There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).
I vote for this. I find that Murdock's properties provide noise at best and inflammatory rhetoric at worst. I would prefer to not see them on the "Top News" or "World News" gadgets that Google provides for iGoogle.
If I want incoherent ramblings, I'll listen to the guy on the street corner. If I want gossip, I'll lean over the fence and listen to the two neighborhood gossips talk.
If I want news, I'll refer to virtually any other publication that one provided by a property that Murdock owns.
I've seen this problem with Firefox ever since moving from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10.
One of the things I noticed in Fedora 10 is the reliance on HAL and evdev_drv to determine my mouse configuration. I have a single mouse (Logitech G5), but a Macintosh mouse button emulation is added as well.
I've tried completely configuring my mouse in xorg.conf, but that doesn't seem to address the problem either.
It appears that some sort of event communication is getting missed somewhere along the line. I'm not sure how to go about tracing it or filing a bug report. It is frustrating, and I'm glad to know that holding down the right mouse button may provide a workaround.
Here's a thumbnail sketch on one approach. I've used this, to develop SCM processes, procedures, roles, and responsibilities for a 600 person development organization. About 1/3 of that organization consisted of contractors.
It took us a little under one year to go from 0 to revision 1 of the system (including vendor selection, piloting, etc.).
The challenges are really the following:
Deciding who the audience is
Deciding what the purpose of the documentation is
Deciding what are documentable processes / procedures
Deciding how the documentation gets used
Once these issues are established, then it's just write, test, revise, test, revise, test, and publish.
I'll give you some scenarios, but the actual implementation is specific to the organization.
1. Deciding who the audience is
This decision will frame how the document is written, what level of detail the document contains, and the general structure of the document.
From your description, it sounds like you have a lot of contractors who will be unfamiliar with your processes and procedures. In that case, you'll probably need some environment documentation and some process documentation in addition to procedural documentation.
Deciding what the purpose of the documentation is
This decision will drive the detailed structure and the language of the documentation.
For example, if the documentation is primarily for education, then keeping the information at a structural level with a few well-chosen examples works well. If the documentation is operational in scope, then a use case type of structure can work well. Finally, if the document is focused on teaching, then an underlying example, lots of repetition, in-line exercises, and documented sequential steps seem to work well.
From your brief description, it sounds there are two purposes. You need to educate incoming contractors concerning your environment and processes. You also need operational documentation.
3. Deciding what are documentable processes / procedures
"Everything" is not the answer to this step. Everything that is not industry-standard might be an answer to this step. A more reasonable answer might be whatever impacts performance metrics.
The level of impact can be assessed, and target topics can be put into MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, want to have) order. This will make the documentation task more manageable.
4. Deciding how the documentation gets used
I see a lot answers jumping to this area. Flowcharts, wikis, web pages, SharePoint, etc. are all technical solutions to this issue.
However, the question has not really been asked. What is the normal work pattern of those people who MUST use the documentation?
If they're seated at a computer with either multiple screens or multiple windows, then online, hyperlinked documentation may be a good fit. The delivery mechanism (actual technology) is up to you.
If people leave their desks a lot to accomplish tasks, then a different format will be needed, as well as a different document structure.
The goal in answering this issue is to make sure the documentation gets used. For that to happen, the documentation has to be a natural extension to their current work habits.
Hammering out the Issues
For the truly ad hoc organization (CMM 1), an assessment followed by a series of JAD sessions works well. This may seem like a waste of time (let's get writing already), but it helps to identify the best use of effort, and it gets everyone on board with the process.
Many people view documentation as constraints, so getting everyone on board via a CMM assessment and JAD sessions is important.
Creating the documentation
Once these issues are hammered out, then the documentation can be created. Writing documentation, especially detailed operational documentation, is tough. One way to ease the pain is by adapting
Deciding on or changing a platform is fairly complex. Without
knowing more about your particulars, all I can write about are
general ideas. While they may be helpful, you will have to customize
them to fit your organization and situation.
Since you've not really framed the technical particulars of
your problem, I'm going to treat the system as a black box. The
question then becomes, "how do you know when to change black boxes?"
I'll break up the ideas into three sections. Tnn will represent
technical considerations, Bnn will represent business considerations,
and Cnn will represent cultural considerations.
T1 - Standards Compliance
Are there openly developed, freely available industry-wide
standards that your black box should implement? If so, does your
current black box implement them? If your current black box does not
implement them, or depends on proprietary extensions for the bulk of
its interesting functionality, then it's time to look at a new black
box. If your black box implements the standards but does not closely
(6 months - 18 months) track significant changes to those standards,
it's time to get a new black box.
T2 - Brittleness
Tight coupling or brittleness is a good reason to change your black
box. I'm using this term in an object-oriented design pattern sense. If
you change your black box (upgrade, improve, etc.), how many other
systems do you have to change? Adding new functionality to other systems
might be acceptable coupling. Changing an operating system to change a
browser so you can interact with a server is probably not acceptable. If
you find yourself in the second situation, then it's time to change your
black box.
B1 - Support
Support can come in the form of in-house (hired), in-house (trained),
community, consultants, or vendor. Sometimes finding and hiring people
with the specific skill set is difficult. Consider hiring someone with
experience in a similar skill set and then training that person through
vendor or third-party classes. You can bridge immediate skill issues by
using consultants, but make sure you get a complete knowledge transfer.
If the classes don't exist, the consultants are sparce, the community for
this black box not vibrant, or newer technologies are seen as replacing
your black box, it's time to get a new black box.
B2 - Repair or Replace
This is the basic used car / new car question. If it's going to be
very expensive (project costs, retraining costs) to replace your black
box and you can find or train a suitable mechanic, then your black
box has a little life left in it. If over the course of 18 months
(single process black box) to 36 months (infrastructure black box), the
repair bill will be larger than the project bill plus any new repair
bills, it's time to get a new black box. Adjust your time frames according
to your business model.
B3 - Fitness for Purpose
Does your black box sit in the corner, doing its job, and rarely
needs a change? Then it might be a good idea to leave your black box
in place until its brittleness impacts your business's requirements to
innovate or change. If you are constantly having to rework business
processes or projects to fit the idiosyncrasies, then it's time
to replace the black box.
