"If people are buying fewer games, what do you have to do? Well, you have to make games that appeal to the mass market, and to mom buying things for Little Johnny. You have to make games based only on big franchises, preferably tied into movies, with additional in-game advertising as an additional source of revenue since your consumer is buying used or pirating. Do you think that will improve the quality of games?"
Yes, but not necessariliy for EA. EA's other choice is to lower development costs and stop equating game quality with how good the textures are in the game, or how many cut scenese are there.
Now, I think the real answer is that by EA raising their development costs on fewer games, they effectively open a door for smaller companies to compete.
More companies producing games is better. Competition is good.
If the game companies routinely sold you a game for $50 that occupied your every moment for 2 months (not only because it was good, but because you felt nicely challenged), at best they could sell you 6 games a year. Probably less.
But if they produce a game that amuses you for just 1 month, they can double their income. And if solve the game in 3 weeks... well, you get the idea.
But if Jim is using FIOS he can only use the amount of bandwidth he's paying for. Unlike cable and DSL, FIOS limits are quite explicit. Your hypothetical example may point out someone who is a pompous ass, but certainly within his moral and legal rights to do.
For FIOS, you do pay for the amount of bandwidth you want, so that bandwidth would be difficult for them to change.
Now for bandwidth out to the rest of the network, let's be real here... if everything was slow except for verizon services, then people would simply complain and move to comcast.
But the video service that Verizon is offering goes over fiber which has enough spare bandwidth that it won't even affect the IP network. I think it's a non-issue, but I'd love to hear the counter argument.
"I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? "
Why does anyone care about what Oprah does or thinks? I'm fascinated why anyone considers her more compelling or important than say, Madonna, Prince Charles, or Winnie the Pooh?
Re:Mitnick may be a smart guy, BUT...
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
"Er, do you have evidence, citations, anything to back your claim? Or should we just trust you because a man named tkrotchko can't be wrong?"
Actually, my name is Tom, and I never claimed to be infallible. But Mitnick's claims simply don't pass the sniff test, and don't stand up to even my back-of-the-envelope analysis.
"Show me the evidence or shut up."
Wow. A charmer. I understand you like MS stuff (I do too), and that may cause you to look at their efforts with a less than critical eye.
Are you looking for anecdotal or statistical evidence??
I'm not a great writer, and so I'll just pull some stuff together that you're free to rip apart.
Windows 2003 vulnerabilities were remotely exploitable 61% of the time, further the Criticality pie-chart shows that Windows exploits were highly or extremely critical 39% of the time.
By contrast, Red Hat shows a smaller amount of exploitable vulnerabilities, both locally and more important remotely.
Let's look at what happened in the alerts from US-CERT:
* 22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
* 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
* 3 were for Oracle products
* 2 were for Cisco products
* 1 was for Mac OS X
* None were for Linux
And I apologize for giving you a blog, but it's late.
Lets look beyond Linux to the BSD's. Let's take NetBSD, this is widely considered the most secure OS because it was built on a foundation of security. There have been no exploits that I'm aware of on this platform for years, and yet the source is widely available. How can that be? The source is there, there must be an exploit? If not, that seems to completely discredit Mitnick's point.
If we move on to Windows XP workstation, there are still significant numbers of pre-SP2 installs, which are *inherently* vulnerable just being attached to the Internet without a hardware firewall. Its a fair bet that almost all of these boxes have been exploited and serve as a zombie for some n'er-do-well to exploit.
Lets push these statistics aside. Windows is closed and proprietary and Linux/BSD is not. Mitnick's claims that OSS is easier to exploit is not borne out either statistically, or by simple analysis of what's going on. Windows is arguable more exploitable that Red Hat, and it is inarguable the BSD's are more secure than Windows as a server. IIS was singled out as something that should not be used by large enterprises by the Gartner group, hardly an OSS advocate.
Where's the beef here? Like I said, Mitnick is a smart guy, but he doesn't appear to have facts on his side.
Now I've put up, and I will shut up, for this is one of those rare times that I believe I am inarguably correct.
Mitnick may be a smart guy, BUT...
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 1
And he may know a few things more than a typical/. person, but his "theory" hasn't held up under any sort of scrutiny.
What I mean is, in theory, he feels he can crack an OSS based box because he can analyse the source code, but in reality, it's easier to crack a proprietary box. So his theory doesn't appear to hold up to simple analysis of what happens in the real world.
