Except that even the non-computer literate have been able to enjoy things like illegal mp3s, divx movies and warez games despite the best technological attempts at cracking down on them.
Sure, my mom wouldn't be able to crack whatever they come up with on their own, but if I as a geek can, there's no doubt that she'll do her best to convince me to set it up so she can as well.
And on the typical college campus, where this sort of thing goes on all the time, the number of local geeks who already are begged by their peers to help them connect to P2P networks will no doubt help them get around these blocks as well.
... as well as the non-anime but still cool Justice League, which I've been enjoying, but is it just me, or are there only like 4 episodes that they just keep looping?
Besides the whole, "you mean there's actually more than four episodes?!?" problem, I'm somewhat dissapointed with the over-the-top plotlines. With the exception of the Atlantis two-parter, every other episode I've seen so far has taken place in far off space locations.
It's a matter of taste, of course, but I'd prefer they tone the whole "other planet as a backdrop" thing down and get to plotlines that were closer to the Batman and Superman type stories.
The two alternatives are for a band to allow their music to continue to allow their music to be downloaded for free and hope they get people to see them in concert, or try to make their money by accepting the pitance the RIAA will give them through plans such as the one mentioned in this story.
With a million downloads only netting a band $2030 USD, I'd wager that it's more economically viable for a band to allow downloads for free to continue in order to use it as free advertising for their concerts and keep the goodwill of the bands.
Since the vast majority of actual bands that aren't being actively pushed right now by the RIAA won't even get anything more than $20 USD out of their downloads, how do they win over simply continueing to allow free downloads which help promot them otherwise?
"the fact remains that many geeks (myself included) have basically been fucking over the artists by downloading free music"
With the way the system has been set up, the Recording Industry has always taken most, if not all, of the money made from sales of recorded media, be it CDs, tapes or legally downloaded MP3s.
There are several articles, available online through a few quick searches, which show that the best way to support the artist through a method in which they actually get a fair share of the profits from their work is to attend live performances.
Legal downloads of MP3s or not, the artist isn't going to get your support unless you give it through the method that works best for them. This is why I've never felt guilty for "trying out" new music genres and bands I've not heard of before by downloading illegal MP3s, as I'm more likely to go to a concert of theirs then and see them in person.
Will Sierra pull another of their standard operating procedures of waiting until the game's development is pretty close to completetion, fan interst is high, and then suddenly cancel it for no good reason, like the Babylon 5 space combat sim, along with many other good projects, only to release yet another Half Life spin-off instead?
Alright, I'm not an accountant, nor do I play one on TV, but . . .
If 2% of your customer base, and therefore contribute only 2% of your revenue use up 50% of your bandwidth, wouldn't it be instantly worth losing that 2% of incoming revenue while decreasing your bandwidth costs by 50%?
As for that 2%, few if any would be able to make a noticiable dent in the other 98%'s perception, good or bad, of your ISP's reputation.
But if you want to ensure that everyone of your remaining 98% of your customers are happy, then communicate with them that you're proactively making sure that a few people aren't using up all their resources on their dime. Then take a small percentage of the bandwidth costs you've just saved and give the 98% of the people who are only using 50% of your bandwidth a small rate reduction, along with the announcement that should anyone want to use more than a generous amount of bandwidth can do so for an appropriate increase in their monthly rate.
AOL/TW is up there with Microsoft in terms of average Linux community member, for even if most people don't outright hate them, they think of them as the haven for the spammers and the clueless.
As I said it's a matter of perception.
Now, while AOL/TW wouldn't care one bit about all the Linux users ceasing to use RedHat products (their goal in buying the company, after all, would be to use its knowledge to create a AOL-OS) it cerainly could help on RedHat's end, as they'd lose any and all goodwill that they have from the community.
And when a significant amount of work is saved for a Linux company by having the community on your side and contributing various things, this certainly would be nothing but a pain for them.
You know you're a scifi geek when you recall that the 1976 Doctor Who story "The Deadly Assasin" features a part in which the hero and villian enter into a virtual world that exists within the ultra-mega-super-duper computer that their people have and face off in deadly combat.
