about the new M$ acronym. WHS for Brits stands for WH Smith, a big office_supplies/bookstore in the UK. On to more confusion this side of the pond../coralsaw
Here's how I use my 60GB video ipod for video. I travel quite a lot, so it's dead easy, powerful and entertaining to fire up my vipod and watch a few old episodes of say Frasier, Seinfeld, Python, or 24.
Currently, I can get 1h of good quality (for the vipod screen size) video in 200MB, so I can fit in around 300h of video (or 150 movies) in with no problem. That's immense by today's standards.
With capacity doubling every 1.5 years, I should expect to fit in all the movies I've ever seen (say 5000 by my calculations) in 16-20 years. Cool, I just hope I have my marbles around by then to enjoy them movies.:)/coralsaw
Act like a proper IT product-developmen company!
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
Dear Mozilla,
So your main competitor copies your product (Firefox). So he has a near monopoly position in the mass market. You're not the only company ever that's gone through this problem. My first advice is to study what others did and react accordingly.
My second advice is to go through the following exercise:
First, understand what audience your product targets (techies, power users, or the mass market?).
Second, what understand what your products "utility dimensions are" (security, ease-of-use, extensibility?).
Third, understand what your products threats, opportunities, barriers to entry and possible substitutions are.
Fourth, target your intended reaction based on the answers to steps one to three.
I'd say that Firefox is a "power-user oriented product" that offers a)security, b)stability, c)extensibility, d)low-bloat-factor, e)adherence to W3 standards.
If you agree with the above product USP, then it's easy to understand that your market audience is probably no more than eg. 30% of the mass market, which means you're doing pretty good already, and that normal growth, not stunt-based growth should be expected. Also, better not alienate your current users by making a bloated bug-ridden mess of a browser just to enlarge your user base.
But most important, lead the way. Don't let Microsoft just catch up. Innovate!
How do you create a market for a product, and make money of a product that has a huge initial creative investment, but then no manufacturing cost, and is in infinite supply?"
The heart of the problem that the music (and to some extent every) entertainment industry is facing nowadays with the advent of quality digital content and independent mainstream distribution mechanisms (like p2p) is not about theft, DRM, copyright issues, etc. It is simply that their traditional product has become largely obsolete. Let me elaborate on this a tiny bit.
The music industry's product has traditionally been twofold:
the physical product (tape/vinyl/CD)
the "star" product (for luck of a better word)
Meaning, they sold you the vinyl, but they also sold you the artist as a star idol, so you'll not only buy the vinyl because of the quality of the music, but also buy the t-shirt in order to identify with the star artist, extracting a star premium as well in the process.
Nowadays technology has blurred the situation. Music can be had for free with very low marginal cost, and the star system faces tough times because of the (chosen) speed at which most stars are promoted and subsequently dropped especially in the pop scene (presumably so that the labels come on top of the power game). In product marketing lingo, the utilityof the augmented product has greatly diminished with a risk of becoming completely obsolete.
Labels can learn lessons from other industries that historically faced the same situation, eg. the railroad industry when better means of long-term transportation came along (car, airplane). They can reinvent their product, diversify their operations, or die.
For instance, they can diversify into online-music distribution businesses that would offer a quality download service, powerful search, collaborative filtering and guaranteed music audio and file quality, while charging a modest price (not the ungodly $1 they need to charge for each song so that their obsolete profit models show the same margins). Or they can completely redefine their physical product, offering eg. a waranty for physical CDs in case of damage, limited edition with rich extras, incentives for people to start building "collectable" CD collections, etc etc. The sky is the limit for creative product marketing.
Your quoted question can be answered by a simple You don't. The profit lies elsewhere, it will just take time for these slow-moving monsters to "get it".
I am not sure what you're getting to. My objection was against having my network card, the absolute outer net connection point of my machine, become a complex (and thus more bug-prone than today's network cards) beast that can be maliciously or otherwise exploited by any outside party that knows more about the (thick) firmware stack of the card than I do.
No piece of software, BTW, can be deemed zero-bug, unless mathematically proven to be so. And then of course there's the dimension of concurrency that adds another complexity level.
And why one earth was the grandparent moderated as troll?? If you can't understand what I'm saying, just don't moderate. Really../coralsaw
in my linux system. I want open source network drivers that implement the TCP/IP stack without, say, phoning home for instance. Drivers that I could compile or hack myself if I wanted to.
