If EA, Activision, THQ, MS, Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Zenimax and Take Two are all, in one way or another on board, your options for non-online 'enabled' games shrink pretty fast.
Made even worse if this is enabled via a distribution channel (the console stores, Steam, Games for Windows Live, whatever the hell it is I log into for Dragon age and Mass effect), which then eliminates the barrier to adopting this DRM system from anyone who has any money.
Sure, there's always indie games. I'm working with(not for) a company right now that will make a PC game for about 2 million, 6 employees, 2 years, but of course they have a publisher (not one mentioned above). 2 Million isn't a huge amount, but most really good games come in 3-5x that, just for development, if you want to hear about it ever, or find it in stores or on the digital distribution stuff you're looking closer to 10 million, now you're talking money you can't just go to the bank and ask for. And that kind of money comes from one of the big publishers, who will of course, demand it be online 'enabled'.
The more people go on about 'I'll just pirate it rather than deal with broken DRM" the more the DRM is going to shift to be less DRM and more buying online "services" which give you access to the content you actually want.
Ah but you see they are working hard to eliminate the competition from piracy. I don't have DA2 yet, but notice with DA1 it logs you in every time you try and play? The infrastructure around the game is now like an MMO even if the content itself is single player. If you don't log in, you don't have access to any of the downloaded content (which fairly quickly can become problematic if you rely on any of it for gameplay).
With ME2 EA claimed to look at piracy as get another venue to get customers to buy DLC. But if the game itself is accessed via your account, and they have some reasonably good method of tying a game to an account, well, it becomes significantly harder to pirate doesn't it?
I'm not saying that's good. But the gaming business is moving to 'integrate' online even into single player, and is going to put your saves in a cloud and so on, wrapped up together this significantly raises the barrier of entry to piracy, and makes used game sales nearly a thing of the past. You can say all you want they're competing with piracy, but from their perspective they are doing everything they can shy of putting a FOB key in the box to force you to either buy it, or not play it.
After all, Microsoft really hasn't "lost" $1.2 million in cash
Careful now. Microsoft points can be used to purchase things from the MS store. Not all of which are owned by MS. If I developed and XBLA game, or DLC for something I expect my 70% (I think it's 70%, steam is 70%, I haven't worked with anyone using MS points in a while), whether the points where legitimate or not is MS's problem. The deal I have is to be compensated, in cash, for downloads of my product through their store.
If they give away 10 million MS points for the hell of it, I still expect to be paid, and it's their pocket it comes out of. If someone hacks the MS algorithm and uses that to buy my stuff either my stuff should be pulled from their account (a non trivial, but perhaps necessary thing to do), or I get paid.
There's a much deeper discussion here about points versus a cash wallet. Points they can give away, take back etc. all for free. But if it's real money there are all sorts of tax implications and so on to giving away, or winning 1000 free 'points'. Which is why they use points in the first place. But on the other side, if someone spends 800 points on my DLC, I expect to be paid the $7 or whater that works out to now.
A computer is really good at finding optimal strategies if you can properly quantify relevant variables. In sport there is advantage in not taking an optimal strategy, because your opponent won't know which non optimal strategy you've chosen until it's too late. If you're going to use randomness to determine which strategy to use, then the computer is no better than a coach.
That assumes, probably wrongly, that you can quantify what's going on. Is that opposing quarterback's limp important, a fake, how serious is it (numerically)? Even if a computer is good at predicting one particular game, (say the superbowl) that would be based on the data from the whole of the rest of the season to assess how good the players are.
There's a lot of sport to be had in running AI's against each other, especially based on the same sets of data and see what they do. But that is a *very* different problem from actually simulating a real match, yes, the average of 10000 trials may be correct, but there are only a few real games, not thousands. That randomness, sportmanship, and people doing extraordinary, unexpected and great (or stupid) things is what separates a real match from a statistical model.
yes, if there isn't demand for 1000 cars either the price drops, increasing demand until demand peaks, or they go make something else which people do want. 50 years ago there was 0 demand for personal computers, and substantially less demand per capita for cars than their is today, and probably less airplane demand (both personal an commercial). Yes 500 people are laid off, that's why you need to be able to get new, better jobs, and the more mobile and flexible they are the better. I didn't say it was easy in the short term, in fact, quite the contrary, I said the opposite. It's long term gain with substantial short term pain.
But if you're paying 1000 people to do the job of 500, someone else will do it with 500, and put you out of business unless you erect trade barriers, and the more trade barriers you have, the less efficient your market is. As one of the other replies above notes, someone in india can do the same job as an american for 3 bucks an hour (or, more likely it varies wildly based on the job, I could make about 20k/year as a software developer in india or 100k/year in canada, and yes, I can work in both countries, or I could make 50k a year in a car factory in canada, or 5k in india). That means, in effect that we've been massively overpaying for cars ( and software), and more importantly, they've been too poor to buy it from us even if they wanted too.
Peoples demand for 'stuff' is effectively infinite, it's a matter of value for the stuff. We, on average, live in bigger houses, have more cars, more computers, fly more, eat more, get better healthcare etc. than the generation before, and presumably the generation that follows us will go about the same routine.
And because the british, french, and prussians education systems all interacted with each other. And if you didn't base your system on one of theirs, they had a few 'suggestions' backed by very big guns.
That's oddly, how you increase productivity in the long run. If 1000 workers create 1000 cars a year, and you find a way to automate that, so that now 500 people can make 1000 cars a year. The other 500 then could: make a second car company, that in turn produces 1000 cars a year, and reduces the price of cars for everyone, they could make better cars, and compete on quality, or they could go make something else entirely.
Either way, where there was once the value of 1000 cars split between 1000 workers, it is now split between 500 (+ added equipment maintenance), + what the other 500 people are producing.
Technology that lays people off is short term pain for long term gain. The more efficient it is to make more stuff, the more stuff ultimately gets made, which means the more stuff people can have. Retraining from one antiquated skill to a modern one is challenging, but macroscopically not a bad thing. For all its faults the great strength of the American system has always supposedly been your (their?) labour mobility, which is essentially the ability to move between jobs.
The big thing with software is that it's hitting industries that aren't used to competition, and when it hits it isn't gradual. Unlike the car business where bringing in new technology is done one plant at a time, and one part of a plant at a time, software can be instantly in the entire company or sector or world, and very quickly wipes out the use of a huge swath of people
They already have some mechanism in place, to distribute royalties from blank CD's, and from actually sold items. Simply applying whatever algorithm that is to a bigger pot of money, and then letting artists wrangle with the body that handles that over their share of the compensation doesn't seem too difficult.
What it does do is create a serious problem for legitimate online music sales businesses (including apple). Since well.. I'm paying 10 bucks a month for unlimited already, what could I possible pay them for that adds much value? Unlike a CD, where I need to find someone with the CD arrange a chance to copy it, then give me my CD, then I have my CD. Online music stores compete directly with the piratebay. In that you can type in Music_I_want and within about 4 clicks have it start downloading, hopefully to the right place. CD vs Burned CD there's some potential value there (the actual album, a better quality physical disk, etc.), but it's pretty tough to add value to something that can be pirated trivially, as the music business has been learning to its peril.
