The key thing about a commodity is that they are 100% fungible. Each one is just as good as the next.
I understand what a commodity is, but perhaps I didn't explain its effects in the OSS realm well enough. Of course software will likely never become a commodity in the manner of, say, pork bellies. I doubt software in its entirety will ever become commoditized, but the forces of commoditization can be a spur to innovation in software. As the bottom end of software complexity becomes commoditized, competition at the top end is enhanced.
Imagine a situation where company M controls the market for a type of software that allows users to create and edit documents, work with numbers, and make presentations on screen. Let's call company M's implementation of this software O.
O began dominating the market years ago, and has had a lock on it for at least a decade. The art of software development has progressed quite a bit in that decade, but O has no real competition. So in order to get people to buy O, M has to add more and more features, 90% of which are never used by customers. It's essentially purely a marketing-driven product, because the value customers derive from it has remained essentially flat for years. The price for O remains relatively high, even though the relative difficulty involved in creating software of this type is lower than it was ten years ago.
Along comes an OSS project. We'll call it F. The developers of F are able to create a rough equivalent of O with far less effort than it took M to create O. Then another OSS project, we'll call it G, does something similar. Now O has competition, and M has to come up with something truly innovative, in the form of an entirely new class of application, more intuitive and useful features, etc. Thus, because the software that M once created has become more of a commodity, M is forced to innovate.
OSS fosters innovation specifically because it is best at converting that which used to be cutting-edge into a commodity. Software developers are thus forced to innovate even more than under a system that precludes OSS.
I've heard many things about the RIAA, but never that they have any connections to the Mob. Are there any books or websites that discuss this? I'm curious if your statement is based on hearsay or anything documented.
Open source doesn't have imagination or innovation, yet is likely to put innovators out of business? This makes no sense. OSS will tend to put non-innovators out of business IMO, while innovators will still be able to sell proprietary software because of their innovations.
So true! I'll just expand on that slightly. OSS is a force for commoditization. It is when industry leaders are allowed to rest on their laurels (American automobile industry, anyone?) that innovation disappears. When there are relentless forces pushing existing technology toward commodity status, market leaders are forced to innovate.
With that in mind, it is baffling to me that free market advocates don't embrace OSS as a non-regulatory means of avoiding anti-competitive monopoly situations. Does anyone really believe that the emergence of OSS hasn't forced Oracle, Microsoft, et. al. to provide at least some products and services that they wouldn't have otherwise offered?
John Lasseter could learn a few things about creativity from this man.
I think Miyazaki has creativity in spades, but I'm curious why you're bashing on Lasseter. I've been impressed by his creativity ever since the early days of Pixar, and I've been even more impressed by his ability to bring interesting and nuanced stories to the big screen. Getting anything even remotely intelligent through the Hollywood system is extremely difficult.
So is your criticism of Lasseter based on the plot of his stories, or the animation of Pixar films, or something else? Maybe I'm missing something. Miyazaki is obviously fantastic, but I don't think that means there can't be any other creative people in mainstream animation.
And I think almost everyone who cares about music would agree that the music business is deeply flawed in its current incarnation. I'm not blaming artists for the state of the industry. But if artists don't take charge of the industry and make it more artist-centric, who will? Where is the collective voice of artists? Where are the big-money artists who are not just talking about changing the industry, but actually doing something about it?
It is FUCKING DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE to market and sell yourself as musician. That's why musicians still rely on labels to deal with those burdens.
No doubt. Marketing anything is difficult and expensive. But the big labels don't really know much about actual music, or about art, or about what people want to hear. They continuously underestimate the public and overestimate their own predictive powers. They're bad at the very things they purport to be good at. Why go back to them again and again for continued abuse?
Slashdot nerds seem to buy into the notion that the internet is some cure-all for the music business. Distribution is only one piece of the problem..
Reliance on distribution of recorded music in any form may be the main problem. What did musicians do before the advent of the phonograph? They played live music. Some musicians still play live music and make a decent living at it. They sell their own CDs at gigs and rely on word of mouth marketing. Performing live isn't for everyone, but I'm not sure there's anything written in stone which dictates that musicians will always and forever be able to make money from recorded music.
