Out of curiosity why should Nintendo "share" their old games..ESPECIALLY if people are willing to buy them? I just don't get the logic that would make you think "oh, well because they are old, they should be free"
That said, yeah, other aspects of Nintendo's operations have been..less than clean.
Ok, I'm as pro-Free Software as the next man, but is this post grounded in fact?
Microsoft also says:
They don't have a monopoly.
Yeah, who WOULD admit they had a monopoly?
They don't have security problems, only lazy customers.
Hm. Well as Bill Gates months ago announced that security initiative to fix all security issues in MS Software (regardless of how well this works) it's pretty clear they DO realize this. I wonder if everyone was running linux software that's three years old (and unpatched) if Linux would be known as a insecure OS?
They don't think you should worry about giving them your information.
IS there a reason you should worry about giving them information? Again, I object to giving out my personal info on principle, but is there anything about giving it out to microsoft that's especially bad?
They don't think 95, 98, 2000, or XP is proprietary.
I guess it depends on what you mean by proprietary? Given that each of those OS's is probably in use more than Linux...
And the grand daddy of them all, they don't think you need anything but automatic update to keep your system secure.
I don't get it? You don't think auto-updating is good? You know there are other venues of getting patches right?
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Without regarding your other similar comments, what the hell kind of elitist philosophy of this? I suppose Gilbert and Sullivan weren't real artists? I suppose Thomas Edison wasn't a real inventor? I suppose METALLICA, an example that you might be aware of, aren't real artists? Come on...
I find it interesting that you refer to the EU taking a stand against American protectionism. As an example, check out French farm subsidies. Pretty interesting comparison.
The reason that China and India are both seen as possible (well, India at least still has some major economic hurdles to overcome, China seems a sure thing) economic powerhouses is largely because of not only their huge populations--but their huge and POOR populations! Cheap wages. Cheap costs in general. That's it.
Subsidies and wealth of the population are actually tied together too. As countries (largely) in the West have become more prosperous overall, costs of living go up, expected wages go up, costs of doing business go up. This in turn makes certain industries more expensive to operate, and in some cases uncompetitive globally. Thus the need for government subsidies.
Ok well with your familiarity with Tex etc, and your appearance on Slashdot leads me to believe you're an engineer or CPS guy:) And as such, you don't get many non-textbooks. If you take humanities courses for interest you get books that AREN'T textbooks--scholarly books, treatises, some books that aren't text books but may be aimed at a college audience. Textbooks are to me the kind of books used in engineering and cps, and also elementary, middle, high school.
Well let me ask you. If you were a publisher, and knew that to sell to a bookstore you would be required to give a let's say 35% discount, how would you price your product?
Well I'm at the moment at a private university, so it may be different at public schools or what not, but afaik (and having talked to multiple professors) that's exactly what they do--design their own courses, and books are of course reviewed in magazines etc. Authors for one like to have publishers sending people out to schools also, for instance to law schools. Authors DO like to have more sales:)
No, I'll try to make myself more clear--there's no doubt that the author is the prime creator and that without the base content there is nothing. The point I'm trying to make is that there seem to be a bunch of people out there who are demonizing the publishers and being worthless and basically thieves--and this simply isn't true. If you went into a shop like the one I worked in, I think you would find almost every person there had an emotional and creative investment (well not accounting or warehouse staff;)) For instance there was one guy who made some of the best book jacket art I've ever seen (and anyone who says jacket art doesn't matter--hah). Isn't part of the total worth of the book now stemmed from his creative input? My point isn't that the publishers could do it without the authors, as you say, that is ridiculous. My point is that the publishing house isn't just a sterile house of greedy capitalist pigs.
Incidentally, you want to know why books are so expensive? Check what kind of discounts bookstores require. Check what kind of return policies they require. Some stores like Amazon get around (or upwards) of 40% discounts buying books from the publishers. If you were a publisher, and you knew you would have to sell to bookstores at 30+% discounts (the primary retaillers ), where would you price books?
