As soon as an "industry" moves from a cottage/craft industry to big business, it will start degrading into conservative blandness until it too is 90% crap.
It costs lots of money to make games. Now would you, as a game company manager, rather spend $$ on a guaranteed hit sequel to your last game and have it out by September, or spend $$$$$ on a new, unknown, novel idea that may or may not make dollar #1 in profit, and won't be out until next spring at the earliest?
From a business point of view, creativity is dangerous and foolhardy. From a craft point of view, it's the very reason for existing.
We need to build up the infrastructure for a gaming cottage industry underneath (or beside?) the existing commercial gaming industry. That's where creativity will come from.
No agreed-upon standards, no consistent format, no market. That's why North America is just barely getting into HDTV now, when Japan and Germany have had it for a decade.
Sun is doing fine everywhere except on the stock market. They're selling computers, making money, and the enterprise slump is going to partly recover somewhere around early august. All they need to do is keep from being bought out, and they'll come through shining.
Hmm. Not quite. They are making threatening remarks, implicating every Linux user. They aren't actually threatening them.
SCO hasn't threatened me yet. If they do, then we'll have a good long chat (most of which will be me saying, "cross your border and come get me, bastards!"), but for now they're just saying a lot of stupid stuff which is entirely ignorable.
Random aside: "I didn't sign anything to use Linux now did I?"
You seem to be implying that any legal stipulations for using Linux are unenforceable. Does that include the GPL? You didn't sign that either.
1) If IBM sends this interrogatory to SCO and assuming SCO replies (since it's either that or drop the case), isn't that information still held strictly between IBM, SCO, and possibly the courts? I believed that it was kept secret from the public, at least in cases of trade secrets.
2) Do trade secret violations fall under civil or criminal jurisdiction in the US?
3) (Yes, I know I said two questions. "Among the many questions...") Here's a scenario: A snippet of proprietary code is put into the Linux kernel. To prove that it's proprietary and a trade secret, SCO has to reveal a larger chunk of (still a trade secret) code which includes that bit. Obviously they can't reveal this to the public.
So where and why is the public expecting to see all of the evidence before appearances in court?
MS gives away "1 billion dollars" in free software. In other words, they give away 'n' copies of software that costs '$x' on the retail shelves, where 'n*x' is a billion dollars.
Philanthropy? Hardly. It's going to cost them a few thousand dollars, (OK, a few tens of thousands--maybe) and they'll take a tax deduction of $1b. Also, they're going to get their software on more systems, which means capturing market share.
Evil? Not really. It's an allowed and accepted way of doing business. If you give something away, you should get a tax rebate for it regardless of if you're a company or an individual. (The ethics of giving away software are a sticky matter, mind you)
Original? Go look at Sun. They gave away scads of 'free' software two months ago--again, something like a billion dollars worth. It's been going on roughly forever--much longer than the computer industry.
Something that FAR too many people here are forgetting, is that SCO has sued IBM. When they get to court, SCO will be legally required to provide any evidence or proof of wrongdoing on IBM's part. Until then, and release of evidence could destroy their case.
IT DOESN'T MATTER at this point if they're telling the truth or full of shit. They CANNOT reasonably reveal their evidence outside a courtroom. Now let's all just quit ranting about how full of shit they are, and wait for the case to come to court. I expect them to end up bankrupt with egg on their face, but I'm at least willing to let them try to defend their claims properly.
For some bizarre reason I went looking through my "freaks" list--the list of people who have marked me as foes. Most of them, I found, were people that I'd have disagreements with online but fundamentally and philosophically agreed with.
You are one such poster. I can't remember what we got on opposite ends over at some point, but nearly every time I see your posts, I agree with them. This is one such case.
ESR has done many things within the open source community, but every time he pokes his nose into the real world, he comes off sounding like a juvenile, immature, and clueless fanatic. This is a legal case, requiring legally acceptable evidence, obtained in proper ways. Asking an anonymous community of geeks is about as far removed from reality as one might get. No one--NO ONE--is going to seriously examine another Raymond Rant.
mysql has been getting...better. Still not really a professional product in any general sense.
How do you rate postgresql then? I'm curious.
