Games are still primarily console driven (with a few notable exceptions); so they are still targetted at decadish old technology like directX 9 with cosmetic bolt on DX10/11 upgrades for their PC versions. That and as someone later notes, toss in an SSD and a modern graphics card, and a 6 year old computer has very few bottlenecks until you are trying to drive multiple mointors at 1080p for call of battlefield duty .
There are very few reasons to have moved beyond XP in the windows space, except for it end of lifing and to be able to see prettier textures in games... that being said, there are no reasons to move on from Windows 7 yet (hell, most large corporates have barely even moved TO windows 7, let alone from...).
Microsoft have certainly strangled themselves to death on the doorknob whilst wanking this time round. Whoever thought sticking a touch centric interface on desktop PC's is the stupidest person born into their generation.
I use the start button about once every 5 minutes. Since my desktop is completely-clean of any icons, the start button is the only method I have to open new programs. Microsoft is probably lying through their teeth about "people don't use it".
Or, perhaps, it is completely true for the subset of win7 users who didn't opt out of the customer experience improvement program?
TFA notes that the telemetry from which this decision was made was from the customer experience improvement program; you *did* read it first, right?
It is possible that the set of users who did not opt out strongly represented users who pin everything they use to the taskbar. Hell, the 19 most used apps of mine are pinned to the taskbar on my windows box and there is still half a screen of air for running apps to appear on. My start menu is regularly used for the search function.
Personally, I am not bitching. Its a change, I'm not certain it is superior in a mouse/keyboard environment but I would not call it inferior to the start menu.
Anyway, to my point. Those of us who opted out (me included) actually voted not to care about influencing interface design decisions. Even if we did not realise this was out vote.
This is ithaca railway stuff, the tyranny of small decisions, we protected our right to privacy by opting out of the system used to gather data about how the UI is used. Therefore our preferences were not able to be counted.
There is a charming americanism (amongst many less so), 'If you don't vote, don't bitch!'. So before you whine about removal of the start button, first check wether or not you bothered to include yourself in the decision.
Of course, this assumes that the 'don't use start menu' group is strongly represented with the improvement program group and the 'do use start menu group' is strongly represented in the opted out group. My theory here being that power users with complex usage needs are more likely to opt out (for all kinds of sound, logical arguements...) and, therefore, not be counted.
Mostly true, but digital devices almost certainly would not suffer inattentional blindness/deafness; so are more trustworthy when any chance of having an invisible gorilla moment is unacceptable.
Current government is incredibly totalitarian in its data retention and censorship policies, but is funding the rollout of a national fibre broadband network... making the task of achieving their former policies definately non trivial and probably impossible...
Other side is lead by a foaming at the mouth christian but we dont quite know where they sit on censorship and data retention (although we can perhaps add one and one there...), but they will cancel the funding of the national broadband network... making sure we get stuck wandering around with out pants around our ankles as the former state owned monopoly continue to monopolise telecommunications and, coincidentally, make sure it is slightly less impossible to implement a totalitarian information dictatorship.
The real question; is a giant cluster of fat glass pipes enough sugar to make me eat a guaranteed dose of big brother or risk a possible dose of bush scale christian extremism along with the bigbrotherness that accompanies it... or are there other issues to decide this election on (we haven't seen them roll out this terms big wedge issue yet, although there are a few hints).
Perhaps we could use a third party?? No, USA, we dont want to borrow Nader! Damn democracy, pity all the alternatives are even crapper! just my $0.02. err! jak.
Indeed... If a person placed a note under my door threatening my family in the middle of the night would be cause for concern regarding the behavior of deranged and possibly violent people who stalk my house. I just do not see what this has to do with gamers. I can't think of any way in which the alleged commission of any crime can be caused by your enjoying video games.
I mean, they arrested a shotgun wielding bandit in Adelaide recently and he had a drivers license and lived in a house... so are we to be scared of drivers and people who aren't homeless now because they will all shoot us in the face with a shotgun??? or should we perhaps reserve that particular fear for shotgun wielding bandits regardless of their hobbies?
It is a gross overstatement to tar all people who share a hobby with the acts of a single individual who claims to share that hobby but cannot prove it.
I could go on to discuss the base rate fallacy in this context but I feel my point is made. err! jak.
yep. my main is 12", so >=10" does not a netbook make.
Spot on... if the form factor of the netbook is much larger than my moleskin then I cant carry them both in the same hand and will have to start encumbering myself with bags and crap. 9" is ideal, 10" is acceptable... 12" is approaching the size of my huge arse slate... just not readily portable unaided and regular notebooks already well serve this portion of the marketplace.
1) as people get wealthier they don't need as many children to "run the farm", so to speak. They in fact become an economic liability.
Actually, it is as excess agricultural production increases labour is freed up from the demands of subsistence and can now be deployed to other activities. This eventually leads to the creation of 'wealth' by trading that excess labour created by excess food. The rest, health care, sanitation etc; these are just engineering solutions to maximising the effectiveness of urbanisation.
Well, that is a gross simplification; still... economies have grown on this basis for at least 3,000 years.
The problem is we don't have another paradigm... and if climate change (man made or otherwise), population growth (well, this has to be man made) or some other factor starts to reduce the excess agricultural production; well, then, those of us who aren't farmers will no longer be able to get the food required to keep us off the farm and being useful in other areas...
