I wanna see the Mac user list of top ten disappointments....
6. No Civ IV
Ask and ye shall receive. The Mac OS X version is scheduled to be released in February or March.
Anyway, I'm sad to say that not getting to play Civ 4 yet on the Mac isn't such a tragedy. I've been playing it on PC, and I have been underwhelmed (religion... WTF? "great persons"... WTF? why can't they make stats and advisors understandable like they were in Civ 2?). I played through one game the first week it was out and haven't played it again. But I may pick up the Mac version anyway since I'm more likely to give it another shot playing it on my PowerBook (which I take on road trips) than the HP laptop that sits around the house.
YOU must understand, that you don't know what a true artist is.
I understand very well what an "artist" is. You'll notice, though, that never once in my post did I use the term "artist" - I said "performer." There is a great difference there.
Artists may or may not choose to follow their art as a career path, and are devoted to following their muse above all else. Performers are relying on their chosen field of entertainment/performance for a career, so they are going to make very different choices when it comes to how they reach their audience and how they get paid for it. It's very easy for someone who doesn't have to make a living from their art to be principled about it - not so much for those who don't have that luxury. Undoubtedly there are counter-examples... but that doesn't invalidate my thesis. I only say this from knowing many performers (struggling actors, musicians, etc.) trying to "make it" in the industry and how they would react. None of them are going to keep working at T.G.I. Fridays so they can stick it to the RIAA/MPAA/whatever.
There are many independent bands who do just fine for themselves financially. They're not pulling in millions, but they're living decently... And then there's this very issue of freedom. Would you trade your freedom and integrity as an artists for money? A true artists, one who puts his or her work above all, most likely would not.
With all due respect, you just don't get it. IT nerds and performers think very differently about their careers, and it is probably useful to understand this difference if you want to understand the choices that each make.
It is a generally accepted principle in our capitalist world that there is a correlation between risks and rewards. The riskier a venture you undertake, the higher the rewards need to be, or else no one would undertake these risks. So far, so good.
Sysadmins, programmers and other nerd types typically follow a medium-risk, medium-return path. You won't make as much as the CEO, but in most cases you won't starve, either. You do a job that is fairly well respected in society and there is (generally, again) a reasonable expectation that you will be able to get a decent job.
Performers - actors, musicians, etc. - follow a high-risk, high-return path. Only a small percentage of people that want to make a living as performers are ever able to do so (imagine if 80% of CompSci graduates could never find a job programming but had to do it on the side while they worked at Starbuck's). They spend years waiting tables or playing in crappy local bars hoping to get their big break. So, when that chance does come, they grab onto it and they feel (rightly, I believe) that they deserve their success. Actors don't work crap jobs for years so they can turn down a $1 million paycheck in a big movie and say, "I don't want to work for a MPAA-affiliated studio!"
The same - by and large - goes for musicians as well. They are performers that (probably) busted their asses to get where they are, and they aren't going to give up a shot at the big time because of what DRM technology is put on their CDs (which generally isn't up to them anyway). It's like this for pro athletes as well, and many other professions where only a tiny percentage of those pursuing it will ever achieve success. (Interestingly, the only place where IT nerds typically do intersect with this world is those who start up their own companies - another high-risk, high-reward path. But these types are arguably a breed apart from most IT folk.)
So you, Mr. Programmer Guy, can talk all you want about how these people are sellouts and should be perfectly happy to just get by with a living wage, etc. However, if you are actually interested in understanding this phenomenon, then you need to understand that performers generally come from a mindset that is 180 degrees away from yours. Even if you don't empathize with this, you should make an effort to understand it.
I believe the idea is that the tech people have a certain veto power over the suits. How this can be a bad thing, I'll never know.
Are you serious?
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
Look, there are a lot of dumb "suits" out there. But - at least in theory - if your company has any brains then these "suits" are where they are because they understand what decisions need to be made in order to grow the business and/or keep it running. Giving engineers "veto power" is bad because they frequently use it to promote nifty nerd things that are not actually helpful to the business. A healthy partnership between producers and managers is needed in any good company... but don't say you can't see how giving engineers final say could be a bad thing!
You can't always just willy nilly start to experiment on your own, or you screw other teams up.
I think what the GP post was talking about in re: people "who don't do anything that they aren't told to do" wasn't people like you who are guarded about overexperimenting. I know a number of IT and engineering folks who do no more than what was precisely described and don't try to proactively make anything better. That's what the problem is - marketing says "we need it to do X," and the engineer comes back at the (not unreasonable) deadline and says "it does X now, but it doesn't scale, doesn't work outside of the scope that was precisely in the spec and it doesn't do anything else that you might reasonably expect it to. If that's not OK, you should resubmit it through our project management process and be more specific."
For example, when I was a product manager at an ISP I gave engineering a spec on how our DSL offering was supposed to link in with our satellite networks. Engineering gave an estimate on infrastructure costs based on what turned out to be wildly underpowered routers, which then went into the business case. When we were implementing the product ad push came to shove they came back and said, "oh, you need something else that costs 3x the original estimate" and hosed our business and pricing model. When I asked them why they didn't think about what would realistically be required to provide the service - which I didn't know how to calculate but they could have - they just said, "well that's not our job to go beyond what was explicity written in your case."
Who knows? Maybe that's the way it has to work... but marketing and sales people are expected to take initiative and go beyond the explicit instructions they receive. They are expected to anticipate not just what the customer specifically asked for, but what they actually want as well. Of course sometimes this is a recipe for disaster, but the point is that they are expected to be holistic in our approach and rightly or wrongly (maybe wrongly), they expect others to do the same. Yes, yes, of course this principle can be abused. I'm not talking about being a mind reader. I am, though, talking about the difference between doing only what is explicity spelled out versus applying common sense and initiative to your job. And that, I think, is what the GP post was saying was the characteristic of someone they didn't want working in their organization.
