Like I said in another post, MMO's are about community.
Not any more. I played DAoC, then switched to WoW at launch and watched my guild fall apart because they could solo in WoW.
People's preferences are clearly and absolutely: 1: Group with a small number of very good friends 2: Solo 3: Group with guild mates (or people they know a bit and trust a bit) (and way down there) 457657465674: Group with strangers
For some people, 1 and 2 are interchangeable. I know people who play WoW daily and have *never* grouped to quest, only to pug instances.
I think that part of WoW's huge success is because you can solo effectively in it, and that suits a lot of people just fine. I don't think any MMO that forces you to group up will get anywhere near WoW's numbers.
It's sad, because my best memories are of times spent grouped up and laughing in either game. On the other hand my worst memories from either game are from other people too. I can understand not wanting to risk the bad stuff to possibly get the good stuff.
How come 'the album' merits preserving as an ideal unit of quality music?
An album is based on the available bandwidth in a vinyl 12-inch record, not on the attention span of the listeners or on the creative urges of the artist(s). So how come it's sacrosant?
So much of this debate is riddled with "it's been that way since I started listening to music, so that's the way it MUST stay" points of view, mostly from people who are so heavily plugged in to the music scene they're almost incapable of stepping back and seeing all the other possibilities.
Music is about to emerge from the ultra-commercial cocoon it's been in for 50 years, and I can't wait to see what it turns into
Since the automobile companies loved his product, and are entirely happy with other people making their parts for them, then I'll bet huge stacks of money that he couldn't meet their supplier management requirements.
Auto companies have really really strict inventory management rules for suppliers. They'll order an exact number of parts for delivery within an exact timeframe. If you can't meet that, they can't do business with you, no matter how good your idea is. Startup and small manufacturers have huge problems with these rules, as they do require a complex and mature distribution system.
And $1mill is small change to an auto company compared to the costs of messing with the supply chain...they bought him off cheap
Again, it comes down to implementation > idea. Ideas are worth nothing without the business model and processes.
So in your view, there is no difference between "images of minors engaged in simulated sex acts" and "simulated images of minors engaged in sex acts"?
Because that's the difference the post is discussing, not whether you think either activity is OK.
No, the post is discussing a survey of people asked a similar question to that, but framed as a 'guilty/not guilty' choice.
Given that choice, most people* will answer the 'guilty/not guilty' part of the question, instead of the 'simulated minors/simulated acts' part of the question.
And because the law as quoted is framed so loosely, most people* will respond to the "guilty/not guilty" question with an answer that reflects their view of the activity, i.e. whether the activity in question should be illegal (and therefore the photoshopper is guilty) or not.
So the post IS actually discussing whether the activity is OK or not. Whether that was the author's intent is meaningless, because the respondants didn't respond to the intent, but to the actual question(s)**.
*making the same wild leaps of unsubstantiated assumption as the original post.
**always assuming they didn't just respond with whatever their mouse landed on so that they could get their 25c and move on.
As an organisation convicted of serial child abuse affecting thousands of children over decades by a government largely sympathetic to it, the Roman Catholic Church will obviously be a large feature on any blacklist intending to protect children.
But, clearly, it won't. Until it does, there is nothing in any of these laws that is protecting children and any proponents of them are clearly immorally using 'think of the children' as a cover.
Agree with the above (where's my mod points?) All offices are political environments and being a geek in that environment can be hard. If you really can't hack it, then buy some protection: make friends with the Queen Bee (every office has one, usually the CEO's PA) and get her on your side to watch your back for you.
I'd also add:
Maintain a list of tasks that you have to do. When someone asks you to do something, add it to the bottom of the list. If they insist on a deadline, ask them what other tasks on the list will need to be delayed/cancelled in order to make that deadline. Do it politely and professionally and don't let them get away with 'whatever'.
The problem with 'authorship as a viable career' is that authorship has been based on the distribution of a scarce good (books). As you rightly point out, the Tubes reduce the marginal cost of production to zero, consequently destroying the scarcity of books and their value.
Music (and in a few years, film) is facing the exact same problem. The Music Industry is really the Record Industry, and built its entire business model on distributing (scarce) records. That business model is now dead, long live the Music Industry, who will use recordings to promote their thriving gig-ticket-and-t-shirt business.
The Book Industry must do the same thing, and re-invent the business model to become the Literature Industry. The interesting question is now what business models work for providing authors with 'enough' reward to write stuff that we want to read...
It's not about indie or mainstream, it's about business models.