It creates a legal headache, for example in the US, which, conveniently being next door and also speaking english we face this problem a lot. If a canadian P2P's files from an american, that's not illegal in canada. What do you do to the american? There's probably a messy legal framework here, can the US prohibit someone in its country from engaging in a legal activity in another, with whom there are friendly treaties. Music files aren't exactly state secrets.
I'm in canada, so lots of websites that do location detection show me pretty crappy, off topic or downright strange adds (usually in lieu of music or TV adds that would be only available in the canada on different networks than the US0. These I think are actually shady, but I don't click on them to know. Facebook seems to have a lot of 'stop smoking' 'get laid', random nonsense job postings that sort thing. Even if it isn't, it seems pretty sketchy. Is it the same if you're a US customer?
I mean, the perception I have here, is that, exactly as you say, shady products from a shady website. It's no less a shady website if you access it from the US, but are the adds more suited to what is (for better or worse) one of the biggest websites around? You'd sort of expect to see car ads, coke, McDonald's that sort of thing, even one of the bigger dating sites (that you know.. advertises on TV). But on facebook.. it's all erm... stuff absolutely no sane person would buy. Looking at it right now there's an ad for 'consulting on HP-Microsoft products".. not an HP ad, not a Microsoft ad.. an ad for some other outfit that will consult on HP-Microsoft products (with some buzzwords about laptops networking and WiFi).
We covered bomb design in nuclear physics (and I think it was McMaster had a nuclear weapons course until a couple of years before I started my underrgad). I specifically said steal. There is a far cry from a 70 year old uranium or plutonium bomb design, and a relatively modern weapon... of american or russian design, like say, the sort the chinese are trying to steal (See the cox report) and may have stolen.
The pentagon papers ( or at least last I checked were) officially classified well after they became public. Didn't prevent people using them. Because we don't know what the Nazi's results were, we may never know if they were thrown out because in truth, they would have perpetrated more evil, or provided great insight into doing useless things.
I think, if it were to happen with today's information systems, the Nazi era of medical records would be impossible to contain, right or wrong. You can burn paper, you can't burn a million web servers distributed around the world. Back then our governments made the choice to protect us from this information, almost certainly after looking it over to see if there was anything really truly useful worth keeping. Who knows, maybe they did keep a handful of useful things and claim to have developed them separately afterwards, though I doubt it. I think the Germans did enough legitimate research to copy that the value of the unethical experiments on people would be of far less value (especially since, from the article you linked, much of their results are effectively mimicked in wartime anyway, or don't provide results that people particularly want).
Wikileaks might show us the problem with raw information. A lot of it is mindless drivel. I'm sure 99% of medical research paperwork is mindless drivel too, ordering stuff, documenting the same thing every 30 seconds for hours on end, bickering over grant funding and meeting times and so on. The real substantive stuff, depends on what it is. If the Nazi's had figured out how to cure cancer, or treat some poison gas or well... anything actually useful, we might be far more reluctant to toss all their work, no matter how unethical it is. If a hacker steals the secrets to stealth technology or nuclear bomb designs and posts them on the web we probably would be far more reluctant to support that than stealing say.. the pentagon papers or a track record of HB gary's rootkit tools.
Not quite. They're big because they're big, and even when other search engines produce good results (including Bing), they don't get hits. Google has established a brand (not entirely undeserved) that they produce the best results, with the cleanest interface.
Take a simple example. Now when I do this I'm from home in canada. A search for "tech news" on google.com (which forcibly redirects me to google.ca, and yes there's ways around that but I'm specifically letting it do that for me), and "tech news" on Bing.
Bing has a picture and a blurb from news. Then it has two links, in the same order as google. Then things go completely different. Google has engadget, wired and/. in that order. Bing has Technews.org (Which shows up lower in the google result), yahoo technews, again, in the google result but lower ranked. The globe and Mail (a canadian paper based in Toronto, I'm searching from London ontario which is about 2.5 hours west of there), some cycling and bike tech news, waterloo tech news, which from a location perspective makes sense.
So right off the bat it looks like google provides roughly the same search results everywhere (US/canada). I'm not sure that's good, but bing, even without asking, and without it telling me, is trying to give more local information, and if I want tech news, I would think Wired,/. and Engadget are all good results, which don't even make the front page of Bing. Very different algorithms clearly, and very different style of results. That radical difference is probably confusing to consumers, while they are both search, they are trying to solve two different problems, in different ways.
Now lets try something more fun. I'm a game developer and I'm writing a 5 sentence blurb on dependency trees for something, so lets see. Bing vs. Google dependency trees go. Wow. Completely different. Not even kind of similar results. Bing is a bunch of software on dependency trees, google is a bunch of scholarly articles on the topic. Unlike the previous search, where I'd give the edge to google for better providing generic tech news and not risking bings Bicycle shop or newspapers (which might have an ideological bias users really don't like), on this one it's not clear, at all, if one is better. They're both pretty on topic, but in very different ways.
So what am I getting at? Google isn't at the top because it necessarily produces the best results, because clearly the results have very different styles to them, but they aren't being anti-competitive either. I think consumers will trend towards centralization and unless googles algorithm gets crushed somehow they seem to have a pretty firm hold on the market. Wal Mart may not be the best retailer, or even the cheapest, but they do a good job keeping that market. And the Bing guys haven't done a good job communicating what they do differently.
MS is used to competing with itself (XP vs 98, 7 vs Vista, Vista vs XP etc.), where you can say how your product is clearly better than your old product. What did you add, what did you fix? But they don't seem to know how to compete in marketting with anyone else anymore.
Stuff like games, video editing, photo editing etc. Just because you and I don't use it, doesn't mean the model won't catch on in 5 or 6 years, I don't buy any games on the iTunes store, despite being a game developer and having an iPhone. The walled garden thing seems to be quite popular. In the time 150k apps were made for Android how many were made for Windows 7 (not the phone, just windows 7)? I have no clue, because no one tracks it. Which ones are good, well, I know some of them, but I'm sure there are great pieces of software out there that I've never heard of or used. How do I find them? Well if I know what I want that's easy. But there's no good way to browse apps generally.
If your ONLY model is the walled garden I think you have a problem. Think Steam. As long as I can buy stuff outside their little fiefdom, their products and services add value for me as a consumer, they make it easier to find stuff and I get better prices, and if they don't want to sell it to me (or don't match a competitor, or don't provide some value I want) I can still go elsewhere. I trade that for the reduced security of several of my purchases being tied to a single service who could go bankrupt. On the other hand my iPhone is entirely (at least legally) tied to Apple, and they decide what I can run on it, so I won't be buying another iPhone. Jailbreaking is fine, but as long as other people offer a legal path to running whatever I'd rather do that.
Simple stuff (facebook, mail etc. ) doesn't need horsepower, and doesn't need native code or any great mechanism to buy as software, because the web already solves that problem. I'm not convinced native code over the web is a workable idea in the long run, but powerful software, distributed via the web is going to become more the norm ( and not necessarily tied to anything). Anything that makes useful software accessible to users who might want it is good. I think right now the only service that fits that bill is the pirate bay, and in their case what they provide is somewhat limited by the desire and capability of users to pirate it.
