Your publishers could go to a fully-digital, copy-preventing system of eBooks. That way your readers will each have to pay for their own copy, file-trading on the Internet will be "impossible," and your rights to collect money from every individual page-turner will be preserved.
Go talk to the RIAA, they'll be your best friends for as long as it takes to get this implemented.
I'm sorry, I understand their complaints, but people have been buying and selling used books for as long as books have existed. They may as well protest public libraries and eBay. Just because Amazon sells new and used books in the same webspace doesn't make them any more "dangerous" to the authors' bottom lines than those other media.
...of course, in a house where we can't even keep the cordless phone on its recharger for more than five minutes and stash the remote control in a new location every day, this will probably be less of a boon than some people think.
I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines?
Hmm. Should I download a distributed computing client to...
analyze the human genome,
fold cancer-curing proteins,
locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
help the government explode a virtual nuke?
(No nastiness intended. My point is that it might be hard to get people to download a client with that particular goal in mind.)
"We're trying to whack them with a verdict significantly large so that they, out of fiscal self-interest, will put warning labels on," he said. "We're trying to get them to act responsibly. They know this is an addictive game."
For the love of Pete, people. Cigarettes are addictive because of nicotene, which is a chemical agent that acts on the brain. Warning labels go on cigarettes because the smoke causes long-term damage to one's lungs, and more. Lawsuits are being levied against the tobacco industry because they've been knowingly increasing the levels of nicotine in their products to increase addiction, marketing to children who may not be aware of the dangers of the product, and have for years denied any knowledge of the dangers their products cause.
None of these arguments apply to video games.
It's a virtual world, people. The problems here are as old as IRC, BBSes and even Ms. Pac-Man arcade machines. Heck, gamblers have for centuries had the same problems. If it's fun, people can and do get addicted. But that's not Sony's fault, nor is it (to be bluntly honest) their problem.
Sony is NOT deliberately manipulating their games or online worlds to make people play longer. They are NOT adding subliminal messages saying "Play more EverQuest" or installing Trojan horses that log you on when you're trying to do productive work. They don't offer any incentive to play, other than virtual money and level powers. The fact that people sell high-powered characters on eBay for real money is something Sony has even tried to prevent in court themselves.
They know the game is popular, but there is no way a sane person can argue they are KNOWINGLY addicting people to this thing.
Elizabeth Woolley of Osceola: I hate to say it, but the game had nothing to do with your son's suicide. The suicide and his addiction to the game doubtless had the same cause -- "A psychologist diagnosed him with depression and schizoid personality disorder," according to the article -- but you cannot hold Sony responsible for keeping him from playing as often as he liked.
The game is popular, it is fun, but it's not designed to be addictive any more than any other video, board, or card game. With all due respect to your tragedy, you're looking for blame in exactly the wrong place.
Based on what I can see about the Unisys systems being touted here (servers with 8-32 processors, costing six-digit dollar amounts), this is not an ad targetting Linux or MacOS X-style BSD. This is aiming squarely at the proprietary UNIX systems Unisys' servers would be competing against -- Sun, HP/UX and the like.
Of course, I've not touched base with the high-end UNIX server market in years. Can someone else fill me/us in on who Unisys' competitors are, and whether or not the ads have any foundation at all?
I compare MS Office to Adobe Photoshop whenever things like this come up: both applications are clearly the best at what they do, with the largest number of features and the greatest extensibility, and wherever they lead, other similar applications follow. They are easily twice as fully-featured as their nearest competitor, if not more. For all intents and purposes, they cannot be "killed" in the market.
But their prices reflect that. There is a simple reason for this (and it's not "monopoly power"): they're both targetted at professionals. Photoshop has print-editing features that no photographer or web developer will ever need; Office is powerful enough to create entire books collaboratively, but most office employees just want something to build good-looking newsletters. Too few consumers realize that they don't need half the features they're paying for, just to get the half that they want.
The trick for the competition, then, is to get that half non-professionals want, and then do them very, very well. Even Microsoft Works doesn't quite provide that. If gobeProductive (or StarOffice or any of the others) can, then it has a chance to be successful, even without scoring a "kill."
it will be interesting to see where this model continues to go -- release a fairly simple but intricate and engaging first version and add to it continuously, for a fee.
