There is no objective pricing of entertainment. If I say it is worth $2 to me, then who can argue with that?
The studios and me. That was my point. Bargaining works like this:
A) Widgets! Get your widgets right here! Only $100! B) I'll pay $2 A) $50 B) $2 A) $25 B) $2 A) Screw you. I'll taking my widget and going home.
You removed the studios' ability to say the last part. It would be one thing if you said "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album" and sucked it up and went without. But when you say "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album; I'm stealing it instead", what incentive does the studio have to lower the price? Sure, a FEW people might buy it instead (you claim you would, but are you sure?), but most would not and they would lose more money (I suspect they could lower it some and gain more from people who abstain, not pirates).
When you say "It's worth $2 to me" that means you're willing to pay $2 and if it costs more you won't have it. It does not mean that you will give the person $2 for the item. A subtle difference, but consider. How much is fetchmail worth to me? I'd say $25, maybe a little more. Does that mean that's how much I pay for it? No. Likewise, the album/movie may be "worth $2" to you, but the studio has no evidence that you won't just steal it anyway, so they won't sell it for $2.
But what kind of a bargaining position do you leave them in if you say "Give it to me for $2 or I'll steal it". You ruin your position when you stoop that low. Much like the people saying they're using "civil disobedience" with MP3s (I know, not you). That's ridiculous, since it's only effective when you make a personal sacrifice in the process.
Also, you seem to be taking things out on possibly the wrong individuals. If Waterworld sucked, you shouldn't steal Judgement at Nuremburg. That should not give you any satisfaction.
The main problem is that suppose the studios did give in and say "Ok, we charged too much. Movies are now 80% off" do you think the pirates of the world (not the few moral pirates, of which I'm sure you count yourself) would go back to buying the product after they've tasted the fruit? I doubt it. The studios therefore have no reason to bother.
There are such things are "winprinters" which rely on specific parts of Windows and can't run without them. They're even more tied to Windows than the winmodems, though I don't know if this actually is one.
I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!
OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says, Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1, technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver sources for a bit and whip them into shape.
Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories, CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard open source project website services. The site will be up and running sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.
So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the source since we announced the driver development project early this year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.
Happy hacking!
Jon Taylor Linux Driver Engineer Creative Labs jtaylor@creativelabs.com
Perhaps that was a bad example. I wasn't saying you bootlegged anything. I was saying that there are a lot of similarities between the legal protections/punishments provided by copyright and those provided in the case of the DVD specifications.
In both cases, someone gets access to something under certain conditions (you get your tape/DVD under the condition that you don't share it; they get the DVD specs on the condition they don't share it). You (presumably) said "Once this happens, it's not an industry cooperative consorium deal anymore." I was simply pointing out that enforcement of the contract between the DVD Forum and the DVD implementors is no different from the implicit contract between you and the company that produced the DVD/tape. I was just saying that it was not unconstitutional in any way, not suggesting that you bootlegged.
Again, you would not so much be in trouble (though DVD is laced with patent upon patent, so you would be in trouble if you implemented it). The company whose product you RE'd would be in trouble. Sorry for the confusion.
I thought I made my point pretty clear. You're in no more trouble REing DVD stuff than you are anything else. It's the manufacturers who would get in trouble, so they have a reason to want to hide it from you.
It would seem that way, but I remember my dad (a corporate lawyer) telling me the story about the guy who owned a taxi service and set up a corporation for every taxi cab so that if one made lots of damage, the most that could be sued for was the value of that one company, which was the value of the cab itself. Needless to say, he didn't get away with it. Dummy corporations set up for such purposes are illegal.
Civil, not criminal prosecution. Toshiba, Sony, et al can make you pay them money. They can't make you go to jail.
You seem to be very anti-copyright (in the traditional sense), since copyrights put limits on what people can do in almost the exact same way. You may not like them, but no one's ever struck them down as unconstitutional. In fact, they're specifically mentioned in the constitution.
It's not the government; it is an organization of corporations, which are not bound by the constitution (at least not to the extent that the government is).
The DVD Forum came up with the DVD Spec. They then sell it to companies under NDAs for quite a bit of money. But built into the NDA that you have to sign to see it is the requirement that you make your player play only one region and don't let people reverse engineer your software (it has to be hard). If either one of these fails, you are in breach of contract with some of the largest corporations on the planet and will be in some serious trouble. It's only by their good graces or because they don't care enough yet that they haven't gone after the guilty yet.
You would not be in any more trouble reverse engineering the stuff than you would REing any random program. It's the company which didn't obscure its program that gets in trouble.
Your explanation uses a different definition of "productivity". If computers can do the same amount of work equally as fast but cheaper, productivity has increased and we no longer have a paradox.
I will agree with the quality part, though. For better or for worse, we have much nicer documents now than we did 10 years ago. And our spreadsheets can be a lot bigger.
