Actually, the popularity of Windows also makes it much more likelly that run-of-the-mill, not really gifted, junior software developers only know how to develop for Windows. (assuming really gifted ones probably try other OSes just for fun)
These are the kind of people which don't regularly code is such a way as to avoid buffer overflows, which blindly trust that, since the JavaScript in a web form validates input parameters, the parameters sent to the webserver are always correct and which think that putting DLLs in the windows system directory is a good idea.
Since there are so many more clueless developers doing development under Windows, it's much more likelly that a piece of software for Windows was done/worked-uppon by somebody with no awareness whatsoever of software security.
PS: In my experience, even with senior developers, it's usually the more gifted ones that know how to develop for multiple OSes.
Corporate death penalty - big fine, dissolve the corporation, shareholders get what's left of it after fines and debt payments. Corporate "prision" sentence - corporation cannot do business in the specified country for X years. Additionally any trade coming from or going to a company of that corporation cannot pass through the territory, airspace or maritime area of that country.
After seing many of the posts here on/. i don't understand this "poor Microsoft evil EU mentality".
You see, my biguest personal grip with the law in capitalist countries at the moment is how disproportionaly harsher it is on individuals that it is on companies - for example, if an individual kills someone due to negligence he/she goes to prison, while if a company kills multiple people they get a fine.
Even more relevant to this situation is the disparity when both the individual and the company do something for which they are fined: the issue here is that, proportionaly to the annual income of the individual and the company, a fine with the same value usually is a much higher burden for an individual than for a company. Worse still, for equally harming crimes, companies often get lower fines than individuals since they have beter lawyers, beter connections and the law is (thanks to many years of lobbying) skewed to be harsher on the types of crimes done by individuals than one those done by companies even when both crimes do the same amount of harm.
So back to the fine on MS and to put things in perspective: - MS had in the year of 2005 a net (thus after taxes) income of $12254 millions, a fine of 1.400 millions is thus 11,4% of their net income. - For an individual making $150000 bruto per month, with a 30% flat income tax (thus $105000 net income), an equivalent fine (thus 11,4% of their yearly net income) would be $11970
Thus, Microsoft's fine is equivalent to a $11970 (in one year) fine for an individual with an well above average income.
From a mainstream point of view it would be even beter if there were some standardized cooling solutions for the whole PC (thus CPU, GFX and possibly HDs and power source) - maybe with things like standard CPU cooling blocks that can actually be mounted the same way as CPU fans, graphics cards with pre-assembled watercooling blocks (not a whole watercooling solution), water cooled power sources, pre-assembled tubing connections with leak-proof connectors at their endings, etc...
As it is at the moment, each manufacturer has their own solutions, each with different sized (and hard to find) tubing; parts compatibility consists of forcing the tubing to fit into oversized connectors or looking up in specialized stores for upsizing/downsizing connectors; fiting a cooling block to a CPU mount or a graphics card usually requires (partial) disassembling of the mountings/existing-cooling on motherboard/graphics card; tubing just comes as one long tube that you have to cut into pieces and (sometimes forcibly) fit into the connectors (hardly foolproof); it's hard to find discrete components outside specialized stores (although full solutions are not that hard to find); fail-prone components such as pumps are usually buil-in on some part or other of the solution and often cannot easilly be replaced without getting a whole new assembly.
Having installed watercooling on my PC some years ago and gone through the paces of extending it to cover the GFX, extending the length of the connections to the dissipation block (by eventually finding a tubbing size which could be forced to fit) and replacing the pump with an external pump, i came to the conclusion that watercooling is still far from mainstream. (on the upside, if i ever get a real aquarius i now know all about which pumps are best)
[...] despite the fact that it's so painfully obvious that anyone with two neurons firing in synch [...]
You clearly have never frequented a gaming forum full of teenage fanboys - if one of those guys loses half his face, all his teeth, one arm and all fingers in the other hand but one when the console controller explodes in his hands, he will still use his one single finger remaining to write posts singing praises to the console and vowing to buy the next version.
