With the grinding march of time, and coinciding with MS's desperate push for Vista, I am seeing every user who knows how to doubleclick an application has heard of both Microsoft Windows and "Apple". The world has learned what an OS is (almost). They have learned that "Microsoft Windows" looks one way, and "Apple" looks some other way.
I really consider this progress.
Now we can barely begin to discuss "is one better than the other?".
The only people I ever see who still do not know what an OS is, are *sub-average* users.
Anyone else see potential for an Abbot & Costello homage here?
"What should I do, Cancel Allowing, or Allow Cancel?" "Who wants to read your clicks" "Cancel" "I didn't say to cancel the dialog, I asked who was reading these." "I just told you, Cancel."
The captcha word is Library, which doesn't sell your clicks.
Recently, Paper has also been called into question.
If you take a heavy-stock piece of high quality paper, fold it into quarters, grasp the edges, and slam your arm down to force air through the middle flap, you can create a sound that will stop an airport in its tracks.
The Etch-A-Sketch brand has been revived and is being offered as a paper-replacement tool, but Microsoft has expressed doubt that the One Etch-a-Sketch Per Child program will work.
There's a tradeoff between "best that can be done" and "Get it to market".
I think I'm seeing more companies using their sales force to cover for the Next-To-Finished versions of software. These are High-Beta / RC level packages that draw on two years worth of initial sales to fund their completion.
Someone in management may decide "our company needs to be positioned *here*", for your choice of some niche and year. In all but the extreme cases (Vista is an extreme case), the paid advertising floats around the media-space, while glitches caused by sludgy design are hushed up inside each end-user company.
No, CS isn't dead because we don't need people to hand-mark the errors on punch cards anymore. Open Source has a million open tasks for CS types to volunteer on, and classical Closed Source houses may be approaching the consolidation period necessary to back the hype of last year's sales push. Code streamlining requires high grade CS, but isn't "Exciting".
(Example: Sloppy CS reared its ugly head on the Street, because the primary computer fell behind processing a "mostly ordinary" run on asian stocks and/or commodities. The time delay caused artificially induced damage, which got amplified even more in the media-space.)
In these discussions, if someone's certs expire, they can just renew them as desired.
When I was investigating U. options in 1993, I thought about the durability of knowledge. I ended up going with an Accounting degree, instead of a pure CS degree. Why? At the time the PC landscape felt very unstable. Windows 3.1 and Mac System 7? A Gigabyte was serious storage.
I didn't have the vocabulary at the time, but I caught on that the degree depends upon the years it encompasses. A course period in CS from 1993-1997 would have been a disaster. While the standards boards have added their shares of new guidelines, Accounting has a durable core of concepts.
I graduated in 1997, Received a gift Win98 machine in 1998, broke the "no experience paradox" with some of the fast money flying around in 1998-1999, and started life.
A couple years later in 2001 is what I consider one of the important CS years. Windows XP and Mac OS X emerged, and Linux had collected some time for itself to establish the very basics. A CS degree taken starting in 2001 would be far more useful in 2005 for the comparable time spent.
I think we're at another junction. Mac OS X has long since polished itself, Microsoft is making a triple-or-nothing stand with the 2007 lineup, and Linux has seriously made a name for itself as a noticeable third. Intel's 45-nm process Quad coree chips are due out this year.
I think a CS degree starting NOW, and following the trends today would make for a truly powerful degree.
I would guess that Certs might have been a way to go in 1993, but I think today's degree is the better option.
There was a rash of these articles in American context recently as well.
And wasn't it just a few stories back that we were all "more productive now that we were fully online (at work).... So tell me where young IT staff is supposed to train & practice... I know! Offline!
What a lot of these comments are investigating is *types* of multitasking.
Consider the Single Person Project: Worker X has to do something which will take approximately five hours at 75% of his capabilities. I consider this the highest sustainable performance level. Optimal completion time... is five hours. Any inserted tasks will cost the raw insertion time, and double the switch time because of lost partial thoughts. No one can possibly argue that the insertions helped the project.
What happened is that someone else wanted a data fragment, and used the authority assistance of the boss. Together they decided that the ability to further their task by acquiring the LynchPin data fragment was more important than the *perceived* loss of time on the Project.
