Someone should have asked about hardware, because I know I spend way more on hardware than I do on the games I play ON the hardware.
How many $60 games can you play, anyhow? An mmo or two at $120-180 a year each is enough to suck ~infinite time out of someone, but you can easily drop $4500 or more on a high-end system. (Overclocked SLI rig with RAID SATA anyone?)
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service?
That's not exactly what I'd call a compelling argument. To translate, you're saying that if a government wanted to block Internet service, they could? That seems to prove that the government not being involved helps the Internet flourish.
I wanted iTMS before it was available on Windows, and I also wanted a lightweight laptop. So I bought an iBook. While I've been quite happy with iTMS and my iPod, the iBook was a horrendous piece of crap that broke *constantly*. I had to RMA it twice in the warranty period - once for memory, and again for the screen. Less than a month after the warranty expired, the screen died *again*. Goodbye, iBook.
By comparison, I had already bought a Dell Inspiron 8100 - *refurbed*. And it has lasted over 3 years and the only thing I ever RMA'd on it was the battery, and it has gotten a lot more travel and abuse than the iBook ever did.
On the upside, the RMA process for the iBook was certainly simple. I felt like, as a warranty caller, I was a second-class citizen calling their support people, but I'm sure lots of people with software problems probably would be leeching free support if they didn't do it how they do. But once we got through the process, the RMA was relatively fast and simple.
So yes, I was the first wave of halo buyers.. I bought a mac to GET iTunes. And I'm thankful it's available on Windows now so I can keep using it, because it wasn't worth the headache of dealing with the iBook's issues.
I'd advising getting in touch with GNU/EFF. From my perspective, even assuming your employer owns the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel, they are still bound by the GPL; otherwise they're violating the copyright of the owners of the original GPL code you built off of. Your contract may give them YOUR rights in the code you wrote, but even so, their contract with you does not enable them to appropriate someone else's work.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but this seems like a complete no-brainer to me. They can claim they own the moon, too, but that doesn't make it so. They don't have the right to distribute dervied works of GPL code without following the terms of the license, which they are not. The right thing to do is contact EFF/GNU - I'd do this first and see if you can get pro bono legal advice. You may end up contacting the original owners about the GPL violation, but since that could expose you to liability for breach of contract or such, you may want legal advice first.
At 5 cents, certainly someone will still be stealing it. But the fact is, it's already plenty possible to steal music. I'm sure there are a ton of people who routinely strip the DRM off every song they buy from iTMS, because it's too much of a pain to worry about if apple will properly authorize a given computer to play a given song -- scary! And frankly, that's half the reason I'm hesitant to buy stuff off iTMS. The other day I was eyeing the U2 "box set" on itunes. Hundreds of songs, like $100 or more. I wanted to buy it - even though I own several U2 albums already and have ripped a number of them into mp3 for myself... but the DRM basically decided me not to. After all, if I want some latest hit for $.99, fine. But when I'm going to drop hundreds on this mega-set, I don't want it to be GONE because I forget to de-authorize a computer (or, like my iBook, it just craps out without a chance to deauth it, and it would cost more to fix than it is worth).
Net result: far less buying. I'm fairly certain that even if iTunes remained $.99 and the DRM was just gone, I think their sales would go up dramatically.
As a matter of fact, that is the brightest future for digial music: $.99 or less... maybe way less... full previews, no DRM (except maybe on the previews), and lossless encoding. There are plenty of good lossless codecs now, and bandwidth is pretty cheap for something you want to have forever.
The fact is, people like music. The fact is, music is damn easy to copy and the Internet made it really easy. You can sue people and keep a lid on it to some extent, but people will keep finding new ways. Rather than fight the tide, sell to those who are willing to pay, because I think we're the majority. Give us everything we want, and watch the money just POUR in.
This question has come up a lot of times, and it's getting old. There are a slew of very viable open-source models. Examples of business models and companies:
(1) Give away product; sell support (Redhat, etc) (2) Give away product; sell specialized tools or enhancements (Zend) (3) Give away OSS product, sell service using it (Livejournal) (4) Give away product, sell customization and integration consulting (you name the product, this is probably going on; BitTorrent is a great example) (5) Give away product; put ads in default distribution
And this list is far from complete.
A lot of these models are FAR from unique to open source. Think of the lack of up front licensing fees as a marketing expenditure. The last big company I was at spent *millions* of dollars on consulting to try to customize and integrate a piece of CRM software - and it had a large license fee as well. I doubt the license was near as much as all the aftercosts, though.
Personally, I've been working for years now under (4); I distributed an ecommerce package for a while. I had to close that down as a project due to lack of time to maintain/respond to issues, because I've been swamped with other work as a result of having it out there. OSS can work commercially if you WANT it to. It may take some creativity and some work, but I bet most products that are quality software and are useful and used can be monetized in some way, if not MANY ways.
I'd gladly pay for show downloads, especially if I could get on-demand anything. I'd like to see an "interspersed ad", "no ad", and "frontloaded ads only" version (traditional, ad-free, and maybe an ad or three at the start but then uninterrupted), so I could choose the level of marketing.
You know, while we at it, this leads to far more POWERFUL marketing. Imagine a fully interactive system where you got showed 6 ads, at the start of a program, each 30 sec-1 min. You could choose to watch any/all of them, but you had to watch 1 before watching the show. You pick, you watch it, you're back at the menu, and now you can continue to the show.
I'd probably be watching ads for stuff that interests me - movies, books, maybe music, computer-related things, PSA-type things possibly, etc. And I wouldn't be force-fed the same obnoxious commercials over and over.