This is a compelling model in that it significantly differs from the form of modelling used in Macro economic forecasting, which makes it useful for debate.
This is still, however, a process model that grossly simplifies the system and is therefore subject to the same limitations as all models; that they are not reality. You can use them to determine relative weightings between different situations but cannot use them to predict the future.
I applaud the concept of introducing different modelling techniques into economic (indeed any) debate; but do not make the mistake of drawing long term conclusions from the results of any one technique, no matter how appealing.
The sad thing is that Academic publication is so insular that a paper such as this did not get play in economic journals... in the same way that an economists take on super symmetry would never get published in a physics journal. The mono-disciplinary goggles that most journals apply is the real danger to progress in almost every field of science. It is more important that we consider the merits of the views and arguments of those who disagree with us than wrap ourselves in a comforting blanket of people who agree with us completely, as they do not inform us.
My observation is that we shaven monkeys that make up the human race are fundamentally incapable of maintenance in any sense. Rather than maintain something in as-new functional condition (maintenance) so it does not fail, we choose to either fix it (fixenance) or replace it (buyenance) when it does.
A factory that makes plastic widgets is just as likely to make these same mistakes in relation to their machinery.
The key point missing here is how many actual transactions that 20% of non pirates represents. That such a large proportion pirated it is interesting, but is there any harm? is there sales diversion (I think we may safely assume that someone who is willing to circumvent a fee of $3; $2 now apparently; can never be considered a lost sale; granted there may be a small subset who live in a region it isnt offered for sale or do not have a means of payment acceptable to iTunes.)? or is this noise obscuring the real signal, did the effort of developing the app and submitting it to iTunes store pay off?
It might be that an 80% piracy rate is a broadly unavoidable part of the system; are the two even comparable sets of data or do 100% of people who have heard about it and are willing to pay for stuff buy it and 100% of idiots who have heard of it and like to fill their phone with a bazillion things for no useful reason pirate it. The real question should be does it impact profits and return on investment and are the costs of preventing it ever going to be recouped with additional sales?
Personally I am firmly in the category where I would shell out $3 on the strength of a few screenshots without a demo, it just isn't expensive enough to worry about for me. Hell, I shell out much more than that on steam pre-orders just on the strength of who is developing a game. The question remains is this level of piracy even causing a problem?
I am not going to attack the morals or ethics here, you make your choices and takes your chances; Personally I am of the view that piracy can not be justified; it is something you do as a child before you have finished learning right from wrong. You want to make a free software stand, then do not use commercial software. You want something, buy it, build it or trade for it; not willing to do that, live without it. Sure, current business models may be broken and I am sick of being treated like a fscking criminal by every game publisher who isn't stardock, but that doesnt change my view.
Dr. Tim Flannery is someone whose work I have introduced all of my young relatives too. He may not be as well recognised outside of Australian and I can honestly say I don't always share his viewpoint; but he conveys the points well and with great passion.
Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki has been doing a scientifically credible, entertaining and honest version of what the mythbuster's do on radio in Australia for donkeys years and is pure gold when it comes to making science fun and accessible.
BZZT. False. Science rests on the belief that order and rationality exist in the universe.
You got the order wrong... Science has nothing to do with faith. It is about choosing the absence of faith. It matters not how strong your faith in an ordered universe is if there exists data that it is not so; as soon as out hypothesis is falsified, we must analyse it with a view to discarding it, no matter how much we want it to be true. If you have faith in science then it has become as dangerous as every other crackpot dogma. Simply, a superior approach to explaining observations rationally to our existing scientific method has yet to be discovered, our current hypothesis remains sound.
Science is about being willing to be wrong (well, it used to be... these days it is about getting published in A journals, sadly). It is about suggesting other than absolutes, about being willing to discard opinions and hypothesis as soon as there exists evidence which falsifies them. The instant your hovering apple is observed, repeated and verified; then we must consider changing or completely discarding the currently accepted hypothesis; if we had faith in this hypothesis, we could not.
To be clear, I have no problem with people having belief's in areas where it is not feasible to prove or disprove or where a falsifiable hypothesis cannot be constructed; I *believe* that is their right and freedom. Belief is not science and vice versa, although they can overlap. Faith is different, it is mutually exclusive, it allows us to justify ignoring data to retain flawed judgements. Faith is where idiots with explosives strapped to them and creationists come from.
**start rant It is one thing to personally believe in the existence of a god, it is another thing to have faith that an anthropocentric supreme being shat out the universe in a 6 day marathon and turned people into salt and gave immaculate birth to a magical resurrection fairy so strongly that no evidence of the human tendancy to make up stories and write them down and speak falsehoods to maintain power will dissuade you from it.
Faith is the most dangerous thing a human can have, because it involves blinding ourselves to other views and evidence. **end rant
I don't have faith in an ordered universe, for all I know there may be a deranged supreme being fiddling with everything we do for their own jollies; but I cannot offer data which supports such a hypothesis nor form an exclusive null hypothesis. However, the hypothesis that the universe is amenable to observation and measurement is supported by reams of data showing repeatable results from controlled methodologies.
Of course, this doesn't consider retrocausality!:)
...a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.