However, a logical fallacy that rewards minimizing the true time cost leads many managers to miscalculate the *cumulative effects* of these interruptions. The first may not be so bad, but seven interruptions later, the Project Performer is likely thoroughly demoaralized, and loses FURTHER productivity.
If worker X doesn't have any 5-hour projects lined up, then all the glorious gains of IT appear because email is an asynchronous communication. Email request for data appears; Begin looking up data fragment; deal with spot-request from Boss; finish looking up data; email answer back.
Email is also far crisper for certain types of data. If you verbally tell someone the log is at Q:/ProgramSuite/Program/BetaDev/Tests/Daily/Series 1/test-2007-04-17.txt and then their phone rings, they're cooked.
However, a phone conversation is better for interchanges in which someone needs serial answers to a complete problem. A solid phone call can get more done in 15 minutes than three days of email.
I just tiptoed into PenguinPark a couple of months ago, after a period of reading up a little. I chatted with my local source and we decided to go for THE most stable distro we could agree on, even if that meant it wasn't decked out. I am interested to watch the "100% Pure" crusade, but newcomers simply have to get started doing *something*.
I will even compromise and only run a very limited series of Apps, because I simply cannot bear any kind of crazy crash in Linux right off the bat. If I get a deathwish and feel like fiddling, I'll fiddle on one of my spare Win boxes.
I don't know what class of users I belong in. I'm using Linux where it fits because of the basic philosophy. I make the concession to proprietary fragments out of raw necessity. Yet I really don't enjoy OS-level problem solving. I far prefer to live within apps and watch them breathe or break as they choose, but when end-process or such executes, I need to know that I can't hurt the root OS.
From this point, all the "Unstable Upgrades" comments about Red Hat begin to make me mildly glad that all these posters are doing okay in uBuntu (Debian-based?).
Unfortunately, so far Linux is one of those items which I will use myself, but will not recommend yet. If nothing else, MS is doing us a 1% favor by having to tell customers that an OS MATTERS. They don't want "just windows" to be good enough anymore. But by being forced to educate users that the OS concept can even be changed gets people looking less-than-180-degrees-away from Linux.
Everyone else in the world is considering how to unify. The Linux movement feels to me like an OS version of what the 1980's were for basic pc's. Everyone's had a few years now to develop the basics. If my theory holds, the best four distros to really consolidate their communities will lead, and the rest will become nostalgia.
Let's suppose there are at least nine major distros right now. (Y'all can list them.) Presume at least seven cores each. Add a few misc items. That's *SEVENTY* variants. Far too many. I'd like to see some of the smaller teams settle differences and do some inter-operability work between upgrades. Four distros with four cores each plus the misc items would cut the serious contenders to 25 variants. That might be focused enough to generate important synergies.
Just my thoughts as a high second-tier user making the switch.
I guess you haven't met practitioners of the SuperFootnote. The trick is they only have 1 subject in the header, but as last-minute item tacked on below.
P.S. Did you see the Vista article in the Register a couple threads below this?
Problem: "Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely."
Solution, from 3 stories down on Slashdot: "UK will start jailing the people who trade in email addresses, or any other personal data. The new regulations will result in a two year prison sentence for violating the Act."
Not counting the minor detail of countries involved, does anyone else read this as : "Attorney General Gonzales could be jailed for trading in email addresses and personal data"?
If you pass too many consecutive over-reaching laws, you eventually create something that convicts yourself. Unfortunately, Governments are above the law. I'd love to see a "consitututional crisis because the entire congress discovered it cast itself into jail".
Limiting the scope of the new idea works in short stories, whose length signals a tight focus. In novels, the available room is there on purpose to explore the connected suite of ideas that result from the *setting*.
Although this next remark is a business comment, I think it holds true for programming. I work hard in my company to reduce the "cheap glory" factor of people understating the time involved. This happens for all kinds of psychological reasons. "It's very simple, and I want it done now!" causes real expectation problems.
I have a copy of Dapper Drake installed with help a couple weeks ago. He got the basic music player working. After I managed to botch it, I snapped my beak, dug out the famed command line from behind the figurative desktop cupboard, worked out the command to restore the main menu, and put the command-line away again. I made basic color changes to the UI, adjusted some mozilla settings, and posted a couple of SlashDot replies. Converting app versions left for some other month. Not bad for my first weekend.
Now what? I am definitely an apps oriented person. Wandering around the OS itself makes me nervous. So here I am, in Linux Land... walnuts taste a little chewey, the grass is sorta greener when it isn't translucent...
