The big problem is this. There's suddenly a shift in entertainment now, where people are simply not willing to pay relatively large amounts of money to relatively few people. Entertainment is everywhere, and there are tons of different kinds, and forms. So right now, nobody wants to pay $20 for a relative "hit" CD, so they're just taking the entertainment.
In the 20th century, when culture in the US, at least, was much more homogenic, stars like Elvis'es, Marilyn Monroe's, Beatles were more universally loved and demanded (paid for). Now, nobody is interested to that extent because there's so much more to see/hear/watch/read. Sure, a few hundred thousand kids may want to pay $5 for the new April Levigne CD, they're not interested enough to want to pay $20 for a CD.
Entertainers are simply not able to earn the money they used to make. Neither are the distribution company. We're seeing an overdue shift down in the amount of money that we are willing to pay for entertainment. Supply of entertainment shot through the stratosphere at the end of the 20th century, and demand merely shot through the roof increased with the population increase and populations joining the modern world (as far as entertainment is concerned).
All of this stuff that this article was about are simply the transitional pains. I predict that in 20 years, very few entertainers of any kind will be able to earn much more than say, a big city local television news personality. The days of Michael Jackson buying amusement parks and Elvis collection gold Cadillacs is over. The days of $20 music albums are over, too. The problem is that the large entertainment industry, as a whole, are going to go kicking and screaming, whether they're actors, musicians, or distribution companies (which are even less relevant now than the entertainers themselves).
The distribution companies do, of course, represent the entertainers demands for more money, of course. The problem for them is compounded by not only are peoples tastes diverging into more and more entertainment options, but people are especially not willing to pay for distribution. They're going the way of buggy whip makers.
What does this mean? It means that in 20 years, celebrities will be everywhere, but few will be massive, massive stars. It also means that they'll be more like actual, working people, and might have to work on their own distribution, if they want to make a good living from it.
Perez Hilton is a great early example of what most of tomorrow's celebrities will look like: organic, diverse, earning money by giving their "art" away for cheap or free, and making money from ads and sponsorships, while handling their own distribution straight to the people.
That's all people are willing to pay for. Why? Well, even if the distribution companies lock it down perfectly, it won't work. The demand isn't there. If you don't want to pay $20 to watch a shitty movie that you'll forget 10 minutes after you watch it, you can hop over to YouTube, and watch some rapidly improving, amateur stuff for free or cheap.
*HUGE* win for SUSE and MS
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
For the reasons stated above, the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights.
Need I say more? MS and SUSE couldn't be in any better possible position. Red Hat and Ubuntu and the other small players are going to have quite a fight on their hands.
And what would that agenda be, exactly? Are you suggesting that thousands of climatologists are making this up... for politics? That just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense, at all, why somebody would make this stuff up. Virtually nobody has anything to gain from it.
I've always wondered why the far right wants to believe that there is some kind of conspiracy about "global warming". Your post clears that right up. A socialist conspiracy to de-industrialize the modern world. Riiiight. That makes *total* sense, now.
Did you hear the one about the Free Masons, red-haired, pale skinned kids ("ginger kids", if you will), and the secret alien transporting tunnel between Boston and Sydney? That's was one of my favorites, but it can't really stand up to... [trying to type this without laughing]... a "socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations". Wow.
Meanwhile MySQL continues to get the job done for the majority of my projects; I have a network of professionals who support it competently; and having followed the project since 2001 or so, I'm confident it's not going anywhere but forwards.
Fool me once, shame on you...
I wouldn't be surprised that people making large infrastructure decisions are going to think twice before making any long term decisions (longer than a few years) concerning "open source" projects based on the two big money grabs just this week.
The privacy implications of a phone that reports back to ad agencies isn't nearly as mind boggling as the Fed's new law that says all US/international communications can be bugged with no search warrant needed. The American way of life is already long gone. The problem is that nobody seems to care.
Could somebody please explain what the point of a hard drive is in a game console? I've been happily using my PS2 for many years with no hard drive, and I don't see what the point of a hard drive in a console is, other than to increase noise, heat, size, and parts that can break.
This is painfully stupid in more ways than I could count. Stupid idea. Bad writing. Not even remotely entertaining or funny, even if you do know all of the uber-dork references.