Since when did Apple give a shit about the "Average Person"; for all their failings, what I will always respect is that Apple would rather make Dollars on one sale than cents on a hundred.
Their value proposition is aimed at the top of the top of the market with significant disposable income and a great interest in non technical attributes (such as brand, design etc...).
If average people or even "power users" buy them, thats just cream; but they will remain happy as long as they are the device of choice for the wealthiest slice of the market.
This is why they punch so far above their weight in terms of media coverage, sales margins etc. considering how relatively small a company they are.
No, that Ballmer doesn't get this should be truly worrying to Microsoft employees and shareholders.
Classification does not equate to censorship per se. Classification of games is required to SELL PRODUCTS IN AUSTRALIA, so this only applies to boxed objects or MMO's run from Australia.
If you downloaded the client from the offshore game website and signed up online with the offshore organisation; no harm, no foul. There may be some fuzziness with steam and other digital storefronts that may have a presence in Australia and technically SELL in Australia, but if I buy a boxed game overseas that is not classified here, I can still bring it in, provided it doesnt contravene OTHER laws; just cant sell it second hand.
Storm in a teacup; seriously who buys boxed MMOs anyway?? Normally they are so out of date they have to re-download the entire game as an update anyway... easier just to grab it online and sign up too...
Game time cards; that could be an interesting legal arguement, but probably a hiding to nowhere since the arent covered by the act.
In summary, little or nothing to see here; move along. err! jak.
Clearly all you need to do to protect yourself from wifi interference is to surround your entire house/apartment/unit with appropriately sized copper mesh, duh!
Mike gave us that one before wifi was even invented! Course, there might be a couple of small engineering challenges in implementation...
For the record - I don't think anything other than in person should be a legal way to serve, but email is not superior to Facebook.
TFA Clearly states that the Court only allowed this because it was presented clear evidence that every other avenue had been attempted and exhausted to serve the couple. Our Courts have allowed in the past innovative approaches to serve papers where defendants have failed to respond to traditional means or attend court in their own defence.
Also note that courts in Australia have DENIED such requests in the past, as they were not convinced in those cases that other avenues had been exhausted.
This approach is not "legal" per se but rather only as instructed by the Court in this case; our Judges have discretion in cases where parties are evidently avoiding the serving of papers through "traditional" channels.
This is a story about a clever investigator providing a lawyer with another approach to serve papers after all available means had been tried and failed. And it worked, the day after this was publicised locally, lo and behold the folks in question re-appeared at the address they are about to be evicted from and basically confirmed that they had indeed been found.
Why do vehicular analogies keep popping up in ICT/Net related discussions??
The net neutrality arguement is incredibly simple;
On the one hand, net neutrality, bandwidth is sold as a service and no-one cares how that bandwidth is consumed; but, assumedly, the CONSUMERS (thats you, the people at home, with a net connection) of that bandwidth will end up paying for the share they use (if the ISPs are clever).
The counter arguement, from the telcos is similar but different, observe; bandwidth is sold as a service, and the telco has determined that by throttling the data rate FROM a certain location, they can sell that bandwidth twice; once to the CONSUMER (who pays for bandwidth used) and once to the PROVIDER (who pays their protection so the mob dont come around and smash their internet stores windows)...
In both arguements the gross ammount of bandwidth will be driven (assuming well run businesses) by the need to satisfy the CONSUMER DEMAND and invested in accordingly. In the latter arguement the people doing the investing also get to roll naked in giant piles of cash with $10k hookers:)
Frankly the former arguement sounds logical, the basis of good service business competition and the latter sounds like organised crime. But maybe Im just to simple to understand the logic of the latter arguement.
Shouldn't trials test a hypothesis or design? If you set out to prove something with a trial, I'm fairly certain that you will carefully design it so that it does, indeed, prove it; as you have already decided you will do it and are now cynically producing evidence.
Trials should be neutral, investigating or testing or gathering data. The *RESULTS* of a trial will support or disprove a concept.
Ultimately, you cant really "prove" anything; just gain sufficient confidence that despite your best efforts, you cannot disprove it.
Perhaps the trial aims to check "the feasibility of" rather than "prove"... well, we can hope. err! jak.
Soldiers dont pull the trigger when "ordered"; machines might, assassins do. Soldiers pull the trigger because the situation demands it. In the same way you dont sit around the battlefield agonising over decisions, you also dont wait for the rupert to decide its a good time to start shooting. Hell, the less decisions officers are allowed to make on the battlefield, the better...
Battlefield decision trees are simple, only three things exist: Threats, potential threats and not threats (some people use the short hand "good guys" for not threats and "bad guys" for threats; its a problem when "bad guys" becomes everyone other than the not threats). Soldiers act to neutralise threats so they are able to achieve their objectives (their "orders", orders are strategic, not tactical). Sure, the newspeak nature of "good guys, bad guys" feeds propaganda and misconceptions...
So, you pull the trigger because that "potential threat" has, in your reflexive judgement, elevated to a threat. Sure, it might have been a tree branch and not a rifle; but you cant afford to take the time to make that judgement, you trust the training, your mates and your instincts or you go home feet first. It was probably a person (but livestock and plants have suffered because of a chance gust of wind or random movement), but you try hard not to consider that either. Once it's kicked off, you just keep going, making the best decisions you can, until the jobs done; threats become simply targets, and your job right then and there is just to get the rounds down into them until its over.
