One suggestion which I thought was partictularly interesting involved a bounty system whereby a price would be put on 'hacker's heads', incentivating other hackers to go after them and bring them forward.
If anyone thinks this will work, then I feel sorry for them. Hackers by and large aren't going to rat on each other. There's one really good reason -- if the one they ratted on finds out who they are, or his/her friends find out, then the rattee is going to be in deep doodoo fast. Facing this, they'll just take the route of least resistance and easy moolah and rat out innocents or even set up innocents and report them.
Think about it, how hard is it to infect the average joe's computer with a trojan, worm or virus? History (heck, recent history in fact) shows us that it's not terribly hard. For some of these worms/etc. that come out, you don't even have to click on anything to get infected! So it'd be easy as pie to set someone up. Just infect their machine with a trojan, make their machine do Evil Things (tm) while they're actually active on it, cover your tracks, and report. Law enforcement tends to be overexuberant on catching cyber evil-doers, and there's a more than fair chance they won't dig deep enough to notice the tracks the hacker left on the innocent guy's computer.
And to be honest, they probably won't get the chance to. How many average joes out there have done something not-so-legal? Probably a lot, it seems everyone and their brother's wife have illegal software of some sort to hear people casually talk about it. I've heard customers at Wal-mart ask employees if they can install ___ software on more than one computer. (Often it's anti-virus software they're asking about ironically.) When average joe is faced with getting in trouble for the stuff he knows he's done wrong, he'll probably cop a plea bargain to avoid that coming to light. And law enforcement will go along, after all it will look like a win for them on the public relations front.
For those that will scream that law enforcement wouldn't do these things, I can only tell you that I hope you never get to find out first-hand just what they will and won't do. I had the misfortune and it was a real eye-opener. I prefer not to go into specifics, but I will say that before my experience I never believed any of the supposed "conspiracy theories"/etc. about how bad law enforecment and/or the FBI/etc. were. Now I think they're all dead on.
Bottom line, putting out bounties on cyber-criminals would result in many innocent victems, and probably very very few real criminals being caught.
I could never figure why in a country as large as the USA, even if it has more TV channels, the commercials policies have to be desperate like this.
Honestly I think it's simply greed to some extent. When the amount of commercials per hour started really rising, product placement was making inroads at the same time. You really have to wonder exactly who that advertising money was going to. While I can understand commercials often help keep the costs down (well supposedly anyway) for your cable company/etc., product placement can only help the people making the shows. It seems to me these two are mutually exclusive in some ways. However, if the companies making the programs are getting money for product placement now, that should help make production less expensive. They still charge as much to syndicate it though I'm sure. Voila, greed!
It's hard to take all the arguments seriously thought when you have a cable monopoly who raises its rates every single year (happens where I live). Even though you can get The Dish or DirecTV with local channels here now, it doesn't faze the cable company, the rates just keep climbing. Right now you can get one of the two sattellite options with local channels and a premium package for about the same price as the "advanced" package from the cable company (which only means you get more than 15 lousy channels, that's the basic package, no premium channels included.) I know we'd change if we could get DSL here, at the moment it costs about $25 less to have cable internet if you subscribe to them, making it too expensive to switch to DirecTV. *sigh*
But it's hard enough to make a TV show entertaining enough to last more than a season. The reason we don't see a lot of ads that are both entertaining and effective at selling a product is that the two are very close to mutually exclusive.
While this is true for TV shows, and possibly commercials, many/most companies don't even try. Here in the US, most commercials are just dry facts, or royally annoying songs played too loud while they advertise some car. (OK, I'll admit it, I'm sick to death of Ford's commercials, and even if I had been inclined to buy a Ford ever (I wasn't), I wouldn't be considering them any longer!)
I certainly don't think it's easy to make something entertaining and effective, but enough commercials have done it that it's obvious that it's not impossible. Not to mention that not all enjoyable commercials are funny entertaining, but the make you think type, or the "whoah, I've never seen that before!" type. Remember the infamous Big Brother Apple commercial that started the whole Super Bowl commerical stuff?
In any case I agree that advertising will change, and if it becomes too annoying (the example you mention of ads scrolling along the bottom of the screen for instance) I think people will just get tired of it, and stick to buying DVDs. I saw one person post that they did that already, preferring to avoid all the commercials altogether.
It's hard to feel sorry for advertisers or TV channels/groups/companies. They've done this to themselves in a big way. Look at the average commercial time per hour nowadays compared to even just 5 or 10 years ago. I know I can't stand to watch a movie on TV any longer since the commerical breaks are sometimes longer than the segments they show of the movie! (This really happened one night, the channel came back from 3 minutes of commercials to only play 4 minutes of movie, then straight back for 5 minutes of commercials. IIRC, this was The USA Network.)
With things like that happening, they've created the market for TiVos, and helped expand it. If one of two things (or even both) happened, then TV companies would be fine. 1. Commercials need to be entertaining, not boring as hell, and 2. TV programs need to be worth watching and putting up with commercials (even if the commercials aren't entertaining.)
I'm really surprised that they haven't figured this out already given that the Super Bowl has more people watching it for the commercials instead of the game. You'd think companies would realize spending more on a commercial that people will actually watch is worth more than spending less on a bunch noone will watch. As a bonus, people remember fun commercials, and the products better. That has to help create more demand for the product, and isn't that what advertising is all about?