I'm not sure if it would be better or worse for musicians and society at large, but if live performances actually drove the market, we might see the balance of power shifting back to artists. As it stands in the Album Era, artists are obviously getting screwed, but too few of them are really trying to reshape the industry in any meaninful structural way.
D'oh! I'm having a tough time dislodging my foot from my mouth.
I do hope and suspect that you are better at financial analysis than the usual suspects in the computer world are at predicting events in the technology market.
My point is that often people listen to the same analysts, even after they screw up repeatedly. There is no easy mechanism for most average readers to determine whether someone like Bajarin or Thomson has a good record or a bad record of prior analysis. To a surprising degree, on anything but softball questions, a lot of people who write analysis pieces in the computer press get things wrong. Yet they keep on writing, and people keep on paying to read their opinions.
if the business model was every actually looked at instead of just blindly protected.
I am also surprised that nobody pays more attention to this. There's an elephant in the room, and nobody wants to believe it exists. Musicians are just as much a part of the problem as the RIAA. Why? Because musicians buy into the notion that they should sign with a label, have the label pay for everything, and receive whatever the label feels fit to give them in return.
Essentially everyone (musicians, labels, consumers) has bought into the notion that the huge crapshoot that the music industry has established, wherein a small minority of music gets major backing and the rest is given limited exposure at best, is a rational marketplace. If musicians in aggregate were less interested in becoming big stars, and more interested in making music and being justly compensated for it, the labels would lose all leverage over artists. For every Madonna there are 99 acts that got signed and never made any real money, because the labels were running a company store setup. The message has been put out by Courtney Love, Janis Ian, et. al. for years now. You have to be blind and deaf not to know that this is the system.
There is no longer any need for the enormous middleman structure that sustains the music industry. Hardly anyone is satisfied with the music being generated by the big labels. There are plenty of musicians who are content to play music and have more control over how their music is distributed. When the majority of musicians accept that a business model built on bloated middlemen is not in their best interests, the rest of us will benefit as well.
Did anybody else notice that Jobs in his keynote addressed why they're switching to Intel, and now however many weeks later the analysts put pen to paper and write down what he said as the reason they think they're switching?
They're analysts. They're smarter than us. Examples:
"I believe this is a purely negotiating move by Apple to grab some attention and headlines and to point out that they're feeling underappreciated by IBM" - Evin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"You just wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do something that disruptive.'' - analyst Tim Bajarin, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"Stick a fork in 'em - this Apple is cooked." Robert Thomson, Financial Post, 2/20/2003
"For those who love Apple's products, this is all just so typical. This company has made an art of innovation -- from the personal computer itself to the point-and-click operating system -- only to invariably surrender the high sales ground to the boring knock-off artists who copy Apple's best ideas into a new and slightly cheaper model. So it's not surprising Wall Street is already bracing for another disappointment." - Steve Maich, Macleans.ca, 2005/05/09
Count David Goldstein, president of the Dallas-based growth-strategy consulting firm Channel Marketing Corp., among the critics of Apple's retail plans. "It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for them to open retail stores," he says. - May 01, 2001 Macworld Magazine
I collect quotes like these, to remind myself why trusting analysts about anything is generally unwise.
The only thing respected here is copying someone else's innovation as cheaply as possible.
I've been on Slashdot for a while (obviously not as long as you), but I don't see copying innovation as the dominant meme here. Slashdotters tend to disagree on most things, with a few exceptions, which are:
Microsoft is generally a force that has become too powerful for the good of the computer industry, except when they provide viable competition for Google.
Apple is generally an innovative (therefore good) force, except when their Open Source licensing doesn't sit right, or when they sue the crap out of people.
Google is the cat's meow, except now they're more like a lion, and they have the potential to own the world, so Slashdotters are more watchful of them now.
Those (CherryOS) who take the work of others and try to present it as their own should be served heaping piles of dogshit.
Those who reverse-engineer or modify existing technology in some way not forseen by or approved of by the manufacturer are renegade heroes.
Linux is awesome. Linus is awesome. RMS is a pain in the ass, but he came up with the GPL, so he deserves to be listened to.
Companies that innovate should do so in a fashion that doesn't preclude other companies and individuals from creating their own innovations. This is where your notion of contempt for innovation arises. My take on it is that the Slashdot community in general gets pissed off when companies produce crippleware, or use patents to unfairly shut off competition. It's not because people here don't want to award innovation; it's because by the Slashdot definition, innovation does not include exclusion.
