Well, people can just go to my slashdot homepage if they want to. My name is there, too. I wasn't trying to make the URL hard to figure out so much as just asking people not to go there. (I would have posted as an Anonymous Coward if I had really cared).
The domain name of the form firstnamelastname.com, where firstname and lastname are my actual names, was registered by someone a couple of years ago, and for a while there was a "This domain name is for sale for $250" site there. Then the design of the page changed and the request was for $500. A few months ago, the requests for money for the domain name vanished, and if you go to the site now you are forwarded to an anti-abortion site with pictures of aborted fetuses on it. This is really quite disturbing.
(I haven't provided a link to the page, and I would prefer it if people do not figure out the URL and go there. I am hoping that sometime soon the domain will expire and I can then buy it, and if the page gets a lot of hits, that might make the present owners realise that someone wants it and encourage them to renew it).
Thýs stýll doesn't answer the question completely, however, as Dutch is not an official language of South Africa. Afrikaans is an official language (and is very close to Dutch), but in Afrikaans the country is called Suid Afrika. Of course,.sa is used by Saudia Arabia, so it might have just been a compromise of sorts. (Also, given that South Africa has eleven official languages, it perhaps doesn't matter very much).
(My attempts to google the answer have just failed. This is intriguing).
Well, you have the Arpanet being invented by the Advanced Research Products agency of the DoD, much of the work of which was in fact done by BBN in Boston. (Largely, it was an East Coast, mainframe and minicomputer thing. And you have a separate hardware culture that came into being largely on the West Coast in the mid 1970s, that includes Apple, the S100/CP/M machines, Microsoft, Atari and the like. A fair bit of this 70s hardware culture was created by long-haired college dropouts and the like. (This didn't really have anything to do with the internet until 1985 at the earliest, however. The thing that this second culture and the Z-Boys skateboarders have in common, however, is that a group of fairly marginal people in a small place who were doing things largely for fun did ultimately have an impact on the culture at large. (That said, the PC revolution was a much bigger thing, and some (if not most) of the people involved genuinely did set out to change the world.
The Homebrew Computer Club and related stuff has been pretty well chronicled already. We have books like "Hackers" and "Fire in the Valley", plus documentaries from Cringely and even telemovies like "Pirates of Silicon Valley".
Given that they devoted space to a display showing how the Quake 3 engine was being used to drive a simulator being used for urban planning, it would be nice to have seen some mention of Quake elsewhwere, yes.
As I mentioned in the review, one of the sections of the exhibit is devoted to "Future Technology", but is devoted to technology more than the games themselves. (Things like new game interfaces and voice controls and things like that).
There is a discussion of the future of gaming on September 7 to mark the end of the exhibition. This might be worth going to.
Actually, I don't recall seeing a BBC micro at all. (I may have missed one, but it wasn't in the "ten classic consoles" section). That's kind of odd, given how widespread they were in the UK.
I was deliberately oversimplifying to make a point about the difference between a company that buys things and sells the same things at a profit and one that makes them and sells them. Intel's cost of goods sold was $12bn for the year. Obviously most of that was not spent on sand.
It is reasonable to use a number before the costs of labor as your measure of the contribution to GDP made by the particular company, however. The company's output is worth $x more than its inputs. This is divided between employees (wage costs), bondholders (interest costs), the government (taxes) and stockholders (who get what is left). Forgetting about taxes for a moment, how it is divided between these people is immaterial for the economy as a whole. The company has actually manufactured the same thing in all cases, and has made the same contribution to total wealth in all cases.
This study compares GDP (The total amount of money spent in an economy) with the sales of specific companies. This isn't a terribly useful thing to do.
When I buy a widget, some of the money I spend goes to the shop that sold me the widget, some to the company that transported the widget to the shop, some to the company that made the widget, some to the company that mined the raw materials that the widget was made from etc. In the GDP number, the total cost of the widget is only counted once , and contributions to it come from all the companies in the supply chain.
If we want to compare the economic size of a country with the total economic size of a particular company, we should only use that portion of the sales number that the company is responsible for . If Wal-Mart buys a widget for $10 and sells it for $15, then the net revenue (gross profit) received by Wal-Mart is only $5. The other $10 goes to companies lower in the supply chain.
This study has (for instance) included the sales of Unilever and the sales of Wal-Mart separately. Unilever produces lots of products that Wal-Mart sells, and the production of these products is thus counted twice in this study.
