Consider: Viacom and others have little bargaining power against the huge number of ways that users can seed content so that it's difficult for engines to find. People would have to actually look at videos to find a 24hrs episode-- it's easy to mask content so that a trawler wouldn't find it. So each and every content owner, lacking a decent solution of their own, will try and position themselves against GooTube in anyway they can, including the Joost Ruse just announnced. It's incumbent on content providers to at least appear that they're trying to protect their assets. Just dumping the content would rile the hell out of Wall Street-- as in 'giving away the store' sorts of criticisms. It's completely natural, even if Joost never sees the light of day, to have invented them.
Capturing and making the energy useful will be tricky, launching a whole new school of (hopefully) lightweight (and safe) efficient power units. Imagine using the thumpa-thumpa woofers in your trunk to scoot your car down the street.
Fully 1/10th of sub-Saharan Africans are at risk. It's already created the largest ophan population since the Spanish Flu of 1918 (my great-granparents died in that one). I hope the antigen attack trials go quickly and smoothly, and the vaccine gets into circulation post-haste.
After that's done, there's still TB, malaria, thypoid, cholera, and unmitigated greed to go after.
It took us several years to break apart AT&T, just to get back essentially four phone companies in the USA. All of Judge Greene's decisions were subverted by a bribed congress. It's no wonder their stock price is low-- we hate them-- and they can't get sufficient capital. Add in the move from landlines (tip and ring) to mobile/cellular, and they struggle. It used to be easy to get rights-of-way, and infrastructure. Consolidation and debt load on the telcos caused massive problems, as did poor choices (ATM) in infrastructure. Add into the mix, the lies and hubris of Enron, mix in a little MCI for fun, and the communications companies that really mattered have spoiled it for themselves.
Worse, we have no useful or standardized taxonomy to measure broadband penetration. It gets worse when you see municipalities from LA and SF to Philly and Boston doing their own muni-WiFi because coverage sucks so uniformly. Add in the prospect of the messyness of "net neutrality" and horrid leadership from the FCC and a bribed congress, and we've fallen behind because of our own stupid mistakes. It won't get fixed soon. Sorry.
While Job's work has done seeming miracles, there is no need for a monopolistic organization to change what it does. Public pressure hasn't changed them at all, else the stunningly bad customer relations that 1) DRM 2) copyright litigation of individuals 3) obscene privacy violations aimed at ISPs (it's almost like extortion) 4) PUTTING ROOT KITS ON MEDIA 5) other staunch asset protection PR nightmares haven't stopped them yet.
This isn't going to be death-by-a-thousand-cuts that hemorrages the RIAA. They have thousands of bandaids, if you'll excuse the pun. The music industry is incestuous with the movie and entertainment industry, and all of them have perverted intellectual property concepts in ways that if you looked at it in 1960 eyes would have made you roll in laughter-- yet they've done the incredible.
You will not make them move until you hit them hard in the wallet. No other action, save litigation will work, because consumers can't rally sufficient mass to hurt them. It's a sad reality.
It's like when Ticketmaster had the Pearl Jam rebellion. Who one that? Ticketmaster. Yes, you can go outside the 'system', but it's not easy and while there are successful financial models to pattern from, it's extraordinarily difficult.
Revenues come from licensing (merchandise), concerts (lots of high-margin revenue), as well as the song marketing themselves. The lyrics and sheet music, coupled with just about everything associated with a 'brand' is revenue production. The RIAA isn't about to let a heavy piece of that go away, even if their cost-of-goods in digital dissemination looks very tasty-- it's the rest of it that then seems to slip away, too.
The mentality of this group (the RIAA) is gruesome, and they have the law on their side in the US, such as the law is (rife with burden of proof mishaps, invasiveness, and other abrogations of common law and even US constitutional twists).
I applaud what indies try to do. It's very very tough for them. Artists aren't good money managers, traditionally, and the vagueries of royalites, copyright law, and the other facets of management and licensing relationships have become truly horrid to manage.
They're like telcos: you can only hurt the RIAA/music licensors in one of three very basic ways:
1) legislation/lawsuit (unlikely as they own the legislatures and have armies of lawyers) 2) have a massive clientele defection (unlikely because they're a monopoly like the telcos) or 3) have their talent pool stop making revenue (crappy quality music, and so on-- also highly unlikely).