C1 - Change
Every business has a certain resistance to change. This must be
factored in when you replace black boxes. A change-adverse organization
might be more comfortable in living with the restrictions of the current
black box. A change-neutral or a change-positive organization might
actually benefit from changing the black box. The impacts of change are
hard to measure, but mostly show up as soft dollar costs in productivity
and team morale. Sometimes even change-adverse organizations must change
their black boxes. However, in order to accomplish that change, an
influential sponsor / stakeholder must lead the charge. Otherwise the
change will fail.
That was a rather long first draft of my opinions about deciding on change
in a business environment. Hopefully some people will find this useful
as a place to start when considering change.
is that today, with just a few clicks, we can get just about anything we want for free.
While free certainly does have its appeal, I think removing the word free tells an even more important story.
Doing research on exactly what songs you want takes time. Creating play lists, ripping to an audio format, and then storing them on a media player takes time. If a record label is going to give people a mechanism to get exactly what people want rather than what people want plus 6-8 songs people don't, then most people are going to go the single song route.
I can think of at least two reasons to generate albums. One is that the popular songs subsidize the unpopular songs, The second is that the record labels are trying to appeal to a larger market by packaging up a broad collection of songs.
I've not listened to a lot of pop music lately, but it seems to me that album concepts are fewer and fewer. There were advantages to getting Alan Parson's Project I, Robot, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Are there any albums concepts being sold today (regardless of whether you like the music listed above)?
I think if the record labels wanted to be successful, they would do something like the following.
Aggressive release schedule digitally
Release one or two new songs at a time - when they're considered ready
Monitor sales and feedback from consumers
Collect well-received tracks together for a CD
Put value-added material on the CD (liner notes, history, etc.
This accomplishes a lot of things. There is less risk per song. Labels and artists would get quicker feedback on their music. Those artists who were concerned about commercial success could focus on that. Those artist who were focused on the art could use the release early, release often strategy to build a following.
I don't know a lot about the mechanics of music (session musicians, recording engineers, sound studios, etc.) although I used to do some recording in college. However, this seems like a workable approach.
What this approach does though is change the dynamics of the music business. A lot of project-oriented people will find their value decreasing. A lot of people who focus on the craft and quality of the art will probably find their stock increasing. For the consumer, this is not a bad thing. For the record executives, advertising executives, and manufacturing executives this is a bad thing indeed.
I have red/green color-deficient vision. Red shades towards black and green shades toward white. When I was growing up, I often wondered why green lights were called green lights.
I cannot read the map. So yes, a different color scheme (or a non-black background) might make the map legible.
I have already been targeted with at least one job scam as fallout from this.
I have gone back and searched through my Monster mail folder, and have found some interesting items. Apparently the Trojan phish has been tried at least twice. I have a mail message from February 27 and one from March 30 with links to non-Monster sites. The February 27 attempt was a little craftier in that the EXE file was not a part of the URL. The March 30 attempt contained the remote host name, and jobseeker_tool.exe as part of the URL.
Both of the mail messages appear to have come from a Yahoo hosting service, hostingprod.com, which maps to geocities.yahoo.com.
The following contains industry executive comments concerning the Simpson's Movie and CAM downloads.
Yet, even though "The Simpsons Movie" was leaked and downloaded tens of thousands of times at the very least, Mavens copy alone has averaged about 9,000 leechers on the Pirate Bay, it still raked in big bucks at the box office over the weekend pulling in some $71.9 million in ticket sales.
"We are ecstatic," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president for distribution at 20th Century Fox. "It far exceeded even the most optimistic of expectations."
To bring this comment back on subject . . . The Canadian theater has no business or legal reason to search their patrons, let alone search them in an abusive manner.
The point under discussion is camcorder bootlegs of movies.
A refereed paper posits no damage to the industries covered (music, movies) by downloads.
Earlier, you stated you have an impressive DVD collection. If you do not watch movies more than once, why do you have such an impressive collection?
The impressive rips your friend downloaded are rips from DVDs (either commercial or screening DVDs). I haven't seen a camcorder bootleg on Usenet in a while, but I haven't looked. I haven't looked for camcorder bootlegs on Pirate Bay either, although they may be there.
As far as music goes, there are a lot of low to medium quality copies of songs available via P2P, Internet radio, and Usenet. Again, I stress the quality. As an experiment, I burned an audio CD from an Internet radio recorded stream and played it on a CD player. The sound was intolerable. Where possible, I purchase CDs of the artists I hear on Internet radio and create better quality tracks for my iPod from the CD.
You are correct, however in that P2P and other forms of distribution have an impact on the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, it's not having the impact that it should. Declining sales and lower profit margins indicate that the product and business processes need to be improved. Instead, we have corporations using questionable legal tactics to maintain artificially (from a market perspective) high prices and profits for the "good ol' boy" people in the entertainment industries.
We've had this same issue before with cassettes and radio, and then with VHS and TV. Tivo and other DVR systems coupled with digital cable have upped the ante a bit.
There are many solutions to the problem. Some of the core ideas for these solutions include the following.
Be less risk-adverse. This of course means engaging a brain when picking new products.
Mine new materials. There are a lot of amazing books that would make great movies. However, that would require producers to read and writers to write. When a comedy about the Geico cavemen is green-lit, I'm not too confident of either.
Reduce the pay scale of people outside of the creative loop. A profit reduction doesn't impact the 'C' level people, but causes more layoffs in the rank and file.
Quit paying A-level performers their outrageous salaries. This is a huge part of the budget for movies in general.
For music, focus on live performances and merchandise rather than recorded media.
As for a real cause and effect, I would enjoy doing a factors analysis of the entertainment industry market. The Balkanization of the market by consumers versus the attempt at market control by the entertainment industry would be another interesting study.
Games have a different dynamic than the more passive entertainment forms. Not being a hard-core gamer, I would have to do a bit of research to determine what consumers feel to be the real challenges with games. As a casual game player, I find lack of performance (sloppy programming), inconsistency, and lack of complexity/richness to be the major barriers to my game play. For serious gamers, the issues could be very different.