Re:ESR is just as bad, if not worse
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 1
Two points.
Several of ESR's points are...specious. I can't access the article right now so I can't dig into them point-by-point, but his interpretation of the facts is rather skewed in places.
Secondly, you state: " he is not the one who started this fight." Seeing as how this was a "fight" between SCO and IBM, he's certainly the only person who inserted himself into it. After all, the lawsuit wasn't against him.
I love seeing people who disagree with me coherently and intelligently.:-)
"If SCO's claims are substantially false then this lawsuit is about significantly more than them taking a gamble and winning or losing. It is about business participants in the open source software community abusing the court systems out of self-interest. Actions of this nature are a significant threat to the viability of open source development, and that is a considerable burden to add when you consider that businesses with a vested interest in maintaining a monopolistic interest in proprietary software development (not to name any names) invest significantly in spreading disinformation about open source, including in lobbying efforts to sway the decisions of our legislators."
I disagree with this.
The 'who owns Unix' question has been hanging around for ages--MUCH too long--and it's time to put an end to it. The SCO lawsuit is likely to clearly define what is SCO's property, what isn't theirs, and what the open source community can or cannot legally use. This is, in my opinion, a Good Thing.
Furthermore, if SCO's claims are substantially or entirely false, the court has the right to hit them with punitive measures, which would also tend to further open up the Unix source code for public development. This would hurt SCO far too much for them to recover easily, if at all.
Ultimately you just don't take on a company like IBM in court unless you see a fair chance of winning, and you don't count on a fair chance of winning unless you have some legal high-ground to stand on. If SCO knew that they were full of shit from the get-go, they would have attacked small companies who couldn't afford to go to court--not IBM. (Divine Inc. is a perfect example of this.)
"Eric Raymond and his co-authors, meanwhile, are expressing an opinion and making it public."
If this was all they were doing, it would be fine. However Eric is actually stating his opinion in a way that implies it to be fact, and is doing so as an informal ambassador of the open source community. It's quite difficult for him to speak exclusively as an interested individual, and he makes no attempt here to do so.
"One last thing - your final comment seems to imply that it is poissible for any endeavor to acheive the best results, without containing a component of vision or mission. I think this is false, and it is particularly false in the world of cooperative, distributed efforts."
Hmm. This isn't quite the context I intended the statement in. Likely I wasn't being clear.
What I meant is that an exclusive vision/mission which limits the approaches to a problem is damaging. If the problem is "how do I implement 'X'?" and the vision is "all solutions and tools used must abide by our particular license!" then you've just limited (a) the tools you can use, and (b) the ways you can solve the problem.
Put another way, Open Source is a philosophical vision, but not always a practial one. Mistaking it for a development scheme is a mistake. (The same can be said for proprietary code--sometimes it's the best solution, but not always.) The take home message is use the best tool for the job.
ESR is just as bad, if not worse
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is getting tiresome.
SCO has made a big gamble here, they're incurring the wrath of much of the Unix community (and ALL of the Linux community), and they might end up destroying what's left of their IP and credibility.
BUT...they're putting their money where their mouth is. They're taking this to court, and winning or losing based on a court ruling.
Eric Raymond, on the other hand, is providing a 'rebuttal' to their case which is at LEAST as revisionist and self serving as SCO's, but he's not risking anything. Instead he's sitting back, making smarmy comments, feeling superior, and further convincing the Linux community that Open Source is a holy and sacred beast, which must take over the world.
In other words, his evangelism is just as galling as SCO's corporatism, but without the clout behind it.
It's time for ESR and all the rest (Theo de Radt, creator/manager of a fabulous OS and general asshole, Linux coders who don't believe in documentation, etc. etc.) to get off of their evangelical horses and start working for the best results, rather than a vision or mission.
Interesting theory. The thing is, if everything you say is true, it still doesn't affect the large (LARGE) enterprise market. IBM and HP are not about to give up HPUX and AIX in the high-end, at least for a while yet, and SCO still holds sway over the licenses there.
I'm also not sure why everyone is so 100% convinced that IBM hasn't violated the licence terms.