It's kind of like the theory that SUVs are safer than other cars, which would appear to be common sense. But it falls apart when you consider real world applications and SUV's are no more or less safe than anything else.
"The po-po could bust down your door for any old reason, throw your underwear drawer out on the front lawn for the world to see."
As long as a judge agreed with the reason, then yes. If they bust in without a warrant, the police (or "po-po" in your parlance) can be thrown in jail. They have "broken the law" in legal lingo.
"they are patenting is the process of using a smiley on the phone/sending it."
Actually, now that I think of it, your interpretation makes the patent seem worse.
Here's why...
If they got a patent on emoticons, you could justify it by saying "The patent examiner never heard of emoticons, ah ha!"
Instead, this indicates they knew about emoticons and felt that sending an emoticon was sufficiently unique that it deserved patent protection. In otherwords, the examiner was so stupid that they thought that emoticons had been invented, but never sent to anyone before. What were they thinking? Emoticons were first used on BBS's over the phone, but never sent? Huh?
Perhaps "went away" is too strong. I don't know of any "copy protected" software any more. There is a lot of niche products that use a form of activation (dongles and phone-home), but that's not the same thing.
And with the exception of Windows XP, very few mainstream products even uses these techniques.
Remember back in the day, you couldn't use Lotus unless you had the key disk, and that key disk could not be copied!
"What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around?"
I think the problem is that Apple is a software company that makes its living as a hardware company. And to make money from hardware, they have to be perceived as different from their competition. If you follow what you're saying to it's logical end, you come up with a solution that says "Apple should not sell hardware, they should write software that runs anywhere".
I'm sure Jobs experience with NeXT tells him that selling an operating system, his experience watching Gasse sell BeOS tells him he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft on that basis. So he's chosen a middle ground that appears to be increasingly difficult to maintain differentiation on the hardware side.
The next few years will be interesting for Apple, that's for sure.
The business world doesn't seem to care very much about consumer rights, only improved quarterly results.
Why is the business approach okay?
We had copy protection on software 20 years ago until everybody took a firm stand against it. Then it went away. Maybe its time to do the same for DRM.
He's hit on a problem, but concludes the search engines are to blame, which is wrong. The search engines fill a void that consumers wanted, or else they would not exist!
I'd argue its the opposite problem... most web sites are so bad that they're not worth navigating so you have to rely on a search engine instead.
Do people rely on search engines to find stuff at Amazon? No, because Amazon's site is designed well enough to find stuff quickly and easily.
On the other hand, too many sites are not worth the effort to sift through to find what you need, so you need an outside engine to correlate the answer.
And let's not forget the most important point about the web. The power of the web for a shopper is that there are a lot of places to buy stuff. Without a search engine, that power cannot be put to use. In the long run that hurts small web sites, because you can't easily reach consumers if people don't know you're there.
I guess it's really an age old story... if you have a large mind-share, you don't need to do a lot of advertising to drive business. But if people don't know you exist, then you have to get the word out. Why is paying a search engine any more outrageous than paying a TV network to advertise your product?
"It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop"
In what was does U.S. control of the root DNS server constitute any kind of cultural control that you imply?
And anyway, I've never heard anyone accuse the U.S. of having a single culture. If you need proof, compare and contrast the culture of Boston to that of the southeast. There's even multiple languages spoken in the U.S.!
On both XM and Sirius, the commericals are on the talk stations only and they do show on the radio display.
But both XM and Sirius could change their advertising policy today and there's nothing a subscriber could do about it. Mind you, I think they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, but look at movie theaters... they charge you $8-10 to see a movie then show you commercials for Coke (or whatever else). Then they wonder why people won't go to the theater. But that's a different topic.
Slashdot Mirror
"If people are buying fewer games, what do you have to do? Well, you have to make games that appeal to the mass market, and to mom buying things for Little Johnny. You have to make games based only on big franchises, preferably tied into movies, with additional in-game advertising as an additional source of revenue since your consumer is buying used or pirating. Do you think that will improve the quality of games?"
Yes, but not necessariliy for EA. EA's other choice is to lower development costs and stop equating game quality with how good the textures are in the game, or how many cut scenese are there.
Now, I think the real answer is that by EA raising their development costs on fewer games, they effectively open a door for smaller companies to compete.
More companies producing games is better. Competition is good.
"If anything games are getting less fun to play."
If the game companies routinely sold you a game for $50 that occupied your every moment for 2 months (not only because it was good, but because you felt nicely challenged), at best they could sell you 6 games a year. Probably less.
