What you're saying makes some sense, but how does HBO make money on the Sopranos? HBO doesn't have advertising, so it's a relatively small number of people spending $15 a month, and I'd imagine that only a small portion of that goes towards funding any one of their original series. Is it DVD sales? How would DVD revenue compare with iTMS? Or is it syndication? I guess Sex in the City probably makes a pretty penny in syndication, but I'm not aware of the Sopranos being syndicated anywhere.
That said, even if you're right, there's probably still room for some lower-budget shows to make some money. I'd love to see independent TV shows comparable to the independent films movement that took hold in the '90s. Yeah, you could say it takes 200 million to make a feature film, but there are people doing it for a couple million. There are people spending a couple million per episode on TV series, but in those cases a large portion of the costs are the actors, like Seinfeld or Friends. At the same time, you have amateurs trying to make fun content for free via YouTube.
All I'm saying is, there has to be some room in the market for a lean, mean operation to make money. The smaller your fan base, the smaller you budget, but as long as you can work in that budget and turn a profit, you can keep going. Network TV, on the other hand, can't afford to put anything in the 8pm time slot unless it's going to be a big hit.
No, it won't. If I have a computer die on me, I can buy PCs from Dell without an OS pre-installed and use my old XP license, which assumes in the first place that my Dell warrantee runs out. Either way, you're not going to see Vista in my company for a couple years, at least, unless there's a reason to upgrade.
Let's ignore people's feelings about Microsoft for a second. A hypothetical software developer has made a lot of changes to their operating system, rewriting a lot of internals, and making huge changes to their UI. Who here is expecting that this hypothetical software release will be "perfect" when it goes gold?
At best, even assuming Microsoft is a great software developer, there will be bugs and problems when it goes out the door. I don't believe that should be our question. My questions are, Is it usable? Will it increase my productivity over Windows XP? Does the new UI offer something beyond being "new"? Are there new features that I'll actually want to use?
Or to bang all of those questions into one super question, Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade? If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
But if you tell me that there aren't drivers for everything yet, well of course there aren't because it's not released yet, but there will be drivers for most things soon. If you tell me there's some little bug on your particular machine, that doesn't bother me. Release broadens the diversity of hardware that software is running on, and so even if everything was perfect in the beta stage, there will be some bugs.
I'm wondering if it's really an improvement. Can't find them, but a while back there were complaints on/. that IE7 fixed enough things that IE6 hacks won't work anymore, but didn't fix the things that people had used the hacks to fix. I haven't seen this myself (I'm not doing web development these days), but supposedly the result of these "fixes" was that pages that displayed properly in IE6 and Firefox (and maybe other browsers) would not display properly in IE7. Therefore, web developers would have to go back through their sites and figure out how to support standards-compliant browsers, IE6, and IE7.
Now, I don't want to assert that as fact because, as I've said, I'm not aware of the facts. But I wanted to ask, is this the case? If so, is it still a problem, or have these issues been addressed in more recent builds? Anyone?
Advertising is a one-shot trick--once the episode is over, it is impossible to get viewers to watch the ads in that show again (until the reruns, which will have different ads). With downloads, older episodes can still be profitable.
This raises the big question for me (that's only loosely connected): how will downloads change the business model of television shows. In the normal broadcast model, there is a sort of scarcity of bandwidth. For each station, there are a limited number of time slots, and a very small number of prime-time time slots. This means that TV stations need to maximize the profitability of that time slot. It's not enough for a show to be profitable, it that stations need to analyze the costs in producing or acquiring rights to the series, balance that with ad revenue, and then decide which shows can make the most money in that time slot relative to the investment.
In this model, popular shows which are capable of making a profit might still be cancelled. At the same time, TV stations have to be sure to fill other less-profitable time slots. From what I've heard, cartoons and kids shows on Saturday morning started because stations found they couldn't find any programming they could put in those slots which adults would watch. That's also why you get old syndicated shows in the middle of the night. People up at 2am will watch something they don't really want to watch just because they want to watch something.