In that sense they're a bit like Mac fanboys, only less given to episodes of techno-religious extasy
For games it is easy to see that they have actually gone up in cost to produce, so it isn't surprising that their purchase cost has gone up. I think this gets to people because they have the reasonable expectation based on experience that technology should go down in price (or stay the same in absolute dollars and thus become cheaper due to inflation), and they see the games as being an extension of that technology. This is the acclimation you're talking about. Or maybe they're like me. I certainly appreciate that games cost more to produce, but honestly I don't care. Telling me how many millions a game cost to produce doesn't make the $100 or whatever price any lower, and doesn't make me want to pay that high a price either.
When calculating how much does it cost to sell a games, there two costs that have to be taken in account: a) Per-unit manufacturing costs. b) Game development costs
The first cost is a lot lower that per-unit selling price and has been going down in the last 20 years. The second cost has been going up per-game but, since the number of units sold has gone up (a lot), the per-unit cost has (quite likelly) remained stable or even become lower.
To summon it: - Per-unit costs are down. - Per-game costs are up, but are spread over a much higher number or units, and thus are lower per-unit.
This is why people don't expect game prices to go up.
IMHO, the reason why Sony has hinted that some PS3 games might go as high as $100 is: a) Per-unit manufacturing costs will be higher (at least in the beginning) for games distributed in Blu-Ray media. b) If unit sales are lower than expect, then the game development costs cannot be spread quite as thinly over all units sold.
Actually games are a bit like ball-point pens: there's only so much fun you can have with a game before it ain't fun anymore, at which point you have to get a new one if you want to have more fun.
In that sense, they work close enough like consumables the my metaphor in the post above works.
The problem using any software development methodology which requires user feedback for new product development is that you don't actually have any users - best you can get is a marketoid and those change their minds every 5 minutes.
You see, the closest you have for a user of a new game is a gamer and those can't really help you refine your requirements 'cause all they want from a game is to be entertained and they don't really know beforehand how a new, entertaining, game will look like - "having fun" is hardly an easy to define business process.
Maybe some sort of mixed approach where you have a game designer with an overall view of the game concept and a generic pool of gamers to check out the "fun factor" during game development. Might work well for games with an "exploration" component (for example RPGs) for which you can design the early levels, "test" them with some gamers and then use the result to fine tune those levels and later ones. Still, i doubt it can be usefull in game genres such as RTS and Sims.
More in general, and judging from the posts i've been seing in./ for the last couple of years, the main process problem with game development seems to be that a lot of the control over the final product lies with Marketing, and worse, Marketing is in a different company altogether (the producer) than game development - so even with good managers on the software development side (already unlikelly) it's difficult to control the the flow of wacky ideas "that just have to be included in the game" coming from the marketoids - thus requirements creep is rife, which almost guarantees that long hours and death marches are standard.
But can I synergize with my results-driven knowledge base while partnering with self-managed teams, increasing single-source responsibility while undergoing a complete paradigm shift?
I didn't think so
No wonder you can't, nobody can do all of those three positions from the "Kama Sutra of Software Development" at once - "Synergizing with a results-driven knowledge base" by itself already requires an unusual ammount of body flexibility... not to mention being really really carefull.
The problem here is that, with the help of their 95% share of the PC market, MS has made DirectX the de facto abstraction layer for games on the PC.
Since MS will not fix issues with older versions of DirectX after they start distributing a new version, game developers are pushed into developing their games to the latest DirectX version.
So via this mechanism, MS makes sure that game developers use MS' chosen DirectX version.
By making DirectX 10 to be Vista only, and since they have locked-in game developers to the latest version of DirectX, it's actually MS (which sold you XP) which is making sure that in the future you will have less use of XP.
For clarity, here's an analogous situation: - Imagine that a washing machine manufacturer, after selling millions of v1 washing machines, had (somehow) made an agreement with all detergent manufacturers so that (somehow) any new detergent batches they made could not be used in v1 washing machines, only in the "new and improved" v2 machines.
In this situation would you not hold it against the washing machine manufacturer since they had no responsability in making sure that the older washing machines worked with the newer detergent batches?
The issue here is that, to get what they payed for (play games/clean clothes), consumers need a base component and a consumable, both coming from two different sellers (OS, game/washing machine, detergent). If, knowingly, the seller of the base component makes it so that, some time after the sale of that component, there will be no more consumables available for it, then said seller is knowingly decieving their customers.
