If Stephenson is right, then AT&T will be able to undercut the competition by delivering a service equal to that of the competition, but they'll be able to expand their service area more quickly and offer it at a lower price.
If, however, this is just a COO trying to spin the fact that AT&T is years behind the competition in investing in infrastructure, then in the next few years we'll see them get thoroughly trounced in the broadband market.
Would you buy a stock with a P/E over 50? If you're invested in the S&P 500, you already are. Would you buy a stock with negative EPS? Yep, you're all over that too.
If you look at the constituent list for the S&P 500, I'm sure you'll see a lot companies that you'll like even less than Google, and you'll probably see a whole bunch more you have no clue about. Bailing just because you think one of the hundreds of constituents is overvalued is silly. If that's your investment style, then you should stay out of indexes altogether.
Nope, not the whole industry, just those who are struggling and/or short-sighted.
The "everyone else is doing it" attitude is a good way to lose your market leadership position. You have to pay more than lip service to your drive to stay competitive. If the review system doesn't reward people for performing, then they either won't perform or they'll move to where their work is better rewarded. It's like MS is saying "Google, you can poach our employees at a discount."
For a company like Microsoft to be losing good people due to poor compensation is bad management that borders on negligence. MS is sitting on billions of dollars. Are they doing anything with that money that's more worthwhile than retaining their talent?
Oh, it's even worse than that, if the article is accurate. From the article:
2). Even if the prototype of the game is finished, the quality or marketability could be deemed "low" (a subjective term not clarified by either Sony or KIPA), the entire development cost would need to be paid to KIPA.
So it's more like you're a contractor who gets paid up front, and if the work doesn't meet some undefined standard then you have to pay the money back.
The whole arrangement is kind of confusing, but if I'm reading it right it goes kinda like this: Developers will create games for Sony's network. Sony can reject the game and get back the money it fronted, or choose to keep the game and get the rights to the software and any sequels for the cost of develeopment.
The only potential upside for the developers is a share of the profits once the game makes enough money to cover the development costs. Sony is not yet prepared to disclose what percent the developers get. But if Sony's dealings with Stan Lee are any indication of what to expect, then developers would be foolish to enter any such agreement.
So it looks like Sony's attempting to capture the profits from development while offloading almost all of the risk onto the developer.
What this says to me is that the powers that be at Intel feel that striking exclusivity deals to lock out the competition is a more effective use of capital than innovating. I have doubts about the potential for growth in such a company.
And what the hell is Skype thinking? I want to see how they'll spin this to customers. So what you're saying is that someone paid you to give me crappy service? Yeah, that's some great PR there.
Apologies, my mistake with the numbering. That should have been #5 ("Environmental ban led to weaker sealant"). Having seen tapes of the exposion, I pretty much assumed that it would dhave killed anyone sitting on top of it.
Yes, Myth #2 seems to be largely an argument of semantics. The Challenger orbiter didn't explode, it was just sitting on top of a huge tank of liquid hydrogen and oxygen when it ignited. And then it was "torn apart as it was flung free of the other rocket components and turned broadside into the Mach 2 airstream."
Personally, I fail to see any substantive difference between "exploded" and "ripped to pieces at 1500 mph."
Myth #1 seems similarly disingenuous. Sure, "few" people saw the actual explos-- high velocity disintegration of the shuttle live, if by "few" you mean "everyone who was watching CNN at the time." I don't know what that number is, but it's probably not a number that most people would characterize as "few". And the author writes that "NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the full mission into television sets in many schools." So somehow the number of schools in which the launch was broadcast qualifies as many, but the number of students who actually saw it was only a few.
I'd never even heard #3 until today.
If this story were posted as a slashdot comment, I'd mod it as "Troll." This article is probably the the most airtime that some of these myths have ever gotten.
They were making copies of the work in its entirety and distributing it to employees because they thought they might be interested in it because the movie was about them. The only reason they had access to the material in the first place was because it was submitted to be rated, and they control the ratings process. IANAL, but I don't see how they'd squeeze a fair use defense out of this.
Remember, this is a movie that was being submitted for rating, so it hadn't been released yet. The MPAA has supported legislation that would have made this kind of copying a felony punishable by jail time.
I would love for this to go to trial and have the MPAA use a fair use defense. I want them on the record as saying distributing a small number of copies for purposes other than financial gain. I want an MPAA executive under oath stating what that number is. Hell, I just want them to submit to the court, in writing, a document that acknowledges the existence of the fair use exceptions.
