I'll be continuing my habit of investing my limited discretionary income in DVDs, video games and hardware upgrades. The artists and the labels can squabble all they want.
Yes, it's true -- I really haven't downloaded as much music during the past year. But I also only purchased one CD during all of 2003, and that was Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief", which I got for my girlfriend after going to see them live in NJ a few month's ago. In fact, I went ahead and sold back all of my old CDs to http://www.wherehouse.com/, in exchange for store credit, which I then used to purchase a whole messload of DVDs.
I wonder who/what the RIAA will blame if this double-helix trend of decreasing file-sharing / decreasing CD sales continues for a few more years. In the meantime, I'll continue to purchase games and DVDs, which provide more bang for my buck than comparably-priced, more heavily restricted CDs.
As a pie-in-the-sky dream, I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of known issues in both Linux and Microsoft. It would be interesting to see what bugs were in the queue within both companies, and how quickly each was resolved.
"From Europe, we jump to la belle province of Quebec for the latest test of broadband internet over power lines [...] I'm all for it... but I live in TORONTO!"
Most interesting is the assertion that the decision by Red Hat to end support for its free distribution and Novell's aquisition of SUSE marks not only the death of free software, but actually is a validation of Microsoft's business model.
This may actually be true. They've given up the ghost on their consumer version of Red Hat Linux, and are going to focus on the Enterprise Server version instead. Not only that, but they seem to believe they are ready to start looking at Linux on the desktop, too.
So, to continue Microsoft's analogy, it's not the death of the OSS model at all. If anything, it's more like the mythological Hydra -- chop off one head, and two more spring back in its place, making it stronger than before.
In this article from ZDNet UK, he is quoted as saying that 'Linux is great' and 'there are a lot of things we should learn from open source' but then is quick to point out that 'We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.'
Sounds like standard operating procedure from Microsoft. And if they haven't talked to a single user who has said OSS is better, why bother listening to them crow at all? Burying your head in the sand won't make problems go away........
I think it's time for someone to file a patent on Earth, Fire, and Water."
James Taylor already has a patent on Fire and Rain. And with a patent on "Sunny Days", I think he might very well have fire (whose energy is derived from a very intense flame-based process called fusion) covered, too.
The guy apparently doesn't know the meaning of "sarcastic". Neither, apparently, do the people who labeled this "Insightful". If I had mod points today, I would have modded it down myself.
IANAE(ngineer), but it does seem rather absurd to me how little progress we've made in the way we generate, store and distribute energy. There have been so many technological revolutions during the past century, and yet we still store energy in batteries the same way we have done for several decades (at least); we still rely on the same utility poles strewn haphazardly about the landscapes; and we still rely upon foreign oil, and use it in a shamefully inefficient manner that wastes a lot of the potential energy it contains.
Aren't we just about due for an energy revolution, then? What would happen if the US were to successfully develop / discover and deploy an alternative, renewable and potentially cleaner fuel source? A new market would be born: new domestic jobs would appear to support, scale out and improve the new infrastructure; pollution would eventually decline; foreign nations would look to the US for help in deploying similar solutions within their own borders; and the US wouldn't be beholden to the Middle Eastern oil cartels anymore.
Yes, it would cause an upheaval across the board. The oil industry would be in decline, which I'm certain wouldn't play very well in the boardrooms of the oil conglomerates. States that derive most of their income from oil revenues (Texas is the obvious choice) would see their political power decline, along with their revenues. But don't the benefits outweigh the risks here?
I know it's probably too much to wish for -- there's too much complacency in our government now to really push for anything revolutionary. We have a (p)resident who's a friend of the oil industry, and doesn't seem to be capable of doing anything his father or Ronald Reagan hasn't already done before. And we have too many companies that are able to use their considerable political power to make sure that things stay the same as they've always been. But wouldn't it be nice..........?
Not as strange as you would think.
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Sort of strange isn't it? Everyone can gain access to your computer (1200 inevitable bugs)... except you (DRM).
But just think about it: hackers (sic) would no longer be able to use your data to effect their nefarious ends. With DRM in place, they wouldn't be able to use the data either, even if they were able to steal it! All they could do is delete / corrupt it........ credit card information is now safe with Microsoft Windows DRM!
