Re:Extranets, vertical markets, gov't sites
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Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
An "IE preferred" message simply means "tested in IE".
I see your point, but it still seems exclusionary by nature. The inference I take from an "IE preferred" message is that for some reason it doesn't work properly in other browsers. In the absence of an "IE preferred" message, I assume the site works as it should, meaning whichever browser I use, I'll be ok.
... I never test on a Mac. It's simply too small of a segment, and I'm not about to buy a Mac just to test with it.
That depends on the type of site you're maintaining, obviously. I assume you've seen BrowserCam. It's pretty useful, though a bit slow at times. I'm coming from the other end of the spectrum, since I use a Mac to develop websites and don't want to hassle with VirtualPC or buy new hardware just to test sites in Windows. One thing I really like about BrowserCam is that I can test against all kinds of browsers, not just the latest versions of IE.
Extranets, vertical markets, gov't sites
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Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
Um, never? Can you point me to a few of these? I use Firefox all the time and have NEVER encountered one. Yes, not once.
I periodically encounter this problem with password protected sites, usually ones built around some sort of proprietary ASP package. For example, our school extranet (which runs on EResadvises: "Our recommended browser is Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher." That said, I've never encountered problems accessing it using Firefox.
I think a good number of sites make users think they won't run in Firefox or other browsers, simply because the site's managers for whatever reason stick those goofy "IE preferred" messages on the home page. For the life of me I can't figure out why as a site manager you would want to make users think they have fewer options than you're actually providing them.
Unfortunately there are some features in certain vertical market web-based tools like LexisNexus and Westlaw that only work with IE. All of the basic features work in Firefox, Safari, et al, but a few of the advanced features do not.
Recently, the US Copyright Office got hammered for creating a website that explicitly supported IE and NS only. The language on the Electronic Copyright Office site says: "The Siebel software, upon which eCO is based, has been successfully tested with Netscape Navigator 7.02 and Internet Explorer 6.0 and may work equally well with other desktop web browsers."
Overall, I think things are trending in the right direction. More and more web developers, even the ones living in their own little bubbles, are starting to grok that building sites around IE (around any single browser, for that matter) is a bad idea.
We have a good system. What it requires is citizen participation. Yes, corporations have money. Yes, politicians are corrupt. But in the last presidential election, only 67% of eligible voters (and that's the most since 1968) turned out. That 2/3 of the electorate voted in Bush despite all the evidence that had accumulated since his election in 2000.
A representative system only works if the people are engaged. The problem is, the people don't want to be engaged. They don't want a smart leader. They don't want to know what's going on in the world. They enjoy watching TV infotainment. They elected the man they felt would be the most fun to take a to a barbeque. Now people are coming out of the woodwork saying they are surprised and dismayed by the actions of the Bush Administration, even though they were willfullly ignorant of his autocratic tendencies in the first four years of his presidency.
We have to point the finger of blame at ourselves, or we're no better than the politicians we elect. Excuses about media bias, corporate power, and so on are ultimately just mechanisms for us as voters (or in many cases, non-voters) to pawn off responsibility on someone else. If we want to fix the system, we need to convince other voters that protection of the balance of powers is of paramount importance, and the rule of law should be more than just a phrase we use when we're invading other countries. We need to do some hard work here at home.
I don't think advertisers are going to go for live spots. For one thing, all it takes is one on-air screw-up to blow an entire ad campaign and wreck an advertiser's credibility. Giant corporations don't advertise because they want to entertain people; they advertise because they think it generates revenue. TV advertisers are for the most part extremely risk-averse organizations, and they want control over the message they broadcast.
As others have noted, product placement is the wave of the future. I wouldn't be surprised if single-sponsor shows started popping up. Now that's a return to the old days. Imagine "The Lords of the Shire" TV sitcom, starring Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and sponsored exclusively by Dr. Scholl's. Hey, I didn't say it would lead to better shows!
Broadcasting is giving way to narrowcasting, and my guess is whether it's on a TV screen, a computer screen, or your iPod screen, advertising in the future is going to be more narrowly focused and less obvious than it is now. Live commercials are exactly the opposite of where commercials are headed.
Then again, wtf do I know? Cuban made zillions by predicting where the Internet business was headed, and I'm just another random Slashdot monkey who thinks he knows what's going on.
It looks like at least a few artists have come to realize that the music industry cartel's stand on DRM is not helpful to artists. If they can get more artists on the bandwagon, they may be able to influence the debate. It's a helluva lot more difficult for the labels to convince people that DRM "helps artists" when the artists themselves are against it.
