It also isn't like Blizzard hasn't ever made a game before that was so absorbing that people just stopped playing anything else.
I don't see any examples of World of Warcraft hurting "the market". What I see in this article is examples of poor game developers, being hurt by capitalism. If Need for Speed is bad enough that spending $12 on WoW makes Need for Speed not worth buying, then the problem here is that need for speed wasn't good enough to be worth $12 to that person. The reason why Matrix Online got "downsized from nine virtual "realms" to three" is because Matrix Online sucks. Notice in the article that NCSoft, who actually makes good games and is competent enough to compete in a fair market, doesn't seem at all worried?
There are a number of developments in video games lately that I would describe as bad for the health of the video game market. World of Warcraft is not one.
I think the graphics for wind waker looked totally awesome. It was the most beautiful video game I had ever played.
I think the graphics for twilight princess also look totally awesome.
I think I may like the art style of wind waker better.
However, it seems reasonable to me to be able to like more than one thing!
When I see them doing something one way the first time, and another way the second time, and find that some people like the first way and some other people like the second way, my response here isn't to think "huh. we should figure out which way is 'better'." My response is something closer to "yay for variety". Doing it this way means that the people in group one get what they want in the first game, the people in group two get what they want in the second game, and I get exactly what I want in both cases-- because, much as I think both art styles look awesome, I think it could get a little tiresome to look at the same art style all the way through two games in a row, even if it was the one which I preferred (Wind Waker's). I think it's much neater that they are mixing things up, and thus satisfying my sense of artistic ADD.
It's just funny, Nintendo gets frequently accused of making the same game over and over but then on the other hand there's a huge contingent of people on every single game complaining about the things they changed.
You can get a pretty good video card right now for $300.
Or I could wait until the PS3 release (or maybe the first price reduction) and get one of those for the same $300... or get a Gamecube for $100 right now and spend the other $200 on games...
Since, as a Macintosh user, I'm afraid I'm highly unlikely to be doing anything with that graphics card, these are more attractive options for me...
It's a mute point anyway. Console games and PC games are different. People usually like one or the other. I happen not to like console games. They are not written for people like me.
I agree firmly, though I'm on the other side of the preference divide.
I was pretty much just harping on the parent because he was choosing to focus on cost and this does not seem to me to be the area where PC gaming shines.
Also when is a console going to dump the whole idea of relying on 1960s (NTSC/PAL) technology for the all important display screen?
Between November and mid next year. You can get an HDMI-DVI converter for about $40, and use that on the PS3. I don't know what kind of output port the XBox 360 uses. I also don't know if you'll be able to use the PS3 with a monitor without this stupid HDCP thing interfering, that may be a problem.
Nintendo has announced they won't support HDTV resolutions with the Nintendo Revolution, but wierdly enough they have specifically announced that you will be able to plug the Revolution directly into "a computer monitor". I don't know what's up with that.
Sony has with its previous consoles sold the console at a loss initially, then gradually moved into profitability on each unit as their production costs come down. The Microsoft XBox was selling at a tremendous loss initially and is probably still doing so now, right up to the point where the console is being discontinued-- Microsoft H&E is still continuously losing money.
Sony will probably sell the PS3 at a loss initially.
Costs for Sony don't mean costs for you as a consumer. Businesses don't necessarily set prices for goods based on what it cost them to make it, they set prices based on what they think the market will bear. If you raise the price of your product by $100 and only half as many people are willing to buy your product as a result, your revenues have just gone down, right? Of course if you lower your prices below your per-unit cost you aren't going to make any per-unit profit, but there's more than one way to make profit; for example, Sony makes licensing fees on every PS3 game sold, and the more people own PS3s the more people there are out there buying PS3 games.
We didn't know whether the PS3 was going to be $300 when that number was batted around. We don't know whether the PS3 is going to be $400 when that number was being batted around. We have no idea what the PS3 is going to cost except that it's almost certainly going to be too expensive. If you don't like that, Nintendo would be more than happy to sell you something cheaper.
If you ask me, console gaming is pointless if you have a worthwhile PC.
So $300 for a console that will last you four to five years is crazy unreasonable highway robbery, but $3000 for a computer that will play this year's top-of-the-line games (but might not play next year's top-of-the-line games unless you buy an expensive new video card) is only just, normal and rational?