Someone mentioned religion, and that type of thinking contains the mood of "my life is no fun now, but when I get to Paris/Afterlife/Linux, everything will be better!". The packaged suites do a pretty good job on some main line functions, but they ARE finite. I'm months away from the understandings needed to take something not on the approved path to modify it cross-version and so on. So right now, I'm just... here. Yay. I think.
The Linux world cannot remain this splintered forever. To the worst of the naysayers, I reply it will never "die off" because "the price is right", and things can hover in non-zero obscurity for a decade. But we do need to take a page from Apple's book about usability. Wrap it in the approved FOSS licenses, etc, but there should be some consolidation and unity. Much like Democrats and Third Parties splitting the Non-Republican vote, MS and Apple are *together* cleaning house while Linux struggles with both a lateral kernel-build array plus a vertical version control spread.
I'm absolutely your best target audience category. low-intermediate computer skills, very basic understanding of the OS mood shift, fiddled with a couple of optional settings... where do we go from here? I'm not a programmer, though I might be able to learn to submit competent testing results.
When all the smoke settles, comptuters are for doing work. I woul submit the biggest gain would be when the linux variants become unified enough that we can market the overall Linux name, and not constantly have to do version control checks to see if a particular application will work. Then the computing world will have three major OS players to contend with, and the OS's will all have to learn to "get along".
"I am a Training Manager in Technical Communications at NetQoS (subsidiary of Dell? Regardless of verb tense, Dell's entire existence owes to bundled MS packages.) Because any serious support of Linux is against my company policy, I am pretending to make a weak subversive attempt to get some Linux footholds.
Presuming being at third level support for the Network Operating Systems support group in Dell at the enterprise server division means I have some above average skills, I still 'did not succeed' in getting Linux to work.
Therefore, since I, with my abilities can't get Linux to work, take my word for it, you can't either. So you'd better spend that $10,000 on the brand new suite MS released yesterday."
So we have something approaching a deadly conflict of interest, because beyond FUD, this becomes a crafted attempt at mis-information.
"A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as **SlashDot**, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting: "[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of **Slashdot** failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both.""
Since we know that the intelligent youth are an important aspect of SlashDot's contributing membership, this hits closer to home than you might think. "No, Timmy, you can't post a driver technical spec on Slashdot. It's past your bedtime."
This looks like the right thread to dive into. Both posters above mean well, and have hit one of the central problems surrounding the whole media empire.
Yes, in decades past, the artist had absolutely no way to reliably reach a national market, so they formed agreements with marketing companies. Slowly, the marketing companies pushed their leverage to the hilt, and popular buzz for the artist became "this is a grind, but the alternative was probably worse".
Now we do indeed have a transformation from real scarcity to artificial scarcity. I know of the Baen Free Library. It probably has served its purpose. I think the grandparent post tried to explain that it takes *longer* for the cycle of benefits to circle around from a loss-leader free-as-in-beer model, than a direct cash transaction.
Someone needs to find a devastating crystal clear replacement economic model that can be proven crisply to doubters. Then Artist Z can say "Look, I do this. My music is DRM free, because I have confidence that the exposure is worth more than the theoretically lost cash, and I made *more* than if I took a recording deal". *That's* when the big empires will begin to get the message.
I am currently using a retired office machine designed to buy the 8 months left until Intel perfects their new generation coming out this year. Then I am quite sure that machine will be Fast Enough for a long time. For the projects I do, the BioWetware of my mind is the limiting factor, not the speed of the silicon when I finally click Start (foo). Also, the TeraByte drives are due at that same period, so Storage will also be Large Enough.
All that's left is to study the price breaks to get solid quality just before the price joins Richard Branson in the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one piece of this might be changing.
With the grinding march of time, and coinciding with MS's desperate push for Vista, I am seeing every user who knows how to doubleclick an application has heard of both Microsoft Windows and "Apple". The world has learned what an OS is (almost). They have learned that "Microsoft Windows" looks one way, and "Apple" looks some other way.
I really consider this progress.
Now we can barely begin to discuss "is one better than the other?".
The only people I ever see who still do not know what an OS is, are *sub-average* users.
Anyone else see potential for an Abbot & Costello homage here?
"What should I do, Cancel Allowing, or Allow Cancel?"