What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.
Beautifully put. I think it would be fascinating to see a more worthwhile survey, one that takes snapshots of people doing programming-related work 5 years after graduating from college, 10 years after, and 15 years after. Then find out what these programmers studied in college, and how they became programmers.
This makes me think of high school. There were a few kids at our school who were really into business. They took the business class, ran the student store (which, I confess, was a great source of Zots candy, but I digress), and generally made plans to make lots of money. They weren't necessarily the people who became entrepreneurs. In fact, I don't know if any of them did. Most of the really successful entrepreneurs I know got interested in business as a vehicle for making something real. They had an idea and wanted to turn it into a business. They learned business techniques along the way, and in so doing became good at business.
How many humanities majors own their own businesses 10 years after graduation? How many of them are programmers 10 years after graduation? I think these are good questions, and if we had the answers to them, we'd know a lot more about what's really doing on in the US IT market.
What if you terminate the employee for not getting their work done?
It does seem rather obvious, doesn't it? I suppose all this business about unrestricted employee Internet access harming businesses indicates how poorly most companies are managed.
Newspaper, book, goofing off on Slashdot, crossword puzzles, phone gossip, water cooler loitering. The bottom line ought to be: are you getting your work done, or not? Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done.
It seems like managing for outcomes is a helluva lot easier, too. If you're spending time as a manager trying to figure out if your employees are surfing the Web, that's time you could be spending checking your employees' actual work output.
I sent a reply to an email a friend of mine sent me (he is a Verizon customer). I got the same message quoted in this story. I've been corresponding with this friend (him using the same Verizon account, and me the same non-Verizon account) for months.
Many will be happy, but some will invariably complain about some aspect of the reaction or about the poster's sig or about the slashdot community in general.
Point taken.
Re:Someone will find a way to complain about this
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Code Monkey Like Fritos
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I suspect that most of the people who believe this are themselves the tortured artiste type who cannot seperate criticism of their work from criticism of their soul.
Well, you are spot-on about me being a tortured artiste type. I'm glad you were able to quickly identify my classification and get to the heart of the matter.
Actually I wasn't referring to criticism of the music itself. I should have more specifically stated that there will almost always be people ready to complain because the server is Slashdotted, or because the editors even posted the story in the first place, or because of something else. Something in the nature of threaded discussion like Slashdot brings out adversarial comments. That's a good thing, because it leads to thoughtful analysis. But it can also lead to criticism for its own sake, imho.
Dude, get a grip and think about this to brighten your day - Maybe your soul really does just plain suck.
Always a possibility, though I'm not sure how it'll brighten my day. Then again, something tells me you didn't really mean for it to brighten my day anyway.
I've simply noticed lately that despite the abundance of free information and valuable tools that people give away for free, a surprising number of people snipe at the giftgivers for one reason or another. I wanted to see if my theory would be borne out with this story, because it is so clearly a case of someone simply giving something away.
My guess is that a few of the sharpshooters will show up for this one.
Did you get a login page to write as well?
No, but I'm sure I came across sounding like I did. It's probably the weather. I think weeks and weeks of overcast sky are finally driving me to lunacy. Too much time in the virtual world, not enough running around outdoors.
Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it?
Of course it would. All I am saying is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Many people presuppose that the Bush Administration's end goal is a police state. I would argue that the Administration doesn't have the imagination necessary to fight terrorism (or pornography) through more effective means. It sees signal interception of all kinds as a panacea, so it attempts to use this capability whenever it can, even if the tool doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
I think the Bushies believe they are truly doing something that will put a dent in child porn. I also think we give them too much credit when we assume that every move they make is based on shrewd Machiavellian politics. If the record shows anything, it is that this White House has been as effectively managed as the Texas Rangers were managed during Dubya's reign there.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Some how i doubt spying on citzens would satisfy any citizen base?
Plenty of people support wiretapping. I don't, and I doubt most Slashdotters do, but the Slashdot crowd isn't even remotely representative of the overall American electorate. It's hard to believe, but about half the country believes that giving the government more police powers will lead to a more secure nation.
You can say what you like about these people being duped, but at some point you have to concede that the importance of privacy is not a universal constant throughout America. To some people, flag burning, for example, is a much more important issue.
Someone will find a way to complain about this
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Code Monkey Like Fritos
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Guy creates song and distributes it for free. Slashdot picks it up. People post their reactions. Many will be happy, but some will invariably complain about some aspect of the song or about the Creative Commons license or about singing in general.