The current music business has a business model that is anathema to file-sharing. Regardless of whether you're indie or mainstream, if your business model looks like record:promote:sell then P2P is going to hurt you, because you will be spending money promoting while a share of your sales will be disappearing to P2P.
The business model that P2P helps with is record:share:merchandise (basically making money off t-shirts and concert tickets rather than the actual music itself) amongst others (record:share:donate for example).
The original author needs to rethink his criticisms of P2P, and use P2P as a powerful viral marketing tool for promoting his t-shirt-and-concert-ticket business.
So Telstra got kicked out of the previous attempt, so they lean on a few of their mates in government and sure enough the old plan is scrapped and a new one is started. Only the new plan is completely taxpayer-funded, subject to no open tendering process, and managed by some demonic clique of Aussie politicians.
Plus, Conroy can give up on his plan to make the commercial ISP's filter content when he can just wedge his filtering plans into this (and any vote becomes 'have nothing or have a filtered feed'). and once it's in it's a simple step to force all ISP's to use the govt's filtered backbone ('the only people using commercial ISP feeds are perverts and pedophiles and we need to stop them from doing that').
I don't know whether I'm too cynical, or not cynical enough.
But there's one last hope that this might actually be done right. I hope all the campaigning that went on to shut Conroy's first attempt down will work and we'll actually get it right.
Well guess what this is a democracy (representative in most) and if you don't make yourself heard then it is your FAULT, not the politicians, nor the "clueless" voters who do vote and make themselves heard.
Actually, in Australia you are required to vote, it's actually illegal not to, and that's enforced.
So no, I disagree: - It *is* the politician's fault. They're the ones listening to right-wing religious pressure groups instead of anyone with half a clue about the tubes.
- It's hard to make yourself heard in a system where there's no abstain choice. If the people who really didn't care one way or another could not vote, then those who do, would, and would be heard better.
Let me just mention the Luminiferous Ether here, briefly, and say that not infrequently has the accepted doctrine with a discipline been totally and completely wrong.
There are incentives within academia, to do with research grants, established theories, professional reputations and arguments from authority, that can lead a discipline astray. Laymen don't have these incentives and so can more freely overturn the orthodoxy.
I don't know if physics is going astray on this, but I have a working bullshit detector, and it goes off every time Dark Matter and Dark Energy gets mentioned. Something that you can't see, can't touch, can't smell, can't measure, and can only infer from the divergence between theory and reality ISN'T THERE!
So let me get this straight...we have Dark Matter because there's not enough gravity within a galaxy to explain the observations, and Dark Energy because there's too much gravity between galaxies to explain the observations.
Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?
Those who pirate never see the DRM in the first place.
Sure they do, I just proved it to you.
yeah, but if you're a pirate, then mounting a DVD image of one more game isn't a huge effort, as you've already got the relevant software set up for your other pirated games.
The original point still holds true...DRM is more of a hassle to legitimate purchasers than it is to pirates.
This is why letting people pick their own prices works.
But it's not your decision to make. If I build a car and decide to sell it for $5000, your only options are to buy it for $5000 or not buy it for $5000. You can't just steal it from me and give me $1000 because that's all you think it's worth. That's just not how trading works. If it were, I could kick you out of your house, toss you a $5 bill and claim I bought it from you.
Trading actually does involve a process whereby the two trading partners find a price that is acceptable to both of them. This doesn't happen in retail (well, in big-store retail anyway. You can still haggle with small retail store owners), but that doesn't mean it can't happen in trade. In standard commercial retail we get the choice to buy for $5K, buy a similar product from someone else for a different price, or not buy at all.
At this point.
It's easy to see a future where we can negotiate with a website to find a mutually acceptable price for a game.
and I assume you backup your critical data when you tweak? just one more thing to add to the backup list...
and increasingly these promotions will be associated with an online identity rather than a specific installation.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?
on
Tech Vs. Business?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
In my experience, exactly the reverse is true.
Most techies (because our curiosity is one of the reasons we ended up techies) take a lively interest in how their business works even if they don't need to. If you're an in-house software developer, you *need* to understand how the business works in order to be able to write software for it.
But the business folk have no clue how IT works, and no desire to ever find out. As others have said, it's like plumbing to them.
Part of the animosity I've experienced is caused by this very problem. IT people understand how the business works (and all the business, not just one department), and also understand how the tech works, so actually have probably the clearest understanding of the business in the entire organisation. They then have to deal with morons in suits who don't understand anything past their next departmental meeting, and the morons resent being treated like morons.
