Lets pretend that scientists like him couldn't work in companies. Recognizing his sheer genius, people would buy him lab equipment if he promised to share his future wealth. Why would they do this even though he had no company? Because he's a freakin' genius. Then he'd get rich. And those who invested in him would get rich.
Although the geniuses of the world surely have the potential to make "leaps and bounds" type discoveries, that does *not* guarantee a monetary reward to anyone.
There wouldn't be any worry about HOW to sell it; he built the best mousetrap, and the world would have beaten a path to his door.
Umm, dangerous ground there. Remember the "Dot Com New Economy"? The one that touted the Field of Dreams marketing philosophy of "If you build it, they will come"? Believe it or not, there were a lot of geniuses who built a lot of really innovative things in that bubble, and only the ones with a decent, solid compamy behind them saw their products succeed in the market. Those who didn't have that are working elsewhere now, with little to show for their past "mousetraps".
It's fine and well to make the world's best mousetrap, but that mousetrap isn't worth anything until it's a successful product and people can actually buy it, and only then does the inventor get the financial rewards coming to him/her. That takes solid business skills.
So, if your Sims eat a ton of Big Macs, do they fatten up, get hardened arteries, and have heart attacks? I hope EA is sticking with the "reality" theme.
Not if they tie-in with some diet product company (lose 10 virtual pounds in 2 days with our simulated miracle drink!). Perhaps they'll allow some spam companies to pay for spamming your sim's email unless you purchase a simulated (insert anti email-spam program here).
Heh, imagine if *everything* you could buy in the online version of The Sims was in fact a paid advertisement. It's actually not a bad revenue model at all, as long as they don't make it obtrusive (the spam example above is quite obtrusive, while buying a Sony "Ultimate Stereo Model X" for your sim's pleasure is not).
This study has very poor controls, so who knows exactly *WHAT* the results are telling us.
He divided the brain activity of participants into four categories -- naming the activity normal, visual, half-videogame, and videogame. The beta waves in the brains of those in the normal category, who rarely played video games, were always stronger than the alpha waves their brains emitted, and little change was shown when they started playing a game. Those in the half-videogame category, who spent between one and three hours each day playing games for three to four days a week, had roughly equal alpha and beta wave activity before they started playing a game. However, once they started playing, the beta waves rapidly decreased, falling below the level of the alpha waves. Beta wave activity in people in the videogame group, who spent between two and seven hours each day playing games, was constantly near zero even when they weren't playing, showing that they hardly used the prefrontal regions of their brains.
Since they categorised the testees based on pre-existing videogame habits, they cannot say whether the decreased beta waves were a symptom of extended videogame playing OR if those with normally lower beta activity simply tend to be more likely to spend more time than average playing games. This test shows some interesting results without doing much to identify exactly what is causing those results. It's as if the study got a group of kids and divided them up into 3 groups: ones wearing Pokemon shirts, ones wearing Barbie shirts, and ones wearing Metallica shirts. The test reveals that when given a test to memorize lyrics to a random Metallica song, not only did the kids with Metallica shirts show better memorization ability, but were even able to recite lyrics not given in the test. Conclusion: wearing a Metallica shirt will dramatically increase your memory! Bad example, but it shows just how useless conclusions based on valid data can be drawn if the test and control groups are poorly selected and controlled, as were the groups in this video game study.
We're not the target market
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Besides the TV, let's look at all the extra "stuff" the average person can hook up to their "Honme Entertainment System": 5.1 Stereo & speakers, Cable/Sat box, DVD, VCR1/2, Tivo-like recording device, game console. You can buy each of those "add-ons" for under $200 at the most, so they're attainable to your "average" consumer.
Do you realize what a major pain in the ass it would be to hook up all those separate devices for your average person who can't even figure out how to program their VCR's clock? *THAT* will stop the masses from buying some (or all) of those components, not the cost. Read: loads of average people who WANT to spend their cash on these add-ons, but won't because the entry knowledge is simply too much for them to bother learning.
This is where the "do everything" boxes come in. All you have to do is plug in perhaps 4 wires, all color-coded, and *viola*! Instant home entertainment center with all the bells and whistles.