As a concrete example, Wal-Mart is listed in this document as the second largest company in the world. By meaningful measures, this is ridiculous. As a volume retailer, it is in a low margin business. The goods it sells cost it perhaps 80% of the cost it sells them for, and therefore its sales number is 5 times its contribution to the economy. Compare this with Intel, which is in an extremely high margin business (it turns sand, which doesn't cost much, into high value electronic products, which do) and has a sales number which is much closer to its economic contribution. So this report both makes companies appear much more important than they really are relative to countries and makes some types of businesses (retailers and financial institutions, most notably) appear much more important than they are relative to other companies
What is a better way of doing this? Compare gross profit with GDP. (Some would argue that I am still being too generous). I have never seen anyone present a table of this for companies versus countries (it is easy to do for companies based in countries with rigorous accounting standards, at least), but it would paint a completely different picture this one
(Okay, just as a quick test. Using financial information readily available on company websites, we find that Wal-Mart in 1999 had sales of $167bn, cost of goods sold of $130bn and had gross profits of only $37bn. Intel had sales of $29bn, cost of goods sold of $12bn and gross profits of $17bn).
Virtually all electronics shops here in Australia do sell multi-region players, and it is perfectly legal for them to do so. However, the local equivalent of the MPAA pressures them (and the hardware manufacturers) not to do so, so you often have to ask the staff in the shop for a multi-region player. The local distributor of one major Japanese hardware manufacturer opens the boxes containing imported DVD players, modifies them so that they are region-free and then reseals the box before sending them to retailers, so that the warranty is still valid. However, when asked by the media about this, it denies this practice, as it doesn't want to admit publicly that it is doing this and so annoy the MPAA equivalent.
In addition, I have seen threatening looking signs posted in shops that sell region 4 DVDs claiming that it is illegal to import region 1 DVDs. This is false. Placing such a sign in your store is very likely illegal under the same Trade Practices Act (which amongst other things, makes it illegal to tell lies in advertising). It is easy to buy region 1 DVDs over the internet from the US or the UK, and I do this all the time.
The ACCC has a very fine record of standing up for consumer rights. However its job is to enforce the law. I have far less confidence in the government itself, which gets to make the law. My understanding is that negotiations are presently going on with international copyright bodies to give us a DMCA like law in Australia, which might even make modifying a DVD player to be region free illegal under anti-circumvention provisions. I hope not, but it could happen.
Michael.
Well, illegal in the sense that Hollywood puts very pompous legal sounding threats on their DVDs, not illegal under any actual laws, generally. Here in Australia, I have a multi region DVD player that was modified by the local distributor of the hardware manufacturer before it was sent to the store. Barnes and Noble in the US and Blackstar in the UK are perfectly happy to sell me region 1 and 2 DVDs respectively. When I start them up, a legal statement that exporting them is illegal often comes up, but I know of no laws suggesting that it is actually illegal. All we now have to do is stop our governments from passing bone headed laws at the request of Hollywood, and of course the evidence isn't good.
The British edition is still in print
on
Hackers
·
· Score: 1
This book is still in print in the UK. You can get a copy from Amazon UK for about $10 plus postage, or for slightly more from W.H. Smith if you are boycotting Amazon.
This article is about the state parliament of NSW complaining about their internet access being censored. The silly censorship laws were passed by the federal parliament. Therefore, it isn't actually the same people being hypocritical. (The article does use the word "State" once, but otherwise expects you to figure it out from the fact that the people named are all state politicians, which is easy if you are an Australian, hard if you are not).
What we need is this. (1) A massive reduction in the cost of music for consumers (2) An increase in the income that artists receive for music. What we do not need is middle men who receive the vast majority of the money paid by consumers. As it is, I pay $16 for a CD, the artist receives maybe $1, the retailer receives maybe $5 and the record company receives maybe $10. If I pay $2 and the artist receives $2, both the artist and I are much better off than now. (If I then spend my other $14 on music from other artists, artists in general are *much* better off than now). At this point in technological development, the record companies perform no useful function. I want to see the system of intellectual property rights that allows the record companies to screw both consumers and artists to be wiped out, and the record companies themselves to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Yes, new business models need to come into existence so that artists are compensated, but I have little doubt that they will, as the potential gains for both artists and consumers are so great. (Micropayments are probably part of the solution). What we need is a little free space in which new business models can evolve. What we do not need is a pile of overrestrictive copyright laws designed to maintain an outdated status quo and to maintain the rights of a bunch of parasitical companies.
Actually the one thing you didn't find in Sydney was Starbucks. Explanation: Australia received an enormous number of Italian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. With them they brought good quality coffee, so one can get an excellent and inexpensive latte on virtually any street corner in Sydney. Starbucks have done very well selling good but a bit overpriced coffee in countries where the coffee was previously terrible. (The US, Britain, Japan, even New Zealand). They have been more reluctant to enter markets with sophisticated coffee cultures already. I believe they are planning on entering the Australian market later this year, but they haven't yet done so.