The Inquirer doesn't say where they got this number from... they don't have a source... it just seems to have come out of nowhere. Do they have a source they just forgot to cite? Or are they just running rumors without checking them?
This is the same number ($100) the Merill Lynch analyst report about the manufacturing costs of the PS3 (which slashdot itself has reported on at least once in the last few months) gave. I have the same doubts about it that I had then; it isn't from an "official" source (or in this case... any source at all), and I wonder if that $100 represents real per-unit costs or things that ought to be considered sunk costs, things that are just a natural byproduct of getting blu-ray production lines up and running. The reason this distinction matters is because Sony is going to have to be paying the second category of costs anyway, since for whatever reason they're going to be building blu-ray drives for sale anyway... so bundling those costs into the per-unit costs of the PS3 doesn't make all that much sense.
So if you actually compare successive images and see what changed, you'll find that what they're REALLY doing is, every second they alter one pixel, and accidentally mildly discolor the rest of the MCU cell that pixel is in:P
The companies can do things like write a law which completely alters the fundamental balance of copyright law, and pass it directly to Jesse Helms who drops it into congress where it passes unanimously on a voice vote because not one single member of congress has read it. The consumers... well, maybe if they write enough letters and make enough noise for enough months they can convince a congressman to give a speech in their favor, which will be written into the congressional record and then forgotten about. If the same group makes enough noise for over a decade maybe a law on the subject they've been agitating about will be put up for debate, though God knows what it will look like by the time it gets through committee.
I mean, okay, in theory the consumers are the ones 'buying' the laws, because the consumers are the ones who vote. However
the consumers by and large don't vote
the ones that do vote don't seem particularly interested in informing themselves about the actions of their elected representatives, or holding them accountable for those actions-- of course at some point this might have something to do with the fact that whether they are considered to be "left" or "right", all the news sources the average consumer finds out about the actions of their government from have connections to the large media companies that "DRM" is being invented for the benefit of
the "consumers" have been so busy bickering about abortion for the last 15 years that there's pretty much no room left in the national debate for trivialities like running the government
Because as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way that ANY PC-style computer is going to be able to even come CLOSE to implementing the kinds of "security" features that the Blu-Ray Association has been talking about, without the kinds of OS+hardware-level "DRM" that Microsoft has been promoting a move toward for the last four or five years...
The entertainment industry is running around shooting at people, and Microsoft just happens to be selling them guns
Microsoft can't coexist with anyone. To them, "the competition" is anyone in the computer industry who is making money or gaining power who is not them. You cannot possibly say MSN search or, say, microsoft netmeeting were serious products Microsoft cared about or which were serious competitors to google or skype when they started up; you cannot possibly say the appearance of skype or google threatened any product that Microsoft was even meaningfully supporting. Yet skype and google gain mindshare, and suddenly making the "google killer" or the "skype killer" become huge priorities. Or at the other end of things, Microsoft ignored Adobe for years as long as they were powerless, profitable but consigned to a "niche", predictable; but suddenly Adobe starts having influence on popular file formats in the form of PDF (invented) or Flash (bought), starts showing signs of growth, and suddenly it becomes absolutely essential for some reason that Microsoft create a PDF Killer.
Microsoft keeps demonstrating, again and again, that they believe no one may have power but them, and keep killing companies to attain that goal. And people just keep pretending this is somehow good for the market, because the idea that market forces could lead to something other than the perfect outcome is just something some people just don't want to admit could happen.
But this is hurting the market, in the most direct way possible: Microsoft's expansion strategy is based not on finding the next big thing, but on stopping it before it starts.
Supposedly the computer industry lives and thrives on small discoveries that grow to the "next big thing". You know, the proverbial cliche of the startup in somebody's garage, a new way of looking at things, an idea that could change the world, yadda yadda yadda. But more and more the fact is-- and most people see this-- if you find that brilliant idea, if you sweat and pour your life and blood and tears into making the new next greatest thing,... then the first thing that happens is the most powerful company in all of software suddenly has it as priority number one to take you out, duplicate your product and give it away for free, subsume your functionality into the OS, etc. They won't always succeed at this, but they have at least the ability to make your life and job very difficult without even breaking a sweat. And it has been demonstrated that even in the most flagrant case of destructive behavior, even if they are tried and convicted of illegal acts, there will be no consequences for them.