I'm not sure what you mean by churning shit with high performance. High performance is relative, and only valuable if you have a use for it. I play a lot of games, so I don't forsee replacing a desktop with a phone anytime soon, even compared to game consoles I'm a factor of 5 or 6 more powerful pretty easily. A 30inch monitor and I'd need even more power again. Not everyone will do that, but I also think there's a market for higher performance that could be served by better access, and software that is meaningful and uses that power. My guess on a 'killer' app, is word or office that let you dictate in real time, without it dying due to memory leaks, pausing, getting horribly confused 15-20% of the time (as tend to happen with the existing stuff on the market). A 15% failure rate on speech to text pretty much destroys it's efficiency advantage, but getting your error rate down to 1 or 2% seems (and this might be an algorithms problem) to be exponentially harder than a 20% error rate, maybe it's a 80/20 thing, where 80% of your processing time will be taken on the 20% hardest words, I dunno. Easy to use diagraming tools, games, multimedia editing, interactive god knows what could all justify more expensive hardware, if the software can manage to do it, and someone can figure out how to get it to customers.
This seems to be where computers will go for most people, but this first implementation clearly sounds more like a beta product than a first generation.
Agreed, but it's a step in the right direction. Being able to carry just a cell phone, and no laptop would be great. But my phone is never going to replace a good desktop at home, if you need one.
No, it can't. But it can replace your netbook or maybe a low powered notebook.
That's a good thing.
But the smartphone market will give a good kick in the arse to intel/AMD to start releasing much better hardware, for less money, to keep the desktop well ahead of the smartphone game. A brand new 900 dollar phone (600 + dock) is roughly on par with a 700 dollar laptop. That's pretty appealing. Desktops, well, I just priced out a bunch of desktops in the 1600-2000 dollar range, which are easily 10x more powerful, so if you have any use for the power, no, the phone won't do it.
10 years ago we passed the point of the hardware making much difference to a word processor. And we aren't quite at the point where the average desktop user can just dictate to their computer (though we're close, I managed a several setups like that for students with disabilities), and pretty much anything can web browse. Until software that people would use everyday catches up to hardware there's probably a market for a phone that replaces a desktop, and then we'll go back to a desktops. It's hurt intel and AMD I think that while transistor density may still be doubling every 18 ish months performance isn't. Core 2 -> i7->sandy bridge is like 20% performace gains clock for clock, at each step, and the clocks aren't much faster, and there aren't even more cores (because nothing uses 6 cores well yet, let alone 8, 12 or 16). HTML 5, and google's native code over the web etc. *might* change things a bit, giving people instant access to stuff. But all the great technologies we're touting, colour e-book readers, mp3 players, phones that can run programs aren't exactly great performance wise. I could read PDF's just as well 15 years ago as I can today, play music maybe 12 years ago as well as I can today, and any computer can run programs. The phone guys have done a good job using the web to make software accessible, but if the desktop guys could pull of the same there'd be demand there (and as someone else pointed out, my Steam games collection isnt' about to run on a phone).
You only work 9-5 if you're hourly. If you're salaried you may be never expected to exceed 35 or 40 hours a week (my last job was 36.5... figure that out), but you get your ass in at 3am if something you designed just broke, because your only job is to get it to work, that's part of being a professional and being responsible for your work done for the company in question. If as happened, I was called in at some crazy time or had to work crazy hours, one guy I worked with had to go to china on 5 hours notice, (not counting 2 hours to get to the airport and 2 more waiting at the airport for the flight), you got time off either later in the week or the next week to compensate.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad. My dad had essentially the same job I did, but he was there from 1969 until 2005, and I think he had to go in at night about 8 times during that period, total, and had to travel on very short notice once. But part of collecting the fat paycheck was that you only worked for that employer and if you were needed, you dropped everything and came. He got a phone call when on vacation, once (this was before cell phones). But if you didn't come in when needed, you found yourself looking for employment.
You are supposing, not entirely correctly, that the algorithms are less efficient. That isn't the case particularly, except maybe with parallel computing. In many cases it is simply doing more things, which may or may not have a lot of benefit (which one can argue till their blue in the face, I mean, how much benefit did windows have over DOS, it was soooo much slower), but they are very deliberately being done
There isn't a whole lot of software that runs hard into requirements other than games anymore. Word will run on anything, hell windows 7 will run on anything that's likely to still run (most hardware outright dies after 7 or 8 years). Parallelization is tricky, very tricky, compared to serial execution. Don't expect a factor of 2 speedup just because you have two symmetric cores, because not all problems can be solved that way. In that sense Wirth's law is significantly out of date, because an order of magnitude increase in algorithm development cost may only achieve a small percentage increase in algorithm efficiency, depending on the specific problem of course. And it's not just one type of algorithm efficiency (a common problem in real systems), you have memory bandwidth use, memory use, CPU time used, cache hit ratios etc. An algorithm that has a 2n^2 runtime for example might have a more efficient version that runs at 0.7n^2, but uses 4x the memory bandwidth. Which is a problem if you need the bandwidth somewhere else (or don't have enough to service a reasonable number of n). The problem might really definitely provably be an n^2 algorithm, so there's bugger all you can do with that.
Directx is the sort of classic example of compatibility vs development time vs customer base (the same applies to OpenGl). Your hardcore gamer types will probably have decent computers, so you could offer them DX11, that's maybe 40% of your market. But not all of them upgraded in the last year and a bit, so you might want a DX10 codepath too (20%). Oh and 40% of your market is still on windows XP, so you need a directx 9 codepath. So if you want to to run on dx9 and dx11 your content designers can't use (say) tessellation or geometry shading as a critical part of the experience, because it won't work on dx9. But they don't keep adding in these new features just to get someone a PhD, they're there because they can be useful. How about memory use? 60% of my customers have 64 bit OS's and can handle my game using 3GB of memory, but 40% even if they have the memory have a 32 bit OS, and can't. So now I'm trying to balance between more customers, but less of an experience the more people that can play. And of course the more work I have to do to write 3 different code paths, of varying efficiency (newer versions are easier and faster for some things because the hardware is better). And if I don't get it out on time, and on budget, someone else will come along and release a DX11 only game that makes mine look like crap and I'll have no sales.
Remember your 'not increasing the efficiency of your algorithms is costing you customers' works equally well the other way, 'not buying new hardware limits the number and quality of the software titles you can enjoy'. If enough things come out that are worth buying, people will upgrade their hardware for those experiences.
Seriously, is it common (in the states) to "own" your employees even when they are not at work?
It's common in certain industries everywhere. It's even common (though I'm not sure if it's legal anymore) to have non-compete clauses in your contract, that you cannot work in a similar job or for a competing company for some period of time after you leave. Software especially, since well, most people who develop software for work would in turn develop software for extra on the side.
Lots of businesses have anti-moonlighting clauses, prohibiting you from working for anyone else (competitor or otherwise) without their permission. I'm at a university in canada, and while I'm not 100% sure about my current school, the last one had rules that you could work for whomever, but if you had a job off campus you were limited in how much funding you could get (as a grad student) on campus, and you were limited in hours for on campus work that wasn't directly related to you studies. That sort of thing is pretty normal.