While I enjoy FPSes as much as most, my passion lately has been role-playing games. Cheating in these games is much more of a problem because your characters are persistent, and permanently affected by cheats. Trade hacks, leveling hacks, and RvR hacks basically define what can be done in Dark Age of Camelot, and it bugs me. I've spent hundreds of hours crafting my way to 'legendary' status, and others that I know have used cheat programs are taking orders away from me and my characters!
Unfortunately, there's a central authority--the game server admins--and they have to use their authority to stop this stuff. Sadly the policy for most persistent online games is "every player we boot off for cheating is a player who won't pay us money anymore."
OK, Firebird 0.6 and Mozilla 1.3. Given that I'm only interested in the browser and also that Mozilla is my day-to-day browser, how far along (ahead, behind?) is Firebird vs. Mozilla? At which point should I switch over?
My second response is that I wish you Opera zealots would quit your blathering! (Although I mean that in the nicest possible way.)
Seriously, I looked at Opera some time (before the IE5.0 release date) ago, and it seemed like a fine browser. I like the layout of Mozilla better. I don't go stomping onto every release note for Opera, talking about why Mozilla is better. (Although Mozilla is free--Opera is still adware)
I like Mozilla. You like Opera. This is NOT a problem! If you don't like Mozilla (Firebird, whatever), then don't use it! If you've paid for Opera or it suits your purposes better, or just makes you happier, then FINE! I'm not trying to find the One True Browser and destroy all of the others. Different products for different people is indirect competition, and is a good thing, dammit!
OK, I'm not a developer. I don't write code--I compile it when the tools I need as an admin aren't available as trusted binaries.
Why, for the love of god, is there a new version of the de facto standard C compiler every week or two? Why can't binary compatability be maintained? WHAT sort of changes and development occur in the land of compiling a language that (as far as I know) isn't changing??!!
This isn't a rant--these are serious questions. I don't understand why so many changes are being done to a compiler, and why it should affect me as a non-developer. What am I missing here?
Well I can answer that from my own point of view at least.
Saturday Night Live these days is tired, boring, repetitive, stale, and forced. I watch bits of it randomly when it's on after a movie I chose is over, but I haven't seen anything worth staying up for an extra five minutes over.
Maybe I'm missing something--maybe I'm too old for the 'modern equivalent of classic SNL,' but what is on the show that hasn't been done to death already? I seem to remember Weekend Update (with Dennis Miller) from the 1980s, and sure enough--it started in 1985. That's nearly TWO DECADES ago! Come on folks, write something else!
It's worth looking at the calibre of actors that SNL turned out over the years. At the start, you had Belushi, Ackroyd, Chase, and Martin. Jump forward a few decades, and we have Chris Rock (barely passable) and...David Spade?!!!
SNL is, as far as I can tell, EXACTLY symptomatic of the decline of commercial entertainment.
...the media companies are working hard at making themselves irrelevant.
News is an important issue, and I get my news from multiple unrelated companies, ideally from different countries. As for entertainment on commercial TV and radio, there ain't none!!!
"Costs are going up, audience is going down, competition is increasing"
Competition increasing is a good thing, and the proposed bills seem to be destroying that aspect. As for the high costs/low audience problem, do you think that spending ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER LEAD CAST MEMBER PER EPISODE on a show as tired and utterly rehashed-to-death as "Friends" might have something to do with that?
Maybe if the media companies started paying their stars less money per weekly episode than most people gross in a decade their costs would go down. Maybe if they spent a TINY amount of money on writers with creative and new ideas, their audience would go up.
But no, it's easier to make money through legislation and monopolies than to actually do your job.
"How much money a film earns is not necessarily a proxy for how "good" it is."
To be fair to the article (hard to do, I'll admit!), they never claimed that their formula would make the "best" movie. It was a formula for a "hit," and in that context, it makes sense to look at other hits.
But the whole premise appears to be garbage, and the fact that it made it as a news article is appalling.
OK, music is 8% (or pieces?! WTF is a pc, besides a progressive conservative?) of a movie. Does this mean that there should be 8% where NOTHING ELSE is happening? No action, adventure, love/sex, or any of the other parts?
