is not that they're the very best product for the $$$. Instead what comes to my mind is monopolistic business practices with Dell. I'm not saying there's anything more to it than my impression, but that's what I think about when I see Intel Inside.
When I think about quality cars, Camry is what comes to mind. When I think about quality processors, AMD takes the top slot...or maybe I should say Socket A.;)
I thought this whole IP thing coult not get any wierder.
This is just the warm up act. Our economy has shifted from making things to brain share products. When 80% of the value of the average company is brain share (I personally hate the term IP) then it's no surprise what area they're going to get silly about when looking to increase revenues. The trend isn't any surprise, but I'm continually amazed in how it manifests in daily life.
Outsource manufacturing is going to come back to bite us right in our big fat collective ass. It already is in many ways. Trying to copyright baseball statistics is just one more symptom of a much deeper economic disease.
The K Street Project must be distracted getting legislator's family members into cushy jobs financed by no-bid government contracts. Otherwise an abomination like this would never have slipped through.
Then MSFT will start calling their contacts on the K Street Project. They'll turn around and contact their Republican buddies on the staffs of key legislators and committee members and I bet by this time next week Homeland Security will be "re-examining" their approach to open source.
...but how about phones that make better phone calls? Instead of trying to add world + dog features to my phone that just junk it up.
Some of the extra features are handy at times. Text messaging isn't fast but it's convenient here and there. Camera is a cute toy but I never use mine.
I wonder how many consumers really want to use their phone as an mp3 player anyway? Or watching TV? Not me, but that's not necessarily reflective of the wider market.
The problem is that within information technology, many users have far too much access and trust than they should truly have.
Another problem I've seen is execs granting themselves and their assistants way more access than they really need to do their job. It's a power issue for some of them. I run the company and should be able to get to anything.
That's not every company and SOX has made thinking about the consequences more attractive for the higher ups.
My cell phone records, if anyone bothered to pay for them, would provide a list of short calls to other dull people...
Where my cell phone records would include friends, customers, and vendors which might prove very interesting to a competitor.
The second is to have an abysmal credit rating.
Again, I'm not that lucky to live a dull, uninteresting life coupled with a crappy credit rating. That's why no one would likely pay for your phone records.
I'll bet we could get this outlawed really fast. See if you could buy the cell phone records of some our elected officials and their staff. Hey, Senator, I couldn't help noticing this number here on your aide's cell phone records which is the number of an escort service across town. And hey, look! First a call to the escort service, then the aide calls this number...that's you right? What a coincidence! Every single time he calls the escort service, he calls you.
While this is certainly good news for the student, it leaves open the question of how much freedom Marquette Dental School students have in posting on their personal, non-university connected blogs.
We started down this slope when employees of companies could be disciplined and even fired for saying something the company didn't like in their personal web sites and blogs. Although the students comments were rude it doesn't appear they were injurous, threatening or inflamatory (if you see that prof kick him in the nuts!).
I think we've gone too far in regulating what people do on their own time and this incident is only one example of many. It's kind of funny how we talk out of both sides of our collective face sometimes. We all believe in freedom of speech, as long as it's a speech we like. We're fighting for freedom in Iraq while running secret prisons in Soviet bloc countries and wiretapping Americans without a warrant. We expect our elected leaders to be ethical in their conduct, yet we elect the same lying, corrupt individuals over and over expecting a different result.
There will always be gray areas. An employee giving away competitive intelligence or trade secrets on their personal blog. Slandering individual coworkers or other people. Encouraging people to engage in criminal behavior, or more specfiically trying to define what constitutes that criminal behavior. But, overall, I think actions speak louder than words. And if actions are any indication, freedom of speech is largely lip service to an ideal we don't really support.
SCO is also asking for specific performance forcing Novell to turn over the Unix copyrights to SCO.
SCO might as well have walked into court and announced the IBM, RedHat and AutoZone cases we're really just attempts at extortion and this is the REAL case. Just ignore all that stuff before and just give us what we need to make the charges in those other cases true.