So my theory is, pay-for-download TV shows might actually make for more generation of new content. Shows compete directly without worrying about time slots, and shows can continue to make new episodes so long as they have a following. Old reruns you've seen a million times will also probably be less appealing than something you haven't seen before, even if it isn't the best thing ever. Plus, the content itself will be targeted to viewers by way of simple supply and demand, instead of being at the whim of the advertiser.
I'm not sure the cable companies' customers would appreciate that. The Nielsen stuff is voluntary, but I know I'm not comfortable with the idea of my cable company keeping records of what shows I watch.
Besides, that still doesn't give demographics, which means it wouldn't be useful for targeting advertising.
Others have pointed me towards Faronics Deep Freeze, but it's not cheap, and not aimed at keeping your dad's machine clean. It more of an enterprise level thing.
I think it's more than that. Yes, coincidences will happen, but I also think part of the issue with people perceiving patterns is that they can switch patterns whenever a new pattern seems to emerge. So, with reference to the Birthday Paradox, it's true that, in a party, it's more likely than you think that two people will have the same birthday, but what if you aren't bound by birthdays? What if you're just constantly looking for anything two people could have in common? If you're at the party constantly talking about dates, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite colors, food alergies, etc.-- then there's an excellent chance that you'll find there are lots of people in the party that something in common.
In the case of the iPod, i have an iPod and put it on shuffle often enough. For a little while, i'd always be suspicious that there was something going on. It seemed to happen way too often that I'd get two songs together off the same album or the same band, or I'd get a bunch of '80s songs together, or a lot of songs that I'd grouped in the same genre. You know, no specific pattern I could use to predict what would come next, but on any given day, I seemed to be able to find a pattern.
It wasn't always very conscious or thought out, but I'd catch myself thinking, "weird, I've heard 4 songs from the same album in the last hour. The iPod must not be mixing it up enough." But then I noticed some of my patterns were like, "huh, I've heard a couple Nirvana songs and Foo Fighter songs. My iPod must like Dave Grohl today." And then I realized, I didn't have the name "Dave Grohl" in any metadata anywhere. In order for the pattern to be caused by the library, you'd have to assume that the iPod's circutry somehow knew that Grohl was in both of those bands, but without any such link existing in my iTunes library.
So of course I got rid of the iPod, because it was obviously possessed by the devil and obessesed with Dave Grohl. I guess this guy is right.
You know, I've done a lot of reinstalling Windows in my lifetime, and a lot of imaging. After all that, I've often wished that you could install your Windows image to a read-only volume that couldn't be written to unless you really tried. Something like, you'd have to turn the computer off, flip a hardware switch, and reboot. most updates to the OS would instead be written to another layer to the filesystem which could be wiped out at any time, restoring the original image without writing a single file.
I know there's software that can do something like that, but it's be nice if things worked like this by default. Sort of like running off of a live CD, but with the speed and capacity of a hard drive, and the ability to process updates.
Well, since you've asked, one option would be to prevent things from being able to be installed from within the browser. It's been by enabling these things to be installed from a remote site with such little effort that these things have spread. They could make it so you have to make some sort of positive effort to get it installed.
Note, however, that I didn't say it was bad security, but only that, since most users will just hit yes/ok, you have to ask how much security is increased by adding another "yes" button. Also note that the question isn't specifically targetted toware Microsoft. Firefox also makes extensions very easy to install from remote sites, including toolbars. So in each case, we should ask whether the security features are fulfilling their intended purpose.
Of course, now that I've RTFA, it looks like what he's proven is that IE's new "reset" feature works fairly well, which is a big improvement on IE's security.
You're right to criticize. On the other hand, hitting "yes/allow/next/install no matter what it says" sounds like an accurate approximation of what 90% of users will do. So I guess it still asks the question, if "increased security" means that there are a couple more pop-ups that I have to click "yes" on, how effective will that "increased security" be?
