Did you know that at one point in the 1950s, a US federal agency (I think it might have been the FDA) recommended DDT for use as a genital lice remover?
I don't understand what your point is here. There would have been nothing wrong with that use of DDT. It was the widespread use in agriculture that caused problems. What's so outrageous or horrifying about using DDT to kill lice? In fact, it's rediculous that people cannot use DDT to kill lice today because we found the use of DDT to be harmful in other applications. From what I heard, DDT was one of the most reliable treatments.
I have received very little spam since having this account (nigh on 4 years), and have seen no correlation between posting on slashdot and spam.
Yeah, just be careful who you piss off. I said something negative about the Xbox around when it came out, and some obnoxious fanboy subscribed me to a half a million mailing lists out of spite. Oh well, 90% of it gets caught by the filter.
Last I checked, 3rd party developers will have shipped 150 titles by years end.
Do you think that PS2 developers are going to sit on their hands? The PS2 library is not only already much larger then the Xbox library, but it's growing faster then the Xbox library too. If you've already got a PS2, then there's no reason to buy an Xbox, and Sony's sold (is selling) a lot of PS2s.
Anyway, now that I know that the Xenosaga games are coming out for PS2, I know I made the right choice!
What if you get the virus through an executable, and it infects your registry and local executables. Can we blame microsoft then, since it's been 20 years, and they still haven't come out with a patch for Windows version whatever that adds filesystem security? (XP doesn't count as a patch, since $100+ is a little steep for a virus preventing patch)
They should have innovated their way into the future 15 years ago instead of letting their marketing department drive the technology. Every other consumer oriented OS that was produced in that time frame got filesystem security before the home flavors of Windows did. No write access, no infection.
So you don't want us to buy from WalMart because they pinch pennies, expect their employees to work when they're at work, and because they make lots of money?
As with OOP itself, generic programming is a Really Good Idea(TM)
Be careful. It's generalizations like this that end up in the hands of managers and can lead to Really Bad Software(TM). There are plenty of cases where a small generalized solution is more apropriate. THere is no golden paradigm for software development.
I agree that piracy equals theft, and I did show that with my example, however you say "either method deprives the producer and/or distributor of their share of revenue on the software product in question". This is not true in the special case where the revenue is $0. When a person will not otherwise buy the product, the revenue that the company is loosing is $0. Because of that, only in cases where the software pirate would have actually paid for the product does the piracy result in a loss for the company. This is different then with shoplifting, since the revenue is less then $0 in the transaction because the company had costs involved in physically putting the product on the shelf that they can now not recover.
Ok, we're going to take words away from you now, because they mean things, and you don't want to acknowledge that. We're going to use math instead. You can't argue with math unless it's added up wrong. Here we go.
Software company 'A' sells a piece of software for $159.95. User 'Bob' doesn't have $159.95 to spend on software. Now, if we take the amount of money that company 'A' has when 'Bob' doesn't buy the software, and subtract it from the amount of money that the company 'A' has when 'Bob' pirates the software we get the indisputably correct amount of money that company 'A' has lost from 'Bob's piracy. I hope you can add, because here we go:
$0 - $0 = $0.
That's right, the company lost $0. $0. That's it, just $0.
I'm a professional software developer. That's what I do for a living. I fully understand that software piracy is bad, but to say that every pirated copy is a loss of money is just a lie. Some are, some aren't. I just showed you the math to prove it. Stop spreading you BSA marketing department lies.
If you want people to listen to you, more importantly if you want to influence people, then you have to tell the truth. People aren't stupid, and they can tell when you are lying to them. If you want to convince people to stop pirating software, you will have to find honest arguments, and you should know that there are many of them. Even 'Bob' the hypothetical software pirate can add, so your arguement won't work on him.
You don't have to go completely open source either. Keep a few Windows PCs and Macs with the proprietary stuff and let the BSA worry about those. You can fix the bulk of the problem by converting the bulk of the machines completely to open source software; the BSA can spend as much time as they want crawling around those machines.