I think how you react to a work of art that someone has made available for free is a good litmus test of your outlook on life.
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
I am!
This is about the Bush Administration wanting to satisfy its socially conservative base. They don't like child pornography, and they'd like to eliminate it. I see no duplicity in their goal of eliminating child pornography. Their preferred means of fighting child porn simply dovetails with their overall approach to "securing the homeland" from domestic and foreign threats of all kinds. Whenever possible, obtain maximum lattitude to conduct surveillance on Americans and foreign nationals.
The Administration's desire to fight child porn with more surveillance helps them satisfy Bush's core constituents, while furthering his goal of broadening the Executive Branch's surveillance capabilities.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
I'm not sure what you mean by moralism, because every definition I've ever come across is squishy. In fact, many of the definitions call it "judgments about the morality of other people." I assume that is not the meaning you wanted to convey.
Did you simply mean to imply that a person who believes in compromise is inherently relativist, and that those who abide by an unwavering philosophy are morally superior?
Lawyers will proclaim and defend any claim ever made, any act ever committed, any atrocity ever foisted upon mankind -- just as long as they get paid to do so.
True. It's a travesty. Until you are the amoral bastard being accused of something evil, something in opposition to the state, or something against public morality. Then an adversarial system of justice makes a lot more sense.
Until the US figures out how to pull itself out of the death spiral of inflating real estate combined with deflating wages, it is best to find another way to live.
I'm not sure what you're advocating. Should the guy move somewhere else? Try a different career that will somehow be unaffected by economic fluctuations? Head for the hills and become a hermit?
There are infinite levels of complexity in the legal system that can be simplified or eliminated, but since lawyers are currently the ones running everything, that won't happen.
I agree that lawyers aren't likely to be the ones to make the legal system less complex. However, I think it's a natural consequence of living in a more complex society that laws and legal procedure becomes more complicated as well. This is particularly true given that we don't live in a homogeneous society, and we value individual autonomy above all else.
Everyone wants to have the ability to sue for whatever they want, whenever they want, and the legal system gives the people what they want, particularly with regard to torts actions. We can force legislative controls on the legal process, and sometimes that happens. For example, in California the cap on malpractice damages seems meet with approval by most of the voters.
The current complexity in the legal system is in many ways an outgrowth of the liberalization of pleadings and the opening up of the legal system to plaintiffs who otherwise would never have used the courts. One of the side effects of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s was the rise of legal aid. With the courts no longer the realm only of the wealthy, caseloads rose across the board. So there's been a tradeoff of added complexity for added access.
I take your point that a wide range of possibilities exists between the poles of anarchy and current American system of jurisprudence. However, I'm not sure many people think of it that way. The knee-jerk reaction to lawyers has existed ever since there have been lawyers. This is not a new phenomenon. The recent rise of corporate legal firms has worsened people's view of the profession. I think many of those concerns are legitimate, but at the same time I don't believe that simply because litigation takes a long time and lawyers make money at it is cause to believe that somehow the rest of us are getting screwed.
As for me, I'm a nontraditional law student. I've been out in the world for many years, and am coming into the legal field with a different perspective than most of the youngins in my class. They're ready to be molded and indoctrinated into the legal profession, but I'm much more inclined to be sceptical. In particular, I have noticed that my classmates tend to ignore the obvious conflicts of interest in a system where giant corporate law firms have their hands in every cookie jar. At the same time, the American legal system really is an amazing achievement. It is far from perfect, but it is in some respects an amazing construct. This enormous, complex, diverse country sticks together in large part because of that system.
The problem is the question of cause and effect - if we remove copyright much of the economic incentive to produce this abundance would disappear, and we would likely to be facing a great decline in both abundance and quality.
I never said anything about removing copyright, and the example of the Hong Kong film industry is irrelevant to discussions of copyright term length.
When copyright was introduced in the comparatively slow-moving commerce of the nascent United States, the term was 14 years, with a right to extend for 14 more years if the author was alive.
Now we live in a global commerce environment that moves much more swiftly, where tremendous profits are made in days and artistic works can be distributed all over the globe in a matter of weeks. Yet amazingly, the copyright term is now the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years for works under corporate authorship. This came into effect even though the vast majority of copyrighted works provide no revenue to their owners beyond a few years.
