Tell that to the dot-com bubble. Maybe we could have avoided it if we'd known that technology isn't magic pixie dust...
I still think that technology has probably the highest ratio of being not understood compared to the number of people that use it directly and make decisions about it.
There's lots of other tricky stuff out there like nuclear physics and abstract math, but I don't see PHB's having direct control and decision power with those, and I don't see them being used daily. The only other devices with this kind of market penetration are simple things like cars, telephones and televisions. And what I mean by simple is that it's easy to understand their application: I don't have to know how the car works, but the average person can comprehend that they're good at moving stuff from one place to another. Computers? Totally misunderstood.... so magic pixie dust is what it is.
There was a really good IBM print advert in the dot-burst days.
There were two frames:
The left one was a {picture of square wheels}, and the caption read: "Bad Idea"
The right one showed www.{picture of square wheels}.com, and the caption read: "Still a Bad Idea"
There's lots of people who think that adding a computer to a problem will somehow solve it... aah, the magic pixie dust.
organizations that consistently screw up have been known to go out of business...
So, does the Treasury Department file for chapter-11 on behalf of the government? and is there a corporate raider big enough to auction off the remains?
Allowing programmers to name serious 'flagship' Linux applications is right in line with letting marketing write them.
The fact that a lot of other OSS apps were named by clever programmers doesn't mean that any of them were correctly named from a marketing perspective.
The fact is that marketers and programmers are not (necessarily) the same people, and (generally) have a very different mind set. That's why they (often) clash so heavily in product discussions - totally different points of view. One wants to make a product that works, and one a product that sells. Somewhere in the middle is a viable product. Letting both sides perform their respective tasks with minimum interference will create the best possible product.
I doubt many people would not use good software because the name is hard to pronounce!
...and you probably think that if you work hard you'll get that promotion, but don't understand why that schmoozer who is clearly useless keeps getting promoted.
The problem is that (most) geeks think that evaluations should be made on the basis of 'what is' not 'what appears to be'.
Anyway, there has been an mp3 of the prunounciation on the website for at least 8 years!
It's been my experience that if you find yourself explaining something to more than one person than it was a bad marketing move. The fact that they have this mp3 file tells me that it is a bad name... Instead of investing resources into explaining the name, expend resources finding and transitioning to a new name. In the long term you will be ahead.
Sadly, it appears that a rose by another name does in fact not smell so sweet...
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
I think the real problem in the system today is that it doesn't allow for $800 million movies to be made.
Clealy we should enact legislation that ensures a profitable return on any film made, even if that means that we drop tax dollars. Maybe a new tax. This is important people! We are on the brink of losing even the possibility of having $1-billion costing movies to be made! Think of the children! oh won't someone please think of Lucas' children!
between youtube and democracy player and all the people out there publishing stuff today, I'm having a harder and harder time fitting in time for the hollywood trash... sure, the downside is it's raw, some of it sucks, sometimes the quality isn't all that great, but it's raw and pure and made for their own reasons - to entertain, to be artists etc and that really shows through... Art can't be made for 'profit'. Art can only be made to free the soul.
He will accept a sentence for theft, but not for murder.
I can only assume that you are trying to make some kind of funny here, but I think you only succeed in disproving your own point. There are different words to describe different actions for precisely the reason you are illustrating. Despite what the *AA's want you to believe, the specific action is called copyright infringment, and is very different from 'theft' or 'piracy' (which generally requires a boat, and sometimes a parrot). Just as armed robbery is different from theft, and joy-riding different from grand theft auto. (the action, not the game...)
It's imporant to keep the language pure, because the *AAs have no end of money to hire marketers to turn restrictive technologies into 'features' using words like 'rights' instead of 'restrictions' and phrases like 'plays-for-sure' instead of 'plays-if-we-let-it'.
While you are free to disagree with my disagreement of IP law, let's at least ensure that any conversation we have uses terms that accurately reflect what is happening, as opposed to the marketing spin they are selling.
Had it not been available on the net, I wouldn't have bought anyway. So my downloading that movie did not deprive the creators of the movie one dime, since I wasn't going to buy it regardless.... and I'm not even trying to justify it in any shape or form.
I recently borrowed Firefly DVD set from a friend. I really liked it, and mentioned it to another friend who wanted to borrow it from me. The two friends don't know each other, yet there is absolutely no one who would say that if I re-lend the DVDs there is some kind of copyright infringment. ...so you also recently borrowed Reign of Fire from a friend-you-have-never-met.
