If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist.
I must disagree. Downloaded music is free. It is easily copyable without loss of quality between copys.
There is no way that the RIAA can or could compete with this new model. It has driven them insane and they are just thrashing away dangerously in their madness. Woe to the people arbitraily caught in one of sweeps. The RIAA is acting like a mad grizzly bear trying to claw every salmon fish passing by it on a stream in Alaska. But eventually the RIAA's madness will cause it to run out of energy and then just roll over and die.
However, this pattern of behavior will manifest itself as industry by industry fails to adjust to the new conditions of the modern age. One by one they will go insane and try to take out as many people at random that they can as long as they have the resources to do so. Smart people will recognize the signs of an industry in the grips of a 'death dance' and avoid being sucked into the malestrom of its fury while it dies. More on this way of thought can be found at www.kunstler.com and other sites like this.
I don't know who is to blame for the major decline in CD sales, the RIAA's stupidly clutching to the old music business model, or the students with 3000+ stolen songs on their ipods.
Blame the RIAA. The people with 3000+ songs on their iPods are really librarians. They are creating vast banks and quasi-public reservoirs of the cultural products available from the "turn of the 21st century" era. They are ensuring that that music of their generation can not be arbirarily destroyed or removed from general circulation by a corporate decree. They are protecting your music for your grandchildren and for music historians that will study it hundreds of years in the future, not unlike the way people of this time study Gregorian chant.
Don't believe any of this 'piracy' horseshit put out by the RIAA. They seem to be having the most difficult time understanding that they don't own the music anymore. They only were able to create this illusion for themselves because of the nature that music was distributed during the first era of audio recording technology that existed during the 20th century.
But it is only an illusion. And fading more every day...
Very interesting post. I want to see posts from people who are directly affected by the topic under discussion.
By the way, I have a friend who is an excellent aucoustic blues guitar and dobro player. Can he come give a concert for a few hours some evening in your store?
Oh, you don't allow music in your music store. You sell the packaged disks that come from the distributor. Music can only be played in a public forum like a bar. With special licenses and fees and union bullshit and dispensations from authorities and on and on.
It's too bad that both my friend and you can't make any money in the 'music' business. He creates music and you sell music; we buy music. Again it's too bad that you both can't work together. You could both make money. But, that's not the way that the music business has been set up by those people who are destroying the entire business by refusing to be flexible to the 21st century.
Oh well... Personally, I feel that I got a lifetime subscription to all music industry product when I spent most of my disposable income on music when I was a teenager. I don't 'buy' music product from music stores anymore. Oh, you disagree? Well, I'm just so sorry....Have a nice day!
This really is a career opportunity. Take an older car towards which males of a certain age feel an emotional affirmative bond. Add a CPU with an "Eliza" program, a speech synthesizer, a text-to-speech analyser, and add robotic interfaces to the vehicle's motion controls. Sell for ten times the price of the car and the electronics.
It is not a good idea to assume that there is always going to be a job awaiting you and your skills. An idea like the one above provides a means to generate an income using your skills outside the 'human resources' envelope. So don't snicker at it so comtemptously.
why 10x the power of the fastest X86? Because no one is going to 'junk' their existing and working software. And the new CPU has to run the existing X86 software at what seems to be the most acceptable emulation speed for PC users. The software community generally accepts that it takes 10 times the processing power of the emulated CPU to appear to be the emulated CPU running at full speed.
And at less than 10 times the power of the current X86, developers are not going to invest the large amount of money and retraining needed to develop next generation software on a completely new platform.
I come from the embedded systems world. Getting a 10 times more powerful CPU for about the same price as the CPU that you are currently developing for is not uncommon and happens every ten years. It is happening now as all the 8051 programmers; all the PIC programmers; and all the AVR programmers are beginning to realize (one by one) that there is a standardized 32-bit ARM processor that is reaching the $5 US price in small quantities.
It's not easy to switch devices; but we seem to do it every ten years or so. I learned on the 6502 in the Commodore 64 and the Motorola 6800 family on the Radio Shack home computers. Then I learned and used the Intel 8051 for ten years. Having gotten tired of wire-wrapping and 100+ connection PCB layouts, I switched to the Atmel AVR about ten years ago. Now, with not a little dread and excitement, I approach the ARM.
The 'rule' that any new processor has to be about ten times more powerful for the same price as the current 'general-use' processor seems to hold well in the embedded-systems field. I suspect that it applies to the general CPUs used in office and home PCs as well.
We lose the X86 when another processor comes along that is cheaper, 10x more powerful, and runs all X86 software at the speed that the users consider to be the same as a PC. Until then we keep the X86. Simple as that. Next tech issue, please.
Circuit City (is that the right one? they're all the same although they're owned by different people) has found that there is not enough difference in the sales between higher paid floor workers and poorly paid ones. That means their stuff either sells itself and people are just using the store as a 'warehouse', or, customers have no need for the higher level of knowledge that the more-experienced (the higher paid) floor workers have about the products on sale.
Also, are the positions being eliminated spread around the USA? or are they mostly in one geographic area? People in San Jose (you know which San Jose I'm talking about, you are Slashdaughters!) are going to make more money regardless of their experience level than people in, say, the central mid-west where the cost of living is cheaper. Will Circuit City fire 50% of the people in the Silicon Valley stores and offer those jobs to people in central Nebraska? Or will they just close stores in high-salary areas? Or is it 8% of the highest paid people in each store?
Has anyone else noticed how eBay (and CraigsList)has made stores like Circuit City obsolete? Why doesn't Circuit City accept items for sale on consignment? Not just Plasma TVs, but speciality electronic items like an original Jimi Hendrix FuzzFace guitar distortion with original Germanium transistors.