This has nothing to do with piracy. United States law in effect says that the ideas of an individual can continue to make money for another party long after the creator dies. It has gone from being an incentive favoring creativity, to an incentive for corporate entities to milk the monetary value of artistic works as long as possible. It is corporate welfare handed out by the government to support established media distribution cartels. They are using legislative action to stave off the collapse of the business models that brought them so much wealth in the 20th century.
As a final note, don't you think it is ironic that Disney, the most powerful promulgator of copyright extension, is using copyright law to extend their exclusive rights to control so many films that originated from the public domain?
Just seems strange.... Intel is the one accused of antitrust violations.... meanwhile the lawyers for the two sides get together and agree that it will take them two or three years to figure it all out.
It's called civil procedure and it is in place to ensure that each side gets an opportunity to bring in all relevant parties, conduct thorough discovery, and reach a decision that isn't arrived at in an arbitrary fashion. It's certainly not perfect, but if you were charged with a violation that could seriously affect your business, you'd want all the facts to be laid out on the table before a judge just arbitrarily swooped in and made a decision based on idle whim.
Sure, lawyers make money when companies have disputes. Perhaps that's just the sad side effect of the rule of law in a complex society. The discovery process in particular takes a very long time because finding all of the pertient information in a suit involving two massive organizations, spanning a period of many years is not easy.
Nobody wants the alternative, a society without laws, where the party that can dish out the most physical violence wins the dispute. Then again, lawyers are convenient scapegoats for all the wrongs of our society. It makes sense. After all, nobody really cares all that much for plumbers until their drain gets backed up.
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
That's not even a roughly accurate analog. Real property is finite. There is only so much real estate on the planet. Ideas are not. Therefore, scarcity of real property exists without any outside involvement by the state or any other actor. Scarcity of intellectual property is a legal construct designed to provide people who create innovative ideas with the ability to profit from them for a short time, in order to spur the development of new ideas, which are beneficial to society as a whole.
The impetus for creation of intellectual property right flowed from the goal to improve society by providing a carrot to innovators. It was government intervention in economics, not the development of a fundamental right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
The public good has not been shown to be served by confiscating physical works of art, which is why in the United States the government can't just come and snatch up that Picasso you have hanging in your den. Intellectual property that primarily serves entertainment purposes is not physical. It is constructed by the legal system, in the same way that any other IP right is constructed. Recorded art in particular is the beneficiary of government largesse.
If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality. If we were talking about the distribution of physical products like silicon chips or automobiles, we'd call this protectionism - government intervention that serves no party but the big businesses being protected. Ultimately, it doesn't even serve them, given that it only shields them from economic forces that should be causing them to alter their business model.
Copyright coverage for a short time does spur creation of new art, but copyright of any duration is always a tradeoff between the previously-existing natural rights of society at large and the artificially-created rights given to the copyright holder.
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'" - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)
Don't be stupid. Microsoft makes most of it's money by licensing Windows to OEM manufacturers.
I understand that MS makes a considerable amount of money by licensing Windows to OEM manufacturers, but I also understand that for many years the hardware upgrade cycle in the Windows world has been influenced by updates to Windows. Over the years many people have purchased new hardware specifically so it could run the latest spiffy new version of Windows. Is it any wonder hardware OEMs are upset?
Now people who have been holding out on buying a new Windows PC have two options: Wait until Vista ships, or buy a box this year with XP, and decide about upgrading at a later date. So at least some portion of those folks will, as you pointed out, not upgrade. Instead, they'll buy a PC now, and stick with XP after Vista ships.
The Q4 buying season is huge. By missing it, Microsoft is slowing down the Vista adoption cycle. By repeatedly missing their target dates, they've sent the message to consumers that they should just buy now, rather than wait for Vista to ship.
You could argue that this doesn't matter, because purchasers are still paying MS the OS license when they buy a computer, whether it's XP or Vista. However, Microsoft's strategy has always been about growth. If they can't get people to adopt Vista at a solid clip, the market will determine that MS has lost its ability to dictate terms to consumers. Changed perceptions will in turn embolden competitors and hurt Microsoft's share prices as well as their ability to negotiate with other companies in all of their ancillary ventures.
Sure, MS is a goliath. But they got that way by letting their opponents make mistakes, while minimizing their own. Now they're in a situation where they're making mistakes, and several of their competitors are executing very well.
eventually the majority of users around the world will be using it.
The real question is how long this shift to Vista will take. MS makes money primarily by leveraging sales of Office and Windows. If it takes many years for owners to shift from XP to Vista, that could adversely affect Microsoft's income, growth, and ultimately, long-term prospects.