I own an iPod. Right now I have about 1600 songs on it. Not a single one was purchased through iTunes. Not a single one was downloaded illegally, either. Most of the people I know who have iPods don't use iTunes. Now do they priate music. They do what I do: rip CDs.
Why the hell would I bother with iTunes? I know very little about the DRM, and I don't really care to learn. My CDs convert easily into MP3s that I can play on as many devices as I please. I can buy them used and get them pretty darned cheap.
Especially when the submitter leaves out the most important bit: Questions still remain over why a site believed to be hosted in the United States has to comply with Chinese law. Microsoft responded to requests for more information on this issue by stating that "Microsoft is a multinational business and, as such, needs to manage the reality of operating in countries around the world."
This should scare the living shit our of you. This, in effect, means that the Chinese government can enfore its laws in the Unites States through any corporation that wants to do business in China.
The irony of this is not lost on me.
MS doesn't seem to be talking about it much, but where is the line drawn here? What if it had been an American writing criticisms of the Chinese government, hosted on MSN? For crying out loud, the American government can't seem to make MS do jack shit, but Microsoft drops to its knees when the Chinese government calls. And if MS rolls over, what are the odds any one else is going to stand up?
Another bit of chill factor: "I have been talking to lots of people today, though, inside and outside of Microsoft. In every instance, they asked me to keep those conversations confidential. Why? Cause we're talking about international relations here--and the lives of employees," Scoble wrote.
Here's a tip, Scoble: when your employees working in a country are at risk of death at the hands of the local government based on some comment an exec makes, maybe it's time to consider offshoring your operations to a nation that's a bit more labor friendly.
Back when we were both quite active on battle.net, I sent him a link to a story about some guy who had died while playing games online. He'd been playing for some absurd length of time in a 24/7 internet cafe subsisting on junk food, coffee and cigarettes, and just collapsed. My friend sent a two word reply:
This is one place where an open source makes things more difficult.
I'm encouraging people to make use of open source alternatives instead of pirating software. Sometimes it's simple. Firefox is a pretty easy sell. But I've been telling my girlfriend for years that she should never run suspicious programs, so now it takes some doing to get her to open a program called "GIMP".
This depends entirely on what your definition of "Good Idea" is. If I'm reading the data at IMDB right, all of the movies you mentioned except "Lost in Space" turned a pretty good profit. What better way than ticket sales is there to measure whether a movie is one that people "love and and are willing to see"? What definition of "bomb" are you using? Usually, a movie that's a "bomb" is one that doesn't turn a profit at the box office. Perhaps you think these movies suck (of course, you don't really know for certain since you haven't seen them), but apparently a lot of people were willing to give them a chance.
If you want to bash a movie based on a TV show that actually tanked at the box office, I've got one for you: Serenity. But you're not likely to see anyone around here railing on that as signifying a creativity crisis. How about the Star Trek movies? And this isn't just about mining TV shows for ideas to recycle, the practice spans the breadth of media. Hell, how many times are we going to see someone come up with an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet? The Passion of the Christ? Now that's dated.
There's plenty to criticize about Hollywood, but I think you're just being pretentious.
Jack Thompson gets the floor. Paul Eibeler listens to his complaints, and offers him a signed document indicating that Take Two will no longer sell violent games as long as Thompson agrees to shut up and leave the shareholder meeting immediately.
Once Thompson's outside, Eibeler jumps him, beats him to death, takes the contract back, and speeds off to the nearest Pay 'N Spray.
I'm generally a strong proponent of RTFA. But if I do that in this case, then Dvorak's column brings in more ad revenue, and I really don't want to contribute to what's seems to be a severely mentally debilitating drug habit.
On the other hand, if we give him enough slashdottings then maybe he'll go on a bender and OD. No more Dvorak drivel.
I once had a conversation that went something like this:
Her: "Boys mature much more slowly than girls do. I just can't connect with guys my own age, we just don't have enough common ground. I won't even consider dating a guy unless he's a few years older."
Me (after looking around the table): "Then why are almost all of your male friends about the same age as you are?"
It's not about maturity, it's about socially conditioned gender roles.
According to the article, the deal is expected to be officially announced this afternoon so I may be eating crow in a few hours. But I'd like to point out a couple of things:
"according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations"
"Representatives of Google and AOL said their companies would not comment on any aspect of the negotiations."
Remember, last week the big news was that Google was going to buy Opera. Lots of people like to speculate on Google. I wouldn't worry about this unless and until the word comes from an official source. But if this is real, you should be really fucking worried. I own Google stock, and I shudder to think was this deal could do to the share price.