Still, I won't be surprised if this is another industry that'll take the RIAA/MPAA route of trying to get legal protection for their flawed business plan instead of fixing it. Oh joy, I can't wait until congress passes the DMAA (Digital Millienium Advertising Act) making it illegal to skip commercials, and requiring every citizen to watch 2 hours of commercials a week or they lose their cable/satellite connection.
Expose everyone who's ever had any brush with justice at all, so they can't get any job at all. Then, without job and without a life they'll... euhm... cut off every legal option for a life they have and they'll... get out and die ?
Nope, many of them give up and commit another crime to get put back in prison. Sometimes they do it because they miss prison (after all, they are fed and sheltered there), others do it because despite their best attempts to start a new honest life, they're met at every turn with roadblocks put up by the state/feds/etc.
I greatly admire those that perservere and manage to finally succeed, but it's not right. I know of a person who ended up serving time due to drug posession. He wasn't a drug user, he just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. (IIRC, he was driving some friends who had drugs on them, that he didn't know about, and one of those random roadblocks stopped them. Since he was the drive/owner of the car, he was considered guilty as well.) He's a well educated guy, has a degree, but can't use it. He was unable to get a job after getting out of jail because of the conviction. He was finally given a break by someone and makes his living painting houses nowadays, making only a fraction of what he'd make in his chosen field.
Now tell me, do you think that he got any real justice? He served his time for a crime he didn't commit, then had to give up his career and education in order to make a life. Personally I've always thought that he's the poster child for all that's wrong with the justice system. I also know someone else who had an even worse experience. having their life totally destroyed just because of a looney person's false accusations. Turns out the feds don't bother to check facts on many (maybe all?) reports in highly publicized cases where they have no leads. They also won't admit they made mistakes, leaving innocent victems in their wake.
Face it folks, things like sex offender registries don't help out innocent citizens, they just propogate false security, destroy the chances of rehabilitaed criminals being able to start a new life and stay out of crime, and completely kick the innocents who were falsely convicted in the balls.
That isn't justice, at least not anything I consider just.
I've seen a few posts speculating that MS may be trying to put off paying out untill next quarter in order to make profits look better, but is it possible that they are just keeping that cash in a high interest account or some other high growth thing for as long as possible to recoup some of the lost mony by collecting interest?
I'm in now way an accountant, but it seems to me that this might be a way to gain back some of those losses.
Interesting theory, but I'm not sure that businesses can work the accounts that way. I think the money would be part of their normal cash holdings until it's actually paid out. The interest would be included in normal earnings estimates in that case, and they'd have to account for the loss of interest from the payout in the next year's reports. So while to you and me it would look like it was helping recoup some of the losses, it wouldn't because the interest was "expected" income, not "unexpected" (i.e. sales better than expected, etc.).
On a side note, there have been a few posts about how $1billion is not much to MS, but really I think that although it might be a much smaller percent of their overal value than any other company, that $1billion is still a fair loss in the sence that it could have been used to generate some ammount >$1billion which is not chump change even to MS
Actually MS is different than other business in that respect. They have absolutely huge cash holdings compared to pretty much any other company around. It's like MS is scared to spend it, or give part of it to stockholders in dividends and such. Strange how a company as big and powerful as MS can act like a terrified little company scared something may come along requiring huge sums of money.
Then again, MS tends to act like a child a lot, so perhaps it's all related to Bill Gates. With MS being so successfuly so quickly, he's probably a bit sheltered from reality, business and otherwise. So he (and in response to that, his company) act like frightened children. It could also be that ole Billy's a bit scared that the success can't continue, since I suspect he doesn't have nearly as much of a clue as to how MS was as successful as it is as he'd like to pretend.:)
As for why MS is doing this. Bill Gates is a little kid. For the last 20 years he has been head of an empire growing ever bigger. Everyone around him told him he was a hero. Now slowly he is finding out that outside his little empire people really don't share his vision of the world. Law makers are after him, geeks are building software for FREE, major companies he thought he had beaten multiple times are still there ready to see him fail.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it that way. I had pointed out in some other posts that MS was acting like a big whiney crying brat, yelling that they wanted everything their way.:)
And I agree, it is just punishment, I guess karma really does work sometimes. (In the real world, not just/.)
Ack, so many posts already, all saying that they agree that the MyFreePC site is probably plagued by cheats. Come on guys, that's not the main point in this article!!! It plainly says the following: "The document, filed on 21st November by Townsend and Townsend and Crew, lead counsel for the Californian class action consumers, points out that none of the claims being held up was actually filed via Lindows.com, yet Microsoft has held them 'hostage' for over two months."
This is about Microsoft wanting its way and screwing over innocents to try and get it. They're just being whiney crybabies here about MyFreePC. Sure, they may have some legit complaints about MyFreePC, but that shouldn't stop them from processing legitimate claims that have nothing at all to do with MyFreePC! This is truly just pathetic behaivor on MS's part.
I know someone from IRC who openly brags about making up information to get a free download of Staroffice 7, because he says his claim will end up being thrown out. The fact is, it does encourage people to make up phony claims, and unfortunately, people like the one I mention above will probably never be caught. This is exactly one of Microsoft's objections, and they couldn't be more right in what they've said. By requiring people to file claims through the court, as would normally happen, people are much less able to make phony claims. As much as I don't like Microsoft, and even though they're guilty, it doesn't make it right to steal from them, or from Lindows.