I'd rather be the one beating the shit out of the criminal that just beat the shit out of a prostitute, and then helping the prostitute with getting medical attention or even a way out of her lifestyle (maybe she's trapped via blackmail and abuse to be a prostitute against her will).
Yes, I'm sure that GTA: Social Worker as you have described above will be a multi-platinum success. Perhaps it can also have exciting mini-games where you provide the prostitute with restaurant vocational training, or where you pay off your grad school student loans. Perhaps you could also suggest to Midway that "Mortal Kombat" games would be vastly improved if the two combatants did small-group self-esteem therapy exercises with each other rather than fighting.
CowboyNeal: It's still usually worth shelling out the cash to see a version that isn't fuzzy with garbled sound, though.
I'm not trying to be a shill for the movie industry here or anything, but whatever happened to "it's still usually worth shelling out the cash so that the people that worked on the movie get the money that they're owed?" You're not supposed to pay for stuff you watch because it's higher quality, you're supposed to pay for it because it's the right thing to do.
If the RIAA and MPAA want to stop piracy, they need to supply what the customer wants.... Convenience is very important - if I could walk out of the cinema and buy a DVD of the film I had just seen, I would probably do so 70% of the time I go to the cinema. Since I have to wait 6 months for the DVD release (because they are paranoid that the DVD sales and resulting piracy will impact cinema attendance) then I frequently fail to buy DVDs that I had intended to purchase simply because I can't be bothered later on.
I'm not particularly interested in defending the MPAA and the movie theater system. But to be fair, what you cite above isn't just paranoia, it's true. Sure, that arrangement would be convenient to you (and I wouldn't mind it either), but most people aren't going to go back and see a movie more than once in the theater if they have the DVD. More importantly, if one of my friends goes and sees [insert popular new movie here] and buys the DVD, I'm not going to go see it in the theater, I'll just borrow the DVD from him and watch it. Therefore, the movie studio, the movie theater and any actors/producers/whatever who have "points" in the gross all lose out. So I don't think it's irrational on their part to have a delay between theatrical release and DVD release.
And no offense, but if you "can't be bothered" to buy a DVD after it comes out, then you probably didn't care much about it and were better off not buying it in the first place.
The story with Apple's NeXT acquisition
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Apple to Buy TiVo?
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I am not so sure that apple "came calling"- in fact, Apple was just about to close a deal to buy Be,Inc.- who had a pretty stellar, multimedia-centric little OS- and Jobs had a fit and offered NeXT instead.
Close, but not quite. Apple was looking for a next-generation OS after it realized that its "Copland" and "Gershwin" development was going nowhere (there was just too much baggage in the old MacOS to gracefully turn it into a modern OS). Jean-Louis Gassee was a former Apple exec (I think he was worldwide sales VP?), BeOS was the hip new thing at the time, and Gil Amelio (remember Gil?) was automatically turned his sights there.
The problem was that Jean-Louis priced himself out of the game. Everything was fine in principle, but J-L wanted (if I recall correctly) north of $100M more for Be than Apple was willing to pay. So Gil Amelio turned to choice number two, some other company run by a former Apple employee...
NeXT did have a hit with WebObjects but its hardware and software businesses were going nowhere, and WO was not nearly enough to keep the whole company afloat. Steve Jobs had investors in NeXT (like Ross Perot) who were very eager to extricate themselves through a buyout, so it made a lot of sense to him. As an added bonus, Jobs even offered to come back on board Apple as a consultant for a while. "Very nice of him," Amelio must have thought.
Six months later, Jobs had engineered the board's ousting of Amelio, took the interim CEO (or "iCEO" as he called it) job, and the rest is history...
Does anyone care? I mean really?... It was the gameplay that counted, not the story.
I think that lots of people care, actually (myself included). It all depends on your preference and what you're in the mood for, but story is extremely important to me - even for FPS, it's what makes the difference between a game I pick up for a few minutes of twitch-n-blast (like Quake3) and one that I play all the way through (like Marathon, Halo or Half-Life). I think it goes without saying that story is also a key element of non-FPS games as well... I wouldn't have finished any of the Final Fantasy games or KOTOR if they didn't have engrossing stories (I didn't bother finishing Metal Gear Solid 2 precisely because it had one of those "what drugs do the Japanese take?" stories that eventually made me stop caring about the game).
It may just be that I'm getting older (yeesh... an ancient 31 now), but the quality of the story is what determines whether I play a game all the way through or put it down after a couple hours. And since that playability basically equates to whether I got my money's worth from the game (hours played vs. money spent), I almost exclusively buy games that I have heard have good stories attached to them. Am I the only one doing this?
here is what it will take for me to pay for music:
1) must host every song ever, available for immediate speedy download in more than a few different formats/bitrates
2) a query tool (genre, artist, date of release, lyrics, etc) at LEAST a simple search utility
3) when I select a song I want to see the list of "other people who selected this song also selected.."
thats it.. first site to implement these 3 features gets my money. I don't care what it costs.
iTMS has items #2 and #3. Every song ever? Come on, nobody has ever had that, nor would anyone want to. It wouldn't be worth the disk space to store or even the cost of electricity to rip the hundreds of thousands of old albums that will never, ever be purchased by anyone again. And nobody but geeks ask for multiple encoding rates... the same Slashdot audience that whines about 99 cents being too much to pay for a song. Not exactly the target market businesses want to cater to.
I'm not suggesting that you personally are doing this... but some people in the past have made deliberately unachievable "want" lists for online music distribution as a justification for pirating music. (And before you ask, yes, I have downloaded music that I don't own; I can rationalize it [not available except on vinyl and I don't have/want a record player] but I know that it doesn't make it right.)