I've noticed in the past that MSN Search picked up my blog entries very well, while Google missed them altogether. You're definitely right that MS got the jump on Google. I think that's actually a good thing. Google needs the competition.
Simply from the fact that our society praises the biggest, strongest, and most beautiful.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. People enjoy watching other humans do incredible things with their bodies. Even people who aren't sports nuts enjoy watching the Olympics simply because it's amazing to see someone run that fast, or be that graceful. There is an element in athletics of pushing beyond normal human boundaries, and in a half-human, half-machine endeavor like computer gaming there just isn't the same purity.
You could say that gamers are somehow using their brains more than athletes, but I don't buy that one. Any athlete at the top eschelon of a sport can tell you that they are making many important decisions each second.
Chess, which is heralded in Western society as the most pure expression of brain-on-brain combat, is popular specifically because of its purity. There is no chance, and nothing stands between you and your opponent.
So while traditional athletic events are pure expressions of physical prowess and thinking on your feet, and chess is a pure expression of raw brain power, computer gaming seems to occupy a fuzzier area. That's not to say that truly skilled gamers aren't extremely talented, but I don't think it generates the same level of raw human connection as athletics or head-to-head brain games like chess.
Google or M$ will more then likely just buy Technorati.
I'm not so sure about that. If Google is already developing their own blog search and already runs Blogger. MS might be interested in Technorati, but I think they're trying to actually develop blog and search tools on their own, just to prove they can do it.
Apple wants to be sure they don't get boxed out by mobile carriers, all of whom want to take away business from iTunes. Apple would rather not make a device that as others have mentioned, is a jack of all trades, master of none. But they're compelled to enter this market as a defensive move. If by some good fortune the ROKR takes off, they'll capitalize on it. If the carriers are all wrong in their bet that mobile phones will unseat MP3 players like the iPod (and I think they are wrong), Apple hasn't invested an arm and a leg in the venture.
I see the ROKR as proof that Apple has become much more adept at business strategy than it was back in the 1990s. People have been screaming for a hybrid phone/iPod for some time now, and Apple has given them what they want. They haven't placed a huge bet on it, and they're letting Motorola do the heavy lifting (which is a long time coming). I say smart move Apple.
After all, they've got a Chief Accountability Officer:
Meria J. Carstarphen, the chief accountability officer, said that D.C. STARS has great potential and that some of the glitches are attributable to long-standing problems with the city's technology infrastructure.
I think that tells you something about the structure of the DC school district. A chief accountability officer? WTF? Is this because the other O-level folks don't have to practice accountability, or is it because they're simply used to having to defend themselves against charges of incompetence?
They've frequently had problems getting the school year to start on time. Back when I lived in DC, it was because of asbestos in the buildings, but there have been other reasons.
The city government as a whole has been a joke for as long as anyone can remember, so it's probably unfair to blame the school district alone. But somehow this late discovery that Apache really doesn't work best with Windows doesn't surprise me, given the source.
Perhaps a study which took a formerly-inconspicuous CEO's salary, and calculated that it wasted more company money than, say, 40 days' solid slacking by a typical employee. Released one week before his pay review, and pushed into a major newspaper.
She's not inconspicuous, but Carly Fiorina certainly got a great deal when she was fired. Here's an analysis of her severance package. Note at the bottom of the page the comparison between Fiorina and a US Army general. The Army general makes about 10 times more than a private does. Apply that to H-P, and the lowest hire at H-P would be making $370k per year.
Ten-to-one seems like a pretty broad divide between the highest-paid and the lowest paid. But in corporate America that's an absurdly low ratio. I'm sure there are plenty of people working at H-P who make $35k per year. Fiorina made $3.5M in 2004. So she made 100x the salary of an entry-level person at the company she ran (I know $35k is a high-side estimate).
Here's the question we need to ask ourselves. Are the Brahmins who run American business really *so* good that they deserve salaries 100x greater than those of their employees? You might be able to make the case that they are, for example in the case of a Gates or a Jobs or a Welch. But the problem is that top-level execs are getting enormous salares *whether they actually produce or not*.