Yeah, nobody owned computers before Microsoft. No one was networking before Microsoft. No one had large-scale information infrastructure before Microsoft.
Good grief, but it's pathetic when the Redmond shills start spewing forth incredible bullshit.
Wait, what are you calling bullshit? It sounds like you're calling yourself a shill because yes, before MS DOS and Windows 3.11 and especially Windows 95, relatively few people did use computers. Unless I'm from a different dimension than you, the MS Windows platform did, indeed, bring computers to the masses.
That's why this is a completely different announcement, that actually references last year's decision: "We have seen more customers utilizing and requesting open source notebook solutions in education, government, and the enterprise since our ThinkPad T60p Linux announcement, and today's announcement expands upon our efforts by offering customers more Linux options," said Lenovo VP Sam Dusi in a statement.
(That's from the article, which you clearly did not read)
I guess I'm not surprised they came up with such a huge figure for dollars lost-- I hate to be the person that's just going to get modded down for this-- but maybe if >80% of computer users werent using windows and there was more diversity on the net (client-wise, at least) viruses and, to a lesser extent, malware wouldn't find it so easy to inflict such damage. A monoculture can be brought to its knees by a common vunerability.
No. You'd still have lots and lots of stupid people online doing stupid things. Now that most people can access the Net, the Net will forever be a chaotic mess of the entire human species, most of which isn't much smarter than my pet dog. I like to think of it like one big, global Wal-Mart: a place accessible and frequented by even the most primitive versions of homo sapiens. Something as simple as multiple OS's won't have any real effect.
also Microsoft professionals created the IT infrastructure that has caused billions of dollars in malware-related downtime, and degraded to useless performance of infested machines. Thank you Bill Gates, you've fucked up more businesses than any world war.
The reason that we have massive IT infrastructures is because of MS in the first place. If not for Windows, then most regular people wouldn't even be using computers.
I think you're right. The thing is that Red Hat customers have go to be scratching their heads at this point... is Red Hat going to continue supporting a desktop platform, or are they going to ditch it abruptly (again)? I think it shows a lack of foresight and planning on Red Hat's part, and it shows them to be a reactionary company. That doesn't exactly instill confidence in customers. My point is that I think that their management doesn't have a very clear vision or direction for their company. I certainly don't have enough confidence that their management knows what's going on to invest in them. They remind me of Sun, Netscape, Novell, and all of the other companies that react to the trends of the day, instead of creating their own trends, and being confident in their own decisions.
This isn't a good sign. They just got finished dumping their desktop version, and now they're making another one? Sounds like their management is starting to flounder. Either they're a desktop software company, or they're not. They've already left the market, and only a few years later, they're re-inventing the wheel to get back in? That's crazy. It reminds me of Sun "The network is the computer. No it's not." Microsystems.
I couldn't disagree more. The masses *love* ads. People pay to wear ads on their clothes. People pay to advertise their car's brands on their cars. People pay a large sum of money to their cable/satellite company every month to watch ads. People willingly sit through ads before a movie that they paid for. There are so many idiots out there who PAY to consume advertising, that I guarantee people are NOT fed up with advertising.
Personally, I'm fed up with ads, but I see no sign that regular people are fed up with advertising.
They wouldn't want their blockbuster title to be rated "AO"....
If they want to maintain their adult audience, it should be rated "M". Part of what sets GTA apart from other great games is that it has a grown-up storyline (as opposed to silly Japanese stuff). I certainly wouldn't be interested in playing a "PG" version of GTA. That would be lame. What would the missions be? "We want you to go tell Mr. Koomba that he's a 'poopy-head'"? C'mon...
You're right. The money in the 2000 era went to all of the people (myself included) who were getting paid ridiculously high salaries. That's where the vast majority of that venture capital went: grossly inflated salaries.
The only thing is that most people who were earning vast amounts of money, either as a "CEO" or a "developer" blew through it because everybody thought that the Net was the new Gilded Age. I blew most of mine in Vegas (on purpose). So money from the VC funded start-ups that I worked for ended up at the Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay, Paris, Caesar's Palace, the Luxor, the Aladdin, etc. You get the idea. The money didn't vanish, but it went from being concentrated in the hands of VC's, to being distributed widely throughout the economy by all of my fellow dot-commers.
I just don't get what they're teaching in business school these days.