But what is it that you don't believe? This is more than just one report by Solow. This is a few dozen reports by lots of people, who still haven't come up with a consistent explanation. The data are gathered from various sources. It may be that computers waste productivity exactly as much as they help, cancelling out the effect. Or maybe they're just not that important (~2% of business capital investments). Or maybe we just need a better measure of productivity, but it stands that "you can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics."
Or could it mean that the standards are rising? I haven't read the material in question, though it sounds interesting, but I know that a lot of times, when capacity to produce increases, demand for production increases at twice the rate.
Well, they're supposed to take rising standards into account when they determine all of that and weight productivity statistics accordingly, but as you might guess it's pretty impossible to do that right.
Having read a lot about Solow's paradox, Moore's law, and economic growth in the past week, I can say that that's probably not very true. The Solow paradox says that computers don't seem to add anything to the productivity statistics. That either means computers aren't as useful as we think, or the statistics are wrong. I tend to think it's a little of both, but the result is that MS doesn't do a whole lot for the economy.
The other thing I've learned is that the main way that computers affect the economy at large is because businesses spend so much on them, and because of Moore's law. The price of computers deflates (as opposed to inflation, though I have some problems with how they measure this deflation). Companies are spending more and more on computers and they keep dropping in price faster. This results in a lower natural rate of inflation (sort of), which is one of the reasons we're seeing low inflation and low unemployment at the same time, something which is very rare. But MS hasn't contributed anything to lower prices for computers. In fact, they go against it. Computers have gone from ~$2000 to ~$1000 recently, and the price of Windows stays the same, making it an ever-increasing part of the total cost.
To summarize: Users pay for it, it's not at all abstract, and it's a hell of a lot more than a few bucks per machine. Educate yourself and then step back into the ring when you have something valid to say
What you say is true, but it's not like what he says is not true. No need to be mean about it. Think: How many normal computer purchasers actually notice the price of Windows? With Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc., I seriously doubt they do. So that leaves someone shopping at a place like yours, where it is specifically itemized on the bill. His point was not that the cost of Windows is not actually substantial or is not passed onto consumers, but that in almost every case they don't notice, at least not to the point where they would buy a pirated copy, even if they had the technical knowledge to install it.
Did you read the message? I'll admit, the point-by-point arguments get kind of old, but this wasn't one of them. Microsoft wrote the article and tried to pass it off as independent. That seems pretty significant, and probably more people than just us care about that.
Don't listen to the naysayers till they actually have something constructive to say.
We all know that Dvorak was the one who published the great results about the Dvorak keyboard. Of course the results were biased. But that doesn't mean it's a worse keyboard.
You have only to look at a QWERTY keyboard to see that it was not designed to be easy. Notice that you can type "typewriter" using only keys on the top row. You think that is a coincidence? Also, see how many words you can type on the home row with QWERTY. Not many. How many with Dvorak (it's aoeuidhtns for those who don't know).
I have never heard of anyone who learned Dvorak "properly" who regretted the change, myself included.
Well, it was published yesterday, which means he wrote it before (probably Friday or earlier). Depending on your view of "drawing board", it may or may not be true.
This is the first I've heard that they actually pay royalties to the makers of the product they ship. Still, perhaps the reason no one gives them any respect is that they don't actually do that much. People respect Mandrake and Red Hat, but what reason is there to talk about MacMillan? It's not like it's a different product. It's just a different box! And a box from a company that has zero presence in "the community", except for some books which are most certainly not free. The article argues that we should pay attention to MacMillan because they sell so many copies, but I just did a Slashdot search on Cheapbytes (an equivalent operations, I suppose). Two responses, neither of which has anything to do with Linux. Why again are we supposed to discuss distributors in detail when one of the benefits of all this open source is that we're not subject to them?
Are you more likely to get something medicinally useful from a given plant than from a given animal? I though the only reason so many medicines come from plants is because there are so many more of them and they move a lot less.
My thinking is that they died out for a reason, and they'll die out again (especially if there is only one!)
Wait a second--you can't clone a plant like this. So far as I know, this process only works for mammals, since they gestate in a womb.
What about when I hose sendmail by installing a bad RPM and need to get the old one back? Starting in single-user would be a much more difficult way of doing things than just starting everything at init5 except sendmail and downloading the RPM. Sure, you can do it your way, but that's a lot harder.
Except that requires root access. Your answer is correct and perhaps more elegant (personally I use the GNOME international keyboard applet), but it won't work on a cluster machine where you're just a user.
Slashdot Mirror
95 years now. You'll be dead.
There is no objective pricing of entertainment. If I say it is worth $2 to me, then who can argue with that?
The studios and me. That was my point. Bargaining works like this:
A) Widgets! Get your widgets right here! Only $100!
B) I'll pay $2
A) $50
B) $2
A) $25
B) $2
A) Screw you. I'll taking my widget and going home.