I skimmed this and thought, "Hmm, this looks like the kind of text that would be generated by a script." A couple of minutes of searching (via Google, ironically enough) turned up the Automatic Complaint Generator.
Sigh. Remember when trolling was an art form, when people would put time, effort, and (dare I say it?) heart into inciting flame wars, even when posting as Anonymous Cowards. The kids these days are just phoning it in, and that saddens this oldtimer's heart.
You don't have to optimize if you're relevant, and if you're not relevant then you're fighting a losing battle. Google employs thousands of people and spends assloads of money to make sure the search engine continues to give good results. Google wants to be the top choice for search, and to do that they need to make sure that when somebody searches for "widget," they get sites most relevant to "widget."
If you've got the spiffiest widget site on the net, then you don't have to optimize for Google because Google is optimizing for you. And they're better at it than you are. It's their business to make sure people get to your site when they're looking for info on widgets.
If your widget site sucks and you manage to optimize your page to get a higher search ranking, then people are going to be annoyed when they search for widgets and your crappy site comes up. Google will see this as a bug in the search engine, and eventually it'll be fixed. Now you're working against Google's dev team. Good luck with that.
The worst part about this isn't that clueless users get screwed. The worst part is that, clueless or not, it's the honest users who get screwed by this. These are people who would never pirate music not because they don't know how but because they believe it's wrong. They want to pay for legitimate copies of their music. They want to support their favorite bands. They want the label to want to put out that next album.
Accessing illegally copied music is easier than ever and the risks are negligible. Yet these people still laid down their $15 to buy the music on Sony's terms. It's not anyone wants a freaking medal for obeying the law. I don't think it's too much for Joe User to ask that his computer not get 0wn3d when he plays a CD.
Getting your content from anonymous criminals has been safer than getting it from corporations for a few years now. It's been over a decade since I had to deal with a virus infection that required a re-install of the operating system. Between anti-virus and anti-spyware software, you're pretty well covered. Stuff like Sony's DRM is even more dangerous because the people you pay to protect you from threats like these knew about Sony's DRM and did nothing about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be easy to see who's right on this one.
If Stephenson is right, then AT&T will be able to undercut the competition by delivering a service equal to that of the competition, but they'll be able to expand their service area more quickly and offer it at a lower price.
If, however, this is just a COO trying to spin the fact that AT&T is years behind the competition in investing in infrastructure, then in the next few years we'll see them get thoroughly trounced in the broadband market.
Anyone wanna place bets on this?
Would you buy a stock with a P/E over 50? If you're invested in the S&P 500, you already are. Would you buy a stock with negative EPS? Yep, you're all over that too.
If you look at the constituent list for the S&P 500, I'm sure you'll see a lot companies that you'll like even less than Google, and you'll probably see a whole bunch more you have no clue about. Bailing just because you think one of the hundreds of constituents is overvalued is silly. If that's your investment style, then you should stay out of indexes altogether.
Nope, not the whole industry, just those who are struggling and/or short-sighted.
The "everyone else is doing it" attitude is a good way to lose your market leadership position. You have to pay more than lip service to your drive to stay competitive. If the review system doesn't reward people for performing, then they either won't perform or they'll move to where their work is better rewarded. It's like MS is saying "Google, you can poach our employees at a discount."
For a company like Microsoft to be losing good people due to poor compensation is bad management that borders on negligence. MS is sitting on billions of dollars. Are they doing anything with that money that's more worthwhile than retaining their talent?
Oh, it's even worse than that, if the article is accurate. From the article:
So it's more like you're a contractor who gets paid up front, and if the work doesn't meet some undefined standard then you have to pay the money back.
The whole arrangement is kind of confusing, but if I'm reading it right it goes kinda like this: Developers will create games for Sony's network. Sony can reject the game and get back the money it fronted, or choose to keep the game and get the rights to the software and any sequels for the cost of develeopment.
The only potential upside for the developers is a share of the profits once the game makes enough money to cover the development costs. Sony is not yet prepared to disclose what percent the developers get. But if Sony's dealings with Stan Lee are any indication of what to expect, then developers would be foolish to enter any such agreement.
So it looks like Sony's attempting to capture the profits from development while offloading almost all of the risk onto the developer.
Illegal or not it's pathetic.
What this says to me is that the powers that be at Intel feel that striking exclusivity deals to lock out the competition is a more effective use of capital than innovating. I have doubts about the potential for growth in such a company.
And what the hell is Skype thinking? I want to see how they'll spin this to customers. So what you're saying is that someone paid you to give me crappy service? Yeah, that's some great PR there.