Slashdot Mirror
An "IE preferred" message simply means "tested in IE".
I see your point, but it still seems exclusionary by nature. The inference I take from an "IE preferred" message is that for some reason it doesn't work properly in other browsers. In the absence of an "IE preferred" message, I assume the site works as it should, meaning whichever browser I use, I'll be ok.
That depends on the type of site you're maintaining, obviously. I assume you've seen BrowserCam. It's pretty useful, though a bit slow at times. I'm coming from the other end of the spectrum, since I use a Mac to develop websites and don't want to hassle with VirtualPC or buy new hardware just to test sites in Windows. One thing I really like about BrowserCam is that I can test against all kinds of browsers, not just the latest versions of IE.
Um, never? Can you point me to a few of these? I use Firefox all the time and have NEVER encountered one. Yes, not once.
I periodically encounter this problem with password protected sites, usually ones built around some sort of proprietary ASP package. For example, our school extranet (which runs on EResadvises: "Our recommended browser is Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher." That said, I've never encountered problems accessing it using Firefox.
I think a good number of sites make users think they won't run in Firefox or other browsers, simply because the site's managers for whatever reason stick those goofy "IE preferred" messages on the home page. For the life of me I can't figure out why as a site manager you would want to make users think they have fewer options than you're actually providing them.
Unfortunately there are some features in certain vertical market web-based tools like LexisNexus and Westlaw that only work with IE. All of the basic features work in Firefox, Safari, et al, but a few of the advanced features do not.
Recently, the US Copyright Office got hammered for creating a website that explicitly supported IE and NS only. The language on the Electronic Copyright Office site says: "The Siebel software, upon which eCO is based, has been successfully tested with Netscape Navigator 7.02 and Internet Explorer 6.0 and may work equally well with other desktop web browsers."
Overall, I think things are trending in the right direction. More and more web developers, even the ones living in their own little bubbles, are starting to grok that building sites around IE (around any single browser, for that matter) is a bad idea.
Me thinks it time for a bloody revolution again!
We have a good system. What it requires is citizen participation. Yes, corporations have money. Yes, politicians are corrupt. But in the last presidential election, only 67% of eligible voters (and that's the most since 1968) turned out. That 2/3 of the electorate voted in Bush despite all the evidence that had accumulated since his election in 2000.
A representative system only works if the people are engaged. The problem is, the people don't want to be engaged. They don't want a smart leader. They don't want to know what's going on in the world. They enjoy watching TV infotainment. They elected the man they felt would be the most fun to take a to a barbeque. Now people are coming out of the woodwork saying they are surprised and dismayed by the actions of the Bush Administration, even though they were willfullly ignorant of his autocratic tendencies in the first four years of his presidency.
We have to point the finger of blame at ourselves, or we're no better than the politicians we elect. Excuses about media bias, corporate power, and so on are ultimately just mechanisms for us as voters (or in many cases, non-voters) to pawn off responsibility on someone else. If we want to fix the system, we need to convince other voters that protection of the balance of powers is of paramount importance, and the rule of law should be more than just a phrase we use when we're invading other countries. We need to do some hard work here at home.
I don't think advertisers are going to go for live spots. For one thing, all it takes is one on-air screw-up to blow an entire ad campaign and wreck an advertiser's credibility. Giant corporations don't advertise because they want to entertain people; they advertise because they think it generates revenue. TV advertisers are for the most part extremely risk-averse organizations, and they want control over the message they broadcast.
As others have noted, product placement is the wave of the future. I wouldn't be surprised if single-sponsor shows started popping up. Now that's a return to the old days. Imagine "The Lords of the Shire" TV sitcom, starring Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and sponsored exclusively by Dr. Scholl's. Hey, I didn't say it would lead to better shows!
Broadcasting is giving way to narrowcasting, and my guess is whether it's on a TV screen, a computer screen, or your iPod screen, advertising in the future is going to be more narrowly focused and less obvious than it is now. Live commercials are exactly the opposite of where commercials are headed.
Then again, wtf do I know? Cuban made zillions by predicting where the Internet business was headed, and I'm just another random Slashdot monkey who thinks he knows what's going on.
It looks like at least a few artists have come to realize that the music industry cartel's stand on DRM is not helpful to artists. If they can get more artists on the bandwagon, they may be able to influence the debate. It's a helluva lot more difficult for the labels to convince people that DRM "helps artists" when the artists themselves are against it.