You removed the studios' ability to say the last part. It would be one thing if you said "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album" and sucked it up and went without. But when you say "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album; I'm stealing it instead", what incentive does the studio have to lower the price? Sure, a FEW people might buy it instead (you claim you would, but are you sure?), but most would not and they would lose more money (I suspect they could lower it some and gain more from people who abstain, not pirates).
When you say "It's worth $2 to me" that means you're willing to pay $2 and if it costs more you won't have it. It does not mean that you will give the person $2 for the item. A subtle difference, but consider. How much is fetchmail worth to me? I'd say $25, maybe a little more. Does that mean that's how much I pay for it? No. Likewise, the album/movie may be "worth $2" to you, but the studio has no evidence that you won't just steal it anyway, so they won't sell it for $2.
But what kind of a bargaining position do you leave them in if you say "Give it to me for $2 or I'll steal it". You ruin your position when you stoop that low. Much like the people saying they're using "civil disobedience" with MP3s (I know, not you). That's ridiculous, since it's only effective when you make a personal sacrifice in the process.
Also, you seem to be taking things out on possibly the wrong individuals. If Waterworld sucked, you shouldn't steal Judgement at Nuremburg. That should not give you any satisfaction.
The main problem is that suppose the studios did give in and say "Ok, we charged too much. Movies are now 80% off" do you think the pirates of the world (not the few moral pirates, of which I'm sure you count yourself) would go back to buying the product after they've tasted the fruit? I doubt it. The studios therefore have no reason to bother.
There are such things are "winprinters" which rely on specific parts of Windows and can't run without them. They're even more tied to Windows than the winmodems, though I don't know if this actually is one.
I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!
OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says,
Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1,
technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would
have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo
mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from
beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which
were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The
source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are
planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the
open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver
sources for a bit and whip them into shape.
Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an
open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories,
CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard
open source project website services. The site will be up and running
sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload
developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up
yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.
So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at
Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to
get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the
source since we announced the driver development project early this
year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able
to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have
been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.
Happy hacking!
Jon Taylor
Linux Driver Engineer
Creative Labs
jtaylor@creativelabs.com
Depends on how you calculate it. If you include stock options (which aren't required, but they are real costs), they lost $3B last year.
I don't doubt that, Bruce, but I seriously doubt you got a Xeon with 2MB cache. I'm seeing $3680 as the minimum price on the net.
Oh, I see where you got that. Strike "you" in that other post and put "nameless DVD hardware manufacturer"
Perhaps that was a bad example. I wasn't saying you bootlegged anything. I was saying that there are a lot of similarities between the legal protections/punishments provided by copyright and those provided in the case of the DVD specifications.
In both cases, someone gets access to something under certain conditions (you get your tape/DVD under the condition that you don't share it; they get the DVD specs on the condition they don't share it). You (presumably) said "Once this happens, it's not an industry cooperative consorium deal anymore." I was simply pointing out that enforcement of the contract between the DVD Forum and the DVD implementors is no different from the implicit contract between you and the company that produced the DVD/tape. I was just saying that it was not unconstitutional in any way, not suggesting that you bootlegged.
Again, you would not so much be in trouble (though DVD is laced with patent upon patent, so you would be in trouble if you implemented it). The company whose product you RE'd would be in trouble. Sorry for the confusion.
I thought I made my point pretty clear. You're in no more trouble REing DVD stuff than you are anything else. It's the manufacturers who would get in trouble, so they have a reason to want to hide it from you.
It would seem that way, but I remember my dad (a corporate lawyer) telling me the story about the guy who owned a taxi service and set up a corporation for every taxi cab so that if one made lots of damage, the most that could be sued for was the value of that one company, which was the value of the cab itself. Needless to say, he didn't get away with it. Dummy corporations set up for such purposes are illegal.
Civil, not criminal prosecution. Toshiba, Sony, et al can make you pay them money. They can't make you go to jail.
You seem to be very anti-copyright (in the traditional sense), since copyrights put limits on what people can do in almost the exact same way. You may not like them, but no one's ever struck them down as unconstitutional. In fact, they're specifically mentioned in the constitution.
It's not the government; it is an organization of corporations, which are not bound by the constitution (at least not to the extent that the government is).
The DVD Forum came up with the DVD Spec. They then sell it to companies under NDAs for quite a bit of money. But built into the NDA that you have to sign to see it is the requirement that you make your player play only one region and don't let people reverse engineer your software (it has to be hard). If either one of these fails, you are in breach of contract with some of the largest corporations on the planet and will be in some serious trouble. It's only by their good graces or because they don't care enough yet that they haven't gone after the guilty yet.
You would not be in any more trouble reverse engineering the stuff than you would REing any random program. It's the company which didn't obscure its program that gets in trouble.
