" Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating — it's all the copies of it. "
Why is that a challenge? Digital media is somewhat unique in that you can carefully craft media or information (reports, programs, videos much in the same way you'd carve a chair) but risk instantly and nearly irrecoverably lose it (much unlike a chair).
Copies of data are a safeguard by redundancy. A website gets taken offline, well good thing there is a mirror. My camera breaks or my hard drive disk fails, well good thing I have an external backup or copies on my DVDs.
Re:To everyone complaining about the positive revi
on
The Laidoff Ninja
·
· Score: 1
"I would imagine that the publishers do a pretty good job of keeping books off the shelves that score on the low end of the scale."
I'm sure they do, but a 1-10 scale for books seems to rate books relative to other books since there is no well defined or accepted rubrik for what defines a good or bad book.
If all books reviewed are above average, then the review really doesn't say anything because general perception doesn't distinguish a 7 from an 8, or an 8 from a 9 or 10.
Now, it might be the case that a 7 isn't really all that different from a 10, but I'd think that someone who spends their time reading books in the 7-10 range would disagree, and want a scale that started at 7 (1) and went to 10 (4).
That 1-4 scale would represent the difference much better in a sea of 7 rated books.
The most recent example was for trying to install SCSI/RAID controller drivers on my Win XP machine. The *only* ways to install them, that I've been able to find, are by floppy disk (also required me to buy an external floppy drive) or by making a re-configured Windows install disk and re-installing my OS.
"And then watch as the premium content gets distributed far and wide without any revenue to you, especially if lawmakers ever recognize the assertion in your signature that copyright is incoherent.
If it's free software, people can set up their own arenas in a private server. And a lot of people will just choose to play single-player or couch multiplayer: one large monitor shared among players and four gamepads. "
You're trying to poke holes based on old videogame models and ignoring a lot of the newer technologies that many games use so that their content is valid and runs through proprietary servers.
Look at how newer games like Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare, even though they have large singleplayer/couch multiplayer modes, are mostly played online through a tracking service.
Either of those could have had their singleplayer multiplayer/online modes given away for free, then sold their ranked server/online unlock item modes as a subscription or expansion (similar to how BF2 sold unlocks through expansions). That's easy to do for consoles like the PS3 and XBOX 360, and good luck subverting Steam to get that content on the PC.
All it takes is a little bit of imagination and tweaking modern videogame distribution models to see how this would work.
I mean, let's take a look at the major game types and see how free games have made money in the past or how they could potentially make money:
FPS: Gunz Online is a good example of how a totally free game can generate cash through selling addtional weapons, items, and outfits. Not everyone pays extra for items, but the people that do end up spending quite a lot of money.
Another model would be to release a medium sized game and then release pay-for expansions linked to an online account.
RTS: This one is easy, since the majority of new RTS's (Starcraft 2 plz?) are played over the internet. Release the singleplayer and multiplayer modes for free and pay extra for an official online ranking service/tracker or more expansions.
MMORPGs: Already gave an example of how this works. Other models use ideas like in Gunz, where a player pays for expanded banks, unique items, tokens to access extra dungeons, etc.
Adventure/Platformers (Mario!): This one isn't as good for examples because they're almost all singleplayer games. However, we can look to the Nintendo E-Reader (moderate success in the U.S., huge success in Japan) for how people would be willing to pay for extra/unique items and outfits (hammer bros. suit:} ) in platformers. I'd gladly pay for extra outfits or minigames in Twilight Princess, or additional boss fights in God of War.
Racing/Simulation games: Pay cash to unlock more vehicles/customization sold via an online store.
Strategy (Gunbound/Wormz): Again, sell items/armor/outfits via an online store.
"I dont see the encouraging part. Some dude wants to kill himself, other dude pretending to be a girl tries to convince him hanging is better than jumping."
He sure as hell isn't discouraging him from committing suicide... or actively seeking police or other authorities to help the other guy out.
Here's an analogy with a less controversial and sympathetic crime:
If someone told you that they were about to murder their girlfriend told you they were going to do it with a knife, if you responded that a baseball bat would be better then offer a helping hand in pointing out locations that do the most damage to the body, wouldn't you agree that you've committed both moral and legal crime?
I would say yes to both, since you have the knowledge that a moral and legal wrong is about to be committed, even though you aren't physically acting, you still hold the intent that the other person (girlfriend or the person you're helping) will die and decide not to act to prevent that wrong.
I feel this is a very close analogy to the situation above, as the only difference is the person that the wrong is being acted upon. It would be different if people had the positive right to death, but they don't, they only have the negative right to life.