What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.
Beautifully put. I think it would be fascinating to see a more worthwhile survey, one that takes snapshots of people doing programming-related work 5 years after graduating from college, 10 years after, and 15 years after. Then find out what these programmers studied in college, and how they became programmers.
This makes me think of high school. There were a few kids at our school who were really into business. They took the business class, ran the student store (which, I confess, was a great source of Zots candy, but I digress), and generally made plans to make lots of money. They weren't necessarily the people who became entrepreneurs. In fact, I don't know if any of them did. Most of the really successful entrepreneurs I know got interested in business as a vehicle for making something real. They had an idea and wanted to turn it into a business. They learned business techniques along the way, and in so doing became good at business.
How many humanities majors own their own businesses 10 years after graduation? How many of them are programmers 10 years after graduation? I think these are good questions, and if we had the answers to them, we'd know a lot more about what's really doing on in the US IT market.
What if you terminate the employee for not getting their work done?
It does seem rather obvious, doesn't it? I suppose all this business about unrestricted employee Internet access harming businesses indicates how poorly most companies are managed.
Newspaper, book, goofing off on Slashdot, crossword puzzles, phone gossip, water cooler loitering. The bottom line ought to be: are you getting your work done, or not? Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done.
It seems like managing for outcomes is a helluva lot easier, too. If you're spending time as a manager trying to figure out if your employees are surfing the Web, that's time you could be spending checking your employees' actual work output.
I sent a reply to an email a friend of mine sent me (he is a Verizon customer). I got the same message quoted in this story. I've been corresponding with this friend (him using the same Verizon account, and me the same non-Verizon account) for months.
Many will be happy, but some will invariably complain about some aspect of the reaction or about the poster's sig or about the slashdot community in general.
Point taken.
I suspect that most of the people who believe this are themselves the tortured artiste type who cannot seperate criticism of their work from criticism of their soul.
Well, you are spot-on about me being a tortured artiste type. I'm glad you were able to quickly identify my classification and get to the heart of the matter.
Actually I wasn't referring to criticism of the music itself. I should have more specifically stated that there will almost always be people ready to complain because the server is Slashdotted, or because the editors even posted the story in the first place, or because of something else. Something in the nature of threaded discussion like Slashdot brings out adversarial comments. That's a good thing, because it leads to thoughtful analysis. But it can also lead to criticism for its own sake, imho.
Dude, get a grip and think about this to brighten your day - Maybe your soul really does just plain suck.
Always a possibility, though I'm not sure how it'll brighten my day. Then again, something tells me you didn't really mean for it to brighten my day anyway.
So far your the only one upset about something.
I've simply noticed lately that despite the abundance of free information and valuable tools that people give away for free, a surprising number of people snipe at the giftgivers for one reason or another. I wanted to see if my theory would be borne out with this story, because it is so clearly a case of someone simply giving something away.
My guess is that a few of the sharpshooters will show up for this one.
Did you get a login page to write as well?
No, but I'm sure I came across sounding like I did. It's probably the weather. I think weeks and weeks of overcast sky are finally driving me to lunacy. Too much time in the virtual world, not enough running around outdoors.
Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it?
Of course it would. All I am saying is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Many people presuppose that the Bush Administration's end goal is a police state. I would argue that the Administration doesn't have the imagination necessary to fight terrorism (or pornography) through more effective means. It sees signal interception of all kinds as a panacea, so it attempts to use this capability whenever it can, even if the tool doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
I think the Bushies believe they are truly doing something that will put a dent in child porn. I also think we give them too much credit when we assume that every move they make is based on shrewd Machiavellian politics. If the record shows anything, it is that this White House has been as effectively managed as the Texas Rangers were managed during Dubya's reign there.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Some how i doubt spying on citzens would satisfy any citizen base?
Plenty of people support wiretapping. I don't, and I doubt most Slashdotters do, but the Slashdot crowd isn't even remotely representative of the overall American electorate. It's hard to believe, but about half the country believes that giving the government more police powers will lead to a more secure nation.
You can say what you like about these people being duped, but at some point you have to concede that the importance of privacy is not a universal constant throughout America. To some people, flag burning, for example, is a much more important issue.
Guy creates song and distributes it for free. Slashdot picks it up. People post their reactions. Many will be happy, but some will invariably complain about some aspect of the song or about the Creative Commons license or about singing in general.
I think how you react to a work of art that someone has made available for free is a good litmus test of your outlook on life.