Zillions of Web sites operate under the same model: Yahoo Mail, Salon.com, Slashdot...
Heck, even Microsoft started doing the same thing when it began charging for Microsoft Plus! and service packs to Windows 95.
That much information could be quickly found on E2 and Google. The fact that my phone number is not on my driver's license, not to mention that you had to calculate the birth year and got it wrong, reassures me that you're not finding what it is you're trying to convince me you're finding.
In other words, my driver's license is still private, safely tucked into my wallet, which (after all) was my original point. And you're a juvenile and a troll for posting it just to get a rise.
No, it's not -- that information was MADE public, by me, on purpose. When you can give me the rest of my driver's license information with only a two-minute head start, I'll be suitably freaked out.
I don't have my driver's license publicly available. I keep it in my wallet, tucked away, and display it only when someone needs to see it. For a police officer, that may require knowledge of my address and full name, and that's well and good.
A bar does NOT need to know that information. The only thing they need to know is whether or not I'm old enough to buy liquor. My name, address and so forth are "need to know" information, and the bar definitely does not need to know that just because I walk in their door.
The bar has absolutely no right to use that kind of information to their advantage. Just because it's written in the same place as my age doesn't mean they have a right to record and data-mine it.
If this becomes a persistent problem, then NY State should respond with an updated license. In addition to the data recorded on that magnetic strip, it should include the equivalent of an opt-in checkbox: "Do you want this data to be used for commercial purposes?" Any merchant who swipes my card would then be LEGALLY REQUIRED to honor my request, under penalty of heavy fines.
Forget about the problems of surfers crashing into these things -- what about a boat, I wondered? If a fishing trawler or passenger motorboat plowed through these things, they'd do serious damage to both themselves and the generators.
Then it occurred to me that they'd obviously want to mark these things off, along with painting them fluorescent orange to make them easily visible, to keep stray boats out of the area. Then I wondered about the impact on the fishing industry if these become widespread. Then it hit me: they could mark off a section of the water and use it both for fish farming and power generation. Double the economic benefits, and now you only have to worry about fish pirates in stealth submarines.
The URL you provided describes capturing wave power at the coastline, by installing a device into the rocks by the water.
This is completely different, a device that floats in the middle of the water and, better yet, can be chain-linked together in series. The installation expense looks to be much lower, and wouldn't damage coastlines either. In fact, you could probably install and use them when you're nowhere near a coastline, like near a free-standing drilling platform.
"RE" far from the first
on
Resident Evil
·
· Score: 2
While past conversions such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter were box-office flops, Resident Evil has the chance to break the game-to-movie-flop habit.
Guess he forgot all about the last three video-game movies to hit the big screen: Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat and even Pokemon: The First Movie. They may not have been rippers in the plot department, but they were certainly financial successes for their respective studios.
We've got plenty of bright people in this country, but we don't make things like this.
That's because rich Americans would rather spend $20,000 on a stereo that does everything, or a handheld that can drive your car, instead of a robot that sings and dances at karaoke parties.
Your manager doesn't care how many lines of code you do or don't write. He doesn't care what those lines do, or how they work. That's because the client or customer doesn't care about those things. All they do care about is features: Did you add what we needed to add today? Did you finish ahead of schedule or behind it? Will we deliver on time or a week later?
Optimize on your own time. All the non-developers care about is what gets into the final product, and if you meet the list of desired features, then you're productive. End of story.
"New.net will seek to work with ICANN to ensure stability in the Internet, and we will attempt to work in the best interests of all parties to not interfere with anything that ICANN plans to do." (Clearly, the author of this article would argue with the use of the word "stability".)
"New.net is building a more open registry business that also will enable other parties to introduce new domain name extensions to the millions of users that have access to New.net domain names. New.net will determine which extensions to release in the future, applying the standards set forth below." (You call that open?)
"We are building a DNS infrastructure that is at least as reliable as the root servers that serve.com,.net,.org,.co.uk, and other top-level domains." (I don't consider having to install special software just to get to a URL "reliable", but maybe I'm narrow-minded.)
MP3 sucks. Well maybe it doesn't suck, but it's a damned sight worse than CD audio, and let's not forget that CDs just barely encompass the resolution and frequency response that we can discern.