That would be great except that the MS site licenses for universities require you to purchase licenses for every machine on your campus, wether it runs windows or not.
Ever try to find a open source tax preperation program? Doesn't exist. True, you can get lots of programs from the open source world, but the more specialized the programs get, the less likely you will find a free alternative.
Software does not have to be open source to run on an open source system. TurboTax for the web works great in Mozilla and Netscape 4.7x under linux. I did my taxes this year with software running under linux just fine.
Yes, just as many games as they would have had to sell before...
Ok, if they stopped console production, and managed to sell off the remaining stock, they would only have had to sell as many games as before. The problem is the stock isn't sold, and they made enough units to cover their incorrect projections. They will sell that overstock, but it'll be at a reduced price (Read: increased cost to Microsoft). Now, if you increase the amount of money you loose on each console sale, you increase the number of games you have to sell before you start making a profit. It's simple math. No matter what the bottom line for MS will be smaller then what they thought it would be because they had to lower prices. You are correct that only time will tell if they come out in the black, but that is only one measure of the success of a product. I don't understand what "games selling consoles, not the other way around" has to do with it. Wait, yes I do. It has nothing to do with it. If microsoft makes enough good games to sell the console, but not enough good games to break even on the console, then they've failed.
How many more games does microsoft have to sell per unit now? Well lets see: They're loosing $145 additional dollars per sale at the new European price. Lets say they pocket $30 for the sale of each game (That's likely generous considering how much marketing they do) $145/$30 = ~5 additional games per unit before they are turning a profit. What percentage does 5 games make up of the average number of games that are purchased for a particular console over it's life (My guess is between 10 and 20%)? How many games did microsoft already have to sell to break even?
The biggest mistake MS (and Sony and Nintendo) have made was in keeping thier sales predictions and expectations at such a high level in the face of ongoing economic problems and more recent political and social concerns that, while they don't directly effect the demand, do have an effect on how buyers will proritize making the purchase of a console.
I'm curious as to why you say that, since only MS seems to be having problems meeting it's sales projections (Though Nintendo hasn't launched in Europe yet, so we don't know what will happen with that).
mainly I've had bad luck with the memory cards on my PS breaking,
Add that into the fact that those memory cards are so fragile,
Sounds like someone bought clone memory cards. I've never had a sony memory card break, but all the clones I've ever bought wore out eventually. I don't know if the problem is as severe with the PS2 as it was with the PSX because flash memory is much more advanced now, but I'm not taking the risk. Two 8Mb sony memory cards should be enough for anyone *. (And you can't bring the hard drive with you:)
The "who has better games" argument is clearly a matter of perspective, but my take on it is that I'll have had two years of great gaming on my PS2 by the time any seriously good games come out for the Xbox. And if any seriously good games come out for the Xbox I can just get the PC port a few months later. 900 MHz CPU's can be had for less then $75 these days, and GeForce 4s will be really cheap soon.
(I don't know how that argument justifies my Gamecube purchase though, since I've been pretty dissapointed with the speed at which games have been released. As long as I get a Mario game, a Zelda game, a Mario Cart game, and Perfect Dark 2, I'll think the $200 was justified.)
--
*(on a PS2 I mean, I'm not making a vast prediction about future consoles here!)
True, the sales figures were lower than expected, but not THAT much lower
I know you want to stick up for your Xbox because you don't want to feel so bad about flushing all that cash, but missing sales targets by more then 50% in Europe, and by way more then that in Japan when you're already taking a big hit on the cost of the hardware to begin with is called failure where I come from. Any company but Microsoft would have been forced to pull out of those markets or go out of business. Do you know how many more games they're going to have to sell now just to break even?
If you've read any of the low carb diet books (eg, Protein Power, Dr Atkins Diet) they can tell you all kinds of tales of hyperinsulinemia and many related ills coming from a high carb diet.