That's what MS is doing here.
There are only 3 possible outcomes:
Game developers break their bond to the latest version of DirectX by dropping DirectX and using OpenGL. This would be great for cross-platform interoperability of games in general and specifically for gaming under Linux
Users drop gaming on the PC and concentrate on consoles for their gaming needs
Spain being a member of the EU and given there's an open and free market of goods around here, for objects of great enough value just mail order them from another country and (lo and behold) you don't pay stupid spanish taxes. (actually, if you choose the right country to order from you even pay less VAT).
I reckon the spanish government has just created a great business oportunity to open a spanish-language webstore across the border in Portugal or France selling mobile phones.
It's a great shot in the arm for cross-border commerce and the common market;)
PS: Living in Holland, i regularly buy stuff from webstores in England, Belgium and sometimes even France, though for the last two it helps if you speak french.
Since patents reward being the first to come up with an idea, not being the first to come up with a way of turning that idea into reality, getting a couple of industry-specialists/bright-people in a room and asking them to imagine what kind of things there might exist in the future is a very good way of getting a lot of patents, some of which will become money makers - some companies have already made it their business model to get patents this way, sit on them until somebody does de actual work of truning them into reality, and then squeeze those people for all they can.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that somebody out there is picking ideas from Science Fiction books and patenting them...
The only news here is that Business Week has picked this up - hopefully this is an indication that there is a growing awareness in business circles of how broken the patent system really is.
Buying stuff is a method of acquiring the stuff you want.
I reckon this is were we diverge - for me buying stuff is a method of aquiring the stuff that you need or gives you pleasure.
Just buying stuff because you want it is a great way of spending your money in tons of wortless underused stuff and only a couple of really fun things.
Personally, i'd rather invest the little time and brainpower required to discern the chaff from the rest and so that i only buy the fun stuff.
So, from my perspective, you're basically suggesting that we all use substandard products and live joyless lives in order to actually work less.
That's exactly the oposite of what i'm sugesting.
It goes like this: - Think before you buy stuff and you'll end up with a lot more stuff you really derive pleasure from instead of a ton of expensive stuff you never use (and a lot less fun stuff). - Work isn't everything. If you're spending so much time at work that you don't have the time to do other things you like (like playing with all the neat toys you bought) then your priorities are badly skewed: what's the point of working long hours to buy stuff you rarelly have the time to use?
BTW: Use some common sense when buying or not white branded stuff - products in well developed, very mature product areas differ very little in quality, often there's no difference at all between branded and generics: thanks to outsourcing, they end up comming from the same factories More expensive is not necessarilly best, it's just more expensive.
Ask yourself: is this product worth the extra money or am i paying extra just for a label?
I see it as being a discerning consumer, not a sheep - u seem to see it as use substandard products and live joyless lives.
If everyone on the planet only worked 20 hours a week, and relied on technology and handouts for food and clothing, there would be no technology, no clothes and no food.
Is that brand new 35 inch plasma TV really worth working 60h/weeks?
Does buying a first generation Blu-Ray burner really compensates for commuting 2h/day every day?
Does getting a SUV instead of cheaper car really compensates for not going on vacations for 3 months to a paradisian island?
Buying stuff is a means to and end. Working is a means to an end.
Here's a sugestion - everytime you want to buy something, ask yourself the following:
Do i need this?
If so (for example toothpaste), do i get anything for it to be an expensive branded product or is a white brand version good enough?
If not (35'' plasma TV), will the pleasure i get from it be worth the hours i have to work in order to earn the money to pay for it?
In my experience most people could work 2/3 or even 1/2 as many hours as they do now and still have the same level of living that that have now...... if they didn't waste so much money in things that aren't really that much enjoyment-giving or in paying for the name of the product instead of the product itself.
In many countries that would be 30 or even 20h/week.
Accepting that one has responsabilities doesn't mean giving up on one's dreams.
Being friendly and joking with people is not the same as being immature.
Being serious all the time and totally giving up one's pleasure in life for the sake of family, community or just to be like everybody else is not maturity, it's being a drone (in my opinion, a sheep).