As such, I don't download games for the same reason I don't download movies. The end result is not worth the time, resources, or effort I expend to obtain the product.
Make a more compelling product using a better business plan and the marketplace will reward you. Make poor products with a poor business plan while skimming 8-figure salaries off the top, and the marketplace will (hopefully) punish you.
I'll see if I can't be a little more polite than some of the other comments.
In summary, you are wrong.
In detail then . . .
As has already been pointed out, the only reviewed study of music and movie pirating via P2P has shown that there is no impact to the music or movie industries. Scroll up for the academic reference.
There are two reasons (from my experience) that theater gross receipts may be off,
Poor product
Poor movie going experience
The product is just plain bad. Couple a poor product with many online forums discussing the poor product, and second week receipts will be down. Some of my personal observations concerning recent movies follows.
Spirderman 3 was horrendous. Even the leads have publicly refused to be in another one of that series unless there is significant character development for Spiderman and Mary Jane.
Fantastic 4 - The Rise of the Silver Surfer was terrible. How can you film Jessica Alba and make her look unattractive?. The Silver Surfer voice characterization was miserable. This is a movie I almost walked out of.
Ocean's 13 had so many glaring plot inconsistencies that the entire plot was unbelievable. An obsessive-compulsive owner of the biggest casino who has access to the FBI crime database doesn't check everyone who applies for a position?
No Reservations is the first movie I've seen where Catherine Zeta-Jones was poorly used. She normally plays a strong woman with an unexpected compassionate side. In this movie, she was just a miserable human being. This movie is also a remake of Mostly Martha, a German film that apparently is much better.
The movie going experience is also unpleasant. The theaters are usually a mess, the staff is unpleasant to rude, and I don't even bother buying concessions. I no longer go to Regal Theaters after I was denied entry (after purchasing a ticket). I had purchased an umbrella on a sunny day. Since I was on my bike at the time, I couldn't leave the purchase in the car. The manager claimed that the umbrella could be used as a weapon and would not allow me to enter the theater with a paid ticket. They no longer get my business.
I never pay full price for movies. I attend matinee shows. Even then, many movies are not worth the $6.
I don't use P2P systems, except for updating games and getting the new version of Fedora. While I have a reasonable Internet connection, I will not waste my time, disk space, or a DVD on most commercial movies. Those few that I like, I will purchase, with the exception of Sony Pictures. I never know if a Sony product will play on my computers due to their use of DRM. Hence, they don't get my business.
Camcorder bootlegs are not something that people buy or download. I have friends in Malaysia, and they all scoff at camcorder copies. People discussing ripped movies on Usenet complain about highly compressed movies, color banding, and color bleed-over. No one is going to waste any time, disk space, or recordable media on camcorder bootlegs.
So based on my personal experience, the experience of many people in countries where US copyrights are largely ignored, discussions on Usenet, and refereed articles you are misinformed.
Corporations in general appear not to want standards or standard - based applications.
While this sounds radical, bear with me for a moment.
At the 'C' executive level, many executives base their directions on marketing. This marketing takes place in print (CIO articles), presentations, and "personal" meetings with 'C' executives from various software vendors. The really astute 'C' executives may consider suitability for a niche purpose, but often that suitability is secondary.
The business executive is normally not concerned about standards. At best, the business executive is concerned about niche functionality. Often, the business executive uses the purchase of new systems as a way of increasing the size of an organization (empire building), or as talking points for status.
The IT executive is not normally concerned about standards, unless it's a de facto standard established by the IT organization. Again, empire building and talking points are prime reasons for this approach.
Many senior IT staff members are not concerned about standards, unless it's a de facto standard supported by their work. Many senior IT staff members use their knowledge of de facto and proprietary standards to appear indispensable to an organization. Outside consultants often use this and information hiding (poor documentation) to obtain repeat business.
Many vendors at best give lip service to standards. They're not selling points to 'C' level and business executives. The use of proprietary and de facto standards enables vendor lock-in, which increases sales. If software was based on freely available and open standards, the software marketplace would then become more of a meritocracy.
People who are concerned about standards generally fall into three camps. There are the architects whose responsibility it is to make "everything" work together. There are IS folks (as opposed to IT folks) who are interested in providing organizations with services rather than technologies. There users who really don't care about computers and computing - they just want to get something done.
None of this will change until at least the following happens.
'C' level executives become aware of and concerned about soft dollar cost impacts due to incompatible systems.
Business executives are measured against business objectives and not the complexity of an organization
Senior IT staff becomes senior IS staff, focusing on providing services, not technology.
Vendors are held responsible for accurately explaining the constraints imposed by their systems.
Just my opinion - based on some pretty ugly hacks I've done as a user and an architect.
I took the time to skim one of his other papers. It's another PDF, so I won't post the link. You can find it on his publications page.
The real challenge in sociological research as someone as already pointed out is gaining access to unbiased information. Failing that, the researcher will need to do factor analysis in order to remove underlying biases or at least address those issues.
The paper that I skimmed has none of the required analysis nor does it address the underlying biases present in his information sources. His paper does not address or even acknowledge that the sources of information he uses could contain biases that prejudice conclusions.
It is tempting to draw malicious inferences concerning the author based on his research conclusions. I prefer to view this in terms of Hanlon's Razor.
Some evidence of this is as follows:
He teaches only first year required courses
His recent papers have no other contributing authors (any grad students?)
No mention of adaptive methods in his area of research (DSDM or other RAD methods?)
In short, his papers will be given far more weight than deserved since he is a faculty member at the Harvard Business School.
As an aside: Had I turned in a paper similar to this for my undergrad sociological methods class, I would have been lucky to get a C.
They've trained people to think that computer crashes are the norm
They've trained people to think that rebooting a computer for updates is the norm
They've trained people to think that poor security is the norm
In short, due to their poor products they've trained three generations of computer users to think that computing is inherently mysterious, and computers are inherently unstable.
