I hope you don't get modded down, because that's a valid thing to say. Microsoft is the George Lucas of IT. A long time ago, they did a few great things, but then became victims of their own wild success. We didn't need the last 25 years to be sans Microsoft...it just would have turned out so much better if they had been not "won" quite so thoroughly.
All this time I thought the Inquisition was killing those witches, but in fact they were being treated to a nice dinner! Sigh, I better go tow the line and beg the question of why the history books could be so wrong.
How many of you think that the government issuing $40 coupons for converter boxes is going to raise the price of converter boxes by $40?
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read about this. It's a giant government give-away to the converter box companies. I sure wish that every time I made a sale, the government would throw in an extra 40 dollars for me.
Or wait, I really don't -- I don't need the government taxing me $80 and giving me $40 back so that I can spend $75 on a forced upgrade.
I agree - at least in the case of the U.S. the summary contains a lot of "this might happen someday" statements. Surely there must be some real data somewhere, and not just someone's "plans"? I mean, there have to be people in the U.S. who plan to win every gold medal at the Olympics, but we don't say, right now, "the U.S. wins all gold medals."
There is also the problem of conflating government and private-sector actions. A Las Vegas casino is under extraordinary surveillance, but I hardly consider that an invasion of my privacy. Under the terms of this report, however, each CCTV at the Bellagio erodes my personal freedoms somehow.
Not to paint things with a big smiley face. I'm perfectly willing to believe the U.S. scores very poorly overall on privacy. This particular report, though, doesn't strike me as convincing.
You haven't used Adobe products lately, I take it. The current crop requires an always-on broadband connection to which the software has unlimited access, so that it can repeatedly ping the authentication servers to make sure you aren't running a pirated copy.
The RAM chip makers artificially restricting demand at a level below demand would cause a shortage and price spike, and that would be illegal.
If I run my factory at half capacity, that's not illegal. Why would it be? What you must have meant is if RAM makers collude to keep chips out of the marketplace.
An astronaut falling toward a black hole (assuming for the sake of argument that he does not get torn apart by tidal forces) perceives that it actually takes forever to fall into the black hole. Externally we would seem him slow down and then stop at the even horizon, but this "stop" is merely the curve receding into infinity, so that further increments are so small we cannot see them. But the astronaut's subjective time becomes infinite.
So if time is slowing down locally, I guess that means in a few billion years we'll all be living in a static (albeit smaller) universe that goes on forever.
It's supposed to be a badly-done mashup of sayings: Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" and (some anonymous coward's) "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."
compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan
Of course such things must be counterfeit. Everybody knows that the RIAA companies would never ever produce something that music fans would actually demand. 100% all good songs on an album, you've got to be kidding me!
In the future, scientists discover that all supernovae, heretofore believed to be natural phenomena, are actually the explosions of a vast intergalactic war.
I have posted similar kinds of things before. Calling your Senator's office is quite painless. Please note: my brother worked for some time on capitol hill and gave me the advice that I continue to live by today. Senators rarely have enough time to formulate an opinion an an issue, or a bill, and they rely on their staff to inform them. A major way that the staff is informed is through telephone calls and postal letters. Email is largely ineffective.
Now, most telephone calls that a Senate office receives are from crackpots. These people either do not live in the State for which the Senator is a representative (very common), or they are incoherent, or something else. For the average non-brain-dead citizen this is a major Ray Of Hope. All you have to do is sound intelligent and informed and your opinion will automatically be counted at the top of the heap. Oh, and please be from the State you are calling about!
Here is how I called my Senator (Herb Kohl) this time:
AID: Good afternoon, Herb Kohl's office.
ME: Hi, my name is Brian and I am a Wisconsin resident* and registered voter. I am generally a supporter of Senator Kohl. Even though I am an independent, I tend to vote Democrat, and I would like to continue to give my support to Senator Kohl but I may not be able to unless his voting record matches my convictions.
AID: OK.
ME: I would voice my opinion on a bill before the Senate. Bill S.2248.
AID: Alright.