But if they produce a game that amuses you for just 1 month, they can double their income. And if solve the game in 3 weeks... well, you get the idea.
"Seems sensible, because I'm in favor of paying artists for the pleasure they give me."
That seems fair.
But if I find the book/game/CD doesn't give you pleaseure, does the "artist" agree to give your money back?
But if Jim is using FIOS he can only use the amount of bandwidth he's paying for. Unlike cable and DSL, FIOS limits are quite explicit. Your hypothetical example may point out someone who is a pompous ass, but certainly within his moral and legal rights to do.
For FIOS, you do pay for the amount of bandwidth you want, so that bandwidth would be difficult for them to change.
Now for bandwidth out to the rest of the network, let's be real here... if everything was slow except for verizon services, then people would simply complain and move to comcast.
But the video service that Verizon is offering goes over fiber which has enough spare bandwidth that it won't even affect the IP network. I think it's a non-issue, but I'd love to hear the counter argument.
"I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? "
Why does anyone care about what Oprah does or thinks? I'm fascinated why anyone considers her more compelling or important than say, Madonna, Prince Charles, or Winnie the Pooh?
"Er, do you have evidence, citations, anything to back your claim? Or should we just trust you because a man named tkrotchko can't be wrong?"
Actually, my name is Tom, and I never claimed to be infallible. But Mitnick's claims simply don't pass the sniff test, and don't stand up to even my back-of-the-envelope analysis.
"Show me the evidence or shut up."
Wow. A charmer. I understand you like MS stuff (I do too), and that may cause you to look at their efforts with a less than critical eye.
Are you looking for anecdotal or statistical evidence??
I'm not a great writer, and so I'll just pull some stuff together that you're free to rip apart.
Let's take a look here:
http://secunia.com/product/1173/
I'll summarize for you:
Windows 2003 vulnerabilities were remotely exploitable 61% of the time, further the Criticality pie-chart shows that Windows exploits were highly or extremely critical 39% of the time.
By contrast, Red Hat shows a smaller amount of exploitable vulnerabilities, both locally and more important remotely.
Let's look at what happened in the alerts from US-CERT:
* 22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
* 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
* 3 were for Oracle products
* 2 were for Cisco products
* 1 was for Mac OS X
* None were for Linux
I think a really good, fair summary is here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=501
And I apologize for giving you a blog, but it's late.
Lets look beyond Linux to the BSD's. Let's take NetBSD, this is widely considered the most secure OS because it was built on a foundation of security. There have been no exploits that I'm aware of on this platform for years, and yet the source is widely available. How can that be? The source is there, there must be an exploit? If not, that seems to completely discredit Mitnick's point.
If we move on to Windows XP workstation, there are still significant numbers of pre-SP2 installs, which are *inherently* vulnerable just being attached to the Internet without a hardware firewall. Its a fair bet that almost all of these boxes have been exploited and serve as a zombie for some n'er-do-well to exploit.
Lets push these statistics aside. Windows is closed and proprietary and Linux/BSD is not. Mitnick's claims that OSS is easier to exploit is not borne out either statistically, or by simple analysis of what's going on. Windows is arguable more exploitable that Red Hat, and it is inarguable the BSD's are more secure than Windows as a server. IIS was singled out as something that should not be used by large enterprises by the Gartner group, hardly an OSS advocate.
Where's the beef here? Like I said, Mitnick is a smart guy, but he doesn't appear to have facts on his side.
Now I've put up, and I will shut up, for this is one of those rare times that I believe I am inarguably correct.
And he may know a few things more than a typical /. person, but his "theory" hasn't held up under any sort of scrutiny.
What I mean is, in theory, he feels he can crack an OSS based box because he can analyse the source code, but in reality, it's easier to crack a proprietary box. So his theory doesn't appear to hold up to simple analysis of what happens in the real world.
It's kind of like the theory that SUVs are safer than other cars, which would appear to be common sense. But it falls apart when you consider real world applications and SUV's are no more or less safe than anything else.
"The po-po could bust down your door for any old reason, throw your underwear drawer out on the front lawn for the world to see."
As long as a judge agreed with the reason, then yes. If they bust in without a warrant, the police (or "po-po" in your parlance) can be thrown in jail. They have "broken the law" in legal lingo.
"Why do you think they haven't already tried impeachment? Because there's no evidence."
Actually congress can impeach and convict the president whenever they choose. They can do it because they don't like his tie. Really.