I have no problem with people making scads of money. But America is going to get buried if we don't start tying executive compensation to actual performance. Judge me by my performance, by all means. Don't watch what I email or worry about whether I'm surfing the Web too much. If I'm fucking up and not producing, fire me. But use the same approach at the executive level, too.
Of course, this sort of equitable approach won't come to pass until American boards of directors are reformed. They continue to be filled with, you guessed it, O-level people from other companies. They want to keep executive compensation obscenely high, so none of them votes against huge pay packages.
This sort of thing isn't something the government should get involved in, imho. The market will likely do it for us. American companies will either adopt, by cutting fat at the top, or they'll get blown out of the water by competitors who are organizationally flatter and better at trimming executive waste.
"The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit."
Because of course every worker is supposed to be productive every minute of every work day. We're primates! We were not built to work eight or nine hours a day at the same pace and intensity. If you want that sort of efficiency use robots.
Seriously. There are plenty of jobs where robots would be better suited to the task. When you're talking about office jobs, there's simply no way for human beings to be productive all the time. Due to the fact that we are social creatures, many of the best insights and increases in overall productivity in the white collar environment (and in blue collar jobs too, from my limited experience) actually happen when people are standing around chatting, or even when their minds are allowed to wander off a bit while they goof off.
I understand that businesses always want their employees to be as productive as possible, but this notion of "lost productivity" is a canard, built on a baseline assumption of 60 minutes an hour of productivity per worker. In reality when you pay people an hourly wage, you know you're not paying for 100% efficiency. If you're a smart employer, you try to keep your employees happy, and you reward actual work results.
The mentality that workers should be monitored (all your emails and web browsing are belong to us!) stems from the same idiotic view of employer/employee relations. Hey, here's an idea: Why don't companies actually train their managers in *leadership* so they know what their employees are doing?
If Employee A is getting a lot of excellent work done, should we really care if he's being productive 100% of every hour on the job? In my experience the person who seems to be working the hardest is usually the one who is not getting the most work done. Eventually that person is also the one who poisons the work environment because their mindless buzzing about to and fro raises the stress level for everyone else. The only way to measure real productivity is by measuring worker output. Even then, you run into all kinds of problems quantifying output, because quality and quantity are often totally unrelated and difficult to evaluate as aspects of overall output.
I want to see someone quantify how many wasted hours CEOs create with about-face decisions, late decisions, and "make work" plans. I want to see a study of how many wasted hours are the product of incompetent people being placed into management positions. I want to see how many wasted hours are created through mid-level manager infighting.
Sorry, I'm having a pissy day. But this is just the most absurd quote, particularly on Labor Day.
Not every new service has to be a brand spanking new innovation. Otherwise we wouldn't have multiple car manufacturers, musicians, architectural jobs, or any other overlapping producers.
He's right, of course. You don't have to like Microsoft to understand this. Please, moderators, don't use your power to bash on people whose views don't align with yours. Use them to discourage ad hominem attacks and encourage intelligent discourse. If I had any mod points, I'd give ScentCone a +1 Insightful for what is obviously a well reasoned post.
Perhaps, but it's a playground argument with big ramifications for both companies (for AMD in particular). They've been at it in the courts for years, but not without some consequences. As the article notes, a settlement in 1995 gave AMD the right to develop chips based on the Intel x86 design.
What I find interesting is Balto's claim that Intel is taking this suit very seriously and that it could take three or four years to litigate. That's got to be a big distraction in money and effort for both companies.
Anyway, I predict that in 35 years the pendulum will have swung. The zeal of the war on piracy will have gone too far for too long, and people will fight back. Sure, the fight will start with copyleft, as it already has begun to do so, but once copyleft has won the establishment will be forced to move in the opposite direction, and lessen the stranglehold of copyright laws.
I agree. It's not in fashion here on Slashdot to actually be optimistic about the mechanisms of change in a representative government. But what people keep forgetting is that the American government was deliberately set up to move slowly on issues of major import. Sometimes that slow pace seems good (when people are trying to overturn something you like), and sometimes it seems bad (when you're trying to turn the tide and it's difficult to do so), but it's that way for good reason.
People are already starting to fight back. Lessig, McLeod, and others are writing about copyright excesses. There are a handfull of Representatives in Congress who really understand what's going on, and they're trying to educate their peers. We lost the Eldred case at the Supreme Court, but that's certainly not the end of the road.
