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Computer games can be downloaded for free, or acquired for a very small fee from your neighbourhood copy-peddler. And still the game-development industry is steadily increasing its revenues.
Not true. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060315-6390 .html

Microsoft releases an OS & you get the service packs for free. Apple releases an OS, and the service packs as another OS. (I mean how many of the tiger updates were changes to desktop artwork?)

They did cut him a check for $10,000.

Employers may face liability for connectivity addiction
Researchers at Rutgers, Gale Porter, along with study co-authors David Vance and Nada Kakabadse, concludes that employers may be legally liable for creating an environment in which workers may become addicted to technology. "Employers rightfully provide programs to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker," states Porter, an associate professor of management at the school

Thanks, that throws this into a much better perspective. Now, it has one more test to pass in order for me to look into buying it. And believe me. this test is the one that sold me on the Nano. I worked in construction and brick manufacture at the time. So I wasn't about to spend any hard earned $'s on something that would crap out after a week or two. I ordered my Nano the day after I read this article. And I still love the thing.

here

This, of course, runs contrary to the common view that American workers are lazy and unproductive. However, there is an interesting catch. Because workers in the US tend to put in more hours than their European counterparts, the rankings change when you look at productivity per hour worked.

Norwegians lead the world with an output of $38 per hour worked last year. French workers were in second place, averaging $35 an hour, the report said. Belgians were third at $34, followed by Americans at $32.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006 /8/21/5065

FTFS:
" ... such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser."

i am not a KDE user, so i wonder what happend to the gecko support in KDE http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040911-4175 .html ?

if it gets to HTML compatibility, it is really just the render engine that matters (IMHO) and if konqueror can use gecko where is the difference ?

Cheers,
-S

It's trading a devil you know for a devil you don't.

According to Ars Technica, Govern had only been at AOL for not quite a year. She replaced John McKinley as CTO after he was promoted to AOL's Digital Services group. He'll act as interim CTO until they find someone new.

It's more likely that they just traded a devil they don't know for a devil they do.

O-M-G, I see smart people.

We do need to hold ISPs responsible to police their own neighborhoods (fat chance really).
For you that say this will infringe on your privacy ... check your TOS, your DSL/cable contracts are written by people that make mazes seem straightforward.

Brave New World
Corporations, ISPs, Spammers, Crackers - think: circlejerk
No ones gonna do nothing about anything and they'll inforce it too.
ref: scewed-blued-tattooed, NO CARRIER joke

http://www.macrovision.com/

http://www.softsummit.com/index.shtml

Old examples (where do you think you stand now?)

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,2122413~roo t=comcast~mode=flat

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20030922-2852 .html

http://wiki.phoenixlabs.org/wiki/Type's_of_Infring ement_Letters

I hope I'm wrong, this internet thingy could be really cool if we could just find a really good "front door" of sorts and quit chaining down ALL THE FURNITURE, Something we could run *anything* - completely unpatched behind, tele-commute with bunnie slippers on - like God intended.
That freedom alone would contribute to ending dependence on oil.

Incidentally, by reading this you're agreeing to:

just kidding.

"it's only after you've lost everything that you are free to do anything"
Fight Club

Ya, the Ars link may have been better to explain the situation instead of some guy's blog trying to get hits.

CNN story quoted by Arstechnica

This, of course, runs contrary to the common view that American workers are lazy and unproductive. However, there is an interesting catch. Because workers in the US tend to put in more hours than their European counterparts, the rankings change when you look at productivity per hour worked.

Norwegians lead the world with an output of $38 per hour worked last year. French workers were in second place, averaging $35 an hour, the report said. Belgians were third at $34, followed by Americans at $32.

With more vacation and less working hours per week, the French were more productive workers than Americans

Ars Technica already has posted a follow-up to the original story that says this isn't actually needed.

Ars Technica already has posted a follow-up to the original story that says this isn't actually needed.

I think we've seen the peak of controller complexity.

The devil's gamepad.

The PS3 is going to cost 5 to 6 bills, probably on the upper end. And this Yankee Group says it's going to DOMINATE? Are they joking? Even the Japanese think that thing is too expensive Here in America, with as many people that complain about gas prices cutting into their budget, are they going to be rushing to put a $600 toy that doesn't even come with any games under the tree for Christmas? Please. Even successful 30-somethings will probably give pause at the sight of the price tag.