If you go to dhmo.org you'll find 100% acurate and scientifically verified tales about Dihydrogen Monoxide causing many ills including sudden death. You'd better go read it becuase Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in all the meat you eat! And you though carbs were your problem?
...and your social skills are such that you can't interact with customers.
The things that make a person a good programmer are the same ones that stop you from being a good manager.
You, sir, have a funny idea as to what the requirements are to be a good programmer. To be effective at producing code in a multi-developer environment, you need to be able to communicate. You need the social skills. Similarly, if you want to make any reasonable amount of money being a solo programmer, you need to be able to manage yourself and talk frequently with the customer. You also have to be able to express your thoughts and ideas in (insert spoken language of your choice here), on paper, so the customer can understand why they wnat to give you money instead of someone else. If you don't have the social and managerial skills then for you programming will be a dead end job. Also know as a job where "you can't move up and you're too valuable to the company to move down"
While writing this comment it became clear to me that C-x C-s should submit in Mozilla:)
The neat stretching my Toshiba 50H80 does to fill 16:9 with 4:3 is PERFECT!
Doesn't it bother you that everything is too wide? I hate when the aspect ratio is incorrect. I'd rather there were horizontal black bars down the sides of the screen...
Aargh! My mom got that on wednesday, and it overwrote all her images and cad drawings. It also, running on one machine, saturated her entire 7.5Mb/sec office internet connection and sent out 1500 copies of itself in less then an hour. Nasty!
There are two types of stories you hear about nvidia drivers. (I speak as someone who has three machines running nvidia cards)
You see the people who have no trouble, and assume that th because they have no trouble the drivers are great, and hence nvidia is great. And then there's everybody else. Each of my 3 machines have had the X server die on occation running the nvidia driver. I have never seen XFree86 die when running any of the open modules that come with it. The module from nvidia doesn't like if you use 2 cards, wether they be both nvidia cards or otherwise. The nvidia driver doesn't always properly put monitors to sleep when it blanks the screen. I have lost a monitor to this bug. This is what you call great support? Where are the binaries for all the other platforms? Where is the support for non-X related graphics? What if I want a dual head framebuffer console?
Are you trying to tell me that you have never had XFree86 die on you with the nvidia driver? I don't believe you. You either haven't been using it for long, you reboot into windows all the time and never have a session open for very long, or you're lieing.
Here's the point. The binary nvidia drivers for linux suck at what they're intended to do (support nvidia cards on i386 linux boxes), and that doesn't even touch on all the things that they can't do because nvidia doesn't bother letting you (like using them on a mac). The open source driver is good, but it can't do 3d, and it can't support dual-headed cards, so I'm forced to have my session disappear out of under me at random once every month or so, or go out and drop a load of cash on a new, non-nvidia, dual head card. Grrr.
This has nothing to do with philosophy, that's another issue for another time. Doing more then any other manufacturer (which isn't true, unless you only count video) isn't good enough. Why is it that if you're a corporation that buys some nvidia chips, they give you the specs so you can program for them, but if you're a consumer that buys some nvidia chips, you don't get the specs, and you aren't allowed to program for them. Why the double standard. Hell, we even pay more for each chip then some company that's buying in bulk. Is it too much to ask to want to know how to use the device you've spent good money on? What good are all the features if they won't tell you how to turn them on.
NVIDIA: if you're reading this, release the dual head specs! I don't care about 3D support, just let me implement dual head in the open source driver! (And what's up with the splash screen, why do we need to wait for that?)
--
And now, off to be modded down by all the nvidia fanboys with mod points...
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that at one point in the 1950s, a US federal agency (I think it might have been the FDA) recommended DDT for use as a genital lice remover?
I don't understand what your point is here. There would have been nothing wrong with that use of DDT. It was the widespread use in agriculture that caused problems. What's so outrageous or horrifying about using DDT to kill lice? In fact, it's rediculous that people cannot use DDT to kill lice today because we found the use of DDT to be harmful in other applications. From what I heard, DDT was one of the most reliable treatments.