Why shouldn't copyright holders be able to continue to profit from the results of their labor.
The question is whether that right is indefinite in duration. The Constitution is very clear about this point: The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. The benefit to the creators of copyrighted material is meant to be balanced against the right of society at large to benefit from the copyrighted material. You are a part of society before you create and copyright something.
You are not an island, and your ability to create is contingent on being part of a society that encourages entrepreneurial creativity. But in order for that creativity to function, copyrights are limited in duration. The limited duration is intended to keep creators from developing copyrighted material then sitting on it, milking it and squeezing out opportunities for other creative uses. Your right to copyright should not ultimately crowd out the rights of others to create by drawing from the culture around them. But it is incredibly difficult to make any sort of creative work these days without potentially running afoul of someone's copyright. That limits creativity and ultimately makes for a less dynamic economy for creators and a less vibrant culture.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand what a commodity is, but perhaps I didn't explain its effects in the OSS realm well enough. Of course software will likely never become a commodity in the manner of, say, pork bellies. I doubt software in its entirety will ever become commoditized, but the forces of commoditization can be a spur to innovation in software. As the bottom end of software complexity becomes commoditized, competition at the top end is enhanced.
Imagine a situation where company M controls the market for a type of software that allows users to create and edit documents, work with numbers, and make presentations on screen. Let's call company M's implementation of this software O.
O began dominating the market years ago, and has had a lock on it for at least a decade. The art of software development has progressed quite a bit in that decade, but O has no real competition. So in order to get people to buy O, M has to add more and more features, 90% of which are never used by customers. It's essentially purely a marketing-driven product, because the value customers derive from it has remained essentially flat for years. The price for O remains relatively high, even though the relative difficulty involved in creating software of this type is lower than it was ten years ago.
Along comes an OSS project. We'll call it F. The developers of F are able to create a rough equivalent of O with far less effort than it took M to create O. Then another OSS project, we'll call it G, does something similar. Now O has competition, and M has to come up with something truly innovative, in the form of an entirely new class of application, more intuitive and useful features, etc. Thus, because the software that M once created has become more of a commodity, M is forced to innovate.
OSS fosters innovation specifically because it is best at converting that which used to be cutting-edge into a commodity. Software developers are thus forced to innovate even more than under a system that precludes OSS.
I've heard many things about the RIAA, but never that they have any connections to the Mob. Are there any books or websites that discuss this? I'm curious if your statement is based on hearsay or anything documented.
So true! I'll just expand on that slightly. OSS is a force for commoditization. It is when industry leaders are allowed to rest on their laurels (American automobile industry, anyone?) that innovation disappears. When there are relentless forces pushing existing technology toward commodity status, market leaders are forced to innovate.
With that in mind, it is baffling to me that free market advocates don't embrace OSS as a non-regulatory means of avoiding anti-competitive monopoly situations. Does anyone really believe that the emergence of OSS hasn't forced Oracle, Microsoft, et. al. to provide at least some products and services that they wouldn't have otherwise offered?
I think Miyazaki has creativity in spades, but I'm curious why you're bashing on Lasseter. I've been impressed by his creativity ever since the early days of Pixar, and I've been even more impressed by his ability to bring interesting and nuanced stories to the big screen. Getting anything even remotely intelligent through the Hollywood system is extremely difficult.
So is your criticism of Lasseter based on the plot of his stories, or the animation of Pixar films, or something else? Maybe I'm missing something. Miyazaki is obviously fantastic, but I don't think that means there can't be any other creative people in mainstream animation.
And I think almost everyone who cares about music would agree that the music business is deeply flawed in its current incarnation. I'm not blaming artists for the state of the industry. But if artists don't take charge of the industry and make it more artist-centric, who will? Where is the collective voice of artists? Where are the big-money artists who are not just talking about changing the industry, but actually doing something about it?
It is FUCKING DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE to market and sell yourself as musician. That's why musicians still rely on labels to deal with those burdens.
No doubt. Marketing anything is difficult and expensive. But the big labels don't really know much about actual music, or about art, or about what people want to hear. They continuously underestimate the public and overestimate their own predictive powers. They're bad at the very things they purport to be good at. Why go back to them again and again for continued abuse?