What is the point of trying to build, or finance something revolutionary like Skype, if you know that whatever it is (even if it isn't something Microsoft does yet) Success will just result in Microsoft signing a corporate death warrant? The answer is obviously "because you love what you are doing", but what about the people who don't love what they're doing enough to take the risk of so much wasted effort? Are there people who would be going out and doing new and interesting things they aren't doing now in a world where trying to change the face of computing is rewarded rather than punished? What kind of chilling effect is this having?
Precisely. You have pointed out what all the "prior art! prior art! Bok bok bok!" screamers have missed: it's the platform that counts here. Even an app that plays MP3 files on the PC likely wouldn't count; the "my PC is just a big fancy MP3 player!" argument likely won't cut it. The legal geniuses around here will likely need to find prior art on an MP3 player.
Why? That is pure and utter bullshit.
A computer is a computer. An iPod can run Linux and my Power Mac 7200 can play mp3s. Just because you wave your magic wand and place some kind of minor semantic divide between "RPC over a network" and "RPC over the internet" or "menus accessing files on a computer device" versus "menus accessing files on a computer device marketed to play music" doesn't mean you've invented something, or are doing anything different than was being done before. The problem remains that the applicability of this idea and everything about it is obvious.
If the patent system is this subject to gaming by the inventing of imaginary "platforms" then the patent system, as people are pointing out anyway, simply shouldn't exist for software. The decision in the 80s that made software patents possible was a mistake.
When I try to think of prior examples of people implementing the Creative patent as I understand it, the absolute first thing that comes to mind is... that little file browser thingy from NeXT. Which was later assimilated into OS X when NeXT was bought by... Apple. Can you tell the difference between this and the cascading menus in the iPod? Because I can't.
And of course I'm still trying to figure out whether NeXT themselves ripped off the browser from that class browser widget you see so often in Smalltalk, or if it went the other way around.
Oh, but of course, the NeXT example covers a browser for files and the Smalltalk example covers a browser for objects, and in the mad calculus of patent law this is totally different from a browser for music files...
OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel.... OS X's kernel has always been based on OPENSTEP's--a Mach microkernel with custom Unix services above it.
And where do you think those UNIX services come from?
Mach isn't a kernel by itself, it provides very low level services and "hosts" the rest of the kernel (though Darwin blurs this line somewhat, such that the mach microkernel and hosted freebsd kernel are technically the same entity). FreeBSD isn't the entire kernel (and its portion of the kernel isn't the part that provides threading services, see link above) but it is still in the kernel and still provides crucial functionality, and serves as a replacement for certain things which in the pre-OS X kernel used to be provided by OpenStep code.
but unless I missed it, there isn't any discussion of OSX Server on X86
I assume this is because you cannot legally get OSX Server on X86 right now, nor is it even finished, making it simultaneously impossible and silly to include it in a series of performance testing articles?
I suppose you had more information than the president by Tuesday morning about how bad it really all was. You have a crystal ball, right?
Well, tuesday morning I had the knowledge and common sense to know that when New Orleans gets hit by a category 5 hurricane becoming a category 4 hurricane, and the levees are designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and there are people still inside the city, you have a serious problem needing immediate, drop-everything attention.
So yes, apparently tuesday morning I had more information than the president of the united states had.
This is not because I have a crystal ball. This is because I have common sense. On Sunday I was on the telephone with my mother, who is a republican campaign contributor who has voted republican for as long as I have been aware of, and we were talking about the news about the hurricane-- and how we were both absolutely baffled that the evacuation order for New Orleans was not mandatory, and absolutely baffled that plans were being made to shelter tens of thousands of people in the superdome but no plans were yet being made to get these tens of thousands of people food or water. So that's at least two people who as of Sunday had apparently more information than the president had tuesday morning-- specifically the information that the known situation in New Orleans from Sunday to Tuesday morning was a bigger and riskier one than the preparations were sufficient for. There are probably many more people who had at least this same level of information. I do not think me and my mother are the only people in the united states with common sense, or at least crystal balls.
Oh, just to remind everyone, the department of homeland security would like to remind you that September is national preparedness month
how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Is every single person currently in New Orleans committing rape?
No?
Then we can be compassionate toward the people still in New Orleans without having to answer your question.
Perhaps we can say that a reasonable interpretation of "compassion" would not require one to show compassion toward people committing rape-- but would by requirement be incompatible with sweeping comments about "all the black rapists" in New Orleans? Because the latter quote is the (currently score:-1) comment this current back and forth is about.