On-demand pay media could not only become a big improvement, it could become a far more effective marketing channel than it is.
Actually, in a civil suit, you only need a "preponderance of evidence" in most circumstances, not proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", and you don't need all 12 jurors to side with the plaintiff, either... usually 9 is enough (well, 3/4ths is enough, so that's 9 if it's a jury of 12, and it may be less).
I've been spoiled by SuSE. Back when I was going to schoool, we had to walk 5 miles through the snow, uphill both ways, with no shoes... er... I mean, we had to actually compile a new kernel to make almost anything work. Driver support? Hah! Better check for drivers BEFORE you buy.
The only thing recently I've had linux not immediately recognize was a year ago when I bought SATA for the first time... and windows didn't have a driver for it either. (And the Dell truemobile card in my laptop; but given that there IS no linux driver and you can still get it working, that's not so bad)
We're not far off at all from linux getting premium support as an OS from almost everyone. The good companies already recognize how much enthusiasts love their linux boxes.
I was just reading this article and pondering whether an elephant-gun solution to this problem might spell the end for the webplication arena; you kill off the ability to make those applications work if you cripple css or JS.
TV has always been a mixed bag. Quality is not in a decline; the vast majority of TV has always been insipid.
The "good" TV is now found on channels you pay for. HBO and Showtime are producing the cutting edge shows, which is why they tend to dominate the awards for the segment. Meanwhile, they're not showing any ads at all.
The DVD aftermarket, meanwhile, is becoming a driving force for TV development. In the end, the amount that networks pay for shows will be lower - probably down well under their development and production costs - and production companies will make that up on DVD sales. Instead of networks bearing the risk, production companies will bear the risk and reap the rewards of TV development. And we (consumers of entertainment) will reap the rewards, because people may watch bad TV, but they don't buy bad TV on DVD.
The FCC decision, meanwhile, had nothing to do with quality of TV. After all, there's more money in TV than ever - there's just fewer mass markets. The FCC just wants their broadcast bandwidth back, and they're under pressure from entertainment providers who can't handle the evolution occurring in the industry.
But it was unclear whether the judges would strike down the FCC's 2003 rule, since doubts were also raised about whether the American Library Association and other opponents had legal standing to challenge the rule in court.
Which means that someone...say, a consumer, aided by the EFF... may need to file a suit to follow up this one in order to stop this land grab of consumer rights to be stopped.
Bush won because he has very strong support with Christians, especially fundamentalists. They (being the GOP and Karl Rove in particular) motivated and mobilized a huge segment of people in '04 that never voted before: people who were largely fundamentalist in religion but disinterested in politics, and they did it by making those people afraid or angry with respect to a supposed "moral decline".
I voted strictly Republican for a number of years. I graduated from a Christian high school. I agreed with (and largely STILL agree with) what I saw as the fundamental tenants of the Republican party:
* Fiscal responsibility (by both the government and individuals) * Smaller government (ie, less of it, and more local where possible)
Eventually, I abandoned my religious viewpoints. Lacking the religious impetus to maintain them, a lot of my so-called "viewpoints" reversed: for example, when I was 18, I'd have probably been arguing for an Amendment to ban Gay Marriage. Now, I just can't figure out why people care who marries who. (Of course, I don't wonder why the religious right cares...)
That said, on top of a conversion to social liberalism, I think the Republicans abandoned their platform quite some time ago. I was a libertarian for quite some time and still regard myself as one at heart, but in races like '04, I had to back the Democrats. To short-list reasons why I was horrified that Bush won and I voted for Kerry instead: (and, yes, I was voting 'against bush'; the only democrat I really 'liked' was Dean)
* Bush and the Republicans passed one of the largest and most inefficient and expensive social program expansions EVER, in the form of the "Prescription Drug Benefit" for medicare. This was insane, as the legislation included language to stop the government from exerting pricing pressure on drug manufacturers...like, say, all the HMOs and PPOs do. Whether you believe we should pay for seniors' drugs or not, the handout to pharma companies was just ludicrous. * Bush and the Republicans are the hard-core proponents of the PATRIOT act and under Bush, there have been a rash of extremely scary violations of civil rights. The complete lack of respect for the Constitution is horrendous, and Bush was completely disingenuous during the debates. During the town hall debate, he was asked a direct question about the way the PATRIOT act limited civil rights and he essentially said that it didn't and that he would never support that. Despite that, the PATRIOT act continues to have provisions struck down by the Courts and we're not anywhere done with it yet. He supported and is now working toward removing the expirations on many of the expiring provisions. * Bush passed a huge tax cut and led us into a huge deficit. Given that tax cuts are often spent on consumer goods and we have an enormous trade deficit which largely comes from an insatiable demand for foreign consumer goods, you could argue that a tax cut stimulated China's economy more than it did ours. Where is the fiscal responsibility? Who's going to pay this bill? Meanwhile, the dollar is suffering huge declines against foreign currencies, especially the Euro. * Bush argued from a position of certainty that Iraq had WMDs. We never found any. Worse, Bush has spread other deliberate misinformation, like using a completely bogus report to very loudly link Iraq with Al-Qaeda; then the report turns out to be a fraud. * Republicans support their own brand of social program. Farm subsidies, for example, are this massive welfare program for red states. It's totally nuts.
Not that I don't have problems with the Democrats. The left side of the Democrats uses the term "Progressive" and when I think: "Progress towards what?" the answer that occurs to me is: full socialist wealth redistribution. Then there's the refusal to support legislation to ban horrendous late-term and even partial-birth abortion. I spent a lot of time analyzing abortion looking for a defensible moral ground, and my conclusion was only that it was indetermin
Cool. John Choi really didn't get really good until the very end of the SSFT2 days. When I was competitive, he was good, but very niche. For example, he was the first guy to make jumping straight up over fireballs a regular occurance in ryu v ryu or ryu v bison sorts of matchups.