Well a couple points--first, publishers have two clients--the people to whom they sell books and authors. Both are important (duh). It's a different business model than most people think of though I believe.
Secondly, ok sure, if all authors who ever wanted to publish a book wanted to learn latex, write everything in latex, figure out how to market their book, to whom to sell, with whom to print, what kind of bindings, design choices, etc, then yeah, anyone could make a book (albeit most likely poorly designed).
But the thing you miss is most authors DON'T want to do this. I don't think the company I was with ever recieved a manuscript in latex format (everything is word or wordperfect, OCCASIONALLY another wordprocessor). Most authors don't WANT to deal with printers or with marketers, etc.
Most authors want to do what they like doing which MOSTLY writing or teaching or working at their "real jobs" in some cases. The problem with people on slashdot trying to make informed decisions about the publishing industry is that they assume that all authors have the time or desire to be able to do all this latex and crap themselves. most authors have neither the time nor inclination! People in engineering and computer science (ie, large portion of the slashdot audience) are certaintly an exception.
You need an agent? hmm...glorified view of being an author possibly..
In any case, you can certaintly do any of those things on your own. Editors are a dime a dozen (varying quality of course), typesetters there are plenty of, marketting companies, sure there are tons of those. So there you go.
Ok, let me refer you back to my previous message where I said "college books" not "college textbooks". There IS a difference, though perhaps I should have said "academic books with a bent towards education at the collegiate or post collegiate level" to have been clear.
Secondly, you may be right about SOME publishers having those requirements, but I can tell you that the publisher I dealt with used tex not at all and didn't know of other shops that did used tex (I brought up tex once as a cost savers and was basically laughed at).
Third, often for textbooks the publisher is instrumental in getting the team of authors together. I DO agree that many college textbooks are overpriced (because its basically a monopoly once a book is assigned) but let me tell you also that there is fierce competition and that price does make a difference to professors when assigning books.
Fourth of all, you TOTALLY misuse middlemen. Publishers are production side, bookstores are the middlemen. You can buy from almost any publishers website direct and avoid the middlemen if you want, but most bookstores get like 40% discounts from publishers (So if a publisher lists a book at $80 they might *have* to sell it to amazon at somewhere around $50--so then whose making off like a bandit here). That's a good point (hah sorry, I'm typing this more or less stream of consciousness). If you want to get rid of the REAL thieves of the book industry, go after the bookstores.
and finally, I love your last comment about the only books you buy/use being textbooks. So clearly you have such a great insight into the industry. Thanks so much for your comments.
We survived for millenia without publishing middlemen in the sense that you describe. The difference was that not every jackass who can figure out a qwerty keyboard got his work published. I see nothing wrong with going back to those days. There are too damn many useless, repetitve texts out there now.
This is why I say if I you want to have a serious discussion you should get some knowledge. This is SO far from the truth. Publishing houses have historically had a huge role to play, historically more so than today!! Hell, publishing houses used to even push their own spelling for words back before english was standardized. Come on, don't post this crap.
Yeah, you're right, it is overstating the role of the publisher..It was the best I could come up with on short notice:)
But I do think your analogies, UNDERstate the role. I know it was suprising to me how much publishers actually DO do (such as sometimes it is the publisher who comes up with an idea for a book, and then searches out an author capable of writing such). interesting stuff.
Anyway, you're also perfectly right about music etc, I'm no RIAA et al fan.
No offense to you (I don't even know if you have a blog), but a blog does not a book make, and most blogs are CRAP in my experience (not saying there aren't some good ones). I think people are taking the analogy of blog book too far..blog diary, maybe.
Besides...most authors do like to make some money of their works so that they can do what they like to do, and blogs aren't to conducive to those means.
Bah, I'm sorry, I stand by my earlier statement--if you want to really talk about this subject get some knowledge first--go write a book or work at a publishing shop.
