When they see huge upside (i.e., a chance to sell out to a bigger company, a chance to get unique position in a huge market), they are willing to play long-shots like Napster.
Amazon.com is a good example. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of their stock sales have been to high-stakes speculators who were hoping to score big, not careful investors who thought it was a solid bet.
The rumor that Apple will put a G4 into a laptop Real Soon Now is not news... it's almost inevitable, as the logical progression of the product line. I might as well put up a web news site and proclaim that Gnome is expected to adopt the drag-and-drop paradigm that Macs and Windows have been using for text manipulation.
Now, any hard news about a subnotebook... that would be interesting. However, given that the Cube was one of the first rumors that the MacGossip sites have gotten right in a long, long time (and that was not until the week before the announcement), I would not hold my breath waiting for them to come up with any real dish on what the Cupertino campus is up to.
The story ran on/. on Sunday evening, right? (Post #3 was from about 10:00) If you check the story posts, by shortly after Midnight on Monday morning the/. readers started shouting "It's a hoax"... right around post 170 or so.
So, it took less than three hours for somebody to catch on that it was a hoax.
Given how remarkable and suspicious the story was, the/. staff should have had their guard up. They would have spotted the holes in the story right away had they bothered to look for them.
The fact that you were fooled after you saw the story from source you trust does not change the fact that their job, as news editors, is to be a little more critial and thoughtful.
Speaking of hoaxes, I do not believe for a second that your CEO ordered a "SETI Accelerator", unless your company thinks it has some strange plan for making money by evaluating random noise from space.:P
1. Raise a ton of VC money. 2. Provide a service to help script kiddies violate Metallica's copyrights. 3. Get sued for providing the service. 4. Raise a bunch more VC money. 5. Settle out of court with the record companies for a gajillion dollars, most of which you borrow or agree to pay over a few years. Include, as part of the settlement, and agreement by which you pay a fee to be a licensed distributer of MP3 files related to the big record companies. 6. Become the biggest player in the world in on-line music distribution. 7. Cash out your options before the business collapses under its own weight, retire and live like fat cats.
So far, Napster has completed step 4, and are surely working on step 5. I'm no Nostrodamous, but I got a feeling I'm on to something here.
Prithee tell, what IS the unambiguously legal use of allowing ANYBODY to download your.mp3 files, including copyrighted ones?
A CD-ROM burner allows ANYBODY to copy music files onto a CD, including copyrighted ones that could be distributed.
You could even make the argument that the main draw of CD-R is copyright violation. It's not a particularilly good medium to replace tape backups (although CD-RW isn't quite as bad), and is much slower than a HD for file access. Obviously, the makers of CD-R hardware (and related software) would not get nearly as many sales were it not for people who want to copy music and games.
By your argument, makers of CD-R drives should be sued, and the devices should be outlawed.
You are absolutely right that the cheat coders are usually hackers who find grepping and editing the code more interesting than the game itself, while cheat users are sort of the in-game equivelent of DDOS script kiddies.
This would not happen if playing these games honestly was as fun as it is supposed to be.
The problem with the entire RPG genre of on-line games is that it isn't really the fun that hooks people in, it is the basic stimulus-response instinct that keeps people up all night playing Everquest or a MUD. By making you do things to get rewards (levels, new items, etc.), and by dishing them out a little at a time (with a fair ammount of randomization), these games tap into the same psychological conditioning scheme that makes old ladies spend their retirement checks all day at slot machines and BINGO games.
Since the satisfaction one gets in these games is usually the reward of a more powerful character, the mind begins to make the association of "better character == more fun", and cheating, or power-leveling, or "twinking" becomes very attractive.
The draw of these games is that they sort of let you live life in fast-forward. In a few dozen hours of gaming, you go from being a pathetic babe in the woods to being a massive warrior or wizard. Cheating speeds this up even more. It's a logical extention of the persuit of the goals the game establishes, really.
You don't often see the kind of rampant cheating that prevailed in Diablo 1 or Ultima Online when you are playing the FPS games. It seems that the shooters have acquired a sort of sports culture. To cheat at Team Fortress would be a lot like cheating at a pick-up basketball game. Neither side has more fun as a result, because the rewards of player-vs-player gaming comes from the joys of testing your skills against other people. Cheating in such situations is boring for both the cheater and the victim, even among younger kids.