Now, in MKII, for a while, I totally dominated at Sunnyvale. I won 4 out of 4 tournaments at the sunnyvale golfland, and 1 out of 1 at the nearby milpitas golfland. Then I stopped playing because I regarded the game as stupid and simplistic as well as insufficiently balanced. I was a shang tsung player and enjoyed mixing it up... although I won Sunnyvale largely on being very good at lowpunch/throw cheese;) I don't know how things were on the east coast, but the attitude in sunnyvale was very, very much "anything goes". I dabbled in MKII later after a fairly long break, it was dominated by Mileena players and either I got bad or the skill level went up, because I couldn't hang.
I agree about the skill level - and I blame the games. The original SSF2 was nearly the pinnacle as far as I'm concerned. I think that SSF2T was more balanced but reflexes played a bigger role there due to the faster speed. Even locked on speed 0, let alone speed 1, SSFT2 was was faster than SSF2. I think the scrubs like that, but I know Jon Prentice - who finished 3rd in the big SF:CE tournament behind Tomo and Mike Watson (playing Sagat no less!) - quit specifically because Turbo was so fast he didn't enjoy the game. Not that Jon was slow - he was a Sagat player who, in CE, had such perfect timing that he could uppercut footsweeps with Sagat. That's basically a one-frame opportunity; Sagat's uppercuts got a lot meatier later on. Anyhow, take the speed and throw in excessive "super moves" and take out the more skilled timed combos and replace them with wonky intterupt chain combos...well, it gets lame. When I played the Alpha beta in Sunnyvale (sunnyvale was betaland for Capcom, since their US HQ was there), I liked it, but by the time they released the production version, I felt they'd mangled it, and stopped playing.
And yeah, I feel in love with Q3 when I played - I didn't have time when I found CS to learn another game, but I went to qcon in '02. There was some 70+ player FFA server that I was owning hours on end as 'async', along with a guy who went by SS5|Vegata who played on the Muppety server with me. Ah, the good ol days. I played against a lot of second-tier wannabe pros but never put the time into 1v1 that it took to get good. My aim was there, but my strategy sucked and my movement really, really sucked. I couldn't even regularly make the hop from the ledge to the bridge above the armor on Q3DM6.:( And that really gets to matter 1v1 when the game is all about how fast you can move around to outpace your opponent to control the resources.
I wonder how Thomas would have been at FPS. He's probably a banker somewhere now;)
Cool. Were you around when SSF2 and SSF2:T were big? I played all the SF2 games, but I got hooked up with the sunnyvale golfland crowd in 94/95 and played fairly competitively there against Thomas Osaki, John Choi, Graham Wolfe, Jason Nelson, etc. Never finished higher than 2nd. On good days, I had a chance to crack anyone but Thomas. Thomas was absolutely inhuman with his reactions. I watched him hammer Mike Watson when Watson came up for a tourney from LA. I know some of those guys made pilgrimages to the east coast to play from time to time, including after the alphas were out. I quit after ssf2t, so I was never paying much attention to that.
I was a fairly dominant Q3 player. I hadn't played an FPS before that since Duke Nukem. I moved on after that to NWN, and played on a RP-oriented server.
Now I'm playing CoH and WoW.
Those games require only a modicum of skill. Yes, it is possible to be 'better' by knowing your character and capabilities, and in the more hectic group-battle situations your decision making can be amplified to the level it is at least somewhat significant. However, there is nowhere *near* the level of learned skill you get compared to a game like Q3 or Counterstrike. I've *always* had fantastic hand-eye coordination and reaction speed. I was competitive with the very best Street Fighter 2 players (back when Capcom used to give away full-sized videogames for winning big tournaments, back in the 90s). Reactions don't translate into skill. They may provide a ceiling, in the same way that physical fitness is a ceiling for competitiveness in a sport like tennis, but those underlying attributes are far less significant than the "learned skill" that goes along with the game.
MMORPGs place an artificial cap on the skill you can attain because the "margin of error" is so large that it is easy for a very quick-thinking, mentally agile and highly practiced opponent to have virtually no advantage over someone who is distinctly second rate. Both of them might trounce on a newb who can't play his character, but their differential of skill at the high level of play doesn't translate into a game significance.
Morever, if you think outplanning and out-thinking your opponent is not a significant part of an FPS, then you're talking out of your ass. Anyone who has watched professionals play a game like Q3 knows that the entire game is a chess match which revolves around control of the map and the resources it provides. Anticipation, timing, the ability to adapt quickly, understanding an opponent; those are the skills which make you good at the highest eschelon of skill in "twitch games". Newb players think it is about fast reactions or perfect aim, but it isn't, because at the top level, EVERY pro hits almost every shot. I only played as a warm-up snack for pros, but when owning one of the major open DM servers at qcon '02, I racked up something like 80 straight hits with the railgun on Q3DM17. My aim and movement was pro-level; I'd still get absolutely *owned* against a pro playing 1v1, because they do that sort of thing automatically, but they back it up with beautiful execution, perfect timing, fluent adaptation, and hard-to-crack strategies for controlling a map. Watching pros play that game was like watching chess. They'd feint, move to control resources. They'd fall back and grab secondary objectives while their opponent was busily getting a primary one they thought they couldn't effectively contest. They'd viciously press their advantage; sacrafice several points in order to get a positional or strategic advantage to put them back in the driver's seat, and so on.
[Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you need advice, consult an attorney who can consider the specifics of your case. And above all, ignore people on Slashdot who display a remarkable ignorance of applicable precedent.]
If you access their site in a manner that they explicitly prohibit in a terms and conditions you necessarily would have to read to get the links in the first place, then you violate their terms and conditions, you could be arrested and tried for violation of the CFAA. They don't need a contract to sue you; they'll just claim the access was unauthorized and an intentional tort, and they'll sue you for lost revenue relating to your posting the links you obtained in violation of the CFAA. The need for an account on their site is an access control.
Also, if you're going to play lawyer on Slashdot, you may want to err on the side of caution rather than advising people that some EULA is unenforceable. Slashdot itself has covered a case where clickthrough EULAs were ruled enforceable, even when they contained draconian provisions (waiving first sale rights, waiving fair use rights).
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.
That's not much of an assumption. Margins in retail businesses are almost never anywhere near that low, unless it's on specific loss-leader items designed to increase traffic, or unless the item is a highly-competitive big-ticket item; say, loose diamonds or new cars. (The former because it's a commodity being sold and distributed by a rabid cottage industry, the latter because consumers have so much information about the costs)
I can say that loose diamond margins for internet purchases at the more cut-throat net retailers are down to about 6% for larger stones... you'll be paying by wire transfer and don't expect any extras. But that's what you'd expect for a commoditized $25,000 item. Compare that to finished pieces with smaller diamonds... a pair of half-carat total-weight earrings might easily be marked up 100%, maybe more if the manufacturer managed to get the diamonds in a cheap lot. (Yes, those $99 specials weren't that special)
A typical niche retail store has 50-200% markups on everything unless it's on special. The fact that the article mentioned the business in question was a "niche retailer" probably implies they're selling a highly non-commoditized item which means their margins might be even larger. Specialty items often have drastically higher margins because less availability means less competition, and less competition means higher prices.
There's even a term for the 100% gross margin: "keystone", which is a retail price of twice what the item cost.
Even Wal-mart and Target are often "less" in their stores because they wield such enormous pricing pressure over manufacturers. They end up having to sell to mega-retailers for less because if they don't, the megas won't stock their products and will buy from their manufacturing competitors instead. But if they DO sell for less to Wal-mart and Target, then they screw all the small retailers and eventually drive them out of business, leaving the ONLY outlet for their goods being the mega-retailer. If you're a hardware manufacturer and don't want to sell to Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Lowes, who are all too big to need you unless your brand is indispensable, then who's left? No one, because all the small hardware stores went out of business 10-20 years ago.
Mind you, at least in terms of price, consumers still benefit from this. Although that intense pricing pressure is what forced almost all manufacturers to outsource their labor to foreign countries. In the end, you're down to basically two types of retailers: massive juggernauts that are all pricing, and little super-niche shops which are essentially charging for the 'service' of finding and stocking niche items that are too rarely bought to demand shelf space at a megastore.
But, I digress. Even at Wal-mart, I doubt margins are anywhere near as low as 15% gross except on loss leaders.
I outlined this in another post, but that's only one scenario. Yes, I agree: code bases which close the loophole by including web services in the "need to release source" requirement will then get less use. But there's another possibility: that people concerned about a disproportionate number of people using their code without contributing changes may then release because they're no longer concerned about "ASP theft" of their code because the current GPL does not protect it. I know some variant licenses have tried to close that loophole, but none carry the weight of the GPL or the legal power of GNU behind them. So this variant license would ENABLE as well as DISABLE certain behaviors... it just remains to be seen what the net benefits and costs are.
Except as an author, I don't have this worry. I write a web service for a living. It is legally unencumbered by copyright issues because it is my original work. One of the ways it can be acquired from me is with source. I provide a license to modify and use, without the right to redistribute. Even *if* I were to also release it under a web-services GPL, I could also give better terms to paying customers.
Obviously, if I distribute under the GPL, and then integrate patches into MY version that OTHERS released as required by the GPL, then *I* am then encumbered unless I get them to assign copyright... which they may well not do. After all, they're required to release the code but they may not have any inherent interest in enhancing my source for my private use...
One thing that we could easily see is an MPL-like variant that also has web services.
In any event, if you're "selling" software, you're really unlikely to be using the BSD or GPL license. If you're just providing it, then the choice has already been made for you.
... as an option. Notice what Eben Moglen says in the quote:
"I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom," he said.
So clearly the GPL will actually have some kind of optional clause of 'GPL 3b' type version which will either add or remove a web services clause that requires access to a modified version of the software as a web service to trigger source code release requirements.
I'm not surprised some want it, and I'm not surprised some don't; I think offering the authors choice is basically a requirement. I figure we'll see a lot of two things happen with the web services clause:
(1) Software that wasn't available before will be released. People who wrote web services software will release it now that the GPL can protect it adequately against unfair competition. (if you write a web service for a living, which I do, a serious concern over releasing under the GPL *now* is that your competition will steal all your enhancements and add their own on their own time, basically allow them to outpace you).
(2) Many existing projects will be forked after the original version adopts the web services clause. People who have an interest in maintaining an unencumbered version will fork off that version. Moreover, there may be a "mindshare" competition. A lot of commercial interests have an inherent interest in a unencumbered license, but the encumbered license may "win" in quality/features arms race precisely because of the license.
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Someone should have asked about hardware, because I know I spend way more on hardware than I do on the games I play ON the hardware.
How many $60 games can you play, anyhow? An mmo or two at $120-180 a year each is enough to suck ~infinite time out of someone, but you can easily drop $4500 or more on a high-end system. (Overclocked SLI rig with RAID SATA anyone?)