You can sort of see some point here. If I pay you 150k a year, I expect that you're working for me, and the time I've spent training and preparing you for this job is going to have some return. I don't want you worrying about some side job you're doing when you're in the office. I also don't care if you work 4 hours a day, or 14, as long as your task gets done. If I keep assigning you tasks that can only be done working 14 hours a day, well then you'll leave, which would be bad management. Also, while you work for me, I want to not tarnish, or confuse the BrAnd (tm) we have established. If you go off on your own and make something that is crap but still put down that you are an 'active MS employee' well that reflects poorly on us. You are also benefiting from our brand by being one of our employees. Oh and I don't want you working on any material that might be controversial or objectionable or might compete with our official products, because that might imply (since the work was being done by an active employee) our endorsement of your activities.
It's a big tradeoff. MS pays it's employees well (as does google), they are are a top tier software developer on the payscale. If you want to be on that salary you sign their contracts. If you want to work on the side you have to decide how much you can make, and if it makes up the difference between your no-moonlighting vs moonlighting contract. I found a few places, if they allow to work multiple places, you pretty much have to to make a decent living.
It's not idiotic. The government needs to determine how many power plants can be built, the infrastructure to support it, deal with the environmental consequences of those power plants, and the waste from the light bulbs. Even if they are privately owned, the US gets tax tax revenue from them, but pays for the cleanup, and determines through zoning where they go (and by extension how many of them).
You can reasonably disagree with the choice of CFLs, they're more expensive waste, and in places that need heating regularly incandescent bulbs are excellent heaters (because they're terrible at producing light efficiently). But it's stupid to have people, especially in hot areas on one hand turn on Incandescent bulbs, and then the other turn on the AC to counter the heat they generate if there's a more light efficient alternative.
The free market, notably the american one, will choose the cheapest source of light. Because it tends to have a narrow view of requirements, a consequence of being a macro-economic phenomena. Just as it would choose the cheapest available car, airline seat or doctor. The government then steps in and sets minimum standards for cars (rear view mirrors, seat belts, basic pollution controls etc.), minimum safety standards for aircraft, because god knows if given the chance airlines would offer standing room only flights from New York to Tokyo, and doctors have to be well, actually doctors. Yes, this is the government intruding into private choice, because given the chance companies would happily only make available bad, or inaccessible or downright dangerous choices to all but the most well to do customers. Light bulbs are, like every other product (lead paint, choking hazards etc. in toys) regulated to make sure that the consumer isn't getting a bad product. Now as I say, we can argue, I think legitimately, if CFL's are inherently better, but the concept of requiring light bulbs to not be enormously wasteful is good.
I will also add, by forcibly creating a market for CFL's they will hopefully drive down the price of CFL's. On one hand it's a captive market, you have to buy a CFL, but 10000 companies can all make CFL's and compete to make them as cheap as possible while still meeting the minimum requirements. As it is, since CFL purchases are voluntary, you only have people competing in (for want of a better phrase) a premium market. Relatively low volume, higher prices because there's less competition and more being able to bank on a customers willingness to pay more to feel good about themselves.
When the first Iphone launched Nokia phones had 3G, voice dialing, half decent web browsing, and workable Versions of MS office on them, and they retained decent call quality, video recording. The first iphone managed e-mail (done better by RIM at that point, not sure about nokia there), a much better, web browser and uh... an ipod with a big screen (other phones had MP3 players already). Lets face the sad reality here, north american wireless providers and phones in general lagged our european and asian counterparts significantly, because no one cared enough to fix it.
Apple made people care. And once people cared, and once computer makers got into the phone business rather than phone companies, they gutted the market.
Nokia's idea of a high end phone is the vertu, a $20 000 device that you can dial a special number to get a special call centre where they will direct you to 5 star restaurants so you don't have to hang out with people who can't afford $20K phones which connect to special call centres. I'm sure there will always be a market for that, but that problem can be solved in software for a lot less than 20k, *AND* the same software will solve a whole lot of other problems while you're at it (like finding the nearest dry cleaner or H&R block).
That was Steve Jobs great brilliance. Nokia wasn't going to to play the crappy network game, and basically gave up on the north american carriers as worthless, incompetent, and not worth dealing with.
So Steve Jobs comes along, releases a device that, at launch, was inferior to Nokia's offerings, and was saddled by an outdated network. But suddenly people could see the potential in their phones, if only they had a decent network, and a decent OS. Nokia had (for the time) a decent OS, but no connection to the network, and by the time the network was getting fixed Apple had used off the money they generated to actually build a decent OS. Now you have RIM, Google and Apple all devouring marketspace that in the rest of the world was basically owned by Nokia, because they didn't catch up on innovation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of Steve Jobs or a lot of the nonsense he pulls, but credit where credit is due, he forced the antiquated network providers in the US and Canada to start pulling their heads out of their asses. That should have been done by Jim Balsillie or Mike Lazaridis of RIM, but they didn't get it.
And now we have phones that are basically computers that can make phone calls. Nokia understood the phones that can do other stuff model, but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls, and RIM is in the same boat. MS, Apple and Google all get it, it's a matter of how well they can execute and any number of other factors for them.
By now the 3rd option, of completely reforming your internal structure was too late. They're too far behind in the smartphone wave to internally restructure, then launch a new mobile platform.
One can certainly disagree with their choice of MS as the 3rd party OS, but I think given the circumstances it was pick one of MS or Google, or be facing serious problems in 2 or 3 years. That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
that's ok, you fall into the 'the pirate bay' as your gaming alliance representative group.
Though to be fair, you're missing out. There are lots of great DRM free games being released every year (the Witcher for example) that are AAA full price games, and those guys deserve money for the work they do.
I'm torn on putting GoG on that list. I like their stuff, and i certainly use it a lot. They're either the most important, or the least important company to something like the gaming alliance. And I'm not really sure which.
On one hand they are the ones who've been dealing with trying to fix all the messed up lack of standards crap that we had for years. That makes games as art hard because well, you need specialized programmers to fix any 5 year old title up enough that it will run on a modern system. All of the nuances of different hardware configurations, incompatible standards, market confusion, etc. all land on their lap. So they probably know the problems more intimately than anyone else, and in some sense are advocates for the long term future of the business by not screwing things up.
On the other hand, once people start buying digital, a service like GoG might not be all that relevant. A game tied to your steam account today will be tied to it 5 years from now (presuming the likely scenario that Valve is still in business). And I'm not sure how much actual business GoG does other than the Witcher. It's a great idea, but there's only so much money to be had on planescape torment and baldur's gate II. And we might be at a point where standards today are good enough that they can be ported/updated along and keep backwards compatibility that many of GoG's issues are going to only apply to that specific timeframe of 1996-2003 or so. (Glide 3DFx to directx 9). 5 years ago from this year is directx 9.0c and directx 10, how many games still have DX9 modes? Nearly all of them, the dragon age 2 demo released yesterday does.
So like I say, I'm not sure if they are the most relevant, or least relevant company to the future of PC gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
why is irrelevant.