Umm, did you miss the important part of the article about the fact that none of the claims being held up are from lindows.com? This would be akin to the IRS saying "Oh well, we know a bunch of people have lied on their income taxes, so we'll hold up sending back any rebates until we catch them all, no matter how long it takes! Oh yeah, and if they volunteer to come forward to tell us they lied, we won't listen, we have to figure this out on our own!"
This isn't an issue of whether Lindows' thing is illegal, or against the settlement terms, etc. This is simply about MS being the whiney little brat screaming and crying, jumping up and down, saying "I want it my way NOW!!!!!"
It doesn't matter whether we're talking about SCO, Microsoft, the DMCA, RIAA, or Michael Jackson. The new get-rich-quick or save-your-ass business model is now based on seeing who can legally travel the farthest on the gas they have in their tank.
Well, yes and no. I'm not surprised because I know Microsoft tends to behave this way, but at the same time, I'm a tad surprised at how flagrantly they're thumbing their nose at all the governments (states and federal) that these settlements effect. As for federal, things aren't looking perfectly hunky-dory for MS on that front, as thre seems to be a fair chance the holdout state may manage to get tougher sanctions placed on MS.
Yes, I know we all think Microsoft is the Evil Empire (tm), but even evil empires/villians generally know when it's time to shut the hell up and at least pretend to play by the rules for a while. Hasn't MS learned by now that further antagonization very well may cause them to end up in bigger trouble? If they start ticking off enough business and individuals, they may find not only public sentiment totally against them, but some seriously powerful lobbying interests pulling out the big guns to launch attacks on them. That could hurt a lot more than any of the current judicial cases/settlements would, and definitely would be far worse than the miniscule amount of money they'll be out by playing by the rules of the game in this case.
However, the flier was almost certainly subject to an embargo. If someone has disclosed information before it came due for release, then they probably have breached a contract. But that is a simple issue of contract law, and has nothing to do with copyright. {Another oft-forgotten point: Copyright law only applies to material which is intended eventually to enter the public domain: copyright provides a temporary monopoly on your work in exchange for you making it available to everyone. A trade secret is not intended to enter the public domain and therefore would not be covered by copyright law.}
This is the dirty secret that Best Buy/etc. and the MPAA and RIAA don't want to mention. A lot, if not all, of released information (or movies/music online) happens by insiders. Instead of trying to fix their own problems, they hire lawyers and cite the DMCA and go after the people who were third party receivers/distributers of that info. If they really want to fix things, they need to find out who leaks this stuff, and stop it. They also need to find out why they do so, and how they can motivate employees to not be tempted to do so again.
Of course with leaking info a way of life now (the info leaks from the White House have taken it to new highs this past year), I doubt this will ever happen. Easier to sue the messenger than to stop the message from being sent in the first place I guess.
Best Buy would have made FatWallet a laughing stock and Best Buy would have ended up looking good. Litigation was the wrong maneuver.
If the info was posted by someone that was a regular to the forums at Fat Wallet and well known, this would backfire, as users would assume Best Buy had done exactly what you say, and think even less of them than they do now. This isn't like the info being anonymously reported to CNN Headline News and the whole world told, it's a small (in terms of total consumers out there) group of users sharing deals with each other.
I think this case will get tossed out before ever being heard. Remember Professor Felton? His case was tossed because the DMCA was threatened, but never actually applied. Therefore, the court considered him without standing and dismissed his case. You can read about it here.
Target issued supoenas under the DMCA trying to find the identity of the person who posted their ad info. They're not going to be able to say they weren't intending to apply the DMCA, because they already did. Best Buy and the others might squirm out from under it, but I doubt it, they sent cease and desist letters citing the DMCA as the reason they could send them. Pretty much all the companies involved have already definitively invocked the DMCA, they can't just claim there was no real intention to sue under it.
Jack Vigelenti, Chairman of the MPAA has fled the country in fear that he will be next in line for anti-DMCA law suits, however the 82 year old texan may not be safe as his previous rallying for similar DMCA laws accross the world means he might only find refuge in hell.
Hell doesn't want him either, the devil's afraid he'll get a law passed making sinning illegal.
I'd love to see the faces on the MPAA law team if FatWallet gets the DMCA overturned because Best Buy threatened to sue over a circular you could find all over the internet.
If it happens, expect video and music prices to go up at all the stores involved. I'm quite sure the MPAA and RIAA will find a way (legally of course) to make them pay for destroying their pet law.
It's all about expectations. Right now, people expect Best Buy, etc. to have great deals on Black Friday. People are waiting in anticipation, people will line up, and Best Buy will sell hordes of crap from people thinking they're gonna get good deals.
But then FatWallet (thanks FatWallet) comes along, and lists what these deals are. After people see what's really on sale, a lot of people will lose interest because the sales aren't great (as you said, "the only remotely great deal is"). Consumers have time to see whether something is really a deal or not by comparing prices in advance. This results in a lot less people expecting good deals, and a lot less people going to Best Buy on Black Friday. And a lot less money for Best Buy. Hence, the takedown notices. They know they'll lose money if people see the hype for what it really is... hype.