Real maturity is achieved when one achieves the level of self-confidence needed to outgrow the "fitting a mold just because thats what one is '(not) expected to do' behaviour" and one finds out it's possible to balance responsabilities and fun without beraking the first or giving up the second.
Unfortunately, our society is designed around the expectation that most people will "settle down", and become "hard-working family men/women". The push is constantly there to be a nice little drone, work hard to make money, buy loads of stuff that don't really make you happy (consume, consume, consume), become what your neighbours expect you to be and expect the same back from them, accept that you're just another average working stiff, accomodate and don't make waves.
BTW: Dressing up in a specific style (geek, retro, necro, whatever) to "make a statement", "be different" or "cause a reaction" can be just as much a form of "trying to belong", "accomodating to a sterotype" or in general "being relative to others" as wearing a suit for work - ask yourself "am i dressing this because of who i am or because of who i want to be?". Clothes are a tool - dressing a certain way can help you progress to certain aims, and it's what you are aiming at that matters, not what you wear.
How about this: - Don't buy the Blu-Ray burner. Save $1000 - Use the $1000 to buy 10x 250GB external HDs. This is equivalent to 40x Blu-Ray disks
If you expect to burn more that 40 Blu-Ray disks AND expect the price per GB of Blu-Ray media to go below that for HDs (keep in mind that the price per-GB of HD media is going down fast), then go ahead and get the burner.
By the way: Reading and writting data to an from and external HD, even via USB is actually much faster than to and from a Blu-Ray disk. Still, if that's a problem buy a Firewire external HD enclosure and 10x 250GB internal HDs.. it will probably still cost you $1000.
But couldn't use use that same argument with any type of hosting/shared server? How about companies like Iron Mountain that handle off site backup storage/archiving? Even if you kept 100% of your data in house, unless you keep everything under a very tight lock and key, it's still subject to employee/insider theft/misuse.
It's all a question of managing one's risks: - A tight contract with a company that handles off site backup storage/archiving including penalty clausules for data loss or data leaks is a much more controlable situation that buying the $20/year plan from an online storage company. - Internal employers can only access the systems you give them access to and via the hardware you allow them to use, while you have no control whatsoever on what employees from a 3rd party company can do.
First rule of security (data security or otherwise) is that there is no such thing as 100% foolproof security, thus the best one can do is limit the risks and have a backup plan for when things go wrong - using an el cheapo online backup provider for backing up potentially sensitive corporate data is a choice that actually increases data loss/leaking risks.
Actually, from the article, the yearly prices for storing any significant amount of data (100Gb+) are so high that buying an external HD pretty much pays itself in 1 or 2 months. From the article:
Mozy's for-pay service is cheap compared with the norm: $20 for up to 5GB, $30 for 10GB, and $40 for 20GB--per annum. You get only five free restore operations per month, but that should be more than enough for most users.
and
The pay plan is more expensive than that of the other free service I looked at, Mozy, but at $10 per month or $100 per year for up to 10GB of storage, ElephantDrive's per-gigabyte rate is half that of either IBackup or XDrive. If your system doesn't have a fast upstream broadband connection, however, it could take days to upload multigigabytes of data to this or any other online storage service.
I suspect our discussion is going around the meaning of 'axis' - my concept for political axis comes from my concept for geometrical axis, as in: - One's position in a 2 dimensions area can be encoded by defining 2 orthogonal axis, X and Y, both extending from minus infinity to plus infinity. The existence of the axis themselfs conveys very little information except that since they are ortoghonal, any X-axis value for a position in the 2D plane is completly independent. The existance of the axis themselfs does not in any way constrain the location of the points in the 2D - they can literally be anywhere. When solving mathematical problems, it's even common to apply transformations in the axis themselfs (ie change the position of the axis) in order to facilitate solving some kinds of mathematical equations.
Similarly, my left-right and liberal-conservative axis are just meant to state that these two scales of belief are independent of each other (orthogonal) and defining those axis does not imply that people's beliefs cluster at extremes of those axis. Just like for points in the 2D universe, i personally believe that in a plane defined by left-right and liberal-conservative axis, people's beliefs are all over the place. (also people's beliefs are not points but areas and, since one's choices in life often involve a lot more than 2 factors, one would need a lot more than 2 dimensions to accurately pinpoint even center of those areas... but that's a different discussion)
Anyway, i believe i understand you point - the current conversational meaning of 'axis' in some cultures has changed from the original meaning from geometry ("the simplest way of assigning numerical values to locations") and aquired connotations of "being in the bad side", polarization and extremism ("axis of evil", "Allies vs Axis").