They are an electonics store, aren't they? Then why do they have such a difficult time actually selling electronics? Why are they so fucking inflexible?
I don't understand plagiarism. I mean I don't care where someone got the original text. It's like where you got the original code for a linked-list. It doesn't matter as long as it works. What difference does it make who wrote something as long as someone else is actually reading it?
Schools make such a big deal about this plagiarism stuff. But it means so little in the real world. There, what is important is that you can take the information that you need from any source that you can find and turn it into profit for your employers.
Next time someone tells you that plagiarism is serious, ask them if they've ever had to make a payroll with sales of an obsolete or marginal product. When you have been in that position, you know what is serious and what is simply pretensious nonsense.
Few teachers, being in protected positions and jobs, can tell the difference...
Someone could take advantage of the madness of the RIAA. First issue a press release that if elected, you will support the review of the copyright laws. Then watch closely for the the RIAA/MPAA to donate money to your opponent. Then come out swinging and don't stop: "My opponent takes money from people who want to put you (or your kids) in jail for moving songs from their CDs to their iPods." "My opponent takes money from organizations who sue 10-year-olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars!".
Be a real pit bull. Have many copies of the affidavits, etc... ready to hand out at press meetings and political rallies. Keep on message: Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers! (don't forget to get those 18+ year olds registered to vote!)Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers! Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers!
People really do hate the RIAA when the learn what this organization is actually doing. You have a good chance of winning the election by taking the anti-RIAA stand instead of just blindly supporting them.
A bigger school problem in the future will be actually getting students to the centralized school buildings. Our fleet of big inefficient yellow school buses are going to be prohibitively expensive when gasoline (and diesel fuel) reaches $4-5 a gallon.
It's time to rethink the whole idea of 'school' anyway. It's a 19th century institution in a 21st century world. Most of it is focused on getting young people into college when at least half of the people in college don't really belong there and would be better off earning a real living at the job that they have been training for since they were 14 years old.
The charge that video games (and by extension, all computer usage in the classroom) is bad for students because it straps them to a television set for many hours a day is basically correct. But the best way to approach this is to make the computers really small (hand held) and wireless and integrate them with cool data collection sensors. Fish dying at a local pond? Don't run video game simulations in the classroom. Go down to the pond with your handheld and take real measurements. Get outside into the real world. For a change.
'More than 300,000 Americans die from cardiac arrest each year. Roughly 9 out of 10 cardiac arrest victims die before they get to a hospital -- partly because they do not get CPR.'"
This is half correct. It is more the difference between (in the USA) between the liberal arts oriented and the science/business oriented. Liberal arts majors and graduates who have the time and inclination to post on political blog sites tend to be willing to pay the extra money to get a Mac, while business/science/technology types either can or know people who can set up a Linux system for them.
I believe that the knowledge barrier keeps the far Right and libertarians away from Linux. You have to know somebody who is into Linux to get it running if you aren't very tech-based. People who aren't techies who obtain and try Linux on their own without a support person almost always go back to Windows within a few hours of puzzling over some petty technical detail that the Linux community doesn't even notice. It's a fact of life, so don't mod me down for just pointing it out.
Actually a more interesting question is the political orientation of those who are using purchased copies of Windows and those who aren't. But the Windows market is so economically distorted that a survey wouldn't reveal any meaningful data. The Windows market is distorted because the price of the included OS is very small when buying a new PC from a major manufacturer when compared to buying Windows as a shrinkwrap product.
Actually, everything about this industry is weird to someone with an economics background.
All this discussion seems to miss the point about what happens if the MPAA actually is successful at stopping downloads of 'product'. Since all the downloading results from an inability to come to an agreement of what price people will pay to watch MPAA product, then if people can't watch MPAA product then they will watch something else.
MPAA product is in its most basic form a sequence of video images edited together in standard film 'grammar' devised over the past 100 years that tells a standardized story (one of the 100 basic plot variations that literature and drama majors study). That's it. It's what all the fight is about.
The greatest misconception of the MPAA is that they are the ONLY source of quality video entertainment available and that all people will naturally chose to 'steal' their product when given any opportunity and technical means to do so. This is actually true at the present time for most people but will, within a decade, not be true given the incredible advances in video games.
Within a decade, games will cease to be only limited first-person shooters and cartoonish extensions of ZORK-style fantasy scenerios. They will take on the characteristics of MPAA product such as photo-realism, emphatic actors and characters, complex story and plot development, and scene editing that approaches standardized film grammar. Plus they will be fully interactive and allow multiple viewers/players to develop the plot line and dialog with each other. Basically 21st-century interactive synthetic cinema (it doesn't even have a real name yet, except for term 'video games') will be to the 20-century MPAA product what movies are to photographs. A completely different dimension and experience only historically and superficially related to the previous media.
When this begins to happen then the MPAA comporations will really be up shit creek. Because they will have alienated all their potential customers and supporters back when their could-have-been customers were young as a result of their clumsy and repulsive gangster tactics that used on college students back at the beginning of the 21st century. By the time that interactive synthestic cinema begins to really take off, the MPAA will have created such a wall of hatred and repulsion between themselves and their former customer base that they will not be able to make any connection between the corporations that they represent and their former audience. They will be as obsolete as 'white-only' drinking fountains, with the same general public repulsion.
This general extortion campaign directed against college students will eventually backfire in a big way when the MPAA comes to realize that they can't get anyone (except media history majors) to download their precious product. By then it will too late for them.
So the ruling Chinese Communists fear the internet. What else is new?