ME: I would urge Senator Kohl to side with Senator Dodd and vote No. Telecommunication companies do not need immunity from prosecution if they have done nothing wrong. I strongly suggest that Senator Kohl allow the courts to determine whether or not the telecommunication companies violated the law of the United States.
AID: Great. I will let the Senator know your opinion!
ME: Sounds good. Have a great day.
AID: You too.
That's all there is to it. Easy as pie. Don't be frightened of it, it's terrifically easy.
* Go ahead and give your full name and address just to let the aid know you really are from the State you claim to be.
It's a ridiculous notion that there should be "Rule X" and it should apply universally across all entities. If an adult starts crying whenever he's hungry, that's going to be frowned upon. Babies do the same thing, and it's fine.
What are these "informed decisions" you speak of? Consumers not having information? Wha?
Capitalism works like this:
Large monopoly or cartel decides how consumers will act.
Government passes laws to back up these mandates and criminalize dissenters.
The monopolies and cartels already have all the information they need to decide how they want consumers to behave. I can't see what sort of "information" we as consumers need except to do what we're told.
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Completely nonplussed, my ID opponent had a ready answer. I have no trouble, he said, with understanding that God is infinite but separate, because God is an infinite presence. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I tried to counter that this does not fit the definition of infinite, although it might meet the definition of pervasive. He would have none of it, and repeated that he had no trouble understanding infinite-but-separate, as if the failure of reasoning was on me.
Now the lesson of this story is that there is no limit to weaseling out of logic if one's precious mental schema is at stake.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe."
I rely on Google Calendar for my day-to-day needs. Can an enterprise implement Zimbra and still send out messages that auto-trigger Google Calendar to update itself like Outlook does? Conversely, can a business implement a Zimbra solution to interface with someone else's Outlook solution?
I really don't know the answer to these questions. I have a number of clients who use Outlook/Exchange for calendaring but I am pretty much all-Linux on my end. The thing that seems to work is they schedule events on my Google Calendar by dint of GCal auto-interpreting Outlook's email messages, but that's the extent of it.
First: who the F cares about announcements from Microsoft regarding open source projects, unless they are actually contributing.
OK, that out of the way, I can't see how a shortage in one project is a shortage overall. OS is about coders scratching an itch. I have contributed to projects but only when it was something that impacted me personally, and I wanted to see it fixed in a hurry. If the number of users of a project grows astronomically, that's great, but it has no bearing on how many coders participate if nobody feels an "itch" they need to scratch. Maybe the software is good enough for end users, and they feel fine about it.
Those coders aren't "gone." They're just off scratching some other itch, is all.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the lawsuits brought by the RIAA in an attempt to preserve/enhance strong copyright ended up severely diminishing U.S. copyright law instead?
Re:Decent Software - But the Marketing?
on
KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Just because AllofMP3's pricing is (maybe?) unsustainable for American music producers does not mean the business model is wrong. I think they have it quite right: pay per byte. The higher bitrate you want, the higher the price; the longer the track, the higher the price (i.e., ringtone MP3s = solved). Let the market find a sustainable equilibrium price. It will do that job just dandy.
What you seem to be arguing is that the record labels have tried to give people what they want. They haven't, not by a long shot. What they have tried to do is perpetuate their shady predatory practices online. Subscription services where all the music vanishes as soon as I stop paying, restrictive DRM, and evil pricing schemes. The same thing that is true for any market, anywhere, is true for the music market -- if you artificially choke the marketplace, the black market will flourish. The black market only goes away when the market is adequately meeting the demands of the buyer. So when we see a large black market in music trading, the lesson is that the marketplace is broken, not that the buyer is evil.
You make a lot of good points. Early on, WoW suffered from a lot of these same faults, except in those days the competition was EverQuest, which sucked so much more that WoW was seen as a huge step up. Blizzard has learned a lot about what people want in the years since launch. The 40-man raid has given way to the 10-man and 5-man raid. They added battlegrounds with rewards on par with raiding, so you don't have to raid to get great loot. The crafting system, while it does in fact require some cooperation among different professions, isn't cripplingly so. (The possible exception is the whole primal nether thing, which requires you to do raids, which in turn requires grouping and a significant time investment.)