Now your average/. reader won't go for these all-in-one boxes, because we are willing to deal with the learning/troubleshooting curve to get everything hooked up correctly in order to get the *exact* components that we want.
For every/. reader, or "home-entertainment buff", there are at least 100 people who just want to plug in a few wires and *have the darn thing work*. It's with that majority that the big bucks are.
It never ceases to amaze me that the major record companies don't see *free advertising* when it's in front of their faces. Those folks who pirate content and don't end up buying that content wouldn't have purchased it in the first place, so there is no net loss. Those who would have purchased the content that they download can access a wider variety of content online, and will end up purchasing more. MP3 quality is a far cry from CD quality, afterall.
Just look at what videotapes did for the movie industry (and when VHS/Beta first came out, the movie industry feared that these would kill the movie industry). They took the technology that they feared, ran with it, and ended up making MORE $ from video sales than from the box office.
Re:Implications for Radio Astronomy. . .
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 0
Have you chec......net telephony recently? The nature of packet..................ble. Packets just do...............ght now.
However, I have high hopes, based on some of the interesting project titles that were listed on that site (didn't wait for them to load), that we'll soon see an entry on that site called "How I run my site on a modified "Tickel Me Elmo" doll. Too cool.
The main reason for having any rating system is to keep kids from seeing adult content. Read: pr0n. Well, as a person who owns several adult content sites, I sure as hell don't want kids surfing my site and sucking up my bandwidth, which I'm paying for. All moral issues aside, they don't have credit cards.
Some scream "Censorship!" and I agree. This is *self-censorship*, and I'm all in favor of censoring myself, as opposed to someone else censoring me. Few complain about our *voluntary* movie rating system, and those who are against it are free to release their movie without a rating and have it shown at independant movie theatres; it won't be shown in most of the chain movie theatres, just like an unrated web site may not be listed in a major search engine (the model that several web rating systems propose). No biggie; it's a choice.
I'd actually go a step further, and propose a voluntary self-categorization system in HTML headers. Few ligit (non-spam ad) sites want irrelavent accidental hits to suck up their bandwidth, so this would ensure that viewers of web sites really intended to see the content that is being sent to them. So a site with a high percentage of words like "large, breasts, squeeze" could either categorize itself in a "/adult/images/women/large_breasts" heirarchy, or a "/health/personal/women/breast_cancer/self_examina tion" one, depending on the context of the site. As it is now, a search on either topic will usually hit on both types of sites, which is clearly unnecessary.
Good points. The bias presented by many common media outlets is quite easily identified by scanning the net for text news releases (audio/video is obviously more time consuming to scan) for irregularities over time. The hype is more often than not designed to spark immediate interest ("stay tuned for the good stuff folks, right after a word from our sponsor..."); objectivity doesn't keep the yah00s interested.
It's a loss, no question.
The current business model of hiring 50+ employees to work on a content driven, ad-financed web site is over. It doesn't work that way. Ad income is just too flaky, and too little to support even a 30+ employee company unless you're a huge portal, like Y@hoo, and even then, it's a shaky future.
Get 4 good techs in a room to create/manage a game related site... rely on user feedback for major content... get inside the industry through experience... that's a profitable game site. Oh, and you need an admin assistant to deal with the real world; 5 people on the payroll. No big deal.
The demise of the.com world is overbloating and dreams that blew off reality. Egos clashed with reality. For source, just look at the head count at any major e-tailor who's screwed. Big numbers there.
It will all balance out, like a porcupine shaking off it's quills.
I think it's great that players can sell items gained in a game in real life. The concept is one that I fully support. I also see someone with a character buying a virtual object, or even a whole account, as a cool thing. If they've got the cash, then go for it.
The problem that I see is with Verant's game model (or most online persistant gaming system's for that matter). They give out a fixed item for every "X" monster spawns (X = a preset random time frame). So monster "BigGuy" always gives item "NeatWeapon" every 4-8 times it re-spawns. So players who want this "NeatWeapon" will sit in front of the spawn area and kill "BigGuy" until they get the item. Get a group of players playing the same high level character 24x7, and they have a virtual business.