Now I'm not an Apple fanboy, and I've never owned a Mac in my life. But I got this beautiful, reasonably priced, wonderfully sounding iPod 60G that plays my old sitcom DVDrips and music.
DRM sucks, for all given reasons. But Apple has managed what noone else has in this market: To make legal MP3 music go mainstream. That means getting record labels to release their tracks online (even with the damn DRM), and creating a standard way (i-tunes) for Joe Public to buy/get music for his gadget without having to read a tome of howtos or web pages. And that's priceless in my book.
Going DRM-less, that's going to be step 2 in the CD->MP3 transition for the record industry. It will come, the free market (and us techies) will make sure this happens. Because DRM has zero proven economic value for the industry, and immense economic value for DRM-making companies.
Do you think record labels would ever license their music for i-tunes (or x-tunes for that matter) without DRM at all? Wake up people! One step at a time.
So just leave Apple alone, alright. It's moving the industry forward.
Businesses do not really care if something is open source or closed source or whatever. This is a fallacy. Businesses care about ROI, pure and simple. And when you care about ROI you want to maximize your returns for a given size of effort. Which in our case, in a very watered down analysis, would mean:
1. Tapping into high-margin customer segments (server software, niche workstation software) 2. Tapping into the mass market (read: consumer)
In case 1. Linux is King (TM). Look at Amazon, Google, e-Bay, with more coming aboard.
In vase 2. XP is King. Which means there are more desktops to tap, and more consumers that are used to pay for software (or need the software) that run XP on their machines rather than Linux. We all know why, major reason being that traditionally Linux was not Desktop-Newbie-Consumer friendly. With the advent of DNC-friendly distros like Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire (observe: paid or not!), the segment grows, more business plans result into positive ROI, more new software is written for Linux.
Granted, there are secondary problems in terms of supporting many distros, the fact that FOSS repositories have zillions of "new and exciting" software already for free (if only one could take the time and look at it), etc.
But the initial assertion of the article: open source viz closed source -> no new and exiciting software is a false assertion, I'm sorry to say./coralsaw
There are always ways to check what an executable program is doing. *nix, and to some extent windoze , have a bunch of tools that allow you to trace sockets and files used, even the code itself if your assembly is still good (damn!). And of course there's always the option of egress firewalling to stop malware from phoning home.
I trust _paid for_ essential software, like firewalls and OSes. I trust it because:
1. It's used by thousands of more qualified people than me that can spot malware
2. It's paranoid not trusting the software, while its underlying hardware is not foolproof either
3. I feel secure knowing that the collective value of my actions on my PC is less than the cost to break its protections and use the data.
So I sleep tight at night.
Why not give for free to the troops some nice Bach Organ works or some Schubert Chamber works. Killing people while listening to Palchelbel's Canon is pure class.-
You present "truth-of-the-matter", non-attributable, non-provable assertions. You superficially touch on many different and -perhaps- important issues that belittles them by default. You validate your arguments by generic statements.
I'm just thinking you should go out in the open air and breath in a bit. Fuck TeeVee and Fuck conspiracy theories. Breath in man, you deserve it!
- I haven't used Linux/Unix since 10 years ago - I tried to get my feet wet with Gentoo (yes, Gentoo!) - Nobody ever on the forum told me to go fuck myself - Nobody ever snubbed me even when I had to ask the most obvious questions - Same thing happened when I switched to Debian (for personal reasons)
Perhaps I'm a lucky bastard. Or perhaps, that's because:
a) I read the FAQs in each forum I subscribe too b) I try to search before I ask c) When I ask, I do it politely understanding that people don't get paid to help me
What's so wrong with the above? The 3 above rules are dead simple and all over the place. Give me a fucking break...
We are still the early days in an industry that has huge potential. Cast your mind back to the AOL days of the web and what Microsoft was saying about the internet, and make your analogies.
The single biggest advantage for cellphones that will make them into the mobile computing hybrid of the future is that they are u-b-i-q-u-i-t-o-u-s. Around the globe, in developed countries, an average of >70% of people have and depend on their cellphones on a daily basis. Computers are so far behind these numbers still.
Your points about technology inconsistencies are valid but belong to a short-term view of the industry. Technology changes fast, user behavior much more slowly...
Yes, but what about minor releases?
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 1
Why on earth are we going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 man? What happened to Web 1.1, hell, what happened to Web 1.11-r4 for that matter?