Basically the more time that people spend on the internet, the more likely they are to come across a source of unfiltered news and history about the actions of the Chinese Communist party. Since all communists and fascists rely on total control of news and information sources as part of their political control, it stands to reason that any access to an uncontrolled source of news and information would be a grounds for a diagnosis of mental disorder.
The Soviets did the same thing. The Cubans are still doing the same thing.
If someone is fanatically using the internet in China to find a way to worm through the security systems of the US Defense Department, then they can spend 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on the net without having the slightest trace of any internet-induced mental disorder.
The Chinese government is 100% full of shit. Just read the history of the 20th century for China, its Communist government, and the millions of lives that they have destroyed and tell me that this is not so.
This writer is assuming that the court has more power than the developer. That may not be the case.
Courts are the arbitrators between the natural adversarial relationships endemic to any political system. In plain language, they decide who is right when the two parties can't decide between themselves without resorting to violence. All political systems reserve for themselves a monopoly on the use of violence. All political systems depend on this monopoly on violence to maintain control and order in all societies. This is the way things have been for a long time, basically since the beginning of the agricultrual age thousands of years ago.
But things are beginning to change. We are entering a new age. An age not based on the control of violence (the armies, the police, the mafia, etc...) but an age where power comes from the control of the distribution of information. In this new age, the people who control the monopoly on the use of violence don't always win.
Courts are dependent on software. Police are dependent on software. Militaries are dependent on software. and the people who control the software are beginning (just beginning at the present) to have a small measure of control over the institutions that are dependent upon software. No one will admit this publicly. But it is beginning to happen. So don't assume that some court is going to decide the fate of some rogue software developer.
Actually it is increasingly becoming our responsibility to control the various rogue software developers. Whether we want to or not.
The standard solution to this problem in most of the world is to make a payoff to someone.
Let's see, in the USA there are roughly about %15 to %20 of the population who can't enter Canada according to these restrictions. We have at least 20-25 million people who have been arrested for possession of marijuana since it became a political crime used against the young about forty years ago. Plus another ten to twenty million people who have been arrested for minor misdemeanors over the course of their lives. Millions of these people want and occasionally need to enter Canada every few years for business.
But now they can't because of this political chickenshit. These restrictions have been in place since the Vietnam War and used against minorities like African-Americans and Euro-American hippies who show up at the border in cars. But generally, arriving by plane with a return ticket gets one into Canada without incident. But now with the computers and databases that dredge up 30-year-old residue-in-a-bong bust it becomes harder to simply ignore for the border 'police' or either country.
So, as whenever a ridiculous and absurd but unresolvable political situation comes up against reality, the same thing always happens. Corruption enters; someone gets paid-off. The 'crime' is overlooked if the price is right.
The only real questions about this situation are:
1) Whether it will be the Canadian border 'police' who will be taking and keeping the bribes on an ad-hoc basis. This turns Canada into a little Mexico, which I don't really think will happen.
2) The situation blows over with time and things go back to 'normal' where only blacks and hippies are arbitrarily and systematically denied entry into Canada for chickenshit reasons.
3) Americans will have to pay a big 'chunk of change' to get someone in the so-called Homeland Security department to 'adjust' the computer records so that the individual making the big payoff is not inconvenienced at borders. This is the most likely scenario because it matches the American obsession with money with their innate corruption. Plus it allows the 'background adjuster' to further extort money from the 'offender' at any point in the future, since making payoffs to government officials is major crime against 'national security'; right up there with residue-in-a-bong drug offenses.
It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing.
I guess the original poster hasn't been spending much time reading the newspapers about what's happening in Iraq lately.
By no one's definition of the term could creatures who place a truckload of high explosives into a crowded marketplace and blow hundreds of people to meat chunks be considered human.
"Human" isn't an anthropological term. It's a state of being that a group of creatures obtain when other civilized humans say that they have reached that state. You don't have to read many newspapers to realize that the creatures that are murdering each other in Iraq because some bizarre concept of 'God' tells them to do so have a long way to go before any civilized group of people on Earth consider them to be human.
Have a nice day. Try to stay away from people driving junk cars in crowded places and screaming "Allah Akbar!" to themselves. 'cause they ain't human.
Economists have a concept called 'Opportunity cost'. This means that the money that you spend on one thing can't be spent on something else. If the utility gained from spending money on something else is greater than that thing that you did spend the money on, then you have lost money.
Tech people and other Slashdaughters, however, have absolutely no sense of Economics when it comes to the concept of space and especially the Moon. So, allow to be brief....
There is NO WAY that the money spent on lunar exploration justifies its opportunity cost. ANYTHING upon which you spend the same amount of public funds will bring more benefit to society than spending it on lunar exploration.
No doubt everyone on this site disagrees with the above statement. But that doesn't change the fact that it is true.
The allocation of the public funds is a public trust. To spend billions and hundreds of billions of dollars on lunar exploration (at this time) is a betrayal of public trust. People who advocate this massive but unjustifiable expense should not and will not be taken seriously by the taxpaying public at large. In other words, techies shouldn't 'chain their bikes to the lunar-exploration signpost', because they will end up losing their bikes. You will lose whatever credibility you have by pushing this program.
Nobody in their right mind wants it. No one except the people who read Slashdot.... and the people who stand to make billions of dollars in profit from this 'lunacy'.
Thank you for taking the time to read the truth. Have a nice day.
:-) "gens," pas "jens," et "connaissez," pas "connaiez."
--nazi grammatique
I know, I know (je sais). I'm not francophone and I didn't have access to a good translation program.
I simply wanted to remind people that there is a solid francophonic nation located in Canada. English all but ends at the Quebec border. For people who are not aware of this, it is like walking through a mirror. Believe it or not, most Americans are not aware of this French nation north of their border.