In other words, in many people's minds, defining an axis equates to defining a border between "us" (implicitly the good guys) and "them" (implicitly not the good guys) - which is very far from the original meaning for 'axis' and not at all the message i wanted to convey.
I suspect the target voters of The Pirate Party are the so-called Internet generation: young people which are confortable with technology and use computers and the Internet often.
This is the same group that is both more likelly to (indiscriminatly) download stuff from the Internet and less likelly to vote (at the moment), since they don't usually believe in the traditional parties and their messages.
If this is so, then it's in the interest of The Pirate Party to both distance themselfs from the mainstream parties and not to adjust their message so that it conforms to the current common political message format.
In other words, the best way not to be confused with a duck is to not quack like a duck and not walk like a duck.
Furthermore, if this is their strategy and they are successful in attracting younger voters, then success will give them all the legitimacy they need.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, there's a lot more porn coming from the US.
Not that i'll know it
Actually, the popularity of Windows also makes it much more likelly that run-of-the-mill, not really gifted, junior software developers only know how to develop for Windows. (assuming really gifted ones probably try other OSes just for fun)
These are the kind of people which don't regularly code is such a way as to avoid buffer overflows, which blindly trust that, since the JavaScript in a web form validates input parameters, the parameters sent to the webserver are always correct and which think that putting DLLs in the windows system directory is a good idea.
Since there are so many more clueless developers doing development under Windows, it's much more likelly that a piece of software for Windows was done/worked-uppon by somebody with no awareness whatsoever of software security.
PS: In my experience, even with senior developers, it's usually the more gifted ones that know how to develop for multiple OSes.
Two small sugestions:
Corporate death penalty - big fine, dissolve the corporation, shareholders get what's left of it after fines and debt payments.
Corporate "prision" sentence - corporation cannot do business in the specified country for X years. Additionally any trade coming from or going to a company of that corporation cannot pass through the territory, airspace or maritime area of that country.
After seing many of the posts here on /. i don't understand this "poor Microsoft evil EU mentality".
You see, my biguest personal grip with the law in capitalist countries at the moment is how disproportionaly harsher it is on individuals that it is on companies - for example, if an individual kills someone due to negligence he/she goes to prison, while if a company kills multiple people they get a fine.
Even more relevant to this situation is the disparity when both the individual and the company do something for which they are fined: the issue here is that, proportionaly to the annual income of the individual and the company, a fine with the same value usually is a much higher burden for an individual than for a company. Worse still, for equally harming crimes, companies often get lower fines than individuals since they have beter lawyers, beter connections and the law is (thanks to many years of lobbying) skewed to be harsher on the types of crimes done by individuals than one those done by companies even when both crimes do the same amount of harm.
So back to the fine on MS and to put things in perspective:
- MS had in the year of 2005 a net (thus after taxes) income of $12254 millions, a fine of 1.400 millions is thus 11,4% of their net income.
- For an individual making $150000 bruto per month, with a 30% flat income tax (thus $105000 net income), an equivalent fine (thus 11,4% of their yearly net income) would be $11970
Thus, Microsoft's fine is equivalent to a $11970 (in one year) fine for an individual with an well above average income.
From a mainstream point of view it would be even beter if there were some standardized cooling solutions for the whole PC (thus CPU, GFX and possibly HDs and power source) - maybe with things like standard CPU cooling blocks that can actually be mounted the same way as CPU fans, graphics cards with pre-assembled watercooling blocks (not a whole watercooling solution), water cooled power sources, pre-assembled tubing connections with leak-proof connectors at their endings, etc ...
As it is at the moment, each manufacturer has their own solutions, each with different sized (and hard to find) tubing; parts compatibility consists of forcing the tubing to fit into oversized connectors or looking up in specialized stores for upsizing/downsizing connectors; fiting a cooling block to a CPU mount or a graphics card usually requires (partial) disassembling of the mountings/existing-cooling on motherboard/graphics card; tubing just comes as one long tube that you have to cut into pieces and (sometimes forcibly) fit into the connectors (hardly foolproof); it's hard to find discrete components outside specialized stores (although full solutions are not that hard to find); fail-prone components such as pumps are usually buil-in on some part or other of the solution and often cannot easilly be replaced without getting a whole new assembly.