Slashdot nerds seem to buy into the notion that the internet is some cure-all for the music business. Distribution is only one piece of the problem..
Reliance on distribution of recorded music in any form may be the main problem. What did musicians do before the advent of the phonograph? They played live music. Some musicians still play live music and make a decent living at it. They sell their own CDs at gigs and rely on word of mouth marketing. Performing live isn't for everyone, but I'm not sure there's anything written in stone which dictates that musicians will always and forever be able to make money from recorded music.
I'm not sure if it would be better or worse for musicians and society at large, but if live performances actually drove the market, we might see the balance of power shifting back to artists. As it stands in the Album Era, artists are obviously getting screwed, but too few of them are really trying to reshape the industry in any meaninful structural way.
D'oh! I'm having a tough time dislodging my foot from my mouth.
I do hope and suspect that you are better at financial analysis than the usual suspects in the computer world are at predicting events in the technology market.
My point is that often people listen to the same analysts, even after they screw up repeatedly. There is no easy mechanism for most average readers to determine whether someone like Bajarin or Thomson has a good record or a bad record of prior analysis. To a surprising degree, on anything but softball questions, a lot of people who write analysis pieces in the computer press get things wrong. Yet they keep on writing, and people keep on paying to read their opinions.
I am also surprised that nobody pays more attention to this. There's an elephant in the room, and nobody wants to believe it exists. Musicians are just as much a part of the problem as the RIAA. Why? Because musicians buy into the notion that they should sign with a label, have the label pay for everything, and receive whatever the label feels fit to give them in return.
Essentially everyone (musicians, labels, consumers) has bought into the notion that the huge crapshoot that the music industry has established, wherein a small minority of music gets major backing and the rest is given limited exposure at best, is a rational marketplace. If musicians in aggregate were less interested in becoming big stars, and more interested in making music and being justly compensated for it, the labels would lose all leverage over artists. For every Madonna there are 99 acts that got signed and never made any real money, because the labels were running a company store setup. The message has been put out by Courtney Love, Janis Ian, et. al. for years now. You have to be blind and deaf not to know that this is the system.
There is no longer any need for the enormous middleman structure that sustains the music industry. Hardly anyone is satisfied with the music being generated by the big labels. There are plenty of musicians who are content to play music and have more control over how their music is distributed. When the majority of musicians accept that a business model built on bloated middlemen is not in their best interests, the rest of us will benefit as well.
They're analysts. They're smarter than us. Examples:
"I believe this is a purely negotiating move by Apple to grab some attention and headlines and to point out that they're feeling underappreciated by IBM" - Evin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"You just wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do something that disruptive.'' - analyst Tim Bajarin, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"Stick a fork in 'em - this Apple is cooked." Robert Thomson, Financial Post, 2/20/2003
"For those who love Apple's products, this is all just so typical. This company has made an art of innovation -- from the personal computer itself to the point-and-click operating system -- only to invariably surrender the high sales ground to the boring knock-off artists who copy Apple's best ideas into a new and slightly cheaper model. So it's not surprising Wall Street is already bracing for another disappointment." - Steve Maich, Macleans.ca, 2005/05/09
Count David Goldstein, president of the Dallas-based growth-strategy consulting firm Channel Marketing Corp., among the critics of Apple's retail plans. "It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for them to open retail stores," he says. - May 01, 2001 Macworld Magazine
I collect quotes like these, to remind myself why trusting analysts about anything is generally unwise.
True. I can't tell you how many times clueless Valleys have cut me off when I'm about to drop in. I feel no compuction in slicing their boards.
*ducks*
I've been on Slashdot for a while (obviously not as long as you), but I don't see copying innovation as the dominant meme here. Slashdotters tend to disagree on most things, with a few exceptions, which are:
Microsoft is generally a force that has become too powerful for the good of the computer industry, except when they provide viable competition for Google.
Apple is generally an innovative (therefore good) force, except when their Open Source licensing doesn't sit right, or when they sue the crap out of people.
Google is the cat's meow, except now they're more like a lion, and they have the potential to own the world, so Slashdotters are more watchful of them now.
Those (CherryOS) who take the work of others and try to present it as their own should be served heaping piles of dogshit.
Those who reverse-engineer or modify existing technology in some way not forseen by or approved of by the manufacturer are renegade heroes.