IMHO, the Wii is going to sit at the top. Yeah it's a dumb name, but with its price point and back-to-basics approach to gaming as opposed to PC shovelware is what will set it apart from the crowd. There is one gambit, though - Microsoft's general release of the SDK for the Xbox 360. I think that people will do some pretty awesome stuff with that, and I'm certainly interested in seeing how that will pan out. One thing's for sure, either way it goes I doubt the PS3 will have a significant share of the market.

Huh? Procedural assets are exactly the kind of things the 360 designers had in mind. No worry there.

Well at least you get the full picture, the above ars guy took the specs on face value, this is the one I had in mind.

Forgot the ars link

In general, Nintendo titles do NOT quickly drop in price after release. At least not first party titles. This has pretty much been the case with the Gamecube, and will remain to be the case on the Wii. How long did it take for the launch titles you mention to get to the budget price they're at now? It took years, not months! The only thing that tends to make a nintendo title quikly drop in price is when a sequel comes out. Unlike the other consoles, becoming a "players choice" title does not grant an immediate $20 price tag either. It just means that they'll keep making more copies of the game, with small price decreases every now and then.

Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata has said before that he feels the game market is much healthier if games are given an appropriate initial priced based on various development criteria and costs, and then not discounted at all for several years.

While the downside to this philosophy is that you do fork over a lot of money for the AAA titles, the benefit is that you also don't have to risk much on low-budget gems. We've also seen this philosophy being played out in the DS market. There, the AAA titles generally run $30-35, while "cheaply produced" titles such as Brain Age and Big Brain Academy hit the shelves at only $20.

...allow me [Matt Lee, a Microsoft Xbox dev] to share a related story. A little over a year ago, one of the people in my group modded an Xbox, installed Avalaunch, and put all sorts of Xbox mod scene apps on the box, like XBMC, RSS readers, etc, along with some "backup" games.:rolleyes: He brought this box along to a meeting with Bill Gates. Bill saw a demo of this, was quite impressed, and asked something along the lines of "How can we engage this community?" - instead of saying something like "How can we squash this?" It's long been on the back of everyone's minds in the Xbox group - how can we get students and hobbyists involved without disrupting the console business model? The good news is that it's still on the radar, we'll see what happens in the future.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars

Hey now. I won't hear any of that. You pay 3 times.

- Once for the movie
- Once for the media
- Once for the temporary CSS licence.
MPAA wants to make sure you are legally burning dvds because they know how easy it is to forget about dvd copying restrictions. Thank you MPAA.

what option do they have except to sue everyone?

Oh, I dunno, how about properly investigate the defendant before filing suit?

If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued.

Hm, could it be that Pirate Kingpin has cost the recording industry several orders of magnitude more in losses than Jane's casual downloading, and her P2P downoads might have even inspired her to buy more music?

No.

See: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 17 - Scroll to about 1/3 down the page, the section beginning with "The controversy" and including this, along with a lot of other stuff:

"In the same way that new word processors are not seen as "WordStar rip-offs," Konfabulator's historical debt to Desk Accessories is not a significant part of the product's identity.

When Konfabulator was introduced, it was (rightfully) seen as a new kind of thing on the Mac platform. This identity was based on Konfabulator's "big idea," its "primary innovation," if you will."

He's saying things that are backed by some good science. You prefer your anti-science Bush administration?
NASA Climatologist silenced as UK government issues chilling report:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/1 /30/2703
and others are easy to find.

Or do you just admire Bush for his ability to disregard the Constitution, the law, common sense, etc.?

How do you define yourself, anyway? Religious zealot, generalized red state idiot, or what, exactly?

Yes, a "sane" drug policy would be nice, but that requires a nuanced, intelligent discorse about the relative risks and benefits of ANY drug. Awfully tough to do - even in the privacy of a doctor's office. Some people understand the concept of risk / benefit, other's don't.

Compound that with the complex problem of addictive behaviors, politics and the fact that this country seems hell bent to be based on some "moral" framework based on a bunch of 18th century dyspeptics and you've got.... well, what you see is what you get.

How high can Apple's marketshare of the laptop market soar? A jump from 6 to 12 percent in such a short period of time is nothing to sneeze at, and with creative professionals on the verge of buying new Macs for a variety of reasons, Apple will hopefully be poised to make some serious gains in the hardware market very soon. Will it be enough to balance out the impending popping of the iPod bubble that is constantly being predicted as of late?