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
I am!
This is about the Bush Administration wanting to satisfy its socially conservative base. They don't like child pornography, and they'd like to eliminate it. I see no duplicity in their goal of eliminating child pornography. Their preferred means of fighting child porn simply dovetails with their overall approach to "securing the homeland" from domestic and foreign threats of all kinds. Whenever possible, obtain maximum lattitude to conduct surveillance on Americans and foreign nationals.
The Administration's desire to fight child porn with more surveillance helps them satisfy Bush's core constituents, while furthering his goal of broadening the Executive Branch's surveillance capabilities.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
I'm not sure what you mean by moralism, because every definition I've ever come across is squishy. In fact, many of the definitions call it "judgments about the morality of other people." I assume that is not the meaning you wanted to convey.
Did you simply mean to imply that a person who believes in compromise is inherently relativist, and that those who abide by an unwavering philosophy are morally superior?
Lawyers will proclaim and defend any claim ever made, any act ever committed, any atrocity ever foisted upon mankind -- just as long as they get paid to do so.
True. It's a travesty. Until you are the amoral bastard being accused of something evil, something in opposition to the state, or something against public morality. Then an adversarial system of justice makes a lot more sense.
Until the US figures out how to pull itself out of the death spiral of inflating real estate combined with deflating wages, it is best to find another way to live.
I'm not sure what you're advocating. Should the guy move somewhere else? Try a different career that will somehow be unaffected by economic fluctuations? Head for the hills and become a hermit?
There are infinite levels of complexity in the legal system that can be simplified or eliminated, but since lawyers are currently the ones running everything, that won't happen.
I agree that lawyers aren't likely to be the ones to make the legal system less complex. However, I think it's a natural consequence of living in a more complex society that laws and legal procedure becomes more complicated as well. This is particularly true given that we don't live in a homogeneous society, and we value individual autonomy above all else.
Everyone wants to have the ability to sue for whatever they want, whenever they want, and the legal system gives the people what they want, particularly with regard to torts actions. We can force legislative controls on the legal process, and sometimes that happens. For example, in California the cap on malpractice damages seems meet with approval by most of the voters.
The current complexity in the legal system is in many ways an outgrowth of the liberalization of pleadings and the opening up of the legal system to plaintiffs who otherwise would never have used the courts. One of the side effects of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s was the rise of legal aid. With the courts no longer the realm only of the wealthy, caseloads rose across the board. So there's been a tradeoff of added complexity for added access.
I take your point that a wide range of possibilities exists between the poles of anarchy and current American system of jurisprudence. However, I'm not sure many people think of it that way. The knee-jerk reaction to lawyers has existed ever since there have been lawyers. This is not a new phenomenon. The recent rise of corporate legal firms has worsened people's view of the profession. I think many of those concerns are legitimate, but at the same time I don't believe that simply because litigation takes a long time and lawyers make money at it is cause to believe that somehow the rest of us are getting screwed.
As for me, I'm a nontraditional law student. I've been out in the world for many years, and am coming into the legal field with a different perspective than most of the youngins in my class. They're ready to be molded and indoctrinated into the legal profession, but I'm much more inclined to be sceptical. In particular, I have noticed that my classmates tend to ignore the obvious conflicts of interest in a system where giant corporate law firms have their hands in every cookie jar. At the same time, the American legal system really is an amazing achievement. It is far from perfect, but it is in some respects an amazing construct. This enormous, complex, diverse country sticks together in large part because of that system.
The problem is the question of cause and effect - if we remove copyright much of the economic incentive to produce this abundance would disappear, and we would likely to be facing a great decline in both abundance and quality.
I never said anything about removing copyright, and the example of the Hong Kong film industry is irrelevant to discussions of copyright term length.
When copyright was introduced in the comparatively slow-moving commerce of the nascent United States, the term was 14 years, with a right to extend for 14 more years if the author was alive.
Now we live in a global commerce environment that moves much more swiftly, where tremendous profits are made in days and artistic works can be distributed all over the globe in a matter of weeks. Yet amazingly, the copyright term is now the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years for works under corporate authorship. This came into effect even though the vast majority of copyrighted works provide no revenue to their owners beyond a few years.
This has nothing to do with piracy. United States law in effect says that the ideas of an individual can continue to make money for another party long after the creator dies. It has gone from being an incentive favoring creativity, to an incentive for corporate entities to milk the monetary value of artistic works as long as possible. It is corporate welfare handed out by the government to support established media distribution cartels. They are using legislative action to stave off the collapse of the business models that brought them so much wealth in the 20th century.