The problem is that average players like me can't get the good spawns, because those organized groups are camping the best spots 24x7 (for profit). *THAT* is what Sony is trying to avoid; it's a playability issue, not the fact that these players are making a few (or a lot of) bucks on the side.
The best solution, in my eyes, is to change the gaming model, not going to court. Change the rules (and yes, this affects the gaming model and the story line) so that unique "cool stuff" is spawned randomly according to the difficulty of a particular monster. This would make camping one spot less fruitful, and would require more playing to get the good stuff, and less fixed-spot camping. In the current model, fixed-spot camping is FAR too profitable.
He was my Calculus teacher in 11th grade. Total nerd, but he loved math and it was obvious to us kids that math was his passion. I hated math at the time, and he didn't persuade me at the time to respect math. I was more interested in D&D and fishing at the time.
In retrospect, I know that he was my best teacher. He tried to show me, and the other students, the beauty of math, and it's power. I wasn't listening. Unlike other math teachers, he had a *passion* about math; it wasn't just formulas and equasions, it was real things being disected by numbers. Damn, I should have listened.
Working in the QA field, we (hopefully) frequently have software that is considered throughout the company as "gold disk canidates" and just-released software that has "gone gold".
God forbid that any major record label hear of this, or else we'll be accused of trying to steal the noteriety of "records that went gold". Or perhaps some jewelry chain will sue us for saying that we offer gold when in fact we only offer software. Oh, and there's a gym who's name starts with "gold's"... *shudders at the thought of 10,000 muscular guys breaking our doors down to kick all of the programmer's asses*
Ever try to get 10 experts to agree on a general thesis, let alone 100 or 1,000? Ouch!
It's sure to have much more updated and technically accurate than any print encyclopedia I've personally seen, but the main point of an encyclopedia (IMO) is to concentrate knowledge of any given field of knowledge and give a solid, accurate portrayal. Sure, there can be many different points of view presented, but ultimately, it needs to wrap up conclusions and points in at least *some* manner. Ever seen a Usenet thread do this successfully?
*Pictures Johnny 11th grader trying to write a HS paper with this encyclopedia, with every paragraph starting like this: "However, Professor John Doe believes that...", "Dr. Paul Denton disagrees...", "Laura Croft, PHD, flamed Paul, however, and..." *
These two trends -- the ability to force information past controls, and the ability to create false information -- work both with and against each other. People tend to believe what they want to believe (or what others they fear or respect want them to believe). Contrary reports can be easily discounted, particularly as people come to understand how easy faking a video can be. The same technologies that let people freely experience the world are those that allow people to deny its reality. The resulting cynicism works in favor of people trusting only the information generated by their own village -- not the globe as a whole. Reality is not universally validated but personally validated based on networks of trust.
I never really thought of this before, but this explains a lot of the online behavior and attitudes we see everyday, even on/.
No matter how much information is out there, it is rare that people will look outside of their familiar haunts and find information that they truly trust that they disagree with.
Agree with your first paragraph. We're deporting the *trained* employees, the ones who were talented enough to contract (for the most part) for 6 years, and then exporting that talent that the US companies trained (it costs $ and time to train employees) in return for opening up yet another *untrained* H-1 slot.
While I agree with others that a H-1 visa worker has no inherant *right* to stay in the US beyone 6 years, it seems silly to deport the most valuable immigrant workers only to allow more untrained talent in.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't own any console platform at all; I'm a PC gamer to the bone. I was just pointing out the main lure that the console games have, and the PC games don't have for the average "Joe" who doesn't care about swapping boards and driver-hell.
It's a trade-off for all involved, and for many ppl I know, 1/2 the fun is in playing games, and the other 1/2 love the fun that the challenge of getting everything to work together that he the "ultimate" PC system entails. Two different crowds for the most part.
The Mac, in it's first few generations, was never intended to be upgraded. Thus the same hard-core following that console games have garnered. When Apple decided that expandibility was a potentially "good-thing" for their Mac line, they unleashed ADB, SCSI I, and Universal Bus *cough*. Lessons not learned from the Apple I and on. x86 systems suffered from the same add-on hardware problems back then (and now), so go figure. They all suffer from the same standards problems. Which was really my whole point.
