Academics just want to publish. They want their papers to be spread far and wide and critiqued and expanded on. That's what they're for. The academic journals traditionally served this purpose.
But we don't need them any more. Almost all of the information can be rendered in HTML, will be freely hosted by universities, gets indexed by google, and spread via all sorts of communication forums. Why do we need the journals? We don't. They've simply become parasites.
The fuel efficiency is only about 10% better than a decent modern injection diesel. Clever electronics and better batteries would enhance the efficiency of the prius hugely. Some claim you can double the efficiency with Lithium-iron batteries (yes, they're expensive, but 100mpg isn't to be sneezed at).
But Commodore 64 games were £10 in the mid 80's. That was just $20 ($37 adjusted for inflation). Early Amiga and Atari ST games were £25 at the time which probably translates to more than a PC game - although at the time they were way too expensive for me ever to buy one. Games have pretty much kept up with inflation since then, but have remained at a price I'd call "really expensive". I think the industry is missing out on the impulse purchase market, but the only way for the prices to fall would be for all publishers to agree to cut their prices by 50%. Nobody will take that risk.
But honestly, how many game take 50 people 4 years to complete? 18 months with a team ramping up to 50 over the course of the project is considerably more typical.
Well, my suggestion was to be taken purely as a business choice without ethics getting in the way. I just wanted to point out that the business argument was a non-starter. This doesn't need to cost any farmer money since branching out into corn isn't a vast leap even for a meat and dairy farmer.
There are many better arguments - end consumer cost, environmental damage, poor taxpayer return - that the business argument is pretty much non-existent.
There will always be a market for sound cards. While they may whine and kick and scream about it because of how hard it is to please the professional audio crowd, that's where it's heading.
Even there, all you need is a digital optical output and feed into an external amplifier, and one digital signal output is the same as another. You probably want better shielding than you can manage in a PC anyway. I'd say they're heading the same way as add-in Parallel and serial cards.
For a lot of these games, especially the newer ones, it would make sense to offer downloadable executable patches that run directly on the PS3 but get data from the PS2 disc. Shouldn't cost too much to get them to work on the PS3, and games are mostly data.
I was just assuming that given a soaring price of corn, someone with a lot of land would be better advised to become a net seller rather than a net buyer. Or reduce his livestock count and grow corn since it's clearly disproportionately profitable at the moment, and should cover his initial investment before the prices start to stabilise.
downloading it off the internet and screwing the developers of the game you love so much, damning your eternal soul, and taking a chance on going to jail,
True. That's why some people choose to pay.
Of course, to some other people their eternal soul and the risk of jail are less than $60 but more than say $30. This is far from an unheard of concept. Most people have a price on their morality.
Yup. You can get 160GB onto a tape, each tape costs a lot less than a disk drive and is more reliable. But they are becoming less common. The price difference is falling and the drives are expensive.
Or rather it's the price that changes the breakdown. Lets assume that a game has a staff of 30 programmers and designers at $100 000 pa and takes a year to write. That means that it cost 3 million to write the code. Now then, if they sell 100 000 copies of that at $60 a time, then that's $30 per programmer for each copy sold, or 50% of the cover price. If they only sell 50 000 copies, that means that 100% of the sale of each game goes to the programmers. If they sell 500 000 then it means $6, or 10% of each game goes to the programmers. So, do they reduce the price of games if they know they'll sell more? Doesn't seem to be the case.
Okay, next - the retailer gets $12 for each game sold. Would he still demand $12 if the games cost $20 each? What if they cost $12? Of course not. The retailer knows that the lower price would yield higher sales and would be happy with a similar percentage cut. Teh same applies to the console feee. The console companies charge a smaller amount per unit for budget games.
Manufacturing costs - Now this is something that actually affects the end unit costs. However they exaggerated severely. Small (1000 disc) runs cost less than half that.
Marketing? Well, that's not even in the picture. If this was considered an expense, they might as well get rid of the marketting department and make a whopping $4 extra per unit. Every dollar spent on marketting sees more than a dollar return either in allowing them to increase the sale price or increasing the number of sales.
All internet radio stations are free to negotiate their own deals with the record industry. Even better, they can ask for, and usually receive substantially better deals from the independents, who would be delighted to get some airplay for their artists.