"they are patenting is the process of using a smiley on the phone/sending it."
Actually, now that I think of it, your interpretation makes the patent seem worse.
Here's why...
If they got a patent on emoticons, you could justify it by saying "The patent examiner never heard of emoticons, ah ha!"
Instead, this indicates they knew about emoticons and felt that sending an emoticon was sufficiently unique that it deserved patent protection. In otherwords, the examiner was so stupid that they thought that emoticons had been invented, but never sent to anyone before. What were they thinking? Emoticons were first used on BBS's over the phone, but never sent? Huh?
Do you see?
http://www.photo2be.com/5935MonaS.htm
McDonalds has the exact correct mix usually. That, and if you can manage to find an old-fashioned soda fountain.
Perhaps "went away" is too strong. I don't know of any "copy protected" software any more. There is a lot of niche products that use a form of activation (dongles and phone-home), but that's not the same thing.
And with the exception of Windows XP, very few mainstream products even uses these techniques.
Remember back in the day, you couldn't use Lotus unless you had the key disk, and that key disk could not be copied!
"What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around?"
I think the problem is that Apple is a software company that makes its living as a hardware company. And to make money from hardware, they have to be perceived as different from their competition. If you follow what you're saying to it's logical end, you come up with a solution that says "Apple should not sell hardware, they should write software that runs anywhere".
I'm sure Jobs experience with NeXT tells him that selling an operating system, his experience watching Gasse sell BeOS tells him he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft on that basis. So he's chosen a middle ground that appears to be increasingly difficult to maintain differentiation on the hardware side.
The next few years will be interesting for Apple, that's for sure.
Well, so what?
The business world doesn't seem to care very much about consumer rights, only improved quarterly results.
Why is the business approach okay?
We had copy protection on software 20 years ago until everybody took a firm stand against it. Then it went away. Maybe its time to do the same for DRM.
If you have Coca-Cola from a soda fountain, it is significantly better. The carbonation is never correct from a bottle or can.
"it could be that some people believe in paying for something that isn't theirs"
If I tape something from the air and watch it on my iPod video, am I stealing?
If I get the tape from someone else (because I forgot to record it that night), and put it on my iPod, am I stealing?
Seems hard to steal something that the network is giving away for free (that is, they broadcast it).
Really, I'm not just being academic with these questions; I just don't see how you can "steal" stuff that's broadcast free for anybody to see.
Can't you record it on a TV Tuner on your PC and then convert to a video to downloaded to your iPod? I think that's legal, isn't it?
He's hit on a problem, but concludes the search engines are to blame, which is wrong. The search engines fill a void that consumers wanted, or else they would not exist!
I'd argue its the opposite problem... most web sites are so bad that they're not worth navigating so you have to rely on a search engine instead.
Do people rely on search engines to find stuff at Amazon? No, because Amazon's site is designed well enough to find stuff quickly and easily.
On the other hand, too many sites are not worth the effort to sift through to find what you need, so you need an outside engine to correlate the answer.
And let's not forget the most important point about the web. The power of the web for a shopper is that there are a lot of places to buy stuff. Without a search engine, that power cannot be put to use. In the long run that hurts small web sites, because you can't easily reach consumers if people don't know you're there.
I guess it's really an age old story... if you have a large mind-share, you don't need to do a lot of advertising to drive business. But if people don't know you exist, then you have to get the word out. Why is paying a search engine any more outrageous than paying a TV network to advertise your product?
Now I'll no longer have to pay a monthly fee for broadband access! The content providers will pay for me!
Caffeine is definitely not your friend...
Sorry, I couldn't find any references to this mandated licensing for ISA anywhere. Could you post a link?
"It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop"
In what was does U.S. control of the root DNS server constitute any kind of cultural control that you imply?
And anyway, I've never heard anyone accuse the U.S. of having a single culture. If you need proof, compare and contrast the culture of Boston to that of the southeast. There's even multiple languages spoken in the U.S.!
"but isn't he being a little melodramatic? "
No, he's beyond melodramatic well into neurosis and with a little nudge he could easily pass right into full-on crazy.
On both XM and Sirius, the commericals are on the talk stations only and they do show on the radio display.
But both XM and Sirius could change their advertising policy today and there's nothing a subscriber could do about it. Mind you, I think they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, but look at movie theaters... they charge you $8-10 to see a movie then show you commercials for Coke (or whatever else). Then they wonder why people won't go to the theater. But that's a different topic.