So who's right? CNet or Ars Technica?

Anybody else remember loudeye from their days as the parent company of "overpeer," who hosted fake music files on p2ps? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051212-5748 .html Well, they are forever on my shit-list for that, and now nokia is too. I still don't understand why someone would pay a dollar a song for poor-quality .mp3s when the actual CD is about the same price (cheaper used). Think I'll be stickin to allofmp3 and my good ole ipod.

misleading eh?

if you were aware of the (limited) details that have been released, you'd know that while the vulnerability that the presenters (Jon Ellch and David Maynor) used was vendor specific, it still worked on the macbook's internal airport card

The demonstration was not really intended to point out the specific problem with these mac drivers. It was more intended to highlight several industry wide problems.

I'm not about to say that letting consumers know about these problems will help or hinder them in any way.. nor will pointing out any specific company. If these problems are as prevalent as Ellch and Maynor claim, virtually no amount of consumer education would solve the problem, and pointing the finger would be the security equivalent of sweeping the problem under the rug.

When Ars speculated about the likely configuration of the Mac Pro, they stated that Apple couldn't use an off-the-shelf Intel chipset/motherboard due to the lack of support for FW800.

With Windows Vista, the operating system will make "shadow" (that is, backup) copies of files and folders for users who have "System Protection" enabled (the default setting). The feature will be called Previous Versions, and will be accessible via the right-click properties menu as "Restore previous versions."

The utility will show multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and users will be able to restore, delete, or copy those versions. The service is configured to monitor modifications to files up to and including the latest "restore point," although this behavior could be modified by the time Vista ships.

... like AOL.

Sorry, but you're wrong about that. It's in a socket, and there's nothing to prevent user upgrades except the general difficulty level involved in taking the thing apart. Saving on manufacturing and development costs is exactly the reason why.

is this a double dupe by Ars AND /. ?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/221227 ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7408 .html )

from the current one:
While text mining 330,000 New York Times articles poses an interesting challenge, it's not as interesting as sifting through 70 million words (from over 70,000 unique documents) found in the Congressional Record. A team of political science researchers has done just that (PDF), and found that their software was able to answer questions too difficult for humans to handle on their own.

from the one posted yesterday:
The discipline of text mining took a step forward recently as a team from the University of California-Irvine used a new technique called "topic modeling" to sift 330,000 articles from the New York Times archive (hardcore geeks can read one of the team's papers [PDF] for more information). The team's goal was to have their computers sort the stories by topic--without requiring any human training or intervention. Computers have trouble understanding large fields of unstructured text without guidance, but the new approach enables them to engage in some unsupervised learning that could soon pay huge dividends for academics, corporations, and government security programs alike.

It's not chicken and egg at all - Apple have stated that they are not and do not intend to be a serious platform for games. They don't help game development at all, and don't intend to.

I think you're working from some very old data. In the late eighties and early nineties, Apple somewhat misguidedly tried to bolster its reputation in the business market by discarding the "toy" image and not encouraging game development. However, once their market share began to seriously tank in the mid/late nineties, Apple "got religion" about games and realized how important they were to keeping their users happy.

After that, Apple hired a series of people as "Games Partnership Managers" to reach out to the game developer community. Apple has recently been rumored to be adding gaming functionality to the iPod. Apple famously reached out to John Carmack with OpenGL to bring iD games to the Mac. Apple devotes a whole section of their retail stores to games. And, of course, they have made gaming a featured section on their website.

So, I think your assertion about Apple discouraging games was once true but is very much outdated.

He's shown an interest in modded XBoxes...

from Ars

A little over a year ago, one of the people in my group modded an Xbox, installed Avalaunch, and put all sorts of Xbox mod scene apps on the box, like XBMC, RSS readers, etc, along with some "backup" games. :rolleyes: He brought this box along to a meeting with Bill Gates. Bill saw a demo of this, was quite impressed, and asked something along the lines of "How can we engage this community?" - instead of saying something like "How can we squash this?" It's long been on the back of everyone's minds in the Xbox group - how can we get students and hobbyists involved without disrupting the console business model? The good news is that it's still on the radar, we'll see what happens in the future.

Other links about the L3 cache.

ARS Technica
Soft32

Managed Copy will allow you to make legal copies of your own movies.

That EC case is specifically about (formerly) private Windows network protocols, particularly ActiveDirectory, which were never intended to be a public API in the first place.