The only thing that bugs me about this argument is that surely the record industry knows this. I can't imagine they're intending to actively encourage their competition.
But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.
Yeah. I wonder what issues the would be with a cross platform x86 binary based cross-platform runtime. Considering the three most common operating systems are primarily x86 now, a compatibility layer could be extremely useful, and could potentially become popular enough to make Windows no longer neccesary
Well, Patents are just the free-ish market way of dealing with this. Since drugs are such a neccesity, we could always implement some sort of mandatory royalty scheme for the company that invents and tests the drug. Okay - this wouldn't be fundamentally different from a patent in the end, but striclty speaking it isn't a patent.
But to be honest, the patent system is a decent enough idea. It just needs to be reformed.
Normally I'm a bit skeptical when Slashdot interprets these patents, and s per usual, the summary does so. The patent does not cover doubly linked lists. It covers a generalisation of the idea that may or may not include doubly linked lists. Inthis patent, the list can be transferred in a number of predefined sequences. Doubly linked lists typically only allow traversal forwards and backwards.
But, this is a well known data type, known as a multiply linked list. A couple of minutes with google code search gave me an example in the form of the "engine" structure in GIST, which can be traversed in order of Active Engines.
Interesting points. Not really related to the points I was trying to make but anyway...
Define this community. I can see the scenario that communities of creative people will congregate and share amongst themselves their creative output.
In this case - Geeks with video cameras, geeks with video capture cards, those who create and want to be heard, and those who don't create but like to share. Some people approve of the latter type (those with another source of income who just make movies for fun, or those who make tangible profits indirectly), others don't.
However, I can also see bands of pirates, who all contribute 'swag,' or stolen property, to their 'community commons.'
I don't see it that way. Pirates (as in blackbeard) are in it for personal gain. They may see a benefit to pooling resources and rewards but that's stil because they do better from it. Youtube pirates are truly trying to be altruistic. They're just naive. They want to share the cool videos they've seen. They don't consider the problems this may cause the copyright holder.
Viacom underestimated just how easy it would become to violate copyright. And possibly how popular it would be to do so.
If I posted a video to my website in 1998, this would have been a rare occurance. I'd have needed a rare video digitiser, heaps of hard disk, and plenty of processing time to convert it into an MPEG. The copyright holder might see it and could examine it, check that it was the video they were after. Then they conveniently send a brief note to the ISP, who would take it down, and provide information about the infringer. They might get a few of these a week. Community content wasn't exactly a big thing back then.
Here's the thing... If you want a PC then the dream machine is the fastest CPU around with the fastest graphics card, the most RAM possible, and an array of really fast really big disks. (Hang RAID. I wat RAED - Redundant array of expensive disks)
But what I want is a decent media PC. Plugs into the TV. Can stream video over the LAN. High quality video and sound output. And fanless.
All of the above is possible. But I want more. I want a remote control, negligible boot time (2 seconds or so), a mouseless UI that incorporates a nice video filing system, and a web browser. And to keep the ability to write additional software for it. I want this to remain as a PC.
Just go in. Work your hours. Do an adequate job. Go home. Make the time not at work as enjoyable as possible. And abuse the company resources looking for another job in the meantime.
But they don't pay a per-unit price for Windows so it wouldn't make any difference to them.
A lot of smaller places that do custom PCs will allow you to specify "No OS" as an option. They'll usually let you remove any other component as well, if for some reason you object to having a processor included.
If all it takes is a 'counter-notification' to get the content back up, why doesn't everyone just throw back a counter-notification, pending a counter-counter-notification, ad infinitum?
It doesn't quite work like that:)
After a counter notification, the submitter has taken full responsibility for the legality of the work, and authorises YouTube to give contact details to the complainant. And further takedowns must be ignored by YouTube. The dispute is now between the poster and the complainant.
Well, the DMCA does have a counter notifaction mechanism. It's not very good but it does limit the harm done by malicious or mistaken takedown notices.
I really do hope Take Two can find a case here, I know I've been angered more than once by his rediculous opinions, and it would be nice to finally shut him up.
I really hope they don't. I've been angered many times by his opinions, and I hope to be angered many times more. Being offended gives me a fuzzy warm feeling that the right to freedom of speech is being upheld.