If EA, Activision, THQ, MS, Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Zenimax and Take Two are all, in one way or another on board, your options for non-online 'enabled' games shrink pretty fast.
Made even worse if this is enabled via a distribution channel (the console stores, Steam, Games for Windows Live, whatever the hell it is I log into for Dragon age and Mass effect), which then eliminates the barrier to adopting this DRM system from anyone who has any money.
Sure, there's always indie games. I'm working with(not for) a company right now that will make a PC game for about 2 million, 6 employees, 2 years, but of course they have a publisher (not one mentioned above). 2 Million isn't a huge amount, but most really good games come in 3-5x that, just for development, if you want to hear about it ever, or find it in stores or on the digital distribution stuff you're looking closer to 10 million, now you're talking money you can't just go to the bank and ask for. And that kind of money comes from one of the big publishers, who will of course, demand it be online 'enabled'.
The more people go on about 'I'll just pirate it rather than deal with broken DRM" the more the DRM is going to shift to be less DRM and more buying online "services" which give you access to the content you actually want.
Ah but you see they are working hard to eliminate the competition from piracy. I don't have DA2 yet, but notice with DA1 it logs you in every time you try and play? The infrastructure around the game is now like an MMO even if the content itself is single player. If you don't log in, you don't have access to any of the downloaded content (which fairly quickly can become problematic if you rely on any of it for gameplay).
With ME2 EA claimed to look at piracy as get another venue to get customers to buy DLC. But if the game itself is accessed via your account, and they have some reasonably good method of tying a game to an account, well, it becomes significantly harder to pirate doesn't it?
I'm not saying that's good. But the gaming business is moving to 'integrate' online even into single player, and is going to put your saves in a cloud and so on, wrapped up together this significantly raises the barrier of entry to piracy, and makes used game sales nearly a thing of the past. You can say all you want they're competing with piracy, but from their perspective they are doing everything they can shy of putting a FOB key in the box to force you to either buy it, or not play it.
After all, Microsoft really hasn't "lost" $1.2 million in cash
Careful now. Microsoft points can be used to purchase things from the MS store. Not all of which are owned by MS. If I developed and XBLA game, or DLC for something I expect my 70% (I think it's 70%, steam is 70%, I haven't worked with anyone using MS points in a while), whether the points where legitimate or not is MS's problem. The deal I have is to be compensated, in cash, for downloads of my product through their store.
If they give away 10 million MS points for the hell of it, I still expect to be paid, and it's their pocket it comes out of. If someone hacks the MS algorithm and uses that to buy my stuff either my stuff should be pulled from their account (a non trivial, but perhaps necessary thing to do), or I get paid.
There's a much deeper discussion here about points versus a cash wallet. Points they can give away, take back etc. all for free. But if it's real money there are all sorts of tax implications and so on to giving away, or winning 1000 free 'points'. Which is why they use points in the first place. But on the other side, if someone spends 800 points on my DLC, I expect to be paid the $7 or whater that works out to now.
I research AI for strategy.
A computer is really good at finding optimal strategies if you can properly quantify relevant variables. In sport there is advantage in not taking an optimal strategy, because your opponent won't know which non optimal strategy you've chosen until it's too late. If you're going to use randomness to determine which strategy to use, then the computer is no better than a coach.
That assumes, probably wrongly, that you can quantify what's going on. Is that opposing quarterback's limp important, a fake, how serious is it (numerically)? Even if a computer is good at predicting one particular game, (say the superbowl) that would be based on the data from the whole of the rest of the season to assess how good the players are.
There's a lot of sport to be had in running AI's against each other, especially based on the same sets of data and see what they do. But that is a *very* different problem from actually simulating a real match, yes, the average of 10000 trials may be correct, but there are only a few real games, not thousands. That randomness, sportmanship, and people doing extraordinary, unexpected and great (or stupid) things is what separates a real match from a statistical model.
yes, if there isn't demand for 1000 cars either the price drops, increasing demand until demand peaks, or they go make something else which people do want. 50 years ago there was 0 demand for personal computers, and substantially less demand per capita for cars than their is today, and probably less airplane demand (both personal an commercial). Yes 500 people are laid off, that's why you need to be able to get new, better jobs, and the more mobile and flexible they are the better. I didn't say it was easy in the short term, in fact, quite the contrary, I said the opposite. It's long term gain with substantial short term pain.
But if you're paying 1000 people to do the job of 500, someone else will do it with 500, and put you out of business unless you erect trade barriers, and the more trade barriers you have, the less efficient your market is. As one of the other replies above notes, someone in india can do the same job as an american for 3 bucks an hour (or, more likely it varies wildly based on the job, I could make about 20k/year as a software developer in india or 100k/year in canada, and yes, I can work in both countries, or I could make 50k a year in a car factory in canada, or 5k in india). That means, in effect that we've been massively overpaying for cars ( and software), and more importantly, they've been too poor to buy it from us even if they wanted too.
Peoples demand for 'stuff' is effectively infinite, it's a matter of value for the stuff. We, on average, live in bigger houses, have more cars, more computers, fly more, eat more, get better healthcare etc. than the generation before, and presumably the generation that follows us will go about the same routine.
And because the british, french, and prussians education systems all interacted with each other. And if you didn't base your system on one of theirs, they had a few 'suggestions' backed by very big guns.
That's oddly, how you increase productivity in the long run. If 1000 workers create 1000 cars a year, and you find a way to automate that, so that now 500 people can make 1000 cars a year. The other 500 then could: make a second car company, that in turn produces 1000 cars a year, and reduces the price of cars for everyone, they could make better cars, and compete on quality, or they could go make something else entirely.
Either way, where there was once the value of 1000 cars split between 1000 workers, it is now split between 500 (+ added equipment maintenance), + what the other 500 people are producing.
Technology that lays people off is short term pain for long term gain. The more efficient it is to make more stuff, the more stuff ultimately gets made, which means the more stuff people can have. Retraining from one antiquated skill to a modern one is challenging, but macroscopically not a bad thing. For all its faults the great strength of the American system has always supposedly been your (their?) labour mobility, which is essentially the ability to move between jobs.
The big thing with software is that it's hitting industries that aren't used to competition, and when it hits it isn't gradual. Unlike the car business where bringing in new technology is done one plant at a time, and one part of a plant at a time, software can be instantly in the entire company or sector or world, and very quickly wipes out the use of a huge swath of people
They already have some mechanism in place, to distribute royalties from blank CD's, and from actually sold items. Simply applying whatever algorithm that is to a bigger pot of money, and then letting artists wrangle with the body that handles that over their share of the compensation doesn't seem too difficult.
What it does do is create a serious problem for legitimate online music sales businesses (including apple). Since well.. I'm paying 10 bucks a month for unlimited already, what could I possible pay them for that adds much value? Unlike a CD, where I need to find someone with the CD arrange a chance to copy it, then give me my CD, then I have my CD. Online music stores compete directly with the piratebay. In that you can type in Music_I_want and within about 4 clicks have it start downloading, hopefully to the right place. CD vs Burned CD there's some potential value there (the actual album, a better quality physical disk, etc.), but it's pretty tough to add value to something that can be pirated trivially, as the music business has been learning to its peril.