Good; I agree. Keep telling this to the RIAA until they get the message that MP3 file sharing is not, in fact, a total threat to their business.
However, for most folks, MP3 is Good Enough. It doesn't contain all the sound, no, but it makes up for it by giving you the power to store all your favorite songs on a single hard drive instead of needing to spring for a 300-CD jukebox for your stereo. Plus it's easier to navigate and program playlists on MP3 jukebox software, using your keyboard and mouse.
If you really think that sound quality is the only thing consumers are interested, you haven't been paying attention. If you can increase convenience by a factor of ten, while decreasing quality by a mere 10%, most people would consider that a spectacular trade-off.
Why spend all that time setting up HomePNA unless you already have it for something else? And even if you do have it, you're still limited by the device's need to be close to a phone jack.
Much more practical, I'd think, to get an FM transmitter installed in your PC, or even just attach one to your speaker jack. Noticably cheaper, than a Rio Receiver either way. This way you can pick up your MP3 collection from any FM radio in the house, even untethered battery-powered ones.
The device offers, according to the linked page, "Built in 10 mbps homePNA connection for streaming music to one or more Rio Receivers."
Nice, but practically speaking a waste. Better to replace the Ethernet card with a low-power FM transmitter, like most car CD jukeboxes do, so that you can pick it up from any radio in your house. The only use for homePNA would be to sell the Rio Receivers, but this $1500 device would be infinitely more valuable if I didn't have to spend more money to get remote listening.
Surely it would be more economical and practical to connect a video output to one's television, like the Kenwood Entré does. You could program/navigate it using the remote control instead of having to stand right in front of it, and the box would be half the height to boot.
Re:Not as bad as all that
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
True, but it only works if your posts to Slashdot aren't modded down. In other words, you have to personally come in and make informative, intelligent posts so that the default user (Google) will see your.sig and index the link.
Again, harder to automate than it sounds. It works, but it's not easy, because Slashdot filters out the spam links before Google even sees them.
Slashdot Mirror
Your publishers could go to a fully-digital, copy-preventing system of eBooks. That way your readers will each have to pay for their own copy, file-trading on the Internet will be "impossible," and your rights to collect money from every individual page-turner will be preserved.
Go talk to the RIAA, they'll be your best friends for as long as it takes to get this implemented.
I'm sorry, I understand their complaints, but people have been buying and selling used books for as long as books have existed. They may as well protest public libraries and eBay. Just because Amazon sells new and used books in the same webspace doesn't make them any more "dangerous" to the authors' bottom lines than those other media.
- analyze the human genome,
- fold cancer-curing proteins,
- locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
- help the government explode a virtual nuke?
(No nastiness intended. My point is that it might be hard to get people to download a client with that particular goal in mind.)...a multi-language translation database called the World Wide Lexicon, using a distributed community of volunteers....
As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of Google's pigeon-based page-ranking technology. "I just hope those volunteers can type really really fast...."
"We're trying to whack them with a verdict significantly large so that they, out of fiscal self-interest, will put warning labels on," he said. "We're trying to get them to act responsibly. They know this is an addictive game."
For the love of Pete, people. Cigarettes are addictive because of nicotene, which is a chemical agent that acts on the brain. Warning labels go on cigarettes because the smoke causes long-term damage to one's lungs, and more. Lawsuits are being levied against the tobacco industry because they've been knowingly increasing the levels of nicotine in their products to increase addiction, marketing to children who may not be aware of the dangers of the product, and have for years denied any knowledge of the dangers their products cause.
None of these arguments apply to video games.
It's a virtual world, people. The problems here are as old as IRC, BBSes and even Ms. Pac-Man arcade machines. Heck, gamblers have for centuries had the same problems. If it's fun, people can and do get addicted. But that's not Sony's fault, nor is it (to be bluntly honest) their problem.
Sony is NOT deliberately manipulating their games or online worlds to make people play longer. They are NOT adding subliminal messages saying "Play more EverQuest" or installing Trojan horses that log you on when you're trying to do productive work. They don't offer any incentive to play, other than virtual money and level powers. The fact that people sell high-powered characters on eBay for real money is something Sony has even tried to prevent in court themselves.