"Who wants to read your clicks"
"Cancel"
"I didn't say to cancel the dialog, I asked who was reading these."
"I just told you, Cancel."
The captcha word is Library, which doesn't sell your clicks.
Recently, Paper has also been called into question.
If you take a heavy-stock piece of high quality paper, fold it into quarters, grasp the edges, and slam your arm down to force air through the middle flap, you can create a sound that will stop an airport in its tracks.
The Etch-A-Sketch brand has been revived and is being offered as a paper-replacement tool, but Microsoft has expressed doubt that the One Etch-a-Sketch Per Child program will work.
There's a tradeoff between "best that can be done" and "Get it to market".
I think I'm seeing more companies using their sales force to cover for the Next-To-Finished versions of software. These are High-Beta / RC level packages that draw on two years worth of initial sales to fund their completion.
Someone in management may decide "our company needs to be positioned *here*", for your choice of some niche and year. In all but the extreme cases (Vista is an extreme case), the paid advertising floats around the media-space, while glitches caused by sludgy design are hushed up inside each end-user company.
No, CS isn't dead because we don't need people to hand-mark the errors on punch cards anymore. Open Source has a million open tasks for CS types to volunteer on, and classical Closed Source houses may be approaching the consolidation period necessary to back the hype of last year's sales push. Code streamlining requires high grade CS, but isn't "Exciting".
(Example: Sloppy CS reared its ugly head on the Street, because the primary computer fell behind processing a "mostly ordinary" run on asian stocks and/or commodities. The time delay caused artificially induced damage, which got amplified even more in the media-space.)
Balmer didn't throw the chair. The chair sprouted wings & flew.
Their first one came in dead last. Then they posted a $4000 patch.
Damn, that's an awesome list of "things to do when bored".
In these discussions, if someone's certs expire, they can just renew them as desired.
When I was investigating U. options in 1993, I thought about the durability of knowledge. I ended up going with an Accounting degree, instead of a pure CS degree. Why? At the time the PC landscape felt very unstable. Windows 3.1 and Mac System 7? A Gigabyte was serious storage.
I didn't have the vocabulary at the time, but I caught on that the degree depends upon the years it encompasses. A course period in CS from 1993-1997 would have been a disaster. While the standards boards have added their shares of new guidelines, Accounting has a durable core of concepts.
I graduated in 1997, Received a gift Win98 machine in 1998, broke the "no experience paradox" with some of the fast money flying around in 1998-1999, and started life.
A couple years later in 2001 is what I consider one of the important CS years. Windows XP and Mac OS X emerged, and Linux had collected some time for itself to establish the very basics. A CS degree taken starting in 2001 would be far more useful in 2005 for the comparable time spent.
I think we're at another junction. Mac OS X has long since polished itself, Microsoft is making a triple-or-nothing stand with the 2007 lineup, and Linux has seriously made a name for itself as a noticeable third. Intel's 45-nm process Quad coree chips are due out this year.
I think a CS degree starting NOW, and following the trends today would make for a truly powerful degree.
I would guess that Certs might have been a way to go in 1993, but I think today's degree is the better option.
There was a rash of these articles in American context recently as well.
... So tell me where young IT staff is supposed to train & practice... I know! Offline!
And wasn't it just a few stories back that we were all "more productive now that we were fully online (at work).
What a lot of these comments are investigating is *types* of multitasking.
... is five hours. Any inserted tasks will cost the raw insertion time, and double the switch time because of lost partial thoughts. No one can possibly argue that the insertions helped the project.
s 1/test-2007-04-17.txt and then their phone rings, they're cooked.
Consider the Single Person Project: Worker X has to do something which will take approximately five hours at 75% of his capabilities. I consider this the highest sustainable performance level. Optimal completion time
What happened is that someone else wanted a data fragment, and used the authority assistance of the boss. Together they decided that the ability to further their task by acquiring the LynchPin data fragment was more important than the *perceived* loss of time on the Project.
However, a logical fallacy that rewards minimizing the true time cost leads many managers to miscalculate the *cumulative effects* of these interruptions. The first may not be so bad, but seven interruptions later, the Project Performer is likely thoroughly demoaralized, and loses FURTHER productivity.
If worker X doesn't have any 5-hour projects lined up, then all the glorious gains of IT appear because email is an asynchronous communication. Email request for data appears; Begin looking up data fragment; deal with spot-request from Boss; finish looking up data; email answer back.