Bottom line: he's sucking up to his clientele (us, supposedly) and Wall Street, especially Wall Street who wants to pound the crap out of them for other foollish moves. They should have demanded that Mark Cuban stay with them for a few years after they bought his Broadcast.Com.
This presumes of course that there is enough hardware. There is not.
The old koan that states that you can't satisfy hunger by looking at a picture of a fish applies here.
This is actually part of the same campaign that's trying to make Gates, his foundations (and those cute pictures of Patty Stonecipher) all make us think nice things in the light of the disaster of Zune, Vista, and many other things Microsoft.
Mod me down as flamebait, but I'm merely the oxygen, not the spark. Microsoft is the fuel. Nothing to see here. Move along.
If they were to change their stance, or their doggedness, they'd be crushed in a heartbeat-- and end of story. Instead, what they don't reveal is that they launched a lot of litigation that was fruitless, because their basis of injury didn't exist, because their rights to Unix code were bogus. They exacerbated their problem by sending out their letters of injury to large corporations. Then they took money in license fees that would be owed to Novell, who in turn, immediately stanched their claims to IP/copyright ownership of SVR3/4 code. Then they made the mistake of trying to queer Linux IP by infering that IBM took code illegally through AIX development and put the code into Linux.
Of the aforementioned, there is no evidence, and what little they tried to publicly prove was laughed off, and apparently, rightly so. In the interim, they've tried to make continuing development efforts succeed with a brave face, and have tried to make mobility code development efforts pay off (they were at CES at Pepcom, I believe; Darl McBride in a table top kiosk, hawking mobile code).
SCOX is essentially worthless at this point. If they hadn't noted the travails in a 10K, then they could add shareholder litigation to their list of problems as well.
Scan the French Riviera and look at the blurs. Why? The Cap D'Agde is one of the most famous nudist places in Europe. Don't want to violate some noodist's privacy now, do we? The places where some of the pixellation occurs has nothing to do with 'interest'. There's sloppiness, high reflection, and likely a lot of simple stupidity and sloth that prevents some places from coming up all nice and tidy down to the shoe-lace level.
and avoid net neutrality issues. Google has more hits and content (with GooTube) than anyone else. If you wanted to bypass the bottlenecks in a very disorganized Internet (just look at the freaking maps, but take your heart medicine first) then you buy up NOC space and cache as much in a distributed network as you can.
He's good, he's smart, he's richer than Cresus. He's the master of drama and slick stuff that works. He did very little himself, however, except running a tight ship.
Apple is not a marketleader, save in one very popular segment. Don't mistake that for being IBM-- they're less than 1/10th the size. He knows how to talk to Hollywood, because he IS HOLLYWOOD-- that's where Pixar and Disney get their $$ from.
Apple ought to break up into three companies: entertainment systems, computer systems, and software. Each would work nicely on their own, and be able to then attack their respective marketplaces less encumbered by the other. If they actually opened up things (no, don't look at the iPhone stupidity), they'd get the best of both worlds, as their BSD 'pedigree' is a bit of a sham.
Jobs ought to retire while we still like him, after choosing someone without a pony tail (sorry, Jonathon).
But the churn rate for GSM phones is the same as CDMA phones, about 2.5yrs now. An older phone gets dirty, has bad batteries, decaying keyboard, and so on. The product life cycle is short, and getting shorter. Your carrier subsidized the cost of the phone-- and you paid it back in other charges-- either base-monthly-cost or toll charges.
A newer phone, better camera, (still 1G, not 3G) with bluetooth and GIS costs more. Maybe you'll like the new features and desire to buy them, or maybe not. Maybe you have too many cables and chargers-- I do. I have a $60 MP3 player, headphones, charger (1 home 1 car). I have 2 mobile phones-- one GSM world phone (quad band) and one CDMA phone (also with chargers, and so on). Then there's bluetooth earpiece. Then synchronization software. Charger for the MP3 player.