I know of operations and management people that think it's normal to reboot UNIX systems and J2EE servers on a nightly basis. When you inform them that a little bit of effort could solve the problem, they calmly look at you and say, "What problem?"
The latest Thinking in Java has Java 5 specific chapters including generics and concurrency. My only complaint is that sometimes the index is a bit weak.
Read my earlier comments on your so-called positive review. A confusing interface, limiting picture transfer, a points system, leasing music (yikes!), and it doesn't integrate with my existing environment . . . .
I don't bother to download or compile free software that has defects as basic as those. Why in the world would I want to pay for it? You're right, I don't.
To refresh your memory, let me quote a few phrases from the review.
In the future, via software update, the Zune should be able to possibly do stuff like share songs over the internet, wirelessly sync with the computer, stream music/video to other devices, and much more
So, the functionality that makes WiFi of interest to users is NOT THERE YET and may never be there.
Another gem from the review.
The community menu options like sending files and pictures are all over the place
In other words, I have to continuously pay attention to the UI, because there is no logical, consistent placement of the information.
Yet another quote from the review.
Pictures are auto-cropped to display large on the screen, and will be auto-resized down from the original whenever you send them to your friends over WiFi
OK, so I want my friends with a Zume to have a smaller, lower resolution picture than I have. Why?
The article spends a lot of time talking about the store. What little I read about the store is confusing (79 points per dollar?) to frightening (leasing music?), to just downright stupid (Zune Marketplace will never fully integrate into Windows Media Player for an all-in-one package like iTunes).
All in all, this may be potentially nice hardware, but it appears to be stillborn due to its software.
And no, I'll resist making the obligatory Microsoft software comment for now . . . .
Of course it's a feature. Since you can only transfer the Vista license once, how else do you think Microsoft is going to keep their revenue stream increasing?
I did a simple search on the site to see how it performed. The results are interesting, but I'm not so sure about the utility of this system.
Search entry
First of all, the searches are very simple. I can only enter a topic to search for. I cannot restrict the search by language, environment, license, or platform. Grouping of search terms does not seem to be possible. Searching for project management software returned results for volume and database management as well as project management.
Search Ordering
There does not seem to be any ordering in the results. The ordering does not seem to be alphabetical, by activity, by language, or by relevance. When 200 entries are returned at approximately 24 per page, some ordering would be nice. Only a dedicated searcher would move past the first three or four pages.
Individual Results
There are a lot of problems with the entry for a particular software package. Here are a few (in no particular order.
Advertisements are mixed with content and have no distinctive styling
Start date is not given - only a statement that the project was started n years ago
Code costs are interesting, and how they computed it is anyone's guess
Developer activity graph means that most people delete and add the same number of lines?
Code contribution graph means that most people delete and add same amount of code?
There is no mention concerning the last update of the package
The home page for the project is at the bottom of the web page in small type
Factoids are inconsistent. A potential licensing conflict in one project is not mentioned in another project with the same licensing issue.
Comparison
Labeling software as abandoned is not positive or informative. For example, one software project was labeled abandoned even though the developer considered the project ready for production.
Here are some other issues.
The summary information is not sorted in any meaningful way.
Advertisements are interspersed with content but have no clearly differentiating style
The graphs are confusing.
Summary
The site is still beta. However, there are a lot of issues that make this site less than useful. These issues are.
Poor search definition
Unordered results
Undifferentiated page layout which makes key information difficult to find
A company (large, reputable) that I finished a contract for bans all free software, and especially all software licensed under any form of GPL, Apache, Mozilla, or Creative Commons licenses. The only exception that they will make is for embedded tools (such as Perl being used in certain commercial applications). The CIO and CFO have to sign off on this use, and the vendor providing the software must contractually promise to indemnify the company against any and all lawsuits stemming from the use of the embedded software.
The company does this solely out of fear of lawsuits.
Using unauthorized GPL, Apache, Mozilla, or Creative Commons software on any corporate system or in connection with any corporate project was grounds for immediate dismissal. Statements to that effect were present in the IT acceptable use policy distributed to every employee and contractor.
Many routers (Linksys, D-Link, etc.) have a monitoring program built in that can be configured to send SNMP traps for every new connection. Then just look at the logs. These same routers come with SNMP trap receiver programs, or you can roll your own with Perl, C#.NET, Ruby, Python, etc., etc.
I guess it's time to check my logs a bit more carefully when I'm on the Windows side of this machine.
Yes, my copy of Windows is legitimate. I still don't like the phone home aspect.
Actually, there is a development version of spellbound that works with Firefox 1.5.0.x. It's quite useful, and has some nice features. You can get it here.
First of all, I would have to upgrade from Windows/2000 Professional to Windows/XP Professional. Since this costs money, I'm not terribly interested. My system has enough trouble running all the stuff I run now (2 databases, a web server, an application server, a development environment, etc. etc.). More operating system overhead is the last thing I'm interested in.
Second of all, I get to write scripts in another language that's not portable across all platforms. I've never worked in a monolithic environment, and I probably never will. Cross-platform tools are a requirement.
Third, I can do a lot of administrative programming for Windows in Perl. I imagine python and ruby have similar hooks (haven't checked). For personal productivity I run Cygwin's version of bash on this machine when I'm running Windows, and bash when I'm running Linux. Different people may want different interactive tools. Fortunately there are several cross-platform choices.
Finally, while I've heard about all these productivity gains with C# and.NET, I've not experienced it. I have.NET, C#, and Visual C++.NET on the Windows side of my environment. What I've seen is that Microsoft makes a credible IDE. The IDE makes simple things easy, and complex things ridiculous. Transferring skills learned in the Microsoft world to any other environment is difficult at best, and pointless for the most part.
I suggest that as many students who can vote with their dollars.
In short, transfer. Any academic institution that forces its students to use such a limiting piece of software deserves to have zero students in year two of its deployment. If an academic institution is so lacking in knowledge and foresight that it deploys this solution, then it is probably not an academic institution that can offer a quality education.
For the record, I designed, installed, and managed an electronic mail environment supporting over 25,000 users with an integrated electronic address book, and interfaced to 6 proprietary mail systems for departments with legacy mail. I created this entire environment with publicly available software with the exception of the servers (a cluster of Sun machines). If I had to do it over again, I might replace the Sun servers with Linux blade servers.