Slashdot Mirror
Academics just want to publish. They want their papers to be spread far and wide and critiqued and expanded on. That's what they're for. The academic journals traditionally served this purpose.
But we don't need them any more. Almost all of the information can be rendered in HTML, will be freely hosted by universities, gets indexed by google, and spread via all sorts of communication forums. Why do we need the journals? We don't. They've simply become parasites.
The fuel efficiency is only about 10% better than a decent modern injection diesel. Clever electronics and better batteries would enhance the efficiency of the prius hugely. Some claim you can double the efficiency with Lithium-iron batteries (yes, they're expensive, but 100mpg isn't to be sneezed at).
But Commodore 64 games were £10 in the mid 80's. That was just $20 ($37 adjusted for inflation). Early Amiga and Atari ST games were £25 at the time which probably translates to more than a PC game - although at the time they were way too expensive for me ever to buy one. Games have pretty much kept up with inflation since then, but have remained at a price I'd call "really expensive". I think the industry is missing out on the impulse purchase market, but the only way for the prices to fall would be for all publishers to agree to cut their prices by 50%. Nobody will take that risk.
But honestly, how many game take 50 people 4 years to complete? 18 months with a team ramping up to 50 over the course of the project is considerably more typical.
Wow!
Once upon a time, it was something like 20% each for the distributor and retailer.
Well, my suggestion was to be taken purely as a business choice without ethics getting in the way. I just wanted to point out that the business argument was a non-starter. This doesn't need to cost any farmer money since branching out into corn isn't a vast leap even for a meat and dairy farmer.
There are many better arguments - end consumer cost, environmental damage, poor taxpayer return - that the business argument is pretty much non-existent.
There will always be a market for sound cards. While they may whine and kick and scream about it because of how hard it is to please the professional audio crowd, that's where it's heading.
Even there, all you need is a digital optical output and feed into an external amplifier, and one digital signal output is the same as another. You probably want better shielding than you can manage in a PC anyway. I'd say they're heading the same way as add-in Parallel and serial cards.
For a lot of these games, especially the newer ones, it would make sense to offer downloadable executable patches that run directly on the PS3 but get data from the PS2 disc. Shouldn't cost too much to get them to work on the PS3, and games are mostly data.
I was just assuming that given a soaring price of corn, someone with a lot of land would be better advised to become a net seller rather than a net buyer. Or reduce his livestock count and grow corn since it's clearly disproportionately profitable at the moment, and should cover his initial investment before the prices start to stabilise.
downloading it off the internet and screwing the developers of the game you love so much, damning your eternal soul, and taking a chance on going to jail,
True. That's why some people choose to pay.
Of course, to some other people their eternal soul and the risk of jail are less than $60 but more than say $30. This is far from an unheard of concept. Most people have a price on their morality.
Yup. You can get 160GB onto a tape, each tape costs a lot less than a disk drive and is more reliable. But they are becoming less common. The price difference is falling and the drives are expensive.
Or rather it's the price that changes the breakdown. Lets assume that a game has a staff of 30 programmers and designers at $100 000 pa and takes a year to write. That means that it cost 3 million to write the code. Now then, if they sell 100 000 copies of that at $60 a time, then that's $30 per programmer for each copy sold, or 50% of the cover price. If they only sell 50 000 copies, that means that 100% of the sale of each game goes to the programmers. If they sell 500 000 then it means $6, or 10% of each game goes to the programmers. So, do they reduce the price of games if they know they'll sell more? Doesn't seem to be the case.
Okay, next - the retailer gets $12 for each game sold. Would he still demand $12 if the games cost $20 each? What if they cost $12? Of course not. The retailer knows that the lower price would yield higher sales and would be happy with a similar percentage cut. Teh same applies to the console feee. The console companies charge a smaller amount per unit for budget games.
Manufacturing costs - Now this is something that actually affects the end unit costs. However they exaggerated severely. Small (1000 disc) runs cost less than half that.
Marketing? Well, that's not even in the picture. If this was considered an expense, they might as well get rid of the marketting department and make a whopping $4 extra per unit. Every dollar spent on marketting sees more than a dollar return either in allowing them to increase the sale price or increasing the number of sales.
All internet radio stations are free to negotiate their own deals with the record industry. Even better, they can ask for, and usually receive substantially better deals from the independents, who would be delighted to get some airplay for their artists.