Music overlays much of a movie. Plot ties a movie together. How can you have "10% plot?"
I have had a handful of video cards since my original trident 8900. Pretty much every time I plug the card in, boot to VGA resolution, install the drivers, and reboot. Everything is done.
I just got an ATI 9500 pro--my first ATI card. The driver installation was a five hour nightmare of crashing Windows, exception errors, hangs, and black screens. When I was done, I couldn't set the refresh rate. Nothing I did (including installing the latest drivers, and trying to use the 'secret' max. refresh setting in the ATI display controls--it wasn't there at all) could get me off of 60Hz.
Games crashed. Windows hung. Horridness. I talked to the manufacturer, and they said it was a bad card--get an RMA, and ship it back. This I can believe.
The problem is, I can no longer set the refresh rate on my OLD video card anymore! These damned drivers screwed up my system substantially! Removing them didn't help at all. I'm going to have to dig into the registry most likely.
If the replacement ATI card doesn't work any better (hardware AND software), then I'll be going back to nVidia permanently, or at least for another two generations. At least their stuff works.
Given that effectively ANY tool can be used for good or evil, and also given that we can't completely eliminate risk...
How can we develop and promote the state-of-the-art in security (tools, understanding, knowledge) while giving as few gems as possible to the criminal wannabes of the world? In other words, how can we bias the work and research towards the defensive, rather than progress that's either neutral or preferentially offensive?
Well since you're already modded up to 5 (i.e. I can't moderate it up anymore), I might as well post.
Agreed 100%. I keep hearing about the potential for "Terrorist attacks," mostly coming from US government officials or Concerned Citizens(tm). Do they forget that the anthrax attacks in the US, terrible as they were, were initiated by a born-and-raised American citizen? Or that they killed less people in total than are killed in the US by handguns every single day?
Give it a rest folks! There will always be some way for psychopaths to kill people, possibly en masse. All that regulating every aspect of life does is annoy people, and make it impossible to live normally anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.
As soon as an "industry" moves from a cottage/craft industry to big business, it will start degrading into conservative blandness until it too is 90% crap.
It costs lots of money to make games. Now would you, as a game company manager, rather spend $$ on a guaranteed hit sequel to your last game and have it out by September, or spend $$$$$ on a new, unknown, novel idea that may or may not make dollar #1 in profit, and won't be out until next spring at the earliest?
From a business point of view, creativity is dangerous and foolhardy. From a craft point of view, it's the very reason for existing.
We need to build up the infrastructure for a gaming cottage industry underneath (or beside?) the existing commercial gaming industry. That's where creativity will come from.
No agreed-upon standards, no consistent format, no market. That's why North America is just barely getting into HDTV now, when Japan and Germany have had it for a decade.
But how do they count production costs? Are they allowed to include R&D costs, development, and depreciation as part of their production?
Bah.
Sun is doing fine everywhere except on the stock market. They're selling computers, making money, and the enterprise slump is going to partly recover somewhere around early august. All they need to do is keep from being bought out, and they'll come through shining.
Hmm. Not quite. They are making threatening remarks, implicating every Linux user. They aren't actually threatening them.
SCO hasn't threatened me yet. If they do, then we'll have a good long chat (most of which will be me saying, "cross your border and come get me, bastards!"), but for now they're just saying a lot of stupid stuff which is entirely ignorable.
Random aside:
"I didn't sign anything to use Linux now did I?"
You seem to be implying that any legal stipulations for using Linux are unenforceable. Does that include the GPL? You didn't sign that either.
OK, two questions though.
1) If IBM sends this interrogatory to SCO and assuming SCO replies (since it's either that or drop the case), isn't that information still held strictly between IBM, SCO, and possibly the courts? I believed that it was kept secret from the public, at least in cases of trade secrets.
2) Do trade secret violations fall under civil or criminal jurisdiction in the US?
3) (Yes, I know I said two questions. "Among the many questions...") Here's a scenario: A snippet of proprietary code is put into the Linux kernel. To prove that it's proprietary and a trade secret, SCO has to reveal a larger chunk of (still a trade secret) code which includes that bit. Obviously they can't reveal this to the public.