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service?
That's not exactly what I'd call a compelling argument. To translate, you're saying that if a government wanted to block Internet service, they could? That seems to prove that the government not being involved helps the Internet flourish.
Good job disproving your own point, though.
I wanted iTMS before it was available on Windows, and I also wanted a lightweight laptop. So I bought an iBook. While I've been quite happy with iTMS and my iPod, the iBook was a horrendous piece of crap that broke *constantly*. I had to RMA it twice in the warranty period - once for memory, and again for the screen. Less than a month after the warranty expired, the screen died *again*. Goodbye, iBook.
By comparison, I had already bought a Dell Inspiron 8100 - *refurbed*. And it has lasted over 3 years and the only thing I ever RMA'd on it was the battery, and it has gotten a lot more travel and abuse than the iBook ever did.
On the upside, the RMA process for the iBook was certainly simple. I felt like, as a warranty caller, I was a second-class citizen calling their support people, but I'm sure lots of people with software problems probably would be leeching free support if they didn't do it how they do. But once we got through the process, the RMA was relatively fast and simple.
So yes, I was the first wave of halo buyers.. I bought a mac to GET iTunes. And I'm thankful it's available on Windows now so I can keep using it, because it wasn't worth the headache of dealing with the iBook's issues.
I'll sleep soundly tonight knowing the black hole formed in NY is "not thought to pose a threat". Very comforting.
I'd advising getting in touch with GNU/EFF. From my perspective, even assuming your employer owns the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel, they are still bound by the GPL; otherwise they're violating the copyright of the owners of the original GPL code you built off of. Your contract may give them YOUR rights in the code you wrote, but even so, their contract with you does not enable them to appropriate someone else's work.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but this seems like a complete no-brainer to me. They can claim they own the moon, too, but that doesn't make it so. They don't have the right to distribute dervied works of GPL code without following the terms of the license, which they are not. The right thing to do is contact EFF/GNU - I'd do this first and see if you can get pro bono legal advice. You may end up contacting the original owners about the GPL violation, but since that could expose you to liability for breach of contract or such, you may want legal advice first.
At 5 cents, certainly someone will still be stealing it. But the fact is, it's already plenty possible to steal music. I'm sure there are a ton of people who routinely strip the DRM off every song they buy from iTMS, because it's too much of a pain to worry about if apple will properly authorize a given computer to play a given song -- scary! And frankly, that's half the reason I'm hesitant to buy stuff off iTMS. The other day I was eyeing the U2 "box set" on itunes. Hundreds of songs, like $100 or more. I wanted to buy it - even though I own several U2 albums already and have ripped a number of them into mp3 for myself... but the DRM basically decided me not to. After all, if I want some latest hit for $.99, fine. But when I'm going to drop hundreds on this mega-set, I don't want it to be GONE because I forget to de-authorize a computer (or, like my iBook, it just craps out without a chance to deauth it, and it would cost more to fix than it is worth).
Net result: far less buying. I'm fairly certain that even if iTunes remained $.99 and the DRM was just gone, I think their sales would go up dramatically.
As a matter of fact, that is the brightest future for digial music: $.99 or less... maybe way less... full previews, no DRM (except maybe on the previews), and lossless encoding. There are plenty of good lossless codecs now, and bandwidth is pretty cheap for something you want to have forever.
The fact is, people like music. The fact is, music is damn easy to copy and the Internet made it really easy. You can sue people and keep a lid on it to some extent, but people will keep finding new ways. Rather than fight the tide, sell to those who are willing to pay, because I think we're the majority. Give us everything we want, and watch the money just POUR in.
This question has come up a lot of times, and it's getting old. There are a slew of very viable open-source models. Examples of business models and companies:
(1) Give away product; sell support (Redhat, etc)
(2) Give away product; sell specialized tools or enhancements (Zend)
(3) Give away OSS product, sell service using it (Livejournal)
(4) Give away product, sell customization and integration consulting (you name the product, this is probably going on; BitTorrent is a great example)
(5) Give away product; put ads in default distribution
And this list is far from complete.
A lot of these models are FAR from unique to open source. Think of the lack of up front licensing fees as a marketing expenditure. The last big company I was at spent *millions* of dollars on consulting to try to customize and integrate a piece of CRM software - and it had a large license fee as well. I doubt the license was near as much as all the aftercosts, though.
Personally, I've been working for years now under (4); I distributed an ecommerce package for a while. I had to close that down as a project due to lack of time to maintain/respond to issues, because I've been swamped with other work as a result of having it out there. OSS can work commercially if you WANT it to. It may take some creativity and some work, but I bet most products that are quality software and are useful and used can be monetized in some way, if not MANY ways.
I'd gladly pay for show downloads, especially if I could get on-demand anything. I'd like to see an "interspersed ad", "no ad", and "frontloaded ads only" version (traditional, ad-free, and maybe an ad or three at the start but then uninterrupted), so I could choose the level of marketing.
You know, while we at it, this leads to far more POWERFUL marketing. Imagine a fully interactive system where you got showed 6 ads, at the start of a program, each 30 sec-1 min. You could choose to watch any/all of them, but you had to watch 1 before watching the show. You pick, you watch it, you're back at the menu, and now you can continue to the show.
I'd probably be watching ads for stuff that interests me - movies, books, maybe music, computer-related things, PSA-type things possibly, etc. And I wouldn't be force-fed the same obnoxious commercials over and over.
On-demand pay media could not only become a big improvement, it could become a far more effective marketing channel than it is.