This is probably what Best Buy is thinking/worried about, but it's silly. Most consumers aren't going to compare the ads from different stores, or check to see if the advertised prices are really good deals. And that will remain true even if they're posted on FatWallet (or elsewhere) weeks or months in advance. People will still look at the Best Buy flyer in the paper and go "ooooo, that looks like a deal, I'd better get there early!" wile the Circuit City flyer with a better price on the same item falls to the floor unnoticed.
I think what it really boils down to is that most consumers are pretty much cash cows, with the intelligence of a cow. They don't research prices, compare ads, or any of the stuff. I'll bet that a good 90%+ of the people who show up at Wal-mart (especially) Friday morning won't have a clue what the deals are until they get a paper at the entrance. Seeing as most people are still shocked to hear Wal-mart will be open all day Thanksgiving day (which has been going on for many years now), they simply can't be reading the Thanksgiving week sales flyer which happily touts the fact.
As sad as it is, no cost savings. NOW, if this situation goes on for much longer people will start hating their jobs and working less and less effectively and will demand to hire more people. Now that will be a huge cost. But from what I can tell, this company is in head count reduction mode. So it'd take quite a big issue to crop up to allow hiring to take place.
If the past few years of worm/virus releases and their virulity and damage increases hold up, I wouldn't be surprised if a new super-worm hits windows machines by the end of next year that shakes the situtation up. I certainly hope not, but all signs seem to point that way.:(
My sympathies go out to the windows guys at your company, that definitely doesn't sound like scheduling anyone would want to have to deal with.
Another thing is Corporate America is barely getting their feet wet with Linux/Apache. The UNIX boxes that are installed are not running Apache, they're running something from a major vendor (ie. Netscape, etc). Up until this year there was NO linux in the corporate company I work for. If a MAJOR vendor will not support a product, corporate america will not install it. They love to point the finger at the vendors. If there's nobody to point a finger at when something goes wrong, it will not get installed.
While I understand Corporate America's dislike of Linux so far (like you said, no one to point fingers at when something messes up), and can extend that to Apache (same thing), I don't understand why Corporate America would still use IIS after all the worms and worms after worms after security holes ad infintum. Netscape's out there as a commercial product for Windows servers as well as UNIX/Linux, and I know there are other ones as well, just not that I'm familiar with. I'd think they're tired of pointing fingers at the MS vendors over worm attacks, and would want something, ANYTHING, besides IIS nowadays.
Or are the bigwigs in Corporate America so out of touch with reality they don't realize that moving from IIS would probably save them tons of money just in manhours saved from less patching/recovering?
Ok, so the Microsoft connection makes it easy to write the whole thing off as astroturfing, but they have a point.
Parked domain names usually aren't separate websites; they're usually hundreds, or thousands of domains pointing to the same server/service that's trying to sell them for profit. In addition, Netcraft counts www.yahooo.com and www.yahoo.com as separate sites-- Even though they both go to Yahoo.
In this manner, Netcraft's method *is* unfair, because there's no weight as to the location to which the domains point.
When presented as statistics for the number of domains using server x, and number using server y, it's probably the fairest method. Sure that includes parked domains and typo domain names, but how could you realistically cull those out in a fair way? You're bound to miss many, if not hundreds of thousands, and your results would be even more unfair. I think Netcraft's current method if the fairest one that can realistically work, at least right now.
We detect that homepage.mac.com is running Apache/1.3.27 (Darwin).
but with this caveat
Note:
No matter what the above results show, this company may be running Microsoft IIS and protecting its Web server identity with ServerMask.
Nope, no bias there.
What's truly sad is that most people will probably believe the caveat. Seeing as I just had my (admittedly already quite low) opinion of the general population's intelligence lowered tonight by a particularly amazing display of stupidity, I'm actually quite sure most people (i.e. non-techies) will believe the caveat.
What brought on this opinion degradation you ask? Oh, just an idiot at Wal-mart who'd put his items out of the cashier's reach on the drink machine besides the register (it butts up to it, one of the express lanes). He asked the cashier if they'd already rung all that up. When told no, that they couldn't reach the stuff. The guy said, and I quote, "Oh, I thought you had one of those belt thingies." I wanted to smack him, it was obvious to even an untrained gerbil there wasn't a belt there. The look the cashier gave the guy was hilarious. It was all I could do to not bust out laughing at the idiot.
So.... If you are running MS IIS your best security measure is to pretend to be running Apache?
Nah, that's just so you can have the false security of thinking hackers won't break in because they're fooled by the server mask. Like any and all of the worms that attack IIS will bother checking first. Of course if you're running IIS, you should be pretty used to new worms reaming your server a new one every month by now.
If spam is labeled, it'll be easy for ISPs to kill it, and advantageous to to so as quickly as possible---they don't like spam wasting bandwidth any more than you do.
Yeah, but the only thing that'll actually be labeled properly will be legit E-mails from marketers/companies you agreed to receive marketing from. If an ISP blocks those, I'm quite sure that the DMA will sue them faster than they can sneeze. The real spam will still clog up the bandwidth and E-mail boxes and server resources like it does now. If anything it'll be worse, the spammers can pretend to be legit while covertly making sure they're not. (i.e. screwing with the mandated subject line so it'll start A dv: instead of ADV: and so on.)