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I hope you don't get modded down, because that's a valid thing to say. Microsoft is the George Lucas of IT. A long time ago, they did a few great things, but then became victims of their own wild success. We didn't need the last 25 years to be sans Microsoft...it just would have turned out so much better if they had been not "won" quite so thoroughly.
Now go find a medium-rare steak to burn me on.
All this time I thought the Inquisition was killing those witches, but in fact they were being treated to a nice dinner! Sigh, I better go tow the line and beg the question of why the history books could be so wrong.
How many of you think that the government issuing $40 coupons for converter boxes is going to raise the price of converter boxes by $40?
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read about this. It's a giant government give-away to the converter box companies. I sure wish that every time I made a sale, the government would throw in an extra 40 dollars for me.
Or wait, I really don't -- I don't need the government taxing me $80 and giving me $40 back so that I can spend $75 on a forced upgrade.
I agree - at least in the case of the U.S. the summary contains a lot of "this might happen someday" statements. Surely there must be some real data somewhere, and not just someone's "plans"? I mean, there have to be people in the U.S. who plan to win every gold medal at the Olympics, but we don't say, right now, "the U.S. wins all gold medals."
There is also the problem of conflating government and private-sector actions. A Las Vegas casino is under extraordinary surveillance, but I hardly consider that an invasion of my privacy. Under the terms of this report, however, each CCTV at the Bellagio erodes my personal freedoms somehow.
Not to paint things with a big smiley face. I'm perfectly willing to believe the U.S. scores very poorly overall on privacy. This particular report, though, doesn't strike me as convincing.
You haven't used Adobe products lately, I take it. The current crop requires an always-on broadband connection to which the software has unlimited access, so that it can repeatedly ping the authentication servers to make sure you aren't running a pirated copy.
The RAM chip makers artificially restricting demand at a level below demand would cause a shortage and price spike, and that would be illegal.
If I run my factory at half capacity, that's not illegal. Why would it be? What you must have meant is if RAM makers collude to keep chips out of the marketplace.
An astronaut falling toward a black hole (assuming for the sake of argument that he does not get torn apart by tidal forces) perceives that it actually takes forever to fall into the black hole. Externally we would seem him slow down and then stop at the even horizon, but this "stop" is merely the curve receding into infinity, so that further increments are so small we cannot see them. But the astronaut's subjective time becomes infinite.
So if time is slowing down locally, I guess that means in a few billion years we'll all be living in a static (albeit smaller) universe that goes on forever.
It's supposed to be a badly-done mashup of sayings: Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" and (some anonymous coward's) "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."
compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan
Of course such things must be counterfeit. Everybody knows that the RIAA companies would never ever produce something that music fans would actually demand. 100% all good songs on an album, you've got to be kidding me!
In the future, scientists discover that all supernovae, heretofore believed to be natural phenomena, are actually the explosions of a vast intergalactic war.
I have posted similar kinds of things before. Calling your Senator's office is quite painless. Please note: my brother worked for some time on capitol hill and gave me the advice that I continue to live by today. Senators rarely have enough time to formulate an opinion an an issue, or a bill, and they rely on their staff to inform them. A major way that the staff is informed is through telephone calls and postal letters. Email is largely ineffective.
Now, most telephone calls that a Senate office receives are from crackpots. These people either do not live in the State for which the Senator is a representative (very common), or they are incoherent, or something else. For the average non-brain-dead citizen this is a major Ray Of Hope. All you have to do is sound intelligent and informed and your opinion will automatically be counted at the top of the heap. Oh, and please be from the State you are calling about!
Here is how I called my Senator (Herb Kohl) this time:
That's all there is to it. Easy as pie. Don't be frightened of it, it's terrifically easy.
* Go ahead and give your full name and address just to let the aid know you really are from the State you claim to be.
No.
"Of course" ?!?