That advantage is compatibility. 1 graphics system, 1 operating system, 1 hardware platform. When you buy a console game, you KNOW that it will run the first time you play it.
This is the biggest drawback against PC gaming; there are millions of different possible hardware combinations, and support all of them is impossible.
On the other hand, while PCs can be upgraded to support the "latest and greatest" bleeding edge hardware (and software); once you buy a console box, you're pretty much stuck with that technological platform except for upgrades that are based on that technology level and no higher.
It's basically a competition between the ever-expandable PC, or the "buy one every 2 years" console. Depends on how much fun the gamers have staying on the bleeding edge of performance.
Apple is a leader in packaging computer products. The Mac, iMac, Cube, etc. are all "firsts" in computer packaging. Their products are often "behind the curve' when it comes to sheer horsepower, but they package it in such novel ways that some people flock to their products, especially ppl who aren't chip-heads. Must be the "It's soooo cute" factor *shrug*.
So yes, releasing the pics early, and breaking the NDA by the employee, did take a little bit of "Oomph" out of Apple's announcement. Not a lot, but a little. The "betrayal" that Apple's leaders felt by this, from one of "their own" is what the lawsuit is all about; Apple is a VERY vindictive company, and often chops off it's nose to spite it's face.
Talk about making old news sound new...
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
"The tech culture is becoming a elitist society with no coherent political values..." IS BECOMING? It's always been that way. It's just that information is the commodity of the "133+" instead of $$. Well, except in Silicon valley where your car determines your "status", but it's always been a status thing, no matter the commodity that determines the percieved status. I can't think of ANY non-political group that has coherent political views. Even religious groups usually have fallings-out because of internal political conflicts, and religious groups are the most coherent type of groups that I can think of. I could go on, but I sense an author with a lot of space to fill, and not enough new ideas. Oh, did you hear that it's recently been discovered that not only is ice cold and hard, but it melts in warm temps? Imagine that! I hear that some underground group in Alaska is trying to reprodece the stuff; I'll post to/. when it's confirmed.
I don't know about the average person, but Napster and it's cousins (or children, or brothers) have caused me to BUY more CDs than I would normally have bought. I hate the MP3 format. It's lossy, and to date I can't play it in my car or my decent stereo without buying a portable player with a horrible DAC. So I buy the CDs I've discovered via Napster and it's kin. I can't preview any CD I like at new record stores (I can preview used ones, but the major record companies don't see a dime of my cash from them). I can't return new CDs I buy that I end up hating, so I didn't buy new CDs before. Now I do, because I can preview the songs via these programs. Not everyone buys the MP3s that they pirate, but these people wouldn't have bought the CDs in the first place; they would have copied them via tape. Same quality, MP3 = decent tape quality. Therefore, minimal $ loss for the record companies, and at least a reasonable $ gain due to their retailer's non-return and non-preview (unless it's top 40 *gack*) policies for new CDs. The hand that feeds you and all that good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets pretend that scientists like him couldn't work in companies. Recognizing his sheer genius, people would buy him lab equipment if he promised to share his future wealth. Why would they do this even though he had no company? Because he's a freakin' genius.
Then he'd get rich.
And those who invested in him would get rich.
Although the geniuses of the world surely have the potential to make "leaps and bounds" type discoveries, that does *not* guarantee a monetary reward to anyone.
There wouldn't be any worry about HOW to sell it; he built the best mousetrap, and the world would have beaten a path to his door.
Umm, dangerous ground there. Remember the "Dot Com New Economy"? The one that touted the Field of Dreams marketing philosophy of "If you build it, they will come"? Believe it or not, there were a lot of geniuses who built a lot of really innovative things in that bubble, and only the ones with a decent, solid compamy behind them saw their products succeed in the market. Those who didn't have that are working elsewhere now, with little to show for their past "mousetraps".
It's fine and well to make the world's best mousetrap, but that mousetrap isn't worth anything until it's a successful product and people can actually buy it, and only then does the inventor get the financial rewards coming to him/her. That takes solid business skills.
So, if your Sims eat a ton of Big Macs, do they fatten up, get hardened arteries, and have heart attacks? I hope EA is sticking with the "reality" theme.