This bill won't help at all, at best it'll have no effect, but it'll probably just make things much worse. Hope the DMA jerks are happy, once the spam reachs critical mass, even their mailings won't make it through anymore.
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One suggestion which I thought was partictularly interesting involved a bounty system whereby a price would be put on 'hacker's heads', incentivating other hackers to go after them and bring them forward.
If anyone thinks this will work, then I feel sorry for them. Hackers by and large aren't going to rat on each other. There's one really good reason -- if the one they ratted on finds out who they are, or his/her friends find out, then the rattee is going to be in deep doodoo fast. Facing this, they'll just take the route of least resistance and easy moolah and rat out innocents or even set up innocents and report them.Think about it, how hard is it to infect the average joe's computer with a trojan, worm or virus? History (heck, recent history in fact) shows us that it's not terribly hard. For some of these worms/etc. that come out, you don't even have to click on anything to get infected! So it'd be easy as pie to set someone up. Just infect their machine with a trojan, make their machine do Evil Things (tm) while they're actually active on it, cover your tracks, and report. Law enforcement tends to be overexuberant on catching cyber evil-doers, and there's a more than fair chance they won't dig deep enough to notice the tracks the hacker left on the innocent guy's computer.
And to be honest, they probably won't get the chance to. How many average joes out there have done something not-so-legal? Probably a lot, it seems everyone and their brother's wife have illegal software of some sort to hear people casually talk about it. I've heard customers at Wal-mart ask employees if they can install ___ software on more than one computer. (Often it's anti-virus software they're asking about ironically.) When average joe is faced with getting in trouble for the stuff he knows he's done wrong, he'll probably cop a plea bargain to avoid that coming to light. And law enforcement will go along, after all it will look like a win for them on the public relations front.
For those that will scream that law enforcement wouldn't do these things, I can only tell you that I hope you never get to find out first-hand just what they will and won't do. I had the misfortune and it was a real eye-opener. I prefer not to go into specifics, but I will say that before my experience I never believed any of the supposed "conspiracy theories"/etc. about how bad law enforecment and/or the FBI/etc. were. Now I think they're all dead on.
Bottom line, putting out bounties on cyber-criminals would result in many innocent victems, and probably very very few real criminals being caught.
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I could never figure why in a country as large as the USA, even if it has more TV channels, the commercials policies have to be desperate like this.
Honestly I think it's simply greed to some extent. When the amount of commercials per hour started really rising, product placement was making inroads at the same time. You really have to wonder exactly who that advertising money was going to. While I can understand commercials often help keep the costs down (well supposedly anyway) for your cable company/etc., product placement can only help the people making the shows. It seems to me these two are mutually exclusive in some ways. However, if the companies making the programs are getting money for product placement now, that should help make production less expensive. They still charge as much to syndicate it though I'm sure. Voila, greed!It's hard to take all the arguments seriously thought when you have a cable monopoly who raises its rates every single year (happens where I live). Even though you can get The Dish or DirecTV with local channels here now, it doesn't faze the cable company, the rates just keep climbing. Right now you can get one of the two sattellite options with local channels and a premium package for about the same price as the "advanced" package from the cable company (which only means you get more than 15 lousy channels, that's the basic package, no premium channels included.) I know we'd change if we could get DSL here, at the moment it costs about $25 less to have cable internet if you subscribe to them, making it too expensive to switch to DirecTV. *sigh*
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But it's hard enough to make a TV show entertaining enough to last more than a season. The reason we don't see a lot of ads that are both entertaining and effective at selling a product is that the two are very close to mutually exclusive.
While this is true for TV shows, and possibly commercials, many/most companies don't even try. Here in the US, most commercials are just dry facts, or royally annoying songs played too loud while they advertise some car. (OK, I'll admit it, I'm sick to death of Ford's commercials, and even if I had been inclined to buy a Ford ever (I wasn't), I wouldn't be considering them any longer!)I certainly don't think it's easy to make something entertaining and effective, but enough commercials have done it that it's obvious that it's not impossible. Not to mention that not all enjoyable commercials are funny entertaining, but the make you think type, or the "whoah, I've never seen that before!" type. Remember the infamous Big Brother Apple commercial that started the whole Super Bowl commerical stuff?
In any case I agree that advertising will change, and if it becomes too annoying (the example you mention of ads scrolling along the bottom of the screen for instance) I think people will just get tired of it, and stick to buying DVDs. I saw one person post that they did that already, preferring to avoid all the commercials altogether.
With things like that happening, they've created the market for TiVos, and helped expand it. If one of two things (or even both) happened, then TV companies would be fine. 1. Commercials need to be entertaining, not boring as hell, and 2. TV programs need to be worth watching and putting up with commercials (even if the commercials aren't entertaining.)
I'm really surprised that they haven't figured this out already given that the Super Bowl has more people watching it for the commercials instead of the game. You'd think companies would realize spending more on a commercial that people will actually watch is worth more than spending less on a bunch noone will watch. As a bonus, people remember fun commercials, and the products better. That has to help create more demand for the product, and isn't that what advertising is all about?