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create. I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all. By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom. Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
The deal is simply that the space station (which is a useless technical dead end dating from delusions of the sixties and seventies) is having its funding preserved because cancelling it would look bad in the eyes of Congress and in return all the interesting science stuff (which is cheaper and can be cut in dribs and drabs rather than all at once) gets cut. I'm not against manned space travel at all. In fact I am wildly in favour. But it has to be something inspiring with potential long term benefits. That clearly means going to Mars. The ridiculous thing is that with a modern cost effective approach, the cost of this is about on a par with that of the space station.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, people can just go to my slashdot homepage if they want to. My name is there, too. I wasn't trying to make the URL hard to figure out so much as just asking people not to go there. (I would have posted as an Anonymous Coward if I had really cared).
The domain name of the form firstnamelastname.com, where firstname and lastname are my actual names, was registered by someone a couple of years ago, and for a while there was a "This domain name is for sale for $250" site there. Then the design of the page changed and the request was for $500. A few months ago, the requests for money for the domain name vanished, and if you go to the site now you are forwarded to an anti-abortion site with pictures of aborted fetuses on it. This is really quite disturbing.
(I haven't provided a link to the page, and I would prefer it if people do not figure out the URL and go there. I am hoping that sometime soon the domain will expire and I can then buy it, and if the page gets a lot of hits, that might make the present owners realise that someone wants it and encourage them to renew it).
Thýs stýll doesn't answer the question completely, however, as Dutch is not an official language of South Africa. Afrikaans is an official language (and is very close to Dutch), but in Afrikaans the country is called Suid Afrika. Of course, .sa is used by Saudia Arabia, so it might have just been a compromise of sorts. (Also, given that South Africa has eleven official languages, it perhaps doesn't matter very much).
(My attempts to google the answer have just failed. This is intriguing).
Well, you have the Arpanet being invented by the Advanced Research Products agency of the DoD, much of the work of which was in fact done by BBN in Boston. (Largely, it was an East Coast, mainframe and minicomputer thing. And you have a separate hardware culture that came into being largely on the West Coast in the mid 1970s, that includes Apple, the S100/CP/M machines, Microsoft, Atari and the like. A fair bit of this 70s hardware culture was created by long-haired college dropouts and the like. (This didn't really have anything to do with the internet until 1985 at the earliest, however. The thing that this second culture and the Z-Boys skateboarders have in common, however, is that a group of fairly marginal people in a small place who were doing things largely for fun did ultimately have an impact on the culture at large. (That said, the PC revolution was a much bigger thing, and some (if not most) of the people involved genuinely did set out to change the world.
The Homebrew Computer Club and related stuff has been pretty well chronicled already. We have books like "Hackers" and "Fire in the Valley", plus documentaries from Cringely and even telemovies like "Pirates of Silicon Valley".
Michael
Given that they devoted space to a display showing how the Quake 3 engine was being used to drive a simulator being used for urban planning, it would be nice to have seen some mention of Quake elsewhwere, yes.
As I mentioned in the review, one of the sections of the exhibit is devoted to "Future Technology", but is devoted to technology more than the games themselves. (Things like new game interfaces and voice controls and things like that).
There is a discussion of the future of gaming on September 7 to mark the end of the exhibition. This might be worth going to.
Michael
Actually, I don't recall seeing a BBC micro at all. (I may have missed one, but it wasn't in the "ten classic consoles" section). That's kind of odd, given how widespread they were in the UK.
Michael.
It is reasonable to use a number before the costs of labor as your measure of the contribution to GDP made by the particular company, however. The company's output is worth $x more than its inputs. This is divided between employees (wage costs), bondholders (interest costs), the government (taxes) and stockholders (who get what is left). Forgetting about taxes for a moment, how it is divided between these people is immaterial for the economy as a whole. The company has actually manufactured the same thing in all cases, and has made the same contribution to total wealth in all cases.
When I buy a widget, some of the money I spend goes to the shop that sold me the widget, some to the company that transported the widget to the shop, some to the company that made the widget, some to the company that mined the raw materials that the widget was made from etc. In the GDP number, the total cost of the widget is only counted once , and contributions to it come from all the companies in the supply chain.
If we want to compare the economic size of a country with the total economic size of a particular company, we should only use that portion of the sales number that the company is responsible for . If Wal-Mart buys a widget for $10 and sells it for $15, then the net revenue (gross profit) received by Wal-Mart is only $5. The other $10 goes to companies lower in the supply chain.