Huh? I don't need to be told that the distributor must provide the source at minimal cost if asked?
The distributer needs to know that, but not the user. It would be nice if the user knows that, but it's not necissary.
I can do whatever I like with it and only worry about the license terms after I become a distributor?
Not after, but until. You can do absolutely anything you want with GPL code as long as you don't distribute it.
4.8 times what though?
You can tell that it's part of the OS because you had to reboot after the upgrade.
I have received very little spam since having this account (nigh on 4 years), and have seen no correlation between posting on slashdot and spam.
Yeah, just be careful who you piss off. I said something negative about the Xbox around when it came out, and some obnoxious fanboy subscribed me to a half a million mailing lists out of spite. Oh well, 90% of it gets caught by the filter.
Last I checked, 3rd party developers will have shipped 150 titles by years end.
Do you think that PS2 developers are going to sit on their hands? The PS2 library is not only already much larger then the Xbox library, but it's growing faster then the Xbox library too. If you've already got a PS2, then there's no reason to buy an Xbox, and Sony's sold (is selling) a lot of PS2s.
Anyway, now that I know that the Xenosaga games are coming out for PS2, I know I made the right choice!
What if you get the virus through an executable, and it infects your registry and local executables. Can we blame microsoft then, since it's been 20 years, and they still haven't come out with a patch for Windows version whatever that adds filesystem security? (XP doesn't count as a patch, since $100+ is a little steep for a virus preventing patch)
They should have innovated their way into the future 15 years ago instead of letting their marketing department drive the technology. Every other consumer oriented OS that was produced in that time frame got filesystem security before the home flavors of Windows did. No write access, no infection.
So you don't want us to buy from WalMart because they pinch pennies, expect their employees to work when they're at work, and because they make lots of money?
I don't get it.
As with OOP itself, generic programming is a Really Good Idea(TM)
Be careful. It's generalizations like this that end up in the hands of managers and can lead to Really Bad Software(TM). There are plenty of cases where a small generalized solution is more apropriate. THere is no golden paradigm for software development.
I agree that piracy equals theft, and I did show that with my example, however you say "either method deprives the producer and/or distributor of their share of revenue on the software product in question". This is not true in the special case where the revenue is $0. When a person will not otherwise buy the product, the revenue that the company is loosing is $0. Because of that, only in cases where the software pirate would have actually paid for the product does the piracy result in a loss for the company. This is different then with shoplifting, since the revenue is less then $0 in the transaction because the company had costs involved in physically putting the product on the shelf that they can now not recover.
Ok, we're going to take words away from you now, because they mean things, and you don't want to acknowledge that. We're going to use math instead. You can't argue with math unless it's added up wrong. Here we go.
Software company 'A' sells a piece of software for $159.95. User 'Bob' doesn't have $159.95 to spend on software. Now, if we take the amount of money that company 'A' has when 'Bob' doesn't buy the software, and subtract it from the amount of money that the company 'A' has when 'Bob' pirates the software we get the indisputably correct amount of money that company 'A' has lost from 'Bob's piracy. I hope you can add, because here we go:
$0 - $0 = $0.
That's right, the company lost $0. $0. That's it, just $0.
I'm a professional software developer. That's what I do for a living. I fully understand that software piracy is bad, but to say that every pirated copy is a loss of money is just a lie. Some are, some aren't. I just showed you the math to prove it. Stop spreading you BSA marketing department lies.
If you want people to listen to you, more importantly if you want to influence people, then you have to tell the truth. People aren't stupid, and they can tell when you are lying to them. If you want to convince people to stop pirating software, you will have to find honest arguments, and you should know that there are many of them. Even 'Bob' the hypothetical software pirate can add, so your arguement won't work on him.
FreeDos
You don't have to go completely open source either. Keep a few Windows PCs and Macs with the proprietary stuff and let the BSA worry about those. You can fix the bulk of the problem by converting the bulk of the machines completely to open source software; the BSA can spend as much time as they want crawling around those machines.