I'm just showing that downloading content from the net does not automatically mean that the creators of the content were denied sales
For the whole deprived argument to hold any kind of water, lending out material would also be depriving the creator...
What all this does is show the very real problems in trying to treat ideas as physical things...
Only the most hard core socialists think otherwise.
I'm no where near a hard-core socialist. In fact as a fairly ardent capitalist I'm against IP because it creates a monopoly -- monopoly is pretty much the great satan to a capitalist... [unless of course you're the owner of said monopoly, in which case you lobby like hell that you're about to lose the second jet and can barely afford the yacht and so require stronger protections while you offer as little service as possible.../rant]
It's funny how for physical stuff capitalists demand competition because it makes better stuff for cheaper by forcing companies to compete with one another. But when someone wants to apply these same principles to 'ideas' these same people are called socialists... wtf?
100. Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a "public performance".
POSICKS ?
POSIX# ?
POSIX.NET ?
MoSftIX ?
ME-NIX / YOU-NIX (from Win-ME)
which leads of course to the British slang... WE-NICK...which is of course Billy's real talent.
Now, with a patent, I stand to recover my money invested at very least, if only by selling it to Conoco-Phillips for them to bury.
Without a patent? I'll get mabye two months making it on my own to recover costs before everyone knocks it off and I'm irrelevant. I probably won't make back anything near research cost before you can buy a Hong Kong knockoff version made by Chinese slave labor for less than my cost to have it machined.
There's some false logic in there. First of all, even with a patent there is no guarantee that you make any kind of return on your time. There is only the guarantee that you can call a lawyer if you see someone else using 'your' invention. Then if you have the cash to pay the lawyer, or can find one that will work for a cut, you can make your way to court, and see if a judge agrees that they owe you some money.
Second, actually making and selling your invention is not the only way to make money from an invention. If your invention impacts an industry you can profit by knowing that your invention is about to hit the market. In your example, your invention decreases fuel consumption. So, this would decrease oil usage, driving oil prices down, so I would short oil companies on the stock market, and profit from knowledge. You would then (in fact) get maximum effect if you broadcast your invention to all and insisted loudly that everyone copy and implement this. The faster the adoption rate, the higher your profits. The point is that making your invention is not necessarily the only way to profit from it.
Third of all, is your two month estimate is based on any kind of research? It seems short to me. Bear in mind that in this world there are limited resources for everyone. No one is going to 'copy' a bad idea - so an 'idea-leaching' company would have to wait to see which ideas take off. While they wait to see if your idea takes off, you are already profiting from it. Then (and only then) do they start to reverse engineer your idea. So even if it only takes a couple of months to figure it out, you still have a couple of years head-start. Beyond that, you have perhaps improved the design since your first release. Finally, you have also become a brand name in this area - and consumers will pay for brands. The brand Aspirin is a trademark (in Canada), and sits next to the generics on the shelf and costs more and still sells. The point is just that the 2-month theft is a very simplistic viewpoint.
Patents allow innovation in the marketplace by giving inventors incentive to innovate. (My god, that just sounded wrong.)
Innovation didn't need an incentive for a million years, and there's no reason to believe it does today. The people pushing this viewpoint are the monopolists who want to keep it that way...
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
While I wasn't there when patents were first debated and granted, I'm not sure that that was the real reason. oh, I'm not saying that wasn't in the glossy, but I just don't think that it was the real reason. The real reason, as it always is, is money. If I could get a law passed that guaranteed my income (by way of eliminating competition) without further effort I'd sure talk to my buddies in the government about getting such a law passed. I'd probably discuss it with them at a lavish dinner party that poor folks weren't invited to...
In the next 30 years steam engines were modified and
improved, and such crucial innovations as the steam train, the
steamboat and the steam jenny all came into wide usage. The key
innovation was the high-pressure steam engine -development of
which had been blocked by Watt by strategically using his 1775
patent. Many new improvements to the steam engine, such as those
of William Bull, Richard Trevithick, and Arthur Woolf, became
available by 1804: although developed earlier these innovations
were kept idle until the Boulton and Watt patent expired. None of
these innovators wished to incur the same fate as Jonathan
Hornblower.
Basically, the industrial-revolution hero Watt, patent holder for an improved steam engine spent the duration of his patent in court, fighting to keep improvements on 'his' invention from being produced.
