The good companies will grow and adapt and thrive(long term), the bad companies or the fly-by-nights will die. There will be lots of ups and downs in between.
While this sounds like common sense, the reality is that even one company in a hundred is stable enough to survive a market crash, there are tens of thousands of people who invested in the other 99. So what difference does it make that one company survived? Those tens of thousands of other people are shit out of luck, and given the fact that over 50% of Americans own stock in one form or another today, that's a recipe for a massive depression. It's one thing to be smug; it's another to be starving.
Give me a break. Raising CD prices? I've been buying CDs since early 1986, and the prices don't appear to have gone up any more than can be attributed to normal inflation. It'd be hard to argue that the RIAA is more monopolistic now than it was 14 years ago. Another thing to remember is that the RIAA is an _organization_ consisting of record industry types. It's not really a company in the sense that Capitol or Warner Bros. are companies, and thus you can't really call it a monopoly any more than you can say that the American Medical Association has a monopoly on healthcare-related practices.
Although this may fall on some deaf ears here at Slashdot, it's hard to argue that making something free is the best long-term antidote to monopolistic practices by industry leaders. If anything, doing so is at best a short-term, last-ditch solution when all else fails.
I don't disagree that MP3 and Napster may represent revolutionary new ways of distributing music, but that's almost a separate issue from that of making the music free. As an earlier poster pointed out, the music artists have to make money somehow. Mr. Katz' implies that the record industries growth figures have something to do with the advent of Web-based music distribution, but this is probably only an insignificant part of the picture. The growth is more likely due to the state of the economy and the much more pervasive ad campaigns launched on behalf of the artists by their record labels.
Just remember: Linux won't have been the biggest contributor if and when MS is broken up. MP3 and Napster certainly don't spell the end of the music industry as we know it.
As an owner and current user of two Newton devices (first the MP100, with the really shitty HWR, and now the 120), I must take exception to the overall sentiment in this forum that the Newton's HWR sucks. The HWR in version 2.x of the Newton OS is FAR superior to that in 1.x. Of course, Apple being Apple, they never really countered the bad publicity that the first version got, and then they let Newton die altogether. I get about a 90% accuracy rate with the version 2 OS, and about 80% of the errors that I do get are limited to a single letter. Making corrections is easy, and I'd sure rather have real HWR than use Graffiti on the Palm!
My former company licensed a beta copy of the Flash 4 File Format SDK, and I can assure you that it's NOT open source. The article on BeNews didn't say "Open Source SDK." It's analogous to what Sun has done with Java: they've published the format of Java class binaries, and the source to the java.* libraries is available for download, but it does NOT mean that developers can modify and distribute the source. Developers CAN write their own Flash players or.swf file creation tools.
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That sig should be "posteriorem tuum", not "posterioram tuam". Better still would be "pratum tuum", but I digress...
While this sounds like common sense, the reality is that even one company in a hundred is stable enough to survive a market crash, there are tens of thousands of people who invested in the other 99. So what difference does it make that one company survived? Those tens of thousands of other people are shit out of luck, and given the fact that over 50% of Americans own stock in one form or another today, that's a recipe for a massive depression. It's one thing to be smug; it's another to be starving.
Give me a break. Raising CD prices? I've been buying CDs since early 1986, and the prices don't appear to have gone up any more than can be attributed to normal inflation. It'd be hard to argue that the RIAA is more monopolistic now than it was 14 years ago.
Another thing to remember is that the RIAA is an _organization_ consisting of record industry types. It's not really a company in the sense that Capitol or Warner Bros. are companies, and thus you can't really call it a monopoly any more than you can say that the American Medical Association has a monopoly on healthcare-related practices.
Although this may fall on some deaf ears here at Slashdot, it's hard to argue that making something free is the best long-term antidote to monopolistic practices by industry leaders. If anything, doing so is at best a short-term, last-ditch solution when all else fails.
I don't disagree that MP3 and Napster may represent revolutionary new ways of distributing music, but that's almost a separate issue from that of making the music free. As an earlier poster pointed out, the music artists have to make money somehow. Mr. Katz' implies that the record industries growth figures have something to do with the advent of Web-based music distribution, but this is probably only an insignificant part of the picture. The growth is more likely due to the state of the economy and the much more pervasive ad campaigns launched on behalf of the artists by their record labels.
Just remember: Linux won't have been the biggest contributor if and when MS is broken up. MP3 and Napster certainly don't spell the end of the music industry as we know it.
As an owner and current user of two Newton devices (first the MP100, with the really shitty HWR, and now the 120), I must take exception to the overall sentiment in this forum that the Newton's HWR sucks. The HWR in version 2.x of the Newton OS is FAR superior to that in 1.x. Of course, Apple being Apple, they never really countered the bad publicity that the first version got, and then they let Newton die altogether. I get about a 90% accuracy rate with the version 2 OS, and about 80% of the errors that I do get are limited to a single letter. Making corrections is easy, and I'd sure rather have real HWR than use Graffiti on the Palm!
My former company licensed a beta copy of the Flash 4 File Format SDK, and I can assure you that it's NOT open source. The article on BeNews didn't say "Open Source SDK." It's analogous to what Sun has done with Java: they've published the format of Java class binaries, and the source to the java.* libraries is available for download, but it does NOT mean that developers can modify and distribute the source. Developers CAN write their own Flash players or .swf file creation tools.