That would be great except that the MS site licenses for universities require you to purchase licenses for every machine on your campus, wether it runs windows or not.
Ever try to find a open source tax preperation program? Doesn't exist. True, you can get lots of programs from the open source world, but the more specialized the programs get, the less likely you will find a free alternative.
Software does not have to be open source to run on an open source system. TurboTax for the web works great in Mozilla and Netscape 4.7x under linux. I did my taxes this year with software running under linux just fine.
Yes, just as many games as they would have had to sell before...
Ok, if they stopped console production, and managed to sell off the remaining stock, they would only have had to sell as many games as before. The problem is the stock isn't sold, and they made enough units to cover their incorrect projections. They will sell that overstock, but it'll be at a reduced price (Read: increased cost to Microsoft). Now, if you increase the amount of money you loose on each console sale, you increase the number of games you have to sell before you start making a profit. It's simple math. No matter what the bottom line for MS will be smaller then what they thought it would be because they had to lower prices. You are correct that only time will tell if they come out in the black, but that is only one measure of the success of a product. I don't understand what "games selling consoles, not the other way around" has to do with it. Wait, yes I do. It has nothing to do with it. If microsoft makes enough good games to sell the console, but not enough good games to break even on the console, then they've failed.
How many more games does microsoft have to sell per unit now? Well lets see: They're loosing $145 additional dollars per sale at the new European price. Lets say they pocket $30 for the sale of each game (That's likely generous considering how much marketing they do) $145/$30 = ~5 additional games per unit before they are turning a profit. What percentage does 5 games make up of the average number of games that are purchased for a particular console over it's life (My guess is between 10 and 20%)? How many games did microsoft already have to sell to break even?
The biggest mistake MS (and Sony and Nintendo) have made was in keeping thier sales predictions
and expectations at such a high level in the face of ongoing economic problems and more recent
political and social concerns that, while they don't directly effect the demand, do have
an effect on how buyers will proritize making the purchase of a console.
I'm curious as to why you say that, since only MS seems to be having problems meeting it's sales projections (Though Nintendo hasn't launched in Europe yet, so we don't know what will happen with that).
mainly I've had bad luck with the memory cards on my PS breaking,
:)
Add that into the fact that those memory cards are so fragile,
Sounds like someone bought clone memory cards. I've never had a sony memory card break, but all the clones I've ever bought wore out eventually. I don't know if the problem is as severe with the PS2 as it was with the PSX because flash memory is much more advanced now, but I'm not taking the risk. Two 8Mb sony memory cards should be enough for anyone *. (And you can't bring the hard drive with you
The "who has better games" argument is clearly a matter of perspective, but my take on it is that I'll have had two years of great gaming on my PS2 by the time any seriously good games come out for the Xbox. And if any seriously good games come out for the Xbox I can just get the PC port a few months later. 900 MHz CPU's can be had for less then $75 these days, and GeForce 4s will be really cheap soon.
(I don't know how that argument justifies my Gamecube purchase though, since I've been pretty dissapointed with the speed at which games have been released. As long as I get a Mario game, a Zelda game, a Mario Cart game, and Perfect Dark 2, I'll think the $200 was justified.)
--
*(on a PS2 I mean, I'm not making a vast prediction about future consoles here!)
True, the sales figures were lower than expected, but not THAT much lower
I know you want to stick up for your Xbox because you don't want to feel so bad about flushing all that cash, but missing sales targets by more then 50% in Europe, and by way more then that in Japan when you're already taking a big hit on the cost of the hardware to begin with is called failure where I come from. Any company but Microsoft would have been forced to pull out of those markets or go out of business. Do you know how many more games they're going to have to sell now just to break even?
I think you people fail to appreciate just how significant subcultural differences are.
The differences are only significant if you fail to overcome them, which is my point. I thank you for repeatedly driving it home for me.
It is interesting to note that a person talented in communication can overcome the subcultural barrier for both sides of the interaction.