You sure have to give them credit for sheer nads. But keep in mind that Novell still has a motion pending requesting 35 million of SCO's money be set aside to pay any potential claims Novell has on the MSFT/Sun license deals. If that goes through it's game, set and match. Absent that and absent any more finance angels dropping another 10 million on them, SCO will be out of money before any of these cases actually go to trial.
I don't suppose Brent Hatch, son of Whorin' Hatch, being on SCO's legal team has had any impact on this charade being in court this long. The great wheel of Republican corruption goes round and round.
Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers' - $1.5 billion to help U.S. households buy new digital TV equipment.
Who needs education when we can just watch TV? You don't have to be smart to get ahead, look at the Republican party.
Why do you need a phone on the job? I work for more than one client and sometimes have to answer questions or send documents while I'm working at another client site. Webmail is the fastest and least intrusive means for what I do.
Unless they're willing to offer me a guaranteed no-cut contract or a hefty buy-out clause, then my business comes first. Now instead of dashing off a couple lines in response, I have to take regular breaks to go outside and use my phone. Overall it costs them more time away from the desk than using web mail.
I became a contractor when companies started treating employees as disposable. Now I look out for number one first. Companies that expect people to be nose to the grind stone isn't realistic in my opinion, though I know a lot of them think that way. Frankly, I don't give a damn what they like or don't like. If they don't like my way of working, they can hire themselves one of those Bangladore wage slaves. I don't have any trouble billing my time, so I must be doing something right.
And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat?
The difference is with Firefox if you feel your browser is bloaty you can uninstall apps until it's down to a comfortable weight. IE is bloated before adding plugins.
Firefox has accelerated the trend of the browser becoming sort of an internet gateway device. FF will continue to innovate rings around MSFT.
I've been seeing the house of the future my whole life. And you know what? The houses of today aren't that much different than houses built 100 years ago. Insulation is a little better, but it's marginal. Appliances are more efficient but not a lot different. If anything the lumber used a 100 years ago is a lot better...at least it's thicker. Air conditioning is better, windows are better but they don't look much different.
If you built the house of the future today with a high thermal mass material like concrete or compact earth, composting toilets, solar and wind turbine power, and grey water utilization...guess what? The bank won't finance it! Ha! It's the biggest inside joke in the real estate business.
If you built a sustainable house there won't be any comps for a house like that. No comps and that means the bank can't sell your paper to Fannie Mae, which means it won't end up at a discount aggregator like Washington Mutual or Wells Fargo. It would have to be a portfolio loan that the bank carries and there are damn few of those.
It can be done, but you either have to be rich enough to afford to finance it yourself, build it yourself with a builder's loan that the bank will end up carrying. And if you're going to sell it, you'd better be prepared to wait for a wealthy buyer or owner finance.
That's why we have row after row of surburban ticky-tacky houses that look exactly alike. With the same cheap, inefficient appliances, cracked foundations, uneven floors, sloppy drywall and doors that won't close right. Because everything in the real estate world is set up to work a certain way and if your house doesn't fit in that mold you have to put up the money. Building codes, home owners associations, comps, and financing are set up to do what they've always done and that's why houses still look pretty much like they did 100 years ago.
'course, I'm preaching to the choir here on Slashdot.
Not necessarily and neither is it a given that the choir would agree with you on all of the big issues. I work for several clients, one of whom has recently gone to what I call the Death Star network security level. They locked down users machines, cut off access to almost any technology that isn't just straight web browsing, including web mail and IM. I could easily exempt myself and skirt their security restrictions but I don't think that's right. It's their network and they can manage it as they choose. As a contractor I'm a guest there. And since they don't allow any kind of remote access, working from home is a non-starter as well.
So, instead I'm wrapping up what I'm doing for them and opted not to renew their contract. Because for me those other technologies are time-savers, a convenience I choose not to go without. I have options where I spend my time, so I'm spending it elsewhere. Another option would have been to get an appliance with wireless internet access, but I opted against that as well. Why should I pay 50 bucks a month out of my pocket because they don't want to let people have web mail?
