Here's a figure for you. According to this analysis, "... owners have doubled their share of royalties, even though the marginal cost of manufacturing has fallen to almost zero."
It seems the greed factor is running just as high as ever in the music industry, even in the face of a radically changing environment. These guys seem to think that it's their God-given right to continue to make more and more money while providing less and less value to customers.
Agreed. I'm doing that exact thing right now with some CSS -routing around IE after having built it for standards-compliance. But there are huge numbers of web developers who think standards are a waste of time. It's a shame, but it's true. I suppose like in any field there are those who want to do it quick and sloppy and those who are a bit more meticulous.
the de-facto standard... which is set by the monopolist, rather than by a standards group. I agree that Netscape, et. al. not conforming to the defacto standard is not smart, but I would say it's a much bigger problem when MS doesn't support the standards that it helped the standards body create in the first place. Many web developers don't even bother supporting non-IE browsers any more, so the effect of IE is far greater on the actual coding habits of developers.
.PNGs don't work? Jesus, use GIFs, JPGs, TIFFs, etc. No big deal.
Actually it is a big deal. PNG provides many advantages over GIF for both designers and Web users. But because the dominant browser doesn't support PNG properly, even those people who don't use IE are saddled with its limitations.
That's one of the most pernicious effects of monopoly control - the weaknesses of a monopoly product become liabilities to everyone.
People should never have been relying upon single points of access for information.
So true. I don't know how many K-12 schools already do this, but I have this dream that someday every child's school education will incorporate instruction in how to engage multiple and varied sources of information in order to derive understanding of current events. It seems that we do ourselves a disservice by pretending that somehow people will learn critical thinking skills from an education system designed to make better factory workers.
The responses to this article are pretty solidly along the lines of, "Those stupid rich fuckers need to RTFM, rather than being worried about wardrivers."
Ponder how you might feel if you were a Regular Joe using your WiFi equipment. You read the confusing literature and try your best to secure your WiFi network. But you're not exactly sure if you go it right. Now you find out that there are people out there lurking around in your neighborhood whose sole purpose is to look for unsecure networks and... and you don't know what, but you're not exactly excited to find out what these wardrivers are going to do once they've gained access.
Will they gain access to your network? Maybe, mabye not. But it makes you nervous because unlike most Slashdot readers, technology is not your life. You're just doing your best with the stuff you bought at the local ComputerShack.
In many ways it is like using Windows. You try your best to secure it against malware and spam, yet the stuff still gets in. You've read the manuals and you do your best, but this stuff that was supposed to be easy is not only a pain in the ass, it now can potentially screw with your life.
The worst part is that the Internet is now so tightly intertwined with most people's lives that to do without it is a major inconvenience. True, nobody is forcing you to use WiFi, but you want convenience, and you don't want to be victimized by people who for all you know could have serious malicious intent. You don't know who these wardrivers are, but you do know that they drive around snooping for open networks. Now tell me honestly, if someone were driving around your neighborhood snooping for open telephone lines, and you had no idea whether your telephone line was secure or not, wouldn't be a bit nervous?
Bashing on regular computer users perpetuates the stereotype that technically-savvy computer geeks are elitist snobs who take every opportunity to trumpet their intellectual superiority while taking advantage of the less technically-inclined.
If Stern didn't have such a huge and dedicated following, would he have picked up this new contract? Of course not. Say what you will about this being a victory for the First Amendment, this is really about a rich media figure pissing off his paymasters and now going to a new paymaster.
This is all a sideshow that obscures what's really going on. Media consolidation has been going on for decades, and when you're talking about broadcast, there are only a handfull of companies deciding what America sees on TV and hears on the radio. The advent of satellite radio is good in that it widens the number of media owners, but we still have a long way to go in the United States if we ever want to get a truly useful Fourth Estate.
Of course, we will never get good media until we reward good journalism with our hard-earned dollars. In the mean time, we get what we buy with our viewing and listening habits.
Do all of the programmers you know exhibit a high level of competence? When you're working with other programmers, is it always easy for you to coordinate your efforts? Do you ever have problems with the way one programmer works and find it much easier to work with another programmer? Are there personality conflicts, or arguments over approach, or differences of opinion about what really works?