It creates a legal headache, for example in the US, which, conveniently being next door and also speaking english we face this problem a lot. If a canadian P2P's files from an american, that's not illegal in canada. What do you do to the american? There's probably a messy legal framework here, can the US prohibit someone in its country from engaging in a legal activity in another, with whom there are friendly treaties. Music files aren't exactly state secrets.
I ask this entirely out of ignorance.
I'm in canada, so lots of websites that do location detection show me pretty crappy, off topic or downright strange adds (usually in lieu of music or TV adds that would be only available in the canada on different networks than the US0. These I think are actually shady, but I don't click on them to know. Facebook seems to have a lot of 'stop smoking' 'get laid', random nonsense job postings that sort thing. Even if it isn't, it seems pretty sketchy. Is it the same if you're a US customer?
I mean, the perception I have here, is that, exactly as you say, shady products from a shady website. It's no less a shady website if you access it from the US, but are the adds more suited to what is (for better or worse) one of the biggest websites around? You'd sort of expect to see car ads, coke, McDonald's that sort of thing, even one of the bigger dating sites (that you know.. advertises on TV). But on facebook.. it's all erm... stuff absolutely no sane person would buy. Looking at it right now there's an ad for 'consulting on HP-Microsoft products".. not an HP ad, not a Microsoft ad.. an ad for some other outfit that will consult on HP-Microsoft products (with some buzzwords about laptops networking and WiFi).
We covered bomb design in nuclear physics (and I think it was McMaster had a nuclear weapons course until a couple of years before I started my underrgad). I specifically said steal. There is a far cry from a 70 year old uranium or plutonium bomb design, and a relatively modern weapon... of american or russian design, like say, the sort the chinese are trying to steal (See the cox report) and may have stolen.
The pentagon papers ( or at least last I checked were) officially classified well after they became public. Didn't prevent people using them. Because we don't know what the Nazi's results were, we may never know if they were thrown out because in truth, they would have perpetrated more evil, or provided great insight into doing useless things.
I think, if it were to happen with today's information systems, the Nazi era of medical records would be impossible to contain, right or wrong. You can burn paper, you can't burn a million web servers distributed around the world. Back then our governments made the choice to protect us from this information, almost certainly after looking it over to see if there was anything really truly useful worth keeping. Who knows, maybe they did keep a handful of useful things and claim to have developed them separately afterwards, though I doubt it. I think the Germans did enough legitimate research to copy that the value of the unethical experiments on people would be of far less value (especially since, from the article you linked, much of their results are effectively mimicked in wartime anyway, or don't provide results that people particularly want).
Wikileaks might show us the problem with raw information. A lot of it is mindless drivel. I'm sure 99% of medical research paperwork is mindless drivel too, ordering stuff, documenting the same thing every 30 seconds for hours on end, bickering over grant funding and meeting times and so on. The real substantive stuff, depends on what it is. If the Nazi's had figured out how to cure cancer, or treat some poison gas or well... anything actually useful, we might be far more reluctant to toss all their work, no matter how unethical it is. If a hacker steals the secrets to stealth technology or nuclear bomb designs and posts them on the web we probably would be far more reluctant to support that than stealing say.. the pentagon papers or a track record of HB gary's rootkit tools.
Not quite. They're big because they're big, and even when other search engines produce good results (including Bing), they don't get hits. Google has established a brand (not entirely undeserved) that they produce the best results, with the cleanest interface.
Take a simple example. Now when I do this I'm from home in canada. A search for "tech news" on google.com (which forcibly redirects me to google.ca, and yes there's ways around that but I'm specifically letting it do that for me), and "tech news" on Bing.
Bing has a picture and a blurb from news. Then it has two links, in the same order as google. Then things go completely different. Google has engadget, wired and /. in that order. Bing has Technews.org (Which shows up lower in the google result), yahoo technews, again, in the google result but lower ranked. The globe and Mail (a canadian paper based in Toronto, I'm searching from London ontario which is about 2.5 hours west of there), some cycling and bike tech news, waterloo tech news, which from a location perspective makes sense.
So right off the bat it looks like google provides roughly the same search results everywhere (US/canada). I'm not sure that's good, but bing, even without asking, and without it telling me, is trying to give more local information, and if I want tech news, I would think Wired, /. and Engadget are all good results, which don't even make the front page of Bing. Very different algorithms clearly, and very different style of results. That radical difference is probably confusing to consumers, while they are both search, they are trying to solve two different problems, in different ways.
Now lets try something more fun. I'm a game developer and I'm writing a 5 sentence blurb on dependency trees for something, so lets see. Bing vs. Google dependency trees go. Wow. Completely different. Not even kind of similar results. Bing is a bunch of software on dependency trees, google is a bunch of scholarly articles on the topic. Unlike the previous search, where I'd give the edge to google for better providing generic tech news and not risking bings Bicycle shop or newspapers (which might have an ideological bias users really don't like), on this one it's not clear, at all, if one is better. They're both pretty on topic, but in very different ways.
So what am I getting at? Google isn't at the top because it necessarily produces the best results, because clearly the results have very different styles to them, but they aren't being anti-competitive either. I think consumers will trend towards centralization and unless googles algorithm gets crushed somehow they seem to have a pretty firm hold on the market. Wal Mart may not be the best retailer, or even the cheapest, but they do a good job keeping that market. And the Bing guys haven't done a good job communicating what they do differently.
MS is used to competing with itself (XP vs 98, 7 vs Vista, Vista vs XP etc.), where you can say how your product is clearly better than your old product. What did you add, what did you fix? But they don't seem to know how to compete in marketting with anyone else anymore.
Stuff like games, video editing, photo editing etc. Just because you and I don't use it, doesn't mean the model won't catch on in 5 or 6 years, I don't buy any games on the iTunes store, despite being a game developer and having an iPhone. The walled garden thing seems to be quite popular. In the time 150k apps were made for Android how many were made for Windows 7 (not the phone, just windows 7)? I have no clue, because no one tracks it. Which ones are good, well, I know some of them, but I'm sure there are great pieces of software out there that I've never heard of or used. How do I find them? Well if I know what I want that's easy. But there's no good way to browse apps generally.
If your ONLY model is the walled garden I think you have a problem. Think Steam. As long as I can buy stuff outside their little fiefdom, their products and services add value for me as a consumer, they make it easier to find stuff and I get better prices, and if they don't want to sell it to me (or don't match a competitor, or don't provide some value I want) I can still go elsewhere. I trade that for the reduced security of several of my purchases being tied to a single service who could go bankrupt. On the other hand my iPhone is entirely (at least legally) tied to Apple, and they decide what I can run on it, so I won't be buying another iPhone. Jailbreaking is fine, but as long as other people offer a legal path to running whatever I'd rather do that.
Simple stuff (facebook, mail etc. ) doesn't need horsepower, and doesn't need native code or any great mechanism to buy as software, because the web already solves that problem. I'm not convinced native code over the web is a workable idea in the long run, but powerful software, distributed via the web is going to become more the norm ( and not necessarily tied to anything). Anything that makes useful software accessible to users who might want it is good. I think right now the only service that fits that bill is the pirate bay, and in their case what they provide is somewhat limited by the desire and capability of users to pirate it.