I can say "I won't buy a satellite TV system until it has a.) 1000 channels and b.) costs less than $9.99/month." I can refuse to buy a DTV or Dish system because it doesn't meet my criteria. But it doesn't justify my going out and pirating satellite TV. The point is that you can sit on the sidelines of the legal downloading market for as long as you like, waiting for your wishlist of features, or you can use what's available to you now if it's good enough. Just don't use "it's not quite the way I want it" as an excuse for doing something wrong.
Again - not saying the parent poster is doing this. But just throwing out a little cosmic karma caution to those who may be doing it.
Anti-RIAA choice of words is hardly inflammatory, at least on slashdot. The first pro-RIAA guy to show up should be bitch-slapped for -20 karma, though I suppose such a mentality would have accumulated any karma at all, or read/. for that matter.
Okay, I have some karma to burn, so I'll take this on. And for whatever it's worth, I hate the RIAA too, and think their lawsuit plan is the worst PR move in recent corporate history.
The story headline isn't so much a reflection of Slashdot groupthink (although there's plenty of that), but of the editor's personal bias. I'm not naming names, but there is a Slashdot editor or two who are well known for the fact that they like to slant stories with their well known political/social leanings... nothing wrong with that on a E/N or editorial site, just don't ever expect anyone to take Slashdot seriously as a news source.
Speaking as a former journalist, the problem with the story title (and the reason it would never pass muster at a "real" news source) is that it misdirects the focus of the action. It would be like if McGraw-Hill sued a bunch of people they thought had photocopied the new Bill Clinton autobio and handed the copies out to other people for free, then the story headline was "McGraw hill sues book lovers!" They aren't being sued because they love books (undoubtedly they do), but because of what they did with those books. So the story title is misleading because it doesn't reflect the actual "why" of what happened. And that's what separates Slashdot (or at least some of its editors) from ever being considered a real journalism outfit.
Apple has said their Music Store is not meant as a profit center, so isn't it better for them
Apple has said no such thing! Slashdotters have inferred this, and it (as these things do) somehow morphed from Speculative Guess(TM) to Common Knowledge(TM) on Slashdot. I think this is the same thing that happened with other intuitive but factually dubious infobits such as "everybody loses money on the game consoles they sell" and "musicians are all rich and don't need any more money."
It makes sense: Apple is probably expecting iTMS to bring in only a fraction of what iPod sales do. However, they would never deliberately expect the iTMS to lose money. Even if they did, they would never publicly admit it. All of which goes back to the idea that they do in fact have something to lose if people buy music from Real's store rather than the iTMS. Plus consider the fact that if you buy music from Real, you aren't buying into AAC (which is also in their interest to promote the format).
I suppose a bomb with a rocket attached to it is classified as a missile.
Technically speaking, as far as I remember, a missile has to be guided. An explosive device with a rocket attached to it that just flies in a straight (or curved, natch) line is still called a rocket. The same device with internal or external guidance is a missile.
Most everything the US military has produced in a long time has been a missile, so we tend to think of that as a generic term. But in the past, the US has created some pretty fascinating rocket weapons as well...
I hear this chesnut thrown around quite a bit. The truth, however - and I say this as someone who has spent a good bit of time as both a reporter and PR flack - is that saying is total crap. Unless all you are interested in is notoriety (not the same thing as fame), there is such a thing as bad publicity.
Trust me on this one, I have seen it. You're far better off getting no review of your software than a terrible review when it comes to a business context. And do you think Intel's sales went up because of all the publicity over the F/DIV bug? Now, "controversy" can be fine - it gets you noticed, and it wouldn't be "controversial" unless at least some of the people thought it was great. But again, strictly speaking, bad publicity is, well... bad.
And this isn't just me... ask anyone who does this for a living (at least people who are publicizing businesses, not pr0n stars) and they'll tell you that bad publicity is something you don't want. It's a sad thing that most F/OSS groups (because so few have involved anyone with marketing or PR experience) often don't know the truth about this... it might help their adoption rate it they did.
"Libel" seems to be one of those words that gets thrown around on Slashdot without people entirely knowing what they're talking about. So, for everybody's future reference, here's the real deal (everybody that goes through journalism school gets a heaping dose of education on this to hopefully save their future employers from being sued into oblivion).
Libel is the printing in a (reasonably) public medium of disparaging comments against an individual. Slander is saying disparaging things in a public forum. Note that private conversations or interpersonal memos etc. are in no case covered by US libel/slander laws - to do so would violate free speech rights by preventing you from saying anything bad about anyone.
If you feel you have been libelled, you bring civil (not criminal) suit against the offending party. If you are a private citizen, you (usually) only have to show that the libel-er was wrong in order to win your case. If you are a public figure, you also have to prove that the libel-er was intentionally getting it wrong to hurt you (or at least being grossly negligent in checking their facts). There is also a provision of libel law called "fair comment" wherein you can be as wrong as you want when talking about a politician or other public figure on certain topics (political philosophies, quality of art/performance, etc.) and not be sued because everyone is free to have wildly differing opinions on those things even if they might be objectively incorrect.
Anyway - the bottom line is that this guy has essentially zero chance of suing for libel or slander and winning, unless his business publicly told others that he did something wrong. But on the positive side maybe he reads this and knows more about libel and slander, and it helps him win a game show or something.
I got burned on 10.1 and will not buy another Apple OS because of it.
BZZT! Sorry, but your otherwise entertaining troll on the high prices of Apple OS upgrades fell apart there. OS X 10.1 was free or $20, depending on how you got it - thus demonstrating that you probably didn't buy 10.1 (or any Apple OS for that matter). Thanks for playing... we have some Turtle Wax and a copy of "Slashdot - The Home Game" for you.
First, my hard drive isn't full of their music. I'm too busy protecting my free speech rights to have any time for actual downloading.