Or if someone comes out with a clearly superior product. I don't see any on the shelves at Best Buy that fit that bill, I haven't heard of any on the horizon, and I don't imagine Apple, the company that it currently is, allowing that to happen. To a certain degree, the question with Apple is, what happens when Jobs retires? Last time he left the company, they went from a company that was constantly pushing the envelope to one that could barely keep up.
But until Jobs leaves or loses his mind, I don't see the iPod leaving its status as a market leader. It might not always be THE market leader in the MP3 market, but it will stay at the forefront as A market leader. Jobs seems to be too good at bringing in good people, keeping them, and inspiring them to make good stuff.
Do they really count an album for every song downloaded? It seems like the most they could account for in lost profits per song is the amount they make from selling on iTunes. (80 cents or so?)
However, I realize that we are bound to Windows for the long term. Previous plans to switch to competitive (preferably OSS) software have always concluded that the initial bump is too high and too wide to overcome without dedicating considerable resources throughout the company. We wouldn't see a positive return for a long time, although eventually there will be a (relatively speaking) small one....[snip]...
Ok, so I've taken the long road to get to my point: you're in a Windows shop, as am I. Neither of us will be upgrading to Vista, but it is inevitable that we will begin running Vista on new machines. It is inevitable that we will eventually have a majority of our machines running Vista. I don't know about you, but I've been installing the release candidates to get an idea of what I'll be seeing in the future. (and trying to optomistic about the obvious flaws in these beta releases..."what do you mean you can't find a driver for my CDROM drive? It's a CDROM drive, just fucking read it!")
I keep wanting to make a switch, but there always seem to be a few people that need a couple Windows-only apps. My experience has generally been that there are a handful of people where all they need is a browser, office suite, and Exchange client, and for those people, it'd be easier for me to support them with Linux. On the other hand, in the larger context of the whole company, it's not worth supporting multiple platforms for a handful, so I have to pick one. By necessity, I stick to Windows.
However, I don't anticipate moving to Vista. Maybe I will someday, if it comes out and it turns out to be great, but I have no plans to do it in the long term or short term. When I buy new machines, I'll keep adding Windows XP licenses. I haven't really liked what I've seen so far from Vista, and frankly, I don't see any value from upgrading from Windows 2000.
It's also interesting to me to think back on my initial impressions of past MS operating systems. The only one that I actually *liked* and *upgraded to* was Windows 2000
I've got to go with you on that one. I can remember my first impressions of various Windows versions pretty distinctly. The timeline is something like this:
Windows 3.1 - I thought it was kind of neat, but a novelty. I stayed in DOS most of the time, but liked using Windows for Microsoft Works.
Windows 95 - I thought it was really weird. I still wasn't convinced by the idea of Windows. I would quit Windows and work in DOS all the time. Even when I started using it, I kept wanting to use progman.exe because explorer somehow didn't make sense to me. I got used to it eventually, and ended up liking it.
Windows 98 - I was really happy. It was like Windows 95, but better icons and it didn't seem to crash as often. Plus, I was really happy about USB support. Suddenly I didn't have to deal with IRQs anymore.
Windows NT 4 - I liked it in abstract, because I was coming to understand that NT should eventually become better than the DOS-based 9x line. Still, it just seemed harder to deal with. Drivers were problematic.
Windows 2000 - I was really anxious for this one, and happy to see how it turned out. It was a Windows NT that had good driver support and played games. It was everything I liked about Windows, but without a lot of the more blatant annoying issues with the 9x line or NT4.
Windows ME - WTF? It was like Windows 98, but with icons from Windows 2000, and it would crash all the time. I didn't see the point at all.
Windows XP - I was a little disappointed. The blue Luna theme stuck out as particularly retarded looking. It still had me a little excited for a new OS, but it wasn't as much of an improvement as I was hoping for. The only thing I that really struck me as an improvement was the new WMP, which I particularly liked because it let me manage my MP3 collection more easily. But I was also a little resentful that they didn't
Or here's another thought: Why don't we put the money spent on this research on another purpose altogether? Maybe we should throw it into a thinktank that can come up with new ways for society to fund the arts, so that we don't have to worry about piracy anymore. Or we could skip all that and give the money to the artists straight-out. I wonder, if the record companies stopped researching piracy and stopped paying lawyers to sue their customers, would the savings be sufficient to give their poor artists a little extra money?