Digital files don't have a good storage medium yet. Any storage technology (and that includes the storage vendors' stuff) designed to hold digital files is subject to bit rot, cd rot, or equivalent. This isn't an immutable property of digital files, but I'm beginning to think it's an immutable property of the commercial environment for digital files.
The key to storing digital files is that you can make a perfect copy as many times as you like. So to store a digital file, copy it often and to multiple destinations
Analogue storage mediums do last, and don't need to be copied, but they also can't be copied without losing quality.
So, your answer is: - If you want to store one copy and forget about it, transfer the footage to analogue medium and shove it in a safe. - If you want to keep it digital, then be prepared to copy it regularly (and often) and maintain multiple storage locations.
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Not really. The observation is that there doesn't seem to be enough visible matter to explain all this gravity. Dark Matter is one possible explanation (simply put: well, the matter must be there, we just can't see it). No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory. There are other explanations, including 'Gravity doesn't scale like we thought it did'.
In my opinion, Dark Matter will turn out to be the Luminiferous Ether of the 20th Century.
that's a vomit-inducing puff piece. I only managed to read the first three paragraphs before my gag reflex kicked in and I had to look away for a while.
I can only take so much sugar in my reading material.
So when does the scientific community get to stop talking about ID/Creationism and move on?
To draw a parallel: The Ether was discredited around 100 years ago as being unnecessary. No serious physicist talks about it any more. Science has moved on, and is now talking about (for example) string theory. In a hundred year's time it will have moved on again and string theory will either be accepted as a working model, or rejected.
Biologists have done the science on evolution, they have questioned it, poked it, prodded it and tested it for over a hundred years, and it stands up to that. It's a good working model, and now everyone would like to move on and stop talking about it.
The desire to not talk about evolution/creationism is not a desire for orthodoxy, but a desire to move the science on.
Actually, it's the other way around. 'God did it' is a remarkably easy thing to understand and believe if you believe in a God in the first place.
The hard bit to understand is how millions and millions of tiny adaptive changes make up the vast array of life around us (and us, of course). But when you do finally grok it, it's amazingly elegant and a constant source of wonder.
I share an ancestor with every living thing on this planet. Isn't that amazing?
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said in another post, MMO's are about community.
Not any more.
I played DAoC, then switched to WoW at launch and watched my guild fall apart because they could solo in WoW.
People's preferences are clearly and absolutely:
1: Group with a small number of very good friends
2: Solo
3: Group with guild mates (or people they know a bit and trust a bit)
(and way down there)
457657465674: Group with strangers
For some people, 1 and 2 are interchangeable. I know people who play WoW daily and have *never* grouped to quest, only to pug instances.
I think that part of WoW's huge success is because you can solo effectively in it, and that suits a lot of people just fine. I don't think any MMO that forces you to group up will get anywhere near WoW's numbers.
It's sad, because my best memories are of times spent grouped up and laughing in either game.
On the other hand my worst memories from either game are from other people too. I can understand not wanting to risk the bad stuff to possibly get the good stuff.
How come 'the album' merits preserving as an ideal unit of quality music?
An album is based on the available bandwidth in a vinyl 12-inch record, not on the attention span of the listeners or on the creative urges of the artist(s). So how come it's sacrosant?
So much of this debate is riddled with "it's been that way since I started listening to music, so that's the way it MUST stay" points of view, mostly from people who are so heavily plugged in to the music scene they're almost incapable of stepping back and seeing all the other possibilities.
Music is about to emerge from the ultra-commercial cocoon it's been in for 50 years, and I can't wait to see what it turns into
Since the automobile companies loved his product, and are entirely happy with other people making their parts for them, then I'll bet huge stacks of money that he couldn't meet their supplier management requirements.
Auto companies have really really strict inventory management rules for suppliers. They'll order an exact number of parts for delivery within an exact timeframe. If you can't meet that, they can't do business with you, no matter how good your idea is. Startup and small manufacturers have huge problems with these rules, as they do require a complex and mature distribution system.
And $1mill is small change to an auto company compared to the costs of messing with the supply chain...they bought him off cheap
Again, it comes down to implementation > idea. Ideas are worth nothing without the business model and processes.
So in your view, there is no difference between "images of minors engaged in simulated sex acts" and "simulated images of minors engaged in sex acts"?
Because that's the difference the post is discussing, not whether you think either activity is OK.
No, the post is discussing a survey of people asked a similar question to that, but framed as a 'guilty/not guilty' choice.