Linux is awesome. Linus is awesome. RMS is a pain in the ass, but he came up with the GPL, so he deserves to be listened to.
Companies that innovate should do so in a fashion that doesn't preclude other companies and individuals from creating their own innovations. This is where your notion of contempt for innovation arises. My take on it is that the Slashdot community in general gets pissed off when companies produce crippleware, or use patents to unfairly shut off competition. It's not because people here don't want to award innovation; it's because by the Slashdot definition, innovation does not include exclusion.
I've noticed in the past that MSN Search picked up my blog entries very well, while Google missed them altogether. You're definitely right that MS got the jump on Google. I think that's actually a good thing. Google needs the competition.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. People enjoy watching other humans do incredible things with their bodies. Even people who aren't sports nuts enjoy watching the Olympics simply because it's amazing to see someone run that fast, or be that graceful. There is an element in athletics of pushing beyond normal human boundaries, and in a half-human, half-machine endeavor like computer gaming there just isn't the same purity.
You could say that gamers are somehow using their brains more than athletes, but I don't buy that one. Any athlete at the top eschelon of a sport can tell you that they are making many important decisions each second.
Chess, which is heralded in Western society as the most pure expression of brain-on-brain combat, is popular specifically because of its purity. There is no chance, and nothing stands between you and your opponent.
So while traditional athletic events are pure expressions of physical prowess and thinking on your feet, and chess is a pure expression of raw brain power, computer gaming seems to occupy a fuzzier area. That's not to say that truly skilled gamers aren't extremely talented, but I don't think it generates the same level of raw human connection as athletics or head-to-head brain games like chess.
I'm not so sure about that. If Google is already developing their own blog search and already runs Blogger. MS might be interested in Technorati, but I think they're trying to actually develop blog and search tools on their own, just to prove they can do it.
I am the King of the World! *croak*
Thanks for clearing that up. Definitely makes more sense now, particularly given what the GAO does.
I see the ROKR as proof that Apple has become much more adept at business strategy than it was back in the 1990s. People have been screaming for a hybrid phone/iPod for some time now, and Apple has given them what they want. They haven't placed a huge bet on it, and they're letting Motorola do the heavy lifting (which is a long time coming). I say smart move Apple.
Meria J. Carstarphen, the chief accountability officer, said that D.C. STARS has great potential and that some of the glitches are attributable to long-standing problems with the city's technology infrastructure.
I think that tells you something about the structure of the DC school district. A chief accountability officer? WTF? Is this because the other O-level folks don't have to practice accountability, or is it because they're simply used to having to defend themselves against charges of incompetence?
They've frequently had problems getting the school year to start on time. Back when I lived in DC, it was because of asbestos in the buildings, but there have been other reasons.
The city government as a whole has been a joke for as long as anyone can remember, so it's probably unfair to blame the school district alone. But somehow this late discovery that Apache really doesn't work best with Windows doesn't surprise me, given the source.
So I won't say it.
She's not inconspicuous, but Carly Fiorina certainly got a great deal when she was fired. Here's an analysis of her severance package. Note at the bottom of the page the comparison between Fiorina and a US Army general. The Army general makes about 10 times more than a private does. Apply that to H-P, and the lowest hire at H-P would be making $370k per year.
Ten-to-one seems like a pretty broad divide between the highest-paid and the lowest paid. But in corporate America that's an absurdly low ratio. I'm sure there are plenty of people working at H-P who make $35k per year. Fiorina made $3.5M in 2004. So she made 100x the salary of an entry-level person at the company she ran (I know $35k is a high-side estimate).
Here's the question we need to ask ourselves. Are the Brahmins who run American business really *so* good that they deserve salaries 100x greater than those of their employees? You might be able to make the case that they are, for example in the case of a Gates or a Jobs or a Welch. But the problem is that top-level execs are getting enormous salares *whether they actually produce or not*.
I have no problem with people making scads of money. But America is going to get buried if we don't start tying executive compensation to actual performance. Judge me by my performance, by all means. Don't watch what I email or worry about whether I'm surfing the Web too much. If I'm fucking up and not producing, fire me. But use the same approach at the executive level, too.
Of course, this sort of equitable approach won't come to pass until American boards of directors are reformed. They continue to be filled with, you guessed it, O-level people from other companies. They want to keep executive compensation obscenely high, so none of them votes against huge pay packages.