I know this was meant to be a "Funny" post, but just for the record, the third world is bound by the Montreal Protocol which bans ozone-unfriendly chemicals too. The last of the "grace period" stragglers have to stop using their CFCs by 2006.
The ozone hole, which this article is about, is not connected to the separate problem of global climate change as a result of human-produced greenhouse gases. The ozone hole is also a problem which is easier to deal with; the CFCs and particles which cause ozone layer damage fall out of the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide.
The articles linked are both right in some sense, the article submission is wrong... the slashdot summary here says the 2005 hole is the "the largest on record", the BBC article it links says it is the largest on record since 2000, which was the actual all-time record...
I'm not exactly sure what the article submitter is trying to imply or ask?
The submitter seems to be trying to say that the BBC and CNN articles contradict one another. However, this isn't the case at all. The BBC article is talking about the size of this year's hole; CNN seems to be talking about the size of the hole in a more general over-years sense. CNN is saying that the ozone hole is levelling off in a long-term sense; the BBC is talking about year-to-year fluctuations. The BBC itself even says: There have been signs over the last two years that damage to the ozone layer has reduced, but a full recovery is not expected until around 2050, seeming to support the CNN article.
Moreover, the article submission is misleading. The submission says the 2005 is the largest on record. The BBC says the 2005 hole is one of the largest on record. The BBC itself says: They show that the Antarctic ozone hole was larger in mid-August this year than at the same period in any year since 2000.The 2000 ozone hole was still larger than this year's hole!
CFCs take a certain amount of time to fall out of the atmosphere, and the damage they cause lasts a certain amount of time beyond that. There is no sign in the news here that the Montreal protocol is anything but working; we're jolting back and forth within a certain area but at least the ozone hole is no longer getting worse constantly.
A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions.
So you think you're going to be able to convince the wider market to change the kinds of things they like?
There is no fricking way that (say) Electroplankton is going to be commercially successful, in any conceivable way the market could configure itself. A lot of things that lack widespread success really just are that way becuase they're just the kind of thing only a limited number of people would like. And this isn't a bad thing. I don't want to be expected to start playing games I don't like just because it's what the mainstream gamers want; I wouldn't expect mainstream gamers to start playing games they don't like because it's what I want. You aren't going to change the fact that people like grand theft auto. You could maybe do something about the areas of the game industry where people keep buying the same franchise year after year because they don't educate themselves as to alternatives, but some things are just popular because they're highly likable.
I think this article is misguided, even aside from the Wired-from-the-90s-style sensory overload layout. What we need is not a market that wants innovation. What we need is a market which allows innovation-- which has enough diversity that there is room for both a ramaging mainstream and a healthy "cult" market . What we don't need is for "the market" or "the audience" to fundamentally change its focuses, becuase that involves changing people's hearts and minds. If we focus on fundamentally changing the market, we're not going to get a lot done.
What we need to look at is the more meaningful goal of keeping the niche/alternative/"indie" market healthy-- making sure there's some way for the niche developers and the niche end-users to connect to one another. Right now there are barriers to that, in the increasing lack of diversity in the publisher market, in the way that it is increasingly difficult or impossible to get anyone to find out about or sell a game without a big corporate patron. Trying to identify these barriers to the health of the niche market and fix them is probably more likely to get us somewhere than just railing against the stagnant state of the mainstream market; the mainstream game publishing market got into its current nasty, stagnant state for a reason. Though, doing things this way will benefit the wider market as well-- it will allow the niche "games as art" market to do what it's done in the past, which is serve as an incubator for the stuff that turns out once the wider, "mainstream" market finds it to be the Next Big Thing, allowing the "mainstream" market to periodically refresh itself.
What we want to avoid if at all possible is a kind of a partitioning, like we've seen in say movies, between "commercial" and "indie". Okay, so there's lots of good indie films out there, but they're inherently limited in what they can do and who they can reach. When was the last time you saw an "indie" sci fi movie? They're not very common, because you need a special effects budget to do that. Indie music is a lot healthier but that's because music production can be potentially done on such a low budget without the quality being impacted; movies and games are something of a larger-scale endeavor. Freeware games are great and all but if your choice is between "buy what the mainstream wants" and "buy games that had no budget" that would be sad. I think there's room in the market for small or more adventurous publishers to coexist right among
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't like MMOs didn't exist before this.