If you're programming with other programmers, you are operating in an environment that has constraints built in. You are constrained by the quality of your teammates, by the amount of time available, by the list of desired features, and so on.
Now imagine that managers are faced with constraints. They have to deal with the insane deadlines imposed on them by the O-level people in the company. Middle managers in particular are often in a very unenviable position, in that they have to try to make impossible demands possible. But just as there are varying levels of programming skill, there are varying levels of management skill. Some managers can push back on their bosses enough to give the project a chance of succeeding, but many are ill-equipped to do so.
Those that are ill-equipped to do so are in this position primarily because unlike the field of programming, where specialized education is seen as a necessary prerequisite to employment (i.e. - "He's got a bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT, we'll hire him") most managers either have no specialized management training, or they have an MBA (a degree that sometimes offers real management training but often provides no practical hands-on management training at all), or even worse, they've been in the same company or types of companies for years, learning the same bad management habits over and over.
What businesses need to do is pay more attention to actual real-world leadership experience and training. "Manager" is a term that reeks of 19th Century automated factories. When you're dealing with abstract concepts, creativity, and continually-shifting requirements, you need to have leadership skills.
You also need to have people skills, and while it's easy to berate salespeople and managers because they often seem defined by their "touchy-feely" capabilities, the flip side is that without those abilities, it's very very difficult to lead people.
"Fashion" and design are not the same thing. Fashion exists for its own sake and doesn't require any functionality. Just ask anyone who wears pants so baggy that they can barely walk. Good design is the creation of things that have pleasing form while providing excellent functionality.
Jobs and Apple have always valued design as a vital component of their products, because they understand that technology can be made more useful if it is more approachable. After all, the Convergence hasn't arrived yet, and most humans like technology that works for them, rather than technology that forces humans to work for it.
As far as influencing the development of technology, being an ubergeek doesn't mean you'll make the list. The entire personal computer industry owes a huge debt of gratitude to Apple, and now so does the music industry. As the guy who led Apple in both of those endeavors, I'd say his influence on technology has been tremendous.
As for ranking Gates, Jobs, Torvalds, et. al. against each other in some sort of pageant, it seems like we as a society have become a bit obsessed with lists. I mean, there is no real way to quantify something like this, so it's all just opinion anyway. I feel like I'm reading Seventeen magazine when I see stuff like this.
Exactly my point. Choice is a great thing, and the more people understand that they have choices, the better for standards, and the better for all of us browser users.
There have been several posts about how these are redundant downloads, only existing Mozilla/FF users are downloading, etc. But regular IE-using people are starting to switch. I know a half-dozen Windows/IE folks who have switched. A Windows enterprise tech support friend of mine has been switching all of his customers over to Firefox. The German government has been telling people to switch. CERT has told people to watch out for IE.
The important thing is that people are now realizing that they actually have a choice. That's the first step.
Honestly, makes it tough to choose who to root for. The greatest band of all time, or everyone's fave iPod maker? Guess it'll have to come down to objectivity...
Waitaminnit... I didn't know the surviving members of The Clash were involved in this litigation! How dare Apple Computer confuse people with their iSandanista product!
My point isn't that deregulation per se solves the problem of unchecked government growth. It was merely a broad example, and it is questionable whether the S&L scandal was caused by intent or by execution.
Deregulation of trucking and oil began under Carter.
True, but it was the Reagan Administration that made deregulation a cornerstone of its economic policy. I'm not arguing that as an economic policy the Reagan approach was all good, partially good, or even good at all. I was really more interested in this as an example of elected officials relinquishing government control.
The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, and over the decades has through rulings turned that "little crack" into "an enormous breach."
Your point about those in power wanting more power is all well and good, but history is replete with cases of federal and state governments relinquishing power when forced to do so by the electorate (or even against the wishes of the electorate). The deregulation enacted by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s is a good example of this, while Margaret Thatcher had to ram de-socialization down the throats of skeptical Brits.