Given that choice, most people* will answer the 'guilty/not guilty' part of the question, instead of the 'simulated minors/simulated acts' part of the question.
And because the law as quoted is framed so loosely, most people* will respond to the "guilty/not guilty" question with an answer that reflects their view of the activity, i.e. whether the activity in question should be illegal (and therefore the photoshopper is guilty) or not.
So the post IS actually discussing whether the activity is OK or not. Whether that was the author's intent is meaningless, because the respondants didn't respond to the intent, but to the actual question(s)**.
*making the same wild leaps of unsubstantiated assumption as the original post.
**always assuming they didn't just respond with whatever their mouse landed on so that they could get their 25c and move on.
As an organisation convicted of serial child abuse affecting thousands of children over decades by a government largely sympathetic to it, the Roman Catholic Church will obviously be a large feature on any blacklist intending to protect children.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8060442.stm amongst others.
But, clearly, it won't. Until it does, there is nothing in any of these laws that is protecting children and any proponents of them are clearly immorally using 'think of the children' as a cover.
Agree with the above (where's my mod points?) All offices are political environments and being a geek in that environment can be hard. If you really can't hack it, then buy some protection: make friends with the Queen Bee (every office has one, usually the CEO's PA) and get her on your side to watch your back for you.
I'd also add:
Maintain a list of tasks that you have to do. When someone asks you to do something, add it to the bottom of the list. If they insist on a deadline, ask them what other tasks on the list will need to be delayed/cancelled in order to make that deadline. Do it politely and professionally and don't let them get away with 'whatever'.
The problem with 'authorship as a viable career' is that authorship has been based on the distribution of a scarce good (books). As you rightly point out, the Tubes reduce the marginal cost of production to zero, consequently destroying the scarcity of books and their value.
Music (and in a few years, film) is facing the exact same problem. The Music Industry is really the Record Industry, and built its entire business model on distributing (scarce) records. That business model is now dead, long live the Music Industry, who will use recordings to promote their thriving gig-ticket-and-t-shirt business.
The Book Industry must do the same thing, and re-invent the business model to become the Literature Industry. The interesting question is now what business models work for providing authors with 'enough' reward to write stuff that we want to read...
It's not about indie or mainstream, it's about business models.
The current music business has a business model that is anathema to file-sharing. Regardless of whether you're indie or mainstream, if your business model looks like record:promote:sell then P2P is going to hurt you, because you will be spending money promoting while a share of your sales will be disappearing to P2P.
The business model that P2P helps with is record:share:merchandise (basically making money off t-shirts and concert tickets rather than the actual music itself) amongst others (record:share:donate for example).
The original author needs to rethink his criticisms of P2P, and use P2P as a powerful viral marketing tool for promoting his t-shirt-and-concert-ticket business.
So Telstra got kicked out of the previous attempt, so they lean on a few of their mates in government and sure enough the old plan is scrapped and a new one is started.
Only the new plan is completely taxpayer-funded, subject to no open tendering process, and managed by some demonic clique of Aussie politicians.
Plus, Conroy can give up on his plan to make the commercial ISP's filter content when he can just wedge his filtering plans into this (and any vote becomes 'have nothing or have a filtered feed'). and once it's in it's a simple step to force all ISP's to use the govt's filtered backbone ('the only people using commercial ISP feeds are perverts and pedophiles and we need to stop them from doing that').
I don't know whether I'm too cynical, or not cynical enough.
But there's one last hope that this might actually be done right. I hope all the campaigning that went on to shut Conroy's first attempt down will work and we'll actually get it right.
Well guess what this is a democracy (representative in most) and if you don't make yourself heard then it is your FAULT, not the politicians, nor the "clueless" voters who do vote and make themselves heard.
Actually, in Australia you are required to vote, it's actually illegal not to, and that's enforced.
So no, I disagree:
- It *is* the politician's fault. They're the ones listening to right-wing religious pressure groups instead of anyone with half a clue about the tubes.
- It's hard to make yourself heard in a system where there's no abstain choice. If the people who really didn't care one way or another could not vote, then those who do, would, and would be heard better.
Let me just mention the Luminiferous Ether here, briefly, and say that not infrequently has the accepted doctrine with a discipline been totally and completely wrong.
There are incentives within academia, to do with research grants, established theories, professional reputations and arguments from authority, that can lead a discipline astray. Laymen don't have these incentives and so can more freely overturn the orthodoxy.