Your statement that "the publiher does not really deserve much credit nor profit" is ridiculous. Let me list a couple things that publishing companies do that authors are quite glad to have no part in doing--market books. The press with which I have experience largely works in college books and things like law books (ie, nonfiction). All publishers devote a signifigant amount of resources to sending people out to schools to get prospective sales--meaning more royalties for the author. How bout managing sales, shipments, warehouses? That's fun. Or dealing with supply vendors, printers, etc? That's great fun too.
Another area I'm quite sure you haven't thought about. In many cases publishers are looking for a book--a book to fill a particular niche, and they go out and find an author to write said book. So if the publisher recruited an author like this is it fair to say that the author has "ZERO, zilch" and does not deserve much credit or profit?
The publisher is NOT just a middleman--they DO take on many activities of middlemen, but the act of publishing a book is a process in which creativity comes out of the employees of the publishing company as well, and in many cases editors and others greatly help the authors.
I could keep going ad inf. But I'll just stop here..
Ok I can tell you a couple things that it's a 100% sure that consumers want in books. Good spelling, properly formatted pages, sentences that make sense, tables of contents and indexes that are correct, covers that look good, footnotes in proper order and together, uniform citation styles, diagrams referred to properly and in the right locations, and I could keep going. If you think all this is easy, I would advise you to seek a job in the publishing industry--sounds like some publishers could really use your help!
You wouldn't believe the state of some manuscripts that come in..
Well I must say I don't like the sewage analogy, but overall I do agree with the point. I would say that instead of sewage, authors (anyone who is creating something) often produce the raw ingredients for a meal--and it is the publisher who "cooks" the meal.
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book. Not just authors--a vast majority of slashdot viewers (and people in general) don't have any idea either I'm sure. Making a book even once an author has completed the manuscript is still time consuming and difficult--not just sending it to the press and saying 'done!'.
To anyone who says publishers aren't needed, I'd advise them to try a job at a publishing shop for a short time, and see how they like the work.
I agree with you for most of your post..the upgrade cycle can get painful at times.
On a personal note, on my desktop computer I've gotten much better sound/video performance on current than stable--I don't know why, but that's a big thing for me.
On the server side, Samba ACL's are the big thing..can't wait to upgrade the servers for that (probably will wait until at least 5.2 or more).
Also it's nice to have devfs and the new RCng boot system (from NetBSD) imho.
Japanese, like any other language, is almost exactly as complex as it needs to be - several thousand years of linguistic development tends to remove the bloat.
Hmm, that's an interesting theory, but do you have any sources or info to back that up? I don't really think that's true. Take English as an example--English has become more complex and more irregular with infusions of new grammar and new vocabularly. Compare to a language dead for almost 1500 years, Latin, which was very structured and very regular. Compare to a language like Turkish which "bloated" up from about 1000ad to 1920ad after which it was (forcibly) "bloated" down.
My statement on the language phenomena would be "languages evolve to serve a need and a niche" NOT to reach some superior state. Just like biological evolution, linguistic evolution doesn't always produce something universally better or less bloated. Biological evolution creates an organism better suited for a particular environment, not a creature that is (necessarily) better for all environemnts.
Stealing what? I'm personally friends with a couple India's who have moved here from India and were given money to go to Grad school by Cisco (as they also work for Cisco). What's wrong with this? Who's stealing what?
fwiw, all those things that you listed are about the most commonly done things--you can find hundreds of FAQ's and HOWTO's for each one--it's not like your situation is one in which you're the first person to want to do one of those things. For areas where demand is strong, internet is, imho, best resource.
So it seems to me that you're defining any GUI that is WIMP as being the same.
3.1 -> 95 and OS9->OSX changed greatly: -aesthetics of controls/windows -method of keeping track of running programs -MDI vs SDI etc -Creation of the desktop -Basic window controls (max,min) -Basic method of exploring the harddrive
Maybe you could give your opinion on an example of a major gui change? (and let's keep it in reality, meaning something that has happened)
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity why should Nintendo "share" their old games..ESPECIALLY if people are willing to buy them? I just don't get the logic that would make you think "oh, well because they are old, they should be free"
That said, yeah, other aspects of Nintendo's operations have been..less than clean.