It makes life complicated. One device for multiple purposes is handy. People pay for handy. But Apple hasn't proven this phone, and it's only GSM, and it's only one carrier so far. Still, Motorola phones stink. Sony Ericsson phones have 'closed' features. Nokia are better, but break. LG and Samsung phones are pretty, but also break easily.
Will Apple succeed? It will be very difficult, but there is some temptation for device simplicity and consistency. Apple makes bad guesses sometimes, but lately, has been much better at making attractive devices that 'just work'. Is it worth the price? We'll see-- maybe, maybe not.
Consider: you phone has changed twice in five years, and was carrier-subsidized. You paid for it one way or the other (except, perhaps, in California). So now, you get more goodies and that famous Apple "it just works" instead of some odd version of Symbian or heaven-help-us Windows Mobile.
I'm not defending the phone. I'd like to NOT change one every 2.5 years, and have some entertainment value for those long, overbooked flight pauses I get. I have too many cables, too many data sources, have used too many carriers (they all uniformly suck), and have to spend at least a few days getting used to whatever bizarre software they put on the phones I've had from Nokia, SE, Moto, etc. Gimme something usable. I hope iPhone is it. Otherwise, Apple can go pound sand.
I would otherwise agree, except that I worked for another Japanese company in consumer electronics that would be shocked and horrified at what Sony has done. The mentality is to brave out the bad words and carry-on, stiff-lipped. Business is war, and war must be won. Their different-drummer status led them to great victories. Now, as you cite, the Koreans (and others) have learned what it takes to advance innovation-- although Korean vendors such as Hyundai and Samsung have outrageous business practices, and scandal is the rule of the day in Seoul. Trillions of won (the currency) have been paid in fines..... but may be the tip of the iceberg. Whereas the press and even the blogosphere can have heavy influence in NA and EU, it's often brushed aside in ASEAN countries. There's a stick-together mentality that just doesn't exist off US101.
My PCG-C1X Vaio mini-laptop uses 2.2 Linux. Not for much, mind you-- with a 4GB hard drive, but it's useful once in a while.
We totally agree.... the battery warranty expired in 90 days-- for a battery that cost 4x what a 108a/12v car battery costs.
Then, one of our notebooks had an exploding Sony battery in it. It melted, but the effect was noxious. Egads. I once waited eagerly for each of their new items. Now, they're easy to skirt on the aisles of the big-box retailers. Foo.
The long view is traditional (ignore the Welsh CEO they have) in Japanese business culture. If you think they get bad press in the English speaking world, wait until you read what the Taiwanese, Chinese, and other Asian (read ASEAN) press skewer them with.
And for good reasons:
* They've been hurt badly in every market they have; viz the iPod, Wii, XBox, and consumer electronics entertainment markets * They've shown little respect for media consumers, viz the installable rootkit, and the HDDVD wars * They've shown little innovation-- a former hallmark * Their PCs break, they have rotten warranties, and they're not designed for real-world mobility; worse, they're anti-FOSS and have no formal Linux support mechanisms worth mentioning
The ultimate problem: their value proposition used to be high-- and priced high, but no longer leads the markets they're in-- they're followers now. They've had their lunch eaten by lots of astute competitors.
Dare I say it? Ok: they've jumped the shark.... sadly.
.... logically, we don't see an ethical problem with participating in the food chain.....
It's logical for those that believe that 'participating' in the 'food chain' is either logical or even moral. It's unproven, just traditional and justified by varying customs and religious mores. If you believe that causing pain in a dog is wrong, then causing pain in a cow is also wrong. The 400 liters of methane each cow produces a day adds another problem, as does the 'logic' that it's ok to feed a cow, when there's famine in many parts of the planet.
It's not cut-and-dried, and 'logic' seems to be weighted in favor of those producing the 'logic'. If there was an alien, or a robot viewing how our 'logic' works, then perhaps we can be rationalized as part of a robotic or alien food chain. The fact that we're not faced with this problem doesn't mean that it won't happen one day, in a future that we can't know, and do very badly at controlling.
Slashdot Mirror
Without eliciting a DCMA take down, let's say we disagree, and on my part, wholeheartedly so.