It also isn't like Blizzard hasn't ever made a game before that was so absorbing that people just stopped playing anything else.
I don't see any examples of World of Warcraft hurting "the market". What I see in this article is examples of poor game developers, being hurt by capitalism. If Need for Speed is bad enough that spending $12 on WoW makes Need for Speed not worth buying, then the problem here is that need for speed wasn't good enough to be worth $12 to that person. The reason why Matrix Online got "downsized from nine virtual "realms" to three" is because Matrix Online sucks. Notice in the article that NCSoft, who actually makes good games and is competent enough to compete in a fair market, doesn't seem at all worried?
There are a number of developments in video games lately that I would describe as bad for the health of the video game market. World of Warcraft is not one.
I think the graphics for wind waker looked totally awesome. It was the most beautiful video game I had ever played.
I think the graphics for twilight princess also look totally awesome.
I think I may like the art style of wind waker better.
However, it seems reasonable to me to be able to like more than one thing!
When I see them doing something one way the first time, and another way the second time, and find that some people like the first way and some other people like the second way, my response here isn't to think "huh. we should figure out which way is 'better'." My response is something closer to "yay for variety". Doing it this way means that the people in group one get what they want in the first game, the people in group two get what they want in the second game, and I get exactly what I want in both cases-- because, much as I think both art styles look awesome, I think it could get a little tiresome to look at the same art style all the way through two games in a row, even if it was the one which I preferred (Wind Waker's). I think it's much neater that they are mixing things up, and thus satisfying my sense of artistic ADD.
It's just funny, Nintendo gets frequently accused of making the same game over and over but then on the other hand there's a huge contingent of people on every single game complaining about the things they changed.
Well clearly this disproves Evolution, then.
Since, as a Macintosh user, I'm afraid I'm highly unlikely to be doing anything with that graphics card, these are more attractive options for me...I agree firmly, though I'm on the other side of the preference divide.
I was pretty much just harping on the parent because he was choosing to focus on cost and this does not seem to me to be the area where PC gaming shines.Between November and mid next year. You can get an HDMI-DVI converter for about $40, and use that on the PS3. I don't know what kind of output port the XBox 360 uses. I also don't know if you'll be able to use the PS3 with a monitor without this stupid HDCP thing interfering, that may be a problem.
Nintendo has announced they won't support HDTV resolutions with the Nintendo Revolution, but wierdly enough they have specifically announced that you will be able to plug the Revolution directly into "a computer monitor". I don't know what's up with that.
Sony has with its previous consoles sold the console at a loss initially, then gradually moved into profitability on each unit as their production costs come down. The Microsoft XBox was selling at a tremendous loss initially and is probably still doing so now, right up to the point where the console is being discontinued-- Microsoft H&E is still continuously losing money.
Sony will probably sell the PS3 at a loss initially.
Costs for Sony don't mean costs for you as a consumer. Businesses don't necessarily set prices for goods based on what it cost them to make it, they set prices based on what they think the market will bear. If you raise the price of your product by $100 and only half as many people are willing to buy your product as a result, your revenues have just gone down, right? Of course if you lower your prices below your per-unit cost you aren't going to make any per-unit profit, but there's more than one way to make profit; for example, Sony makes licensing fees on every PS3 game sold, and the more people own PS3s the more people there are out there buying PS3 games.
We didn't know whether the PS3 was going to be $300 when that number was batted around. We don't know whether the PS3 is going to be $400 when that number was being batted around. We have no idea what the PS3 is going to cost except that it's almost certainly going to be too expensive. If you don't like that, Nintendo would be more than happy to sell you something cheaper.
If you ask me, console gaming is pointless if you have a worthwhile PC.
So $300 for a console that will last you four to five years is crazy unreasonable highway robbery, but $3000 for a computer that will play this year's top-of-the-line games (but might not play next year's top-of-the-line games unless you buy an expensive new video card) is only just, normal and rational?
Right...
Where are they getting this from?
The Inquirer doesn't say where they got this number from... they don't have a source... it just seems to have come out of nowhere. Do they have a source they just forgot to cite? Or are they just running rumors without checking them?