I can sort of see their point, which you elaborated. That it keeps users from tracking in bad stuff from their web mail accounts, IM virus and phishing attacks, and the other problems you mentioned. But you could also take away their telephones and fax machines to prevent social engineering attacks, ban cell phones (some companies do that) and other restrictive measures. I believe, ultimately, that strategy is counter-productive.
It's unfortunate Windows is so easy to hork with spyware, trojans and key loggers that it's necessary to practice Death Star networking to keep it working right. The funny thing is, they still seem to manage to get the odd virus and trojan, even with all the restrictive security. Balance that with how long it will find them to locate another programmer to work part-time on site to maintain the programs I built for them and the blue chip analyst and two other programmers who quit for largely the same reasons. There's price to pay going either route.
Well, this is isn't that much worse than some of the things they've done before. This isn't about winning cases, it's about intimidating people. RIAA has in the past employed people to pretend to be police officers to "raid" flea market booths. Suing grandparents and single moms is all in a day's work. So you're *shocked* they would coach and intimidate a 15 year old? Get real. They'll do worse than that and they'll keep it up until the FBI raids their offices and hauls away the top execs. But since most of the top people at RIAA are Republican, you can forget about that happening, just like you can forget about that criminal Bush being impeached.
Our history is littered with over-reaching corporations. This is just an over-reaching corporate organization designed to shield their member companies from liability. So if RIAA ever does go too far Sony-BMG can put on their best corporate innocent look and say they never authorized THAT.
But as long as Republicans run our government, this is going to be how you're going to be treated by corporate Amerika. While both parties may be corrupt to a greater or lesser degree, Republicans have taken a giant step towards fascism. Governmeny by big business, for big business. Anyone care to argue that's not the defacto situation we have now?
Republicans are corrupt to the core and no one who calls themselves a Christian can continue to support them with a clean conscience. Not that they didn't have to kid themselves before, but now they do it knowingly.
I worked for a software company that had a pretty big business in paying OEMs to pre-install crippleware and share back the revenue made off of upgrades.
For a demonstration of the truth of that, just build your own PC sometime and install a clean copy of Windows that you buy yourself. It's so clean. Though I'm sure that's changing. MSFT will take money for crippleware on images just like Dell.
Donno, since I haven't built a Windoze box in a couple years but I'm guessing that's the case. Does retail box Windows come with crippleware pre-installed? I mean crippleware besides the operating system, IE and Outlook Express!
but was not afraid to admit how much of an overkill it is for the enthusiast market.
No kidding. That's enough power to run a refrigerator. That really is overkill. Though it wasn't that long ago that a 250 watt PS was overkill. So who knows.
The inability of the companies behind the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) content management system to complete their work has already caused Toshiba to put launch plans for its HD DVD player on hold.
You think that's bad, you should try working a project with EDS. Then you'll learn what "delay" really means.
Let's see...the Republicans have both houses of Congress and the White House and it's me that needs to get real? Anything that's not happening is 100% Republican owned. When the DMCA was passed in 1998 the Repubs had majorities in both houses then too, which means they could have kept it from even getting to the floor for a vote.
Maybe it wouldn't have been any different if the Dems had been in power, but we'll never know. The bottom line is it was Republican conceived, Republican passed and the Republicans are occupied running our country even farther into the ground while it's used to abuse the poor and the weak.
Yes, our entire government is corrupt. Both parties. But the Republicans are the ones with all the cards and they own the responsibility for the shit that's going on.
If I'm being sued, I settle out of court for fearing of losing more money. Even if she wins the case, she's lost more money than the settlement.
And that's exactly why it keeps happening and will keep happening until those getting sued do what some companies have done on patent claims: Team up and share legal expenses. As long as people roll over, it enables their behavior. Let someone else stand up to them, that's the ticket. But if we (the collective we, which obviously doesn't include you) don't make a stand against this behavior, it's going to start happening for other areas besides music sharing.