So where and why is the public expecting to see all of the evidence before appearances in court?
MS gives away "1 billion dollars" in free software. In other words, they give away 'n' copies of software that costs '$x' on the retail shelves, where 'n*x' is a billion dollars.
Philanthropy? Hardly. It's going to cost them a few thousand dollars, (OK, a few tens of thousands--maybe) and they'll take a tax deduction of $1b. Also, they're going to get their software on more systems, which means capturing market share.
Evil? Not really. It's an allowed and accepted way of doing business. If you give something away, you should get a tax rebate for it regardless of if you're a company or an individual. (The ethics of giving away software are a sticky matter, mind you)
Original? Go look at Sun. They gave away scads of 'free' software two months ago--again, something like a billion dollars worth. It's been going on roughly forever--much longer than the computer industry.
...it comes to court.
Something that FAR too many people here are forgetting, is that SCO has sued IBM. When they get to court, SCO will be legally required to provide any evidence or proof of wrongdoing on IBM's part. Until then, and release of evidence could destroy their case.
IT DOESN'T MATTER at this point if they're telling the truth or full of shit. They CANNOT reasonably reveal their evidence outside a courtroom. Now let's all just quit ranting about how full of shit they are, and wait for the case to come to court. I expect them to end up bankrupt with egg on their face, but I'm at least willing to let them try to defend their claims properly.
Heh.
For some bizarre reason I went looking through my "freaks" list--the list of people who have marked me as foes. Most of them, I found, were people that I'd have disagreements with online but fundamentally and philosophically agreed with.
You are one such poster. I can't remember what we got on opposite ends over at some point, but nearly every time I see your posts, I agree with them. This is one such case.
ESR has done many things within the open source community, but every time he pokes his nose into the real world, he comes off sounding like a juvenile, immature, and clueless fanatic. This is a legal case, requiring legally acceptable evidence, obtained in proper ways. Asking an anonymous community of geeks is about as far removed from reality as one might get. No one--NO ONE--is going to seriously examine another Raymond Rant.
mysql has been getting...better. Still not really a professional product in any general sense.
How do you rate postgresql then? I'm curious.
Two points.
Several of ESR's points are...specious. I can't access the article right now so I can't dig into them point-by-point, but his interpretation of the facts is rather skewed in places.
Secondly, you state: " he is not the one who started this fight." Seeing as how this was a "fight" between SCO and IBM, he's certainly the only person who inserted himself into it. After all, the lawsuit wasn't against him.
I love seeing people who disagree with me coherently and intelligently. :-)
"If SCO's claims are substantially false then this lawsuit is about significantly more than them taking a gamble and winning or losing. It is about business participants in the open source software community abusing the court systems out of self-interest. Actions of this nature are a significant threat to the viability of open source development, and that is a considerable burden to add when you consider that businesses with a vested interest in maintaining a monopolistic interest in proprietary software development (not to name any names) invest significantly in spreading disinformation about open source, including in lobbying efforts to sway the decisions of our legislators."
I disagree with this.
The 'who owns Unix' question has been hanging around for ages--MUCH too long--and it's time to put an end to it. The SCO lawsuit is likely to clearly define what is SCO's property, what isn't theirs, and what the open source community can or cannot legally use. This is, in my opinion, a Good Thing.
Furthermore, if SCO's claims are substantially or entirely false, the court has the right to hit them with punitive measures, which would also tend to further open up the Unix source code for public development. This would hurt SCO far too much for them to recover easily, if at all.
Ultimately you just don't take on a company like IBM in court unless you see a fair chance of winning, and you don't count on a fair chance of winning unless you have some legal high-ground to stand on. If SCO knew that they were full of shit from the get-go, they would have attacked small companies who couldn't afford to go to court--not IBM. (Divine Inc. is a perfect example of this.)
"Eric Raymond and his co-authors, meanwhile, are expressing an opinion and making it public."
If this was all they were doing, it would be fine. However Eric is actually stating his opinion in a way that implies it to be fact, and is doing so as an informal ambassador of the open source community. It's quite difficult for him to speak exclusively as an interested individual, and he makes no attempt here to do so.