I am also too busy protecting my free speech to download things. It's an 18-hour-a-day job posting "freedom of speech is great!" comments to Slashdot, which I think is a great use of my time because 1.) Slashdot is full of anti-free-speech advocates and it's important to win these people over, and 2.) the readership of Slashdot has a lot of political pull in Washington DC, and every "+5 insightful" comment probably sways a couple of senators.
I also rode a giant blue doggy to the Candy Planet.
Everything is placed in a tree-like hierarchy that is easier (compared to Windows' interface) to find things in, especially if you haven't had experience with the interface.
I'm a rabid OS X fan. I significantly prefer OS X's look and feel to WinXP, and I agree that Microsoft has failed to dictate sensible UI conventions to its developers. So many Windows apps seem to be duking it out for the "worst interface of all time" title (currently held by the main menu screens of Madden NFL 2004).*
However, I have to say that this is a pretty damn clever UI for non tech-savvy folks (which is the vast majority of them). Contextual menus are provided for each piece of hardware, allowing inexperienced users to visually identify their system components and then click on them to bring up service or configuration options. Assuming that this view can be hidden for more experienced users, I think it's a significant improvement over current desktop metaphors for beginners (even with OS X, my parents would never know to click on the Apple menu to find system preferences if I didn't tell them).
It pains me to say this about Microsoft, but this is an innovative (as far as I can tell) interface. Even though it breaks conventions (bad), it seems to be leaps beyond anything that Apple has done recently in terms of "can your grandmother use this?" user interfaces (good). If nothing else, it gives Apple some real competition in the UI department (and some much-needed "grandma-centric" inspiration to Gnome and KDE).
I've never understood the "over qualified" position. Who cares if you're over qualified?
In the past, I didn't understand the "overqualified" concept either. It wasn't until I took a job for which I was overqualified that I understood the problem. I had gotten laid off when my employer went bankrupt, and was lucky enough to get offered a job rather quickly at a larger company - but with a lower title.
I was perfectly happy to have been offered the job, and I'm still there. So in that sense, "overqualified" is a bogus issue.
However, I'm here because the job market is dreadful. If it weren't so awful, I'd be out the door here in a second... and my employer knows that. The "overqualified" rationale is that people like that will leave for a more appropriate job as soon as they get the chance, and nobody wants to hire employees that are just waiting to bolt.
Similarly, being overqualified means that (even moreso than usual) you tend not to enjoy your job because you're not meeting your potential. You're doing work for people that you are equally qualified with (or more qualified), and it tends to breed disgruntled employees. I'm not terribly disgruntled because I feel lucky to have been given a decent job in a relatively niche technology industry... but I'm also counting the days until I can get another position where I can learn and grow.
So "overqualified" is to some extent crap - if you're happy to have a job, overqualified or not, then it isn't relevant. But if you hate the job you're overqualified for and are bitter/waiting to bolt, then companies do have a reason for avoiding you. It's the fact that companies can't tell which type you'll be which leads them to often avoid all "overqualified" folks.
People keep asking this question, so it seems like it deserves a "OK, once and for all, this is why" answer.
Your question is based on the (common) misconception that all of a company's shares (or even a majority of them) are necessarily publicly traded. A company, when it "goes public," may make 95% of all its shares available to the public, or it may make only 5% of those shares public.
If the case is the latter, you could go to the NYSE or NASDAQ and buy every share there that someone is selling, and you would still only own 5% of the company. Ownership percentage = the percentage of votes you can cast on shareholder questions like kicking out the board of directors, etc.
I don't have figures, but I believe that SCO is more than 51% privately held. So buying all the publicly traded shares of SCO still isn't going to let you dictate the course of the company, it would just give you a bunch of (hopefully soon worthless) shares. The only way to gain control of the company would be to buy out the private owners... who, I'm guessing, will make that price VERY steep if they think they have any chance at winning.
> Actually they already got paid by the RIAA to make that work.
Payment is taken care of as far as the creator (or group of creators) are concerned.
NO NO NO NO. Where do people keep getting this idea?
Bands get an advance from their recording label on their album. Their recording, production and marketing costs are charged to them. If their album sells enough copies to cover the label's advance and their production costs, THEN they start getting royalties. If they don't make back those costs, they can theoretically end up owing their label money!
Some people involved in creating the album, like producers, engineers, etc., are often paid a flat fee, and in that sense, some of the people are paid already regardless of how many copies the album sells. But the band members/songwriters are paid on a per-copy royalty basis. So PLEASE don't spread the incorrect idea that the musicians aren't missing out on actual money if you don't buy the music.
We have an uphill battle to fight to get copyright laws made sensible... it doesn't help our cause when people go around supporting their arguments with bogus "facts."
Perhaps more artists will be forced to tour constantly to earn a living. Gone will be the good old days when they could just set back, get fat/stoned/whatever off royalty money. It breaks my heart to know that they will have to WORK ON AVERAGE 40 OR MORE HOURS A WEEK 50 WEEKS A YEAR to get by. I mean, that should be criminal. What if we were all forced to do that?!
I think the point you're missing is that it doesn't matter if you don't like the fact that people get royalties on creative works. It is NOT your right to say, "I think these people get paid too much, so I will use their [goods/services/music/whatever] but won't pay for it." If you dislike the way that songwriters, musicians or anyone else gets paid, you have the right to not use their work and not pay them. But you DON'T have the right to use it but just not pay them.
A friend of mine suggested tonight that since American power extends so far around the world, it would only be fair to let everyone vote in US elections, not just US citizens.
That's fine with me as soon as everyone in the world puts their money where their mouth is and starts paying US taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanna see the Mac user list of top ten disappointments....
6. No Civ IV
Ask and ye shall receive. The Mac OS X version is scheduled to be released in February or March.