Wouldn't buy them anyway if they couldn't have gotten them through illegal means (IMO the majority)
Yeah... This is just anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who download movies and music illegally are just digital packrats. They might listen to the songs a couple times or watch a movie once or twice, but I've even known people who will download things and never watch it or listen to it. It's just a compulsive behavior to accrue a "library", which they want to be complete as possible, even though it's not used for anything. These people, as far as I can tell, are bored and willing to spend hours on this little hobby, but aren't really willing to spend the sort of money necessary, so you get someone with a hundred downloaded movies and a thousand downloaded CDs worth of music. Maybe this person would have bought a few things that they downloaded instead, but for all the downloads, the record/movie companies probably haven't lost more than $100 in sales.
The people I've known who aren't this sort of packrat are usually very casual about the whole thing. They've ended up with a few hundred illegal songs over the past 5 years or so, but not really purposefully. The process is more like, they want to listen to a song, and they want to hear it right then. If it were on the radio or MTV or something, they'd just listen to it, but since it's not, they take 20 minutes to find it online and download it. They listen to it a couple times, after which they might very well forget about it and never listen to it again, but they just don't bother to delete it in case they might want to download it again. I myself am kind of like that, but I download it from iTunes in that case. For me, the 99 cents is worth paying if it cuts those 20 minutes of searching and downloading to a 30 second search and 1 minute download. I don't like the DRM, but I'm not trying to accrue a library as much as listen to a couple things when and where I want to, and convenience outweighs pretty much everything else.
RedHat, for example, doesn't need to pay programmers for them to ship a complete Linux distribution. How do we know that? Because several other distributions manage to do just that without paying programmers, including Debian, Knoppix, and Ubuntu.
Yeah, Debian isn't a profitable business (it isn't even intended to be), and Ubuntu is run by Canonical, who is hoping to make a business out of commercial support. My whole point was that, if Redhat wants to sell copies, they need to fund improvements on various OSS components to their product.
Why should I make that analysis? You made the claim--you should support your claim
My claim is already supported by facts, common knowledge, and common sense. Yours isn't. Sounds like a good reason.
(As a matter of fact, however, I have done some statistics on the source code of common Linux distributions, and the fraction of it that comes from RedHat is small.)
Where is this research? What's the percentage? How did you measure? The reason I asked those questions is because you can't answer. There's no way to measure what code wouldn't have been written if not for Redhat's programmers and funding. There's no way to state definitively where code originated. For example, maybe a certain portion of the Linux kernel was submitted by someone completely unconnected to Redhat, but it was a simple rewrite of logic from Redhat's code. How would you ever know? How would you track all the improvements made by someone working on a Redhat-funded project?
As a point in fact, there are Debian packages for Gnome, and Gnome was funded by Redhat. There are Debian packages for KDE, which has been sponsored by SuSE and Mandriva. There are Debian packages for Evolution, including the exchange connector, which was created by Ximian with support from Redhat, and open-sourced by Novell. It's absurdly ignorant to claim that just because Debian doesn't pay programmers, that Debian doesn't benefit from funding by commercial software developers.
If you can't do better than this, then I'm just going to stop arguing. You aren't saying anything that remotely indicates that what I've been saying is incorrect.
So let's make this simple. In case you actually want to try to respond or continue this discussion in any way, I propose this: Read the following statements.
Redhat pays programmers and fund projects
Code written by Redhat-paid programmers and written in Redhat-funded projects exists in both Redhat and other Linux distributions
Redhat pays these programmers and funds these projects with profits generated from sales of Redhat products
In your next reply, please tell me where there are inaccuracies in one or more of these 3 statements. Back up your statements with something resembling an argument or proof.
Well, if you want to argue that Linux is cool, I think it would need to be between step 1 and 2. It hasn't really hit the mainstream as "cool", even if the mainstream has been aware of the existence of Linux for years.