As a final note, don't you think it is ironic that Disney, the most powerful promulgator of copyright extension, is using copyright law to extend their exclusive rights to control so many films that originated from the public domain?
Just seems strange.... Intel is the one accused of antitrust violations.... meanwhile the lawyers for the two sides get together and agree that it will take them two or three years to figure it all out.
It's called civil procedure and it is in place to ensure that each side gets an opportunity to bring in all relevant parties, conduct thorough discovery, and reach a decision that isn't arrived at in an arbitrary fashion. It's certainly not perfect, but if you were charged with a violation that could seriously affect your business, you'd want all the facts to be laid out on the table before a judge just arbitrarily swooped in and made a decision based on idle whim.
Sure, lawyers make money when companies have disputes. Perhaps that's just the sad side effect of the rule of law in a complex society. The discovery process in particular takes a very long time because finding all of the pertient information in a suit involving two massive organizations, spanning a period of many years is not easy.
Nobody wants the alternative, a society without laws, where the party that can dish out the most physical violence wins the dispute. Then again, lawyers are convenient scapegoats for all the wrongs of our society. It makes sense. After all, nobody really cares all that much for plumbers until their drain gets backed up.
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
That's not even a roughly accurate analog. Real property is finite. There is only so much real estate on the planet. Ideas are not. Therefore, scarcity of real property exists without any outside involvement by the state or any other actor. Scarcity of intellectual property is a legal construct designed to provide people who create innovative ideas with the ability to profit from them for a short time, in order to spur the development of new ideas, which are beneficial to society as a whole.
The impetus for creation of intellectual property right flowed from the goal to improve society by providing a carrot to innovators. It was government intervention in economics, not the development of a fundamental right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
The public good has not been shown to be served by confiscating physical works of art, which is why in the United States the government can't just come and snatch up that Picasso you have hanging in your den. Intellectual property that primarily serves entertainment purposes is not physical. It is constructed by the legal system, in the same way that any other IP right is constructed. Recorded art in particular is the beneficiary of government largesse.
If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality. If we were talking about the distribution of physical products like silicon chips or automobiles, we'd call this protectionism - government intervention that serves no party but the big businesses being protected. Ultimately, it doesn't even serve them, given that it only shields them from economic forces that should be causing them to alter their business model.
Copyright coverage for a short time does spur creation of new art, but copyright of any duration is always a tradeoff between the previously-existing natural rights of society at large and the artificially-created rights given to the copyright holder.
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'" - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)
*ducks*
Sorry, I couldn't resist. It's been a long week, and I've seen one too many speculative articles about Wintelintosh.
Don't be stupid. Microsoft makes most of it's money by licensing Windows to OEM manufacturers.
I understand that MS makes a considerable amount of money by licensing Windows to OEM manufacturers, but I also understand that for many years the hardware upgrade cycle in the Windows world has been influenced by updates to Windows. Over the years many people have purchased new hardware specifically so it could run the latest spiffy new version of Windows. Is it any wonder hardware OEMs are upset?
Now people who have been holding out on buying a new Windows PC have two options: Wait until Vista ships, or buy a box this year with XP, and decide about upgrading at a later date. So at least some portion of those folks will, as you pointed out, not upgrade. Instead, they'll buy a PC now, and stick with XP after Vista ships.
The Q4 buying season is huge. By missing it, Microsoft is slowing down the Vista adoption cycle. By repeatedly missing their target dates, they've sent the message to consumers that they should just buy now, rather than wait for Vista to ship.
You could argue that this doesn't matter, because purchasers are still paying MS the OS license when they buy a computer, whether it's XP or Vista. However, Microsoft's strategy has always been about growth. If they can't get people to adopt Vista at a solid clip, the market will determine that MS has lost its ability to dictate terms to consumers. Changed perceptions will in turn embolden competitors and hurt Microsoft's share prices as well as their ability to negotiate with other companies in all of their ancillary ventures.
Sure, MS is a goliath. But they got that way by letting their opponents make mistakes, while minimizing their own. Now they're in a situation where they're making mistakes, and several of their competitors are executing very well.
eventually the majority of users around the world will be using it.
The real question is how long this shift to Vista will take. MS makes money primarily by leveraging sales of Office and Windows. If it takes many years for owners to shift from XP to Vista, that could adversely affect Microsoft's income, growth, and ultimately, long-term prospects.