Living with the decisions comes later... but that should factor into your choice to become a soldier in the first place. The battlefield is entirely the wrong place for making moral judgements; since killing someone is NEVER morally correct (arguable not ethically correct either), but if you have decided that in this case the ends justify those means, you do the job. The ethical decision is made before you depart; Im either willing to kill to achieve this goal or Im not: if you start convincing yourself that its MORALLY right to do so, then you are going to end up shooting people for cutting in line, but thats another discussion.
Back to the topic; devices like this help minimise the risk of a potential threat (EVERYONE not in your squad, regardless of where they are or what colours they wear) being mistaken for a threat when they are actually not a threat. As such, they are a Good Thing.
Democratising intelligence gathering on the battlefield is ALWAYS a Good Thing, the closer to real time the information soldiers use to make decisions is, the less often the wrong people will die.
Im sure someone else has rightly ranted about this. TFA is quite good, even if the title is misleading newspeak... it is neither accurate to conclude nor precise to state that TFA reports the iPhone as twice as reliable; merely half as likely to fail.
Going from 88ish% reliability to 94ish% reliability is not a DOUBLING. Even if the failure rate has been halved, it does not follow that the reliability has been doubled... I really wish more people payed attention to primary school mathematics, percentages are easy to use and understand; why do people so often get them wrong.
Id rather turn this point of view around slightly.
Leave out for the moment piracy, counter piracy, DRM etc... Lets talk about "value"; or the consumers percieved Value. I realise that when an Engineer starts using arguements from Economics, there is a real risk of the universe imploding, but Im willing to bear that risk.
If a game costs $100 AUD, I pause... Thats 2.5 Slabs of beer, that is a significant investment of my disposable funds (for the foreign, a "slab" is 24 375ml bottles or cans of beer). Im definately going to be tempted by the opportunity to get it "for free", assuming I can find a suitably trusted source. In this case, the Pirate is COMPETEING with the Game company with an effective pitch; same quality, lower price and (potentially) faster delivery (Im not explicitly agreeing that there are only 3 aspects of competition, but its a good enough template for discussion!).
This is further complicated by stupid, arbitrary product boundaries where I pay MORE in AUD (often by a factor of 2 or more) that they pay in AUD equivalent Euros or USD. Where games "arent available" over steam or some other form of digital distribution. All of these actions tend to INCREASE the relative value of the Pirate's offering. Then there is DRM, often I need to access the Pirates offering for games I legitimately purchased so I can get around the inconvenience of hauling around and schlepping disks in and out of my PC.
If a game costs, say, $20 AUD... Ive normally finished punching in my payment details and are downloading before my brain kicks in and asks why I didnt grab the demo (I simplify, but not by much). At this point, the cost is low enough that it is close enough to "free" for me (considering I dont buy games daily). Therefore the pirate no longer has a compelling pitch for me personally. Why not buy the official, supported and theoretically more trustworthy version; all of a sudden, the pirate cant effectively compete.
*THIS* proposition is further compounded with uniform, global, internet based distribution. If I can click, buy, download and play for a cost which doesnt cross my "personal" cost value threshold, then the Pirates value proposition is further diminished. Particularly where I am not dicked around with stupid arbitrary boundaries based on outdated notions of geographical distribution related to physical scarcity.
So what I am suggesting is that this comes down to understanding the market. If you offer more VALUE than the Pirate, then they wont use the Pirate as a source of products.
Sure, there will always be dicks in wealthy nations who will pirate regardless and there will be portions of the world where you simply cant provide the product cheap enough to compete with free, regardless of the remaining offerings. Still, that leaves a relatively large *potential* market; and you can consider the piracy in developing nations as market building, because eventually they will be affluent enough that this postulation becomes true for them too, and if they already enjoy and wish to consume games... well, work out where that goes when 2 billion Indian and Chinese people have sufficient disposable income to consider 15ish USD expenses "as good as free" (assuming we have found a way to get to this point without exhausting all available resources!! If we regress clubs and hunter-gathering; none of these arguements are really important!);)
Essentially we have the same issue here as with movies and music; the Lumbering and inefficient supply chains and distribution networks developed to sell physical goods are a huge overhead weight on a product which could otherwise be profitably produced and distributed in an "online-only" format.
You need not face piracy if you produce a product offering that is SUPERIOR to the pirate's offering which is, IMO, exactly the same as yours except that they are FREE, LESS TRUSTWORTHY and provide NO AFTER SALES SERVICE. So, if your price is low enough as to make negligible the "FREE" arguement to
Slashdot Mirror
Games are still primarily console driven (with a few notable exceptions); so they are still targetted at decadish old technology like directX 9 with cosmetic bolt on DX10/11 upgrades for their PC versions. That and as someone later notes, toss in an SSD and a modern graphics card, and a 6 year old computer has very few bottlenecks until you are trying to drive multiple mointors at 1080p for call of battlefield duty .
There are very few reasons to have moved beyond XP in the windows space, except for it end of lifing and to be able to see prettier textures in games... that being said, there are no reasons to move on from Windows 7 yet (hell, most large corporates have barely even moved TO windows 7, let alone from...).