But is Linux "cool"? I have no knowledge of this phenomenon.
Sysinternal's website says ghosting software usually keeps the SID, and they reason they distribute NewSID is because you wouldn't want them to be the same. I've had problems doing a simple clone of a hard drive from one HD to another, just because I wanted to give the user a bigger hard drive.
Fine, if I'm so wrong, you give me numbers. Let's say you give me all the financials on Sun, with an analysis the profitability of StarOffice. Then an analysis of Novell and Redhat's Linux distributions, including the original source of all code, and all places where the code is used in other distributions and other projects. Then do the same for other an assortment of other popular open-source projects, including their financials to show that the profits from sales do not fund development.
If what I'm saying is wrong, back up your position with something other than "na-uh!" Because, you know, what I'm saying is pretty common sense. What's your argument? That Redhat doesn't fund any development of FOSS? Go to the Fedora homepage, and it says "Sponsored by Redhat" all over the place. Redhat was one of the first sponsors of Gnome. Or are you arguing that Redhat's funding these projects with something other than their profits from running their business? Ummm..... where do you think it comes from?
Slashdot Mirror
What you're saying makes some sense, but how does HBO make money on the Sopranos? HBO doesn't have advertising, so it's a relatively small number of people spending $15 a month, and I'd imagine that only a small portion of that goes towards funding any one of their original series. Is it DVD sales? How would DVD revenue compare with iTMS? Or is it syndication? I guess Sex in the City probably makes a pretty penny in syndication, but I'm not aware of the Sopranos being syndicated anywhere.
That said, even if you're right, there's probably still room for some lower-budget shows to make some money. I'd love to see independent TV shows comparable to the independent films movement that took hold in the '90s. Yeah, you could say it takes 200 million to make a feature film, but there are people doing it for a couple million. There are people spending a couple million per episode on TV series, but in those cases a large portion of the costs are the actors, like Seinfeld or Friends. At the same time, you have amateurs trying to make fun content for free via YouTube.
All I'm saying is, there has to be some room in the market for a lean, mean operation to make money. The smaller your fan base, the smaller you budget, but as long as you can work in that budget and turn a profit, you can keep going. Network TV, on the other hand, can't afford to put anything in the 8pm time slot unless it's going to be a big hit.
No, it won't. If I have a computer die on me, I can buy PCs from Dell without an OS pre-installed and use my old XP license, which assumes in the first place that my Dell warrantee runs out. Either way, you're not going to see Vista in my company for a couple years, at least, unless there's a reason to upgrade.
Let's ignore people's feelings about Microsoft for a second. A hypothetical software developer has made a lot of changes to their operating system, rewriting a lot of internals, and making huge changes to their UI. Who here is expecting that this hypothetical software release will be "perfect" when it goes gold?
At best, even assuming Microsoft is a great software developer, there will be bugs and problems when it goes out the door. I don't believe that should be our question. My questions are, Is it usable? Will it increase my productivity over Windows XP? Does the new UI offer something beyond being "new"? Are there new features that I'll actually want to use?
Or to bang all of those questions into one super question, Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade? If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
But if you tell me that there aren't drivers for everything yet, well of course there aren't because it's not released yet, but there will be drivers for most things soon. If you tell me there's some little bug on your particular machine, that doesn't bother me. Release broadens the diversity of hardware that software is running on, and so even if everything was perfect in the beta stage, there will be some bugs.
It's a beta.
I'm wondering if it's really an improvement. Can't find them, but a while back there were complaints on /. that IE7 fixed enough things that IE6 hacks won't work anymore, but didn't fix the things that people had used the hacks to fix. I haven't seen this myself (I'm not doing web development these days), but supposedly the result of these "fixes" was that pages that displayed properly in IE6 and Firefox (and maybe other browsers) would not display properly in IE7. Therefore, web developers would have to go back through their sites and figure out how to support standards-compliant browsers, IE6, and IE7.
