You realise this story is actually about apps, rather than phones, right? They might have "only" 28% of the smartphone market (I say only because it seems a small figure but it's currently second only to RIM/Blackberry at the moment, and they're having their pie eaten at an alarming rate), but they control a disproportionately high share of the app market (the most recent figures I can find are a year old, unfornately, but I doubt they've shifted in anyone else's favour too much in that time). 79% market share when your nearest competitor has only 15% share sounds like it might be a big enough advantage to constitute a monopoly.
I missed the part where 28% is a monopoly. Explain that to me again.
You also apparently missed the part where GP specifically said it's not a monopoly, he was just indicating that the figure is actually much higher than the "less than 10%" quoted above.
Too many companies only see the short term costs of buying the equipment and ignore the long term productivity gains (this is in reference to upgrading in general, I should say, rather than any specific advantages of 7 over XP). I know I've worked at a big blue chip where my crappy 1GB XP desktop took an hour to crunch through generating a huge XML feed (during which time my system was pretty much locked up for all intents and purposes), while my 4GB XP home desktop could manage the same process in about 20 minutes. At peak times (just before a big deployment when there were lots of last minute changes and fixes going through) I might have to run this process on average four or five times per day, but asking for another 3GB of RAM to effectively add another 2-3 hours of worktime to my day was like asking for them to sacrifice their first born. Of course, deadlines still had to be hit, so I just ended up doing 2-3 hours unpaid overtime (on top of the 1-2 hours unpaid overtime I was already doing to deliver a project estimated at 3 months but budgeted to take 1 month without going into the red). What they also don't factor in is how much they'll lose when their stupid practices drive away people with good skills and intimate knowledge of their systems and applications...
I used WinME back in the day... mostly because I got it for free from an MS employee.
Wow, they sure made a mess of that "the first hit is free" policy. That's like a cocaine dealer trying to get you hooked by giving you a free hit that's been cut with ground glass and lye...
Cameras, in particular, tend to come with huge instruction manuals too. It's much cheaper (and as you said, easier to rectify mistakes/add new features) if the manual is supplied in digital format on the card rather than as a dead tree version in every box (although it's still more common to find a bundled CD than the software on the card). Nevertheless, I can't see this practice going away any time soon.
Erm, you know, he did give two options. You could always try the "train them" route before the "fire them" route. As you even mentioned yourself, you've already had to give them training to do the job, why baulk at training them how to properly use the systems?
Yeah, because having to take away an executive's computer to clean up a virus that could have been prevented if you'd tightened security a little is a much more career enhancing activity than just spending a little extra time showing the same executive how to access the files sans autorun...
Uh, yeah change. I haven't bought a single Sony product since the rootkit fiasco. It doesn't stop a major Sony SNAFU every six months or so. If you think a few people (and it will never be more than a few, too many people have short memories or just love their cheap tech enough to overlook a bit of evil) will change the practices of these companies, you're wrong. What it will do is ensure that I personally don't get screwed by this company, and in lieu of changing the world, that will just have to be good enough.
Actually the analogy is pretty close. AV companies are currently advocating Windows because it has a massive userbase and its flaws are well known, easy sales. If we ever reached a point where Linux or OSX had equal market share, or where (don't laugh) Windows gained a reputation for bullet proof security, the AV vendors would do more to market their products to those other operating systems. Likewise BP will eventually advocate switching to renewable resources, but not while they're making scads of cash by just sucking oil directly from the ground. It would be just as crazy for BP to put all of its marketing budget into solar right now, likewise just as crazy for a big AV vendor to put all of their money into advertising their alternative OS products.
True, but GP's point still stands because it's the OS of choice for AV vendors right now (low hanging fruite, and all that - it's much easier to convince a Windows user that they need AV than it is a Linux/BSD/OSX user, not to mention the volumes are there for a decent ROI). They have every reason to want users to stay on an insecure system while publicly decrying security flaws elsewhere.