And what about nightly builds, a practice that has served M$ (and leak-boys) so well in the past???
"We think it's important to build the brand image, so changing to this alpha system really helps put Lincoln more in the spotlight as a brand," spokeswoman Sara Tatchio said. "It also indicates a certain level of luxury."
Gah, will the next Intel D model also sport a GTI version? Cause I want it bad!
FACT: Google has hired AI experts FACT: Google has won a machine translation contest FACT: Google has all internet text indexed FACT: Google has been buying massive computing and network resources
HYPOTHESIS: Google will create a terribly sophisticated answering machine, that will also update wikipedia automatically.
I see a bit of a disjoint here. Or perhaps a sense of irony. Plus, we all know the answer: It's 42./coralsaw
I've heard this before, when VISA and MASTERCARD got together to create the one and only mobile payment system, with very limited funding. Which didn't go anywhere because it was underfunded and thus non-committed to by its founder members.
These people, Google MS and Sun, won't even spit on the ground for $1.5 mil, let alone create a business plan... If they really intended to go beyond window dressing, they should have put their money where their mouth is and pour some real money into it.
It's an intended failure from the word go./coralsaw
... but similar to all other oppresive regimes it 'crawls' all over its minions too. Unless of course you walk around with a robot.txt tatoo on your shoulder.
Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is.
That's d/\mn wrong! Information must be a.relevant, b.timely, and c.useful> . Data are just a carrier of information.
I'd wild guess that today, in the data spam web that waves around our daily lives, information is scarcer than ever. That's the whole point the grandfather article is trying to make.
The ad fad is prone to uncontrolled escalation
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 1
I'm calling it a fad, because I'm pretty sure in 100 years advertising will be a bygone (what luck to live in the future!).
Modern advertizing methods remind me of cold-war era nuclear escalation doctrine:
Preemptive strike: strike first, where you're not expected
Maximum damage: strike en force and en masse and cause maximum distress and damage
Build the biggest n-arsenal:the more 'baums', the better
Modern advertising is intrusive, annoying and creeps into every possible orifice of modern life. A hateful social phenomenon, if there ever was one.
Slashdot Mirror
about the new M$ acronym. WHS for Brits stands for WH Smith, a big office_supplies/bookstore in the UK. On to more confusion this side of the pond.. /coralsaw
WTF are you talking about. They pay you to work on their own stuff 20% of the time..
Here's how I use my 60GB video ipod for video. I travel quite a lot, so it's dead easy, powerful and entertaining to fire up my vipod and watch a few old episodes of say Frasier, Seinfeld, Python, or 24.
:) /coralsaw
Currently, I can get 1h of good quality (for the vipod screen size) video in 200MB, so I can fit in around 300h of video (or 150 movies) in with no problem. That's immense by today's standards.
With capacity doubling every 1.5 years, I should expect to fit in all the movies I've ever seen (say 5000 by my calculations) in 16-20 years. Cool, I just hope I have my marbles around by then to enjoy them movies.
Dear Mozilla,
So your main competitor copies your product (Firefox). So he has a near monopoly position in the mass market. You're not the only company ever that's gone through this problem. My first advice is to study what others did and react accordingly.
My second advice is to go through the following exercise:I'd say that Firefox is a "power-user oriented product" that offers a)security, b)stability, c)extensibility, d)low-bloat-factor, e)adherence to W3 standards.
If you agree with the above product USP, then it's easy to understand that your market audience is probably no more than eg. 30% of the mass market, which means you're doing pretty good already, and that normal growth, not stunt-based growth should be expected. Also, better not alienate your current users by making a bloated bug-ridden mess of a browser just to enlarge your user base.
But most important, lead the way. Don't let Microsoft just catch up. Innovate!
The heart of the problem that the music (and to some extent every) entertainment industry is facing nowadays with the advent of quality digital content and independent mainstream distribution mechanisms (like p2p) is not about theft, DRM, copyright issues, etc. It is simply that their traditional product has become largely obsolete. Let me elaborate on this a tiny bit.
The music industry's product has traditionally been twofold:
Meaning, they sold you the vinyl, but they also sold you the artist as a star idol, so you'll not only buy the vinyl because of the quality of the music, but also buy the t-shirt in order to identify with the star artist, extracting a star premium as well in the process.