Not too recently, Edwards Theaters was purchased by Regal Entertainment.
Not long after that, I had the following experience..
I ride a bike, and stop at the mall. I know it's going to rain the next day, so I go in to purchase a new umbrella. I then see that there's a movie I'm interested in (playing at the local Regal, ne Edwards) theaters.
"Sir, you can't go in with that", the manager states.
"With what, the umbrella?. I just bought it."
"Yes sir. It might be used as a weapon."
"I'm on my bike, so I have no place to put it. Can you watch it for me?"
"I'm sorry sir, but we cannot take responsibility for personal items."
"Well, what am I going to do with this ticket? Can I have a refund since you won't let me watch the movie?"
"I'm sorry sir. We do not give refunds. The person at the ticket counter should not have sold you the ticket."
Basically, because I had an umbrella and it wasn't raining, they would not allow me to enter the theater. Granted, this is in southern California and rain is a rare sight, but sheesh.
Couple that with a $2 increase in the ticket prices, and I won't ever set foot in a Regal Entertainment theater again. If it's not shown in another theater chain, I'll wait for the DVD or cable movie. And no, I don't have a home theater system.
I also don't like my bike shoes sticking to the lobby floor, and having to sweep popcorn off the theater seat before I sit down.
However, I don't think I'm missing much. In the theaters we have the following:
Ultraviolet - Milla Jojovich doing runway walks while CGI changes her hair
V is for Vendetta - Apple's "1984" advertisement expanded to movie version and mashed up with Phantom of the Opera
Coming this summer we have three sequels, two remakes, and one mashup. Someone tell me why I want to spend $20 for poor customer service, sticky floors, and movies with little original content.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).
I vote for this. I find that Murdock's properties provide noise at best and inflammatory rhetoric at worst. I would prefer to not see them on the "Top News" or "World News" gadgets that Google provides for iGoogle.
If I want incoherent ramblings, I'll listen to the guy on the street corner. If I want gossip, I'll lean over the fence and listen to the two neighborhood gossips talk.
If I want news, I'll refer to virtually any other publication that one provided by a property that Murdock owns.
I've seen this problem with Firefox ever since moving from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10.
One of the things I noticed in Fedora 10 is the reliance on HAL and evdev_drv to determine my mouse configuration. I have a single mouse (Logitech G5), but a Macintosh mouse button emulation is added as well.
I've tried completely configuring my mouse in xorg.conf, but that doesn't seem to address the problem either.
It appears that some sort of event communication is getting missed somewhere along the line. I'm not sure how to go about tracing it or filing a bug report. It is frustrating, and I'm glad to know that holding down the right mouse button may provide a workaround.
Here's a thumbnail sketch on one approach. I've used this, to develop SCM processes, procedures, roles, and responsibilities for a 600 person development organization. About 1/3 of that organization consisted of contractors.
It took us a little under one year to go from 0 to revision 1 of the system (including vendor selection, piloting, etc.).
The challenges are really the following:
Once these issues are established, then it's just write, test, revise, test, revise, test, and publish.
I'll give you some scenarios, but the actual implementation is specific to the organization.
1. Deciding who the audience is
This decision will frame how the document is written, what level of detail the document contains, and the general structure of the document.
From your description, it sounds like you have a lot of contractors who will be unfamiliar with your processes and procedures. In that case, you'll probably need some environment documentation and some process documentation in addition to procedural documentation.
Deciding what the purpose of the documentation is
This decision will drive the detailed structure and the language of the documentation.
For example, if the documentation is primarily for education, then keeping the information at a structural level with a few well-chosen examples works well. If the documentation is operational in scope, then a use case type of structure can work well. Finally, if the document is focused on teaching, then an underlying example, lots of repetition, in-line exercises, and documented sequential steps seem to work well.
From your brief description, it sounds there are two purposes. You need to educate incoming contractors concerning your environment and processes. You also need operational documentation.
3. Deciding what are documentable processes / procedures
"Everything" is not the answer to this step. Everything that is not industry-standard might be an answer to this step. A more reasonable answer might be whatever impacts performance metrics.
The level of impact can be assessed, and target topics can be put into MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, want to have) order. This will make the documentation task more manageable.
4. Deciding how the documentation gets used
I see a lot answers jumping to this area. Flowcharts, wikis, web pages, SharePoint, etc. are all technical solutions to this issue.
However, the question has not really been asked. What is the normal work pattern of those people who MUST use the documentation?
If they're seated at a computer with either multiple screens or multiple windows, then online, hyperlinked documentation may be a good fit. The delivery mechanism (actual technology) is up to you.
If people leave their desks a lot to accomplish tasks, then a different format will be needed, as well as a different document structure.
The goal in answering this issue is to make sure the documentation gets used. For that to happen, the documentation has to be a natural extension to their current work habits.
Hammering out the Issues
For the truly ad hoc organization (CMM 1), an assessment followed by a series of JAD sessions works well. This may seem like a waste of time (let's get writing already), but it helps to identify the best use of effort, and it gets everyone on board with the process.
Many people view documentation as constraints, so getting everyone on board via a CMM assessment and JAD sessions is important.
Creating the documentation
Once these issues are hammered out, then the documentation can be created. Writing documentation, especially detailed operational documentation, is tough. One way to ease the pain is by adapting
Deciding on or changing a platform is fairly complex. Without knowing more about your particulars, all I can write about are general ideas. While they may be helpful, you will have to customize them to fit your organization and situation.
Since you've not really framed the technical particulars of your problem, I'm going to treat the system as a black box. The question then becomes, "how do you know when to change black boxes?"
I'll break up the ideas into three sections. Tnn will represent technical considerations, Bnn will represent business considerations, and Cnn will represent cultural considerations.
T1 - Standards Compliance
Are there openly developed, freely available industry-wide standards that your black box should implement? If so, does your current black box implement them? If your current black box does not implement them, or depends on proprietary extensions for the bulk of its interesting functionality, then it's time to look at a new black box. If your black box implements the standards but does not closely (6 months - 18 months) track significant changes to those standards, it's time to get a new black box.