"One last thing - your final comment seems to imply that it is poissible for any endeavor to acheive the best results, without containing a component of vision or mission. I think this is false, and it is particularly false in the world of cooperative, distributed efforts."
Hmm. This isn't quite the context I intended the statement in. Likely I wasn't being clear.
What I meant is that an exclusive vision/mission which limits the approaches to a problem is damaging. If the problem is "how do I implement 'X'?" and the vision is "all solutions and tools used must abide by our particular license!" then you've just limited (a) the tools you can use, and (b) the ways you can solve the problem.
Put another way, Open Source is a philosophical vision, but not always a practial one. Mistaking it for a development scheme is a mistake. (The same can be said for proprietary code--sometimes it's the best solution, but not always.) The take home message is use the best tool for the job.
This is getting tiresome.
SCO has made a big gamble here, they're incurring the wrath of much of the Unix community (and ALL of the Linux community), and they might end up destroying what's left of their IP and credibility.
BUT...they're putting their money where their mouth is. They're taking this to court, and winning or losing based on a court ruling.
Eric Raymond, on the other hand, is providing a 'rebuttal' to their case which is at LEAST as revisionist and self serving as SCO's, but he's not risking anything. Instead he's sitting back, making smarmy comments, feeling superior, and further convincing the Linux community that Open Source is a holy and sacred beast, which must take over the world.
In other words, his evangelism is just as galling as SCO's corporatism, but without the clout behind it.
It's time for ESR and all the rest (Theo de Radt, creator/manager of a fabulous OS and general asshole, Linux coders who don't believe in documentation, etc. etc.) to get off of their evangelical horses and start working for the best results, rather than a vision or mission.
Interesting theory. The thing is, if everything you say is true, it still doesn't affect the large (LARGE) enterprise market. IBM and HP are not about to give up HPUX and AIX in the high-end, at least for a while yet, and SCO still holds sway over the licenses there.
I'm also not sure why everyone is so 100% convinced that IBM hasn't violated the licence terms.
While I enjoy FPSes as much as most, my passion lately has been role-playing games. Cheating in these games is much more of a problem because your characters are persistent, and permanently affected by cheats. Trade hacks, leveling hacks, and RvR hacks basically define what can be done in Dark Age of Camelot, and it bugs me. I've spent hundreds of hours crafting my way to 'legendary' status, and others that I know have used cheat programs are taking orders away from me and my characters!
Unfortunately, there's a central authority--the game server admins--and they have to use their authority to stop this stuff. Sadly the policy for most persistent online games is "every player we boot off for cheating is a player who won't pay us money anymore."
OK, Firebird 0.6 and Mozilla 1.3. Given that I'm only interested in the browser and also that Mozilla is my day-to-day browser, how far along (ahead, behind?) is Firebird vs. Mozilla? At which point should I switch over?
My first response is "Bah!"
My second response is that I wish you Opera zealots would quit your blathering! (Although I mean that in the nicest possible way.)
Seriously, I looked at Opera some time (before the IE5.0 release date) ago, and it seemed like a fine browser. I like the layout of Mozilla better. I don't go stomping onto every release note for Opera, talking about why Mozilla is better. (Although Mozilla is free--Opera is still adware)
I like Mozilla. You like Opera. This is NOT a problem! If you don't like Mozilla (Firebird, whatever), then don't use it! If you've paid for Opera or it suits your purposes better, or just makes you happier, then FINE! I'm not trying to find the One True Browser and destroy all of the others. Different products for different people is indirect competition, and is a good thing, dammit!
OK, I'm not a developer. I don't write code--I compile it when the tools I need as an admin aren't available as trusted binaries.
Why, for the love of god, is there a new version of the de facto standard C compiler every week or two? Why can't binary compatability be maintained? WHAT sort of changes and development occur in the land of compiling a language that (as far as I know) isn't changing??!!
This isn't a rant--these are serious questions. I don't understand why so many changes are being done to a compiler, and why it should affect me as a non-developer. What am I missing here?
Well I can answer that from my own point of view at least.