Consider: Viacom and others have little bargaining power against the huge number of ways that users can seed content so that it's difficult for engines to find. People would have to actually look at videos to find a 24hrs episode-- it's easy to mask content so that a trawler wouldn't find it. So each and every content owner, lacking a decent solution of their own, will try and position themselves against GooTube in anyway they can, including the Joost Ruse just announnced. It's incumbent on content providers to at least appear that they're trying to protect their assets. Just dumping the content would rile the hell out of Wall Street-- as in 'giving away the store' sorts of criticisms. It's completely natural, even if Joost never sees the light of day, to have invented them.
Capturing and making the energy useful will be tricky, launching a whole new school of (hopefully) lightweight (and safe) efficient power units. Imagine using the thumpa-thumpa woofers in your trunk to scoot your car down the street.
Fully 1/10th of sub-Saharan Africans are at risk. It's already created the largest ophan population since the Spanish Flu of 1918 (my great-granparents died in that one). I hope the antigen attack trials go quickly and smoothly, and the vaccine gets into circulation post-haste.
After that's done, there's still TB, malaria, thypoid, cholera, and unmitigated greed to go after.
It took us several years to break apart AT&T, just to get back essentially four phone companies in the USA. All of Judge Greene's decisions were subverted by a bribed congress. It's no wonder their stock price is low-- we hate them-- and they can't get sufficient capital. Add in the move from landlines (tip and ring) to mobile/cellular, and they struggle. It used to be easy to get rights-of-way, and infrastructure. Consolidation and debt load on the telcos caused massive problems, as did poor choices (ATM) in infrastructure. Add into the mix, the lies and hubris of Enron, mix in a little MCI for fun, and the communications companies that really mattered have spoiled it for themselves.
Worse, we have no useful or standardized taxonomy to measure broadband penetration. It gets worse when you see municipalities from LA and SF to Philly and Boston doing their own muni-WiFi because coverage sucks so uniformly. Add in the prospect of the messyness of "net neutrality" and horrid leadership from the FCC and a bribed congress, and we've fallen behind because of our own stupid mistakes. It won't get fixed soon. Sorry.
While Job's work has done seeming miracles, there is no need for a monopolistic organization to change what it does. Public pressure hasn't changed them at all, else the stunningly bad customer relations that 1) DRM 2) copyright litigation of individuals 3) obscene privacy violations aimed at ISPs (it's almost like extortion) 4) PUTTING ROOT KITS ON MEDIA 5) other staunch asset protection PR nightmares haven't stopped them yet.
This isn't going to be death-by-a-thousand-cuts that hemorrages the RIAA. They have thousands of bandaids, if you'll excuse the pun. The music industry is incestuous with the movie and entertainment industry, and all of them have perverted intellectual property concepts in ways that if you looked at it in 1960 eyes would have made you roll in laughter-- yet they've done the incredible.
You will not make them move until you hit them hard in the wallet. No other action, save litigation will work, because consumers can't rally sufficient mass to hurt them. It's a sad reality.
It's like when Ticketmaster had the Pearl Jam rebellion. Who one that? Ticketmaster. Yes, you can go outside the 'system', but it's not easy and while there are successful financial models to pattern from, it's extraordinarily difficult.
Revenues come from licensing (merchandise), concerts (lots of high-margin revenue), as well as the song marketing themselves. The lyrics and sheet music, coupled with just about everything associated with a 'brand' is revenue production. The RIAA isn't about to let a heavy piece of that go away, even if their cost-of-goods in digital dissemination looks very tasty-- it's the rest of it that then seems to slip away, too.
The mentality of this group (the RIAA) is gruesome, and they have the law on their side in the US, such as the law is (rife with burden of proof mishaps, invasiveness, and other abrogations of common law and even US constitutional twists).
I applaud what indies try to do. It's very very tough for them. Artists aren't good money managers, traditionally, and the vagueries of royalites, copyright law, and the other facets of management and licensing relationships have become truly horrid to manage.
They're like telcos: you can only hurt the RIAA/music licensors in one of three very basic ways:
1) legislation/lawsuit (unlikely as they own the legislatures and have armies of lawyers)
2) have a massive clientele defection (unlikely because they're a monopoly like the telcos) or
3) have their talent pool stop making revenue (crappy quality music, and so on-- also highly unlikely).