Your explanation uses a different definition of "productivity". If computers can do the same amount of work equally as fast but cheaper, productivity has increased and we no longer have a paradox.
I will agree with the quality part, though. For better or for worse, we have much nicer documents now than we did 10 years ago. And our spreadsheets can be a lot bigger.
But what is it that you don't believe? This is more than just one report by Solow. This is a few dozen reports by lots of people, who still haven't come up with a consistent explanation. The data are gathered from various sources. It may be that computers waste productivity exactly as much as they help, cancelling out the effect. Or maybe they're just not that important (~2% of business capital investments). Or maybe we just need a better measure of productivity, but it stands that "you can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics."
Or could it mean that the standards are rising? I haven't read the material in question, though it sounds interesting, but I know that a lot of times, when capacity to produce increases, demand for production increases at twice the rate.
Well, they're supposed to take rising standards into account when they determine all of that and weight productivity statistics accordingly, but as you might guess it's pretty impossible to do that right.
Having read a lot about Solow's paradox, Moore's law, and economic growth in the past week, I can say that that's probably not very true. The Solow paradox says that computers don't seem to add anything to the productivity statistics. That either means computers aren't as useful as we think, or the statistics are wrong. I tend to think it's a little of both, but the result is that MS doesn't do a whole lot for the economy.
The other thing I've learned is that the main way that computers affect the economy at large is because businesses spend so much on them, and because of Moore's law. The price of computers deflates (as opposed to inflation, though I have some problems with how they measure this deflation). Companies are spending more and more on computers and they keep dropping in price faster. This results in a lower natural rate of inflation (sort of), which is one of the reasons we're seeing low inflation and low unemployment at the same time, something which is very rare. But MS hasn't contributed anything to lower prices for computers. In fact, they go against it. Computers have gone from ~$2000 to ~$1000 recently, and the price of Windows stays the same, making it an ever-increasing part of the total cost.
Disclaimer: IANAE (Economist)
To summarize: Users pay for it, it's not at all abstract, and it's a hell of a lot more than a few bucks per machine.
Educate yourself and then step back into the ring when you have something valid to say
What you say is true, but it's not like what he says is not true. No need to be mean about it. Think: How many normal computer purchasers actually notice the price of Windows? With Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc., I seriously doubt they do. So that leaves someone shopping at a place like yours, where it is specifically itemized on the bill. His point was not that the cost of Windows is not actually substantial or is not passed onto consumers, but that in almost every case they don't notice, at least not to the point where they would buy a pirated copy, even if they had the technical knowledge to install it.
Did you read the message? I'll admit, the point-by-point arguments get kind of old, but this wasn't one of them. Microsoft wrote the article and tried to pass it off as independent. That seems pretty significant, and probably more people than just us care about that.
Don't listen to the naysayers till they actually have something constructive to say.
We all know that Dvorak was the one who published the great results about the Dvorak keyboard. Of course the results were biased. But that doesn't mean it's a worse keyboard.
You have only to look at a QWERTY keyboard to see that it was not designed to be easy. Notice that you can type "typewriter" using only keys on the top row. You think that is a coincidence? Also, see how many words you can type on the home row with QWERTY. Not many. How many with Dvorak (it's aoeuidhtns for those who don't know).
I have never heard of anyone who learned Dvorak "properly" who regretted the change, myself included.
Studies? We don't need no steeenking studies.
Well, it was published yesterday, which means he wrote it before (probably Friday or earlier). Depending on your view of "drawing board", it may or may not be true.
This is the first I've heard that they actually pay royalties to the makers of the product they ship. Still, perhaps the reason no one gives them any respect is that they don't actually do that much. People respect Mandrake and Red Hat, but what reason is there to talk about MacMillan? It's not like it's a different product. It's just a different box! And a box from a company that has zero presence in "the community", except for some books which are most certainly not free. The article argues that we should pay attention to MacMillan because they sell so many copies, but I just did a Slashdot search on Cheapbytes (an equivalent operations, I suppose). Two responses, neither of which has anything to do with Linux. Why again are we supposed to discuss distributors in detail when one of the benefits of all this open source is that we're not subject to them?
Are you more likely to get something medicinally useful from a given plant than from a given animal? I though the only reason so many medicines come from plants is because there are so many more of them and they move a lot less.
My thinking is that they died out for a reason, and they'll die out again (especially if there is only one!)
Wait a second--you can't clone a plant like this. So far as I know, this process only works for mammals, since they gestate in a womb.
What about when I hose sendmail by installing a bad RPM and need to get the old one back? Starting in single-user would be a much more difficult way of doing things than just starting everything at init5 except sendmail and downloading the RPM. Sure, you can do it your way, but that's a lot harder.
Except that requires root access. Your answer is correct and perhaps more elegant (personally I use the GNOME international keyboard applet), but it won't work on a cluster machine where you're just a user.