Actually, in a civil suit, you only need a "preponderance of evidence" in most circumstances, not proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", and you don't need all 12 jurors to side with the plaintiff, either... usually 9 is enough (well, 3/4ths is enough, so that's 9 if it's a jury of 12, and it may be less).
(IANAL, and TINLA)
I've been spoiled by SuSE. Back when I was going to schoool, we had to walk 5 miles through the snow, uphill both ways, with no shoes... er... I mean, we had to actually compile a new kernel to make almost anything work. Driver support? Hah! Better check for drivers BEFORE you buy.
The only thing recently I've had linux not immediately recognize was a year ago when I bought SATA for the first time... and windows didn't have a driver for it either. (And the Dell truemobile card in my laptop; but given that there IS no linux driver and you can still get it working, that's not so bad)
We're not far off at all from linux getting premium support as an OS from almost everyone. The good companies already recognize how much enthusiasts love their linux boxes.
I was just reading this article and pondering whether an elephant-gun solution to this problem might spell the end for the webplication arena; you kill off the ability to make those applications work if you cripple css or JS.
Not all adverts do have div ID's though, but thankfully we're still well within the realm of being able to use Adblock to nuke them.
All floaters have IDs of some kind. Otherwise, JS can't manipulate them via the DOM, and they can't "float". The non-floater ads are "solved" already.
Prove it.
TV has always been a mixed bag. Quality is not in a decline; the vast majority of TV has always been insipid.
The "good" TV is now found on channels you pay for. HBO and Showtime are producing the cutting edge shows, which is why they tend to dominate the awards for the segment. Meanwhile, they're not showing any ads at all.
The DVD aftermarket, meanwhile, is becoming a driving force for TV development. In the end, the amount that networks pay for shows will be lower - probably down well under their development and production costs - and production companies will make that up on DVD sales. Instead of networks bearing the risk, production companies will bear the risk and reap the rewards of TV development. And we (consumers of entertainment) will reap the rewards, because people may watch bad TV, but they don't buy bad TV on DVD.
The FCC decision, meanwhile, had nothing to do with quality of TV. After all, there's more money in TV than ever - there's just fewer mass markets. The FCC just wants their broadcast bandwidth back, and they're under pressure from entertainment providers who can't handle the evolution occurring in the industry.
But it was unclear whether the judges would strike down the FCC's 2003 rule, since doubts were also raised about whether the American Library Association and other opponents had legal standing to challenge the rule in court.
Which means that someone...say, a consumer, aided by the EFF... may need to file a suit to follow up this one in order to stop this land grab of consumer rights to be stopped.
Bush won because he has very strong support with Christians, especially fundamentalists. They (being the GOP and Karl Rove in particular) motivated and mobilized a huge segment of people in '04 that never voted before: people who were largely fundamentalist in religion but disinterested in politics, and they did it by making those people afraid or angry with respect to a supposed "moral decline".
I voted strictly Republican for a number of years. I graduated from a Christian high school. I agreed with (and largely STILL agree with) what I saw as the fundamental tenants of the Republican party:
* Fiscal responsibility (by both the government and individuals)
* Smaller government (ie, less of it, and more local where possible)
Eventually, I abandoned my religious viewpoints. Lacking the religious impetus to maintain them, a lot of my so-called "viewpoints" reversed: for example, when I was 18, I'd have probably been arguing for an Amendment to ban Gay Marriage. Now, I just can't figure out why people care who marries who. (Of course, I don't wonder why the religious right cares...)
That said, on top of a conversion to social liberalism, I think the Republicans abandoned their platform quite some time ago. I was a libertarian for quite some time and still regard myself as one at heart, but in races like '04, I had to back the Democrats. To short-list reasons why I was horrified that Bush won and I voted for Kerry instead: (and, yes, I was voting 'against bush'; the only democrat I really 'liked' was Dean)
* Bush and the Republicans passed one of the largest and most inefficient and expensive social program expansions EVER, in the form of the "Prescription Drug Benefit" for medicare. This was insane, as the legislation included language to stop the government from exerting pricing pressure on drug manufacturers...like, say, all the HMOs and PPOs do. Whether you believe we should pay for seniors' drugs or not, the handout to pharma companies was just ludicrous.
* Bush and the Republicans are the hard-core proponents of the PATRIOT act and under Bush, there have been a rash of extremely scary violations of civil rights. The complete lack of respect for the Constitution is horrendous, and Bush was completely disingenuous during the debates. During the town hall debate, he was asked a direct question about the way the PATRIOT act limited civil rights and he essentially said that it didn't and that he would never support that. Despite that, the PATRIOT act continues to have provisions struck down by the Courts and we're not anywhere done with it yet. He supported and is now working toward removing the expirations on many of the expiring provisions.
* Bush passed a huge tax cut and led us into a huge deficit. Given that tax cuts are often spent on consumer goods and we have an enormous trade deficit which largely comes from an insatiable demand for foreign consumer goods, you could argue that a tax cut stimulated China's economy more than it did ours. Where is the fiscal responsibility? Who's going to pay this bill? Meanwhile, the dollar is suffering huge declines against foreign currencies, especially the Euro.
* Bush argued from a position of certainty that Iraq had WMDs. We never found any. Worse, Bush has spread other deliberate misinformation, like using a completely bogus report to very loudly link Iraq with Al-Qaeda; then the report turns out to be a fraud.
* Republicans support their own brand of social program. Farm subsidies, for example, are this massive welfare program for red states. It's totally nuts.