Now, I don't want to assert that as fact because, as I've said, I'm not aware of the facts. But I wanted to ask, is this the case? If so, is it still a problem, or have these issues been addressed in more recent builds? Anyone?
This raises the big question for me (that's only loosely connected): how will downloads change the business model of television shows. In the normal broadcast model, there is a sort of scarcity of bandwidth. For each station, there are a limited number of time slots, and a very small number of prime-time time slots. This means that TV stations need to maximize the profitability of that time slot. It's not enough for a show to be profitable, it that stations need to analyze the costs in producing or acquiring rights to the series, balance that with ad revenue, and then decide which shows can make the most money in that time slot relative to the investment.
In this model, popular shows which are capable of making a profit might still be cancelled. At the same time, TV stations have to be sure to fill other less-profitable time slots. From what I've heard, cartoons and kids shows on Saturday morning started because stations found they couldn't find any programming they could put in those slots which adults would watch. That's also why you get old syndicated shows in the middle of the night. People up at 2am will watch something they don't really want to watch just because they want to watch something.
So my theory is, pay-for-download TV shows might actually make for more generation of new content. Shows compete directly without worrying about time slots, and shows can continue to make new episodes so long as they have a following. Old reruns you've seen a million times will also probably be less appealing than something you haven't seen before, even if it isn't the best thing ever. Plus, the content itself will be targeted to viewers by way of simple supply and demand, instead of being at the whim of the advertiser.
It could be a really good thing.
I'm not sure the cable companies' customers would appreciate that. The Nielsen stuff is voluntary, but I know I'm not comfortable with the idea of my cable company keeping records of what shows I watch.
Besides, that still doesn't give demographics, which means it wouldn't be useful for targeting advertising.
Tried that, but I think my friends need to be tweaked some more. One of them recommended "Cheaper by the Dozen 2".
I'm offering a $10 reward for anyone who can make a 10% improvement in my friends.
Others have pointed me towards Faronics Deep Freeze, but it's not cheap, and not aimed at keeping your dad's machine clean. It more of an enterprise level thing.
I think it's more than that. Yes, coincidences will happen, but I also think part of the issue with people perceiving patterns is that they can switch patterns whenever a new pattern seems to emerge. So, with reference to the Birthday Paradox, it's true that, in a party, it's more likely than you think that two people will have the same birthday, but what if you aren't bound by birthdays? What if you're just constantly looking for anything two people could have in common? If you're at the party constantly talking about dates, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite colors, food alergies, etc.-- then there's an excellent chance that you'll find there are lots of people in the party that something in common.
In the case of the iPod, i have an iPod and put it on shuffle often enough. For a little while, i'd always be suspicious that there was something going on. It seemed to happen way too often that I'd get two songs together off the same album or the same band, or I'd get a bunch of '80s songs together, or a lot of songs that I'd grouped in the same genre. You know, no specific pattern I could use to predict what would come next, but on any given day, I seemed to be able to find a pattern.
It wasn't always very conscious or thought out, but I'd catch myself thinking, "weird, I've heard 4 songs from the same album in the last hour. The iPod must not be mixing it up enough." But then I noticed some of my patterns were like, "huh, I've heard a couple Nirvana songs and Foo Fighter songs. My iPod must like Dave Grohl today." And then I realized, I didn't have the name "Dave Grohl" in any metadata anywhere. In order for the pattern to be caused by the library, you'd have to assume that the iPod's circutry somehow knew that Grohl was in both of those bands, but without any such link existing in my iTunes library.
So of course I got rid of the iPod, because it was obviously possessed by the devil and obessesed with Dave Grohl. I guess this guy is right.
You know, I've done a lot of reinstalling Windows in my lifetime, and a lot of imaging. After all that, I've often wished that you could install your Windows image to a read-only volume that couldn't be written to unless you really tried. Something like, you'd have to turn the computer off, flip a hardware switch, and reboot. most updates to the OS would instead be written to another layer to the filesystem which could be wiped out at any time, restoring the original image without writing a single file.