"Compassion? Is that the same compassion that kills abortion doctors?"
Leave your straw man in the corn fields please. They are for crows and films, not discussions.
Don't confuse the previous generations' specialists with widespread adoption. The handful of people who did use technology before 1990 really know their stuff, but that's a handful. Compare that to now, when nearly everyone in an industrialized nation has or has access to a computer.
I mean, your claim is the equivalent of declaring that the middle ages were the reading ages since the advent of widespread book publication was available after the invention of the printing press. Even though the books were still restricted to the religious clergy. Even though literacy during the early middle ages was almost non-existent in the public.
That might sound like a tangent, but it's a close analogy to the argument you presented. Calling Generation Z the "Tech Generation" is valid and accurate.
The area just got lit the fuck up by a bunch of really powerful, really loud cannon rounds. A van drives right into it, bunch of people running around picking stuff up...
Looks like the calvary came to grab the weapons and reinforce the people that just went down.
That's a perfectly good reason to light the van up too.
If they were concerned what it looked like on people, they would have average people as the medium, not 6 foot, 90 lb caricatures of women shaking their hips down a runway.
These are artists, not engineers. Logic and accuracy need not apply.
Slashdot Mirror
" Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating — it's all the copies of it. "
Why is that a challenge? Digital media is somewhat unique in that you can carefully craft media or information (reports, programs, videos much in the same way you'd carve a chair) but risk instantly and nearly irrecoverably lose it (much unlike a chair).
Copies of data are a safeguard by redundancy. A website gets taken offline, well good thing there is a mirror. My camera breaks or my hard drive disk fails, well good thing I have an external backup or copies on my DVDs.
"I would imagine that the publishers do a pretty good job of keeping books off the shelves that score on the low end of the scale."
I'm sure they do, but a 1-10 scale for books seems to rate books relative to other books since there is no well defined or accepted rubrik for what defines a good or bad book.
If all books reviewed are above average, then the review really doesn't say anything because general perception doesn't distinguish a 7 from an 8, or an 8 from a 9 or 10.
Now, it might be the case that a 7 isn't really all that different from a 10, but I'd think that someone who spends their time reading books in the 7-10 range would disagree, and want a scale that started at 7 (1) and went to 10 (4).
That 1-4 scale would represent the difference much better in a sea of 7 rated books.
According to watersheds.org:
"Salat is the German word for salad, and probably came to the Ozarks with German settlers. Poke salat is made from Pokeweed."
I built it 4 years ago.
I seem to get corrupt burned CDs all the time... so it seems like both options suffer from that problem.
Just, I've never had it happen with floppies.
Sounds like a problem on your end. I've never had a problem like that.
The most recent example was for trying to install SCSI/RAID controller drivers on my Win XP machine. The *only* ways to install them, that I've been able to find, are by floppy disk (also required me to buy an external floppy drive) or by making a re-configured Windows install disk and re-installing my OS.
Since the former was easier, that's what I did.
"And then watch as the premium content gets distributed far and wide without any revenue to you, especially if lawmakers ever recognize the assertion in your signature that copyright is incoherent.
:} ) in platformers. I'd gladly pay for extra outfits or minigames in Twilight Princess, or additional boss fights in God of War.
If it's free software, people can set up their own arenas in a private server. And a lot of people will just choose to play single-player or couch multiplayer: one large monitor shared among players and four gamepads. "
You're trying to poke holes based on old videogame models and ignoring a lot of the newer technologies that many games use so that their content is valid and runs through proprietary servers.
Look at how newer games like Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare, even though they have large singleplayer/couch multiplayer modes, are mostly played online through a tracking service.
Either of those could have had their singleplayer multiplayer/online modes given away for free, then sold their ranked server/online unlock item modes as a subscription or expansion (similar to how BF2 sold unlocks through expansions). That's easy to do for consoles like the PS3 and XBOX 360, and good luck subverting Steam to get that content on the PC.
All it takes is a little bit of imagination and tweaking modern videogame distribution models to see how this would work.
I mean, let's take a look at the major game types and see how free games have made money in the past or how they could potentially make money:
FPS: Gunz Online is a good example of how a totally free game can generate cash through selling addtional weapons, items, and outfits. Not everyone pays extra for items, but the people that do end up spending quite a lot of money.
Another model would be to release a medium sized game and then release pay-for expansions linked to an online account.
RTS: This one is easy, since the majority of new RTS's (Starcraft 2 plz?) are played over the internet. Release the singleplayer and multiplayer modes for free and pay extra for an official online ranking service/tracker or more expansions.