Funny Stuff.
- 07 -22
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002
Microsoft also says:
They don't have a monopoly.
Yeah, who WOULD admit they had a monopoly?
They don't have security problems, only lazy customers.
Hm. Well as Bill Gates months ago announced that security initiative to fix all security issues in MS Software (regardless of how well this works) it's pretty clear they DO realize this. I wonder if everyone was running linux software that's three years old (and unpatched) if Linux would be known as a insecure OS?
They don't think you should worry about giving them your information.
IS there a reason you should worry about giving them information? Again, I object to giving out my personal info on principle, but is there anything about giving it out to microsoft that's especially bad?
They don't think 95, 98, 2000, or XP is proprietary.
I guess it depends on what you mean by proprietary? Given that each of those OS's is probably in use more than Linux...
And the grand daddy of them all, they don't think you need anything but automatic update to keep your system secure.
I don't get it? You don't think auto-updating is good? You know there are other venues of getting patches right?
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Without regarding your other similar comments, what the hell kind of elitist philosophy of this? I suppose Gilbert and Sullivan weren't real artists? I suppose Thomas Edison wasn't a real inventor? I suppose METALLICA, an example that you might be aware of, aren't real artists? Come on...
I find it interesting that you refer to the EU taking a stand against American protectionism. As an example, check out French farm subsidies. Pretty interesting comparison.
The reason that China and India are both seen as possible (well, India at least still has some major economic hurdles to overcome, China seems a sure thing) economic powerhouses is largely because of not only their huge populations--but their huge and POOR populations! Cheap wages. Cheap costs in general. That's it.
Subsidies and wealth of the population are actually tied together too. As countries (largely) in the West have become more prosperous overall, costs of living go up, expected wages go up, costs of doing business go up. This in turn makes certain industries more expensive to operate, and in some cases uncompetitive globally. Thus the need for government subsidies.
Ok well with your familiarity with Tex etc, and your appearance on Slashdot leads me to believe you're an engineer or CPS guy :) And as such, you don't get many non-textbooks. If you take humanities courses for interest you get books that AREN'T textbooks--scholarly books, treatises, some books that aren't text books but may be aimed at a college audience. Textbooks are to me the kind of books used in engineering and cps, and also elementary, middle, high school.
Well let me ask you. If you were a publisher, and knew that to sell to a bookstore you would be required to give a let's say 35% discount, how would you price your product?
Well I'm at the moment at a private university, so it may be different at public schools or what not, but afaik (and having talked to multiple professors) that's exactly what they do--design their own courses, and books are of course reviewed in magazines etc. Authors for one like to have publishers sending people out to schools also, for instance to law schools. Authors DO like to have more sales :)
No, I'll try to make myself more clear--there's no doubt that the author is the prime creator and that without the base content there is nothing. The point I'm trying to make is that there seem to be a bunch of people out there who are demonizing the publishers and being worthless and basically thieves--and this simply isn't true. If you went into a shop like the one I worked in, I think you would find almost every person there had an emotional and creative investment (well not accounting or warehouse staff ;)) For instance there was one guy who made some of the best book jacket art I've ever seen (and anyone who says jacket art doesn't matter--hah). Isn't part of the total worth of the book now stemmed from his creative input? My point isn't that the publishers could do it without the authors, as you say, that is ridiculous. My point is that the publishing house isn't just a sterile house of greedy capitalist pigs.
Incidentally, you want to know why books are so expensive? Check what kind of discounts bookstores require. Check what kind of return policies they require. Some stores like Amazon get around (or upwards) of 40% discounts buying books from the publishers. If you were a publisher, and you knew you would have to sell to bookstores at 30+% discounts (the primary retaillers ), where would you price books?
Heh, so you want to add ANOTHER middleman into the mix? :p
Well a couple points--first, publishers have two clients--the people to whom they sell books and authors. Both are important (duh). It's a different business model than most people think of though I believe.