Too bad we the people don't have any representation in Washington. Because a government by the people would stomp all over the organization doing this, and the member companies funding it. But our government is too busy with really important things like helping Anna Nicole Smith get her money from an old guy's estate (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10606237/from/RL.1/) and running secret prisons in former Soviet block countries while spying on millions of innocent Americans. To Republicans those are more important than some single mom being strong-armed by major corporations.
I wonder why, considering we have more than one state, that it's always New York taking the lead to try and give consumers an even break? He went after the mutual fund timing trades, record company payolla, and now more record company misbehavior. California also went after Edward Jones. California and New York the only states sticking up for consumers instead of standing by and watching consumers get the sticking.
Slashdot Mirror
A good example of that would be the Toyota Camry. It is a very good car. For the most part Camry owners wouldn't even think about buying a different car. Toyota earned their brand loyalty by not compromising on quality.
But can you really say the same thing about Intel? My working boxes are all AMD's. To me they offer more bang for the buck. When I think of Intel what comes to mind is not that they're the very best product for the $$$. Instead what comes to my mind is monopolistic business practices with Dell. I'm not saying there's anything more to it than my impression, but that's what I think about when I see Intel Inside.
When I think about quality cars, Camry is what comes to mind. When I think about quality processors, AMD takes the top slot...or maybe I should say Socket A. ;)
This is just the warm up act. Our economy has shifted from making things to brain share products. When 80% of the value of the average company is brain share (I personally hate the term IP) then it's no surprise what area they're going to get silly about when looking to increase revenues. The trend isn't any surprise, but I'm continually amazed in how it manifests in daily life.
Outsource manufacturing is going to come back to bite us right in our big fat collective ass. It already is in many ways. Trying to copyright baseball statistics is just one more symptom of a much deeper economic disease.
The K Street Project must be distracted getting legislator's family members into cushy jobs financed by no-bid government contracts. Otherwise an abomination like this would never have slipped through.
Almost sounds like he thinks that's a bad thing.
Then MSFT will start calling their contacts on the K Street Project. They'll turn around and contact their Republican buddies on the staffs of key legislators and committee members and I bet by this time next week Homeland Security will be "re-examining" their approach to open source.
Some of the extra features are handy at times. Text messaging isn't fast but it's convenient here and there. Camera is a cute toy but I never use mine.
I wonder how many consumers really want to use their phone as an mp3 player anyway? Or watching TV? Not me, but that's not necessarily reflective of the wider market.
Another problem I've seen is execs granting themselves and their assistants way more access than they really need to do their job. It's a power issue for some of them. I run the company and should be able to get to anything.
That's not every company and SOX has made thinking about the consequences more attractive for the higher ups.
Where my cell phone records would include friends, customers, and vendors which might prove very interesting to a competitor.
The second is to have an abysmal credit rating.
Again, I'm not that lucky to live a dull, uninteresting life coupled with a crappy credit rating. That's why no one would likely pay for your phone records.
I'll bet we could get this outlawed really fast. See if you could buy the cell phone records of some our elected officials and their staff. Hey, Senator, I couldn't help noticing this number here on your aide's cell phone records which is the number of an escort service across town. And hey, look! First a call to the escort service, then the aide calls this number...that's you right? What a coincidence! Every single time he calls the escort service, he calls you.
We started down this slope when employees of companies could be disciplined and even fired for saying something the company didn't like in their personal web sites and blogs. Although the students comments were rude it doesn't appear they were injurous, threatening or inflamatory (if you see that prof kick him in the nuts!).
I think we've gone too far in regulating what people do on their own time and this incident is only one example of many. It's kind of funny how we talk out of both sides of our collective face sometimes. We all believe in freedom of speech, as long as it's a speech we like. We're fighting for freedom in Iraq while running secret prisons in Soviet bloc countries and wiretapping Americans without a warrant. We expect our elected leaders to be ethical in their conduct, yet we elect the same lying, corrupt individuals over and over expecting a different result.