Why exactly is it necessary to install games as root?
Wow. In a way that seems really...pathetic. A hundred years ago this described half the population of the United States.
(And no, I don't mean the other half had cell reception.)
It's a ridiculous notion that there should be "Rule X" and it should apply universally across all entities. If an adult starts crying whenever he's hungry, that's going to be frowned upon. Babies do the same thing, and it's fine.
What are these "informed decisions" you speak of? Consumers not having information? Wha?
Capitalism works like this:
The monopolies and cartels already have all the information they need to decide how they want consumers to behave. I can't see what sort of "information" we as consumers need except to do what we're told.
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Completely nonplussed, my ID opponent had a ready answer. I have no trouble, he said, with understanding that God is infinite but separate, because God is an infinite presence. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I tried to counter that this does not fit the definition of infinite, although it might meet the definition of pervasive. He would have none of it, and repeated that he had no trouble understanding infinite-but-separate, as if the failure of reasoning was on me.
Now the lesson of this story is that there is no limit to weaseling out of logic if one's precious mental schema is at stake.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe."
I rely on Google Calendar for my day-to-day needs. Can an enterprise implement Zimbra and still send out messages that auto-trigger Google Calendar to update itself like Outlook does? Conversely, can a business implement a Zimbra solution to interface with someone else's Outlook solution?
I really don't know the answer to these questions. I have a number of clients who use Outlook/Exchange for calendaring but I am pretty much all-Linux on my end. The thing that seems to work is they schedule events on my Google Calendar by dint of GCal auto-interpreting Outlook's email messages, but that's the extent of it.
If they're doing well with those 25, why does the team have to grow?
Precisely. Raw numbers of coders don't mean anything. And now for the real reason for my reply...
In Soviet Slashdot, a beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman imagines you
Oh, please let that be true.
First: who the F cares about announcements from Microsoft regarding open source projects, unless they are actually contributing.
OK, that out of the way, I can't see how a shortage in one project is a shortage overall. OS is about coders scratching an itch. I have contributed to projects but only when it was something that impacted me personally, and I wanted to see it fixed in a hurry. If the number of users of a project grows astronomically, that's great, but it has no bearing on how many coders participate if nobody feels an "itch" they need to scratch. Maybe the software is good enough for end users, and they feel fine about it.
Those coders aren't "gone." They're just off scratching some other itch, is all.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the lawsuits brought by the RIAA in an attempt to preserve/enhance strong copyright ended up severely diminishing U.S. copyright law instead?
Klearly it should have been named Kalamity.
Just because AllofMP3's pricing is (maybe?) unsustainable for American music producers does not mean the business model is wrong. I think they have it quite right: pay per byte. The higher bitrate you want, the higher the price; the longer the track, the higher the price (i.e., ringtone MP3s = solved). Let the market find a sustainable equilibrium price. It will do that job just dandy.
What you seem to be arguing is that the record labels have tried to give people what they want. They haven't, not by a long shot. What they have tried to do is perpetuate their shady predatory practices online. Subscription services where all the music vanishes as soon as I stop paying, restrictive DRM, and evil pricing schemes. The same thing that is true for any market, anywhere, is true for the music market -- if you artificially choke the marketplace, the black market will flourish. The black market only goes away when the market is adequately meeting the demands of the buyer. So when we see a large black market in music trading, the lesson is that the marketplace is broken, not that the buyer is evil.
Life is a set that is likely to be considerably larger than the set of advanced civilizations.
You make a lot of good points. Early on, WoW suffered from a lot of these same faults, except in those days the competition was EverQuest, which sucked so much more that WoW was seen as a huge step up. Blizzard has learned a lot about what people want in the years since launch. The 40-man raid has given way to the 10-man and 5-man raid. They added battlegrounds with rewards on par with raiding, so you don't have to raid to get great loot. The crafting system, while it does in fact require some cooperation among different professions, isn't cripplingly so. (The possible exception is the whole primal nether thing, which requires you to do raids, which in turn requires grouping and a significant time investment.)