Microsoft have certainly strangled themselves to death on the doorknob whilst wanking this time round. Whoever thought sticking a touch centric interface on desktop PC's is the stupidest person born into their generation.
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
You can have my Grappa when you take it from my cold, dead hands; HIPPIE!
Use corn, thats easy to grow and would just be wasted on feeding poor people otherwise!
I use the start button about once every 5 minutes. Since my desktop is completely-clean of any icons, the start button is the only method I have to open new programs. Microsoft is probably lying through their teeth about "people don't use it".
Or, perhaps, it is completely true for the subset of win7 users who didn't opt out of the customer experience improvement program?
TFA notes that the telemetry from which this decision was made was from the customer experience improvement program; you *did* read it first, right?
It is possible that the set of users who did not opt out strongly represented users who pin everything they use to the taskbar. Hell, the 19 most used apps of mine are pinned to the taskbar on my windows box and there is still half a screen of air for running apps to appear on. My start menu is regularly used for the search function.
Personally, I am not bitching. Its a change, I'm not certain it is superior in a mouse/keyboard environment but I would not call it inferior to the start menu.
Anyway, to my point. Those of us who opted out (me included) actually voted not to care about influencing interface design decisions. Even if we did not realise this was out vote.
This is ithaca railway stuff, the tyranny of small decisions, we protected our right to privacy by opting out of the system used to gather data about how the UI is used. Therefore our preferences were not able to be counted.
There is a charming americanism (amongst many less so), 'If you don't vote, don't bitch!'. So before you whine about removal of the start button, first check wether or not you bothered to include yourself in the decision.
Of course, this assumes that the 'don't use start menu' group is strongly represented with the improvement program group and the 'do use start menu group' is strongly represented in the opted out group. My theory here being that power users with complex usage needs are more likely to opt out (for all kinds of sound, logical arguements...) and, therefore, not be counted.
Just my $0.02,
err!
jak.
Oops, logging in first would have been wise; I claim the above... karma punishment or reward as appropriate.
Clearly I 'don't know' very much myself!
err!
jak.
Mostly true, but digital devices almost certainly would not suffer inattentional blindness/deafness; so are more trustworthy when any chance of having an invisible gorilla moment is unacceptable.
Just my $0.02,
err!
D.
The conundrum:
Current government is incredibly totalitarian in its data retention and censorship policies, but is funding the rollout of a national fibre broadband network... making the task of achieving their former policies definately non trivial and probably impossible...
Other side is lead by a foaming at the mouth christian but we dont quite know where they sit on censorship and data retention (although we can perhaps add one and one there...), but they will cancel the funding of the national broadband network... making sure we get stuck wandering around with out pants around our ankles as the former state owned monopoly continue to monopolise telecommunications and, coincidentally, make sure it is slightly less impossible to implement a totalitarian information dictatorship.
The real question; is a giant cluster of fat glass pipes enough sugar to make me eat a guaranteed dose of big brother or risk a possible dose of bush scale christian extremism along with the bigbrotherness that accompanies it... or are there other issues to decide this election on (we haven't seen them roll out this terms big wedge issue yet, although there are a few hints).
Perhaps we could use a third party?? No, USA, we dont want to borrow Nader!
Damn democracy, pity all the alternatives are even crapper!
just my $0.02.
err!
jak.
Indeed... If a person placed a note under my door threatening my family in the middle of the night would be cause for concern regarding the behavior of deranged and possibly violent people who stalk my house. I just do not see what this has to do with gamers. I can't think of any way in which the alleged commission of any crime can be caused by your enjoying video games.
I mean, they arrested a shotgun wielding bandit in Adelaide recently and he had a drivers license and lived in a house... so are we to be scared of drivers and people who aren't homeless now because they will all shoot us in the face with a shotgun??? or should we perhaps reserve that particular fear for shotgun wielding bandits regardless of their hobbies?
It is a gross overstatement to tar all people who share a hobby with the acts of a single individual who claims to share that hobby but cannot prove it.
I could go on to discuss the base rate fallacy in this context but I feel my point is made.
err!
jak.
Simply listing ALL software that is used, the vendor and the cost. This is then not an endorsement, simply informing the public.
If it happens that alot of the software is open source and cheap, then that is just fact; not endorsement.
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
yep. my main is 12", so >=10" does not a netbook make.
Spot on... if the form factor of the netbook is much larger than my moleskin then I cant carry them both in the same hand and will have to start encumbering myself with bags and crap. 9" is ideal, 10" is acceptable... 12" is approaching the size of my huge arse slate... just not readily portable unaided and regular notebooks already well serve this portion of the marketplace.
just my $0.02
err!
jak.
1) as people get wealthier they don't need as many children to "run the farm", so to speak. They in fact become an economic liability.
Actually, it is as excess agricultural production increases labour is freed up from the demands of subsistence and can now be deployed to other activities. This eventually leads to the creation of 'wealth' by trading that excess labour created by excess food. The rest, health care, sanitation etc; these are just engineering solutions to maximising the effectiveness of urbanisation.
Well, that is a gross simplification; still... economies have grown on this basis for at least 3,000 years.