Apologies, my mistake with the numbering. That should have been #5 ("Environmental ban led to weaker sealant"). Having seen tapes of the exposion, I pretty much assumed that it would dhave killed anyone sitting on top of it.
Yes, Myth #2 seems to be largely an argument of semantics. The Challenger orbiter didn't explode, it was just sitting on top of a huge tank of liquid hydrogen and oxygen when it ignited. And then it was "torn apart as it was flung free of the other rocket components and turned broadside into the Mach 2 airstream."
Personally, I fail to see any substantive difference between "exploded" and "ripped to pieces at 1500 mph."
Myth #1 seems similarly disingenuous. Sure, "few" people saw the actual explos-- high velocity disintegration of the shuttle live, if by "few" you mean "everyone who was watching CNN at the time." I don't know what that number is, but it's probably not a number that most people would characterize as "few". And the author writes that "NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the full mission into television sets in many schools." So somehow the number of schools in which the launch was broadcast qualifies as many, but the number of students who actually saw it was only a few.
I'd never even heard #3 until today.
If this story were posted as a slashdot comment, I'd mod it as "Troll." This article is probably the the most airtime that some of these myths have ever gotten.
That's funny, since Jack Valenti (President of the MPAA until 2004) has claimed repeatedly that there's no such thing as fair use.
They were making copies of the work in its entirety and distributing it to employees because they thought they might be interested in it because the movie was about them. The only reason they had access to the material in the first place was because it was submitted to be rated, and they control the ratings process. IANAL, but I don't see how they'd squeeze a fair use defense out of this.
Remember, this is a movie that was being submitted for rating, so it hadn't been released yet. The MPAA has supported legislation that would have made this kind of copying a felony punishable by jail time.
I would love for this to go to trial and have the MPAA use a fair use defense. I want them on the record as saying distributing a small number of copies for purposes other than financial gain. I want an MPAA executive under oath stating what that number is. Hell, I just want them to submit to the court, in writing, a document that acknowledges the existence of the fair use exceptions.
A night at the strip club would also be much less costly, much more fun, and just as effective.
I own an iPod. Right now I have about 1600 songs on it. Not a single one was purchased through iTunes. Not a single one was downloaded illegally, either. Most of the people I know who have iPods don't use iTunes. Now do they priate music. They do what I do: rip CDs.
Why the hell would I bother with iTunes? I know very little about the DRM, and I don't really care to learn. My CDs convert easily into MP3s that I can play on as many devices as I please. I can buy them used and get them pretty darned cheap.
The technology industry agrees that DVD is dead? Alrighty then...
How many companies have stopped producing DVD players?
How many stores have stopped selling DVDs?
How many DVD pressing factories have shut down?
Where can I buy a next-gen media player (HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, whatever)?
WTF do they mean when they say DVD is dead?
Especially when the submitter leaves out the most important bit: Questions still remain over why a site believed to be hosted in the United States has to comply with Chinese law. Microsoft responded to requests for more information on this issue by stating that "Microsoft is a multinational business and, as such, needs to manage the reality of operating in countries around the world."
This should scare the living shit our of you. This, in effect, means that the Chinese government can enfore its laws in the Unites States through any corporation that wants to do business in China.
The irony of this is not lost on me.
MS doesn't seem to be talking about it much, but where is the line drawn here? What if it had been an American writing criticisms of the Chinese government, hosted on MSN? For crying out loud, the American government can't seem to make MS do jack shit, but Microsoft drops to its knees when the Chinese government calls. And if MS rolls over, what are the odds any one else is going to stand up?
Another bit of chill factor: "I have been talking to lots of people today, though, inside and outside of Microsoft. In every instance, they asked me to keep those conversations confidential. Why? Cause we're talking about international relations here--and the lives of employees," Scoble wrote.
Here's a tip, Scoble: when your employees working in a country are at risk of death at the hands of the local government based on some comment an exec makes, maybe it's time to consider offshoring your operations to a nation that's a bit more labor friendly.
"How many bra patents can you possibly have?"
I'd say four or five at most. More than a handful's a waste.
And it would have stayed his dirty little secret if he hadn't been overheard yelling "I'm feeling lucky!"
A friend of mine took a different stance.
Back when we were both quite active on battle.net, I sent him a link to a story about some guy who had died while playing games online. He'd been playing for some absurd length of time in a 24/7 internet cafe subsisting on junk food, coffee and cigarettes, and just collapsed. My friend sent a two word reply:
"Fuckin noob."
This is one place where an open source makes things more difficult.