Secondly, ok sure, if all authors who ever wanted to publish a book wanted to learn latex, write everything in latex, figure out how to market their book, to whom to sell, with whom to print, what kind of bindings, design choices, etc, then yeah, anyone could make a book (albeit most likely poorly designed).
But the thing you miss is most authors DON'T want to do this. I don't think the company I was with ever recieved a manuscript in latex format (everything is word or wordperfect, OCCASIONALLY another wordprocessor). Most authors don't WANT to deal with printers or with marketers, etc.
Most authors want to do what they like doing which MOSTLY writing or teaching or working at their "real jobs" in some cases. The problem with people on slashdot trying to make informed decisions about the publishing industry is that they assume that all authors have the time or desire to be able to do all this latex and crap themselves. most authors have neither the time nor inclination! People in engineering and computer science (ie, large portion of the slashdot audience) are certaintly an exception.
You need an agent? hmm...glorified view of being an author possibly..
In any case, you can certaintly do any of those things on your own. Editors are a dime a dozen (varying quality of course), typesetters there are plenty of, marketting companies, sure there are tons of those. So there you go.
Ok, let me refer you back to my previous message where I said "college books" not "college textbooks". There IS a difference, though perhaps I should have said "academic books with a bent towards education at the collegiate or post collegiate level" to have been clear.
Secondly, you may be right about SOME publishers having those requirements, but I can tell you that the publisher I dealt with used tex not at all and didn't know of other shops that did used tex (I brought up tex once as a cost savers and was basically laughed at).
Third, often for textbooks the publisher is instrumental in getting the team of authors together. I DO agree that many college textbooks are overpriced (because its basically a monopoly once a book is assigned) but let me tell you also that there is fierce competition and that price does make a difference to professors when assigning books.
Fourth of all, you TOTALLY misuse middlemen. Publishers are production side, bookstores are the middlemen. You can buy from almost any publishers website direct and avoid the middlemen if you want, but most bookstores get like 40% discounts from publishers (So if a publisher lists a book at $80 they might *have* to sell it to amazon at somewhere around $50--so then whose making off like a bandit here). That's a good point (hah sorry, I'm typing this more or less stream of consciousness). If you want to get rid of the REAL thieves of the book industry, go after the bookstores.
and finally, I love your last comment about the only books you buy/use being textbooks. So clearly you have such a great insight into the industry. Thanks so much for your comments.
We survived for millenia without publishing middlemen in the sense that you describe. The difference was that not every jackass who can figure out a qwerty keyboard got his work published. I see nothing wrong with going back to those days. There are too damn many useless, repetitve texts out there now.
This is why I say if I you want to have a serious discussion you should get some knowledge. This is SO far from the truth. Publishing houses have historically had a huge role to play, historically more so than today!! Hell, publishing houses used to even push their own spelling for words back before english was standardized. Come on, don't post this crap.
Yeah, you're right, it is overstating the role of the publisher..It was the best I could come up with on short notice :)
But I do think your analogies, UNDERstate the role. I know it was suprising to me how much publishers actually DO do (such as sometimes it is the publisher who comes up with an idea for a book, and then searches out an author capable of writing such). interesting stuff.
Anyway, you're also perfectly right about music etc, I'm no RIAA et al fan.
No offense to you (I don't even know if you have a blog), but a blog does not a book make, and most blogs are CRAP in my experience (not saying there aren't some good ones). I think people are taking the analogy of blog book too far..blog diary, maybe.
Besides...most authors do like to make some money of their works so that they can do what they like to do, and blogs aren't to conducive to those means.
Bah, I'm sorry, I stand by my earlier statement--if you want to really talk about this subject get some knowledge first--go write a book or work at a publishing shop.
Your statement that "the publiher does not really deserve much credit nor profit" is ridiculous. Let me list a couple things that publishing companies do that authors are quite glad to have no part in doing--market books. The press with which I have experience largely works in college books and things like law books (ie, nonfiction). All publishers devote a signifigant amount of resources to sending people out to schools to get prospective sales--meaning more royalties for the author. How bout managing sales, shipments, warehouses? That's fun. Or dealing with supply vendors, printers, etc? That's great fun too.