Anyway, I'm sad to say that not getting to play Civ 4 yet on the Mac isn't such a tragedy. I've been playing it on PC, and I have been underwhelmed (religion ... WTF? "great persons" ... WTF? why can't they make stats and advisors understandable like they were in Civ 2?). I played through one game the first week it was out and haven't played it again. But I may pick up the Mac version anyway since I'm more likely to give it another shot playing it on my PowerBook (which I take on road trips) than the HP laptop that sits around the house.
YOU must understand, that you don't know what a true artist is.
I understand very well what an "artist" is. You'll notice, though, that never once in my post did I use the term "artist" - I said "performer." There is a great difference there.
Artists may or may not choose to follow their art as a career path, and are devoted to following their muse above all else. Performers are relying on their chosen field of entertainment/performance for a career, so they are going to make very different choices when it comes to how they reach their audience and how they get paid for it. It's very easy for someone who doesn't have to make a living from their art to be principled about it - not so much for those who don't have that luxury. Undoubtedly there are counter-examples ... but that doesn't invalidate my thesis. I only say this from knowing many performers (struggling actors, musicians, etc.) trying to "make it" in the industry and how they would react. None of them are going to keep working at T.G.I. Fridays so they can stick it to the RIAA/MPAA/whatever.
There are many independent bands who do just fine for themselves financially. They're not pulling in millions, but they're living decently ... And then there's this very issue of freedom. Would you trade your freedom and integrity as an artists for money? A true artists, one who puts his or her work above all, most likely would not.
With all due respect, you just don't get it. IT nerds and performers think very differently about their careers, and it is probably useful to understand this difference if you want to understand the choices that each make.
It is a generally accepted principle in our capitalist world that there is a correlation between risks and rewards. The riskier a venture you undertake, the higher the rewards need to be, or else no one would undertake these risks. So far, so good.
Sysadmins, programmers and other nerd types typically follow a medium-risk, medium-return path. You won't make as much as the CEO, but in most cases you won't starve, either. You do a job that is fairly well respected in society and there is (generally, again) a reasonable expectation that you will be able to get a decent job.
Performers - actors, musicians, etc. - follow a high-risk, high-return path. Only a small percentage of people that want to make a living as performers are ever able to do so (imagine if 80% of CompSci graduates could never find a job programming but had to do it on the side while they worked at Starbuck's). They spend years waiting tables or playing in crappy local bars hoping to get their big break. So, when that chance does come, they grab onto it and they feel (rightly, I believe) that they deserve their success. Actors don't work crap jobs for years so they can turn down a $1 million paycheck in a big movie and say, "I don't want to work for a MPAA-affiliated studio!"
The same - by and large - goes for musicians as well. They are performers that (probably) busted their asses to get where they are, and they aren't going to give up a shot at the big time because of what DRM technology is put on their CDs (which generally isn't up to them anyway). It's like this for pro athletes as well, and many other professions where only a tiny percentage of those pursuing it will ever achieve success. (Interestingly, the only place where IT nerds typically do intersect with this world is those who start up their own companies - another high-risk, high-reward path. But these types are arguably a breed apart from most IT folk.)
So you, Mr. Programmer Guy, can talk all you want about how these people are sellouts and should be perfectly happy to just get by with a living wage, etc. However, if you are actually interested in understanding this phenomenon, then you need to understand that performers generally come from a mindset that is 180 degrees away from yours. Even if you don't empathize with this, you should make an effort to understand it.
I believe the idea is that the tech people have a certain veto power over the suits. How this can be a bad thing, I'll never know.
Are you serious?
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
Look, there are a lot of dumb "suits" out there. But - at least in theory - if your company has any brains then these "suits" are where they are because they understand what decisions need to be made in order to grow the business and/or keep it running. Giving engineers "veto power" is bad because they frequently use it to promote nifty nerd things that are not actually helpful to the business. A healthy partnership between producers and managers is needed in any good company ... but don't say you can't see how giving engineers final say could be a bad thing!
You can't always just willy nilly start to experiment on your own, or you screw other teams up.
I think what the GP post was talking about in re: people "who don't do anything that they aren't told to do" wasn't people like you who are guarded about overexperimenting. I know a number of IT and engineering folks who do no more than what was precisely described and don't try to proactively make anything better. That's what the problem is - marketing says "we need it to do X," and the engineer comes back at the (not unreasonable) deadline and says "it does X now, but it doesn't scale, doesn't work outside of the scope that was precisely in the spec and it doesn't do anything else that you might reasonably expect it to. If that's not OK, you should resubmit it through our project management process and be more specific."
For example, when I was a product manager at an ISP I gave engineering a spec on how our DSL offering was supposed to link in with our satellite networks. Engineering gave an estimate on infrastructure costs based on what turned out to be wildly underpowered routers, which then went into the business case. When we were implementing the product ad push came to shove they came back and said, "oh, you need something else that costs 3x the original estimate" and hosed our business and pricing model. When I asked them why they didn't think about what would realistically be required to provide the service - which I didn't know how to calculate but they could have - they just said, "well that's not our job to go beyond what was explicity written in your case."
Who knows? Maybe that's the way it has to work ... but marketing and sales people are expected to take initiative and go beyond the explicit instructions they receive. They are expected to anticipate not just what the customer specifically asked for, but what they actually want as well. Of course sometimes this is a recipe for disaster, but the point is that they are expected to be holistic in our approach and rightly or wrongly (maybe wrongly), they expect others to do the same. Yes, yes, of course this principle can be abused. I'm not talking about being a mind reader. I am, though, talking about the difference between doing only what is explicity spelled out versus applying common sense and initiative to your job. And that, I think, is what the GP post was saying was the characteristic of someone they didn't want working in their organization.
I'd rather be the one beating the shit out of the criminal that just beat the shit out of a prostitute, and then helping the prostitute with getting medical attention or even a way out of her lifestyle (maybe she's trapped via blackmail and abuse to be a prostitute against her will).