This study has (for instance) included the sales of Unilever and the sales of Wal-Mart separately. Unilever produces lots of products that Wal-Mart sells, and the production of these products is thus counted twice in this study.
As a concrete example, Wal-Mart is listed in this document as the second largest company in the world. By meaningful measures, this is ridiculous. As a volume retailer, it is in a low margin business. The goods it sells cost it perhaps 80% of the cost it sells them for, and therefore its sales number is 5 times its contribution to the economy. Compare this with Intel, which is in an extremely high margin business (it turns sand, which doesn't cost much, into high value electronic products, which do) and has a sales number which is much closer to its economic contribution. So this report both makes companies appear much more important than they really are relative to countries and makes some types of businesses (retailers and financial institutions, most notably) appear much more important than they are relative to other companies
What is a better way of doing this? Compare gross profit with GDP. (Some would argue that I am still being too generous). I have never seen anyone present a table of this for companies versus countries (it is easy to do for companies based in countries with rigorous accounting standards, at least), but it would paint a completely different picture this one
(Okay, just as a quick test. Using financial information readily available on company websites, we find that Wal-Mart in 1999 had sales of $167bn, cost of goods sold of $130bn and had gross profits of only $37bn. Intel had sales of $29bn, cost of goods sold of $12bn and gross profits of $17bn).
Michael
In addition, I have seen threatening looking signs posted in shops that sell region 4 DVDs claiming that it is illegal to import region 1 DVDs. This is false. Placing such a sign in your store is very likely illegal under the same Trade Practices Act (which amongst other things, makes it illegal to tell lies in advertising). It is easy to buy region 1 DVDs over the internet from the US or the UK, and I do this all the time.
The ACCC has a very fine record of standing up for consumer rights. However its job is to enforce the law. I have far less confidence in the government itself, which gets to make the law. My understanding is that negotiations are presently going on with international copyright bodies to give us a DMCA like law in Australia, which might even make modifying a DVD player to be region free illegal under anti-circumvention provisions. I hope not, but it could happen. Michael.
Well, illegal in the sense that Hollywood puts very pompous legal sounding threats on their DVDs, not illegal under any actual laws, generally. Here in Australia, I have a multi region DVD player that was modified by the local distributor of the hardware manufacturer before it was sent to the store. Barnes and Noble in the US and Blackstar in the UK are perfectly happy to sell me region 1 and 2 DVDs respectively. When I start them up, a legal statement that exporting them is illegal often comes up, but I know of no laws suggesting that it is actually illegal. All we now have to do is stop our governments from passing bone headed laws at the request of Hollywood, and of course the evidence isn't good.
Michael.
Michael.
What we need is this. (1) A massive reduction in the cost of music for consumers (2) An increase in the income that artists receive for music. What we do not need is middle men who receive the vast majority of the money paid by consumers. As it is, I pay $16 for a CD, the artist receives maybe $1, the retailer receives maybe $5 and the record company receives maybe $10. If I pay $2 and the artist receives $2, both the artist and I are much better off than now. (If I then spend my other $14 on music from other artists, artists in general are *much* better off than now). At this point in technological development, the record companies perform no useful function. I want to see the system of intellectual property rights that allows the record companies to screw both consumers and artists to be wiped out, and the record companies themselves to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Yes, new business models need to come into existence so that artists are compensated, but I have little doubt that they will, as the potential gains for both artists and consumers are so great. (Micropayments are probably part of the solution). What we need is a little free space in which new business models can evolve. What we do not need is a pile of overrestrictive copyright laws designed to maintain an outdated status quo and to maintain the rights of a bunch of parasitical companies.
Actually the one thing you didn't find in Sydney was Starbucks. Explanation: Australia received an enormous number of Italian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. With them they brought good quality coffee, so one can get an excellent and inexpensive latte on virtually any street corner in Sydney. Starbucks have done very well selling good but a bit overpriced coffee in countries where the coffee was previously terrible. (The US, Britain, Japan, even New Zealand). They have been more reluctant to enter markets with sophisticated coffee cultures already. I believe they are planning on entering the Australian market later this year, but they haven't yet done so.
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create. I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all. By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom. Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
The deal is simply that the space station (which is a useless technical dead end dating from delusions of the sixties and seventies) is having its funding preserved because cancelling it would look bad in the eyes of Congress and in return all the interesting science stuff (which is cheaper and can be cut in dribs and drabs rather than all at once) gets cut. I'm not against manned space travel at all. In fact I am wildly in favour. But it has to be something inspiring with potential long term benefits. That clearly means going to Mars. The ridiculous thing is that with a modern cost effective approach, the cost of this is about on a par with that of the space station.