Bottom line: he's sucking up to his clientele (us, supposedly) and Wall Street, especially Wall Street who wants to pound the crap out of them for other foollish moves. They should have demanded that Mark Cuban stay with them for a few years after they bought his Broadcast.Com.
It's all PR. Nothing to see here.
If you think Lake Geneva and Lake Constance are large, wait until you see Lake Switzerland.
Someone did a query
53 security.microsoft.com ptr
The record that cannot be resolved.
Try 10M of Kubuntu.
This presumes of course that there is enough hardware. There is not.
The old koan that states that you can't satisfy hunger by looking at a picture of a fish applies here.
This is actually part of the same campaign that's trying to make Gates, his foundations (and those cute pictures of Patty Stonecipher) all make us think nice things in the light of the disaster of Zune, Vista, and many other things Microsoft.
Mod me down as flamebait, but I'm merely the oxygen, not the spark. Microsoft is the fuel. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Down to the bitter end.
If they were to change their stance, or their doggedness, they'd be crushed in a heartbeat-- and end of story. Instead, what they don't reveal is that they launched a lot of litigation that was fruitless, because their basis of injury didn't exist, because their rights to Unix code were bogus. They exacerbated their problem by sending out their letters of injury to large corporations. Then they took money in license fees that would be owed to Novell, who in turn, immediately stanched their claims to IP/copyright ownership of SVR3/4 code. Then they made the mistake of trying to queer Linux IP by infering that IBM took code illegally through AIX development and put the code into Linux.
Of the aforementioned, there is no evidence, and what little they tried to publicly prove was laughed off, and apparently, rightly so. In the interim, they've tried to make continuing development efforts succeed with a brave face, and have tried to make mobility code development efforts pay off (they were at CES at Pepcom, I believe; Darl McBride in a table top kiosk, hawking mobile code).
SCOX is essentially worthless at this point. If they hadn't noted the travails in a 10K, then they could add shareholder litigation to their list of problems as well.
Scan the French Riviera and look at the blurs. Why? The Cap D'Agde is one of the most famous nudist places in Europe. Don't want to violate some noodist's privacy now, do we? The places where some of the pixellation occurs has nothing to do with 'interest'. There's sloppiness, high reflection, and likely a lot of simple stupidity and sloth that prevents some places from coming up all nice and tidy down to the shoe-lace level.
all the passwords were "NigellaDoMe"
and avoid net neutrality issues. Google has more hits and content (with GooTube) than anyone else. If you wanted to bypass the bottlenecks in a very disorganized Internet (just look at the freaking maps, but take your heart medicine first) then you buy up NOC space and cache as much in a distributed network as you can.
On this one, Cringely is dead wrong.
no sense of adventure, eh?
Good heavens. You have a point ;)>
He's good, he's smart, he's richer than Cresus. He's the master of drama and slick stuff that works. He did very little himself, however, except running a tight ship.
Apple is not a marketleader, save in one very popular segment. Don't mistake that for being IBM-- they're less than 1/10th the size. He knows how to talk to Hollywood, because he IS HOLLYWOOD-- that's where Pixar and Disney get their $$ from.
Apple ought to break up into three companies: entertainment systems, computer systems, and software. Each would work nicely on their own, and be able to then attack their respective marketplaces less encumbered by the other. If they actually opened up things (no, don't look at the iPhone stupidity), they'd get the best of both worlds, as their BSD 'pedigree' is a bit of a sham.
Jobs ought to retire while we still like him, after choosing someone without a pony tail (sorry, Jonathon).
But the churn rate for GSM phones is the same as CDMA phones, about 2.5yrs now. An older phone gets dirty, has bad batteries, decaying keyboard, and so on. The product life cycle is short, and getting shorter. Your carrier subsidized the cost of the phone-- and you paid it back in other charges-- either base-monthly-cost or toll charges.
A newer phone, better camera, (still 1G, not 3G) with bluetooth and GIS costs more. Maybe you'll like the new features and desire to buy them, or maybe not. Maybe you have too many cables and chargers-- I do. I have a $60 MP3 player, headphones, charger (1 home 1 car). I have 2 mobile phones-- one GSM world phone (quad band) and one CDMA phone (also with chargers, and so on). Then there's bluetooth earpiece. Then synchronization software. Charger for the MP3 player.