I enjoy making this transision between cultures myself, but I must admit, it can at times be very difficult for an English-only monophone (like myself) to visit Quebec. I like to prepare for a visit to Quebec by watching French-language movie videos and DVDs for several months before my trips there. I live on the Western USA, and there is absolutely no-one who speaks French here, so DVDs are our only access to this language.
People do the same things with their computers today as they did 15 (even 20) years ago: play games, print, e-mail, read, write, collect media.
That is true inclusively but not exclusively. 15 (or 20) years ago people used PCs for mostly office applications and home computers for games and light word processing. Geeks and tech-types used computers for programming: either work-enhancing or hobbyist programming (often both).
Interfacing with other computer users in real time through BBS systems and modems was just beginning to catch on. E-mail outside defense and academic environments was all but unknown.
A real computer revolution happened with the widespread inexpensive introduction of 100+ MHz Pentium and compatable processors that enabled the rise of MP3 audio file-sharing and CD ripping. That, along with photo-quality graphics and large hard-disks (bigger than anyone's collection application programs and data), led to the use of PCs as media-centers as we now use them. That happened about ten years ago with the introduction of Napster.
The multi-gigahertz machines (and the DeCSS program) enabled the video and movie PC revolution that we have today. The communications revolution (VoIP, Skype) is also a direct result of sub-$500 multi-gigahertz boxes.
The next revolution will be near-photographic quality interactive games using synthetic video and real-time voice-to-voice language translation.
What is interesting to watch is the destruction of various industries with each phase of this continuing PC revolution. Word processing wiped out the typewriter industry. (ever meet anyone under 21 who has ever used one?) The spreadsheet destroyed the specialized mechanical calculator. AutoCAD destroyed paper drafting. MP3 file sharing is currently destroying the recorded music industry (sales of CDs down 50% from 1997, according to Rolling Stone). Photo-quality video in interactive games will destroy the television industry. iPhones and Skype will destroy the global telecommunications companies.
Souvent, beaucoup de jens oublie qu'il y a deux Canada. Il y a le canada donc vous connaiez et l'autre canada. Ils sont tres different. S.V.P, vous vous souvenez le difference.
I suspect the above comment is what the English call 'ironic', which is a curious aspect of that language where one says exactly the opposite of what one means.
Irony should be avoided on all multinational,multilingual, and multicultural web sites like Slashdot because only a small percentage of the viewers will understand that the writer is being ironic.
Also the great fortunes arising from software come from the sale and appreciation of corporate stock value. A company founder will grant himself 80% of the shares and release the remaining 20% to public sale. If the public sale price rises greatly, then the value of the founder's shares rises to become a paper fortune. But rarely are those shares ever sold except in small amounts. Instead the dividends and other generated funds from this paper fortune are placed into either trusts or foundations to avoid large taxes.
The software development process itself is expensive and difficult. My point is that the software development community CHOSES to keep this process expensive and difficult primarily to protect their income potential of their long and difficult training. Software would be cheap if it could be developed cheaply. But software is cheap if one simply copies it. So software is in effect a giant transfer of wealth from the 1st world to the 3rd world.
While most of the comments about this original article are concerned with the possible presence of viruses and trojans in copied disks, no one seems to be asking the real question.
Why would there be viruses and trojans in copied 3rd world CDs? The purpose of this renegade code is to collect passwords and account information and send it to a criminal organization that will use it to defraud the software user without their knowledge. But if someone is paying $2 for a copy of MS Office, then they don't have anything that these criminal organizations would consider worth stealing. It's only the big companies and wealthly (relative to the third world) individuals that actually do pay $500 for a piece of software that attracts the interest of the virus and trojan writers.
The only people who would be interested in destroying the OS and data of the $2 CD buyers would be the BSA companies themselves. They would do this to discourage people from buying $2 copies of their $500 programs. If they could do this without affecting the actual program buyers, they wouldn't hesitate to do so.
The unspoken problem here is not that someone is selling $2 copies of $500 programs, it is that the process of software development is so backward and difficult that it requires developers to charge $500 for a non-trival application. Software companies have to charge $500 and sell thousands of copies at that price in order to cover development costs. If software development, like hardware, fell in price/performance ratio cost by 50% every few years, then there wouldn't be this issue at all.
The really good thing about having people in the 3rd world (don't like that term? K my A) making $2 copies of corporate $500 a seat programs is that it puts a ceiling on the number of copies of the program that can be sold at the high price. This forces (or will someday eventually) the software companies to invest in higher quality software development tools and techniques in order to get a greater productivity from their expensive developers. Otherwise we would be spending the rest of eternity developing code in such brain-dead 1970s nightmares like C++.
Is this good common sense or the costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism?
The evil doers are trying to force us to spend ourselves into bankruptcy in an effort to protect ourselves from them. They can do horrible things at very little relative cost. We are supposed to pay enormous amounts to protect ourselves because we are civilized and don't do random horrible things.
Maybe we should simply make a "hell" list: if this thing is done to us then we will do this horrible thing to this place and these people; no exceptions, no mercy. Then if a group of murders decide to shoot down a commercial airliner at landing with a missile, they will know that a city (but not which city) will be bombed in such a way to result in tens of thousands of causalities within a few days.
Then we could say that the airplane murders are directly responsible for not only the murders of the airline passengers, but also for the tens of thousands that died horrible deaths.
After a few times the message will be clear. Do some cheap horrible thing, and be responsible for some huge horror afterwards. Nobody's god could be used to justify that.
Perhaps we should stop being so civilized when we're dealing with monsters who have convinced themselves that their god wants them to die.
Slashdot Mirror
If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist.
I must disagree. Downloaded music is free. It is easily copyable without loss of quality between copys.