See, MS security is getting better -- users can make data as useless to hackers as hackers can make it useless to users.:)
Ah..... I stand corrected. In which case, yeah, that's not a viable option at all. Hell, that kind of tax would cause a lot of business to go across the border, much like what's happening now with people making trips to buy prescription drugs in Canada.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
That sounds like an acceptable price point for me. Assume that the average MP3-encoded track is 1MB/minute, and the average track is 5 minutes long. That's a tax of $0.05 per track. The average album would then be taxed a total of $0.50. But because any track downloaded via p2p is considered a legitimately owned track, $0.50 is the total cost to the consumer -- unless they're the one who originally purchased the CD.
If what they're proposing is to drop the cost of music to $0.50/CD, I'm all for it. Lord knows how they would enforce the "penny per megabyte" of music owned, but it would be cheap enough for all consumers to come into compliance. And with the wider (i.e. global) audience they could reach, they'd probably make more $$ than they do now.
Sadly, even if this were to pass, I doubt any more of that money would trickle down to the artists. But it's partly their fault for agreeing to crappy contracts, or not exploring the idea of digital media distribution. As long as I'm in compliance and I'm playing by the RIAA's rules, I could care less what happens to artists actually represented by the RIAA. If there were some way to compensate the artist directly, I'd do it........
The LawMeme article thinks this is bad news for innovation since Congress might be likely to pass a law making innovative software providers more liable for the copyright infringements of their customers [...]
And while they're at it, why don't they make software providers more liable for the security and stability of the applications their customers use? I'm sick of Windows crashing, so why don't we add in that request to the mix, too?
I agree with your friend, in that artists deserve to get paid. But even if users did buy the music they currently get for free on file-trading networks, they're not gonna get paid. I've heard that AAA acts who have a lot of leverage can negotiate their contracts to collect $0.50 - $1.00 in royalties per CD sold, but that this is very, very rare, and that royalties usually amount to pennies or nickels for each $10 - $18 CD sold. Maybe those numbers are way off, so if you come up with more accurate ones, please post them -- I'm sure everybody would do well to know what those statistics look like.
So yeah, the artists are working and ought to be paid. But they should be taking that issue up with the labels they sign with, when it comes time to negotiate contracts, and not the end users. Consumers have been paying a premium for their music for a long time, and if music sales and file-sharing trends are any indication, they don't believe the music is worth the price anymore. And honestly, do you think prosecuting a 12-year-old girl is going to help recoup lost profits? Let's assume that a 12-year-old girl did have $150,000 to cough up, to settle with the RIAA -- do you think that money is going to wind up in any of the pockets whose copyrights have been infringed upon? No, they're going to the same place all the cash goes anyway -- the RIAA, and the music industry middlemen.
Yes, the RIAA has a pretty good distribution infrastructure in place. But that's conventional wisdom speaking -- file-sharing networks have proven there's a better way of getting the product to the end-users. The main problem here is that there's no way for the RIAA to enforce copyright law in cyberspace, except for implementing technology-based restrictions (DRM). Copyright is a concept, an idea, and one that people usually won't adhere to if there are less cumbersome alternatives available. And until there's a foolproof way of preventing users from sharing their music (legal or technological), the RIAA and the companies it represents will not be able to take advantage of this distribution system.
Artists, on the other hand, can. They just need to accept the fact that their music is going to be passed around, and that they're not going to see royalties for each copy of their work. Given how crappily most contracts compensate artists, I can't see this as being such a huge problem -- you could sell millions of CDs with the RIAA and still end up with pittance. But with file-sharing, your potential audience grows by an order of magnitude. And if even a fraction of that audience compensates you directly for your work, you'll end up making scads more than you otherwise would. You would have more control over price, which means you could price it more attractively, and you could stipulate whether to sell your music by the track or full album. But you would sacrifice some of your ability to be compensated for your work, as there will always be people who want music for free, and won't buy it at any price.
The reason for CDs costing so much now is that the major labels subsidize their failures with the extra cash they make from their big winners. For every band that "makes it", there are dozens that don't, for whom the labels have coughed up cash to promote and produce CDs for, but don't ever break even. But that's their problem, not ours -- I'm only paying for the music in front of me. The labels either need to start being more discriminating in who they sign, or else they need to start pricing their wares far more attractively. The latter I doubt will happen -- Universal's move to $13 CDs is a step in the right direction, but it still factors in the costs from subsidizing failures.