This is the same number ($100) the Merill Lynch analyst report about the manufacturing costs of the PS3 (which slashdot itself has reported on at least once in the last few months) gave. I have the same doubts about it that I had then; it isn't from an "official" source (or in this case... any source at all), and I wonder if that $100 represents real per-unit costs or things that ought to be considered sunk costs, things that are just a natural byproduct of getting blu-ray production lines up and running. The reason this distinction matters is because Sony is going to have to be paying the second category of costs anyway, since for whatever reason they're going to be building blu-ray drives for sale anyway... so bundling those costs into the per-unit costs of the PS3 doesn't make all that much sense.
So if you actually compare successive images and see what changed, you'll find that what they're REALLY doing is, every second they alter one pixel, and accidentally mildly discolor the rest of the MCU cell that pixel is in :P
Because the companies are the ones who buy the laws, not the consumers.
This is why it is, in fact, illegal for the consumer to tinker with the product that that consumer has purchased. (So long as you aren't a believer in that whole "a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law" thing.)
The companies can do things like write a law which completely alters the fundamental balance of copyright law, and pass it directly to Jesse Helms who drops it into congress where it passes unanimously on a voice vote because not one single member of congress has read it. The consumers... well, maybe if they write enough letters and make enough noise for enough months they can convince a congressman to give a speech in their favor, which will be written into the congressional record and then forgotten about. If the same group makes enough noise for over a decade maybe a law on the subject they've been agitating about will be put up for debate, though God knows what it will look like by the time it gets through committee.
I mean, okay, in theory the consumers are the ones 'buying' the laws, because the consumers are the ones who vote. However
Because as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way that ANY PC-style computer is going to be able to even come CLOSE to implementing the kinds of "security" features that the Blu-Ray Association has been talking about, without the kinds of OS+hardware-level "DRM" that Microsoft has been promoting a move toward for the last four or five years...
The entertainment industry is running around shooting at people, and Microsoft just happens to be selling them guns
Slashdot already ran a story on this exact subject, and that contained much more information-- it appears that all this new story is is that at some point this week Reuters referenced the announcement from last month, and engadget, which hadn't heard about it the first time, ran it as a new story.
It's worth noting that at the time the last story was run, at least one slashdotter was disputing its veracity, but I don't know how much credence you can put in that.
Microsoft can't coexist with anyone. To them, "the competition" is anyone in the computer industry who is making money or gaining power who is not them. You cannot possibly say MSN search or, say, microsoft netmeeting were serious products Microsoft cared about or which were serious competitors to google or skype when they started up; you cannot possibly say the appearance of skype or google threatened any product that Microsoft was even meaningfully supporting. Yet skype and google gain mindshare, and suddenly making the "google killer" or the "skype killer" become huge priorities. Or at the other end of things, Microsoft ignored Adobe for years as long as they were powerless, profitable but consigned to a "niche", predictable; but suddenly Adobe starts having influence on popular file formats in the form of PDF (invented) or Flash (bought), starts showing signs of growth, and suddenly it becomes absolutely essential for some reason that Microsoft create a PDF Killer.
... then the first thing that happens is the most powerful company in all of software suddenly has it as priority number one to take you out, duplicate your product and give it away for free, subsume your functionality into the OS, etc. They won't always succeed at this, but they have at least the ability to make your life and job very difficult without even breaking a sweat. And it has been demonstrated that even in the most flagrant case of destructive behavior, even if they are tried and convicted of illegal acts, there will be no consequences for them.
Microsoft keeps demonstrating, again and again, that they believe no one may have power but them, and keep killing companies to attain that goal. And people just keep pretending this is somehow good for the market, because the idea that market forces could lead to something other than the perfect outcome is just something some people just don't want to admit could happen.
But this is hurting the market, in the most direct way possible: Microsoft's expansion strategy is based not on finding the next big thing, but on stopping it before it starts.
Supposedly the computer industry lives and thrives on small discoveries that grow to the "next big thing". You know, the proverbial cliche of the startup in somebody's garage, a new way of looking at things, an idea that could change the world, yadda yadda yadda. But more and more the fact is-- and most people see this-- if you find that brilliant idea, if you sweat and pour your life and blood and tears into making the new next greatest thing,
What is the point of trying to build, or finance something revolutionary like Skype, if you know that whatever it is (even if it isn't something Microsoft does yet) Success will just result in Microsoft signing a corporate death warrant? The answer is obviously "because you love what you are doing", but what about the people who don't love what they're doing enough to take the risk of so much wasted effort? Are there people who would be going out and doing new and interesting things they aren't doing now in a world where trying to change the face of computing is rewarded rather than punished? What kind of chilling effect is this having?