You don't need to go that far, just not running stuff without being explicitly told to would be sufficiant to block most of this sort of crap.
They already tried that with UAC. Users just defaulted to auto-clicking yes every time because they ended up getting a request every time they tried to do pretty much anything.
It. Is. Not. Stealing. I know I shouldn't feed the obvious troll, but really, I can promise you, as someone who is legally trained, stealing is completely different to infringement of intellectual property rights. That's not a justification of any action, it's a plain statement of fact. That you can't or won't understand this either indicates that you are reasonably ignorant of the differences (in which case, best not to comment) or that you're an obvious shill for the labels who would like everyone to believe the two are the same, since stealing has a lot more negative connotations than copyright infringement (people can envision having something of theirs stolen, they can less easily envision having some copyright of theirs infringed). So, no, I actually know you're not right - I understand the point you're trying to make, but when you use deliberately inflammatory terms which are just incorrect, you invalidate your whole argument. Had you said it was morally wrong, maybe you'd have a point that was worthy of condiseration and discussion, but to say it's stealing is no more accurate than to say it's murder, or to follow the **AAs definition of file sharing as being an act of hijack that takes place on the high seas.
Don't think of it as coffee, more as coffee flavoured milk drinks. Like a warm coffee milkshake. It's as far from real coffee as strawberry milkshake is from real strawberries, but doesn't mean you can't enjoy both so long as you don't delude yourself about the nature of them by believing it's anything approaching proper coffee.
That's irrelevant. There's no locked down system that's so bullet proof that some label won't say it's not enough. The point is you find a compromise where the largest number of people are happy to pay, the right price point with the right freedoms, and you accept you'll never convert 100% of the market. The problem the **AAs seem to have is that they just can't accept that not everyone is going to pay, and they're willing to throw away huge sums of money on DRM and annoy all their legitimate customers to go after the few extra percent, when they could do none of that and still make money hand over fist.
Is there any way their performance can be attributed back to Spain's liberal file sharing attitude? I can't think of anything more likely to get Joe Sixpack up in arms about anti-file sharing laws than the possibility that it might help his team perform well:)
Firstly, the **AAs started throwing the term around as a derogatory way to describe people sharing files. That Pirate Bay picked it up to use shouldn't change the validity of their arguments one iota, unless you're saying politicians, judges and high-price lawyers really can't see through the meaningless attribution of a name.
It's difficult without reading the full judgment (and my Spanish is next to non-existent so I won't be doing that) but from the snippet in TFA it seems that their analogy with sharing books is not about the format, but about the fact that the sharing is not for financial gain. What they seem to be saying is that the real criminals are those who seek to profit by selling copied items, but distributing them for free is (currently) acceptable under the law. What they're saying is, there may come into existence laws which will make sharing illegal, but those laws don't currently exist and you can't shoe-horn one of these existing laws to do the work for you.
End result: more stringent laws. Lobbying groups with money to throw around will always trump the views of the man in the street in the eyes of government, even when that same man in the street put them in power. The problem is all of the main parties have pretty similar views on this (or if they don't now, they will have shortly after being elected) so there's no real alternative even if you do think your vote can change anything.
I don't see the moral ambiguity. So the guy at the gas station is struggling? He's still earning his living on the basis of a company whose practices you are ethically opposed to. If a toy company tries to shave a few cents off their product by using toxic components, do you still buy one for your kid because you want to support the mom and pop stockist down the road?
You do realise that they've bought an ad space, they're not paying to bury all the other organic search results. It's one ad that appears in the clearly marked sponsored area and links to a page that gives some information about how they're trying (and failing) to do anything, with some webcams and a pitiful "have you got any ideas to help?" request. It's hardly preventing people finding the information they want, any more than Dulux are trying to destroy our cultural heritage by preventing us accessing information on the great artists because they show an ad when I search for "painting".