Hello! Why would leaving Kazaa running all day be illegal?!
By "illegal", the poster was most likely thinking in terms of the school's network acceptable use policy, which most state in relatively vague terms that a user will not abuse the network's bandwidth or use more than their fair share.
Could the drop in percentage of software being pirated have less to do with individuals pirating less than they did before, and just the sheer number of computer users increasing?
In general, even the ease of use of peer 2 peer networks requires a minimum of tech saavy, and a faster broadband connection to make pirating your average 500+MB CD-Rom worth it, two things which the growing population new to computers don't have.
In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users and not just people who owned one for email or web browsing was certainly higher.
With this decrease in more advanced users compared to the general public, and the increase in the sheer size of pirated programs needing to be sent across your connection (Games, for example, going from a couple megs to a couple hundred in size), I'd see those two as the reason for the drop.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military historian and author of On Killing, argues that this type of "entertainment" is actually conditioning children to become killers.
"If we had a clear-cut objective of raising a generation of assassins and killers who are unrestrained by either authority or the nature of the victim, it is difficult to imagine how we could do a better job," he writes. "The inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment and vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."
Damn, all that money wasted on sending me through Basic Combat Training for the US Army, and all they had to do was put us in a room with some toys and saturday morning cartoons.
I tell you, Looney Toon cartoons are enough training material in ways to hurt, maim and kill for any would be assassin!
Seriously, this is just another Frontpage 4.0 built site from a mother who saw too much violence in her kid's toys and decided to put together a small site with her opinions on what toys are bad influences on young minds.
Wasn't that the beauty of the Internet? To give each and every person a place to express their opinions and ideas, regardless of just how silly it is?
When it comes to MS Windows, I've never really believed that ATI fully supports their cards in terms of driver development. At least after having both an ATI Rage Fury and a Radeon 64MB DDR.
This was the real revolution at Xerox Parc: the idea that ordinary users should be consulted, not just coders.
Consulted? Sure. Obeyed? Not necessarily.
People who use your program are a great source of information, but their use doesn't create any sort of contract on how you have to behave in regards to that program unless you've agreed to one.
While the secretary, in your example, might be a good source of ideas to increase usability, she's not the driving source behind actual work on the project, the programmers are. And since they're the ones doing the actual creation, albeit with the help of the users, they deserve the right to determine what they want their program licensed under.
The user still gets something out of this interaction, and that's a better program.
It's definitely not the case in Northern Ohio. Both Gamecubes and XBoxen have sold out within the day and backorders for pre-orders are common.
:shrug:
Re:Artificial Criteria
on
Good to Great
·
· Score: 2
The title of the book is "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't", which would by definition disqualify the theoretical company you mention which does 1.5 x the market over 100 years.
The main premise of the book, from just this review, seems to be an in depth study of companies that were good (but not great) and then changed something or other and became great.
Now, in order to help justify the idea that these were actually only 'good' companies prior, and not just in a slump or other short-term performance variance, they limited the companies chosen to those who performed that way for an extended length of time. Additionally, you'd need almost as long of 'great' performance to ensure that their changes were the actual source of their new success, and not just a fluke that could be corrected over the short term.
But that's just my guess, having not actually read more than this review.
$60 USD? That was the original list price for those little babies, but the fact that they're so hard to find and no longer produced, means that they fetch double to triple that amount these days.
I have a Dreamcast which I bought recently precisely because of its current budget price, however, the Broadband Adaptor is the one thing I want, but really don't see the cost justification in purchasing.
As long as it's not by the company that just released Real War, which loudly proclaims on both its box art and in every other form of media that it is a "commercial version of the official military Joint Forces game being used to train the US armed forces."
In reality,as this Gamespot review notes, it's a "throwback to the days of those horrible real-time strategy clones that followed the success of Westwood's Command & Conquer series.".
A definite waste of my $39.99 USD and a solid contender for 'Meh' game of the year.
If anything, I'd imagine the loss of life would have been much worse had the towers simply fallen to the sides, as they would've taken several surrounding buildings down immediately along with the people inside.