The problem is we don't have another paradigm... and if climate change (man made or otherwise), population growth (well, this has to be man made) or some other factor starts to reduce the excess agricultural production; well, then, those of us who aren't farmers will no longer be able to get the food required to keep us off the farm and being useful in other areas...
Scary, neh?
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
...the map is not the landscape.
This is a compelling model in that it significantly differs from the form of modelling used in Macro economic forecasting, which makes it useful for debate.
This is still, however, a process model that grossly simplifies the system and is therefore subject to the same limitations as all models; that they are not reality. You can use them to determine relative weightings between different situations but cannot use them to predict the future.
I applaud the concept of introducing different modelling techniques into economic (indeed any) debate; but do not make the mistake of drawing long term conclusions from the results of any one technique, no matter how appealing.
The sad thing is that Academic publication is so insular that a paper such as this did not get play in economic journals... in the same way that an economists take on super symmetry would never get published in a physics journal. The mono-disciplinary goggles that most journals apply is the real danger to progress in almost every field of science. It is more important that we consider the merits of the views and arguments of those who disagree with us than wrap ourselves in a comforting blanket of people who agree with us completely, as they do not inform us.
Just my $0.02.
err!
jak.
and the sentiment is no less true.
My observation is that we shaven monkeys that make up the human race are fundamentally incapable of maintenance in any sense. Rather than maintain something in as-new functional condition (maintenance) so it does not fail, we choose to either fix it (fixenance) or replace it (buyenance) when it does.
A factory that makes plastic widgets is just as likely to make these same mistakes in relation to their machinery.
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
The key point missing here is how many actual transactions that 20% of non pirates represents. That such a large proportion pirated it is interesting, but is there any harm? is there sales diversion (I think we may safely assume that someone who is willing to circumvent a fee of $3; $2 now apparently; can never be considered a lost sale; granted there may be a small subset who live in a region it isnt offered for sale or do not have a means of payment acceptable to iTunes.)? or is this noise obscuring the real signal, did the effort of developing the app and submitting it to iTunes store pay off?
It might be that an 80% piracy rate is a broadly unavoidable part of the system; are the two even comparable sets of data or do 100% of people who have heard about it and are willing to pay for stuff buy it and 100% of idiots who have heard of it and like to fill their phone with a bazillion things for no useful reason pirate it. The real question should be does it impact profits and return on investment and are the costs of preventing it ever going to be recouped with additional sales?
Personally I am firmly in the category where I would shell out $3 on the strength of a few screenshots without a demo, it just isn't expensive enough to worry about for me. Hell, I shell out much more than that on steam pre-orders just on the strength of who is developing a game. The question remains is this level of piracy even causing a problem?
I am not going to attack the morals or ethics here, you make your choices and takes your chances; Personally I am of the view that piracy can not be justified; it is something you do as a child before you have finished learning right from wrong. You want to make a free software stand, then do not use commercial software. You want something, buy it, build it or trade for it; not willing to do that, live without it. Sure, current business models may be broken and I am sick of being treated like a fscking criminal by every game publisher who isn't stardock, but that doesnt change my view.
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
Dr. Tim Flannery is someone whose work I have introduced all of my young relatives too. He may not be as well recognised outside of Australian and I can honestly say I don't always share his viewpoint; but he conveys the points well and with great passion.
Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki has been doing a scientifically credible, entertaining and honest version of what the mythbuster's do on radio in Australia for donkeys years and is pure gold when it comes to making science fun and accessible.
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Jak.
BZZT. False. Science rests on the belief that order and rationality exist in the universe.
You got the order wrong... Science has nothing to do with faith. It is about choosing the absence of faith. It matters not how strong your faith in an ordered universe is if there exists data that it is not so; as soon as out hypothesis is falsified, we must analyse it with a view to discarding it, no matter how much we want it to be true. If you have faith in science then it has become as dangerous as every other crackpot dogma. Simply, a superior approach to explaining observations rationally to our existing scientific method has yet to be discovered, our current hypothesis remains sound.
Science is about being willing to be wrong (well, it used to be... these days it is about getting published in A journals, sadly). It is about suggesting other than absolutes, about being willing to discard opinions and hypothesis as soon as there exists evidence which falsifies them. The instant your hovering apple is observed, repeated and verified; then we must consider changing or completely discarding the currently accepted hypothesis; if we had faith in this hypothesis, we could not.
To be clear, I have no problem with people having belief's in areas where it is not feasible to prove or disprove or where a falsifiable hypothesis cannot be constructed; I *believe* that is their right and freedom. Belief is not science and vice versa, although they can overlap. Faith is different, it is mutually exclusive, it allows us to justify ignoring data to retain flawed judgements. Faith is where idiots with explosives strapped to them and creationists come from.
**start rant
It is one thing to personally believe in the existence of a god, it is another thing to have faith that an anthropocentric supreme being shat out the universe in a 6 day marathon and turned people into salt and gave immaculate birth to a magical resurrection fairy so strongly that no evidence of the human tendancy to make up stories and write them down and speak falsehoods to maintain power will dissuade you from it.
Faith is the most dangerous thing a human can have, because it involves blinding ourselves to other views and evidence.