The real Windows API (Win32, .NET, COM, DirectX, etc) documentation is packaged as the MSDN Library, which is available for all to see. And the local version of the MSDN Library is now available for free download as well (it was formerly only available with Visual Studio, MSDN subscriptions, etc).

Read this great piece from ars. It's so sad that Bell labs and its ilk don't exist anymore.

Ars Technica put an article out circa 17:11 GMT today claiming that The Register is misleading. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7366 .html

and the Monopoly money will keep coming

like Americans use "Ter[o]rist" or the label "communist" before that.

What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?

Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.

If things are going to get better, we must not settle for the same old tired excuses. Isn't it funny how in the intarweb of tubes, the ISPs are handing out tiny little coffee stirrers for their users to sip through, then whining that they have to break network neutrality and double charge companies for the bandwidth they already paid for to keep those little straws from clogging up? Stinks of artificial scarcity and greed to me.

Against my better judgment, I'm going to respond to this, even though you've once again descended into being a rude asshole.

Dell ranks near the bottom for customer satisfaction, support surveys, and hardware reliability almost every year, significantly worse than even HP or Gateway... Independent testing and surveys from a company who makes it their only business and whose reputation is their only real asset say Apple machines are better quality. I'll put that above your random guess.

Not true on both counts. Unlike you, who decided to reference a study and then not provide a material link to it, I actually did your work for you and found the latest Consumer Reports statistics here and here. And you'll note in both studies that Dell is either at the top, or neck-and-neck, with all of the other major players in the PC arena., with regards to their technical support. (The major players here being HP, Lenovo, Gateway, and Compaq.)

As far as quality, reliability, etc. goes, the only mention of this I can find is that those surveyed claimed to have to submit their Apples machines for repair "much less" than those who had Windows PCs. I don't see any numbers, and more importantly, there is no mention of what constitutes a repair. I have worked for Dell as a hardware technician, and I know for a fact that their techs get called to do "repair" on software-related issues all the time. This does not prove Apple machines fail less--it proves that for whatever reason, Apple machines are sent in for repairs less frequently. I'm glad you know little enough about statistics that you think the two are equivalent, but they are not.

Further, the next time you reference a study--ANY STUDY--either back it up with a link or don't bother. Your method of argument makes the baby Jesus cry. I'm not going to take your word on anything, especially not when you have the arrogance of beginning your reply by truncating my points to "blah blah" like some smug asshole. I did a point-by-point comparison of two equivalent machines, and I did not leave out "dozens of hardware features." I took exactly what Apple shows you when you go to their site and choose to buy a Mac, and CUT AND PASTED. If this leaves out "dozens of great features," take it up with them, because I didn't do any selective editing. I fully admitted that Apple's software suite is more robust than the Dell's. Any value you seek to add to one or the other is purely subjective until you can link a study that proves otherwise. You think the Macbook Pro is higher quality? Fantastic. You like OSX more? GREAT. It doesn't matter. In the end, people buy what they like. Trying to justify it objectively is pointless; Apple hardware is more expensive than the equivalently-configured PC, in almost all cases, end of story. The severity of that gap varies, but it is always there. It's just a fact, and to act like it doesn't exist, or that the price difference is magically made better by X-that-is-not-quantifiable is stupid and pointless. If you like Macs, buy a Mac. I will buy a Mac Mini and possibly a Macbook (non-Pro) myself soon. But I'm not kidding myself--I'm buying them because I like Apple's style, not because of some falsely-objective points that I desperately cling to in order to justify the price.

This will open up at least two new ways to win in John Siracusa's bingo...

Where are you getting the 3 million sold from? ArsTechnica reported 5 million sold. That puts them on track for 7 to 9 million by the time of the PS3 launch. It would be nice to see a breakdown per territory, but I have not seen one. Do you have a link?

I am just the messenger here. I am only speaking on behalf of a lot of inside journalist and key-note speakers. Here are a few different sites speaking about the "intel has killed gaming" idea. 1. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/12/epics-mark-rein- intel-is-killing-pc-gaming/ 2. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/20 06/07/12/is_intel_killing_pc_gaming.html 3. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060712-7247 .html

Actually, if Ars Technica is to be believed, the French Office of Defense has done a comparitive security analysis, and Open Office lost badly. The kinds of bugs the OO.o had were design bugs; these are file handling bugs. If equivalent design bugs existed in Office, they'd be the ones exploited, not the harder to find and exploit data validation bugs.