Not if they tie-in with some diet product company (lose 10 virtual pounds in 2 days with our simulated miracle drink!). Perhaps they'll allow some spam companies to pay for spamming your sim's email unless you purchase a simulated (insert anti email-spam program here).
Heh, imagine if *everything* you could buy in the online version of The Sims was in fact a paid advertisement. It's actually not a bad revenue model at all, as long as they don't make it obtrusive (the spam example above is quite obtrusive, while buying a Sony "Ultimate Stereo Model X" for your sim's pleasure is not).
He divided the brain activity of participants into four categories -- naming the activity normal, visual, half-videogame, and videogame.
The beta waves in the brains of those in the normal category, who rarely played video games, were always stronger than the alpha waves their brains emitted, and little change was shown when they started playing a game.
Those in the half-videogame category, who spent between one and three hours each day playing games for three to four days a week, had roughly equal alpha and beta wave activity before they started playing a game. However, once they started playing, the beta waves rapidly decreased, falling below the level of the alpha waves.
Beta wave activity in people in the videogame group, who spent between two and seven hours each day playing games, was constantly near zero even when they weren't playing, showing that they hardly used the prefrontal regions of their brains.
Since they categorised the testees based on pre-existing videogame habits, they cannot say whether the decreased beta waves were a symptom of extended videogame playing OR if those with normally lower beta activity simply tend to be more likely to spend more time than average playing games. This test shows some interesting results without doing much to identify exactly what is causing those results.
It's as if the study got a group of kids and divided them up into 3 groups: ones wearing Pokemon shirts, ones wearing Barbie shirts, and ones wearing Metallica shirts. The test reveals that when given a test to memorize lyrics to a random Metallica song, not only did the kids with Metallica shirts show better memorization ability, but were even able to recite lyrics not given in the test. Conclusion: wearing a Metallica shirt will dramatically increase your memory! Bad example, but it shows just how useless conclusions based on valid data can be drawn if the test and control groups are poorly selected and controlled, as were the groups in this video game study.
Besides the TV, let's look at all the extra "stuff" the average person can hook up to their "Honme Entertainment System": 5.1 Stereo & speakers, Cable/Sat box, DVD, VCR1/2, Tivo-like recording device, game console. You can buy each of those "add-ons" for under $200 at the most, so they're attainable to your "average" consumer.
/. reader won't go for these all-in-one boxes, because we are willing to deal with the learning/troubleshooting curve to get everything hooked up correctly in order to get the *exact* components that we want.
/. reader, or "home-entertainment buff", there are at least 100 people who just want to plug in a few wires and *have the darn thing work*. It's with that majority that the big bucks are.
Do you realize what a major pain in the ass it would be to hook up all those separate devices for your average person who can't even figure out how to program their VCR's clock? *THAT* will stop the masses from buying some (or all) of those components, not the cost. Read: loads of average people who WANT to spend their cash on these add-ons, but won't because the entry knowledge is simply too much for them to bother learning.
This is where the "do everything" boxes come in. All you have to do is plug in perhaps 4 wires, all color-coded, and *viola*! Instant home entertainment center with all the bells and whistles.
Now your average
For every
It never ceases to amaze me that the major record companies don't see *free advertising* when it's in front of their faces. Those folks who pirate content and don't end up buying that content wouldn't have purchased it in the first place, so there is no net loss. Those who would have purchased the content that they download can access a wider variety of content online, and will end up purchasing more. MP3 quality is a far cry from CD quality, afterall.
Just look at what videotapes did for the movie industry (and when VHS/Beta first came out, the movie industry feared that these would kill the movie industry). They took the technology that they feared, ran with it, and ended up making MORE $ from video sales than from the box office.
Have you chec......net telephony recently? The nature of packet..................ble. Packets just do...............ght now.
...........YONE THERE?
Hello?
HELL...........OU HEAR ME?
HELLO?!?
HELLO???..............
Completely Slashdotted site.
However, I have high hopes, based on some of the interesting project titles that were listed on that site (didn't wait for them to load), that we'll soon see an entry on that site called "How I run my site on a modified "Tickel Me Elmo" doll. Too cool.