**end rant
I don't have faith in an ordered universe, for all I know there may be a deranged supreme being fiddling with everything we do for their own jollies; but I cannot offer data which supports such a hypothesis nor form an exclusive null hypothesis. However, the hypothesis that the universe is amenable to observation and measurement is supported by reams of data showing repeatable results from controlled methodologies.
Of course, this doesn't consider retrocausality! :)
Just my $0.02.
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jak.
Since when did Apple give a shit about the "Average Person"; for all their failings, what I will always respect is that Apple would rather make Dollars on one sale than cents on a hundred.
Their value proposition is aimed at the top of the top of the market with significant disposable income and a great interest in non technical attributes (such as brand, design etc...).
If average people or even "power users" buy them, thats just cream; but they will remain happy as long as they are the device of choice for the wealthiest slice of the market.
This is why they punch so far above their weight in terms of media coverage, sales margins etc. considering how relatively small a company they are.
No, that Ballmer doesn't get this should be truly worrying to Microsoft employees and shareholders.
Colour me amused.
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jak.
Classification does not equate to censorship per se. Classification of games is required to SELL PRODUCTS IN AUSTRALIA, so this only applies to boxed objects or MMO's run from Australia.
If you downloaded the client from the offshore game website and signed up online with the offshore organisation; no harm, no foul. There may be some fuzziness with steam and other digital storefronts that may have a presence in Australia and technically SELL in Australia, but if I buy a boxed game overseas that is not classified here, I can still bring it in, provided it doesnt contravene OTHER laws; just cant sell it second hand.
Storm in a teacup; seriously who buys boxed MMOs anyway?? Normally they are so out of date they have to re-download the entire game as an update anyway... easier just to grab it online and sign up too...
Game time cards; that could be an interesting legal arguement, but probably a hiding to nowhere since the arent covered by the act.
In summary, little or nothing to see here; move along.
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jak.
Clearly all you need to do to protect yourself from wifi interference is to surround your entire house/apartment/unit with appropriately sized copper mesh, duh!
Mike gave us that one before wifi was even invented! Course, there might be a couple of small engineering challenges in implementation...
perhaps I need more sleep...
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jak.
For the record - I don't think anything other than in person should be a legal way to serve, but email is not superior to Facebook.
TFA Clearly states that the Court only allowed this because it was presented clear evidence that every other avenue had been attempted and exhausted to serve the couple. Our Courts have allowed in the past innovative approaches to serve papers where defendants have failed to respond to traditional means or attend court in their own defence.
Also note that courts in Australia have DENIED such requests in the past, as they were not convinced in those cases that other avenues had been exhausted.
This approach is not "legal" per se but rather only as instructed by the Court in this case; our Judges have discretion in cases where parties are evidently avoiding the serving of papers through "traditional" channels.
This is a story about a clever investigator providing a lawyer with another approach to serve papers after all available means had been tried and failed. And it worked, the day after this was publicised locally, lo and behold the folks in question re-appeared at the address they are about to be evicted from and basically confirmed that they had indeed been found.
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jak.
Around here I think we're just special ;)
YAAAY! I get to wear a helmet and ride to school on the short bus!!!
Why do vehicular analogies keep popping up in ICT/Net related discussions??
The net neutrality arguement is incredibly simple;
On the one hand, net neutrality, bandwidth is sold as a service and no-one cares how that bandwidth is consumed; but, assumedly, the CONSUMERS (thats you, the people at home, with a net connection) of that bandwidth will end up paying for the share they use (if the ISPs are clever).
The counter arguement, from the telcos is similar but different, observe; bandwidth is sold as a service, and the telco has determined that by throttling the data rate FROM a certain location, they can sell that bandwidth twice; once to the CONSUMER (who pays for bandwidth used) and once to the PROVIDER (who pays their protection so the mob dont come around and smash their internet stores windows)...
In both arguements the gross ammount of bandwidth will be driven (assuming well run businesses) by the need to satisfy the CONSUMER DEMAND and invested in accordingly. In the latter arguement the people doing the investing also get to roll naked in giant piles of cash with $10k hookers :)
Frankly the former arguement sounds logical, the basis of good service business competition and the latter sounds like organised crime. But maybe Im just to simple to understand the logic of the latter arguement.
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jak.
Shouldn't trials test a hypothesis or design? If you set out to prove something with a trial, I'm fairly certain that you will carefully design it so that it does, indeed, prove it; as you have already decided you will do it and are now cynically producing evidence.
Trials should be neutral, investigating or testing or gathering data. The *RESULTS* of a trial will support or disprove a concept.
Ultimately, you cant really "prove" anything; just gain sufficient confidence that despite your best efforts, you cannot disprove it.
Perhaps the trial aims to check "the feasibility of" rather than "prove"... well, we can hope.
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jak.
Soldiers dont pull the trigger when "ordered"; machines might, assassins do. Soldiers pull the trigger because the situation demands it. In the same way you dont sit around the battlefield agonising over decisions, you also dont wait for the rupert to decide its a good time to start shooting. Hell, the less decisions officers are allowed to make on the battlefield, the better...
Battlefield decision trees are simple, only three things exist: Threats, potential threats and not threats (some people use the short hand "good guys" for not threats and "bad guys" for threats; its a problem when "bad guys" becomes everyone other than the not threats). Soldiers act to neutralise threats so they are able to achieve their objectives (their "orders", orders are strategic, not tactical). Sure, the newspeak nature of "good guys, bad guys" feeds propaganda and misconceptions...