Yes, I'm sure that GTA: Social Worker as you have described above will be a multi-platinum success. Perhaps it can also have exciting mini-games where you provide the prostitute with restaurant vocational training, or where you pay off your grad school student loans. Perhaps you could also suggest to Midway that "Mortal Kombat" games would be vastly improved if the two combatants did small-group self-esteem therapy exercises with each other rather than fighting.
And this is exactly the reason I stopped buying Apple and migrated the entire company where I worked to Windows NT.
You migrated away from Apple and to Microsoft because you disliked Apple's business practices?
CowboyNeal: It's still usually worth shelling out the cash to see a version that isn't fuzzy with garbled sound, though.
I'm not trying to be a shill for the movie industry here or anything, but whatever happened to "it's still usually worth shelling out the cash so that the people that worked on the movie get the money that they're owed?" You're not supposed to pay for stuff you watch because it's higher quality, you're supposed to pay for it because it's the right thing to do.
If the RIAA and MPAA want to stop piracy, they need to supply what the customer wants. ... Convenience is very important - if I could walk out of the cinema and buy a DVD of the film I had just seen, I would probably do so 70% of the time I go to the cinema. Since I have to wait 6 months for the DVD release (because they are paranoid that the DVD sales and resulting piracy will impact cinema attendance) then I frequently fail to buy DVDs that I had intended to purchase simply because I can't be bothered later on.
I'm not particularly interested in defending the MPAA and the movie theater system. But to be fair, what you cite above isn't just paranoia, it's true. Sure, that arrangement would be convenient to you (and I wouldn't mind it either), but most people aren't going to go back and see a movie more than once in the theater if they have the DVD. More importantly, if one of my friends goes and sees [insert popular new movie here] and buys the DVD, I'm not going to go see it in the theater, I'll just borrow the DVD from him and watch it. Therefore, the movie studio, the movie theater and any actors/producers/whatever who have "points" in the gross all lose out. So I don't think it's irrational on their part to have a delay between theatrical release and DVD release.
And no offense, but if you "can't be bothered" to buy a DVD after it comes out, then you probably didn't care much about it and were better off not buying it in the first place.
I am not so sure that apple "came calling"- in fact, Apple was just about to close a deal to buy Be,Inc.- who had a pretty stellar, multimedia-centric little OS- and Jobs had a fit and offered NeXT instead.
Close, but not quite. Apple was looking for a next-generation OS after it realized that its "Copland" and "Gershwin" development was going nowhere (there was just too much baggage in the old MacOS to gracefully turn it into a modern OS). Jean-Louis Gassee was a former Apple exec (I think he was worldwide sales VP?), BeOS was the hip new thing at the time, and Gil Amelio (remember Gil?) was automatically turned his sights there.
The problem was that Jean-Louis priced himself out of the game. Everything was fine in principle, but J-L wanted (if I recall correctly) north of $100M more for Be than Apple was willing to pay. So Gil Amelio turned to choice number two, some other company run by a former Apple employee ...
NeXT did have a hit with WebObjects but its hardware and software businesses were going nowhere, and WO was not nearly enough to keep the whole company afloat. Steve Jobs had investors in NeXT (like Ross Perot) who were very eager to extricate themselves through a buyout, so it made a lot of sense to him. As an added bonus, Jobs even offered to come back on board Apple as a consultant for a while. "Very nice of him," Amelio must have thought.
Six months later, Jobs had engineered the board's ousting of Amelio, took the interim CEO (or "iCEO" as he called it) job, and the rest is history...
Does anyone care? I mean really? ... It was the gameplay that counted, not the story.
I think that lots of people care, actually (myself included). It all depends on your preference and what you're in the mood for, but story is extremely important to me - even for FPS, it's what makes the difference between a game I pick up for a few minutes of twitch-n-blast (like Quake3) and one that I play all the way through (like Marathon, Halo or Half-Life). I think it goes without saying that story is also a key element of non-FPS games as well ... I wouldn't have finished any of the Final Fantasy games or KOTOR if they didn't have engrossing stories (I didn't bother finishing Metal Gear Solid 2 precisely because it had one of those "what drugs do the Japanese take?" stories that eventually made me stop caring about the game).
It may just be that I'm getting older (yeesh ... an ancient 31 now), but the quality of the story is what determines whether I play a game all the way through or put it down after a couple hours. And since that playability basically equates to whether I got my money's worth from the game (hours played vs. money spent), I almost exclusively buy games that I have heard have good stories attached to them. Am I the only one doing this?
here is what it will take for me to pay for music:
1) must host every song ever, available for immediate speedy download in more than a few different formats/bitrates
2) a query tool (genre, artist, date of release, lyrics, etc) at LEAST a simple search utility
3) when I select a song I want to see the list of "other people who selected this song also selected.."
thats it.. first site to implement these 3 features gets my money. I don't care what it costs.
iTMS has items #2 and #3. Every song ever? Come on, nobody has ever had that, nor would anyone want to. It wouldn't be worth the disk space to store or even the cost of electricity to rip the hundreds of thousands of old albums that will never, ever be purchased by anyone again. And nobody but geeks ask for multiple encoding rates ... the same Slashdot audience that whines about 99 cents being too much to pay for a song. Not exactly the target market businesses want to cater to.
I'm not suggesting that you personally are doing this ... but some people in the past have made deliberately unachievable "want" lists for online music distribution as a justification for pirating music. (And before you ask, yes, I have downloaded music that I don't own; I can rationalize it [not available except on vinyl and I don't have/want a record player] but I know that it doesn't make it right.)