Another area I'm quite sure you haven't thought about. In many cases publishers are looking for a book--a book to fill a particular niche, and they go out and find an author to write said book. So if the publisher recruited an author like this is it fair to say that the author has "ZERO, zilch" and does not deserve much credit or profit?
The publisher is NOT just a middleman--they DO take on many activities of middlemen, but the act of publishing a book is a process in which creativity comes out of the employees of the publishing company as well, and in many cases editors and others greatly help the authors.
I could keep going ad inf. But I'll just stop here..
Ok I can tell you a couple things that it's a 100% sure that consumers want in books. Good spelling, properly formatted pages, sentences that make sense, tables of contents and indexes that are correct, covers that look good, footnotes in proper order and together, uniform citation styles, diagrams referred to properly and in the right locations, and I could keep going. If you think all this is easy, I would advise you to seek a job in the publishing industry--sounds like some publishers could really use your help!
You wouldn't believe the state of some manuscripts that come in..
Well I must say I don't like the sewage analogy, but overall I do agree with the point. I would say that instead of sewage, authors (anyone who is creating something) often produce the raw ingredients for a meal--and it is the publisher who "cooks" the meal.
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book. Not just authors--a vast majority of slashdot viewers (and people in general) don't have any idea either I'm sure. Making a book even once an author has completed the manuscript is still time consuming and difficult--not just sending it to the press and saying 'done!'.
To anyone who says publishers aren't needed, I'd advise them to try a job at a publishing shop for a short time, and see how they like the work.
I agree with you for most of your post..the upgrade cycle can get painful at times.
On a personal note, on my desktop computer I've gotten much better sound/video performance on current than stable--I don't know why, but that's a big thing for me.
On the server side, Samba ACL's are the big thing..can't wait to upgrade the servers for that (probably will wait until at least 5.2 or more).
Also it's nice to have devfs and the new RCng boot system (from NetBSD) imho.
Japanese, like any other language, is almost exactly as complex as it needs to be - several thousand years of linguistic development tends to remove the bloat.
Hmm, that's an interesting theory, but do you have any sources or info to back that up? I don't really think that's true. Take English as an example--English has become more complex and more irregular with infusions of new grammar and new vocabularly. Compare to a language dead for almost 1500 years, Latin, which was very structured and very regular. Compare to a language like Turkish which "bloated" up from about 1000ad to 1920ad after which it was (forcibly) "bloated" down.
My statement on the language phenomena would be "languages evolve to serve a need and a niche" NOT to reach some superior state. Just like biological evolution, linguistic evolution doesn't always produce something universally better or less bloated. Biological evolution creates an organism better suited for a particular environment, not a creature that is (necessarily) better for all environemnts.
thoughts?
Ok, so what IS the impact? What's so terrible about this? That it gives a microsoft browser a speed advantage over a free browser?
to pad their numbers? If it gives a verifiable speed increase and makes IE "so fast" as the article says, what's wrong with that?
Stealing what? I'm personally friends with a couple India's who have moved here from India and were given money to go to Grad school by Cisco (as they also work for Cisco). What's wrong with this? Who's stealing what?
fwiw, all those things that you listed are about the most commonly done things--you can find hundreds of FAQ's and HOWTO's for each one--it's not like your situation is one in which you're the first person to want to do one of those things. For areas where demand is strong, internet is, imho, best resource.
So it seems to me that you're defining any GUI that is WIMP as being the same.
3.1 -> 95 and OS9->OSX changed greatly:
-aesthetics of controls/windows
-method of keeping track of running programs
-MDI vs SDI etc
-Creation of the desktop
-Basic window controls (max,min)
-Basic method of exploring the harddrive
Maybe you could give your opinion on an example of a major gui change? (and let's keep it in reality, meaning something that has happened)