As someone who went to (a good) business school, I'll tell ya' that one of the main things that they teach is that a company cannot be all things to all people. Companies that try to do this invariably fail. They teach that there are customers (sometimes many customers) that a well run company will fire because they're not profitable. They also teach you that you can't make major, company changing decisions based on nothing more than a gut reaction.
You're suggesting that Dell spend many millions in order to reach a tiny number of customers that they might not even want in the first place. You'd flunk any decent business school, I'm sorry to say.
Why would the PC industry think that Vista would boost PC sales? XP is a mature OS. It works. PC's are powerful enough for most people to do most things they need them to do. Why would anybody think that people would have any interest in running out to buy a new PC running Vista? That kinda' seems like a non-starter to me.
People do that with Apple, largely because people have come to fetishize Apple products. PC's are PC's now. They're appliances. There's no reason to run out and buy the latest and greatest, because the latest and greatest don't really offer anything new, and PC's just aren't all that interesting any more.
Well, of course "smarter" and IQ points are relative. I wouldn't consider somebody who couldn't get laid (but wanted to) all that smart. It's really not rocket science. Even if you want to fuck the homecoming queen, it's just a matter of figuring out what you have to do to get there. It's a pretty simple formula. If somebody can work on astrophysics or integrated circuits, but can't figure out how to bag a chick, that's kinda' sad.
Now don't get me wrong. People have different priorities. Some (strange) people may not want to throw down with somebody else. That's their prerogative. I'm talking about people who WANT to get laid and simply can't figure out how to make it happen.
All of these existed and flourished well in their time, and all existed before MSWord, whose first incarnation on the PC/XT was wretched!
To say that MSWord can never be dethroned is bunk!
There are probably 1000 times more PC users than there were then, and PC's are much, MUCH more important to daily life today than it was 30 or even 20 years ago. Word is pretty darn entrenched.
You're right, but the fact that Apple makes the devices like this means that they're only encouraging this type of behavior. It's not a very responsible thing to do on their part. A responsible company would provide those of us with any scrap of fiscal sanity to be able to hold onto and use their products for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem is this. There's suddenly a shift in entertainment now, where people are simply not willing to pay relatively large amounts of money to relatively few people. Entertainment is everywhere, and there are tons of different kinds, and forms. So right now, nobody wants to pay $20 for a relative "hit" CD, so they're just taking the entertainment.
In the 20th century, when culture in the US, at least, was much more homogenic, stars like Elvis'es, Marilyn Monroe's, Beatles were more universally loved and demanded (paid for). Now, nobody is interested to that extent because there's so much more to see/hear/watch/read. Sure, a few hundred thousand kids may want to pay $5 for the new April Levigne CD, they're not interested enough to want to pay $20 for a CD.
Entertainers are simply not able to earn the money they used to make. Neither are the distribution company. We're seeing an overdue shift down in the amount of money that we are willing to pay for entertainment. Supply of entertainment shot through the stratosphere at the end of the 20th century, and demand merely shot through the roof increased with the population increase and populations joining the modern world (as far as entertainment is concerned).
All of this stuff that this article was about are simply the transitional pains. I predict that in 20 years, very few entertainers of any kind will be able to earn much more than say, a big city local television news personality. The days of Michael Jackson buying amusement parks and Elvis collection gold Cadillacs is over. The days of $20 music albums are over, too. The problem is that the large entertainment industry, as a whole, are going to go kicking and screaming, whether they're actors, musicians, or distribution companies (which are even less relevant now than the entertainers themselves).
The distribution companies do, of course, represent the entertainers demands for more money, of course. The problem for them is compounded by not only are peoples tastes diverging into more and more entertainment options, but people are especially not willing to pay for distribution. They're going the way of buggy whip makers.
What does this mean? It means that in 20 years, celebrities will be everywhere, but few will be massive, massive stars. It also means that they'll be more like actual, working people, and might have to work on their own distribution, if they want to make a good living from it.
Perez Hilton is a great early example of what most of tomorrow's celebrities will look like: organic, diverse, earning money by giving their "art" away for cheap or free, and making money from ads and sponsorships, while handling their own distribution straight to the people.
That's all people are willing to pay for. Why? Well, even if the distribution companies lock it down perfectly, it won't work. The demand isn't there. If you don't want to pay $20 to watch a shitty movie that you'll forget 10 minutes after you watch it, you can hop over to YouTube, and watch some rapidly improving, amateur stuff for free or cheap.