There is no way that the RIAA can or could compete with this new model. It has driven them insane and they are just thrashing away dangerously in their madness. Woe to the people arbitraily caught in one of sweeps. The RIAA is acting like a mad grizzly bear trying to claw every salmon fish passing by it on a stream in Alaska. But eventually the RIAA's madness will cause it to run out of energy and then just roll over and die.
However, this pattern of behavior will manifest itself as industry by industry fails to adjust to the new conditions of the modern age. One by one they will go insane and try to take out as many people at random that they can as long as they have the resources to do so. Smart people will recognize the signs of an industry in the grips of a 'death dance' and avoid being sucked into the malestrom of its fury while it dies. More on this way of thought can be found at www.kunstler.com and other sites like this.
I don't know who is to blame for the major decline in CD sales, the RIAA's stupidly clutching to the old music business model, or the students with 3000+ stolen songs on their ipods.
Blame the RIAA. The people with 3000+ songs on their iPods are really librarians. They are creating vast banks and quasi-public reservoirs of the cultural products available from the "turn of the 21st century" era. They are ensuring that that music of their generation can not be arbirarily destroyed or removed from general circulation by a corporate decree. They are protecting your music for your grandchildren and for music historians that will study it hundreds of years in the future, not unlike the way people of this time study Gregorian chant.
Don't believe any of this 'piracy' horseshit put out by the RIAA. They seem to be having the most difficult time understanding that they don't own the music anymore. They only were able to create this illusion for themselves because of the nature that music was distributed during the first era of audio recording technology that existed during the 20th century.
But it is only an illusion. And fading more every day...
Very interesting post. I want to see posts from people who are directly affected by the topic under discussion.
By the way, I have a friend who is an excellent aucoustic blues guitar and dobro player. Can he come give a concert for a few hours some evening in your store?
Oh, you don't allow music in your music store. You sell the packaged disks that come from the distributor. Music can only be played in a public forum like a bar. With special licenses and fees and union bullshit and dispensations from authorities and on and on.
It's too bad that both my friend and you can't make any money in the 'music' business. He creates music and you sell music; we buy music. Again it's too bad that you both can't work together. You could both make money. But, that's not the way that the music business has been set up by those people who are destroying the entire business by refusing to be flexible to the 21st century.
Oh well... Personally, I feel that I got a lifetime subscription to all music industry product when I spent most of my disposable income on music when I was a teenager. I don't 'buy' music product from music stores anymore. Oh, you disagree? Well, I'm just so sorry....Have a nice day!
This really is a career opportunity. Take an older car towards which males of a certain age feel an emotional affirmative bond. Add a CPU with an "Eliza" program, a speech synthesizer, a text-to-speech analyser, and add robotic interfaces to the vehicle's motion controls. Sell for ten times the price of the car and the electronics.
It is not a good idea to assume that there is always going to be a job awaiting you and your skills. An idea like the one above provides a means to generate an income using your skills outside the 'human resources' envelope. So don't snicker at it so comtemptously.
why 10x the power of the fastest X86? Because no one is going to 'junk' their existing and working software. And the new CPU has to run the existing X86 software at what seems to be the most acceptable emulation speed for PC users. The software community generally accepts that it takes 10 times the processing power of the emulated CPU to appear to be the emulated CPU running at full speed.
And at less than 10 times the power of the current X86, developers are not going to invest the large amount of money and retraining needed to develop next generation software on a completely new platform.
I come from the embedded systems world. Getting a 10 times more powerful CPU for about the same price as the CPU that you are currently developing for is not uncommon and happens every ten years. It is happening now as all the 8051 programmers; all the PIC programmers; and all the AVR programmers are beginning to realize (one by one) that there is a standardized 32-bit ARM processor that is reaching the $5 US price in small quantities.
It's not easy to switch devices; but we seem to do it every ten years or so. I learned on the 6502 in the Commodore 64 and the Motorola 6800 family on the Radio Shack home computers. Then I learned and used the Intel 8051 for ten years. Having gotten tired of wire-wrapping and 100+ connection PCB layouts, I switched to the Atmel AVR about ten years ago. Now, with not a little dread and excitement, I approach the ARM.
The 'rule' that any new processor has to be about ten times more powerful for the same price as the current 'general-use' processor seems to hold well in the embedded-systems field. I suspect that it applies to the general CPUs used in office and home PCs as well.
We lose the X86 when another processor comes along that is cheaper, 10x more powerful, and runs all X86 software at the speed that the users consider to be the same as a PC. Until then we keep the X86. Simple as that. Next tech issue, please.
Circuit City (is that the right one? they're all the same although they're owned by different people) has found that there is not enough difference in the sales between higher paid floor workers and poorly paid ones. That means their stuff either sells itself and people are just using the store as a 'warehouse', or, customers have no need for the higher level of knowledge that the more-experienced (the higher paid) floor workers have about the products on sale.
Also, are the positions being eliminated spread around the USA? or are they mostly in one geographic area? People in San Jose (you know which San Jose I'm talking about, you are Slashdaughters!) are going to make more money regardless of their experience level than people in, say, the central mid-west where the cost of living is cheaper. Will Circuit City fire 50% of the people in the Silicon Valley stores and offer those jobs to people in central Nebraska? Or will they just close stores in high-salary areas? Or is it 8% of the highest paid people in each store?
Has anyone else noticed how eBay (and CraigsList)has made stores like Circuit City obsolete? Why doesn't Circuit City accept items for sale on consignment? Not just Plasma TVs, but speciality electronic items like an original Jimi Hendrix FuzzFace guitar distortion with original Germanium transistors.
They are an electonics store, aren't they? Then why do they have such a difficult time actually selling electronics? Why are they so fucking inflexible?