But the point is that government won't inevitably continue to grow and grow and grow. It is only inevitable if the electorate lets it be.
What's wrong with additional competition? And why should legislative bodies protect telecommunications monopolies?
There's nothing wrong with additional competition. It's good for the economy, and it's good for you and me. It's just bad for telecom giants who are used to lobbying for (and in many cases) getting their way.
Americans have become so used to looking first to giant corporations that we've in many ways lost the ability to come up with our own local solutions. The fact that more and more localities are bucking this trend is a good thing indeed, but at the state and federal level telecom giants hold much more power.
Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, giving breaks to big players and shutting out small players seems anti-competitive, doesn't it?
Whazzumatter with you? Did you stop drinking the soma or something? When you stop thinking in binary fashion, you become very dangerous. So stop looking for multiple-choice answers and be a good malleable American, dammit!
I'm definitely not against the government paying contractors to do work for them. I've been known to work on a government contract or two myself, and as frustrating as it often is, I ususally feel like I'm more a part of the solution than part of the problem.
One of the reasons government has to outsource so much these days is that they're under tremendous much pressure to become efficient, as you mention. Of course, the irony is that the money gets spent one way or another. They do it through outsourcing or through hiring, and nobody wants to pay for more government employees.
No matter how you slice it, the layers of local, state and federal government in the US form a staggering entity, and as you accurately suggest, bringing efficiency to something that sprawling is difficult at best.
I just can't help but think that with better accounting rules, government entities could do so much more with fewer funds. Of course, you and I would still stay in business because we're so much more efficient than our own government contracting competition.:-)
Absolutely right. If there is one thing ordinary citizens fail to understand about how government works, it is that in government accounting, recipients of funds do not get to "roll it over" the following fiscal period. Not only do you have to spend what you have, if you don't spend what you have, you don't get more money later.
With large government IT projects (as voting machines are), the projects that get funded get funded again only if they use the money they've been given in the first place. Complaining that government agencies *don't get it* is beside the point. They are in many ways completely hamstrung by the accounting system used by government.
In fact, dasmegabyte raises an interesting point. If you want to change things for the better, get on Congress to come up with a better means of accounting for all of those tax dollars and managing their use. There is so much waste inherent in the system that has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, but with bean counters and spreadsheets.
Ultimately, the probability of war, any war, ain't 0.
Agreed. There is never a zero probability of anything where international affairs is concerned. But the parent made the assumption that war with China was a *given* not a remote possibility. There's a huge difference between the two perspectives.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now?
The interesting thing about these vague pronouncements about China wanting to attack us is that if repeated often enough, people will think China really does want to destroy the United States.
But China is no longer Communist. It is a despotic government, to be sure, but it has no real ideological axe to grind with the US, particularly given that we have shown no interest in truly affecting their internal politics.
So aside from vague notions of "the biggest two powers must clash" can you give me any other reason to explain why any prosperous country would risk major war with another prosperous nation? The potential devastation in such an encounter is tremendous, and even a despotic leadership like China's knows better than to risk such a war.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems the greed factor is running just as high as ever in the music industry, even in the face of a radically changing environment. These guys seem to think that it's their God-given right to continue to make more and more money while providing less and less value to customers.
Agreed. I'm doing that exact thing right now with some CSS -routing around IE after having built it for standards-compliance. But there are huge numbers of web developers who think standards are a waste of time. It's a shame, but it's true. I suppose like in any field there are those who want to do it quick and sloppy and those who are a bit more meticulous.
Actually it is a big deal. PNG provides many advantages over GIF for both designers and Web users. But because the dominant browser doesn't support PNG properly, even those people who don't use IE are saddled with its limitations.
That's one of the most pernicious effects of monopoly control - the weaknesses of a monopoly product become liabilities to everyone.
So true. I don't know how many K-12 schools already do this, but I have this dream that someday every child's school education will incorporate instruction in how to engage multiple and varied sources of information in order to derive understanding of current events. It seems that we do ourselves a disservice by pretending that somehow people will learn critical thinking skills from an education system designed to make better factory workers.