Precisely. You have pointed out what all the "prior art! prior art! Bok bok bok!" screamers have missed: it's the platform that counts here. Even an app that plays MP3 files on the PC likely wouldn't count; the "my PC is just a big fancy MP3 player!" argument likely won't cut it. The legal geniuses around here will likely need to find prior art on an MP3 player.
Why? That is pure and utter bullshit.
A computer is a computer. An iPod can run Linux and my Power Mac 7200 can play mp3s. Just because you wave your magic wand and place some kind of minor semantic divide between "RPC over a network" and "RPC over the internet" or "menus accessing files on a computer device" versus "menus accessing files on a computer device marketed to play music" doesn't mean you've invented something, or are doing anything different than was being done before. The problem remains that the applicability of this idea and everything about it is obvious.
If the patent system is this subject to gaming by the inventing of imaginary "platforms" then the patent system, as people are pointing out anyway, simply shouldn't exist for software. The decision in the 80s that made software patents possible was a mistake.
When I try to think of prior examples of people implementing the Creative patent as I understand it, the absolute first thing that comes to mind is... that little file browser thingy from NeXT. Which was later assimilated into OS X when NeXT was bought by... Apple. Can you tell the difference between this and the cascading menus in the iPod? Because I can't.
And of course I'm still trying to figure out whether NeXT themselves ripped off the browser from that class browser widget you see so often in Smalltalk, or if it went the other way around.
Oh, but of course, the NeXT example covers a browser for files and the Smalltalk example covers a browser for objects, and in the mad calculus of patent law this is totally different from a browser for music files...
OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel. ... OS X's kernel has always been based on OPENSTEP's--a Mach microkernel with custom Unix services above it.
And where do you think those UNIX services come from?
Because the answer is, FreeBSD.
Mach isn't a kernel by itself, it provides very low level services and "hosts" the rest of the kernel (though Darwin blurs this line somewhat, such that the mach microkernel and hosted freebsd kernel are technically the same entity). FreeBSD isn't the entire kernel (and its portion of the kernel isn't the part that provides threading services, see link above) but it is still in the kernel and still provides crucial functionality, and serves as a replacement for certain things which in the pre-OS X kernel used to be provided by OpenStep code.
but unless I missed it, there isn't any discussion of OSX Server on X86
I assume this is because you cannot legally get OSX Server on X86 right now, nor is it even finished, making it simultaneously impossible and silly to include it in a series of performance testing articles?
I suppose you had more information than the president by Tuesday morning about how bad it really all was. You have a crystal ball, right?
Well, tuesday morning I had the knowledge and common sense to know that when New Orleans gets hit by a category 5 hurricane becoming a category 4 hurricane, and the levees are designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and there are people still inside the city, you have a serious problem needing immediate, drop-everything attention.
So yes, apparently tuesday morning I had more information than the president of the united states had.
This is not because I have a crystal ball. This is because I have common sense. On Sunday I was on the telephone with my mother, who is a republican campaign contributor who has voted republican for as long as I have been aware of, and we were talking about the news about the hurricane-- and how we were both absolutely baffled that the evacuation order for New Orleans was not mandatory, and absolutely baffled that plans were being made to shelter tens of thousands of people in the superdome but no plans were yet being made to get these tens of thousands of people food or water. So that's at least two people who as of Sunday had apparently more information than the president had tuesday morning-- specifically the information that the known situation in New Orleans from Sunday to Tuesday morning was a bigger and riskier one than the preparations were sufficient for. There are probably many more people who had at least this same level of information. I do not think me and my mother are the only people in the united states with common sense, or at least crystal balls.
Oh, just to remind everyone, the department of homeland security would like to remind you that September is national preparedness month
I don't think you understand the word libertarian
Unfortunately, neither do the vast majority of the libertarians I have met.
how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Is every single person currently in New Orleans committing rape?
No?
Then we can be compassionate toward the people still in New Orleans without having to answer your question.
Perhaps we can say that a reasonable interpretation of "compassion" would not require one to show compassion toward people committing rape-- but would by requirement be incompatible with sweeping comments about "all the black rapists" in New Orleans? Because the latter quote is the (currently score:-1) comment this current back and forth is about.
Aand.. what happens when you accidentally drop your usb "key" in the fishtank?