It was interesting, but it just seemed like someone ported over the Assault gametype from Unreal Tournament and a roughly similiar map to AS-Overlord to the Quake 3 engine.
But that was of course, only an initial impression, as asked for.
Re:Real criminals just aren't too bright...
on
Real Cyber-Spying
·
· Score: 1
... or more likely it's the simple fact that the smarter criminals are less likely to be caught, therefore the vast majority of people brought to trial tend to be stupid criminals
Slashdot Mirror
Except that even the non-computer literate have been able to enjoy things like illegal mp3s, divx movies and warez games despite the best technological attempts at cracking down on them.
Sure, my mom wouldn't be able to crack whatever they come up with on their own, but if I as a geek can, there's no doubt that she'll do her best to convince me to set it up so she can as well.
And on the typical college campus, where this sort of thing goes on all the time, the number of local geeks who already are begged by their peers to help them connect to P2P networks will no doubt help them get around these blocks as well.
Besides the whole, "you mean there's actually more than four episodes?!?" problem, I'm somewhat dissapointed with the over-the-top plotlines. With the exception of the Atlantis two-parter, every other episode I've seen so far has taken place in far off space locations.
It's a matter of taste, of course, but I'd prefer they tone the whole "other planet as a backdrop" thing down and get to plotlines that were closer to the Batman and Superman type stories.
The two alternatives are for a band to allow their music to continue to allow their music to be downloaded for free and hope they get people to see them in concert, or try to make their money by accepting the pitance the RIAA will give them through plans such as the one mentioned in this story.
With a million downloads only netting a band $2030 USD, I'd wager that it's more economically viable for a band to allow downloads for free to continue in order to use it as free advertising for their concerts and keep the goodwill of the bands.
Since the vast majority of actual bands that aren't being actively pushed right now by the RIAA won't even get anything more than $20 USD out of their downloads, how do they win over simply continueing to allow free downloads which help promot them otherwise?
"the fact remains that many geeks (myself included) have basically been fucking over the artists by downloading free music"
With the way the system has been set up, the Recording Industry has always taken most, if not all, of the money made from sales of recorded media, be it CDs, tapes or legally downloaded MP3s.
There are several articles, available online through a few quick searches, which show that the best way to support the artist through a method in which they actually get a fair share of the profits from their work is to attend live performances.
Legal downloads of MP3s or not, the artist isn't going to get your support unless you give it through the method that works best for them. This is why I've never felt guilty for "trying out" new music genres and bands I've not heard of before by downloading illegal MP3s, as I'm more likely to go to a concert of theirs then and see them in person.
Will Sierra pull another of their standard operating procedures of waiting until the game's development is pretty close to completetion, fan interst is high, and then suddenly cancel it for no good reason, like the Babylon 5 space combat sim, along with many other good projects, only to release yet another Half Life spin-off instead?
Not that I'm bitter or anything . . .
"Have you ever heard of TV clubs?
No, but I've seen many fan clubs, organizations, web sites and forums for individual shows.
Alright, I'm not an accountant, nor do I play one on TV, but . . .
If 2% of your customer base, and therefore contribute only 2% of your revenue use up 50% of your bandwidth, wouldn't it be instantly worth losing that 2% of incoming revenue while decreasing your bandwidth costs by 50%?
As for that 2%, few if any would be able to make a noticiable dent in the other 98%'s perception, good or bad, of your ISP's reputation.
But if you want to ensure that everyone of your remaining 98% of your customers are happy, then communicate with them that you're proactively making sure that a few people aren't using up all their resources on their dime. Then take a small percentage of the bandwidth costs you've just saved and give the 98% of the people who are only using 50% of your bandwidth a small rate reduction, along with the announcement that should anyone want to use more than a generous amount of bandwidth can do so for an appropriate increase in their monthly rate.
AOL/TW is up there with Microsoft in terms of average Linux community member, for even if most people don't outright hate them, they think of them as the haven for the spammers and the clueless.
As I said it's a matter of perception.
Now, while AOL/TW wouldn't care one bit about all the Linux users ceasing to use RedHat products (their goal in buying the company, after all, would be to use its knowledge to create a AOL-OS) it cerainly could help on RedHat's end, as they'd lose any and all goodwill that they have from the community.