Agreed - the people selling copies of games are the real pirates who are stealing sales and money from the industry. Most serial downloaders are either people who are already spending a large portion of their income on games and couldn't afford to spend more, or their people who never had any intention of buying even if they couldn't get it for free. There's also a not-insignificant subset of those people who are just serial hoarders, I've known people who have literally thousands of downloaded games or music or movies and haven't "consumed" even 5% of them, they just like to be able to boast or take pride in the completeness of their collection. They'd have to take out a mortgage to afford to actually buy all those things, it's ridiculous to assume they're all lost sales, and these people must make up a hefty chunk of the "piracy" figures.
Also, consider the third one from the opposite perspective - people who use downloads as a means of determining if the game is worth purchasing. Maybe neither of these are a significant contributing factor (I don't know enough about Japanese culture to definitively say), but considering their method of calculating the world total is to multipl the Japanese total by 4, I'd say there are some pretty big holes in their figures anyway, unless there are studies to show that piracy levels are the same worldwide.
The difference is that we've seen the effects of large scale nuclear attacks agains populated areas - we can make a reasonable extrapolation from that or what it would be like if two superpowers with nuclear weapons were to use them against each other. We've never seen what a "cyberwarfare" attack of the same magnitude could accomplish outside of a movie. Would it really bring society to its knees, or, more likely, would there be a few isolated incidents resulting in us taking some systems offline until exploits and security flaws were patched and then business as normal? The only way I can see cyberwarfare alone having much of an impact is if you can use it to trigger some kind of physical event while making it more difficult for the emergency services to respond, but it still seems the scale wouldn't be anywhere near so great as even conventional long range bombing. Possibly there is a place for such an attack alongside a conventional invasion, to knock out communications and make logistics, warning systems and intel gathering more difficult. On its own I can't imagine it ever being effective, for one thing you'd leave a society largely unaffected, if they're more powerful militarily than you you'd better hope they can't trace the attack, because you just gave them the perfect excuse to wipe you off the face of the planet in "self defence".
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You realise this story is actually about apps, rather than phones, right? They might have "only" 28% of the smartphone market (I say only because it seems a small figure but it's currently second only to RIM/Blackberry at the moment, and they're having their pie eaten at an alarming rate), but they control a disproportionately high share of the app market (the most recent figures I can find are a year old, unfornately, but I doubt they've shifted in anyone else's favour too much in that time). 79% market share when your nearest competitor has only 15% share sounds like it might be a big enough advantage to constitute a monopoly.
I missed the part where 28% is a monopoly. Explain that to me again.
You also apparently missed the part where GP specifically said it's not a monopoly, he was just indicating that the figure is actually much higher than the "less than 10%" quoted above.
Too many companies only see the short term costs of buying the equipment and ignore the long term productivity gains (this is in reference to upgrading in general, I should say, rather than any specific advantages of 7 over XP). I know I've worked at a big blue chip where my crappy 1GB XP desktop took an hour to crunch through generating a huge XML feed (during which time my system was pretty much locked up for all intents and purposes), while my 4GB XP home desktop could manage the same process in about 20 minutes. At peak times (just before a big deployment when there were lots of last minute changes and fixes going through) I might have to run this process on average four or five times per day, but asking for another 3GB of RAM to effectively add another 2-3 hours of worktime to my day was like asking for them to sacrifice their first born. Of course, deadlines still had to be hit, so I just ended up doing 2-3 hours unpaid overtime (on top of the 1-2 hours unpaid overtime I was already doing to deliver a project estimated at 3 months but budgeted to take 1 month without going into the red). What they also don't factor in is how much they'll lose when their stupid practices drive away people with good skills and intimate knowledge of their systems and applications...
I used WinME back in the day... mostly because I got it for free from an MS employee.
Wow, they sure made a mess of that "the first hit is free" policy. That's like a cocaine dealer trying to get you hooked by giving you a free hit that's been cut with ground glass and lye...
How do you handle violent sex?