Email is also far crisper for certain types of data. If you verbally tell someone the log is at Q:/ProgramSuite/Program/BetaDev/Tests/Daily/Serie
However, a phone conversation is better for interchanges in which someone needs serial answers to a complete problem. A solid phone call can get more done in 15 minutes than three days of email.
How many malware authors rate their trojans to run at 8 mhz and 20 megs of ram?
I just tiptoed into PenguinPark a couple of months ago, after a period of reading up a little. I chatted with my local source and we decided to go for THE most stable distro we could agree on, even if that meant it wasn't decked out. I am interested to watch the "100% Pure" crusade, but newcomers simply have to get started doing *something*.
I will even compromise and only run a very limited series of Apps, because I simply cannot bear any kind of crazy crash in Linux right off the bat. If I get a deathwish and feel like fiddling, I'll fiddle on one of my spare Win boxes.
I don't know what class of users I belong in. I'm using Linux where it fits because of the basic philosophy. I make the concession to proprietary fragments out of raw necessity. Yet I really don't enjoy OS-level problem solving. I far prefer to live within apps and watch them breathe or break as they choose, but when end-process or such executes, I need to know that I can't hurt the root OS.
From this point, all the "Unstable Upgrades" comments about Red Hat begin to make me mildly glad that all these posters are doing okay in uBuntu (Debian-based?).
Unfortunately, so far Linux is one of those items which I will use myself, but will not recommend yet. If nothing else, MS is doing us a 1% favor by having to tell customers that an OS MATTERS. They don't want "just windows" to be good enough anymore. But by being forced to educate users that the OS concept can even be changed gets people looking less-than-180-degrees-away from Linux.
Everyone else in the world is considering how to unify. The Linux movement feels to me like an OS version of what the 1980's were for basic pc's. Everyone's had a few years now to develop the basics. If my theory holds, the best four distros to really consolidate their communities will lead, and the rest will become nostalgia.
Let's suppose there are at least nine major distros right now. (Y'all can list them.) Presume at least seven cores each. Add a few misc items. That's *SEVENTY* variants. Far too many. I'd like to see some of the smaller teams settle differences and do some inter-operability work between upgrades. Four distros with four cores each plus the misc items would cut the serious contenders to 25 variants. That might be focused enough to generate important synergies.
Just my thoughts as a high second-tier user making the switch.
Wait for it...
Do I smell the RIAA encouraging this? Wouldn't they LOVE to nuke anyone who uses an Mp3?
Because they swiped it from Commodore. Light Out, MS.
Poke 53280,0
Poke 53281,0
Ready.
I guess you haven't met practitioners of the SuperFootnote. The trick is they only have 1 subject in the header, but as last-minute item tacked on below.
P.S. Did you see the Vista article in the Register a couple threads below this?
Does this help?
Problem: "Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely."
Solution, from 3 stories down on Slashdot: "UK will start jailing the people who trade in email addresses, or any other personal data. The new regulations will result in a two year prison sentence for violating the Act."
Not counting the minor detail of countries involved, does anyone else read this as : "Attorney General Gonzales could be jailed for trading in email addresses and personal data"?
If you pass too many consecutive over-reaching laws, you eventually create something that convicts yourself. Unfortunately, Governments are above the law. I'd love to see a "consitututional crisis because the entire congress discovered it cast itself into jail".
The preview word for this post is victors.
Limiting the scope of the new idea works in short stories, whose length signals a tight focus. In novels, the available room is there on purpose to explore the connected suite of ideas that result from the *setting*.
Although this next remark is a business comment, I think it holds true for programming. I work hard in my company to reduce the "cheap glory" factor of people understating the time involved. This happens for all kinds of psychological reasons. "It's very simple, and I want it done now!" causes real expectation problems.
... And this is the MAFIAA legal strategy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGYdmx1JBLo
The preview word for this is bulldog.
I'm here!
... here. Yay. I think.
I have a copy of Dapper Drake installed with help a couple weeks ago. He got the basic music player working. After I managed to botch it, I snapped my beak, dug out the famed command line from behind the figurative desktop cupboard, worked out the command to restore the main menu, and put the command-line away again. I made basic color changes to the UI, adjusted some mozilla settings, and posted a couple of SlashDot replies. Converting app versions left for some other month. Not bad for my first weekend.