I know this was meant to be a "Funny" post, but just for the record, the third world is bound by the Montreal Protocol which bans ozone-unfriendly chemicals too. The last of the "grace period" stragglers have to stop using their CFCs by 2006.
Carbon Dioxide has no impact on the ozone hole.
The ozone hole, which this article is about, is not connected to the separate problem of global climate change as a result of human-produced greenhouse gases. The ozone hole is also a problem which is easier to deal with; the CFCs and particles which cause ozone layer damage fall out of the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide.
The articles linked are both right in some sense, the article submission is wrong... the slashdot summary here says the 2005 hole is the "the largest on record", the BBC article it links says it is the largest on record since 2000, which was the actual all-time record...
I'm not exactly sure what the article submitter is trying to imply or ask?
The submitter seems to be trying to say that the BBC and CNN articles contradict one another. However, this isn't the case at all. The BBC article is talking about the size of this year's hole; CNN seems to be talking about the size of the hole in a more general over-years sense. CNN is saying that the ozone hole is levelling off in a long-term sense; the BBC is talking about year-to-year fluctuations. The BBC itself even says: There have been signs over the last two years that damage to the ozone layer has reduced, but a full recovery is not expected until around 2050, seeming to support the CNN article.
Moreover, the article submission is misleading. The submission says the 2005 is the largest on record. The BBC says the 2005 hole is one of the largest on record. The BBC itself says: They show that the Antarctic ozone hole was larger in mid-August this year than at the same period in any year since 2000. The 2000 ozone hole was still larger than this year's hole!
CFCs take a certain amount of time to fall out of the atmosphere, and the damage they cause lasts a certain amount of time beyond that. There is no sign in the news here that the Montreal protocol is anything but working; we're jolting back and forth within a certain area but at least the ozone hole is no longer getting worse constantly.
A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions.
So you think you're going to be able to convince the wider market to change the kinds of things they like?
There is no fricking way that (say) Electroplankton is going to be commercially successful, in any conceivable way the market could configure itself. A lot of things that lack widespread success really just are that way becuase they're just the kind of thing only a limited number of people would like. And this isn't a bad thing. I don't want to be expected to start playing games I don't like just because it's what the mainstream gamers want; I wouldn't expect mainstream gamers to start playing games they don't like because it's what I want. You aren't going to change the fact that people like grand theft auto. You could maybe do something about the areas of the game industry where people keep buying the same franchise year after year because they don't educate themselves as to alternatives, but some things are just popular because they're highly likable.
I think this article is misguided, even aside from the Wired-from-the-90s-style sensory overload layout. What we need is not a market that wants innovation. What we need is a market which allows innovation-- which has enough diversity that there is room for both a ramaging mainstream and a healthy "cult" market . What we don't need is for "the market" or "the audience" to fundamentally change its focuses, becuase that involves changing people's hearts and minds. If we focus on fundamentally changing the market, we're not going to get a lot done.
What we need to look at is the more meaningful goal of keeping the niche/alternative/"indie" market healthy-- making sure there's some way for the niche developers and the niche end-users to connect to one another. Right now there are barriers to that, in the increasing lack of diversity in the publisher market, in the way that it is increasingly difficult or impossible to get anyone to find out about or sell a game without a big corporate patron. Trying to identify these barriers to the health of the niche market and fix them is probably more likely to get us somewhere than just railing against the stagnant state of the mainstream market; the mainstream game publishing market got into its current nasty, stagnant state for a reason. Though, doing things this way will benefit the wider market as well-- it will allow the niche "games as art" market to do what it's done in the past, which is serve as an incubator for the stuff that turns out once the wider, "mainstream" market finds it to be the Next Big Thing, allowing the "mainstream" market to periodically refresh itself.
What we want to avoid if at all possible is a kind of a partitioning, like we've seen in say movies, between "commercial" and "indie". Okay, so there's lots of good indie films out there, but they're inherently limited in what they can do and who they can reach. When was the last time you saw an "indie" sci fi movie? They're not very common, because you need a special effects budget to do that. Indie music is a lot healthier but that's because music production can be potentially done on such a low budget without the quality being impacted; movies and games are something of a larger-scale endeavor. Freeware games are great and all but if your choice is between "buy what the mainstream wants" and "buy games that had no budget" that would be sad. I think there's room in the market for small or more adventurous publishers to coexist right among