It seems to me that the challenge that lies before those who wish to write on-line RPG's is to get a little farther away from the "kill monster, get a treat" format that is so common to these games. Good storytelling is helpful; nobody cheats at games like Myst. Creating a social environment that facilitates less of a "who's got the biggest *" mindset would also reduce cheating dramatically.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the typical hack-and-slash, smash-and-grab RPG does not have its place. I wore out a mouse on the first Diablo, same as the next geek. All I am trying to say is that game designers ought to start thinking beyond it, now that the current technology allows them to explore a lot of new avenues.
News Flash! High Tech Law Journal Publishes Story About Computer Crime!
In other breaking news, Playboy Magazine publishes photographs of nude women, and the Wall Street Journal has printed yesterday's closing NYSE stock prices.
We will continue to report on these shocking events as they unfold.
As a libertarian myself, I feel obliged to provide a little nitpicking to your post.
1. The Federal Reserve was established specifically to prevent depressions. In the 1890's, private banks took a bath to stop a major crash from turning into a depression, partly out of self interest (what good it to be rich in a failed economy?), and partly out of a sense of obligation. The Fed often must take on the same role... for all the tied with the government, it is still basically a private banking institution which underwrites the American economy. We are better off with it than without it.
2. The Great Depression was caused by a lot of factors, among the most note-worthy: the practice of over-extending debt to invest money you don't have, which resulted in lots of loans defaulting when the market crashed, followed by lots of people trying to get at money the banks simply did not have; a major real-estate crash after the hurricane that took out Miami Beach, the resort town where a lot of "new money" was tied up; a massive drought in Oklahoma and Arkansas, making exiles of thousands of farming families (who also defaulted on bank loans), Europe's inability to completely recover economically from the cost of WWI; the list goes on.
FDR's efforts to provide government jobs by building lots of dams and bridges was not terribly successful at restoring the economy, but a lot of people were able to eat who might not have otherwise, and the boom created by the WWII effort (massive federal deficit along with a productivity boom from putting women to work) finally bailed us out.
You are absolutely correct that free markets almost never create monopolies or trusts. It usually takes another monolithic organization, like the government, to prop one up.
I'm also an ex-player of Everquest. I stuck with it for a few months because I knew a lot of people that played, but finally gave up on it ever being that interesting.
Paying $10 a month to log on to over-taxed and buggy servers is a joke as it is, but then when they finally made a tiny expansion to the game world like they promised back during the initial release, they had the gall to charge their regular customers, who already shelled out $60 plus monthly fees for what is really just a MUD with pictures.
I can't believe you fell for the marketing that paints Celera as anything less than the Microsoft of the biotech industry.
Um. I'm not always the first to stick up for Katz, but I think that was the whole point of his article (such as it was). He even used the expression "the Microsoft of..." as part of his stern warning about Hunkapiller.
Slamming Katz is great fun, though... so I won't hold it against you that you reacted a little too quickly.:)
Einstein was a mega-superstar when he was still alive. Probably the most famous a living scientist ever was in the 20th Centrury... even much more so than Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking.
So, you are saying that the owner of a research company in a field which has not yet produced any obvious practical applications should be a household word!? Somehow, we should all be more likely to know about him that somebody who has had a profound direct effect (for better or worse) on the lifestyles of well over 60% of all Americans?
Riiiiight.
And now it is a "syndrome" that the richest man in the world (until recently) is more famous than a leading venture capitalist in a field that most non-scientists don't yet completely understand.
I wonder what all the chickclickers think about this latest corporatist problem. Is it a threat to our inviolate personality? Good thing we have the sensemakers from the Open Media to raise our awareness of it!
Beethoven (yes, it is spelled like that) made lots of money, but did not manage it very well. He was one of the first successful "free agent" type composers... so much in demand that he really didn't need a patron; he mostly wrote and performed where and when he chose. Part of this stems from the fact that he hated royalty. (He originally dedicated his 3rd symphony, "The Eroica" to Napoleon Bonaparte, until he heard the news of Napoleon crowning himself, at which time he mutilated the dedication page of the score in anger. Later, he wrote his 9th for the "New World". He was a huge believer in democracy.)