Now what? I am definitely an apps oriented person. Wandering around the OS itself makes me nervous. So here I am, in Linux Land... walnuts taste a little chewey, the grass is sorta greener when it isn't translucent...
Someone mentioned religion, and that type of thinking contains the mood of "my life is no fun now, but when I get to Paris/Afterlife/Linux, everything will be better!". The packaged suites do a pretty good job on some main line functions, but they ARE finite. I'm months away from the understandings needed to take something not on the approved path to modify it cross-version and so on. So right now, I'm just
The Linux world cannot remain this splintered forever. To the worst of the naysayers, I reply it will never "die off" because "the price is right", and things can hover in non-zero obscurity for a decade. But we do need to take a page from Apple's book about usability. Wrap it in the approved FOSS licenses, etc, but there should be some consolidation and unity. Much like Democrats and Third Parties splitting the Non-Republican vote, MS and Apple are *together* cleaning house while Linux struggles with both a lateral kernel-build array plus a vertical version control spread.
I'm absolutely your best target audience category. low-intermediate computer skills, very basic understanding of the OS mood shift, fiddled with a couple of optional settings... where do we go from here? I'm not a programmer, though I might be able to learn to submit competent testing results.
When all the smoke settles, comptuters are for doing work. I woul submit the biggest gain would be when the linux variants become unified enough that we can market the overall Linux name, and not constantly have to do version control checks to see if a particular application will work. Then the computing world will have three major OS players to contend with, and the OS's will all have to learn to "get along".
Day After Vista Launches:
"I am a Training Manager in Technical Communications at NetQoS (subsidiary of Dell? Regardless of verb tense, Dell's entire existence owes to bundled MS packages.) Because any serious support of Linux is against my company policy, I am pretending to make a weak subversive attempt to get some Linux footholds.
Presuming being at third level support for the Network Operating Systems support group in Dell at the enterprise server division means I have some above average skills, I still 'did not succeed' in getting Linux to work.
Therefore, since I, with my abilities can't get Linux to work, take my word for it, you can't either. So you'd better spend that $10,000 on the brand new suite MS released yesterday."
So we have something approaching a deadly conflict of interest, because beyond FUD, this becomes a crafted attempt at mis-information.
And there was no opinion poll on this? (Of if there was, I missed it. I'm just not hip to the California cutting edge news.)
Now I can't make a site called Y.um
We don't HAVE kids... some of us ARE kids...
Paraphrased from the article:
"A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as **SlashDot**, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting:
"[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of **Slashdot** failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both.""
Since we know that the intelligent youth are an important aspect of SlashDot's contributing membership, this hits closer to home than you might think. "No, Timmy, you can't post a driver technical spec on Slashdot. It's past your bedtime."
Think of the Children!!
the captcha word for this post is Subverts.
Post below is correct for the US.
"Discounted" = "Free plus a dollar", right back where he started.
This looks like the right thread to dive into. Both posters above mean well, and have hit one of the central problems surrounding the whole media empire.
Yes, in decades past, the artist had absolutely no way to reliably reach a national market, so they formed agreements with marketing companies. Slowly, the marketing companies pushed their leverage to the hilt, and popular buzz for the artist became "this is a grind, but the alternative was probably worse".
Now we do indeed have a transformation from real scarcity to artificial scarcity. I know of the Baen Free Library. It probably has served its purpose. I think the grandparent post tried to explain that it takes *longer* for the cycle of benefits to circle around from a loss-leader free-as-in-beer model, than a direct cash transaction.
Someone needs to find a devastating crystal clear replacement economic model that can be proven crisply to doubters. Then Artist Z can say "Look, I do this. My music is DRM free, because I have confidence that the exposure is worth more than the theoretically lost cash, and I made *more* than if I took a recording deal". *That's* when the big empires will begin to get the message.
I agree.
I am currently using a retired office machine designed to buy the 8 months left until Intel perfects their new generation coming out this year. Then I am quite sure that machine will be Fast Enough for a long time. For the projects I do, the BioWetware of my mind is the limiting factor, not the speed of the silicon when I finally click Start (foo). Also, the TeraByte drives are due at that same period, so Storage will also be Large Enough.
All that's left is to study the price breaks to get solid quality just before the price joins Richard Branson in the sky.