There will always be gray areas. An employee giving away competitive intelligence or trade secrets on their personal blog. Slandering individual coworkers or other people. Encouraging people to engage in criminal behavior, or more specfiically trying to define what constitutes that criminal behavior. But, overall, I think actions speak louder than words. And if actions are any indication, freedom of speech is largely lip service to an ideal we don't really support.
SCO might as well have walked into court and announced the IBM, RedHat and AutoZone cases we're really just attempts at extortion and this is the REAL case. Just ignore all that stuff before and just give us what we need to make the charges in those other cases true.
You sure have to give them credit for sheer nads. But keep in mind that Novell still has a motion pending requesting 35 million of SCO's money be set aside to pay any potential claims Novell has on the MSFT/Sun license deals. If that goes through it's game, set and match. Absent that and absent any more finance angels dropping another 10 million on them, SCO will be out of money before any of these cases actually go to trial.
I don't suppose Brent Hatch, son of Whorin' Hatch, being on SCO's legal team has had any impact on this charade being in court this long. The great wheel of Republican corruption goes round and round.
Tuck those wings in, give it jets instead of props and it's Thunderbird 2.
Who needs education when we can just watch TV? You don't have to be smart to get ahead, look at the Republican party.
Why do you need a phone on the job? I work for more than one client and sometimes have to answer questions or send documents while I'm working at another client site. Webmail is the fastest and least intrusive means for what I do.
Unless they're willing to offer me a guaranteed no-cut contract or a hefty buy-out clause, then my business comes first. Now instead of dashing off a couple lines in response, I have to take regular breaks to go outside and use my phone. Overall it costs them more time away from the desk than using web mail.
I became a contractor when companies started treating employees as disposable. Now I look out for number one first. Companies that expect people to be nose to the grind stone isn't realistic in my opinion, though I know a lot of them think that way. Frankly, I don't give a damn what they like or don't like. If they don't like my way of working, they can hire themselves one of those Bangladore wage slaves. I don't have any trouble billing my time, so I must be doing something right.
The difference is with Firefox if you feel your browser is bloaty you can uninstall apps until it's down to a comfortable weight. IE is bloated before adding plugins.
Firefox has accelerated the trend of the browser becoming sort of an internet gateway device. FF will continue to innovate rings around MSFT.
If you built the house of the future today with a high thermal mass material like concrete or compact earth, composting toilets, solar and wind turbine power, and grey water utilization...guess what? The bank won't finance it! Ha! It's the biggest inside joke in the real estate business.
If you built a sustainable house there won't be any comps for a house like that. No comps and that means the bank can't sell your paper to Fannie Mae, which means it won't end up at a discount aggregator like Washington Mutual or Wells Fargo. It would have to be a portfolio loan that the bank carries and there are damn few of those.
It can be done, but you either have to be rich enough to afford to finance it yourself, build it yourself with a builder's loan that the bank will end up carrying. And if you're going to sell it, you'd better be prepared to wait for a wealthy buyer or owner finance.
That's why we have row after row of surburban ticky-tacky houses that look exactly alike. With the same cheap, inefficient appliances, cracked foundations, uneven floors, sloppy drywall and doors that won't close right. Because everything in the real estate world is set up to work a certain way and if your house doesn't fit in that mold you have to put up the money. Building codes, home owners associations, comps, and financing are set up to do what they've always done and that's why houses still look pretty much like they did 100 years ago.
Not necessarily and neither is it a given that the choir would agree with you on all of the big issues. I work for several clients, one of whom has recently gone to what I call the Death Star network security level. They locked down users machines, cut off access to almost any technology that isn't just straight web browsing, including web mail and IM. I could easily exempt myself and skirt their security restrictions but I don't think that's right. It's their network and they can manage it as they choose. As a contractor I'm a guest there. And since they don't allow any kind of remote access, working from home is a non-starter as well.