In all competitive industries, companies strive to become more efficient. When they do, production costs go down, which means that they can afford to price their products more competitively to consumers. And because the price becomes more affordable to more people, their potential market increases -- basic supply and dem
Ok, let's assume that within this select subset of applications, developing for Windows is 25-28% cheaper than for Linux per application. There's also the underlying operating system to consider. Windows, for whatever reason -- inherent security flaws or merely higher visibility / threat risk, I don't care -- is more likely to be attacked and infected by worms and viruses. As a result, the cost of maintaining applications and the operating system is higher. I'm fairly certain such a cost isn't factored into the study, and I'm fairly certain it's a considerable amount -- trying to keep things secured in my company's 250-user environment is hard enough.
Company cleverly circumvents GPL to have its software development subsidized. No source code to community.
No average end-user will ever know what the underlying operating system is.
The OS licensing bit is less than 2% of the final cost of the product - in other words, the price savings will not appreciably passed along.
This new PVR cleverly circumvents the GPL? How so? Seems like all they've done is taken the core operating system, used / extended it to suit it's own needs, package it up as a consumable product, and try to make money off of it. Or am I missing something so obvious it's sickening?
Secondly, the consumer shouldn't have to care what operating system runs the show -- IT JUST WORKS. In the MIS/IT world, support staff are doing an excellent job when nothing appears to be broken -- end-users could give two craps what it takes to get there. This is no different.
Finally, what does price savings have to do with any of this? If the product is more expensive than the market will tolerate, people won't buy it and Sony will either lower the price, add more features to make it more attractive, a combination of the two, or else lose a lot of money for as long as they deign to offer these PVRs. Who cares if the product cost absolutely nothing to make?!
Ok, fine, Linux costs next to nothing to license. How do you know price savings weren't passed along? If they needed to license Windows, it would have doubtlessly been more expensive to produce, which means price would have gone up. So I suspect price savings ARE, in fact, being passed along. Either way, do you have any idea what their overall development, marketing, manufacturing and support costs are? If not, then how can you say with any degree of certainty whether savings are being passed along or not?
This is a win for Linux: it's another case of another company that has opted to use Linux to power the products it develops, be it hardware or software or something else I'm leaving out. This is more proof that Linux is better suited to this particular task than all other OS's, at least where this company is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Does Anal?" detector.
I'll be continuing my habit of investing my limited discretionary income in DVDs, video games and hardware upgrades. The artists and the labels can squabble all they want.
Yes, it's true -- I really haven't downloaded as much music during the past year. But I also only purchased one CD during all of 2003, and that was Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief", which I got for my girlfriend after going to see them live in NJ a few month's ago. In fact, I went ahead and sold back all of my old CDs to http://www.wherehouse.com/, in exchange for store credit, which I then used to purchase a whole messload of DVDs.
I wonder who/what the RIAA will blame if this double-helix trend of decreasing file-sharing / decreasing CD sales continues for a few more years. In the meantime, I'll continue to purchase games and DVDs, which provide more bang for my buck than comparably-priced, more heavily restricted CDs.
"You're a major security risk" is NOT good enough.
That is, unless your homeworld has been nuked by Cylons and you suspect a certain arms dealer is a Cylon infiltrator. Then it's a very valid one.
I get a lot of user mail from Netscape 4 users, and it only makes sense that they're running it somewhere.
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't think that Netscape 4 was an operating system.
As a pie-in-the-sky dream, I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of known issues in both Linux and Microsoft. It would be interesting to see what bugs were in the queue within both companies, and how quickly each was resolved.
A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines.
;)
OTOH, every four years a president gets elected for exploiting voting machines.
"From Europe, we jump to la belle province of Quebec for the latest test of broadband internet over power lines [...] I'm all for it... but I live in TORONTO!"
:-P
Isn't Quebec the same thing as Toronto?
McBride is what is known in the poker world as a fish. Which is to SCO's great misfortune because penguins literally eat fish for breakfast.
Yes, but do penguins also play poker, as your statment seems to imply?
Most interesting is the assertion that the decision by Red Hat to end support for its free distribution and Novell's aquisition of SUSE marks not only the death of free software, but actually is a validation of Microsoft's business model.
This may actually be true. They've given up the ghost on their consumer version of Red Hat Linux, and are going to focus on the Enterprise Server version instead. Not only that, but they seem to believe they are ready to start looking at Linux on the desktop, too.
So, to continue Microsoft's analogy, it's not the death of the OSS model at all. If anything, it's more like the mythological Hydra -- chop off one head, and two more spring back in its place, making it stronger than before.
In this article from ZDNet UK, he is quoted as saying that 'Linux is great' and 'there are a lot of things we should learn from open source' but then is quick to point out that 'We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.'