Still, I won't be surprised if this is another industry that'll take the RIAA/MPAA route of trying to get legal protection for their flawed business plan instead of fixing it. Oh joy, I can't wait until congress passes the DMAA (Digital Millienium Advertising Act) making it illegal to skip commercials, and requiring every citizen to watch 2 hours of commercials a week or they lose their cable/satellite connection.
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Expose everyone who's ever had any brush with justice at all, so they can't get any job at all. Then, without job and without a life they'll
... euhm ... cut off every legal option for a life they have and they'll ... get out and die ?
Nope, many of them give up and commit another crime to get put back in prison. Sometimes they do it because they miss prison (after all, they are fed and sheltered there), others do it because despite their best attempts to start a new honest life, they're met at every turn with roadblocks put up by the state/feds/etc.I greatly admire those that perservere and manage to finally succeed, but it's not right. I know of a person who ended up serving time due to drug posession. He wasn't a drug user, he just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. (IIRC, he was driving some friends who had drugs on them, that he didn't know about, and one of those random roadblocks stopped them. Since he was the drive/owner of the car, he was considered guilty as well.) He's a well educated guy, has a degree, but can't use it. He was unable to get a job after getting out of jail because of the conviction. He was finally given a break by someone and makes his living painting houses nowadays, making only a fraction of what he'd make in his chosen field.
Now tell me, do you think that he got any real justice? He served his time for a crime he didn't commit, then had to give up his career and education in order to make a life. Personally I've always thought that he's the poster child for all that's wrong with the justice system. I also know someone else who had an even worse experience. having their life totally destroyed just because of a looney person's false accusations. Turns out the feds don't bother to check facts on many (maybe all?) reports in highly publicized cases where they have no leads. They also won't admit they made mistakes, leaving innocent victems in their wake.
Face it folks, things like sex offender registries don't help out innocent citizens, they just propogate false security, destroy the chances of rehabilitaed criminals being able to start a new life and stay out of crime, and completely kick the innocents who were falsely convicted in the balls.
That isn't justice, at least not anything I consider just.
I find it particularly amusing that Cartoon Network just had/is having an Iron Giant marathon and this article shows up. :)
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I've seen a few posts speculating that MS may be trying to put off paying out untill next quarter in order to make profits look better, but is it possible that they are just keeping that cash in a high interest account or some other high growth thing for as long as possible to recoup some of the lost mony by collecting interest?
I'm in now way an accountant, but it seems to me that this might be a way to gain back some of those losses.
Interesting theory, but I'm not sure that businesses can work the accounts that way. I think the money would be part of their normal cash holdings until it's actually paid out. The interest would be included in normal earnings estimates in that case, and they'd have to account for the loss of interest from the payout in the next year's reports. So while to you and me it would look like it was helping recoup some of the losses, it wouldn't because the interest was "expected" income, not "unexpected" (i.e. sales better than expected, etc.).-
On a side note, there have been a few posts about how $1billion is not much to MS, but really I think that although it might be a much smaller percent of their overal value than any other company, that $1billion is still a fair loss in the sence that it could have been used to generate some ammount >$1billion which is not chump change even to MS
Actually MS is different than other business in that respect. They have absolutely huge cash holdings compared to pretty much any other company around. It's like MS is scared to spend it, or give part of it to stockholders in dividends and such. Strange how a company as big and powerful as MS can act like a terrified little company scared something may come along requiring huge sums of money.Then again, MS tends to act like a child a lot, so perhaps it's all related to Bill Gates. With MS being so successfuly so quickly, he's probably a bit sheltered from reality, business and otherwise. So he (and in response to that, his company) act like frightened children. It could also be that ole Billy's a bit scared that the success can't continue, since I suspect he doesn't have nearly as much of a clue as to how MS was as successful as it is as he'd like to pretend. :)
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As for why MS is doing this. Bill Gates is a little kid. For the last 20 years he has been head of an empire growing ever bigger. Everyone around him told him he was a hero. Now slowly he is finding out that outside his little empire people really don't share his vision of the world. Law makers are after him, geeks are building software for FREE, major companies he thought he had beaten multiple times are still there ready to see him fail.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it that way. I had pointed out in some other posts that MS was acting like a big whiney crying brat, yelling that they wanted everything their way.And I agree, it is just punishment, I guess karma really does work sometimes. (In the real world, not just /.)
This is about Microsoft wanting its way and screwing over innocents to try and get it. They're just being whiney crybabies here about MyFreePC. Sure, they may have some legit complaints about MyFreePC, but that shouldn't stop them from processing legitimate claims that have nothing at all to do with MyFreePC! This is truly just pathetic behaivor on MS's part.
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I know someone from IRC who openly brags about making up information to get a free download of Staroffice 7, because he says his claim will end up being thrown out. The fact is, it does encourage people to make up phony claims, and unfortunately, people like the one I mention above will probably never be caught. This is exactly one of Microsoft's objections, and they couldn't be more right in what they've said. By requiring people to file claims through the court, as would normally happen, people are much less able to make phony claims. As much as I don't like Microsoft, and even though they're guilty, it doesn't make it right to steal from them, or from Lindows.
Umm, did you miss the important part of the article about the fact that none of the claims being held up are from lindows.com? This would be akin to the IRS saying "Oh well, we know a bunch of people have lied on their income taxes, so we'll hold up sending back any rebates until we catch them all, no matter how long it takes! Oh yeah, and if they volunteer to come forward to tell us they lied, we won't listen, we have to figure this out on our own!"This isn't an issue of whether Lindows' thing is illegal, or against the settlement terms, etc. This is simply about MS being the whiney little brat screaming and crying, jumping up and down, saying "I want it my way NOW!!!!!"