Having installed watercooling on my PC some years ago and gone through the paces of extending it to cover the GFX, extending the length of the connections to the dissipation block (by eventually finding a tubbing size which could be forced to fit) and replacing the pump with an external pump, i came to the conclusion that watercooling is still far from mainstream.
(on the upside, if i ever get a real aquarius i now know all about which pumps are best)
You clearly have never frequented a gaming forum full of teenage fanboys - if one of those guys loses half his face, all his teeth, one arm and all fingers in the other hand but one when the console controller explodes in his hands, he will still use his one single finger remaining to write posts singing praises to the console and vowing to buy the next version.
In that sense they're a bit like Mac fanboys, only less given to episodes of techno-religious extasy
When calculating how much does it cost to sell a games, there two costs that have to be taken in account:
a) Per-unit manufacturing costs.
b) Game development costs
The first cost is a lot lower that per-unit selling price and has been going down in the last 20 years.
The second cost has been going up per-game but, since the number of units sold has gone up (a lot), the per-unit cost has (quite likelly) remained stable or even become lower.
To summon it:
- Per-unit costs are down.
- Per-game costs are up, but are spread over a much higher number or units, and thus are lower per-unit.
This is why people don't expect game prices to go up.
IMHO, the reason why Sony has hinted that some PS3 games might go as high as $100 is:
a) Per-unit manufacturing costs will be higher (at least in the beginning) for games distributed in Blu-Ray media.
b) If unit sales are lower than expect, then the game development costs cannot be spread quite as thinly over all units sold.
I loooove puppies .... roasted with small potatoes they're really good.
Actually games are a bit like ball-point pens: there's only so much fun you can have with a game before it ain't fun anymore, at which point you have to get a new one if you want to have more fun.
In that sense, they work close enough like consumables the my metaphor in the post above works.
The problem using any software development methodology which requires user feedback for new product development is that you don't actually have any users - best you can get is a marketoid and those change their minds every 5 minutes.
./ for the last couple of years, the main process problem with game development seems to be that a lot of the control over the final product lies with Marketing, and worse, Marketing is in a different company altogether (the producer) than game development - so even with good managers on the software development side (already unlikelly) it's difficult to control the the flow of wacky ideas "that just have to be included in the game" coming from the marketoids - thus requirements creep is rife, which almost guarantees that long hours and death marches are standard.
You see, the closest you have for a user of a new game is a gamer and those can't really help you refine your requirements 'cause all they want from a game is to be entertained and they don't really know beforehand how a new, entertaining, game will look like - "having fun" is hardly an easy to define business process.
Maybe some sort of mixed approach where you have a game designer with an overall view of the game concept and a generic pool of gamers to check out the "fun factor" during game development. Might work well for games with an "exploration" component (for example RPGs) for which you can design the early levels, "test" them with some gamers and then use the result to fine tune those levels and later ones. Still, i doubt it can be usefull in game genres such as RTS and Sims.
More in general, and judging from the posts i've been seing in
No wonder you can't, nobody can do all of those three positions from the "Kama Sutra of Software Development" at once - "Synergizing with a results-driven knowledge base" by itself already requires an unusual ammount of body flexibility
Just glue a picture of a pair of eyes to the wall of your cube
Since MS will not fix issues with older versions of DirectX after they start distributing a new version, game developers are pushed into developing their games to the latest DirectX version.
So via this mechanism, MS makes sure that game developers use MS' chosen DirectX version.
By making DirectX 10 to be Vista only, and since they have locked-in game developers to the latest version of DirectX, it's actually MS (which sold you XP) which is making sure that in the future you will have less use of XP.
For clarity, here's an analogous situation:
- Imagine that a washing machine manufacturer, after selling millions of v1 washing machines, had (somehow) made an agreement with all detergent manufacturers so that (somehow) any new detergent batches they made could not be used in v1 washing machines, only in the "new and improved" v2 machines.