I know there's software that can do something like that, but it's be nice if things worked like this by default. Sort of like running off of a live CD, but with the speed and capacity of a hard drive, and the ability to process updates.
Well, since you've asked, one option would be to prevent things from being able to be installed from within the browser. It's been by enabling these things to be installed from a remote site with such little effort that these things have spread. They could make it so you have to make some sort of positive effort to get it installed.
Note, however, that I didn't say it was bad security, but only that, since most users will just hit yes/ok, you have to ask how much security is increased by adding another "yes" button. Also note that the question isn't specifically targetted toware Microsoft. Firefox also makes extensions very easy to install from remote sites, including toolbars. So in each case, we should ask whether the security features are fulfilling their intended purpose.
Seems to me the big news here is the ease with which the offending software was removed. Apparently Microsoft has done something right there.
Of course, now that I've RTFA, it looks like what he's proven is that IE's new "reset" feature works fairly well, which is a big improvement on IE's security.
You're right to criticize. On the other hand, hitting "yes/allow/next/install no matter what it says" sounds like an accurate approximation of what 90% of users will do. So I guess it still asks the question, if "increased security" means that there are a couple more pop-ups that I have to click "yes" on, how effective will that "increased security" be?
Or if someone comes out with a clearly superior product. I don't see any on the shelves at Best Buy that fit that bill, I haven't heard of any on the horizon, and I don't imagine Apple, the company that it currently is, allowing that to happen. To a certain degree, the question with Apple is, what happens when Jobs retires? Last time he left the company, they went from a company that was constantly pushing the envelope to one that could barely keep up.
But until Jobs leaves or loses his mind, I don't see the iPod leaving its status as a market leader. It might not always be THE market leader in the MP3 market, but it will stay at the forefront as A market leader. Jobs seems to be too good at bringing in good people, keeping them, and inspiring them to make good stuff.
Do they really count an album for every song downloaded? It seems like the most they could account for in lost profits per song is the amount they make from selling on iTunes. (80 cents or so?)
I keep wanting to make a switch, but there always seem to be a few people that need a couple Windows-only apps. My experience has generally been that there are a handful of people where all they need is a browser, office suite, and Exchange client, and for those people, it'd be easier for me to support them with Linux. On the other hand, in the larger context of the whole company, it's not worth supporting multiple platforms for a handful, so I have to pick one. By necessity, I stick to Windows.
However, I don't anticipate moving to Vista. Maybe I will someday, if it comes out and it turns out to be great, but I have no plans to do it in the long term or short term. When I buy new machines, I'll keep adding Windows XP licenses. I haven't really liked what I've seen so far from Vista, and frankly, I don't see any value from upgrading from Windows 2000.
I've got to go with you on that one. I can remember my first impressions of various Windows versions pretty distinctly. The timeline is something like this:
Or here's another thought: Why don't we put the money spent on this research on another purpose altogether? Maybe we should throw it into a thinktank that can come up with new ways for society to fund the arts, so that we don't have to worry about piracy anymore. Or we could skip all that and give the money to the artists straight-out. I wonder, if the record companies stopped researching piracy and stopped paying lawyers to sue their customers, would the savings be sufficient to give their poor artists a little extra money?
Wouldn't buy them anyway if they couldn't have gotten them through illegal means (IMO the majority)
Yeah... This is just anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who download movies and music illegally are just digital packrats. They might listen to the songs a couple times or watch a movie once or twice, but I've even known people who will download things and never watch it or listen to it. It's just a compulsive behavior to accrue a "library", which they want to be complete as possible, even though it's not used for anything. These people, as far as I can tell, are bored and willing to spend hours on this little hobby, but aren't really willing to spend the sort of money necessary, so you get someone with a hundred downloaded movies and a thousand downloaded CDs worth of music. Maybe this person would have bought a few things that they downloaded instead, but for all the downloads, the record/movie companies probably haven't lost more than $100 in sales.