T2 - Brittleness
Tight coupling or brittleness is a good reason to change your black box. I'm using this term in an object-oriented design pattern sense. If you change your black box (upgrade, improve, etc.), how many other systems do you have to change? Adding new functionality to other systems might be acceptable coupling. Changing an operating system to change a browser so you can interact with a server is probably not acceptable. If you find yourself in the second situation, then it's time to change your black box.
B1 - Support
Support can come in the form of in-house (hired), in-house (trained), community, consultants, or vendor. Sometimes finding and hiring people with the specific skill set is difficult. Consider hiring someone with experience in a similar skill set and then training that person through vendor or third-party classes. You can bridge immediate skill issues by using consultants, but make sure you get a complete knowledge transfer. If the classes don't exist, the consultants are sparce, the community for this black box not vibrant, or newer technologies are seen as replacing your black box, it's time to get a new black box.
B2 - Repair or Replace
This is the basic used car / new car question. If it's going to be very expensive (project costs, retraining costs) to replace your black box and you can find or train a suitable mechanic, then your black box has a little life left in it. If over the course of 18 months (single process black box) to 36 months (infrastructure black box), the repair bill will be larger than the project bill plus any new repair bills, it's time to get a new black box. Adjust your time frames according to your business model.
B3 - Fitness for Purpose
Does your black box sit in the corner, doing its job, and rarely needs a change? Then it might be a good idea to leave your black box in place until its brittleness impacts your business's requirements to innovate or change. If you are constantly having to rework business processes or projects to fit the idiosyncrasies, then it's time to replace the black box.
C1 - Change
Every business has a certain resistance to change. This must be factored in when you replace black boxes. A change-adverse organization might be more comfortable in living with the restrictions of the current black box. A change-neutral or a change-positive organization might actually benefit from changing the black box. The impacts of change are hard to measure, but mostly show up as soft dollar costs in productivity and team morale. Sometimes even change-adverse organizations must change their black boxes. However, in order to accomplish that change, an influential sponsor / stakeholder must lead the charge. Otherwise the change will fail.
That was a rather long first draft of my opinions about deciding on change in a business environment. Hopefully some people will find this useful as a place to start when considering change.
While free certainly does have its appeal, I think removing the word free tells an even more important story.
Doing research on exactly what songs you want takes time. Creating play lists, ripping to an audio format, and then storing them on a media player takes time. If a record label is going to give people a mechanism to get exactly what people want rather than what people want plus 6-8 songs people don't, then most people are going to go the single song route.
I can think of at least two reasons to generate albums. One is that the popular songs subsidize the unpopular songs, The second is that the record labels are trying to appeal to a larger market by packaging up a broad collection of songs.
I've not listened to a lot of pop music lately, but it seems to me that album concepts are fewer and fewer. There were advantages to getting Alan Parson's Project I, Robot, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Are there any albums concepts being sold today (regardless of whether you like the music listed above)?
I think if the record labels wanted to be successful, they would do something like the following.
This accomplishes a lot of things. There is less risk per song. Labels and artists would get quicker feedback on their music. Those artists who were concerned about commercial success could focus on that. Those artist who were focused on the art could use the release early, release often strategy to build a following.
I don't know a lot about the mechanics of music (session musicians, recording engineers, sound studios, etc.) although I used to do some recording in college. However, this seems like a workable approach.
What this approach does though is change the dynamics of the music business. A lot of project-oriented people will find their value decreasing. A lot of people who focus on the craft and quality of the art will probably find their stock increasing. For the consumer, this is not a bad thing. For the record executives, advertising executives, and manufacturing executives this is a bad thing indeed.
Welcome to the (new) machine - the Internet.
I have red/green color-deficient vision. Red shades towards black and green shades toward white. When I was growing up, I often wondered why green lights were called green lights.
I cannot read the map. So yes, a different color scheme (or a non-black background) might make the map legible.
I have already been targeted with at least one job scam as fallout from this.
I have gone back and searched through my Monster mail folder, and have found some interesting items. Apparently the Trojan phish has been tried at least twice. I have a mail message from February 27 and one from March 30 with links to non-Monster sites. The February 27 attempt was a little craftier in that the EXE file was not a part of the URL. The March 30 attempt contained the remote host name, and jobseeker_tool.exe as part of the URL.
Both of the mail messages appear to have come from a Yahoo hosting service, hostingprod.com, which maps to geocities.yahoo.com.
Fun and games, folks.
Replying to my own comments . . . .
The following contains industry executive comments concerning the Simpson's Movie and CAM downloads.
To bring this comment back on subject . . . The Canadian theater has no business or legal reason to search their patrons, let alone search them in an abusive manner.
Please don't bait and switch
The point under discussion is camcorder bootlegs of movies.
A refereed paper posits no damage to the industries covered (music, movies) by downloads.
Earlier, you stated you have an impressive DVD collection. If you do not watch movies more than once, why do you have such an impressive collection?
The impressive rips your friend downloaded are rips from DVDs (either commercial or screening DVDs). I haven't seen a camcorder bootleg on Usenet in a while, but I haven't looked. I haven't looked for camcorder bootlegs on Pirate Bay either, although they may be there.
As far as music goes, there are a lot of low to medium quality copies of songs available via P2P, Internet radio, and Usenet. Again, I stress the quality. As an experiment, I burned an audio CD from an Internet radio recorded stream and played it on a CD player. The sound was intolerable. Where possible, I purchase CDs of the artists I hear on Internet radio and create better quality tracks for my iPod from the CD.
You are correct, however in that P2P and other forms of distribution have an impact on the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, it's not having the impact that it should. Declining sales and lower profit margins indicate that the product and business processes need to be improved. Instead, we have corporations using questionable legal tactics to maintain artificially (from a market perspective) high prices and profits for the "good ol' boy" people in the entertainment industries.
We've had this same issue before with cassettes and radio, and then with VHS and TV. Tivo and other DVR systems coupled with digital cable have upped the ante a bit.