So there are a couple of interesting bits to this:
(1) Watt produced few steam engines while he held the patent. He spent his time in court, not in a factory/on-site making steam-engines. Nor did he improve upon it. Others did.
(2) Innovation happened despite his patent, but were simply held back until the patent expired. So, it can easily be argued that patents held back the industrial revolution by (roughly) the duration of the patent.
(3) After the patent expired, and despite newcomers to the field, and despite everyone having twenty years to prepare for this eventuality, Watt was able to make a living selling, installing and servicing steam engines. Despite other advances, and despite competitors also making steam engines, his expertise and his steam engines were still saleable commodities.
From all this it can easily be argued that without patents we would be further (technologically) along than we are today. It can be further argued that patents were unnecessary for Watt to earn an income/return on his investment. Since these are the two basic arguments for patent protection it's easy to see that patent was in fact a negative effect on one of the most important events in the last few hundred years.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years.
Innovation is based on all invention that came before. Therefore I would expect innovation to grow at an increasing non-linear (exponential or logarithmic?) rate. Innovation 'expenditures' (time&money) are pulled from leisure time. In other words: We won't spend our time inventing before we hunt and gather food. So while the previous million years people spent the bulk of their day just trying to survive, we now complain when there are three people in queue at the checkout.
Change may well have made the patent system unnecessary today, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate its utility in the past, or the soundness of the original idea.
We have identified seventeen economic studies
that have examined this issue empirically. The executive summary:
these studies find weak or no evidence that strengthening patent
regimes increases innovation; they find evidence that strengthening
the patent regime increases... patenting!
They go on to quote from these studies, both for patent and copyright. With one exception (Copyright in France, and only France, not all of Europe) copyright and patent were introduced and... well, nothing changed other than patents were filed, monopolies were granted, and individuals got rich. No increase. They do then, however show that in areas where there was no protection, innovation ran rampant: take software as an example. Unprotected by patent, software has nonetheless come a long way, and now with patents looming ugly I think we can all see that innovation is going to be stifled, or at least reserved to big companies that have patent portfolios with which they can bargain with other big companies... where does that leave the little-guy-in-the-garage? fskerd...
DRM is just fine. It's not "against the constitution" because you don't have a right to buy something without DRM. You have the choice not to buy it. DRM is simply another product.
DRM observes neither the first-sale doctrine, nor the limited-time requirement. In other words, there is no mechanism in iTunes to sell 'stuff' I own. The right to resell material was upheld by the courts. And the 'limited-time' bit is in fact the 'our benefit' part of the copyright deal. Since their DRM never expires I would agree that it's not aligned with the constitution.
DRM isn't bad or immoral. It's not anything, as it's just another product you can buy or not buy. It's just copy protection to combat piracy, which itself is bad and immoral, since that takes content without paying people for it.
The ends justify the means? You must be pretty happy with your Sony rootkit then...
Blame the pirates for forcing content creators' hands.
If only it were the content creators that are pushing this. Many artists have said time and again that they don't care if their stuff is shared - it's the gate keepers (aka RIAA) who don't actually contribute to the making of art (but still keep almost all the revenue) that are fighting hard... let's keep straight who is who in this.
DRM isn't based on the idea that you are a criminal. In fact, DRM doesn't do anything at all if you don't try to do something wrong like copy iTunes music to someone else's account. You might as well say locks are based on the idea that you are a criminal.
No. I use my locks on my property to limit others. DRM limits me on my property. See the (very essential) difference?
How do people find iTunes DRM acceptable? Because most people don't even notice it's there. It's that liberal a copy protection scheme.
More specfically, most people don't understand the issue, don't understand that this is all about monopoly control, and don't understand that there is actually a lot at stake here.
You're just using emotive propaganda to attempt to spread an overly idealistic message. You may as well don a tinfoil hat. If you tried to argue your position rationally, I would be more willing to listen to your points, but as it is, you just went through the dictionary picking out words with emotional connotation behind them to drum up support. I just can't respect that as a debate position.
Ok - read the link in the sig. No emotive propoganda, no tin-foil hat, just filled with rational arguments and historical example. It's also one of my journal entries and is open for comments...
doesn't magically mean they have the right to pirate it like some freeloading hippie without a job.
...yeah, but those freeloading hippies without a job have a powerful lobby that keeps extending copyright and limiting our personal freedoms. And while Courtney Love and I agree with you that they are pirates...well, whatdya gonna do? It's the system we have.