Sounds like standard operating procedure from Microsoft. And if they haven't talked to a single user who has said OSS is better, why bother listening to them crow at all? Burying your head in the sand won't make problems go away........
That is all.
I think it's time for someone to file a patent on Earth, Fire, and Water."
James Taylor already has a patent on Fire and Rain. And with a patent on "Sunny Days", I think he might very well have fire (whose energy is derived from a very intense flame-based process called fusion) covered, too.
The guy apparently doesn't know the meaning of "sarcastic". Neither, apparently, do the people who labeled this "Insightful". If I had mod points today, I would have modded it down myself.
IANAE(ngineer), but it does seem rather absurd to me how little progress we've made in the way we generate, store and distribute energy. There have been so many technological revolutions during the past century, and yet we still store energy in batteries the same way we have done for several decades (at least); we still rely on the same utility poles strewn haphazardly about the landscapes; and we still rely upon foreign oil, and use it in a shamefully inefficient manner that wastes a lot of the potential energy it contains.
Aren't we just about due for an energy revolution, then? What would happen if the US were to successfully develop / discover and deploy an alternative, renewable and potentially cleaner fuel source? A new market would be born: new domestic jobs would appear to support, scale out and improve the new infrastructure; pollution would eventually decline; foreign nations would look to the US for help in deploying similar solutions within their own borders; and the US wouldn't be beholden to the Middle Eastern oil cartels anymore.
Yes, it would cause an upheaval across the board. The oil industry would be in decline, which I'm certain wouldn't play very well in the boardrooms of the oil conglomerates. States that derive most of their income from oil revenues (Texas is the obvious choice) would see their political power decline, along with their revenues. But don't the benefits outweigh the risks here?
I know it's probably too much to wish for -- there's too much complacency in our government now to really push for anything revolutionary. We have a (p)resident who's a friend of the oil industry, and doesn't seem to be capable of doing anything his father or Ronald Reagan hasn't already done before. And we have too many companies that are able to use their considerable political power to make sure that things stay the same as they've always been. But wouldn't it be nice..........?
Sort of strange isn't it? Everyone can gain access to your computer (1200 inevitable bugs)... except you (DRM).
:)
But just think about it: hackers (sic) would no longer be able to use your data to effect their nefarious ends. With DRM in place, they wouldn't be able to use the data either, even if they were able to steal it! All they could do is delete / corrupt it........ credit card information is now safe with Microsoft Windows DRM!
See, MS security is getting better -- users can make data as useless to hackers as hackers can make it useless to users.
After all, with items like the MagRider and the Pulsar, who could live to disagree?
Would using relative font sizes (such as em, as opposed to px) make a difference?
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
Ah..... I stand corrected. In which case, yeah, that's not a viable option at all. Hell, that kind of tax would cause a lot of business to go across the border, much like what's happening now with people making trips to buy prescription drugs in Canada.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
That sounds like an acceptable price point for me. Assume that the average MP3-encoded track is 1MB/minute, and the average track is 5 minutes long. That's a tax of $0.05 per track. The average album would then be taxed a total of $0.50. But because any track downloaded via p2p is considered a legitimately owned track, $0.50 is the total cost to the consumer -- unless they're the one who originally purchased the CD.
If what they're proposing is to drop the cost of music to $0.50/CD, I'm all for it. Lord knows how they would enforce the "penny per megabyte" of music owned, but it would be cheap enough for all consumers to come into compliance. And with the wider (i.e. global) audience they could reach, they'd probably make more $$ than they do now.
Sadly, even if this were to pass, I doubt any more of that money would trickle down to the artists. But it's partly their fault for agreeing to crappy contracts, or not exploring the idea of digital media distribution. As long as I'm in compliance and I'm playing by the RIAA's rules, I could care less what happens to artists actually represented by the RIAA. If there were some way to compensate the artist directly, I'd do it........
The LawMeme article thinks this is bad news for innovation since Congress might be likely to pass a law making innovative software providers more liable for the copyright infringements of their customers [...]
And while they're at it, why don't they make software providers more liable for the security and stability of the applications their customers use? I'm sick of Windows crashing, so why don't we add in that request to the mix, too?
[/SARCASM]
I agree with your friend, in that artists deserve to get paid. But even if users did buy the music they currently get for free on file-trading networks, they're not gonna get paid. I've heard that AAA acts who have a lot of leverage can negotiate their contracts to collect $0.50 - $1.00 in royalties per CD sold, but that this is very, very rare, and that royalties usually amount to pennies or nickels for each $10 - $18 CD sold. Maybe those numbers are way off, so if you come up with more accurate ones, please post them -- I'm sure everybody would do well to know what those statistics look like.