I'm encouraging people to make use of open source alternatives instead of pirating software. Sometimes it's simple. Firefox is a pretty easy sell. But I've been telling my girlfriend for years that she should never run suspicious programs, so now it takes some doing to get her to open a program called "GIMP".
This depends entirely on what your definition of "Good Idea" is. If I'm reading the data at IMDB right, all of the movies you mentioned except "Lost in Space" turned a pretty good profit. What better way than ticket sales is there to measure whether a movie is one that people "love and and are willing to see"? What definition of "bomb" are you using? Usually, a movie that's a "bomb" is one that doesn't turn a profit at the box office. Perhaps you think these movies suck (of course, you don't really know for certain since you haven't seen them), but apparently a lot of people were willing to give them a chance.
If you want to bash a movie based on a TV show that actually tanked at the box office, I've got one for you: Serenity. But you're not likely to see anyone around here railing on that as signifying a creativity crisis. How about the Star Trek movies? And this isn't just about mining TV shows for ideas to recycle, the practice spans the breadth of media. Hell, how many times are we going to see someone come up with an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet? The Passion of the Christ? Now that's dated.
There's plenty to criticize about Hollywood, but I think you're just being pretentious.
Oh yes, this will be entertaining.
Jack Thompson gets the floor. Paul Eibeler listens to his complaints, and offers him a signed document indicating that Take Two will no longer sell violent games as long as Thompson agrees to shut up and leave the shareholder meeting immediately.
Once Thompson's outside, Eibeler jumps him, beats him to death, takes the contract back, and speeds off to the nearest Pay 'N Spray.
I'm generally a strong proponent of RTFA. But if I do that in this case, then Dvorak's column brings in more ad revenue, and I really don't want to contribute to what's seems to be a severely mentally debilitating drug habit.
On the other hand, if we give him enough slashdottings then maybe he'll go on a bender and OD. No more Dvorak drivel.
I once had a conversation that went something like this:
It's not about maturity, it's about socially conditioned gender roles.
According to the article, the deal is expected to be officially announced this afternoon so I may be eating crow in a few hours. But I'd like to point out a couple of things:
"according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations"
"Representatives of Google and AOL said their companies would not comment on any aspect of the negotiations."
Remember, last week the big news was that Google was going to buy Opera. Lots of people like to speculate on Google. I wouldn't worry about this unless and until the word comes from an official source. But if this is real, you should be really fucking worried. I own Google stock, and I shudder to think was this deal could do to the share price.
Argh! Do people even read before they mod? It's funny, people , laugh! I did.
I skimmed this and thought, "Hmm, this looks like the kind of text that would be generated by a script." A couple of minutes of searching (via Google, ironically enough) turned up the Automatic Complaint Generator.
Sigh. Remember when trolling was an art form, when people would put time, effort, and (dare I say it?) heart into inciting flame wars, even when posting as Anonymous Cowards. The kids these days are just phoning it in, and that saddens this oldtimer's heart.
Absolutely correct.
You don't have to optimize if you're relevant, and if you're not relevant then you're fighting a losing battle. Google employs thousands of people and spends assloads of money to make sure the search engine continues to give good results. Google wants to be the top choice for search, and to do that they need to make sure that when somebody searches for "widget," they get sites most relevant to "widget."
If you've got the spiffiest widget site on the net, then you don't have to optimize for Google because Google is optimizing for you. And they're better at it than you are. It's their business to make sure people get to your site when they're looking for info on widgets.
If your widget site sucks and you manage to optimize your page to get a higher search ranking, then people are going to be annoyed when they search for widgets and your crappy site comes up. Google will see this as a bug in the search engine, and eventually it'll be fixed. Now you're working against Google's dev team. Good luck with that.
The worst part about this isn't that clueless users get screwed. The worst part is that, clueless or not, it's the honest users who get screwed by this. These are people who would never pirate music not because they don't know how but because they believe it's wrong. They want to pay for legitimate copies of their music. They want to support their favorite bands. They want the label to want to put out that next album.
Accessing illegally copied music is easier than ever and the risks are negligible. Yet these people still laid down their $15 to buy the music on Sony's terms. It's not anyone wants a freaking medal for obeying the law. I don't think it's too much for Joe User to ask that his computer not get 0wn3d when he plays a CD.
Getting your content from anonymous criminals has been safer than getting it from corporations for a few years now. It's been over a decade since I had to deal with a virus infection that required a re-install of the operating system. Between anti-virus and anti-spyware software, you're pretty well covered. Stuff like Sony's DRM is even more dangerous because the people you pay to protect you from threats like these knew about Sony's DRM and did nothing about it.