This sort of thing isn't something the government should get involved in, imho. The market will likely do it for us. American companies will either adopt, by cutting fat at the top, or they'll get blown out of the water by competitors who are organizationally flatter and better at trimming executive waste.
Because of course every worker is supposed to be productive every minute of every work day. We're primates! We were not built to work eight or nine hours a day at the same pace and intensity. If you want that sort of efficiency use robots.
Seriously. There are plenty of jobs where robots would be better suited to the task. When you're talking about office jobs, there's simply no way for human beings to be productive all the time. Due to the fact that we are social creatures, many of the best insights and increases in overall productivity in the white collar environment (and in blue collar jobs too, from my limited experience) actually happen when people are standing around chatting, or even when their minds are allowed to wander off a bit while they goof off.
I understand that businesses always want their employees to be as productive as possible, but this notion of "lost productivity" is a canard, built on a baseline assumption of 60 minutes an hour of productivity per worker. In reality when you pay people an hourly wage, you know you're not paying for 100% efficiency. If you're a smart employer, you try to keep your employees happy, and you reward actual work results.
The mentality that workers should be monitored (all your emails and web browsing are belong to us!) stems from the same idiotic view of employer/employee relations. Hey, here's an idea: Why don't companies actually train their managers in *leadership* so they know what their employees are doing?
If Employee A is getting a lot of excellent work done, should we really care if he's being productive 100% of every hour on the job? In my experience the person who seems to be working the hardest is usually the one who is not getting the most work done. Eventually that person is also the one who poisons the work environment because their mindless buzzing about to and fro raises the stress level for everyone else. The only way to measure real productivity is by measuring worker output. Even then, you run into all kinds of problems quantifying output, because quality and quantity are often totally unrelated and difficult to evaluate as aspects of overall output.
I want to see someone quantify how many wasted hours CEOs create with about-face decisions, late decisions, and "make work" plans. I want to see a study of how many wasted hours are the product of incompetent people being placed into management positions. I want to see how many wasted hours are created through mid-level manager infighting.
Sorry, I'm having a pissy day. But this is just the most absurd quote, particularly on Labor Day.
He's right, of course. You don't have to like Microsoft to understand this. Please, moderators, don't use your power to bash on people whose views don't align with yours. Use them to discourage ad hominem attacks and encourage intelligent discourse. If I had any mod points, I'd give ScentCone a +1 Insightful for what is obviously a well reasoned post.
Perhaps, but it's a playground argument with big ramifications for both companies (for AMD in particular). They've been at it in the courts for years, but not without some consequences. As the article notes, a settlement in 1995 gave AMD the right to develop chips based on the Intel x86 design.
What I find interesting is Balto's claim that Intel is taking this suit very seriously and that it could take three or four years to litigate. That's got to be a big distraction in money and effort for both companies.
I agree. It's not in fashion here on Slashdot to actually be optimistic about the mechanisms of change in a representative government. But what people keep forgetting is that the American government was deliberately set up to move slowly on issues of major import. Sometimes that slow pace seems good (when people are trying to overturn something you like), and sometimes it seems bad (when you're trying to turn the tide and it's difficult to do so), but it's that way for good reason.
People are already starting to fight back. Lessig, McLeod, and others are writing about copyright excesses. There are a handfull of Representatives in Congress who really understand what's going on, and they're trying to educate their peers. We lost the Eldred case at the Supreme Court, but that's certainly not the end of the road.
The question is whether that right is indefinite in duration. The Constitution is very clear about this point: The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. The benefit to the creators of copyrighted material is meant to be balanced against the right of society at large to benefit from the copyrighted material. You are a part of society before you create and copyright something.
You are not an island, and your ability to create is contingent on being part of a society that encourages entrepreneurial creativity. But in order for that creativity to function, copyrights are limited in duration. The limited duration is intended to keep creators from developing copyrighted material then sitting on it, milking it and squeezing out opportunities for other creative uses. Your right to copyright should not ultimately crowd out the rights of others to create by drawing from the culture around them. But it is incredibly difficult to make any sort of creative work these days without potentially running afoul of someone's copyright. That limits creativity and ultimately makes for a less dynamic economy for creators and a less vibrant culture.