The main reason for having any rating system is to keep kids from seeing adult content. Read: pr0n. Well, as a person who owns several adult content sites, I sure as hell don't want kids surfing my site and sucking up my bandwidth, which I'm paying for. All moral issues aside, they don't have credit cards.
a tion" one, depending on the context of the site. As it is now, a search on either topic will usually hit on both types of sites, which is clearly unnecessary.
Some scream "Censorship!" and I agree. This is *self-censorship*, and I'm all in favor of censoring myself, as opposed to someone else censoring me. Few complain about our *voluntary* movie rating system, and those who are against it are free to release their movie without a rating and have it shown at independant movie theatres; it won't be shown in most of the chain movie theatres, just like an unrated web site may not be listed in a major search engine (the model that several web rating systems propose). No biggie; it's a choice.
I'd actually go a step further, and propose a voluntary self-categorization system in HTML headers. Few ligit (non-spam ad) sites want irrelavent accidental hits to suck up their bandwidth, so this would ensure that viewers of web sites really intended to see the content that is being sent to them. So a site with a high percentage of words like "large, breasts, squeeze" could either categorize itself in a "/adult/images/women/large_breasts" heirarchy, or a "/health/personal/women/breast_cancer/self_examin
It's a loss, no question. The current business model of hiring 50+ employees to work on a content driven, ad-financed web site is over. It doesn't work that way. Ad income is just too flaky, and too little to support even a 30+ employee company unless you're a huge portal, like Y@hoo, and even then, it's a shaky future. Get 4 good techs in a room to create/manage a game related site... rely on user feedback for major content... get inside the industry through experience... that's a profitable game site. Oh, and you need an admin assistant to deal with the real world; 5 people on the payroll. No big deal. The demise of the .com world is overbloating and dreams that blew off reality. Egos clashed with reality. For source, just look at the head count at any major e-tailor who's screwed. Big numbers there.
It will all balance out, like a porcupine shaking off it's quills.
The problem that I see is with Verant's game model (or most online persistant gaming system's for that matter). They give out a fixed item for every "X" monster spawns (X = a preset random time frame). So monster "BigGuy" always gives item "NeatWeapon" every 4-8 times it re-spawns. So players who want this "NeatWeapon" will sit in front of the spawn area and kill "BigGuy" until they get the item. Get a group of players playing the same high level character 24x7, and they have a virtual business.
The problem is that average players like me can't get the good spawns, because those organized groups are camping the best spots 24x7 (for profit). *THAT* is what Sony is trying to avoid; it's a playability issue, not the fact that these players are making a few (or a lot of) bucks on the side.
The best solution, in my eyes, is to change the gaming model, not going to court. Change the rules (and yes, this affects the gaming model and the story line) so that unique "cool stuff" is spawned randomly according to the difficulty of a particular monster. This would make camping one spot less fruitful, and would require more playing to get the good stuff, and less fixed-spot camping. In the current model, fixed-spot camping is FAR too profitable.
In retrospect, I know that he was my best teacher. He tried to show me, and the other students, the beauty of math, and it's power. I wasn't listening. Unlike other math teachers, he had a *passion* about math; it wasn't just formulas and equasions, it was real things being disected by numbers. Damn, I should have listened.
God forbid that any major record label hear of this, or else we'll be accused of trying to steal the noteriety of "records that went gold". Or perhaps some jewelry chain will sue us for saying that we offer gold when in fact we only offer software. Oh, and there's a gym who's name starts with "gold's"... *shudders at the thought of 10,000 muscular guys breaking our doors down to kick all of the programmer's asses*
It's sure to have much more updated and technically accurate than any print encyclopedia I've personally seen, but the main point of an encyclopedia (IMO) is to concentrate knowledge of any given field of knowledge and give a solid, accurate portrayal. Sure, there can be many different points of view presented, but ultimately, it needs to wrap up conclusions and points in at least *some* manner. Ever seen a Usenet thread do this successfully?
*Pictures Johnny 11th grader trying to write a HS paper with this encyclopedia, with every paragraph starting like this: "However, Professor John Doe believes that...", "Dr. Paul Denton disagrees...", "Laura Croft, PHD, flamed Paul, however, and..." *
Anyhow, this is a really cool experiment.