It makes life complicated. One device for multiple purposes is handy. People pay for handy. But Apple hasn't proven this phone, and it's only GSM, and it's only one carrier so far. Still, Motorola phones stink. Sony Ericsson phones have 'closed' features. Nokia are better, but break. LG and Samsung phones are pretty, but also break easily.
Will Apple succeed? It will be very difficult, but there is some temptation for device simplicity and consistency. Apple makes bad guesses sometimes, but lately, has been much better at making attractive devices that 'just work'. Is it worth the price? We'll see-- maybe, maybe not.
Consider: you phone has changed twice in five years, and was carrier-subsidized. You paid for it one way or the other (except, perhaps, in California). So now, you get more goodies and that famous Apple "it just works" instead of some odd version of Symbian or heaven-help-us Windows Mobile.
I'm not defending the phone. I'd like to NOT change one every 2.5 years, and have some entertainment value for those long, overbooked flight pauses I get. I have too many cables, too many data sources, have used too many carriers (they all uniformly suck), and have to spend at least a few days getting used to whatever bizarre software they put on the phones I've had from Nokia, SE, Moto, etc. Gimme something usable. I hope iPhone is it. Otherwise, Apple can go pound sand.
I would otherwise agree, except that I worked for another Japanese company in consumer electronics that would be shocked and horrified at what Sony has done. The mentality is to brave out the bad words and carry-on, stiff-lipped. Business is war, and war must be won. Their different-drummer status led them to great victories. Now, as you cite, the Koreans (and others) have learned what it takes to advance innovation-- although Korean vendors such as Hyundai and Samsung have outrageous business practices, and scandal is the rule of the day in Seoul. Trillions of won (the currency) have been paid in fines..... but may be the tip of the iceberg. Whereas the press and even the blogosphere can have heavy influence in NA and EU, it's often brushed aside in ASEAN countries. There's a stick-together mentality that just doesn't exist off US101.
My PCG-C1X Vaio mini-laptop uses 2.2 Linux. Not for much, mind you-- with a 4GB hard drive, but it's useful once in a while.
We totally agree.... the battery warranty expired in 90 days-- for a battery that cost 4x what a 108a/12v car battery costs.
Then, one of our notebooks had an exploding Sony battery in it. It melted, but the effect was noxious. Egads. I once waited eagerly for each of their new items. Now, they're easy to skirt on the aisles of the big-box retailers. Foo.
I double yellow dog dare you to point to a source.....
The long view is traditional (ignore the Welsh CEO they have) in Japanese business culture. If you think they get bad press in the English speaking world, wait until you read what the Taiwanese, Chinese, and other Asian (read ASEAN) press skewer them with.
And for good reasons:
* They've been hurt badly in every market they have; viz the iPod, Wii, XBox, and consumer electronics entertainment markets
* They've shown little respect for media consumers, viz the installable rootkit, and the HDDVD wars
* They've shown little innovation-- a former hallmark
* Their PCs break, they have rotten warranties, and they're not designed for real-world mobility; worse, they're anti-FOSS and have no formal Linux support mechanisms worth mentioning
The ultimate problem: their value proposition used to be high-- and priced high, but no longer leads the markets they're in-- they're followers now. They've had their lunch eaten by lots of astute competitors.
Dare I say it? Ok: they've jumped the shark.... sadly.
.... logically, we don't see an ethical problem with participating in the food chain.....
It's logical for those that believe that 'participating' in the 'food chain' is either logical or even moral. It's unproven, just traditional and justified by varying customs and religious mores. If you believe that causing pain in a dog is wrong, then causing pain in a cow is also wrong. The 400 liters of methane each cow produces a day adds another problem, as does the 'logic' that it's ok to feed a cow, when there's famine in many parts of the planet.
It's not cut-and-dried, and 'logic' seems to be weighted in favor of those producing the 'logic'. If there was an alien, or a robot viewing how our 'logic' works, then perhaps we can be rationalized as part of a robotic or alien food chain. The fact that we're not faced with this problem doesn't mean that it won't happen one day, in a future that we can't know, and do very badly at controlling.