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Is anyone surprised?
Well, yes and no. I'm not surprised because I know Microsoft tends to behave this way, but at the same time, I'm a tad surprised at how flagrantly they're thumbing their nose at all the governments (states and federal) that these settlements effect. As for federal, things aren't looking perfectly hunky-dory for MS on that front, as thre seems to be a fair chance the holdout state may manage to get tougher sanctions placed on MS.It doesn't matter whether we're talking about SCO, Microsoft, the DMCA, RIAA, or Michael Jackson. The new get-rich-quick or save-your-ass business model is now based on seeing who can legally travel the farthest on the gas they have in their tank.
Yes, I know we all think Microsoft is the Evil Empire (tm), but even evil empires/villians generally know when it's time to shut the hell up and at least pretend to play by the rules for a while. Hasn't MS learned by now that further antagonization very well may cause them to end up in bigger trouble? If they start ticking off enough business and individuals, they may find not only public sentiment totally against them, but some seriously powerful lobbying interests pulling out the big guns to launch attacks on them. That could hurt a lot more than any of the current judicial cases/settlements would, and definitely would be far worse than the miniscule amount of money they'll be out by playing by the rules of the game in this case.
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However, the flier was almost certainly subject to an embargo. If someone has disclosed information before it came due for release, then they probably have breached a contract. But that is a simple issue of contract law, and has nothing to do with copyright. {Another oft-forgotten point: Copyright law only applies to material which is intended eventually to enter the public domain: copyright provides a temporary monopoly on your work in exchange for you making it available to everyone. A trade secret is not intended to enter the public domain and therefore would not be covered by copyright law.}
This is the dirty secret that Best Buy/etc. and the MPAA and RIAA don't want to mention. A lot, if not all, of released information (or movies/music online) happens by insiders. Instead of trying to fix their own problems, they hire lawyers and cite the DMCA and go after the people who were third party receivers/distributers of that info. If they really want to fix things, they need to find out who leaks this stuff, and stop it. They also need to find out why they do so, and how they can motivate employees to not be tempted to do so again.Of course with leaking info a way of life now (the info leaks from the White House have taken it to new highs this past year), I doubt this will ever happen. Easier to sue the messenger than to stop the message from being sent in the first place I guess.
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Best Buy would have made FatWallet a laughing stock and Best Buy would have ended up looking good. Litigation was the wrong maneuver.
If the info was posted by someone that was a regular to the forums at Fat Wallet and well known, this would backfire, as users would assume Best Buy had done exactly what you say, and think even less of them than they do now. This isn't like the info being anonymously reported to CNN Headline News and the whole world told, it's a small (in terms of total consumers out there) group of users sharing deals with each other.-
I think this case will get tossed out before ever being heard. Remember Professor Felton? His case was tossed because the DMCA was threatened, but never actually applied. Therefore, the court considered him without standing and dismissed his case. You can read about it here.
Target issued supoenas under the DMCA trying to find the identity of the person who posted their ad info. They're not going to be able to say they weren't intending to apply the DMCA, because they already did. Best Buy and the others might squirm out from under it, but I doubt it, they sent cease and desist letters citing the DMCA as the reason they could send them. Pretty much all the companies involved have already definitively invocked the DMCA, they can't just claim there was no real intention to sue under it.-
Jack Vigelenti, Chairman of the MPAA has fled the country in fear that he will be next in line for anti-DMCA law suits, however the 82 year old texan may not be safe as his previous rallying for similar DMCA laws accross the world means he might only find refuge in hell.
Hell doesn't want him either, the devil's afraid he'll get a law passed making sinning illegal.-
I'd love to see the faces on the MPAA law team if FatWallet gets the DMCA overturned because Best Buy threatened to sue over a circular you could find all over the internet.
If it happens, expect video and music prices to go up at all the stores involved. I'm quite sure the MPAA and RIAA will find a way (legally of course) to make them pay for destroying their pet law.-
I'm still waiting for someone to patent reducing prices online as a business method.
Shhh, Jeff Bezos may hear you.-
It's all about expectations. Right now, people expect Best Buy, etc. to have great deals on Black Friday. People are waiting in anticipation, people will line up, and Best Buy will sell hordes of crap from people thinking they're gonna get good deals.
This is probably what Best Buy is thinking/worried about, but it's silly. Most consumers aren't going to compare the ads from different stores, or check to see if the advertised prices are really good deals. And that will remain true even if they're posted on FatWallet (or elsewhere) weeks or months in advance. People will still look at the Best Buy flyer in the paper and go "ooooo, that looks like a deal, I'd better get there early!" wile the Circuit City flyer with a better price on the same item falls to the floor unnoticed.But then FatWallet (thanks FatWallet) comes along, and lists what these deals are. After people see what's really on sale, a lot of people will lose interest because the sales aren't great (as you said, "the only remotely great deal is"). Consumers have time to see whether something is really a deal or not by comparing prices in advance. This results in a lot less people expecting good deals, and a lot less people going to Best Buy on Black Friday. And a lot less money for Best Buy. Hence, the takedown notices. They know they'll lose money if people see the hype for what it really is ... hype.