They know the game is popular, but there is no way a sane person can argue they are KNOWINGLY addicting people to this thing.
Elizabeth Woolley of Osceola: I hate to say it, but the game had nothing to do with your son's suicide. The suicide and his addiction to the game doubtless had the same cause -- "A psychologist diagnosed him with depression and schizoid personality disorder," according to the article -- but you cannot hold Sony responsible for keeping him from playing as often as he liked.
The game is popular, it is fun, but it's not designed to be addictive any more than any other video, board, or card game. With all due respect to your tragedy, you're looking for blame in exactly the wrong place.
Based on what I can see about the Unisys systems being touted here (servers with 8-32 processors, costing six-digit dollar amounts), this is not an ad targetting Linux or MacOS X-style BSD. This is aiming squarely at the proprietary UNIX systems Unisys' servers would be competing against -- Sun, HP/UX and the like.
Of course, I've not touched base with the high-end UNIX server market in years. Can someone else fill me/us in on who Unisys' competitors are, and whether or not the ads have any foundation at all?
I compare MS Office to Adobe Photoshop whenever things like this come up: both applications are clearly the best at what they do, with the largest number of features and the greatest extensibility, and wherever they lead, other similar applications follow. They are easily twice as fully-featured as their nearest competitor, if not more. For all intents and purposes, they cannot be "killed" in the market.
But their prices reflect that. There is a simple reason for this (and it's not "monopoly power"): they're both targetted at professionals. Photoshop has print-editing features that no photographer or web developer will ever need; Office is powerful enough to create entire books collaboratively, but most office employees just want something to build good-looking newsletters. Too few consumers realize that they don't need half the features they're paying for, just to get the half that they want.
The trick for the competition, then, is to get that half non-professionals want, and then do them very, very well. Even Microsoft Works doesn't quite provide that. If gobeProductive (or StarOffice or any of the others) can, then it has a chance to be successful, even without scoring a "kill."
it will be interesting to see where this model continues to go -- release a fairly simple but intricate and engaging first version and add to it continuously, for a fee.
Zillions of Web sites operate under the same model: Yahoo Mail, Salon.com, Slashdot...
Heck, even Microsoft started doing the same thing when it began charging for Microsoft Plus! and service packs to Windows 95.
That much information could be quickly found on E2 and Google. The fact that my phone number is not on my driver's license, not to mention that you had to calculate the birth year and got it wrong, reassures me that you're not finding what it is you're trying to convince me you're finding.
In other words, my driver's license is still private, safely tucked into my wallet, which (after all) was my original point. And you're a juvenile and a troll for posting it just to get a rise.
No, it's not -- that information was MADE public, by me, on purpose. When you can give me the rest of my driver's license information with only a two-minute head start, I'll be suitably freaked out.
You pulled that off of my homepage at E2, and E2 is linked at the top of each of my Slashdot posts. Don't pretend you're particularly clever.
I don't have my driver's license publicly available. I keep it in my wallet, tucked away, and display it only when someone needs to see it. For a police officer, that may require knowledge of my address and full name, and that's well and good.
A bar does NOT need to know that information. The only thing they need to know is whether or not I'm old enough to buy liquor. My name, address and so forth are "need to know" information, and the bar definitely does not need to know that just because I walk in their door.
The bar has absolutely no right to use that kind of information to their advantage. Just because it's written in the same place as my age doesn't mean they have a right to record and data-mine it.
If this becomes a persistent problem, then NY State should respond with an updated license. In addition to the data recorded on that magnetic strip, it should include the equivalent of an opt-in checkbox: "Do you want this data to be used for commercial purposes?" Any merchant who swipes my card would then be LEGALLY REQUIRED to honor my request, under penalty of heavy fines.
Forget about the problems of surfers crashing into these things -- what about a boat, I wondered? If a fishing trawler or passenger motorboat plowed through these things, they'd do serious damage to both themselves and the generators.
Then it occurred to me that they'd obviously want to mark these things off, along with painting them fluorescent orange to make them easily visible, to keep stray boats out of the area. Then I wondered about the impact on the fishing industry if these become widespread. Then it hit me: they could mark off a section of the water and use it both for fish farming and power generation. Double the economic benefits, and now you only have to worry about fish pirates in stealth submarines.