They already know how to do it. Linguistic anomalies and other factors can skew Google News results. When you're talking about human events, there's no way to remove bias.
Ponder how you might feel if you were a Regular Joe using your WiFi equipment. You read the confusing literature and try your best to secure your WiFi network. But you're not exactly sure if you go it right. Now you find out that there are people out there lurking around in your neighborhood whose sole purpose is to look for unsecure networks and... and you don't know what, but you're not exactly excited to find out what these wardrivers are going to do once they've gained access.
Will they gain access to your network? Maybe, mabye not. But it makes you nervous because unlike most Slashdot readers, technology is not your life. You're just doing your best with the stuff you bought at the local ComputerShack.
In many ways it is like using Windows. You try your best to secure it against malware and spam, yet the stuff still gets in. You've read the manuals and you do your best, but this stuff that was supposed to be easy is not only a pain in the ass, it now can potentially screw with your life.
The worst part is that the Internet is now so tightly intertwined with most people's lives that to do without it is a major inconvenience. True, nobody is forcing you to use WiFi, but you want convenience, and you don't want to be victimized by people who for all you know could have serious malicious intent. You don't know who these wardrivers are, but you do know that they drive around snooping for open networks. Now tell me honestly, if someone were driving around your neighborhood snooping for open telephone lines, and you had no idea whether your telephone line was secure or not, wouldn't be a bit nervous?
Bashing on regular computer users perpetuates the stereotype that technically-savvy computer geeks are elitist snobs who take every opportunity to trumpet their intellectual superiority while taking advantage of the less technically-inclined.
This is all a sideshow that obscures what's really going on. Media consolidation has been going on for decades, and when you're talking about broadcast, there are only a handfull of companies deciding what America sees on TV and hears on the radio. The advent of satellite radio is good in that it widens the number of media owners, but we still have a long way to go in the United States if we ever want to get a truly useful Fourth Estate.
Of course, we will never get good media until we reward good journalism with our hard-earned dollars. In the mean time, we get what we buy with our viewing and listening habits.
If you're programming with other programmers, you are operating in an environment that has constraints built in. You are constrained by the quality of your teammates, by the amount of time available, by the list of desired features, and so on.
Now imagine that managers are faced with constraints. They have to deal with the insane deadlines imposed on them by the O-level people in the company. Middle managers in particular are often in a very unenviable position, in that they have to try to make impossible demands possible. But just as there are varying levels of programming skill, there are varying levels of management skill. Some managers can push back on their bosses enough to give the project a chance of succeeding, but many are ill-equipped to do so.
Those that are ill-equipped to do so are in this position primarily because unlike the field of programming, where specialized education is seen as a necessary prerequisite to employment (i.e. - "He's got a bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT, we'll hire him") most managers either have no specialized management training, or they have an MBA (a degree that sometimes offers real management training but often provides no practical hands-on management training at all), or even worse, they've been in the same company or types of companies for years, learning the same bad management habits over and over.
What businesses need to do is pay more attention to actual real-world leadership experience and training. "Manager" is a term that reeks of 19th Century automated factories. When you're dealing with abstract concepts, creativity, and continually-shifting requirements, you need to have leadership skills.
You also need to have people skills, and while it's easy to berate salespeople and managers because they often seem defined by their "touchy-feely" capabilities, the flip side is that without those abilities, it's very very difficult to lead people.
This is not news until the vote actually occurs.
"Fashion" and design are not the same thing. Fashion exists for its own sake and doesn't require any functionality. Just ask anyone who wears pants so baggy that they can barely walk. Good design is the creation of things that have pleasing form while providing excellent functionality.
Jobs and Apple have always valued design as a vital component of their products, because they understand that technology can be made more useful if it is more approachable. After all, the Convergence hasn't arrived yet, and most humans like technology that works for them, rather than technology that forces humans to work for it.
As far as influencing the development of technology, being an ubergeek doesn't mean you'll make the list. The entire personal computer industry owes a huge debt of gratitude to Apple, and now so does the music industry. As the guy who led Apple in both of those endeavors, I'd say his influence on technology has been tremendous.