So, instead I'm wrapping up what I'm doing for them and opted not to renew their contract. Because for me those other technologies are time-savers, a convenience I choose not to go without. I have options where I spend my time, so I'm spending it elsewhere. Another option would have been to get an appliance with wireless internet access, but I opted against that as well. Why should I pay 50 bucks a month out of my pocket because they don't want to let people have web mail?
I can sort of see their point, which you elaborated. That it keeps users from tracking in bad stuff from their web mail accounts, IM virus and phishing attacks, and the other problems you mentioned. But you could also take away their telephones and fax machines to prevent social engineering attacks, ban cell phones (some companies do that) and other restrictive measures. I believe, ultimately, that strategy is counter-productive.
It's unfortunate Windows is so easy to hork with spyware, trojans and key loggers that it's necessary to practice Death Star networking to keep it working right. The funny thing is, they still seem to manage to get the odd virus and trojan, even with all the restrictive security. Balance that with how long it will find them to locate another programmer to work part-time on site to maintain the programs I built for them and the blue chip analyst and two other programmers who quit for largely the same reasons. There's price to pay going either route.
Our history is littered with over-reaching corporations. This is just an over-reaching corporate organization designed to shield their member companies from liability. So if RIAA ever does go too far Sony-BMG can put on their best corporate innocent look and say they never authorized THAT.
But as long as Republicans run our government, this is going to be how you're going to be treated by corporate Amerika. While both parties may be corrupt to a greater or lesser degree, Republicans have taken a giant step towards fascism. Governmeny by big business, for big business. Anyone care to argue that's not the defacto situation we have now?
Republicans are corrupt to the core and no one who calls themselves a Christian can continue to support them with a clean conscience. Not that they didn't have to kid themselves before, but now they do it knowingly.
For a demonstration of the truth of that, just build your own PC sometime and install a clean copy of Windows that you buy yourself. It's so clean. Though I'm sure that's changing. MSFT will take money for crippleware on images just like Dell.
Donno, since I haven't built a Windoze box in a couple years but I'm guessing that's the case. Does retail box Windows come with crippleware pre-installed? I mean crippleware besides the operating system, IE and Outlook Express!
No kidding. That's enough power to run a refrigerator. That really is overkill. Though it wasn't that long ago that a 250 watt PS was overkill. So who knows.
You think that's bad, you should try working a project with EDS. Then you'll learn what "delay" really means.
Let's see...the Republicans have both houses of Congress and the White House and it's me that needs to get real? Anything that's not happening is 100% Republican owned. When the DMCA was passed in 1998 the Repubs had majorities in both houses then too, which means they could have kept it from even getting to the floor for a vote.
Maybe it wouldn't have been any different if the Dems had been in power, but we'll never know. The bottom line is it was Republican conceived, Republican passed and the Republicans are occupied running our country even farther into the ground while it's used to abuse the poor and the weak.
Yes, our entire government is corrupt. Both parties. But the Republicans are the ones with all the cards and they own the responsibility for the shit that's going on.
And that's exactly why it keeps happening and will keep happening until those getting sued do what some companies have done on patent claims: Team up and share legal expenses. As long as people roll over, it enables their behavior. Let someone else stand up to them, that's the ticket. But if we (the collective we, which obviously doesn't include you) don't make a stand against this behavior, it's going to start happening for other areas besides music sharing.
Too bad we the people don't have any representation in Washington. Because a government by the people would stomp all over the organization doing this, and the member companies funding it. But our government is too busy with really important things like helping Anna Nicole Smith get her money from an old guy's estate (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10606237/from/RL.1/) and running secret prisons in former Soviet block countries while spying on millions of innocent Americans. To Republicans those are more important than some single mom being strong-armed by major corporations.
I wonder why, considering we have more than one state, that it's always New York taking the lead to try and give consumers an even break? He went after the mutual fund timing trades, record company payolla, and now more record company misbehavior. California also went after Edward Jones. California and New York the only states sticking up for consumers instead of standing by and watching consumers get the sticking.
Not quite, but the inmates are running the asylum.
My kingdom is not of this world; (John 18:36)
isn't clear?