I can say "I won't buy a satellite TV system until it has a.) 1000 channels and b.) costs less than $9.99/month." I can refuse to buy a DTV or Dish system because it doesn't meet my criteria. But it doesn't justify my going out and pirating satellite TV. The point is that you can sit on the sidelines of the legal downloading market for as long as you like, waiting for your wishlist of features, or you can use what's available to you now if it's good enough. Just don't use "it's not quite the way I want it" as an excuse for doing something wrong.
Again - not saying the parent poster is doing this. But just throwing out a little cosmic karma caution to those who may be doing it.
Anti-RIAA choice of words is hardly inflammatory, at least on slashdot. The first pro-RIAA guy to show up should be bitch-slapped for -20 karma, though I suppose such a mentality would have accumulated any karma at all, or read /. for that matter.
Okay, I have some karma to burn, so I'll take this on. And for whatever it's worth, I hate the RIAA too, and think their lawsuit plan is the worst PR move in recent corporate history.
The story headline isn't so much a reflection of Slashdot groupthink (although there's plenty of that), but of the editor's personal bias. I'm not naming names, but there is a Slashdot editor or two who are well known for the fact that they like to slant stories with their well known political/social leanings ... nothing wrong with that on a E/N or editorial site, just don't ever expect anyone to take Slashdot seriously as a news source.
Speaking as a former journalist, the problem with the story title (and the reason it would never pass muster at a "real" news source) is that it misdirects the focus of the action. It would be like if McGraw-Hill sued a bunch of people they thought had photocopied the new Bill Clinton autobio and handed the copies out to other people for free, then the story headline was "McGraw hill sues book lovers!" They aren't being sued because they love books (undoubtedly they do), but because of what they did with those books. So the story title is misleading because it doesn't reflect the actual "why" of what happened. And that's what separates Slashdot (or at least some of its editors) from ever being considered a real journalism outfit.
You can go ahead and mod-bomb now. ;)
Apple has said their Music Store is not meant as a profit center, so isn't it better for them
Apple has said no such thing! Slashdotters have inferred this, and it (as these things do) somehow morphed from Speculative Guess(TM) to Common Knowledge(TM) on Slashdot. I think this is the same thing that happened with other intuitive but factually dubious infobits such as "everybody loses money on the game consoles they sell" and "musicians are all rich and don't need any more money."
It makes sense: Apple is probably expecting iTMS to bring in only a fraction of what iPod sales do. However, they would never deliberately expect the iTMS to lose money. Even if they did, they would never publicly admit it. All of which goes back to the idea that they do in fact have something to lose if people buy music from Real's store rather than the iTMS. Plus consider the fact that if you buy music from Real, you aren't buying into AAC (which is also in their interest to promote the format).
I suppose a bomb with a rocket attached to it is classified as a missile.
Technically speaking, as far as I remember, a missile has to be guided. An explosive device with a rocket attached to it that just flies in a straight (or curved, natch) line is still called a rocket. The same device with internal or external guidance is a missile.
Most everything the US military has produced in a long time has been a missile, so we tend to think of that as a generic term. But in the past, the US has created some pretty fascinating rocket weapons as well...
Of course, I could be wrong. And I frequently am.
Any publicity is good publicity, after all.
I hear this chesnut thrown around quite a bit. The truth, however - and I say this as someone who has spent a good bit of time as both a reporter and PR flack - is that saying is total crap. Unless all you are interested in is notoriety (not the same thing as fame), there is such a thing as bad publicity.
Trust me on this one, I have seen it. You're far better off getting no review of your software than a terrible review when it comes to a business context. And do you think Intel's sales went up because of all the publicity over the F/DIV bug? Now, "controversy" can be fine - it gets you noticed, and it wouldn't be "controversial" unless at least some of the people thought it was great. But again, strictly speaking, bad publicity is, well ... bad.
And this isn't just me ... ask anyone who does this for a living (at least people who are publicizing businesses, not pr0n stars) and they'll tell you that bad publicity is something you don't want. It's a sad thing that most F/OSS groups (because so few have involved anyone with marketing or PR experience) often don't know the truth about this ... it might help their adoption rate it they did.
One word: Libel.
Nope.
"Libel" seems to be one of those words that gets thrown around on Slashdot without people entirely knowing what they're talking about. So, for everybody's future reference, here's the real deal (everybody that goes through journalism school gets a heaping dose of education on this to hopefully save their future employers from being sued into oblivion).
Libel is the printing in a (reasonably) public medium of disparaging comments against an individual. Slander is saying disparaging things in a public forum. Note that private conversations or interpersonal memos etc. are in no case covered by US libel/slander laws - to do so would violate free speech rights by preventing you from saying anything bad about anyone.
If you feel you have been libelled, you bring civil (not criminal) suit against the offending party. If you are a private citizen, you (usually) only have to show that the libel-er was wrong in order to win your case. If you are a public figure, you also have to prove that the libel-er was intentionally getting it wrong to hurt you (or at least being grossly negligent in checking their facts). There is also a provision of libel law called "fair comment" wherein you can be as wrong as you want when talking about a politician or other public figure on certain topics (political philosophies, quality of art/performance, etc.) and not be sued because everyone is free to have wildly differing opinions on those things even if they might be objectively incorrect.
Anyway - the bottom line is that this guy has essentially zero chance of suing for libel or slander and winning, unless his business publicly told others that he did something wrong. But on the positive side maybe he reads this and knows more about libel and slander, and it helps him win a game show or something.
I got burned on 10.1 and will not buy another Apple OS because of it.
BZZT! Sorry, but your otherwise entertaining troll on the high prices of Apple OS upgrades fell apart there. OS X 10.1 was free or $20, depending on how you got it - thus demonstrating that you probably didn't buy 10.1 (or any Apple OS for that matter). Thanks for playing ... we have some Turtle Wax and a copy of "Slashdot - The Home Game" for you.
First, my hard drive isn't full of their music. I'm too busy protecting my free speech rights to have any time for actual downloading.