For the reasons stated above, the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights.
Need I say more? MS and SUSE couldn't be in any better possible position. Red Hat and Ubuntu and the other small players are going to have quite a fight on their hands.
And what would that agenda be, exactly? Are you suggesting that thousands of climatologists are making this up... for politics? That just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense, at all, why somebody would make this stuff up. Virtually nobody has anything to gain from it.
I've always wondered why the far right wants to believe that there is some kind of conspiracy about "global warming". Your post clears that right up. A socialist conspiracy to de-industrialize the modern world. Riiiight. That makes *total* sense, now.
Did you hear the one about the Free Masons, red-haired, pale skinned kids ("ginger kids", if you will), and the secret alien transporting tunnel between Boston and Sydney? That's was one of my favorites, but it can't really stand up to... [trying to type this without laughing]... a "socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations". Wow.
Meanwhile MySQL continues to get the job done for the majority of my projects; I have a network of professionals who support it competently; and having followed the project since 2001 or so, I'm confident it's not going anywhere but forwards.
Fool me once, shame on you...
I wouldn't be surprised that people making large infrastructure decisions are going to think twice before making any long term decisions (longer than a few years) concerning "open source" projects based on the two big money grabs just this week.
The privacy implications are mind boggling
The privacy implications of a phone that reports back to ad agencies isn't nearly as mind boggling as the Fed's new law that says all US/international communications can be bugged with no search warrant needed. The American way of life is already long gone. The problem is that nobody seems to care.
Could somebody please explain what the point of a hard drive is in a game console? I've been happily using my PS2 for many years with no hard drive, and I don't see what the point of a hard drive in a console is, other than to increase noise, heat, size, and parts that can break.
I'd rather see my tax money wasted on something like this instead of wasted on new ways to slaughter more people even faster.
This is painfully stupid in more ways than I could count. Stupid idea. Bad writing. Not even remotely entertaining or funny, even if you do know all of the uber-dork references.
Yeah, nobody owned computers before Microsoft. No one was networking before Microsoft. No one had large-scale information infrastructure before Microsoft. Good grief, but it's pathetic when the Redmond shills start spewing forth incredible bullshit.
Wait, what are you calling bullshit? It sounds like you're calling yourself a shill because yes, before MS DOS and Windows 3.11 and especially Windows 95, relatively few people did use computers. Unless I'm from a different dimension than you, the MS Windows platform did, indeed, bring computers to the masses.
That's why this is a completely different announcement, that actually references last year's decision:
"We have seen more customers utilizing and requesting open source notebook solutions in education, government, and the enterprise since our ThinkPad T60p Linux announcement, and today's announcement expands upon our efforts by offering customers more Linux options," said Lenovo VP Sam Dusi in a statement.
(That's from the article, which you clearly did not read)
I guess I'm not surprised they came up with such a huge figure for dollars lost-- I hate to be the person that's just going to get modded down for this-- but maybe if >80% of computer users werent using windows and there was more diversity on the net (client-wise, at least) viruses and, to a lesser extent, malware wouldn't find it so easy to inflict such damage. A monoculture can be brought to its knees by a common vunerability.
No. You'd still have lots and lots of stupid people online doing stupid things. Now that most people can access the Net, the Net will forever be a chaotic mess of the entire human species, most of which isn't much smarter than my pet dog. I like to think of it like one big, global Wal-Mart: a place accessible and frequented by even the most primitive versions of homo sapiens. Something as simple as multiple OS's won't have any real effect.
also Microsoft professionals created the IT infrastructure that has caused billions of dollars in malware-related downtime, and degraded to useless performance of infested machines. Thank you Bill Gates, you've fucked up more businesses than any world war.
The reason that we have massive IT infrastructures is because of MS in the first place. If not for Windows, then most regular people wouldn't even be using computers.
I think you're right. The thing is that Red Hat customers have go to be scratching their heads at this point... is Red Hat going to continue supporting a desktop platform, or are they going to ditch it abruptly (again)? I think it shows a lack of foresight and planning on Red Hat's part, and it shows them to be a reactionary company. That doesn't exactly instill confidence in customers. My point is that I think that their management doesn't have a very clear vision or direction for their company. I certainly don't have enough confidence that their management knows what's going on to invest in them. They remind me of Sun, Netscape, Novell, and all of the other companies that react to the trends of the day, instead of creating their own trends, and being confident in their own decisions.