Cameras, in particular, tend to come with huge instruction manuals too. It's much cheaper (and as you said, easier to rectify mistakes/add new features) if the manual is supplied in digital format on the card rather than as a dead tree version in every box (although it's still more common to find a bundled CD than the software on the card). Nevertheless, I can't see this practice going away any time soon.
Erm, you know, he did give two options. You could always try the "train them" route before the "fire them" route. As you even mentioned yourself, you've already had to give them training to do the job, why baulk at training them how to properly use the systems?
Yeah, because having to take away an executive's computer to clean up a virus that could have been prevented if you'd tightened security a little is a much more career enhancing activity than just spending a little extra time showing the same executive how to access the files sans autorun...
Uh, yeah change. I haven't bought a single Sony product since the rootkit fiasco. It doesn't stop a major Sony SNAFU every six months or so. If you think a few people (and it will never be more than a few, too many people have short memories or just love their cheap tech enough to overlook a bit of evil) will change the practices of these companies, you're wrong. What it will do is ensure that I personally don't get screwed by this company, and in lieu of changing the world, that will just have to be good enough.
They're the quintessential gift that keeps on giving.
Actually the analogy is pretty close. AV companies are currently advocating Windows because it has a massive userbase and its flaws are well known, easy sales. If we ever reached a point where Linux or OSX had equal market share, or where (don't laugh) Windows gained a reputation for bullet proof security, the AV vendors would do more to market their products to those other operating systems. Likewise BP will eventually advocate switching to renewable resources, but not while they're making scads of cash by just sucking oil directly from the ground. It would be just as crazy for BP to put all of its marketing budget into solar right now, likewise just as crazy for a big AV vendor to put all of their money into advertising their alternative OS products.
True, but GP's point still stands because it's the OS of choice for AV vendors right now (low hanging fruite, and all that - it's much easier to convince a Windows user that they need AV than it is a Linux/BSD/OSX user, not to mention the volumes are there for a decent ROI). They have every reason to want users to stay on an insecure system while publicly decrying security flaws elsewhere.
You don't need to go that far, just not running stuff without being explicitly told to would be sufficiant to block most of this sort of crap.
They already tried that with UAC. Users just defaulted to auto-clicking yes every time because they ended up getting a request every time they tried to do pretty much anything.
It. Is. Not. Stealing. I know I shouldn't feed the obvious troll, but really, I can promise you, as someone who is legally trained, stealing is completely different to infringement of intellectual property rights. That's not a justification of any action, it's a plain statement of fact. That you can't or won't understand this either indicates that you are reasonably ignorant of the differences (in which case, best not to comment) or that you're an obvious shill for the labels who would like everyone to believe the two are the same, since stealing has a lot more negative connotations than copyright infringement (people can envision having something of theirs stolen, they can less easily envision having some copyright of theirs infringed). So, no, I actually know you're not right - I understand the point you're trying to make, but when you use deliberately inflammatory terms which are just incorrect, you invalidate your whole argument. Had you said it was morally wrong, maybe you'd have a point that was worthy of condiseration and discussion, but to say it's stealing is no more accurate than to say it's murder, or to follow the **AAs definition of file sharing as being an act of hijack that takes place on the high seas.
Don't think of it as coffee, more as coffee flavoured milk drinks. Like a warm coffee milkshake. It's as far from real coffee as strawberry milkshake is from real strawberries, but doesn't mean you can't enjoy both so long as you don't delude yourself about the nature of them by believing it's anything approaching proper coffee.
That's irrelevant. There's no locked down system that's so bullet proof that some label won't say it's not enough. The point is you find a compromise where the largest number of people are happy to pay, the right price point with the right freedoms, and you accept you'll never convert 100% of the market. The problem the **AAs seem to have is that they just can't accept that not everyone is going to pay, and they're willing to throw away huge sums of money on DRM and annoy all their legitimate customers to go after the few extra percent, when they could do none of that and still make money hand over fist.