I don't understand plagiarism. I mean I don't care where someone got the original text. It's like where you got the original code for a linked-list. It doesn't matter as long as it works. What difference does it make who wrote something as long as someone else is actually reading it?
Schools make such a big deal about this plagiarism stuff. But it means so little in the real world. There, what is important is that you can take the information that you need from any source that you can find and turn it into profit for your employers.
Next time someone tells you that plagiarism is serious, ask them if they've ever had to make a payroll with sales of an obsolete or marginal product. When you have been in that position, you know what is serious and what is simply pretensious nonsense.
Few teachers, being in protected positions and jobs, can tell the difference...
Someone could take advantage of the madness of the RIAA. First issue a press release that if elected, you will support the review of the copyright laws. Then watch closely for the the RIAA/MPAA to donate money to your opponent. Then come out swinging and don't stop: "My opponent takes money from people who want to put you (or your kids) in jail for moving songs from their CDs to their iPods." "My opponent takes money from organizations who sue 10-year-olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars!".
Be a real pit bull. Have many copies of the affidavits, etc... ready to hand out at press meetings and political rallies. Keep on message: Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers! (don't forget to get those 18+ year olds registered to vote!)Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers! Sue the children! Imprison the teenagers!
People really do hate the RIAA when the learn what this organization is actually doing. You have a good chance of winning the election by taking the anti-RIAA stand instead of just blindly supporting them.
A bigger school problem in the future will be actually getting students to the centralized school buildings. Our fleet of big inefficient yellow school buses are going to be prohibitively expensive when gasoline (and diesel fuel) reaches $4-5 a gallon.
It's time to rethink the whole idea of 'school' anyway. It's a 19th century institution in a 21st century world. Most of it is focused on getting young people into college when at least half of the people in college don't really belong there and would be better off earning a real living at the job that they have been training for since they were 14 years old.
The charge that video games (and by extension, all computer usage in the classroom) is bad for students because it straps them to a television set for many hours a day is basically correct. But the best way to approach this is to make the computers really small (hand held) and wireless and integrate them with cool data collection sensors. Fish dying at a local pond? Don't run video game simulations in the classroom. Go down to the pond with your handheld and take real measurements. Get outside into the real world. For a change.
'More than 300,000 Americans die from cardiac arrest each year. Roughly 9 out of 10 cardiac arrest victims die before they get to a hospital -- partly because they do not get CPR.'"
One less asshole: one more job opening.
This is half correct. It is more the difference between (in the USA) between the liberal arts oriented and the science/business oriented. Liberal arts majors and graduates who have the time and inclination to post on political blog sites tend to be willing to pay the extra money to get a Mac, while business/science/technology types either can or know people who can set up a Linux system for them.
I believe that the knowledge barrier keeps the far Right and libertarians away from Linux. You have to know somebody who is into Linux to get it running if you aren't very tech-based. People who aren't techies who obtain and try Linux on their own without a support person almost always go back to Windows within a few hours of puzzling over some petty technical detail that the Linux community doesn't even notice. It's a fact of life, so don't mod me down for just pointing it out.
Actually a more interesting question is the political orientation of those who are using purchased copies of Windows and those who aren't. But the Windows market is so economically distorted that a survey wouldn't reveal any meaningful data. The Windows market is distorted because the price of the included OS is very small when buying a new PC from a major manufacturer when compared to buying Windows as a shrinkwrap product.
Actually, everything about this industry is weird to someone with an economics background.
All this discussion seems to miss the point about what happens if the MPAA actually is successful at stopping downloads of 'product'.
Since all the downloading results from an inability to come to an agreement of what price people will pay to watch MPAA product, then if people can't watch MPAA product then they will watch something else.
MPAA product is in its most basic form a sequence of video images edited together in standard film 'grammar' devised over the past 100 years that tells a standardized story (one of the 100 basic plot variations that literature and drama majors study). That's it. It's what all the fight is about.
The greatest misconception of the MPAA is that they are the ONLY source of quality video entertainment available and that all people will naturally chose to 'steal' their product when given any opportunity and technical means to do so. This is actually true at the present time for most people but will, within a decade, not be true given the incredible advances in video games.
Within a decade, games will cease to be only limited first-person shooters and cartoonish extensions of ZORK-style fantasy scenerios. They will take on the characteristics of MPAA product such as photo-realism, emphatic actors and characters, complex story and plot development, and scene editing that approaches standardized film grammar. Plus they will be fully interactive and allow multiple viewers/players to develop the plot line and dialog with each other. Basically 21st-century interactive synthetic cinema (it doesn't even have a real name yet, except for term 'video games') will be to the 20-century MPAA product what movies are to photographs. A completely different dimension and experience only historically and superficially related to the previous media.
When this begins to happen then the MPAA comporations will really be up shit creek. Because they will have alienated all their potential customers and supporters back when their could-have-been customers were young as a result of their clumsy and repulsive gangster tactics that used on college students back at the beginning of the 21st century. By the time that interactive synthestic cinema begins to really take off, the MPAA will have created such a wall of hatred and repulsion between themselves and their former customer base that they will not be able to make any connection between the corporations that they represent and their former audience. They will be as obsolete as 'white-only' drinking fountains, with the same general public repulsion.
This general extortion campaign directed against college students will eventually backfire in a big way when the MPAA comes to realize that they can't get anyone (except media history majors) to download their precious product. By then it will too late for them.
So the ruling Chinese Communists fear the internet. What else is new?
Basically the more time that people spend on the internet, the more likely they are to come across a source of unfiltered news and history about the actions of the Chinese Communist party. Since all communists and fascists rely on total control of news and information sources as part of their political control, it stands to reason that any access to an uncontrolled source of news and information would be a grounds for a diagnosis of mental disorder.