Saturday Night Live these days is tired, boring, repetitive, stale, and forced. I watch bits of it randomly when it's on after a movie I chose is over, but I haven't seen anything worth staying up for an extra five minutes over.
Maybe I'm missing something--maybe I'm too old for the 'modern equivalent of classic SNL,' but what is on the show that hasn't been done to death already? I seem to remember Weekend Update (with Dennis Miller) from the 1980s, and sure enough--it started in 1985. That's nearly TWO DECADES ago! Come on folks, write something else!
It's worth looking at the calibre of actors that SNL turned out over the years. At the start, you had Belushi, Ackroyd, Chase, and Martin. Jump forward a few decades, and we have Chris Rock (barely passable) and...David Spade?!!!
SNL is, as far as I can tell, EXACTLY symptomatic of the decline of commercial entertainment.
...the media companies are working hard at making themselves irrelevant.
News is an important issue, and I get my news from multiple unrelated companies, ideally from different countries. As for entertainment on commercial TV and radio, there ain't none!!!
"Costs are going up, audience is going down, competition is increasing"
Competition increasing is a good thing, and the proposed bills seem to be destroying that aspect. As for the high costs/low audience problem, do you think that spending ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER LEAD CAST MEMBER PER EPISODE on a show as tired and utterly rehashed-to-death as "Friends" might have something to do with that?
Maybe if the media companies started paying their stars less money per weekly episode than most people gross in a decade their costs would go down. Maybe if they spent a TINY amount of money on writers with creative and new ideas, their audience would go up.
But no, it's easier to make money through legislation and monopolies than to actually do your job.
Just one minor nit on an excellent post.
"How much money a film earns is not necessarily a proxy for how "good" it is."
To be fair to the article (hard to do, I'll admit!), they never claimed that their formula would make the "best" movie. It was a formula for a "hit," and in that context, it makes sense to look at other hits.
But the whole premise appears to be garbage, and the fact that it made it as a news article is appalling.
OK, music is 8% (or pieces?! WTF is a pc, besides a progressive conservative?) of a movie. Does this mean that there should be 8% where NOTHING ELSE is happening? No action, adventure, love/sex, or any of the other parts?
Music overlays much of a movie. Plot ties a movie together. How can you have "10% plot?"
Bad drugs, I think, is what inspired this study.
I have had a handful of video cards since my original trident 8900. Pretty much every time I plug the card in, boot to VGA resolution, install the drivers, and reboot. Everything is done.
I just got an ATI 9500 pro--my first ATI card. The driver installation was a five hour nightmare of crashing Windows, exception errors, hangs, and black screens. When I was done, I couldn't set the refresh rate. Nothing I did (including installing the latest drivers, and trying to use the 'secret' max. refresh setting in the ATI display controls--it wasn't there at all) could get me off of 60Hz.
Games crashed. Windows hung. Horridness. I talked to the manufacturer, and they said it was a bad card--get an RMA, and ship it back. This I can believe.
The problem is, I can no longer set the refresh rate on my OLD video card anymore! These damned drivers screwed up my system substantially! Removing them didn't help at all. I'm going to have to dig into the registry most likely.
If the replacement ATI card doesn't work any better (hardware AND software), then I'll be going back to nVidia permanently, or at least for another two generations. At least their stuff works.
Given that effectively ANY tool can be used for good or evil, and also given that we can't completely eliminate risk...
How can we develop and promote the state-of-the-art in security (tools, understanding, knowledge) while giving as few gems as possible to the criminal wannabes of the world? In other words, how can we bias the work and research towards the defensive, rather than progress that's either neutral or preferentially offensive?
Well since you're already modded up to 5 (i.e. I can't moderate it up anymore), I might as well post.
Agreed 100%. I keep hearing about the potential for "Terrorist attacks," mostly coming from US government officials or Concerned Citizens(tm). Do they forget that the anthrax attacks in the US, terrible as they were, were initiated by a born-and-raised American citizen? Or that they killed less people in total than are killed in the US by handguns every single day?
Give it a rest folks! There will always be some way for psychopaths to kill people, possibly en masse. All that regulating every aspect of life does is annoy people, and make it impossible to live normally anymore.