Nowadays technology has blurred the situation. Music can be had for free with very low marginal cost, and the star system faces tough times because of the (chosen) speed at which most stars are promoted and subsequently dropped especially in the pop scene (presumably so that the labels come on top of the power game). In product marketing lingo, the utilityof the augmented product has greatly diminished with a risk of becoming completely obsolete.
Labels can learn lessons from other industries that historically faced the same situation, eg. the railroad industry when better means of long-term transportation came along (car, airplane). They can reinvent their product, diversify their operations, or die.
For instance, they can diversify into online-music distribution businesses that would offer a quality download service, powerful search, collaborative filtering and guaranteed music audio and file quality, while charging a modest price (not the ungodly $1 they need to charge for each song so that their obsolete profit models show the same margins). Or they can completely redefine their physical product, offering eg. a waranty for physical CDs in case of damage, limited edition with rich extras, incentives for people to start building "collectable" CD collections, etc etc. The sky is the limit for creative product marketing.
Your quoted question can be answered by a simple You don't. The profit lies elsewhere, it will just take time for these slow-moving monsters to "get it".
I am not sure what you're getting to. My objection was against having my network card, the absolute outer net connection point of my machine, become a complex (and thus more bug-prone than today's network cards) beast that can be maliciously or otherwise exploited by any outside party that knows more about the (thick) firmware stack of the card than I do.
/coralsaw
No piece of software, BTW, can be deemed zero-bug, unless mathematically proven to be so. And then of course there's the dimension of concurrency that adds another complexity level.
And why one earth was the grandparent moderated as troll?? If you can't understand what I'm saying, just don't moderate. Really..
in my linux system. I want open source network drivers that implement the TCP/IP stack without, say, phoning home for instance. Drivers that I could compile or hack myself if I wanted to.
Now I'm not an Apple fanboy, and I've never owned a Mac in my life. But I got this beautiful, reasonably priced, wonderfully sounding iPod 60G that plays my old sitcom DVDrips and music. DRM sucks, for all given reasons. But Apple has managed what noone else has in this market: To make legal MP3 music go mainstream. That means getting record labels to release their tracks online (even with the damn DRM), and creating a standard way (i-tunes) for Joe Public to buy/get music for his gadget without having to read a tome of howtos or web pages. And that's priceless in my book. Going DRM-less, that's going to be step 2 in the CD->MP3 transition for the record industry. It will come, the free market (and us techies) will make sure this happens. Because DRM has zero proven economic value for the industry, and immense economic value for DRM-making companies. Do you think record labels would ever license their music for i-tunes (or x-tunes for that matter) without DRM at all? Wake up people! One step at a time. So just leave Apple alone, alright. It's moving the industry forward.
Businesses do not really care if something is open source or closed source or whatever. This is a fallacy. Businesses care about ROI, pure and simple. And when you care about ROI you want to maximize your returns for a given size of effort. Which in our case, in a very watered down analysis, would mean:
/coralsaw
1. Tapping into high-margin customer segments (server software, niche workstation software)
2. Tapping into the mass market (read: consumer)
In case 1. Linux is King (TM). Look at Amazon, Google, e-Bay, with more coming aboard.
In vase 2. XP is King. Which means there are more desktops to tap, and more consumers that are used to pay for software (or need the software) that run XP on their machines rather than Linux. We all know why, major reason being that traditionally Linux was not Desktop-Newbie-Consumer friendly. With the advent of DNC-friendly distros like Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire (observe: paid or not!), the segment grows, more business plans result into positive ROI, more new software is written for Linux.
Granted, there are secondary problems in terms of supporting many distros, the fact that FOSS repositories have zillions of "new and exciting" software already for free (if only one could take the time and look at it), etc.
But the initial assertion of the article: open source viz closed source -> no new and exiciting software is a false assertion, I'm sorry to say.
There are always ways to check what an executable program is doing. *nix, and to some extent windoze , have a bunch of tools that allow you to trace sockets and files used, even the code itself if your assembly is still good (damn!). And of course there's always the option of egress firewalling to stop malware from phoning home. I trust _paid for_ essential software, like firewalls and OSes. I trust it because: 1. It's used by thousands of more qualified people than me that can spot malware 2. It's paranoid not trusting the software, while its underlying hardware is not foolproof either 3. I feel secure knowing that the collective value of my actions on my PC is less than the cost to break its protections and use the data. So I sleep tight at night.