The Soviets did the same thing. The Cubans are still doing the same thing.
If someone is fanatically using the internet in China to find a way to worm through the security systems of the US Defense Department, then they can spend 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on the net without having the slightest trace of any internet-induced mental disorder.
The Chinese government is 100% full of shit. Just read the history of the 20th century for China, its Communist government, and the millions of lives that they have destroyed and tell me that this is not so.
hat developer better hope the court he'll face ...
This writer is assuming that the court has more power than the developer. That may not be the case.
Courts are the arbitrators between the natural adversarial relationships endemic to any political system. In plain language, they decide who is right when the two parties can't decide between themselves without resorting to violence.
All political systems reserve for themselves a monopoly on the use of violence. All political systems depend on this monopoly on violence to maintain control and order in all societies. This is the way things have been for a long time, basically since the beginning of the agricultrual age thousands of years ago.
But things are beginning to change. We are entering a new age. An age not based on the control of violence (the armies, the police, the mafia, etc...) but an age where power comes from the control of the distribution of information. In this new age, the people who control the monopoly on the use of violence don't always win.
Courts are dependent on software. Police are dependent on software. Militaries are dependent on software. and the people who control the software are beginning (just beginning at the present) to have a small measure of control over the institutions that are dependent upon software. No one will admit this publicly. But it is beginning to happen.
So don't assume that some court is going to decide the fate of some rogue software developer.
Actually it is increasingly becoming our responsibility to control the various rogue software developers. Whether we want to or not.
The standard solution to this problem in most of the world is to make a payoff to someone.
Let's see, in the USA there are roughly about %15 to %20 of the population who can't enter Canada according to these restrictions. We have at least 20-25 million people who have been arrested for possession of marijuana since it became a political crime used against the young about forty years ago. Plus another ten to twenty million people who have been arrested for minor misdemeanors over the course of their lives. Millions of these people want and occasionally need to enter Canada every few years for business.
But now they can't because of this political chickenshit. These restrictions have been in place since the Vietnam War and used against minorities like African-Americans and Euro-American hippies who show up at the border in cars. But generally, arriving by plane with a return ticket gets one into Canada without incident. But now with the computers and databases that dredge up 30-year-old residue-in-a-bong bust it becomes harder to simply ignore for the border 'police' or either country.
So, as whenever a ridiculous and absurd but unresolvable political situation comes up against reality, the same thing always happens. Corruption enters; someone gets paid-off. The 'crime' is overlooked if the price is right.
The only real questions about this situation are:
1) Whether it will be the Canadian border 'police' who will be taking and keeping the bribes on an ad-hoc basis. This turns Canada into a little Mexico, which I don't really think will happen.
2) The situation blows over with time and things go back to 'normal' where only blacks and hippies are arbitrarily and systematically denied entry into Canada for chickenshit reasons.
3) Americans will have to pay a big 'chunk of change' to get someone in the so-called Homeland Security department to 'adjust' the computer records so that the individual making the big payoff is not inconvenienced at borders. This is the most likely scenario because it matches the American obsession with money with their innate corruption. Plus it allows the 'background adjuster' to further extort money from the 'offender' at any point in the future, since making payoffs to government officials is major crime against 'national security'; right up there with residue-in-a-bong drug offenses.
That would make sense if he...
Why do you assume that I'm male? Just because I post to Slashdot? How many males do you know named Simonetta?
It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing.
I guess the original poster hasn't been spending much time reading the newspapers about what's happening in Iraq lately.
By no one's definition of the term could creatures who place a truckload of high explosives into a crowded marketplace and blow hundreds of people to meat chunks be considered human.
"Human" isn't an anthropological term. It's a state of being that a group of creatures obtain when other civilized humans say that they have reached that state. You don't have to read many newspapers to realize that the creatures that are murdering each other in Iraq because some bizarre concept of 'God' tells them to do so have a long way to go before any civilized group of people on Earth consider them to be human.
Have a nice day. Try to stay away from people driving junk cars in crowded places and screaming "Allah Akbar!" to themselves. 'cause they ain't human.
Economists have a concept called 'Opportunity cost'. This means that the money that you spend on one thing can't be spent on something else. If the utility gained from spending money on something else is greater than that thing that you did spend the money on, then you have lost money.
Tech people and other Slashdaughters, however, have absolutely no sense of Economics when it comes to the concept of space and especially the Moon. So, allow to be brief....
There is NO WAY that the money spent on lunar exploration justifies its opportunity cost. ANYTHING upon which you spend the same amount of public funds will bring more benefit to society than spending it on lunar exploration.
No doubt everyone on this site disagrees with the above statement. But that doesn't change the fact that it is true.
The allocation of the public funds is a public trust. To spend billions and hundreds of billions of dollars on lunar exploration (at this time) is a betrayal of public trust. People who advocate this massive but unjustifiable expense should not and will not be taken seriously by the taxpaying public at large. In other words, techies shouldn't 'chain their bikes to the lunar-exploration signpost', because they will end up losing their bikes. You will lose whatever credibility you have by pushing this program.
Nobody in their right mind wants it. No one except the people who read Slashdot.... and the people who stand to make billions of dollars in profit from this 'lunacy'.
Thank you for taking the time to read the truth.
Have a nice day.
:-) "gens," pas "jens," et "connaissez," pas "connaiez."
--nazi grammatique
I know, I know (je sais). I'm not francophone and I didn't have access to a good translation program.
I simply wanted to remind people that there is a solid francophonic nation located in Canada. English all but ends at the Quebec border. For people who are not aware of this, it is like walking through a mirror. Believe it or not, most Americans are not aware of this French nation north of their border.