This isn't a good sign. They just got finished dumping their desktop version, and now they're making another one? Sounds like their management is starting to flounder. Either they're a desktop software company, or they're not. They've already left the market, and only a few years later, they're re-inventing the wheel to get back in? That's crazy. It reminds me of Sun "The network is the computer. No it's not." Microsystems.
I couldn't disagree more. The masses *love* ads. People pay to wear ads on their clothes. People pay to advertise their car's brands on their cars. People pay a large sum of money to their cable/satellite company every month to watch ads. People willingly sit through ads before a movie that they paid for. There are so many idiots out there who PAY to consume advertising, that I guarantee people are NOT fed up with advertising.
Personally, I'm fed up with ads, but I see no sign that regular people are fed up with advertising.
They wouldn't want their blockbuster title to be rated "AO"....
If they want to maintain their adult audience, it should be rated "M". Part of what sets GTA apart from other great games is that it has a grown-up storyline (as opposed to silly Japanese stuff). I certainly wouldn't be interested in playing a "PG" version of GTA. That would be lame. What would the missions be? "We want you to go tell Mr. Koomba that he's a 'poopy-head'"? C'mon...
Unless you can point to a MS standard that MS said that it would be free to implement and then charged for it, then you're just spreading FUD.
This is an article about MS Works, not MS Office. They're completely different products.
You're right. The money in the 2000 era went to all of the people (myself included) who were getting paid ridiculously high salaries. That's where the vast majority of that venture capital went: grossly inflated salaries.
The only thing is that most people who were earning vast amounts of money, either as a "CEO" or a "developer" blew through it because everybody thought that the Net was the new Gilded Age. I blew most of mine in Vegas (on purpose). So money from the VC funded start-ups that I worked for ended up at the Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay, Paris, Caesar's Palace, the Luxor, the Aladdin, etc. You get the idea. The money didn't vanish, but it went from being concentrated in the hands of VC's, to being distributed widely throughout the economy by all of my fellow dot-commers.
I just don't get what they're teaching in business school these days.
As someone who went to (a good) business school, I'll tell ya' that one of the main things that they teach is that a company cannot be all things to all people. Companies that try to do this invariably fail. They teach that there are customers (sometimes many customers) that a well run company will fire because they're not profitable. They also teach you that you can't make major, company changing decisions based on nothing more than a gut reaction.
You're suggesting that Dell spend many millions in order to reach a tiny number of customers that they might not even want in the first place. You'd flunk any decent business school, I'm sorry to say.
Why would the PC industry think that Vista would boost PC sales? XP is a mature OS. It works. PC's are powerful enough for most people to do most things they need them to do. Why would anybody think that people would have any interest in running out to buy a new PC running Vista? That kinda' seems like a non-starter to me.
People do that with Apple, largely because people have come to fetishize Apple products. PC's are PC's now. They're appliances. There's no reason to run out and buy the latest and greatest, because the latest and greatest don't really offer anything new, and PC's just aren't all that interesting any more.
Well, of course "smarter" and IQ points are relative. I wouldn't consider somebody who couldn't get laid (but wanted to) all that smart. It's really not rocket science. Even if you want to fuck the homecoming queen, it's just a matter of figuring out what you have to do to get there. It's a pretty simple formula. If somebody can work on astrophysics or integrated circuits, but can't figure out how to bag a chick, that's kinda' sad.
Now don't get me wrong. People have different priorities. Some (strange) people may not want to throw down with somebody else. That's their prerogative. I'm talking about people who WANT to get laid and simply can't figure out how to make it happen.
All of these existed and flourished well in their time, and all existed before MSWord, whose first incarnation on the PC/XT was wretched! To say that MSWord can never be dethroned is bunk!
There are probably 1000 times more PC users than there were then, and PC's are much, MUCH more important to daily life today than it was 30 or even 20 years ago. Word is pretty darn entrenched.
You're right, but the fact that Apple makes the devices like this means that they're only encouraging this type of behavior. It's not a very responsible thing to do on their part. A responsible company would provide those of us with any scrap of fiscal sanity to be able to hold onto and use their products for a long time.