In this situation would you not hold it against the washing machine manufacturer since they had no responsability in making sure that the older washing machines worked with the newer detergent batches?
The issue here is that, to get what they payed for (play games/clean clothes), consumers need a base component and a consumable, both coming from two different sellers (OS, game/washing machine, detergent). If, knowingly, the seller of the base component makes it so that, some time after the sale of that component, there will be no more consumables available for it, then said seller is knowingly decieving their customers.
That's what MS is doing here.
There are only 3 possible outcomes:
Spain being a member of the EU and given there's an open and free market of goods around here, for objects of great enough value just mail order them from another country and (lo and behold) you don't pay stupid spanish taxes. (actually, if you choose the right country to order from you even pay less VAT).
;)
I reckon the spanish government has just created a great business oportunity to open a spanish-language webstore across the border in Portugal or France selling mobile phones.
It's a great shot in the arm for cross-border commerce and the common market
PS: Living in Holland, i regularly buy stuff from webstores in England, Belgium and sometimes even France, though for the last two it helps if you speak french.
Dunno about the rest, but around here sending hate e-mails to CmdrTaco is considered a social duty
These kinds of companies are hardly new:
...
Since patents reward being the first to come up with an idea, not being the first to come up with a way of turning that idea into reality, getting a couple of industry-specialists/bright-people in a room and asking them to imagine what kind of things there might exist in the future is a very good way of getting a lot of patents, some of which will become money makers - some companies have already made it their business model to get patents this way, sit on them until somebody does de actual work of truning them into reality, and then squeeze those people for all they can.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that somebody out there is picking ideas from Science Fiction books and patenting them
The only news here is that Business Week has picked this up - hopefully this is an indication that there is a growing awareness in business circles of how broken the patent system really is.
I reckon this is were we diverge - for me buying stuff is a method of aquiring the stuff that you need or gives you pleasure.
Just buying stuff because you want it is a great way of spending your money in tons of wortless underused stuff and only a couple of really fun things.
Personally, i'd rather invest the little time and brainpower required to discern the chaff from the rest and so that i only buy the fun stuff.
That's exactly the oposite of what i'm sugesting.
It goes like this:
- Think before you buy stuff and you'll end up with a lot more stuff you really derive pleasure from instead of a ton of expensive stuff you never use (and a lot less fun stuff).
- Work isn't everything. If you're spending so much time at work that you don't have the time to do other things you like (like playing with all the neat toys you bought) then your priorities are badly skewed: what's the point of working long hours to buy stuff you rarelly have the time to use?
BTW: Use some common sense when buying or not white branded stuff - products in well developed, very mature product areas differ very little in quality, often there's no difference at all between branded and generics: thanks to outsourcing, they end up comming from the same factories
More expensive is not necessarilly best, it's just more expensive.
Ask yourself: is this product worth the extra money or am i paying extra just for a label?
I see it as being a discerning consumer, not a sheep - u seem to see it as use substandard products and live joyless lives.
Is that brand new 35 inch plasma TV really worth working 60h/weeks?
Does buying a first generation Blu-Ray burner really compensates for commuting 2h/day every day?
Does getting a SUV instead of cheaper car really compensates for not going on vacations for 3 months to a paradisian island?
Buying stuff is a means to and end.
Working is a means to an end.
Here's a sugestion - everytime you want to buy something, ask yourself the following:
In my experience most people could work 2/3 or even 1/2 as many hours as they do now and still have the same level of living that that have now
In many countries that would be 30 or even 20h/week.
Accepting that one has responsabilities doesn't mean giving up on one's dreams.
Being friendly and joking with people is not the same as being immature.
Being serious all the time and totally giving up one's pleasure in life for the sake of family, community or just to be like everybody else is not maturity, it's being a drone (in my opinion, a sheep).
Real maturity is achieved when one achieves the level of self-confidence needed to outgrow the "fitting a mold just because thats what one is '(not) expected to do' behaviour" and one finds out it's possible to balance responsabilities and fun without beraking the first or giving up the second.