Too bad they didn't make one with the QuarterDuck though.
I never really thought of this before, but this explains a lot of the online behavior and attitudes we see everyday, even on /.
No matter how much information is out there, it is rare that people will look outside of their familiar haunts and find information that they truly trust that they disagree with.
Agree with your first paragraph. We're deporting the *trained* employees, the ones who were talented enough to contract (for the most part) for 6 years, and then exporting that talent that the US companies trained (it costs $ and time to train employees) in return for opening up yet another *untrained* H-1 slot. While I agree with others that a H-1 visa worker has no inherant *right* to stay in the US beyone 6 years, it seems silly to deport the most valuable immigrant workers only to allow more untrained talent in.
It's a trade-off for all involved, and for many ppl I know, 1/2 the fun is in playing games, and the other 1/2 love the fun that the challenge of getting everything to work together that he the "ultimate" PC system entails. Two different crowds for the most part.
The Mac, in it's first few generations, was never intended to be upgraded. Thus the same hard-core following that console games have garnered. When Apple decided that expandibility was a potentially "good-thing" for their Mac line, they unleashed ADB, SCSI I, and Universal Bus *cough*. Lessons not learned from the Apple I and on. x86 systems suffered from the same add-on hardware problems back then (and now), so go figure. They all suffer from the same standards problems. Which was really my whole point.
Anyhow, no flame bait intended.
This is the biggest drawback against PC gaming; there are millions of different possible hardware combinations, and support all of them is impossible.
On the other hand, while PCs can be upgraded to support the "latest and greatest" bleeding edge hardware (and software); once you buy a console box, you're pretty much stuck with that technological platform except for upgrades that are based on that technology level and no higher.
It's basically a competition between the ever-expandable PC, or the "buy one every 2 years" console. Depends on how much fun the gamers have staying on the bleeding edge of performance.
Apple is a leader in packaging computer products. The Mac, iMac, Cube, etc. are all "firsts" in computer packaging. Their products are often "behind the curve' when it comes to sheer horsepower, but they package it in such novel ways that some people flock to their products, especially ppl who aren't chip-heads. Must be the "It's soooo cute" factor *shrug*. So yes, releasing the pics early, and breaking the NDA by the employee, did take a little bit of "Oomph" out of Apple's announcement. Not a lot, but a little. The "betrayal" that Apple's leaders felt by this, from one of "their own" is what the lawsuit is all about; Apple is a VERY vindictive company, and often chops off it's nose to spite it's face.
"The tech culture is becoming a elitist society with no coherent political values..." IS BECOMING? It's always been that way. It's just that information is the commodity of the "133+" instead of $$. Well, except in Silicon valley where your car determines your "status", but it's always been a status thing, no matter the commodity that determines the percieved status. I can't think of ANY non-political group that has coherent political views. Even religious groups usually have fallings-out because of internal political conflicts, and religious groups are the most coherent type of groups that I can think of. I could go on, but I sense an author with a lot of space to fill, and not enough new ideas. Oh, did you hear that it's recently been discovered that not only is ice cold and hard, but it melts in warm temps? Imagine that! I hear that some underground group in Alaska is trying to reprodece the stuff; I'll post to /. when it's confirmed.
I don't know about the average person, but Napster and it's cousins (or children, or brothers) have caused me to BUY more CDs than I would normally have bought. I hate the MP3 format. It's lossy, and to date I can't play it in my car or my decent stereo without buying a portable player with a horrible DAC. So I buy the CDs I've discovered via Napster and it's kin. I can't preview any CD I like at new record stores (I can preview used ones, but the major record companies don't see a dime of my cash from them). I can't return new CDs I buy that I end up hating, so I didn't buy new CDs before. Now I do, because I can preview the songs via these programs. Not everyone buys the MP3s that they pirate, but these people wouldn't have bought the CDs in the first place; they would have copied them via tape. Same quality, MP3 = decent tape quality. Therefore, minimal $ loss for the record companies, and at least a reasonable $ gain due to their retailer's non-return and non-preview (unless it's top 40 *gack*) policies for new CDs. The hand that feeds you and all that good stuff.