The URL you provided describes capturing wave power at the coastline, by installing a device into the rocks by the water.
This is completely different, a device that floats in the middle of the water and, better yet, can be chain-linked together in series. The installation expense looks to be much lower, and wouldn't damage coastlines either. In fact, you could probably install and use them when you're nowhere near a coastline, like near a free-standing drilling platform.
While past conversions such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter were box-office flops, Resident Evil has the chance to break the game-to-movie-flop habit.
Guess he forgot all about the last three video-game movies to hit the big screen: Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat and even Pokemon: The First Movie. They may not have been rippers in the plot department, but they were certainly financial successes for their respective studios.
We've got plenty of bright people in this country, but we don't make things like this.
That's because rich Americans would rather spend $20,000 on a stereo that does everything, or a handheld that can drive your car, instead of a robot that sings and dances at karaoke parties.
Jerome T Heckencamp --> A KNEE JERK COMETH
Your manager doesn't care how many lines of code you do or don't write. He doesn't care what those lines do, or how they work. That's because the client or customer doesn't care about those things. All they do care about is features: Did you add what we needed to add today? Did you finish ahead of schedule or behind it? Will we deliver on time or a week later?
Optimize on your own time. All the non-developers care about is what gets into the final product, and if you meet the list of desired features, then you're productive. End of story.
It tells you everything you need to know. You can even install their software, if you're feeling self-destructive.
Some choice quotes from http://www.new.net/about_us_guiding.tp:
.com, .net, .org, .co.uk, and other top-level domains." (I don't consider having to install special software just to get to a URL "reliable", but maybe I'm narrow-minded.)
"New.net will seek to work with ICANN to ensure stability in the Internet, and we will attempt to work in the best interests of all parties to not interfere with anything that ICANN plans to do." (Clearly, the author of this article would argue with the use of the word "stability".)
"New.net is building a more open registry business that also will enable other parties to introduce new domain name extensions to the millions of users that have access to New.net domain names. New.net will determine which extensions to release in the future, applying the standards set forth below." (You call that open?)
"We are building a DNS infrastructure that is at least as reliable as the root servers that serve
MP3 sucks. Well maybe it doesn't suck, but it's a damned sight worse than CD audio, and let's not forget that CDs just barely encompass the resolution and frequency response that we can discern.
Good; I agree. Keep telling this to the RIAA until they get the message that MP3 file sharing is not, in fact, a total threat to their business.
However, for most folks, MP3 is Good Enough. It doesn't contain all the sound, no, but it makes up for it by giving you the power to store all your favorite songs on a single hard drive instead of needing to spring for a 300-CD jukebox for your stereo. Plus it's easier to navigate and program playlists on MP3 jukebox software, using your keyboard and mouse.
If you really think that sound quality is the only thing consumers are interested, you haven't been paying attention. If you can increase convenience by a factor of ten, while decreasing quality by a mere 10%, most people would consider that a spectacular trade-off.
Why spend all that time setting up HomePNA unless you already have it for something else? And even if you do have it, you're still limited by the device's need to be close to a phone jack.
Much more practical, I'd think, to get an FM transmitter installed in your PC, or even just attach one to your speaker jack. Noticably cheaper, than a Rio Receiver either way. This way you can pick up your MP3 collection from any FM radio in the house, even untethered battery-powered ones.
The device offers, according to the linked page, "Built in 10 mbps homePNA connection for streaming music to one or more Rio Receivers."
Nice, but practically speaking a waste. Better to replace the Ethernet card with a low-power FM transmitter, like most car CD jukeboxes do, so that you can pick it up from any radio in your house. The only use for homePNA would be to sell the Rio Receivers, but this $1500 device would be infinitely more valuable if I didn't have to spend more money to get remote listening.
Surely it would be more economical and practical to connect a video output to one's television, like the Kenwood Entré does. You could program/navigate it using the remote control instead of having to stand right in front of it, and the box would be half the height to boot.
True, but it only works if your posts to Slashdot aren't modded down. In other words, you have to personally come in and make informative, intelligent posts so that the default user (Google) will see your .sig and index the link.
Again, harder to automate than it sounds. It works, but it's not easy, because Slashdot filters out the spam links before Google even sees them.