The people I've known who aren't this sort of packrat are usually very casual about the whole thing. They've ended up with a few hundred illegal songs over the past 5 years or so, but not really purposefully. The process is more like, they want to listen to a song, and they want to hear it right then. If it were on the radio or MTV or something, they'd just listen to it, but since it's not, they take 20 minutes to find it online and download it. They listen to it a couple times, after which they might very well forget about it and never listen to it again, but they just don't bother to delete it in case they might want to download it again. I myself am kind of like that, but I download it from iTunes in that case. For me, the 99 cents is worth paying if it cuts those 20 minutes of searching and downloading to a 30 second search and 1 minute download. I don't like the DRM, but I'm not trying to accrue a library as much as listen to a couple things when and where I want to, and convenience outweighs pretty much everything else.
RedHat, for example, doesn't need to pay programmers for them to ship a complete Linux distribution. How do we know that? Because several other distributions manage to do just that without paying programmers, including Debian, Knoppix, and Ubuntu.
Yeah, Debian isn't a profitable business (it isn't even intended to be), and Ubuntu is run by Canonical, who is hoping to make a business out of commercial support. My whole point was that, if Redhat wants to sell copies, they need to fund improvements on various OSS components to their product.
Why should I make that analysis? You made the claim--you should support your claim
My claim is already supported by facts, common knowledge, and common sense. Yours isn't. Sounds like a good reason.
(As a matter of fact, however, I have done some statistics on the source code of common Linux distributions, and the fraction of it that comes from RedHat is small.)
Where is this research? What's the percentage? How did you measure? The reason I asked those questions is because you can't answer. There's no way to measure what code wouldn't have been written if not for Redhat's programmers and funding. There's no way to state definitively where code originated. For example, maybe a certain portion of the Linux kernel was submitted by someone completely unconnected to Redhat, but it was a simple rewrite of logic from Redhat's code. How would you ever know? How would you track all the improvements made by someone working on a Redhat-funded project?
As a point in fact, there are Debian packages for Gnome, and Gnome was funded by Redhat. There are Debian packages for KDE, which has been sponsored by SuSE and Mandriva. There are Debian packages for Evolution, including the exchange connector, which was created by Ximian with support from Redhat, and open-sourced by Novell. It's absurdly ignorant to claim that just because Debian doesn't pay programmers, that Debian doesn't benefit from funding by commercial software developers.
If you can't do better than this, then I'm just going to stop arguing. You aren't saying anything that remotely indicates that what I've been saying is incorrect.
So let's make this simple. In case you actually want to try to respond or continue this discussion in any way, I propose this: Read the following statements.
In your next reply, please tell me where there are inaccuracies in one or more of these 3 statements. Back up your statements with something resembling an argument or proof.
Well, if you want to argue that Linux is cool, I think it would need to be between step 1 and 2. It hasn't really hit the mainstream as "cool", even if the mainstream has been aware of the existence of Linux for years.
But is Linux "cool"? I have no knowledge of this phenomenon.
Sysinternal's website says ghosting software usually keeps the SID, and they reason they distribute NewSID is because you wouldn't want them to be the same. I've had problems doing a simple clone of a hard drive from one HD to another, just because I wanted to give the user a bigger hard drive.
Fine, if I'm so wrong, you give me numbers. Let's say you give me all the financials on Sun, with an analysis the profitability of StarOffice. Then an analysis of Novell and Redhat's Linux distributions, including the original source of all code, and all places where the code is used in other distributions and other projects. Then do the same for other an assortment of other popular open-source projects, including their financials to show that the profits from sales do not fund development.
If what I'm saying is wrong, back up your position with something other than "na-uh!" Because, you know, what I'm saying is pretty common sense. What's your argument? That Redhat doesn't fund any development of FOSS? Go to the Fedora homepage, and it says "Sponsored by Redhat" all over the place. Redhat was one of the first sponsors of Gnome. Or are you arguing that Redhat's funding these projects with something other than their profits from running their business? Ummm..... where do you think it comes from?
If they didn't fix any bugs, it would be simply a Release, not a Candidate.
So I guess the question is, is it a candidate for not fixing any bugs? If not, it's not a release candidate.