Not that I don't have problems with the Democrats. The left side of the Democrats uses the term "Progressive" and when I think: "Progress towards what?" the answer that occurs to me is: full socialist wealth redistribution. Then there's the refusal to support legislation to ban horrendous late-term and even partial-birth abortion. I spent a lot of time analyzing abortion looking for a defensible moral ground, and my conclusion was only that it was indetermin
Cool. John Choi really didn't get really good until the very end of the SSFT2 days. When I was competitive, he was good, but very niche. For example, he was the first guy to make jumping straight up over fireballs a regular occurance in ryu v ryu or ryu v bison sorts of matchups.
;) I don't know how things were on the east coast, but the attitude in sunnyvale was very, very much "anything goes". I dabbled in MKII later after a fairly long break, it was dominated by Mileena players and either I got bad or the skill level went up, because I couldn't hang.
:( And that really gets to matter 1v1 when the game is all about how fast you can move around to outpace your opponent to control the resources.
;)
Now, in MKII, for a while, I totally dominated at Sunnyvale. I won 4 out of 4 tournaments at the sunnyvale golfland, and 1 out of 1 at the nearby milpitas golfland. Then I stopped playing because I regarded the game as stupid and simplistic as well as insufficiently balanced. I was a shang tsung player and enjoyed mixing it up... although I won Sunnyvale largely on being very good at lowpunch/throw cheese
I agree about the skill level - and I blame the games. The original SSF2 was nearly the pinnacle as far as I'm concerned. I think that SSF2T was more balanced but reflexes played a bigger role there due to the faster speed. Even locked on speed 0, let alone speed 1, SSFT2 was was faster than SSF2. I think the scrubs like that, but I know Jon Prentice - who finished 3rd in the big SF:CE tournament behind Tomo and Mike Watson (playing Sagat no less!) - quit specifically because Turbo was so fast he didn't enjoy the game. Not that Jon was slow - he was a Sagat player who, in CE, had such perfect timing that he could uppercut footsweeps with Sagat. That's basically a one-frame opportunity; Sagat's uppercuts got a lot meatier later on. Anyhow, take the speed and throw in excessive "super moves" and take out the more skilled timed combos and replace them with wonky intterupt chain combos...well, it gets lame. When I played the Alpha beta in Sunnyvale (sunnyvale was betaland for Capcom, since their US HQ was there), I liked it, but by the time they released the production version, I felt they'd mangled it, and stopped playing.
And yeah, I feel in love with Q3 when I played - I didn't have time when I found CS to learn another game, but I went to qcon in '02. There was some 70+ player FFA server that I was owning hours on end as 'async', along with a guy who went by SS5|Vegata who played on the Muppety server with me. Ah, the good ol days. I played against a lot of second-tier wannabe pros but never put the time into 1v1 that it took to get good. My aim was there, but my strategy sucked and my movement really, really sucked. I couldn't even regularly make the hop from the ledge to the bridge above the armor on Q3DM6.
I wonder how Thomas would have been at FPS. He's probably a banker somewhere now
Cool. Were you around when SSF2 and SSF2:T were big? I played all the SF2 games, but I got hooked up with the sunnyvale golfland crowd in 94/95 and played fairly competitively there against Thomas Osaki, John Choi, Graham Wolfe, Jason Nelson, etc. Never finished higher than 2nd. On good days, I had a chance to crack anyone but Thomas. Thomas was absolutely inhuman with his reactions. I watched him hammer Mike Watson when Watson came up for a tourney from LA. I know some of those guys made pilgrimages to the east coast to play from time to time, including after the alphas were out. I quit after ssf2t, so I was never paying much attention to that.
The problem here is that if their system stops 97% of ripping software, then everyone using that 97% will immediately switch to the other 3%.
I was a fairly dominant Q3 player. I hadn't played an FPS before that since Duke Nukem. I moved on after that to NWN, and played on a RP-oriented server.
Now I'm playing CoH and WoW.
Those games require only a modicum of skill. Yes, it is possible to be 'better' by knowing your character and capabilities, and in the more hectic group-battle situations your decision making can be amplified to the level it is at least somewhat significant. However, there is nowhere *near* the level of learned skill you get compared to a game like Q3 or Counterstrike. I've *always* had fantastic hand-eye coordination and reaction speed. I was competitive with the very best Street Fighter 2 players (back when Capcom used to give away full-sized videogames for winning big tournaments, back in the 90s). Reactions don't translate into skill. They may provide a ceiling, in the same way that physical fitness is a ceiling for competitiveness in a sport like tennis, but those underlying attributes are far less significant than the "learned skill" that goes along with the game.
MMORPGs place an artificial cap on the skill you can attain because the "margin of error" is so large that it is easy for a very quick-thinking, mentally agile and highly practiced opponent to have virtually no advantage over someone who is distinctly second rate. Both of them might trounce on a newb who can't play his character, but their differential of skill at the high level of play doesn't translate into a game significance.
Morever, if you think outplanning and out-thinking your opponent is not a significant part of an FPS, then you're talking out of your ass. Anyone who has watched professionals play a game like Q3 knows that the entire game is a chess match which revolves around control of the map and the resources it provides. Anticipation, timing, the ability to adapt quickly, understanding an opponent; those are the skills which make you good at the highest eschelon of skill in "twitch games". Newb players think it is about fast reactions or perfect aim, but it isn't, because at the top level, EVERY pro hits almost every shot. I only played as a warm-up snack for pros, but when owning one of the major open DM servers at qcon '02, I racked up something like 80 straight hits with the railgun on Q3DM17. My aim and movement was pro-level; I'd still get absolutely *owned* against a pro playing 1v1, because they do that sort of thing automatically, but they back it up with beautiful execution, perfect timing, fluent adaptation, and hard-to-crack strategies for controlling a map. Watching pros play that game was like watching chess. They'd feint, move to control resources. They'd fall back and grab secondary objectives while their opponent was busily getting a primary one they thought they couldn't effectively contest. They'd viciously press their advantage; sacrafice several points in order to get a positional or strategic advantage to put them back in the driver's seat, and so on.
[Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you need advice, consult an attorney who can consider the specifics of your case. And above all, ignore people on Slashdot who display a remarkable ignorance of applicable precedent.]
If you access their site in a manner that they explicitly prohibit in a terms and conditions you necessarily would have to read to get the links in the first place, then you violate their terms and conditions, you could be arrested and tried for violation of the CFAA. They don't need a contract to sue you; they'll just claim the access was unauthorized and an intentional tort, and they'll sue you for lost revenue relating to your posting the links you obtained in violation of the CFAA. The need for an account on their site is an access control.
Also, if you're going to play lawyer on Slashdot, you may want to err on the side of caution rather than advising people that some EULA is unenforceable. Slashdot itself has covered a case where clickthrough EULAs were ruled enforceable, even when they contained draconian provisions (waiving first sale rights, waiving fair use rights).
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.
That's not much of an assumption. Margins in retail businesses are almost never anywhere near that low, unless it's on specific loss-leader items designed to increase traffic, or unless the item is a highly-competitive big-ticket item; say, loose diamonds or new cars. (The former because it's a commodity being sold and distributed by a rabid cottage industry, the latter because consumers have so much information about the costs)
I can say that loose diamond margins for internet purchases at the more cut-throat net retailers are down to about 6% for larger stones... you'll be paying by wire transfer and don't expect any extras. But that's what you'd expect for a commoditized $25,000 item. Compare that to finished pieces with smaller diamonds... a pair of half-carat total-weight earrings might easily be marked up 100%, maybe more if the manufacturer managed to get the diamonds in a cheap lot. (Yes, those $99 specials weren't that special)
A typical niche retail store has 50-200% markups on everything unless it's on special. The fact that the article mentioned the business in question was a "niche retailer" probably implies they're selling a highly non-commoditized item which means their margins might be even larger. Specialty items often have drastically higher margins because less availability means less competition, and less competition means higher prices.
There's even a term for the 100% gross margin: "keystone", which is a retail price of twice what the item cost.
Even Wal-mart and Target are often "less" in their stores because they wield such enormous pricing pressure over manufacturers. They end up having to sell to mega-retailers for less because if they don't, the megas won't stock their products and will buy from their manufacturing competitors instead. But if they DO sell for less to Wal-mart and Target, then they screw all the small retailers and eventually drive them out of business, leaving the ONLY outlet for their goods being the mega-retailer. If you're a hardware manufacturer and don't want to sell to Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Lowes, who are all too big to need you unless your brand is indispensable, then who's left? No one, because all the small hardware stores went out of business 10-20 years ago.
Mind you, at least in terms of price, consumers still benefit from this. Although that intense pricing pressure is what forced almost all manufacturers to outsource their labor to foreign countries. In the end, you're down to basically two types of retailers: massive juggernauts that are all pricing, and little super-niche shops which are essentially charging for the 'service' of finding and stocking niche items that are too rarely bought to demand shelf space at a megastore.
But, I digress. Even at Wal-mart, I doubt margins are anywhere near as low as 15% gross except on loss leaders.
I outlined this in another post, but that's only one scenario. Yes, I agree: code bases which close the loophole by including web services in the "need to release source" requirement will then get less use. But there's another possibility: that people concerned about a disproportionate number of people using their code without contributing changes may then release because they're no longer concerned about "ASP theft" of their code because the current GPL does not protect it. I know some variant licenses have tried to close that loophole, but none carry the weight of the GPL or the legal power of GNU behind them. So this variant license would ENABLE as well as DISABLE certain behaviors... it just remains to be seen what the net benefits and costs are.
Except as an author, I don't have this worry. I write a web service for a living. It is legally unencumbered by copyright issues because it is my original work. One of the ways it can be acquired from me is with source. I provide a license to modify and use, without the right to redistribute. Even *if* I were to also release it under a web-services GPL, I could also give better terms to paying customers.
Obviously, if I distribute under the GPL, and then integrate patches into MY version that OTHERS released as required by the GPL, then *I* am then encumbered unless I get them to assign copyright... which they may well not do. After all, they're required to release the code but they may not have any inherent interest in enhancing my source for my private use...
One thing that we could easily see is an MPL-like variant that also has web services.
In any event, if you're "selling" software, you're really unlikely to be using the BSD or GPL license. If you're just providing it, then the choice has already been made for you.
... as an option. Notice what Eben Moglen says in the quote:
"I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom," he said.
So clearly the GPL will actually have some kind of optional clause of 'GPL 3b' type version which will either add or remove a web services clause that requires access to a modified version of the software as a web service to trigger source code release requirements.
I'm not surprised some want it, and I'm not surprised some don't; I think offering the authors choice is basically a requirement. I figure we'll see a lot of two things happen with the web services clause:
(1) Software that wasn't available before will be released. People who wrote web services software will release it now that the GPL can protect it adequately against unfair competition. (if you write a web service for a living, which I do, a serious concern over releasing under the GPL *now* is that your competition will steal all your enhancements and add their own on their own time, basically allow them to outpace you).
(2) Many existing projects will be forked after the original version adopts the web services clause. People who have an interest in maintaining an unencumbered version will fork off that version. Moreover, there may be a "mindshare" competition. A lot of commercial interests have an inherent interest in a unencumbered license, but the encumbered license may "win" in quality/features arms race precisely because of the license.