For an average consumer, that choice can be narrowed down to 3 or 4 of the best. Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. It's not unreasonable to say to the consumer "here are your choices". All four are very high quality distributions and are really only going to differ in eye candy (all of which have very good eye candy anyway).
There is no reason that Dell couldn't offer to ship with all four on CDs (or a DVD).
Sure there is a marginal incremental support cost, but the distros are sufficiently close for the purpose of supporting the average user ("is it plugged in?"). In a shop the size of Dell, they could easily allocate dozen people in Linux (general support) and divvie up the group to be specialists in areas/distros... the support'd be...you know, like a cummunity (novel idea, I know!) and the incremental would approach zero.
Why do you people keep insisting on looking at license costs!?
Ten bucks, forty bucks who cares?... c'mon! Clearly you only want to look at TCO, and I have several reports handy here...err, somewhere, I'll find them - - and they all show that Microsoft has the lowest TCO!
Slashdot Mirror
I still think that technology has probably the highest ratio of being not understood compared to the number of people that use it directly and make decisions about it.
There's lots of other tricky stuff out there like nuclear physics and abstract math, but I don't see PHB's having direct control and decision power with those, and I don't see them being used daily. The only other devices with this kind of market penetration are simple things like cars, telephones and televisions. And what I mean by simple is that it's easy to understand their application: I don't have to know how the car works, but the average person can comprehend that they're good at moving stuff from one place to another. Computers? Totally misunderstood.... so magic pixie dust is what it is.
There was a really good IBM print advert in the dot-burst days.
There were two frames:
The left one was a {picture of square wheels}, and the caption read: "Bad Idea"
The right one showed www.{picture of square wheels}.com, and the caption read: "Still a Bad Idea"
There's lots of people who think that adding a computer to a problem will somehow solve it... aah, the magic pixie dust.
The fact is that marketers and programmers are not (necessarily) the same people, and (generally) have a very different mind set. That's why they (often) clash so heavily in product discussions - totally different points of view.
One wants to make a product that works, and one a product that sells. Somewhere in the middle is a viable product. Letting both sides perform their respective tasks with minimum interference will create the best possible product.
The problem is that (most) geeks think that evaluations should be made on the basis of 'what is' not 'what appears to be'. It's been my experience that if you find yourself explaining something to more than one person than it was a bad marketing move. The fact that they have this mp3 file tells me that it is a bad name... Instead of investing resources into explaining the name, expend resources finding and transitioning to a new name. In the long term you will be ahead.
Sadly, it appears that a rose by another name does in fact not smell so sweet...
C'mon, these guys are pros, and have a long history of understanding their market.
Clealy we should enact legislation that ensures a profitable return on any film made, even if that means that we drop tax dollars. Maybe a new tax. This is important people! We are on the brink of losing even the possibility of having $1-billion costing movies to be made! Think of the children! oh won't someone please think of Lucas' children!
between youtube and democracy player and all the people out there publishing stuff today, I'm having a harder and harder time fitting in time for the hollywood trash... sure, the downside is it's raw, some of it sucks, sometimes the quality isn't all that great, but it's raw and pure and made for their own reasons - to entertain, to be artists etc and that really shows through ... Art can't be made for 'profit'. Art can only be made to free the soul.
There are different words to describe different actions for precisely the reason you are illustrating. Despite what the *AA's want you to believe, the specific action is called copyright infringment, and is very different from 'theft' or 'piracy' (which generally requires a boat, and sometimes a parrot). Just as armed robbery is different from theft, and joy-riding different from grand theft auto. (the action, not the game...)
It's imporant to keep the language pure, because the *AAs have no end of money to hire marketers to turn restrictive technologies into 'features' using words like 'rights' instead of 'restrictions' and phrases like 'plays-for-sure' instead of 'plays-if-we-let-it'.
While you are free to disagree with my disagreement of IP law, let's at least ensure that any conversation we have uses terms that accurately reflect what is happening, as opposed to the marketing spin they are selling.
What all this does is show the very real problems in trying to treat ideas as physical things...
It's funny how for physical stuff capitalists demand competition because it makes better stuff for cheaper by forcing companies to compete with one another. But when someone wants to apply these same principles to 'ideas' these same people are called socialists... wtf?
Assuming that "they" is Sony, yes, I think that might have been the intent.
What a wonderful word ... Fabulous choice, since it's really IP laws that are sophistry ...
The MPAA's MIB will be there shortly to help you with that...