So, you pull the trigger because that "potential threat" has, in your reflexive judgement, elevated to a threat. Sure, it might have been a tree branch and not a rifle; but you cant afford to take the time to make that judgement, you trust the training, your mates and your instincts or you go home feet first. It was probably a person (but livestock and plants have suffered because of a chance gust of wind or random movement), but you try hard not to consider that either. Once it's kicked off, you just keep going, making the best decisions you can, until the jobs done; threats become simply targets, and your job right then and there is just to get the rounds down into them until its over.
Living with the decisions comes later... but that should factor into your choice to become a soldier in the first place. The battlefield is entirely the wrong place for making moral judgements; since killing someone is NEVER morally correct (arguable not ethically correct either), but if you have decided that in this case the ends justify those means, you do the job. The ethical decision is made before you depart; Im either willing to kill to achieve this goal or Im not: if you start convincing yourself that its MORALLY right to do so, then you are going to end up shooting people for cutting in line, but thats another discussion.
Back to the topic; devices like this help minimise the risk of a potential threat (EVERYONE not in your squad, regardless of where they are or what colours they wear) being mistaken for a threat when they are actually not a threat. As such, they are a Good Thing.
Democratising intelligence gathering on the battlefield is ALWAYS a Good Thing, the closer to real time the information soldiers use to make decisions is, the less often the wrong people will die.
Just my $0.02
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jak.
Im sure someone else has rightly ranted about this. TFA is quite good, even if the title is misleading newspeak... it is neither accurate to conclude nor precise to state that TFA reports the iPhone as twice as reliable; merely half as likely to fail.
Going from 88ish% reliability to 94ish% reliability is not a DOUBLING. Even if the failure rate has been halved, it does not follow that the reliability has been doubled... I really wish more people payed attention to primary school mathematics, percentages are easy to use and understand; why do people so often get them wrong.
Just my $0.02
jak!
Id rather turn this point of view around slightly.
Leave out for the moment piracy, counter piracy, DRM etc... Lets talk about "value"; or the consumers percieved Value. I realise that when an Engineer starts using arguements from Economics, there is a real risk of the universe imploding, but Im willing to bear that risk.
If a game costs $100 AUD, I pause... Thats 2.5 Slabs of beer, that is a significant investment of my disposable funds (for the foreign, a "slab" is 24 375ml bottles or cans of beer). Im definately going to be tempted by the opportunity to get it "for free", assuming I can find a suitably trusted source. In this case, the Pirate is COMPETEING with the Game company with an effective pitch; same quality, lower price and (potentially) faster delivery (Im not explicitly agreeing that there are only 3 aspects of competition, but its a good enough template for discussion!).
This is further complicated by stupid, arbitrary product boundaries where I pay MORE in AUD (often by a factor of 2 or more) that they pay in AUD equivalent Euros or USD. Where games "arent available" over steam or some other form of digital distribution. All of these actions tend to INCREASE the relative value of the Pirate's offering. Then there is DRM, often I need to access the Pirates offering for games I legitimately purchased so I can get around the inconvenience of hauling around and schlepping disks in and out of my PC.
If a game costs, say, $20 AUD... Ive normally finished punching in my payment details and are downloading before my brain kicks in and asks why I didnt grab the demo (I simplify, but not by much). At this point, the cost is low enough that it is close enough to "free" for me (considering I dont buy games daily). Therefore the pirate no longer has a compelling pitch for me personally. Why not buy the official, supported and theoretically more trustworthy version; all of a sudden, the pirate cant effectively compete.
*THIS* proposition is further compounded with uniform, global, internet based distribution. If I can click, buy, download and play for a cost which doesnt cross my "personal" cost value threshold, then the Pirates value proposition is further diminished. Particularly where I am not dicked around with stupid arbitrary boundaries based on outdated notions of geographical distribution related to physical scarcity.
So what I am suggesting is that this comes down to understanding the market. If you offer more VALUE than the Pirate, then they wont use the Pirate as a source of products.
Sure, there will always be dicks in wealthy nations who will pirate regardless and there will be portions of the world where you simply cant provide the product cheap enough to compete with free, regardless of the remaining offerings. Still, that leaves a relatively large *potential* market; and you can consider the piracy in developing nations as market building, because eventually they will be affluent enough that this postulation becomes true for them too, and if they already enjoy and wish to consume games... well, work out where that goes when 2 billion Indian and Chinese people have sufficient disposable income to consider 15ish USD expenses "as good as free" (assuming we have found a way to get to this point without exhausting all available resources!! If we regress clubs and hunter-gathering; none of these arguements are really important!) ;)
Essentially we have the same issue here as with movies and music; the Lumbering and inefficient supply chains and distribution networks developed to sell physical goods are a huge overhead weight on a product which could otherwise be profitably produced and distributed in an "online-only" format.
You need not face piracy if you produce a product offering that is SUPERIOR to the pirate's offering which is, IMO, exactly the same as yours except that they are FREE, LESS TRUSTWORTHY and provide NO AFTER SALES SERVICE. So, if your price is low enough as to make negligible the "FREE" arguement to