Working well with other developers and being able to ineract well with customer are widely divergent activities.
The difference is simply a matter of perspective. Either way, those are skills you need to advance from mediocrity.
If you've read any of the low carb diet books (eg, Protein Power, Dr Atkins Diet) they can tell you all kinds of tales of hyperinsulinemia and many related ills coming from a high carb diet.
If you go to dhmo.org you'll find 100% acurate and scientifically verified tales about Dihydrogen Monoxide causing many ills including sudden death. You'd better go read it becuase Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in all the meat you eat! And you though carbs were your problem?
...and your social skills are such that you can't interact with customers.
:)
The things that make a person a good programmer are the same ones that stop you from being a good manager.
You, sir, have a funny idea as to what the requirements are to be a good programmer. To be effective at producing code in a multi-developer environment, you need to be able to communicate. You need the social skills. Similarly, if you want to make any reasonable amount of money being a solo programmer, you need to be able to manage yourself and talk frequently with the customer. You also have to be able to express your thoughts and ideas in (insert spoken language of your choice here), on paper, so the customer can understand why they wnat to give you money instead of someone else. If you don't have the social and managerial skills then for you programming will be a dead end job. Also know as a job where "you can't move up and you're too valuable to the company to move down"
While writing this comment it became clear to me that C-x C-s should submit in Mozilla
The neat stretching my Toshiba 50H80 does to fill 16:9 with 4:3 is PERFECT!
Doesn't it bother you that everything is too wide? I hate when the aspect ratio is incorrect. I'd rather there were horizontal black bars down the sides of the screen...
Sweet! Thanks!
Aargh! My mom got that on wednesday, and it overwrote all her images and cad drawings. It also, running on one machine, saturated her entire 7.5Mb/sec office internet connection and sent out 1500 copies of itself in less then an hour. Nasty!
There are two types of stories you hear about nvidia drivers. (I speak as someone who has three machines running nvidia cards)
You see the people who have no trouble, and assume that th because they have no trouble the drivers are great, and hence nvidia is great. And then there's everybody else. Each of my 3 machines have had the X server die on occation running the nvidia driver. I have never seen XFree86 die when running any of the open modules that come with it. The module from nvidia doesn't like if you use 2 cards, wether they be both nvidia cards or otherwise. The nvidia driver doesn't always properly put monitors to sleep when it blanks the screen. I have lost a monitor to this bug. This is what you call great support? Where are the binaries for all the other platforms? Where is the support for non-X related graphics? What if I want a dual head framebuffer console?
Are you trying to tell me that you have never had XFree86 die on you with the nvidia driver? I don't believe you. You either haven't been using it for long, you reboot into windows all the time and never have a session open for very long, or you're lieing.
Here's the point. The binary nvidia drivers for linux suck at what they're intended to do (support nvidia cards on i386 linux boxes), and that doesn't even touch on all the things that they can't do because nvidia doesn't bother letting you (like using them on a mac). The open source driver is good, but it can't do 3d, and it can't support dual-headed cards, so I'm forced to have my session disappear out of under me at random once every month or so, or go out and drop a load of cash on a new, non-nvidia, dual head card. Grrr.
This has nothing to do with philosophy, that's another issue for another time. Doing more then any other manufacturer (which isn't true, unless you only count video) isn't good enough. Why is it that if you're a corporation that buys some nvidia chips, they give you the specs so you can program for them, but if you're a consumer that buys some nvidia chips, you don't get the specs, and you aren't allowed to program for them. Why the double standard. Hell, we even pay more for each chip then some company that's buying in bulk. Is it too much to ask to want to know how to use the device you've spent good money on? What good are all the features if they won't tell you how to turn them on.
NVIDIA: if you're reading this, release the dual head specs! I don't care about 3D support, just let me implement dual head in the open source driver! (And what's up with the splash screen, why do we need to wait for that?)
--
And now, off to be modded down by all the nvidia fanboys with mod points...