There are many solutions to the problem. Some of the core ideas for these solutions include the following.
As for a real cause and effect, I would enjoy doing a factors analysis of the entertainment industry market. The Balkanization of the market by consumers versus the attempt at market control by the entertainment industry would be another interesting study.
Games have a different dynamic than the more passive entertainment forms. Not being a hard-core gamer, I would have to do a bit of research to determine what consumers feel to be the real challenges with games. As a casual game player, I find lack of performance (sloppy programming), inconsistency, and lack of complexity/richness to be the major barriers to my game play. For serious gamers, the issues could be very different.
As such, I don't download games for the same reason I don't download movies. The end result is not worth the time, resources, or effort I expend to obtain the product.
Make a more compelling product using a better business plan and the marketplace will reward you. Make poor products with a poor business plan while skimming 8-figure salaries off the top, and the marketplace will (hopefully) punish you.
I'll see if I can't be a little more polite than some of the other comments.
In summary, you are wrong.
In detail then . . .
As has already been pointed out, the only reviewed study of music and movie pirating via P2P has shown that there is no impact to the music or movie industries. Scroll up for the academic reference.
There are two reasons (from my experience) that theater gross receipts may be off,
The product is just plain bad. Couple a poor product with many online forums discussing the poor product, and second week receipts will be down. Some of my personal observations concerning recent movies follows.
The movie going experience is also unpleasant. The theaters are usually a mess, the staff is unpleasant to rude, and I don't even bother buying concessions. I no longer go to Regal Theaters after I was denied entry (after purchasing a ticket). I had purchased an umbrella on a sunny day. Since I was on my bike at the time, I couldn't leave the purchase in the car. The manager claimed that the umbrella could be used as a weapon and would not allow me to enter the theater with a paid ticket. They no longer get my business.
I never pay full price for movies. I attend matinee shows. Even then, many movies are not worth the $6.
I don't use P2P systems, except for updating games and getting the new version of Fedora. While I have a reasonable Internet connection, I will not waste my time, disk space, or a DVD on most commercial movies. Those few that I like, I will purchase, with the exception of Sony Pictures. I never know if a Sony product will play on my computers due to their use of DRM. Hence, they don't get my business.
Camcorder bootlegs are not something that people buy or download. I have friends in Malaysia, and they all scoff at camcorder copies. People discussing ripped movies on Usenet complain about highly compressed movies, color banding, and color bleed-over. No one is going to waste any time, disk space, or recordable media on camcorder bootlegs.
So based on my personal experience, the experience of many people in countries where US copyrights are largely ignored, discussions on Usenet, and refereed articles you are misinformed.
Corporations in general appear not to want standards or standard - based applications.
While this sounds radical, bear with me for a moment.
At the 'C' executive level, many executives base their directions on marketing. This marketing takes place in print (CIO articles), presentations, and "personal" meetings with 'C' executives from various software vendors. The really astute 'C' executives may consider suitability for a niche purpose, but often that suitability is secondary.
The business executive is normally not concerned about standards. At best, the business executive is concerned about niche functionality. Often, the business executive uses the purchase of new systems as a way of increasing the size of an organization (empire building), or as talking points for status.
The IT executive is not normally concerned about standards, unless it's a de facto standard established by the IT organization. Again, empire building and talking points are prime reasons for this approach.
Many senior IT staff members are not concerned about standards, unless it's a de facto standard supported by their work. Many senior IT staff members use their knowledge of de facto and proprietary standards to appear indispensable to an organization. Outside consultants often use this and information hiding (poor documentation) to obtain repeat business.
Many vendors at best give lip service to standards. They're not selling points to 'C' level and business executives. The use of proprietary and de facto standards enables vendor lock-in, which increases sales. If software was based on freely available and open standards, the software marketplace would then become more of a meritocracy.
People who are concerned about standards generally fall into three camps. There are the architects whose responsibility it is to make "everything" work together. There are IS folks (as opposed to IT folks) who are interested in providing organizations with services rather than technologies. There users who really don't care about computers and computing - they just want to get something done.
None of this will change until at least the following happens.
Just my opinion - based on some pretty ugly hacks I've done as a user and an architect.
The operative word is lucky.
I took the time to skim one of his other papers. It's another PDF, so I won't post the link. You can find it on his publications page.
The real challenge in sociological research as someone as already pointed out is gaining access to unbiased information. Failing that, the researcher will need to do factor analysis in order to remove underlying biases or at least address those issues.
The paper that I skimmed has none of the required analysis nor does it address the underlying biases present in his information sources. His paper does not address or even acknowledge that the sources of information he uses could contain biases that prejudice conclusions.
It is tempting to draw malicious inferences concerning the author based on his research conclusions. I prefer to view this in terms of Hanlon's Razor.
Some evidence of this is as follows:
In short, his papers will be given far more weight than deserved since he is a faculty member at the Harvard Business School.
As an aside: Had I turned in a paper similar to this for my undergrad sociological methods class, I would have been lucky to get a C.
I hate Microsoft for some very simple reasons
In short, due to their poor products they've trained three generations of computer users to think that computing is inherently mysterious, and computers are inherently unstable.
I know of operations and management people that think it's normal to reboot UNIX systems and J2EE servers on a nightly basis. When you inform them that a little bit of effort could solve the problem, they calmly look at you and say, "What problem?"
The latest Thinking in Java has Java 5 specific chapters including generics and concurrency. My only complaint is that sometimes the index is a bit weak.
In general, it's an excellent book.
Read my earlier comments on your so-called positive review. A confusing interface, limiting picture transfer, a points system, leasing music (yikes!), and it doesn't integrate with my existing environment . . . .
I don't bother to download or compile free software that has defects as basic as those. Why in the world would I want to pay for it? You're right, I don't.
This is a positive review?
To refresh your memory, let me quote a few phrases from the review.
So, the functionality that makes WiFi of interest to users is NOT THERE YET and may never be there.
Another gem from the review.
In other words, I have to continuously pay attention to the UI, because there is no logical, consistent placement of the information.
Yet another quote from the review.
OK, so I want my friends with a Zume to have a smaller, lower resolution picture than I have. Why?