I'm not sure what you mean by churning shit with high performance. High performance is relative, and only valuable if you have a use for it. I play a lot of games, so I don't forsee replacing a desktop with a phone anytime soon, even compared to game consoles I'm a factor of 5 or 6 more powerful pretty easily. A 30inch monitor and I'd need even more power again. Not everyone will do that, but I also think there's a market for higher performance that could be served by better access, and software that is meaningful and uses that power. My guess on a 'killer' app, is word or office that let you dictate in real time, without it dying due to memory leaks, pausing, getting horribly confused 15-20% of the time (as tend to happen with the existing stuff on the market). A 15% failure rate on speech to text pretty much destroys it's efficiency advantage, but getting your error rate down to 1 or 2% seems (and this might be an algorithms problem) to be exponentially harder than a 20% error rate, maybe it's a 80/20 thing, where 80% of your processing time will be taken on the 20% hardest words, I dunno. Easy to use diagraming tools, games, multimedia editing, interactive god knows what could all justify more expensive hardware, if the software can manage to do it, and someone can figure out how to get it to customers.
This seems to be where computers will go for most people, but this first implementation clearly sounds more like a beta product than a first generation.
Agreed, but it's a step in the right direction. Being able to carry just a cell phone, and no laptop would be great. But my phone is never going to replace a good desktop at home, if you need one.
No, it can't. But it can replace your netbook or maybe a low powered notebook.
That's a good thing.
But the smartphone market will give a good kick in the arse to intel/AMD to start releasing much better hardware, for less money, to keep the desktop well ahead of the smartphone game. A brand new 900 dollar phone (600 + dock) is roughly on par with a 700 dollar laptop. That's pretty appealing. Desktops, well, I just priced out a bunch of desktops in the 1600-2000 dollar range, which are easily 10x more powerful, so if you have any use for the power, no, the phone won't do it.
10 years ago we passed the point of the hardware making much difference to a word processor. And we aren't quite at the point where the average desktop user can just dictate to their computer (though we're close, I managed a several setups like that for students with disabilities), and pretty much anything can web browse. Until software that people would use everyday catches up to hardware there's probably a market for a phone that replaces a desktop, and then we'll go back to a desktops. It's hurt intel and AMD I think that while transistor density may still be doubling every 18 ish months performance isn't. Core 2 -> i7->sandy bridge is like 20% performace gains clock for clock, at each step, and the clocks aren't much faster, and there aren't even more cores (because nothing uses 6 cores well yet, let alone 8, 12 or 16). HTML 5, and google's native code over the web etc. *might* change things a bit, giving people instant access to stuff. But all the great technologies we're touting, colour e-book readers, mp3 players, phones that can run programs aren't exactly great performance wise. I could read PDF's just as well 15 years ago as I can today, play music maybe 12 years ago as well as I can today, and any computer can run programs. The phone guys have done a good job using the web to make software accessible, but if the desktop guys could pull of the same there'd be demand there (and as someone else pointed out, my Steam games collection isnt' about to run on a phone).
You only work 9-5 if you're hourly. If you're salaried you may be never expected to exceed 35 or 40 hours a week (my last job was 36.5... figure that out), but you get your ass in at 3am if something you designed just broke, because your only job is to get it to work, that's part of being a professional and being responsible for your work done for the company in question. If as happened, I was called in at some crazy time or had to work crazy hours, one guy I worked with had to go to china on 5 hours notice, (not counting 2 hours to get to the airport and 2 more waiting at the airport for the flight), you got time off either later in the week or the next week to compensate.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad. My dad had essentially the same job I did, but he was there from 1969 until 2005, and I think he had to go in at night about 8 times during that period, total, and had to travel on very short notice once. But part of collecting the fat paycheck was that you only worked for that employer and if you were needed, you dropped everything and came. He got a phone call when on vacation, once (this was before cell phones). But if you didn't come in when needed, you found yourself looking for employment.
You are supposing, not entirely correctly, that the algorithms are less efficient. That isn't the case particularly, except maybe with parallel computing. In many cases it is simply doing more things, which may or may not have a lot of benefit (which one can argue till their blue in the face, I mean, how much benefit did windows have over DOS, it was soooo much slower), but they are very deliberately being done
There isn't a whole lot of software that runs hard into requirements other than games anymore. Word will run on anything, hell windows 7 will run on anything that's likely to still run (most hardware outright dies after 7 or 8 years). Parallelization is tricky, very tricky, compared to serial execution. Don't expect a factor of 2 speedup just because you have two symmetric cores, because not all problems can be solved that way. In that sense Wirth's law is significantly out of date, because an order of magnitude increase in algorithm development cost may only achieve a small percentage increase in algorithm efficiency, depending on the specific problem of course. And it's not just one type of algorithm efficiency (a common problem in real systems), you have memory bandwidth use, memory use, CPU time used, cache hit ratios etc. An algorithm that has a 2n^2 runtime for example might have a more efficient version that runs at 0.7n^2, but uses 4x the memory bandwidth. Which is a problem if you need the bandwidth somewhere else (or don't have enough to service a reasonable number of n). The problem might really definitely provably be an n^2 algorithm, so there's bugger all you can do with that.
Directx is the sort of classic example of compatibility vs development time vs customer base (the same applies to OpenGl). Your hardcore gamer types will probably have decent computers, so you could offer them DX11, that's maybe 40% of your market. But not all of them upgraded in the last year and a bit, so you might want a DX10 codepath too (20%). Oh and 40% of your market is still on windows XP, so you need a directx 9 codepath. So if you want to to run on dx9 and dx11 your content designers can't use (say) tessellation or geometry shading as a critical part of the experience, because it won't work on dx9. But they don't keep adding in these new features just to get someone a PhD, they're there because they can be useful. How about memory use? 60% of my customers have 64 bit OS's and can handle my game using 3GB of memory, but 40% even if they have the memory have a 32 bit OS, and can't. So now I'm trying to balance between more customers, but less of an experience the more people that can play. And of course the more work I have to do to write 3 different code paths, of varying efficiency (newer versions are easier and faster for some things because the hardware is better). And if I don't get it out on time, and on budget, someone else will come along and release a DX11 only game that makes mine look like crap and I'll have no sales.
Remember your 'not increasing the efficiency of your algorithms is costing you customers' works equally well the other way, 'not buying new hardware limits the number and quality of the software titles you can enjoy'. If enough things come out that are worth buying, people will upgrade their hardware for those experiences.
Seriously, is it common (in the states) to "own" your employees even when they are not at work?
It's common in certain industries everywhere. It's even common (though I'm not sure if it's legal anymore) to have non-compete clauses in your contract, that you cannot work in a similar job or for a competing company for some period of time after you leave. Software especially, since well, most people who develop software for work would in turn develop software for extra on the side.
Lots of businesses have anti-moonlighting clauses, prohibiting you from working for anyone else (competitor or otherwise) without their permission. I'm at a university in canada, and while I'm not 100% sure about my current school, the last one had rules that you could work for whomever, but if you had a job off campus you were limited in how much funding you could get (as a grad student) on campus, and you were limited in hours for on campus work that wasn't directly related to you studies. That sort of thing is pretty normal.