Haydn (an even weirder spelling, also correct) enjoyed the benifits of the patronage system to the fullest.
Leadbelly, like most great folk singers, had a pretty hard life.
I played a lot of soccer as a kid. America has considered it a great sport for youngsters to play for a long time, but there have been several attempts to get a professional soccer league off the ground in the US, with little success. Minnesota has had two teams in two different leagues over the past 20 years, both were huge economic failures. For some reason, it hasn't drawn fans in the US the way other sports has.
(One huge exception is women's soccer, which we all love. Mia Hamm is a superstar over here, occationally doing Gatorade commercials with Michael Jordan.)
American football, on the other hand, has started to catch on in some parts of Europe. Some of the games get broadcast over here, and it looks like the stadiums in places like Scotland and Rhine are drawing pretty big crowds.
1. An all-pro NFL lineman on either side of the ball these days is usually over 275 pounds and fast as hell. (Every year, there are a few more guys that enter the league with 300 pounds of ropey, horse-like muscle.) I remember in High School we had a kid in our class that went on to play college ball in Iowa. Years later, he still holds the school bench-press record, and was nearly all-state for the 100-meter dash. As terrifyingly strong and fast as he was, he was not big enough nor was he fast enough to make it in the pros. Don't let the wide bodies fool you, those guys are like steam trains, except the accelerate really fast from a dead start.
2. The pads and head-to-head crashes actually make it a much more brutal game than rugby. Rugby players do not have nearly as many serious injuries as American Football players. One player from the Detroit Lions is still barely able to walk from a collision with a teammate two years ago. (He is lucky to be alive).
3. You will notice that rugby players have not had a lot of success at American football. The Euro-NFL tends to rely a lot on American players. This will probably change a little as more Europeans learn how to play the game, but obviously it is not as easy as they would have guessed.
The comment about soccer not requiring opposable thumbs was just a friendly joke, but it is pretty much true. On those few occations when the ball is picked up it is usually with two hands, so thumbs are optional for the entire team.:)
Not to mention that Seti@home is a waste of precious CPU cycles that could be put to much better use by sitting idle and doing nothing.
Well, here's the big secret. There are aliens. They know about us, and they are deliberately ignoring the SETI signal because they hate Spam!
When we quit wasting bandwidth on nudie drawings of a guy with 4 arms inside a circle, and nearly meaningless mathematical constructs, maybe they'll stop by for a chat. Until then, they'll continue to blow us off as a planet full of time-wasting trolls.
Now, the next lawsuit against them will be much easier.
Ah, but this is another way that they win.
If you live in a state that was covered by one of these settlements (which are pretty much boilerplate now), then you personally can't sue them for anything, because it has alrealy been litigated for you by the state (or the feds, depending on where you live). The lawyers got most of the money, the government took their slice and allocated it to pork-barrel "health awareness promotions", and you get nothing. (Or, as big tobbbacco companies would put it if you caught their eeeevil overlords off-camera, "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Bwahahahaha!!!!!!")
Aren't you glad that your government loves you so much?
Slashdot Mirror
When they see huge upside (i.e., a chance to sell out to a bigger company, a chance to get unique position in a huge market), they are willing to play long-shots like Napster.
Amazon.com is a good example. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of their stock sales have been to high-stakes speculators who were hoping to score big, not careful investors who thought it was a solid bet.
The rumor that Apple will put a G4 into a laptop Real Soon Now is not news... it's almost inevitable, as the logical progression of the product line. I might as well put up a web news site and proclaim that Gnome is expected to adopt the drag-and-drop paradigm that Macs and Windows have been using for text manipulation.
Now, any hard news about a subnotebook... that would be interesting. However, given that the Cube was one of the first rumors that the MacGossip sites have gotten right in a long, long time (and that was not until the week before the announcement), I would not hold my breath waiting for them to come up with any real dish on what the Cupertino campus is up to.
So, it took less than three hours for somebody to catch on that it was a hoax.
Given how remarkable and suspicious the story was, the /. staff should have had their guard up. They would have spotted the holes in the story right away had they bothered to look for them.
The fact that you were fooled after you saw the story from source you trust does not change the fact that their job, as news editors, is to be a little more critial and thoughtful.