Is there any way their performance can be attributed back to Spain's liberal file sharing attitude? I can't think of anything more likely to get Joe Sixpack up in arms about anti-file sharing laws than the possibility that it might help his team perform well :)
Firstly, the **AAs started throwing the term around as a derogatory way to describe people sharing files. That Pirate Bay picked it up to use shouldn't change the validity of their arguments one iota, unless you're saying politicians, judges and high-price lawyers really can't see through the meaningless attribution of a name.
It's difficult without reading the full judgment (and my Spanish is next to non-existent so I won't be doing that) but from the snippet in TFA it seems that their analogy with sharing books is not about the format, but about the fact that the sharing is not for financial gain. What they seem to be saying is that the real criminals are those who seek to profit by selling copied items, but distributing them for free is (currently) acceptable under the law. What they're saying is, there may come into existence laws which will make sharing illegal, but those laws don't currently exist and you can't shoe-horn one of these existing laws to do the work for you.
End result: more stringent laws. Lobbying groups with money to throw around will always trump the views of the man in the street in the eyes of government, even when that same man in the street put them in power. The problem is all of the main parties have pretty similar views on this (or if they don't now, they will have shortly after being elected) so there's no real alternative even if you do think your vote can change anything.
I don't see the moral ambiguity. So the guy at the gas station is struggling? He's still earning his living on the basis of a company whose practices you are ethically opposed to. If a toy company tries to shave a few cents off their product by using toxic components, do you still buy one for your kid because you want to support the mom and pop stockist down the road?
You do realise that they've bought an ad space, they're not paying to bury all the other organic search results. It's one ad that appears in the clearly marked sponsored area and links to a page that gives some information about how they're trying (and failing) to do anything, with some webcams and a pitiful "have you got any ideas to help?" request. It's hardly preventing people finding the information they want, any more than Dulux are trying to destroy our cultural heritage by preventing us accessing information on the great artists because they show an ad when I search for "painting".
Agreed - the people selling copies of games are the real pirates who are stealing sales and money from the industry. Most serial downloaders are either people who are already spending a large portion of their income on games and couldn't afford to spend more, or their people who never had any intention of buying even if they couldn't get it for free. There's also a not-insignificant subset of those people who are just serial hoarders, I've known people who have literally thousands of downloaded games or music or movies and haven't "consumed" even 5% of them, they just like to be able to boast or take pride in the completeness of their collection. They'd have to take out a mortgage to afford to actually buy all those things, it's ridiculous to assume they're all lost sales, and these people must make up a hefty chunk of the "piracy" figures.
Also, consider the third one from the opposite perspective - people who use downloads as a means of determining if the game is worth purchasing. Maybe neither of these are a significant contributing factor (I don't know enough about Japanese culture to definitively say), but considering their method of calculating the world total is to multipl the Japanese total by 4, I'd say there are some pretty big holes in their figures anyway, unless there are studies to show that piracy levels are the same worldwide.
The difference is that we've seen the effects of large scale nuclear attacks agains populated areas - we can make a reasonable extrapolation from that or what it would be like if two superpowers with nuclear weapons were to use them against each other. We've never seen what a "cyberwarfare" attack of the same magnitude could accomplish outside of a movie. Would it really bring society to its knees, or, more likely, would there be a few isolated incidents resulting in us taking some systems offline until exploits and security flaws were patched and then business as normal? The only way I can see cyberwarfare alone having much of an impact is if you can use it to trigger some kind of physical event while making it more difficult for the emergency services to respond, but it still seems the scale wouldn't be anywhere near so great as even conventional long range bombing. Possibly there is a place for such an attack alongside a conventional invasion, to knock out communications and make logistics, warning systems and intel gathering more difficult. On its own I can't imagine it ever being effective, for one thing you'd leave a society largely unaffected, if they're more powerful militarily than you you'd better hope they can't trace the attack, because you just gave them the perfect excuse to wipe you off the face of the planet in "self defence".