As for ranking Gates, Jobs, Torvalds, et. al. against each other in some sort of pageant, it seems like we as a society have become a bit obsessed with lists. I mean, there is no real way to quantify something like this, so it's all just opinion anyway. I feel like I'm reading Seventeen magazine when I see stuff like this.
Exactly my point. Choice is a great thing, and the more people understand that they have choices, the better for standards, and the better for all of us browser users.
The important thing is that people are now realizing that they actually have a choice. That's the first step.
Waitaminnit... I didn't know the surviving members of The Clash were involved in this litigation! How dare Apple Computer confuse people with their iSandanista product!
My point isn't that deregulation per se solves the problem of unchecked government growth. It was merely a broad example, and it is questionable whether the S&L scandal was caused by intent or by execution.
Deregulation of trucking and oil began under Carter.
True, but it was the Reagan Administration that made deregulation a cornerstone of its economic policy. I'm not arguing that as an economic policy the Reagan approach was all good, partially good, or even good at all. I was really more interested in this as an example of elected officials relinquishing government control.
Your point about those in power wanting more power is all well and good, but history is replete with cases of federal and state governments relinquishing power when forced to do so by the electorate (or even against the wishes of the electorate). The deregulation enacted by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s is a good example of this, while Margaret Thatcher had to ram de-socialization down the throats of skeptical Brits.
But the point is that government won't inevitably continue to grow and grow and grow. It is only inevitable if the electorate lets it be.
There's nothing wrong with additional competition. It's good for the economy, and it's good for you and me. It's just bad for telecom giants who are used to lobbying for (and in many cases) getting their way.
Americans have become so used to looking first to giant corporations that we've in many ways lost the ability to come up with our own local solutions. The fact that more and more localities are bucking this trend is a good thing indeed, but at the state and federal level telecom giants hold much more power.
Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, giving breaks to big players and shutting out small players seems anti-competitive, doesn't it?
Whazzumatter with you? Did you stop drinking the soma or something? When you stop thinking in binary fashion, you become very dangerous. So stop looking for multiple-choice answers and be a good malleable American, dammit!
One of the reasons government has to outsource so much these days is that they're under tremendous much pressure to become efficient, as you mention. Of course, the irony is that the money gets spent one way or another. They do it through outsourcing or through hiring, and nobody wants to pay for more government employees.
No matter how you slice it, the layers of local, state and federal government in the US form a staggering entity, and as you accurately suggest, bringing efficiency to something that sprawling is difficult at best.
I just can't help but think that with better accounting rules, government entities could do so much more with fewer funds. Of course, you and I would still stay in business because we're so much more efficient than our own government contracting competition. :-)
Absolutely right. If there is one thing ordinary citizens fail to understand about how government works, it is that in government accounting, recipients of funds do not get to "roll it over" the following fiscal period. Not only do you have to spend what you have, if you don't spend what you have, you don't get more money later.
With large government IT projects (as voting machines are), the projects that get funded get funded again only if they use the money they've been given in the first place. Complaining that government agencies *don't get it* is beside the point. They are in many ways completely hamstrung by the accounting system used by government.
In fact, dasmegabyte raises an interesting point. If you want to change things for the better, get on Congress to come up with a better means of accounting for all of those tax dollars and managing their use. There is so much waste inherent in the system that has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, but with bean counters and spreadsheets.
Agreed. There is never a zero probability of anything where international affairs is concerned. But the parent made the assumption that war with China was a *given* not a remote possibility. There's a huge difference between the two perspectives.
The interesting thing about these vague pronouncements about China wanting to attack us is that if repeated often enough, people will think China really does want to destroy the United States.
But China is no longer Communist. It is a despotic government, to be sure, but it has no real ideological axe to grind with the US, particularly given that we have shown no interest in truly affecting their internal politics.
So aside from vague notions of "the biggest two powers must clash" can you give me any other reason to explain why any prosperous country would risk major war with another prosperous nation? The potential devastation in such an encounter is tremendous, and even a despotic leadership like China's knows better than to risk such a war.