Speaking of hoaxes, I do not believe for a second that your CEO ordered a "SETI Accelerator", unless your company thinks it has some strange plan for making money by evaluating random noise from space. :P
It would be nice if they at least did one or the other.
1. Raise a ton of VC money.
2. Provide a service to help script kiddies violate Metallica's copyrights.
3. Get sued for providing the service.
4. Raise a bunch more VC money.
5. Settle out of court with the record companies for a gajillion dollars, most of which you borrow or agree to pay over a few years. Include, as part of the settlement, and agreement by which you pay a fee to be a licensed distributer of MP3 files related to the big record companies.
6. Become the biggest player in the world in on-line music distribution.
7. Cash out your options before the business collapses under its own weight, retire and live like fat cats.
So far, Napster has completed step 4, and are surely working on step 5. I'm no Nostrodamous, but I got a feeling I'm on to something here.
A CD-ROM burner allows ANYBODY to copy music files onto a CD, including copyrighted ones that could be distributed.
You could even make the argument that the main draw of CD-R is copyright violation. It's not a particularilly good medium to replace tape backups (although CD-RW isn't quite as bad), and is much slower than a HD for file access. Obviously, the makers of CD-R hardware (and related software) would not get nearly as many sales were it not for people who want to copy music and games.
By your argument, makers of CD-R drives should be sued, and the devices should be outlawed.
You are absolutely right that the cheat coders are usually hackers who find grepping and editing the code more interesting than the game itself, while cheat users are sort of the in-game equivelent of DDOS script kiddies.
The problem with the entire RPG genre of on-line games is that it isn't really the fun that hooks people in, it is the basic stimulus-response instinct that keeps people up all night playing Everquest or a MUD. By making you do things to get rewards (levels, new items, etc.), and by dishing them out a little at a time (with a fair ammount of randomization), these games tap into the same psychological conditioning scheme that makes old ladies spend their retirement checks all day at slot machines and BINGO games.
Since the satisfaction one gets in these games is usually the reward of a more powerful character, the mind begins to make the association of "better character == more fun", and cheating, or power-leveling, or "twinking" becomes very attractive.
The draw of these games is that they sort of let you live life in fast-forward. In a few dozen hours of gaming, you go from being a pathetic babe in the woods to being a massive warrior or wizard. Cheating speeds this up even more. It's a logical extention of the persuit of the goals the game establishes, really.
You don't often see the kind of rampant cheating that prevailed in Diablo 1 or Ultima Online when you are playing the FPS games. It seems that the shooters have acquired a sort of sports culture. To cheat at Team Fortress would be a lot like cheating at a pick-up basketball game. Neither side has more fun as a result, because the rewards of player-vs-player gaming comes from the joys of testing your skills against other people. Cheating in such situations is boring for both the cheater and the victim, even among younger kids.
It seems to me that the challenge that lies before those who wish to write on-line RPG's is to get a little farther away from the "kill monster, get a treat" format that is so common to these games. Good storytelling is helpful; nobody cheats at games like Myst. Creating a social environment that facilitates less of a "who's got the biggest *" mindset would also reduce cheating dramatically.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the typical hack-and-slash, smash-and-grab RPG does not have its place. I wore out a mouse on the first Diablo, same as the next geek. All I am trying to say is that game designers ought to start thinking beyond it, now that the current technology allows them to explore a lot of new avenues.
In other breaking news, Playboy Magazine publishes photographs of nude women, and the Wall Street Journal has printed yesterday's closing NYSE stock prices.
We will continue to report on these shocking events as they unfold.
1. The Federal Reserve was established specifically to prevent depressions. In the 1890's, private banks took a bath to stop a major crash from turning into a depression, partly out of self interest (what good it to be rich in a failed economy?), and partly out of a sense of obligation. The Fed often must take on the same role... for all the tied with the government, it is still basically a private banking institution which underwrites the American economy. We are better off with it than without it.
2. The Great Depression was caused by a lot of factors, among the most note-worthy: the practice of over-extending debt to invest money you don't have, which resulted in lots of loans defaulting when the market crashed, followed by lots of people trying to get at money the banks simply did not have; a major real-estate crash after the hurricane that took out Miami Beach, the resort town where a lot of "new money" was tied up; a massive drought in Oklahoma and Arkansas, making exiles of thousands of farming families (who also defaulted on bank loans), Europe's inability to completely recover economically from the cost of WWI; the list goes on.