I am also too busy protecting my free speech to download things. It's an 18-hour-a-day job posting "freedom of speech is great!" comments to Slashdot, which I think is a great use of my time because 1.) Slashdot is full of anti-free-speech advocates and it's important to win these people over, and 2.) the readership of Slashdot has a lot of political pull in Washington DC, and every "+5 insightful" comment probably sways a couple of senators.
I also rode a giant blue doggy to the Candy Planet.
Everything is placed in a tree-like hierarchy that is easier (compared to Windows' interface) to find things in, especially if you haven't had experience with the interface.
I'm a rabid OS X fan. I significantly prefer OS X's look and feel to WinXP, and I agree that Microsoft has failed to dictate sensible UI conventions to its developers. So many Windows apps seem to be duking it out for the "worst interface of all time" title (currently held by the main menu screens of Madden NFL 2004).*
However, I have to say that this is a pretty damn clever UI for non tech-savvy folks (which is the vast majority of them). Contextual menus are provided for each piece of hardware, allowing inexperienced users to visually identify their system components and then click on them to bring up service or configuration options. Assuming that this view can be hidden for more experienced users, I think it's a significant improvement over current desktop metaphors for beginners (even with OS X, my parents would never know to click on the Apple menu to find system preferences if I didn't tell them).
It pains me to say this about Microsoft, but this is an innovative (as far as I can tell) interface. Even though it breaks conventions (bad), it seems to be leaps beyond anything that Apple has done recently in terms of "can your grandmother use this?" user interfaces (good). If nothing else, it gives Apple some real competition in the UI department (and some much-needed "grandma-centric" inspiration to Gnome and KDE).
* Yes, it's worse than QuickTime 4.
I've never understood the "over qualified" position. Who cares if you're over qualified?
In the past, I didn't understand the "overqualified" concept either. It wasn't until I took a job for which I was overqualified that I understood the problem. I had gotten laid off when my employer went bankrupt, and was lucky enough to get offered a job rather quickly at a larger company - but with a lower title.
I was perfectly happy to have been offered the job, and I'm still there. So in that sense, "overqualified" is a bogus issue.
However, I'm here because the job market is dreadful. If it weren't so awful, I'd be out the door here in a second ... and my employer knows that. The "overqualified" rationale is that people like that will leave for a more appropriate job as soon as they get the chance, and nobody wants to hire employees that are just waiting to bolt.
Similarly, being overqualified means that (even moreso than usual) you tend not to enjoy your job because you're not meeting your potential. You're doing work for people that you are equally qualified with (or more qualified), and it tends to breed disgruntled employees. I'm not terribly disgruntled because I feel lucky to have been given a decent job in a relatively niche technology industry ... but I'm also counting the days until I can get another position where I can learn and grow.
So "overqualified" is to some extent crap - if you're happy to have a job, overqualified or not, then it isn't relevant. But if you hate the job you're overqualified for and are bitter/waiting to bolt, then companies do have a reason for avoiding you. It's the fact that companies can't tell which type you'll be which leads them to often avoid all "overqualified" folks.
Just my $.02.
Why doesn't RedHat just buy them?
People keep asking this question, so it seems like it deserves a "OK, once and for all, this is why" answer.
Your question is based on the (common) misconception that all of a company's shares (or even a majority of them) are necessarily publicly traded. A company, when it "goes public," may make 95% of all its shares available to the public, or it may make only 5% of those shares public.
If the case is the latter, you could go to the NYSE or NASDAQ and buy every share there that someone is selling, and you would still only own 5% of the company. Ownership percentage = the percentage of votes you can cast on shareholder questions like kicking out the board of directors, etc.
I don't have figures, but I believe that SCO is more than 51% privately held. So buying all the publicly traded shares of SCO still isn't going to let you dictate the course of the company, it would just give you a bunch of (hopefully soon worthless) shares. The only way to gain control of the company would be to buy out the private owners ... who, I'm guessing, will make that price VERY steep if they think they have any chance at winning.
(...) and expected payment for.
> Actually they already got paid by the RIAA to make that work. Payment is taken care of as far as the creator (or group of creators) are concerned.
NO NO NO NO. Where do people keep getting this idea?
Bands get an advance from their recording label on their album. Their recording, production and marketing costs are charged to them. If their album sells enough copies to cover the label's advance and their production costs, THEN they start getting royalties. If they don't make back those costs, they can theoretically end up owing their label money!
Some people involved in creating the album, like producers, engineers, etc., are often paid a flat fee, and in that sense, some of the people are paid already regardless of how many copies the album sells. But the band members/songwriters are paid on a per-copy royalty basis. So PLEASE don't spread the incorrect idea that the musicians aren't missing out on actual money if you don't buy the music.
We have an uphill battle to fight to get copyright laws made sensible ... it doesn't help our cause when people go around supporting their arguments with bogus "facts."
Perhaps more artists will be forced to tour constantly to earn a living. Gone will be the good old days when they could just set back, get fat/stoned/whatever off royalty money. It breaks my heart to know that they will have to WORK ON AVERAGE 40 OR MORE HOURS A WEEK 50 WEEKS A YEAR to get by. I mean, that should be criminal. What if we were all forced to do that?!
I think the point you're missing is that it doesn't matter if you don't like the fact that people get royalties on creative works. It is NOT your right to say, "I think these people get paid too much, so I will use their [goods/services/music/whatever] but won't pay for it." If you dislike the way that songwriters, musicians or anyone else gets paid, you have the right to not use their work and not pay them. But you DON'T have the right to use it but just not pay them.
A friend of mine suggested tonight that since American power extends so far around the world, it would only be fair to let everyone vote in US elections, not just US citizens.
That's fine with me as soon as everyone in the world puts their money where their mouth is and starts paying US taxes.