Unfortunately, our society is designed around the expectation that most people will "settle down", and become "hard-working family men/women". The push is constantly there to be a nice little drone, work hard to make money, buy loads of stuff that don't really make you happy (consume, consume, consume), become what your neighbours expect you to be and expect the same back from them, accept that you're just another average working stiff, accomodate and don't make waves.
BTW: Dressing up in a specific style (geek, retro, necro, whatever) to "make a statement", "be different" or "cause a reaction" can be just as much a form of "trying to belong", "accomodating to a sterotype" or in general "being relative to others" as wearing a suit for work - ask yourself "am i dressing this because of who i am or because of who i want to be?". Clothes are a tool - dressing a certain way can help you progress to certain aims, and it's what you are aiming at that matters, not what you wear.
Eat less chili - save the planet!
How about this:
.. it will probably still cost you $1000.
- Don't buy the Blu-Ray burner. Save $1000
- Use the $1000 to buy 10x 250GB external HDs. This is equivalent to 40x Blu-Ray disks
If you expect to burn more that 40 Blu-Ray disks AND expect the price per GB of Blu-Ray media to go below that for HDs (keep in mind that the price per-GB of HD media is going down fast), then go ahead and get the burner.
By the way: Reading and writting data to an from and external HD, even via USB is actually much faster than to and from a Blu-Ray disk. Still, if that's a problem buy a Firewire external HD enclosure and 10x 250GB internal HDs
It's all a question of managing one's risks:
- A tight contract with a company that handles off site backup storage/archiving including penalty clausules for data loss or data leaks is a much more controlable situation that buying the $20/year plan from an online storage company.
- Internal employers can only access the systems you give them access to and via the hardware you allow them to use, while you have no control whatsoever on what employees from a 3rd party company can do.
First rule of security (data security or otherwise) is that there is no such thing as 100% foolproof security, thus the best one can do is limit the risks and have a backup plan for when things go wrong - using an el cheapo online backup provider for backing up potentially sensitive corporate data is a choice that actually increases data loss/leaking risks.
and
*sigh*
I suspect our discussion is going around the meaning of 'axis' - my concept for political axis comes from my concept for geometrical axis, as in:
... but that's a different discussion)
:)
- One's position in a 2 dimensions area can be encoded by defining 2 orthogonal axis, X and Y, both extending from minus infinity to plus infinity. The existence of the axis themselfs conveys very little information except that since they are ortoghonal, any X-axis value for a position in the 2D plane is completly independent. The existance of the axis themselfs does not in any way constrain the location of the points in the 2D - they can literally be anywhere. When solving mathematical problems, it's even common to apply transformations in the axis themselfs (ie change the position of the axis) in order to facilitate solving some kinds of mathematical equations.
Similarly, my left-right and liberal-conservative axis are just meant to state that these two scales of belief are independent of each other (orthogonal) and defining those axis does not imply that people's beliefs cluster at extremes of those axis. Just like for points in the 2D universe, i personally believe that in a plane defined by left-right and liberal-conservative axis, people's beliefs are all over the place.
(also people's beliefs are not points but areas and, since one's choices in life often involve a lot more than 2 factors, one would need a lot more than 2 dimensions to accurately pinpoint even center of those areas
Anyway, i believe i understand you point - the current conversational meaning of 'axis' in some cultures has changed from the original meaning from geometry ("the simplest way of assigning numerical values to locations") and aquired connotations of "being in the bad side", polarization and extremism ("axis of evil", "Allies vs Axis").
In other words, in many people's minds, defining an axis equates to defining a border between "us" (implicitly the good guys) and "them" (implicitly not the good guys) - which is very far from the original meaning for 'axis' and not at all the message i wanted to convey.
I'll keep that in mind for next time
I suspect the target voters of The Pirate Party are the so-called Internet generation: young people which are confortable with technology and use computers and the Internet often.
This is the same group that is both more likelly to (indiscriminatly) download stuff from the Internet and less likelly to vote (at the moment), since they don't usually believe in the traditional parties and their messages.
If this is so, then it's in the interest of The Pirate Party to both distance themselfs from the mainstream parties and not to adjust their message so that it conforms to the current common political message format.
In other words, the best way not to be confused with a duck is to not quack like a duck and not walk like a duck.
Furthermore, if this is their strategy and they are successful in attracting younger voters, then success will give them all the legitimacy they need.