I don't know if physics is going astray on this, but I have a working bullshit detector, and it goes off every time Dark Matter and Dark Energy gets mentioned. Something that you can't see, can't touch, can't smell, can't measure, and can only infer from the divergence between theory and reality ISN'T THERE!
So let me get this straight...we have Dark Matter because there's not enough gravity within a galaxy to explain the observations, and Dark Energy because there's too much gravity between galaxies to explain the observations.
Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?
Those who pirate never see the DRM in the first place.
Sure they do, I just proved it to you.
yeah, but if you're a pirate, then mounting a DVD image of one more game isn't a huge effort, as you've already got the relevant software set up for your other pirated games.
The original point still holds true...DRM is more of a hassle to legitimate purchasers than it is to pirates.
But it's not your decision to make. If I build a car and decide to sell it for $5000, your only options are to buy it for $5000 or not buy it for $5000. You can't just steal it from me and give me $1000 because that's all you think it's worth. That's just not how trading works. If it were, I could kick you out of your house, toss you a $5 bill and claim I bought it from you.
Trading actually does involve a process whereby the two trading partners find a price that is acceptable to both of them. This doesn't happen in retail (well, in big-store retail anyway. You can still haggle with small retail store owners), but that doesn't mean it can't happen in trade.
In standard commercial retail we get the choice to buy for $5K, buy a similar product from someone else for a different price, or not buy at all.
At this point.
It's easy to see a future where we can negotiate with a website to find a mutually acceptable price for a game.
...this study shows that an older person uses less brute-force brainpower than a younger person to perform the same task.
and I assume you backup your critical data when you tweak? just one more thing to add to the backup list...
and increasingly these promotions will be associated with an online identity rather than a specific installation.
In my experience, exactly the reverse is true.
Most techies (because our curiosity is one of the reasons we ended up techies) take a lively interest in how their business works even if they don't need to. If you're an in-house software developer, you *need* to understand how the business works in order to be able to write software for it.
But the business folk have no clue how IT works, and no desire to ever find out. As others have said, it's like plumbing to them.
Part of the animosity I've experienced is caused by this very problem. IT people understand how the business works (and all the business, not just one department), and also understand how the tech works, so actually have probably the clearest understanding of the business in the entire organisation. They then have to deal with morons in suits who don't understand anything past their next departmental meeting, and the morons resent being treated like morons.
Digital files don't have a good storage medium yet. Any storage technology (and that includes the storage vendors' stuff) designed to hold digital files is subject to bit rot, cd rot, or equivalent. This isn't an immutable property of digital files, but I'm beginning to think it's an immutable property of the commercial environment for digital files.
The key to storing digital files is that you can make a perfect copy as many times as you like. So to store a digital file, copy it often and to multiple destinations
Analogue storage mediums do last, and don't need to be copied, but they also can't be copied without losing quality.
So, your answer is:
- If you want to store one copy and forget about it, transfer the footage to analogue medium and shove it in a safe.
- If you want to keep it digital, then be prepared to copy it regularly (and often) and maintain multiple storage locations.
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Not really. The observation is that there doesn't seem to be enough visible matter to explain all this gravity.Dark Matter is one possible explanation (simply put: well, the matter must be there, we just can't see it).
No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory.
There are other explanations, including 'Gravity doesn't scale like we thought it did'.
In my opinion, Dark Matter will turn out to be the Luminiferous Ether of the 20th Century.
that's a vomit-inducing puff piece. I only managed to read the first three paragraphs before my gag reflex kicked in and I had to look away for a while.
I can only take so much sugar in my reading material.
So when does the scientific community get to stop talking about ID/Creationism and move on?
To draw a parallel: The Ether was discredited around 100 years ago as being unnecessary. No serious physicist talks about it any more. Science has moved on, and is now talking about (for example) string theory. In a hundred year's time it will have moved on again and string theory will either be accepted as a working model, or rejected.
Biologists have done the science on evolution, they have questioned it, poked it, prodded it and tested it for over a hundred years, and it stands up to that. It's a good working model, and now everyone would like to move on and stop talking about it.
The desire to not talk about evolution/creationism is not a desire for orthodoxy, but a desire to move the science on.
Actually, it's the other way around. 'God did it' is a remarkably easy thing to understand and believe if you believe in a God in the first place. The hard bit to understand is how millions and millions of tiny adaptive changes make up the vast array of life around us (and us, of course). But when you do finally grok it, it's amazingly elegant and a constant source of wonder. I share an ancestor with every living thing on this planet. Isn't that amazing?
The study actually just found that women are unclear about communicating their intentions to men.