Why not give for free to the troops some nice Bach Organ works or some Schubert Chamber works. Killing people while listening to Palchelbel's Canon is pure class.-
What on earth are you talking about?
You present "truth-of-the-matter", non-attributable, non-provable assertions. You superficially touch on many different and -perhaps- important issues that belittles them by default. You validate your arguments by generic statements.
I'm just thinking you should go out in the open air and breath in a bit. Fuck TeeVee and Fuck conspiracy theories. Breath in man, you deserve it!
of the fittest. Darwin was right yet once more then..
Bah, semantics...
These tokens that banks give out, they cost less than $20. Type your pass, put the one-time token number in and on you log to your Deb dev box.
I'd be amazed if there's only one compromised distro dev box out there. And I'm not only talking Debian.
Sleepers ahoy...
Call them on their cellphone and radio-alphabet the passphrase in. Charlie would then need to tap both the cell and the email to decipher the message.
Could also give them half of the credit card by phone and half by email. Same principle really...
Here's my little story.
- I haven't used Linux/Unix since 10 years ago
- I tried to get my feet wet with Gentoo (yes, Gentoo!)
- Nobody ever on the forum told me to go fuck myself
- Nobody ever snubbed me even when I had to ask the most obvious questions
- Same thing happened when I switched to Debian (for personal reasons)
Perhaps I'm a lucky bastard. Or perhaps, that's because:
a) I read the FAQs in each forum I subscribe too
b) I try to search before I ask
c) When I ask, I do it politely understanding that people don't get paid to help me
What's so wrong with the above? The 3 above rules are dead simple and all over the place. Give me a fucking break...
I disagree.
We are still the early days in an industry that has huge potential. Cast your mind back to the AOL days of the web and what Microsoft was saying about the internet, and make your analogies.
The single biggest advantage for cellphones that will make them into the mobile computing hybrid of the future is that they are u-b-i-q-u-i-t-o-u-s. Around the globe, in developed countries, an average of >70% of people have and depend on their cellphones on a daily basis. Computers are so far behind these numbers still.
Your points about technology inconsistencies are valid but belong to a short-term view of the industry. Technology changes fast, user behavior much more slowly...
Why on earth are we going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 man? What happened to Web 1.1, hell, what happened to Web 1.11-r4 for that matter?
And what about nightly builds, a practice that has served M$ (and leak-boys) so well in the past???
self.confused
What the man said.
= /20060102/SUB/51229028/1023
Make the consumer identify with the mother brand, not the models that change yearly. Check out Lincoln's parallel path, and their explanation for it:
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID
"We think it's important to build the brand image, so changing to this alpha system really helps put Lincoln more in the spotlight as a brand," spokeswoman Sara Tatchio said. "It also indicates a certain level of luxury."
Gah, will the next Intel D model also sport a GTI version? Cause I want it bad!
Let me see if I understand what you're saying:
/coralsaw
FACT: Google has hired AI experts
FACT: Google has won a machine translation contest
FACT: Google has all internet text indexed
FACT: Google has been buying massive computing and network resources
HYPOTHESIS: Google will create a terribly sophisticated answering machine, that will also update wikipedia automatically.
I see a bit of a disjoint here. Or perhaps a sense of irony. Plus, we all know the answer: It's 42.
I've heard this before, when VISA and MASTERCARD got together to create the one and only mobile payment system, with very limited funding. Which didn't go anywhere because it was underfunded and thus non-committed to by its founder members.
/coralsaw
These people, Google MS and Sun, won't even spit on the ground for $1.5 mil, let alone create a business plan... If they really intended to go beyond window dressing, they should have put their money where their mouth is and pour some real money into it.
It's an intended failure from the word go.
... but similar to all other oppresive regimes it 'crawls' all over its minions too. Unless of course you walk around with a robot.txt tatoo on your shoulder.
That's d/\mn wrong! Information must be a.relevant, b.timely, and c.useful> . Data are just a carrier of information.
I'd wild guess that today, in the data spam web that waves around our daily lives, information is scarcer than ever. That's the whole point the grandfather article is trying to make.
I'm calling it a fad, because I'm pretty sure in 100 years advertising will be a bygone (what luck to live in the future!).
Modern advertizing methods remind me of cold-war era nuclear escalation doctrine:
Modern advertising is intrusive, annoying and creeps into every possible orifice of modern life. A hateful social phenomenon, if there ever was one.