FDR's efforts to provide government jobs by building lots of dams and bridges was not terribly successful at restoring the economy, but a lot of people were able to eat who might not have otherwise, and the boom created by the WWII effort (massive federal deficit along with a productivity boom from putting women to work) finally bailed us out.
You are absolutely correct that free markets almost never create monopolies or trusts. It usually takes another monolithic organization, like the government, to prop one up.
Paying $10 a month to log on to over-taxed and buggy servers is a joke as it is, but then when they finally made a tiny expansion to the game world like they promised back during the initial release, they had the gall to charge their regular customers, who already shelled out $60 plus monthly fees for what is really just a MUD with pictures.
Screw EQ. Go Worldforge team!
Solaris is designed to run on Sun's boxes. They may have gotten it to work on x86 hardware, but that is not where it shines.
Yea, but then all the other Theo Hasenpfeffers out there would gat hate mail that was sent to the wrong address.
I guess that's what he means by "Open Media".
ROFL. You should have logged in and taken credit for that. Best zinger I've seen on /. in weeks! :)
Heh. The issues Katz raises are never new. He's in the middle of a f*ing series about online privacy, of all things.
For his next feature, I'm sure he will be trying to call our attention to the impact of these new-fangled "auto mobiles" on our society. :)
Um. I'm not always the first to stick up for Katz, but I think that was the whole point of his article (such as it was). He even used the expression "the Microsoft of..." as part of his stern warning about Hunkapiller.
Slamming Katz is great fun, though... so I won't hold it against you that you reacted a little too quickly. :)
Einstein was a mega-superstar when he was still alive. Probably the most famous a living scientist ever was in the 20th Centrury... even much more so than Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking.
Riiiiight.
And now it is a "syndrome" that the richest man in the world (until recently) is more famous than a leading venture capitalist in a field that most non-scientists don't yet completely understand.
I wonder what all the chickclickers think about this latest corporatist problem. Is it a threat to our inviolate personality? Good thing we have the sensemakers from the Open Media to raise our awareness of it!
If you spill your drink down you while you are in a pub do not proclaim that you have 'wet your pants'
That's not an expression unique to England. It means the same thing here as it does there.
Haydn (an even weirder spelling, also correct) enjoyed the benifits of the patronage system to the fullest.
Leadbelly, like most great folk singers, had a pretty hard life.
(One huge exception is women's soccer, which we all love. Mia Hamm is a superstar over here, occationally doing Gatorade commercials with Michael Jordan.)
American football, on the other hand, has started to catch on in some parts of Europe. Some of the games get broadcast over here, and it looks like the stadiums in places like Scotland and Rhine are drawing pretty big crowds.
2. The pads and head-to-head crashes actually make it a much more brutal game than rugby. Rugby players do not have nearly as many serious injuries as American Football players. One player from the Detroit Lions is still barely able to walk from a collision with a teammate two years ago. (He is lucky to be alive).
3. You will notice that rugby players have not had a lot of success at American football. The Euro-NFL tends to rely a lot on American players. This will probably change a little as more Europeans learn how to play the game, but obviously it is not as easy as they would have guessed.
The comment about soccer not requiring opposable thumbs was just a friendly joke, but it is pretty much true. On those few occations when the ball is picked up it is usually with two hands, so thumbs are optional for the entire team. :)
Well, here's the big secret. There are aliens. They know about us, and they are deliberately ignoring the SETI signal because they hate Spam!
When we quit wasting bandwidth on nudie drawings of a guy with 4 arms inside a circle, and nearly meaningless mathematical constructs, maybe they'll stop by for a chat. Until then, they'll continue to blow us off as a planet full of time-wasting trolls.
Ah, but this is another way that they win.
If you live in a state that was covered by one of these settlements (which are pretty much boilerplate now), then you personally can't sue them for anything, because it has alrealy been litigated for you by the state (or the feds, depending on where you live). The lawyers got most of the money, the government took their slice and allocated it to pork-barrel "health awareness promotions", and you get nothing. (Or, as big tobbbacco companies would put it if you caught their eeeevil overlords off-camera, "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Bwahahahaha!!!!!!")
Aren't you glad that your government loves you so much?