POSICKS ? ... WE-NICK...which is of course Billy's real talent.
POSIX# ?
POSIX.NET ?
MoSftIX ?
ME-NIX / YOU-NIX (from Win-ME)
which leads of course to the British slang
First of all, even with a patent there is no guarantee that you make any kind of return on your time. There is only the guarantee that you can call a lawyer if you see someone else using 'your' invention. Then if you have the cash to pay the lawyer, or can find one that will work for a cut, you can make your way to court, and see if a judge agrees that they owe you some money.
Second, actually making and selling your invention is not the only way to make money from an invention. If your invention impacts an industry you can profit by knowing that your invention is about to hit the market. In your example, your invention decreases fuel consumption. So, this would decrease oil usage, driving oil prices down, so I would short oil companies on the stock market, and profit from knowledge. You would then (in fact) get maximum effect if you broadcast your invention to all and insisted loudly that everyone copy and implement this. The faster the adoption rate, the higher your profits. The point is that making your invention is not necessarily the only way to profit from it.
Third of all, is your two month estimate is based on any kind of research? It seems short to me. Bear in mind that in this world there are limited resources for everyone. No one is going to 'copy' a bad idea - so an 'idea-leaching' company would have to wait to see which ideas take off. While they wait to see if your idea takes off, you are already profiting from it. Then (and only then) do they start to reverse engineer your idea. So even if it only takes a couple of months to figure it out, you still have a couple of years head-start. Beyond that, you have perhaps improved the design since your first release. Finally, you have also become a brand name in this area - and consumers will pay for brands. The brand Aspirin is a trademark (in Canada), and sits next to the generics on the shelf and costs more and still sells. The point is just that the 2-month theft is a very simplistic viewpoint. Innovation didn't need an incentive for a million years, and there's no reason to believe it does today. The people pushing this viewpoint are the monopolists who want to keep it that way...
The real reason, as it always is, is money. If I could get a law passed that guaranteed my income (by way of eliminating competition) without further effort I'd sure talk to my buddies in the government about getting such a law passed. I'd probably discuss it with them at a lavish dinner party that poor folks weren't invited to...
So there are a couple of interesting bits to this:
(1) Watt produced few steam engines while he held the patent. He spent his time in court, not in a factory/on-site making steam-engines. Nor did he improve upon it. Others did.
(2) Innovation happened despite his patent, but were simply held back until the patent expired. So, it can easily be argued that patents held back the industrial revolution by (roughly) the duration of the patent.
(3) After the patent expired, and despite newcomers to the field, and despite everyone having twenty years to prepare for this eventuality, Watt was able to make a living selling, installing and servicing steam engines. Despite other advances, and despite competitors also making steam engines, his expertise and his steam engines were still saleable commodities.
From all this it can easily be argued that without patents we would be further (technologically) along than we are today. It can be further argued that patents were unnecessary for Watt to earn an income/return on his investment. Since these are the two basic arguments for patent protection it's easy to see that patent was in fact a negative effect on one of the most important events in the last few hundred years.
Innovation 'expenditures' (time&money) are pulled from leisure time. In other words: We won't spend our time inventing before we hunt and gather food. So while the previous million years people spent the bulk of their day just trying to survive, we now complain when there are three people in queue at the checkout.
Actually, historically, it looks like patents did nothing. From (pdf warning) Against Intellectual Monopoly: They go on to quote from these studies, both for patent and copyright. With one exception (Copyright in France, and only France, not all of Europe) copyright and patent were introduced and
They do then, however show that in areas where there was no protection, innovation ran rampant: take software as an example. Unprotected by patent, software has nonetheless come a long way, and now with patents looming ugly I think we can all see that innovation is going to be stifled, or at least reserved to big companies that have patent portfolios with which they can bargain with other big companies
It's also one of my journal entries and is open for comments...
Sure there is a marginal incremental support cost, but the distros are sufficiently close for the purpose of supporting the average user ("is it plugged in?"). In a shop the size of Dell, they could easily allocate dozen people in Linux (general support) and divvie up the group to be specialists in areas/distros ... the support'd be...you know, like a cummunity (novel idea, I know!) and the incremental would approach zero.
I guess either me or the mods funny filter is off... maybe it was me.
Ten bucks, forty bucks who cares?... c'mon! Clearly you only want to look at TCO, and I have several reports handy here
TCO!
TCO!
...now go buy some Windows servers! Quick!