Posted by Dennis Sellers

The status quo of mobile phone licensing today is that royalties are levied for access to patents that are essential to the mobile standard being incorporated in each device, according to ABI Research.

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"IT vendors may be growing increasingly desperate amid the global economic downturn, but customers must employ a range of tactics -- not just bullying -- to extract cost savings from them, a group of Forrester Research analysts said during a client teleconference Wednesday./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Companies simply can#39;t use a shotgun-style approach and expect to succeed, said software licensing analyst Duncan Jones: quot;Anything that is undifferentiated, like a general letter that goes out [to vendors] saying we#39;ve got to cut everyone#39;s maintenance by 10 percent? That#39;s not going anywhere.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[#160;For more on how to deal with the recession, check out#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/archives/t.jsp?N=samp;V=113008amp;source=fssr"InfoWorld#39;s special report: IT and the financial crisis/a.#160;]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Analyst Paul Roehrig, who focuses on outsourcing and IT services, said it is difficult and awkward to extract price concessions on a signed contract./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Either you#39;re begging or threatening.... Those [tactics] tend to work, but only for a short time,quot; he said, adding, quot;unless you#39;re really overpaying, there#39;s really not that much room in the provider#39;s margin where they can lower the price point without changing the service level.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"And if a customer does succeed in lowering its services costs, quot;the vendor is going to immediately substitute junior people,quot; said analyst John McCarthy, whose coverage areas include offshoring./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Instead of begging for a rate cut, customers could instead ask their vendors to assign more seasoned workers to their projects, resulting in productivity gains and cost savings, McCarthy said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Meanwhile, the tactics are different for software licenses and maintenance agreements, according to Jones./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;One of the problems is, you#39;re dealing with a software rep who has different goals than you. He needs to sell new licenses and has no interest in helping you cut costs,quot; he said. quot;But if you get up higher in the organization, there are going to be people who care more about the long-term relationship, and there#39;s flexibility there.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"That said, now is the time to push for bigger discounts on new licenses, as sales representatives quot;are desperate to meet their number by end of the year,quot; Jones added./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Companies could even indicate they#39;d be happy to let any outstanding deals float over into 2009, he said: quot;That will probably be too late for the rep, so try it as a tactic and see how much flexibility you#39;ve got.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Also, customers could use money they#39;re prepared to spend on new software as leverage, Jones said: quot;Anything you#39;re trying to get, like cutting maintenance on products you#39;re not using, you might be able to get that as a quid pro quo for spending in another area.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Beyond maximizing their buying power, companies should save money by determining which software assets no longer need a maintenance contract, Jones said: quot;You save costs with minimal impact on the business, but you put pressure on other vendors because it shows you#39;re seriously looking at everything.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"A similar approach should be taken to IT services contracts, Roehrig said. quot;If you#39;re asking for the highest levels of service, you#39;re going to be paying top dollar, when the reality is that the enterprise can function just fine with not everyone having gold-plated service.quot;/pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Companies should also try to get more value out of outsourcing in general through strategic hiring, he said. quot;If I had money as a client to invest in one thing ... I would get someone who really knows how to manage a service provider. Some of the best outsourcing deals I#39;ve come up against have really good people who know how to get a service provider to do what you want.quot;/pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Customers should also seek to lower the total number of service providers they contract with, leading the way to bigger volume discounts, Roehrig said. But he noted that this can be difficult for heavily federated organizations to accomplish./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"It#39;s also possible to save money by actually helping one#39;s vendor cut costs, according to Jones./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"If four divisions within a company are negotiating separately with a vendor, they should consider consolidating those relationships, he said: quot;I would go to the vendor and say, how can I earn cost reductions by dealing with you in a centralized fashion?quot;/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=d2af144ea36d92b98b864852471867f8p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=d2af144ea36d92b98b864852471867f8p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=d2af144ea36d92b98b864852471867f8 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: George Romero’s “Dead” Films

Normally, when I talk about a series’ storytelling engine, what I’m really doing is trying to take a look at a long-running (or occasionally short-running) series from a different perspective. Instead of just seeing the elements of the series as part of the story the writer is telling, I’m looking at them as story-generating components–the supporting cast fulfills this function, the setting adds this potential, the protagonist moves the plot this way, and so on. But it’s very rare that I think that writers consciously consider their status quo as a machine that generates plots.

In the case of George Romero’s seminal zombie movie series (”Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “Day of the Dead”, “Land of the Dead”, “Diary of the Dead”), though, that’s pretty much exactly what they are. Romero starts with a set of postulates that function as his “engine”, and then takes other stories and runs them through the engine to see what the result will be. It’s a storytelling engine that takes the world as it is, applies a major change, and observes the logical result.

The change is, of course, the dead coming back to life. Romero postulates an event (never explicated, but hinted as some sort of radiation wave released by a returning satellite) that causes every recently-deceased corpse in the world to re-animate and seek out living humans with an instinct to consume their flesh. (Their bite is invariably lethal, although Romero never makes it clear whether this is an effect of their status as zombies, or just due to the normal infections that would result from being bitten by a septic, rotting corpse.) They retain traces of their former personality, but generally have limited intelligence and diminished physical capacity (they’re slower, but stronger.) Being dead, they’re pretty much immune to pain, and the only way of permanently killing them is with damage to the head. But more importantly, the event affected living humans as well, even if it doesn’t show. Anyone who dies in the series re-animates within minutes of their death as a zombie, unless that death is due to head trauma.

Romero’s movies (and the various comic and novel spin-offs) focus on the consequences of this event for different groups. He never returns to the same set of protagonists (which allows him a lot of freedom when it comes to killing off characters), but the world is always the same. Humans find ways to survive the zombie apocalypse, some of which are co-operative (as in the small community of survivors in “Land”) and some of which are competitive and counter-productive (as with the nihilistic end to “Dawn”.) Different people cope with the psychological stress of the event in different ways (most of which aren’t good–if Romero’s movies have a common theme, it’s that people tend to come unglued in crisis situations.) And the zombie horde always gets larger–in fact, with the span of time separating the movies, the size of the zombie horde provides the only definitive timeline for the series. “Diary” might look like 2005 and “Night” might look like 1968, but the two both occur early on in the zombie plague.

Romero’s “zombie rules” provide a very interesting storytelling engine, precisely because they’re the only real element of an engine with very loose continuity from installment to installment. This faithfulness to the rules has meant that the entire zombie sub-genre of horror has found itself defined by Romero’s rules and the ground-breaking films that provided them, to the point where many zombie movies are essentially Romero movies in all but name. Some of them are loving homages, like “Shaun of the Dead”, others are rip-offs, like “The Dead Next Door”, and still others are deliberate reactions against or alterations of the Romero rules, like “Return of the Living Dead” or “28 Days Later” (or, for that matter, the James Gunn/Zack Snyder remake of “Dawn of the Dead”.) But the Romero rules now provide a practically inescapable framework for everyone following in Romero’s footsteps, a storytelling engine that has escaped its creator and run wild throughout the genre. Its simplicity is also its strength, something that is constantly proved with each new zombie movie, comic, or book that comes out.

À entendre ou à lire les reporters des grands réseaux de télévision du Québec, on pourrait croire que rien ne changera dans les vingt prochaines années et que le capitalisme triomphant va continuer son petit bonhomme de chemin brisant de plus en plus de vies, faisant augmenter banques alimentaires et soupes populaires. Les citoyens vont tout simplement continuer à élire joyeusement des politiciens néo-libéraux qui vont continuer à nous dire que la solution à ces problèmes est de créer de (...)