The only thing that bugs me about this argument is that surely the record industry knows this. I can't imagine they're intending to actively encourage their competition.
But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.
Start growing corn then.
Yeah. I wonder what issues the would be with a cross platform x86 binary based cross-platform runtime. Considering the three most common operating systems are primarily x86 now, a compatibility layer could be extremely useful, and could potentially become popular enough to make Windows no longer neccesary
Well, Patents are just the free-ish market way of dealing with this. Since drugs are such a neccesity, we could always implement some sort of mandatory royalty scheme for the company that invents and tests the drug. Okay - this wouldn't be fundamentally different from a patent in the end, but striclty speaking it isn't a patent.
But to be honest, the patent system is a decent enough idea. It just needs to be reformed.
Normally I'm a bit skeptical when Slashdot interprets these patents, and s per usual, the summary does so. The patent does not cover doubly linked lists. It covers a generalisation of the idea that may or may not include doubly linked lists. Inthis patent, the list can be transferred in a number of predefined sequences. Doubly linked lists typically only allow traversal forwards and backwards.
But, this is a well known data type, known as a multiply linked list. A couple of minutes with google code search gave me an example in the form of the "engine" structure in GIST, which can be traversed in order of Active Engines.
Oh, and also - Dupe!
Interesting points. Not really related to the points I was trying to make but anyway...
Define this community. I can see the scenario that communities of creative people will congregate and share amongst themselves their creative output.
In this case - Geeks with video cameras, geeks with video capture cards, those who create and want to be heard, and those who don't create but like to share. Some people approve of the latter type (those with another source of income who just make movies for fun, or those who make tangible profits indirectly), others don't.
However, I can also see bands of pirates, who all contribute 'swag,' or stolen property, to their 'community commons.'
I don't see it that way. Pirates (as in blackbeard) are in it for personal gain. They may see a benefit to pooling resources and rewards but that's stil because they do better from it. Youtube pirates are truly trying to be altruistic. They're just naive. They want to share the cool videos they've seen. They don't consider the problems this may cause the copyright holder.
Viacom underestimated just how easy it would become to violate copyright. And possibly how popular it would be to do so.
If I posted a video to my website in 1998, this would have been a rare occurance. I'd have needed a rare video digitiser, heaps of hard disk, and plenty of processing time to convert it into an MPEG. The copyright holder might see it and could examine it, check that it was the video they were after. Then they conveniently send a brief note to the ISP, who would take it down, and provide information about the infringer. They might get a few of these a week. Community content wasn't exactly a big thing back then.
Here's the thing... If you want a PC then the dream machine is the fastest CPU around with the fastest graphics card, the most RAM possible, and an array of really fast really big disks. (Hang RAID. I wat RAED - Redundant array of expensive disks)
But what I want is a decent media PC. Plugs into the TV. Can stream video over the LAN. High quality video and sound output. And fanless.
All of the above is possible. But I want more. I want a remote control, negligible boot time (2 seconds or so), a mouseless UI that incorporates a nice video filing system, and a web browser. And to keep the ability to write additional software for it. I want this to remain as a PC.
Just go in. Work your hours. Do an adequate job. Go home. Make the time not at work as enjoyable as possible. And abuse the company resources looking for another job in the meantime.
But they don't pay a per-unit price for Windows so it wouldn't make any difference to them.
A lot of smaller places that do custom PCs will allow you to specify "No OS" as an option. They'll usually let you remove any other component as well, if for some reason you object to having a processor included.
If all it takes is a 'counter-notification' to get the content back up, why doesn't everyone just throw back a counter-notification, pending a counter-counter-notification, ad infinitum?
It doesn't quite work like that:)
After a counter notification, the submitter has taken full responsibility for the legality of the work, and authorises YouTube to give contact details to the complainant. And further takedowns must be ignored by YouTube. The dispute is now between the poster and the complainant.
Well, the DMCA does have a counter notifaction mechanism. It's not very good but it does limit the harm done by malicious or mistaken takedown notices.
I really do hope Take Two can find a case here, I know I've been angered more than once by his rediculous opinions, and it would be nice to finally shut him up.
I really hope they don't. I've been angered many times by his opinions, and I hope to be angered many times more. Being offended gives me a fuzzy warm feeling that the right to freedom of speech is being upheld.