MMORPGs: Already gave an example of how this works. Other models use ideas like in Gunz, where a player pays for expanded banks, unique items, tokens to access extra dungeons, etc.
Adventure/Platformers (Mario!): This one isn't as good for examples because they're almost all singleplayer games. However, we can look to the Nintendo E-Reader (moderate success in the U.S., huge success in Japan) for how people would be willing to pay for extra/unique items and outfits (hammer bros. suit
Racing/Simulation games: Pay cash to unlock more vehicles/customization sold via an online store.
Strategy (Gunbound/Wormz): Again, sell items/armor/outfits via an online store.
Then why would the launch date be pushed back by several months?
Yea, anyone dropping $14k on a back can surely afford to drop $80 on a 32gb CF card (600'ish photos between offloads).
"I dont see the encouraging part. Some dude wants to kill himself, other dude pretending to be a girl tries to convince him hanging is better than jumping."
He sure as hell isn't discouraging him from committing suicide... or actively seeking police or other authorities to help the other guy out.
Here's an analogy with a less controversial and sympathetic crime:
If someone told you that they were about to murder their girlfriend told you they were going to do it with a knife, if you responded that a baseball bat would be better then offer a helping hand in pointing out locations that do the most damage to the body, wouldn't you agree that you've committed both moral and legal crime?
I would say yes to both, since you have the knowledge that a moral and legal wrong is about to be committed, even though you aren't physically acting, you still hold the intent that the other person (girlfriend or the person you're helping) will die and decide not to act to prevent that wrong.
I feel this is a very close analogy to the situation above, as the only difference is the person that the wrong is being acted upon. It would be different if people had the positive right to death, but they don't, they only have the negative right to life.
"Compassion? Is that the same compassion that kills abortion doctors?"
Leave your straw man in the corn fields please. They are for crows and films, not discussions.
Yea, WinXP only makes up 58% of the world market share. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp)
I suspect that thanks to an aggressive auto-update campaign, the vast majority of those are SP3.
The easy solution is to hide them. There's no reason to break into a car to check for iPads if they don't know they're in there.
An extra thirty seconds added on to your wait to get into your hotel isn't too much of an inconvenience... especially not for a thousand dollars.
That's Logitech and Razor, not Microsoft.
Quick look at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105039&cm_re=microsoft_mous-_-26-105-039-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105072&cm_re=microsoft_mous-_-26-105-072-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105098&cm_re=microsoft_mous-_-26-105-098-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105213&cm_re=microsoft_mous-_-26-105-213-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105046&cm_re=microsoft_mous-_-26-105-046-_-Product
If they put together 3 mice per person, per hour, then at minimum wage in the U.S., the increase in price would only be a couple dollars.
If they move it to the U.S., that would be assuming they don't save anything on shipping costs/tariffs.
"or taking away hundreds of thousands of jobs from those Chinese people"
Because the unemployment rate in the U.S. isn't 9.7% or anything...
That would only be true if the alleviation of pain is happiness... (i.e. you're a masochist that denies himself pain for pleasure...)
Oh god... low refresh CRTs are like hell behind glass.
If this were the ivory trade, that would make sense.
However, since people that create real child pornography are their own demand, your argument falls flat.
Don't confuse the previous generations' specialists with widespread adoption. The handful of people who did use technology before 1990 really know their stuff, but that's a handful. Compare that to now, when nearly everyone in an industrialized nation has or has access to a computer.
I mean, your claim is the equivalent of declaring that the middle ages were the reading ages since the advent of widespread book publication was available after the invention of the printing press. Even though the books were still restricted to the religious clergy. Even though literacy during the early middle ages was almost non-existent in the public.
That might sound like a tangent, but it's a close analogy to the argument you presented. Calling Generation Z the "Tech Generation" is valid and accurate.
Technically, the cost of the combined war in iraq and war in afghanistan have not yet reached 1 trillion dollars.
http://costofwar.com/
You mean, iNewtons.
If you take it in context...
The area just got lit the fuck up by a bunch of really powerful, really loud cannon rounds. A van drives right into it, bunch of people running around picking stuff up...
Looks like the calvary came to grab the weapons and reinforce the people that just went down.
That's a perfectly good reason to light the van up too.
In hindsight: none
At the time: calvary
If they were concerned what it looked like on people, they would have average people as the medium, not 6 foot, 90 lb caricatures of women shaking their hips down a runway.
These are artists, not engineers. Logic and accuracy need not apply.