You can sort of see some point here. If I pay you 150k a year, I expect that you're working for me, and the time I've spent training and preparing you for this job is going to have some return. I don't want you worrying about some side job you're doing when you're in the office. I also don't care if you work 4 hours a day, or 14, as long as your task gets done. If I keep assigning you tasks that can only be done working 14 hours a day, well then you'll leave, which would be bad management. Also, while you work for me, I want to not tarnish, or confuse the BrAnd (tm) we have established. If you go off on your own and make something that is crap but still put down that you are an 'active MS employee' well that reflects poorly on us. You are also benefiting from our brand by being one of our employees. Oh and I don't want you working on any material that might be controversial or objectionable or might compete with our official products, because that might imply (since the work was being done by an active employee) our endorsement of your activities.
It's a big tradeoff. MS pays it's employees well (as does google), they are are a top tier software developer on the payscale. If you want to be on that salary you sign their contracts. If you want to work on the side you have to decide how much you can make, and if it makes up the difference between your no-moonlighting vs moonlighting contract. I found a few places, if they allow to work multiple places, you pretty much have to to make a decent living.
It's not idiotic. The government needs to determine how many power plants can be built, the infrastructure to support it, deal with the environmental consequences of those power plants, and the waste from the light bulbs. Even if they are privately owned, the US gets tax tax revenue from them, but pays for the cleanup, and determines through zoning where they go (and by extension how many of them).
You can reasonably disagree with the choice of CFLs, they're more expensive waste, and in places that need heating regularly incandescent bulbs are excellent heaters (because they're terrible at producing light efficiently). But it's stupid to have people, especially in hot areas on one hand turn on Incandescent bulbs, and then the other turn on the AC to counter the heat they generate if there's a more light efficient alternative.
The free market, notably the american one, will choose the cheapest source of light. Because it tends to have a narrow view of requirements, a consequence of being a macro-economic phenomena. Just as it would choose the cheapest available car, airline seat or doctor. The government then steps in and sets minimum standards for cars (rear view mirrors, seat belts, basic pollution controls etc.), minimum safety standards for aircraft, because god knows if given the chance airlines would offer standing room only flights from New York to Tokyo, and doctors have to be well, actually doctors. Yes, this is the government intruding into private choice, because given the chance companies would happily only make available bad, or inaccessible or downright dangerous choices to all but the most well to do customers. Light bulbs are, like every other product (lead paint, choking hazards etc. in toys) regulated to make sure that the consumer isn't getting a bad product. Now as I say, we can argue, I think legitimately, if CFL's are inherently better, but the concept of requiring light bulbs to not be enormously wasteful is good.
I will also add, by forcibly creating a market for CFL's they will hopefully drive down the price of CFL's. On one hand it's a captive market, you have to buy a CFL, but 10000 companies can all make CFL's and compete to make them as cheap as possible while still meeting the minimum requirements. As it is, since CFL purchases are voluntary, you only have people competing in (for want of a better phrase) a premium market. Relatively low volume, higher prices because there's less competition and more being able to bank on a customers willingness to pay more to feel good about themselves.
When the first Iphone launched Nokia phones had 3G, voice dialing, half decent web browsing, and workable Versions of MS office on them, and they retained decent call quality, video recording. The first iphone managed e-mail (done better by RIM at that point, not sure about nokia there), a much better, web browser and uh... an ipod with a big screen (other phones had MP3 players already). Lets face the sad reality here, north american wireless providers and phones in general lagged our european and asian counterparts significantly, because no one cared enough to fix it.
Apple made people care. And once people cared, and once computer makers got into the phone business rather than phone companies, they gutted the market.
Nokia's idea of a high end phone is the vertu, a $20 000 device that you can dial a special number to get a special call centre where they will direct you to 5 star restaurants so you don't have to hang out with people who can't afford $20K phones which connect to special call centres. I'm sure there will always be a market for that, but that problem can be solved in software for a lot less than 20k, *AND* the same software will solve a whole lot of other problems while you're at it (like finding the nearest dry cleaner or H&R block).
That was Steve Jobs great brilliance. Nokia wasn't going to to play the crappy network game, and basically gave up on the north american carriers as worthless, incompetent, and not worth dealing with.
So Steve Jobs comes along, releases a device that, at launch, was inferior to Nokia's offerings, and was saddled by an outdated network. But suddenly people could see the potential in their phones, if only they had a decent network, and a decent OS. Nokia had (for the time) a decent OS, but no connection to the network, and by the time the network was getting fixed Apple had used off the money they generated to actually build a decent OS. Now you have RIM, Google and Apple all devouring marketspace that in the rest of the world was basically owned by Nokia, because they didn't catch up on innovation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of Steve Jobs or a lot of the nonsense he pulls, but credit where credit is due, he forced the antiquated network providers in the US and Canada to start pulling their heads out of their asses. That should have been done by Jim Balsillie or Mike Lazaridis of RIM, but they didn't get it.
And now we have phones that are basically computers that can make phone calls. Nokia understood the phones that can do other stuff model, but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls, and RIM is in the same boat. MS, Apple and Google all get it, it's a matter of how well they can execute and any number of other factors for them.
By now the 3rd option, of completely reforming your internal structure was too late. They're too far behind in the smartphone wave to internally restructure, then launch a new mobile platform.
One can certainly disagree with their choice of MS as the 3rd party OS, but I think given the circumstances it was pick one of MS or Google, or be facing serious problems in 2 or 3 years. That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
You also know too little about computer security to be trusted with important information our organization stores on a computer.
that's ok, you fall into the 'the pirate bay' as your gaming alliance representative group.
Though to be fair, you're missing out. There are lots of great DRM free games being released every year (the Witcher for example) that are AAA full price games, and those guys deserve money for the work they do.
I'm torn on putting GoG on that list. I like their stuff, and i certainly use it a lot. They're either the most important, or the least important company to something like the gaming alliance. And I'm not really sure which.
On one hand they are the ones who've been dealing with trying to fix all the messed up lack of standards crap that we had for years. That makes games as art hard because well, you need specialized programmers to fix any 5 year old title up enough that it will run on a modern system. All of the nuances of different hardware configurations, incompatible standards, market confusion, etc. all land on their lap. So they probably know the problems more intimately than anyone else, and in some sense are advocates for the long term future of the business by not screwing things up.
On the other hand, once people start buying digital, a service like GoG might not be all that relevant. A game tied to your steam account today will be tied to it 5 years from now (presuming the likely scenario that Valve is still in business). And I'm not sure how much actual business GoG does other than the Witcher. It's a great idea, but there's only so much money to be had on planescape torment and baldur's gate II. And we might be at a point where standards today are good enough that they can be ported/updated along and keep backwards compatibility that many of GoG's issues are going to only apply to that specific timeframe of 1996-2003 or so. (Glide 3DFx to directx 9). 5 years ago from this year is directx 9.0c and directx 10, how many games still have DX9 modes? Nearly all of them, the dragon age 2 demo released yesterday does.
So like I say, I'm not sure if they are the most relevant, or least relevant company to the future of PC gaming.