I think what it really boils down to is that most consumers are pretty much cash cows, with the intelligence of a cow. They don't research prices, compare ads, or any of the stuff. I'll bet that a good 90%+ of the people who show up at Wal-mart (especially) Friday morning won't have a clue what the deals are until they get a paper at the entrance. Seeing as most people are still shocked to hear Wal-mart will be open all day Thanksgiving day (which has been going on for many years now), they simply can't be reading the Thanksgiving week sales flyer which happily touts the fact.
Or am I being too pessimistic? :)
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As sad as it is, no cost savings. NOW, if this situation goes on for much longer people will start hating their jobs and working less and less effectively and will demand to hire more people. Now that will be a huge cost. But from what I can tell, this company is in head count reduction mode. So it'd take quite a big issue to crop up to allow hiring to take place.
If the past few years of worm/virus releases and their virulity and damage increases hold up, I wouldn't be surprised if a new super-worm hits windows machines by the end of next year that shakes the situtation up. I certainly hope not, but all signs seem to point that way.My sympathies go out to the windows guys at your company, that definitely doesn't sound like scheduling anyone would want to have to deal with.
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Another thing is Corporate America is barely getting their feet wet with Linux/Apache. The UNIX boxes that are installed are not running Apache, they're running something from a major vendor (ie. Netscape, etc). Up until this year there was NO linux in the corporate company I work for. If a MAJOR vendor will not support a product, corporate america will not install it. They love to point the finger at the vendors. If there's nobody to point a finger at when something goes wrong, it will not get installed.
While I understand Corporate America's dislike of Linux so far (like you said, no one to point fingers at when something messes up), and can extend that to Apache (same thing), I don't understand why Corporate America would still use IIS after all the worms and worms after worms after security holes ad infintum. Netscape's out there as a commercial product for Windows servers as well as UNIX/Linux, and I know there are other ones as well, just not that I'm familiar with. I'd think they're tired of pointing fingers at the MS vendors over worm attacks, and would want something, ANYTHING, besides IIS nowadays.Or are the bigwigs in Corporate America so out of touch with reality they don't realize that moving from IIS would probably save them tons of money just in manhours saved from less patching/recovering?
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Ok, so the Microsoft connection makes it easy to write the whole thing off as astroturfing, but they have a point.
Parked domain names usually aren't separate websites; they're usually hundreds, or thousands of domains pointing to the same server/service that's trying to sell them for profit. In addition, Netcraft counts www.yahooo.com and www.yahoo.com as separate sites-- Even though they both go to Yahoo.
In this manner, Netcraft's method *is* unfair, because there's no weight as to the location to which the domains point.
When presented as statistics for the number of domains using server x, and number using server y, it's probably the fairest method. Sure that includes parked domains and typo domain names, but how could you realistically cull those out in a fair way? You're bound to miss many, if not hundreds of thousands, and your results would be even more unfair. I think Netcraft's current method if the fairest one that can realistically work, at least right now.-
We detect that homepage.mac.com is running Apache/1.3.27 (Darwin).
but with this caveat
Note:
No matter what the above results show, this company may be running Microsoft IIS and protecting its Web server identity with ServerMask.
Nope, no bias there.
What's truly sad is that most people will probably believe the caveat. Seeing as I just had my (admittedly already quite low) opinion of the general population's intelligence lowered tonight by a particularly amazing display of stupidity, I'm actually quite sure most people (i.e. non-techies) will believe the caveat.What brought on this opinion degradation you ask? Oh, just an idiot at Wal-mart who'd put his items out of the cashier's reach on the drink machine besides the register (it butts up to it, one of the express lanes). He asked the cashier if they'd already rung all that up. When told no, that they couldn't reach the stuff. The guy said, and I quote, "Oh, I thought you had one of those belt thingies." I wanted to smack him, it was obvious to even an untrained gerbil there wasn't a belt there. The look the cashier gave the guy was hilarious. It was all I could do to not bust out laughing at the idiot.
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So.... If you are running MS IIS your best security measure is to pretend to be running Apache?
Nah, that's just so you can have the false security of thinking hackers won't break in because they're fooled by the server mask. Like any and all of the worms that attack IIS will bother checking first. Of course if you're running IIS, you should be pretty used to new worms reaming your server a new one every month by now.-
Nothing can stop spam outside of God.
He's too busy processing souls from all the deaths in Iraq to deal with spam though.-
If spam is labeled, it'll be easy for ISPs to kill it, and advantageous to to so as quickly as possible---they don't like spam wasting bandwidth any more than you do.
Yeah, but the only thing that'll actually be labeled properly will be legit E-mails from marketers/companies you agreed to receive marketing from. If an ISP blocks those, I'm quite sure that the DMA will sue them faster than they can sneeze. The real spam will still clog up the bandwidth and E-mail boxes and server resources like it does now. If anything it'll be worse, the spammers can pretend to be legit while covertly making sure they're not. (i.e. screwing with the mandated subject line so it'll start A dv: instead of ADV: and so on.)This bill won't help at all, at best it'll have no effect, but it'll probably just make things much worse. Hope the DMA jerks are happy, once the spam reachs critical mass, even their mailings won't make it through anymore.