I enjoy making this transision between cultures myself, but I must admit, it can at times be very difficult for an English-only monophone (like myself) to visit Quebec. I like to prepare for a visit to Quebec by watching French-language movie videos and DVDs for several months before my trips there. I live on the Western USA, and there is absolutely no-one who speaks French here, so DVDs are our only access to this language.
People do the same things with their computers today as they did 15 (even 20) years ago: play games, print, e-mail, read, write, collect media.
That is true inclusively but not exclusively. 15 (or 20) years ago people used PCs for mostly office applications and home computers for games and light word processing. Geeks and tech-types used computers for programming: either work-enhancing or hobbyist programming (often both).
Interfacing with other computer users in real time through BBS systems and modems was just beginning to catch on. E-mail outside defense and academic environments was all but unknown.
A real computer revolution happened with the widespread inexpensive introduction of 100+ MHz Pentium and compatable processors that enabled the rise of MP3 audio file-sharing and CD ripping. That, along with photo-quality graphics and large hard-disks (bigger than anyone's collection application programs and data), led to the use of PCs as media-centers as we now use them. That happened about ten years ago with the introduction of Napster.
The multi-gigahertz machines (and the DeCSS program) enabled the video and movie PC revolution that we have today. The communications revolution (VoIP, Skype) is also a direct result of sub-$500 multi-gigahertz boxes.
The next revolution will be near-photographic quality interactive games using synthetic video and real-time voice-to-voice language translation.
What is interesting to watch is the destruction of various industries with each phase of this continuing PC revolution. Word processing wiped out the typewriter industry. (ever meet anyone under 21 who has ever used one?) The spreadsheet destroyed the specialized mechanical calculator. AutoCAD destroyed paper drafting. MP3 file sharing is currently destroying the recorded music industry (sales of CDs down 50% from 1997, according to Rolling Stone). Photo-quality video in interactive games will destroy the television industry. iPhones and Skype will destroy the global telecommunications companies.
What fun!!!
Souvent, beaucoup de jens oublie qu'il y a deux Canada. Il y a le canada donc vous connaiez et l'autre canada. Ils sont tres different. S.V.P, vous vous souvenez le difference.
Merci.
I suspect the above comment is what the English call 'ironic', which is a curious aspect of that language where one says exactly the opposite of what one means.
Irony should be avoided on all multinational,multilingual, and multicultural web sites like Slashdot because only a small percentage of the viewers will understand that the writer is being ironic.
Also the great fortunes arising from software come from the sale and appreciation of corporate stock value. A company founder will grant himself 80% of the shares and release the remaining 20% to public sale. If the public sale price rises greatly, then the value of the founder's shares rises to become a paper fortune. But rarely are those shares ever sold except in small amounts. Instead the dividends and other generated funds from this paper fortune are placed into either trusts or foundations to avoid large taxes.
The software development process itself is expensive and difficult. My point is that the software development community CHOSES to keep this process expensive and difficult primarily to protect their income potential of their long and difficult training. Software would be cheap if it could be developed cheaply. But software is cheap if one simply copies it. So software is in effect a giant transfer of wealth from the 1st world to the 3rd world.
While most of the comments about this original article are concerned with the possible presence of viruses and trojans in copied disks, no one seems to be asking the real question.
Why would there be viruses and trojans in copied 3rd world CDs? The purpose of this renegade code is to collect passwords and account information and send it to a criminal organization that will use it to defraud the software user without their knowledge. But if someone is paying $2 for a copy of MS Office, then they don't have anything that these criminal organizations would consider worth stealing. It's only the big companies and wealthly (relative to the third world) individuals that actually do pay $500 for a piece of software that attracts the interest of the virus and trojan writers.
The only people who would be interested in destroying the OS and data of the $2 CD buyers would be the BSA companies themselves. They would do this to discourage people from buying $2 copies of their $500 programs. If they could do this without affecting the actual program buyers, they wouldn't hesitate to do so.
The unspoken problem here is not that someone is selling $2 copies of $500 programs, it is that the process of software development is so backward and difficult that it requires developers to charge $500 for a non-trival application. Software companies have to charge $500 and sell thousands of copies at that price in order to cover development costs. If software development, like hardware, fell in price/performance ratio cost by 50% every few years, then there wouldn't be this issue at all.
The really good thing about having people in the 3rd world (don't like that term? K my A) making $2 copies of corporate $500 a seat programs is that it puts a ceiling on the number of copies of the program that can be sold at the high price. This forces (or will someday eventually) the software companies to invest in higher quality software development tools and techniques in order to get a greater productivity from their expensive developers. Otherwise we would be spending the rest of eternity developing code in such brain-dead 1970s nightmares like C++.
Is this good common sense or the costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism?
The evil doers are trying to force us to spend ourselves into bankruptcy in an effort to protect ourselves from them. They can do horrible things at very little relative cost. We are supposed to pay enormous amounts to protect ourselves because we are civilized and don't do random horrible things.
Maybe we should simply make a "hell" list: if this thing is done to us then we will do this horrible thing to this place and these people; no exceptions, no mercy. Then if a group of murders decide to shoot down a commercial airliner at landing with a missile, they will know that a city (but not which city) will be bombed in such a way to result in tens of thousands of causalities within a few days.
Then we could say that the airplane murders are directly responsible for not only the murders of the airline passengers, but also for the tens of thousands that died horrible deaths.
After a few times the message will be clear. Do some cheap horrible thing, and be responsible for some huge horror afterwards. Nobody's god could be used to justify that.
Perhaps we should stop being so civilized when we're dealing with monsters who have convinced themselves that their god wants them to die.