The article spends a lot of time talking about the store. What little I read about the store is confusing (79 points per dollar?) to frightening (leasing music?), to just downright stupid (Zune Marketplace will never fully integrate into Windows Media Player for an all-in-one package like iTunes).
All in all, this may be potentially nice hardware, but it appears to be stillborn due to its software.
And no, I'll resist making the obligatory Microsoft software comment for now . . . .
Of course it's a feature. Since you can only transfer the Vista license once, how else do you think Microsoft is going to keep their revenue stream increasing?
I did a simple search on the site to see how it performed. The results are interesting, but I'm not so sure about the utility of this system.
Search entry
First of all, the searches are very simple. I can only enter a topic to search for. I cannot restrict the search by language, environment, license, or platform. Grouping of search terms does not seem to be possible. Searching for project management software returned results for volume and database management as well as project management.
Search Ordering
There does not seem to be any ordering in the results. The ordering does not seem to be alphabetical, by activity, by language, or by relevance. When 200 entries are returned at approximately 24 per page, some ordering would be nice. Only a dedicated searcher would move past the first three or four pages.
Individual Results
There are a lot of problems with the entry for a particular software package. Here are a few (in no particular order.
Comparison
Labeling software as abandoned is not positive or informative. For example, one software project was labeled abandoned even though the developer considered the project ready for production.
Here are some other issues.
Summary
The site is still beta. However, there are a lot of issues that make this site less than useful. These issues are.
I agree.
A company (large, reputable) that I finished a contract for bans all free software, and especially all software licensed under any form of GPL, Apache, Mozilla, or Creative Commons licenses. The only exception that they will make is for embedded tools (such as Perl being used in certain commercial applications). The CIO and CFO have to sign off on this use, and the vendor providing the software must contractually promise to indemnify the company against any and all lawsuits stemming from the use of the embedded software.
The company does this solely out of fear of lawsuits.
Using unauthorized GPL, Apache, Mozilla, or Creative Commons software on any corporate system or in connection with any corporate project was grounds for immediate dismissal. Statements to that effect were present in the IT acceptable use policy distributed to every employee and contractor.
Many routers (Linksys, D-Link, etc.) have a monitoring program built in that can be configured to send SNMP traps for every new connection. Then just look at the logs. These same routers come with SNMP trap receiver programs, or you can roll your own with Perl, C#.NET, Ruby, Python, etc., etc.
I guess it's time to check my logs a bit more carefully when I'm on the Windows side of this machine.
Yes, my copy of Windows is legitimate. I still don't like the phone home aspect.
Actually, there is a development version of spellbound that works with Firefox 1.5.0.x. It's quite useful, and has some nice features. You can get it here.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=351The install link is a little difficult to find, but look for "Install SpellBound Dev" near the end of the first message.
This works for me, but as always, your mileage may vary
First of all, I would have to upgrade from Windows/2000 Professional to Windows/XP Professional. Since this costs money, I'm not terribly interested. My system has enough trouble running all the stuff I run now (2 databases, a web server, an application server, a development environment, etc. etc.). More operating system overhead is the last thing I'm interested in.
Second of all, I get to write scripts in another language that's not portable across all platforms. I've never worked in a monolithic environment, and I probably never will. Cross-platform tools are a requirement.
Third, I can do a lot of administrative programming for Windows in Perl. I imagine python and ruby have similar hooks (haven't checked). For personal productivity I run Cygwin's version of bash on this machine when I'm running Windows, and bash when I'm running Linux. Different people may want different interactive tools. Fortunately there are several cross-platform choices.
Finally, while I've heard about all these productivity gains with C# and .NET, I've not experienced it. I have .NET, C#, and Visual C++ .NET on the Windows side of my environment. What I've seen is that Microsoft makes a credible IDE. The IDE makes simple things easy, and complex things ridiculous. Transferring skills learned in the Microsoft world to any other environment is difficult at best, and pointless for the most part.
Oh - never mind - that's Microsoft's point.
I suggest that as many students who can vote with their dollars.
In short, transfer. Any academic institution that forces its students to use such a limiting piece of software deserves to have zero students in year two of its deployment. If an academic institution is so lacking in knowledge and foresight that it deploys this solution, then it is probably not an academic institution that can offer a quality education.
For the record, I designed, installed, and managed an electronic mail environment supporting over 25,000 users with an integrated electronic address book, and interfaced to 6 proprietary mail systems for departments with legacy mail. I created this entire environment with publicly available software with the exception of the servers (a cluster of Sun machines). If I had to do it over again, I might replace the Sun servers with Linux blade servers.
Then again, I might not.
Not too recently, Edwards Theaters was purchased by Regal Entertainment.
Not long after that, I had the following experience..
I ride a bike, and stop at the mall. I know it's going to rain the next day, so I go in to purchase a new umbrella. I then see that there's a movie I'm interested in (playing at the local Regal, ne Edwards) theaters.
"Sir, you can't go in with that", the manager states.
"With what, the umbrella?. I just bought it."
"Yes sir. It might be used as a weapon."
"I'm on my bike, so I have no place to put it. Can you watch it for me?"
"I'm sorry sir, but we cannot take responsibility for personal items."
"Well, what am I going to do with this ticket? Can I have a refund since you won't let me watch the movie?"
"I'm sorry sir. We do not give refunds. The person at the ticket counter should not have sold you the ticket."
Basically, because I had an umbrella and it wasn't raining, they would not allow me to enter the theater. Granted, this is in southern California and rain is a rare sight, but sheesh.
Couple that with a $2 increase in the ticket prices, and I won't ever set foot in a Regal Entertainment theater again. If it's not shown in another theater chain, I'll wait for the DVD or cable movie. And no, I don't have a home theater system.
I also don't like my bike shoes sticking to the lobby floor, and having to sweep popcorn off the theater seat before I sit down.
However, I don't think I'm missing much. In the theaters we have the following:
Coming this summer we have three sequels, two remakes, and one mashup. Someone tell me why I want to spend $20 for poor customer service, sticky floors, and movies with little original content.
You're right, I don't.