So yeah, the artists are working and ought to be paid. But they should be taking that issue up with the labels they sign with, when it comes time to negotiate contracts, and not the end users. Consumers have been paying a premium for their music for a long time, and if music sales and file-sharing trends are any indication, they don't believe the music is worth the price anymore. And honestly, do you think prosecuting a 12-year-old girl is going to help recoup lost profits? Let's assume that a 12-year-old girl did have $150,000 to cough up, to settle with the RIAA -- do you think that money is going to wind up in any of the pockets whose copyrights have been infringed upon? No, they're going to the same place all the cash goes anyway -- the RIAA, and the music industry middlemen.
Yes, the RIAA has a pretty good distribution infrastructure in place. But that's conventional wisdom speaking -- file-sharing networks have proven there's a better way of getting the product to the end-users. The main problem here is that there's no way for the RIAA to enforce copyright law in cyberspace, except for implementing technology-based restrictions (DRM). Copyright is a concept, an idea, and one that people usually won't adhere to if there are less cumbersome alternatives available. And until there's a foolproof way of preventing users from sharing their music (legal or technological), the RIAA and the companies it represents will not be able to take advantage of this distribution system.
Artists, on the other hand, can. They just need to accept the fact that their music is going to be passed around, and that they're not going to see royalties for each copy of their work. Given how crappily most contracts compensate artists, I can't see this as being such a huge problem -- you could sell millions of CDs with the RIAA and still end up with pittance. But with file-sharing, your potential audience grows by an order of magnitude. And if even a fraction of that audience compensates you directly for your work, you'll end up making scads more than you otherwise would. You would have more control over price, which means you could price it more attractively, and you could stipulate whether to sell your music by the track or full album. But you would sacrifice some of your ability to be compensated for your work, as there will always be people who want music for free, and won't buy it at any price.
The reason for CDs costing so much now is that the major labels subsidize their failures with the extra cash they make from their big winners. For every band that "makes it", there are dozens that don't, for whom the labels have coughed up cash to promote and produce CDs for, but don't ever break even. But that's their problem, not ours -- I'm only paying for the music in front of me. The labels either need to start being more discriminating in who they sign, or else they need to start pricing their wares far more attractively. The latter I doubt will happen -- Universal's move to $13 CDs is a step in the right direction, but it still factors in the costs from subsidizing failures.
In all competitive industries, companies strive to become more efficient. When they do, production costs go down, which means that they can afford to price their products more competitively to consumers. And because the price becomes more affordable to more people, their potential market increases -- basic supply and dem
Ok, let's assume that within this select subset of applications, developing for Windows is 25-28% cheaper than for Linux per application. There's also the underlying operating system to consider. Windows, for whatever reason -- inherent security flaws or merely higher visibility / threat risk, I don't care -- is more likely to be attacked and infected by worms and viruses. As a result, the cost of maintaining applications and the operating system is higher. I'm fairly certain such a cost isn't factored into the study, and I'm fairly certain it's a considerable amount -- trying to keep things secured in my company's 250-user environment is hard enough.
This new PVR cleverly circumvents the GPL? How so? Seems like all they've done is taken the core operating system, used / extended it to suit it's own needs, package it up as a consumable product, and try to make money off of it. Or am I missing something so obvious it's sickening?
Secondly, the consumer shouldn't have to care what operating system runs the show -- IT JUST WORKS. In the MIS/IT world, support staff are doing an excellent job when nothing appears to be broken -- end-users could give two craps what it takes to get there. This is no different.
Finally, what does price savings have to do with any of this? If the product is more expensive than the market will tolerate, people won't buy it and Sony will either lower the price, add more features to make it more attractive, a combination of the two, or else lose a lot of money for as long as they deign to offer these PVRs. Who cares if the product cost absolutely nothing to make?!
Ok, fine, Linux costs next to nothing to license. How do you know price savings weren't passed along? If they needed to license Windows, it would have doubtlessly been more expensive to produce, which means price would have gone up. So I suspect price savings ARE, in fact, being passed along. Either way, do you have any idea what their overall development, marketing, manufacturing and support costs are? If not, then how can you say with any degree of certainty whether savings are being passed along or not?
This is a win for Linux: it's another case of another company that has opted to use Linux to power the products it develops, be it hardware or software or something else I'm leaving out. This is more proof that Linux is better suited to this particular task than all other OS's, at least where this company is concerned.