And when a significant amount of work is saved for a Linux company by having the community on your side and contributing various things, this certainly would be nothing but a pain for them.
"...same reason they bought Netscape."
With Netscape being where it is, isn't this a bad thing for the future of Red Hat?
You know you're a scifi geek when you recall that the 1976 Doctor Who story "The Deadly Assasin" features a part in which the hero and villian enter into a virtual world that exists within the ultra-mega-super-duper computer that their people have and face off in deadly combat.
Could the drop in percentage of software being pirated have less to do with individuals pirating less than they did before, and just the sheer number of computer users increasing?
In general, even the ease of use of peer 2 peer networks requires a minimum of tech saavy, and a faster broadband connection to make pirating your average 500+MB CD-Rom worth it, two things which the growing population new to computers don't have.
In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users and not just people who owned one for email or web browsing was certainly higher.
With this decrease in more advanced users compared to the general public, and the increase in the sheer size of pirated programs needing to be sent across your connection (Games, for example, going from a couple megs to a couple hundred in size), I'd see those two as the reason for the drop.
Damn, all that money wasted on sending me through Basic Combat Training for the US Army, and all they had to do was put us in a room with some toys and saturday morning cartoons.
I tell you, Looney Toon cartoons are enough training material in ways to hurt, maim and kill for any would be assassin!
Seriously, this is just another Frontpage 4.0 built site from a mother who saw too much violence in her kid's toys and decided to put together a small site with her opinions on what toys are bad influences on young minds.
Wasn't that the beauty of the Internet? To give each and every person a place to express their opinions and ideas, regardless of just how silly it is?
When it comes to MS Windows, I've never really believed that ATI fully supports their cards in terms of driver development. At least after having both an ATI Rage Fury and a Radeon 64MB DDR.
Consulted? Sure. Obeyed? Not necessarily.
People who use your program are a great source of information, but their use doesn't create any sort of contract on how you have to behave in regards to that program unless you've agreed to one.
While the secretary, in your example, might be a good source of ideas to increase usability, she's not the driving source behind actual work on the project, the programmers are. And since they're the ones doing the actual creation, albeit with the help of the users, they deserve the right to determine what they want their program licensed under.
The user still gets something out of this interaction, and that's a better program.
So the user's freedom (power) is more important that the freedom (power) of the person who works on the program?
o_O
It's definitely not the case in Northern Ohio. Both Gamecubes and XBoxen have sold out within the day and backorders for pre-orders are common.
:shrug:
The title of the book is " Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't ", which would by definition disqualify the theoretical company you mention which does 1.5 x the market over 100 years.
The main premise of the book, from just this review, seems to be an in depth study of companies that were good (but not great) and then changed something or other and became great.
Now, in order to help justify the idea that these were actually only 'good' companies prior, and not just in a slump or other short-term performance variance, they limited the companies chosen to those who performed that way for an extended length of time. Additionally, you'd need almost as long of 'great' performance to ensure that their changes were the actual source of their new success, and not just a fluke that could be corrected over the short term.
But that's just my guess, having not actually read more than this review.
$60 USD? That was the original list price for those little babies, but the fact that they're so hard to find and no longer produced, means that they fetch double to triple that amount these days.
I have a Dreamcast which I bought recently precisely because of its current budget price, however, the Broadband Adaptor is the one thing I want, but really don't see the cost justification in purchasing.
As long as it's not by the company that just released Real War, which loudly proclaims on both its box art and in every other form of media that it is a "commercial version of the official military Joint Forces game being used to train the US armed forces."
In reality,as this Gamespot review notes, it's a "throwback to the days of those horrible real-time strategy clones that followed the success of Westwood's Command & Conquer series.".
A definite waste of my $39.99 USD and a solid contender for 'Meh' game of the year.
Meh. The modern Internet has trouble surviving an attack by a backhoe, let alone nuclear weapons.
If anything, I'd imagine the loss of life would have been much worse had the towers simply fallen to the sides, as they would've taken several surrounding buildings down immediately along with the people inside.
But that was of course, only an initial impression, as asked for.