Lets say I create a super file manager, that's way better than Windows Explorer. I try to sell it, but no one buys it. Do I deserve to have the government come in and bail me out?
No, of course not. Microsoft would be correct in claiming that the Windows file manager is "an integral part of the operating system" and they have a reason other than anticompetition to include it in the OS.
IE used to be a separately sold product. Nobody believes that it's part of the OS. I went to a MS recruiting event and the MS guy got a giant laugh out of the audience by mocking the claim that IE is part of the OS. They don't even believe it themselves - except under oath in court.
The actual event goes like this: MS sold products at a loss to drive away competition. They just tried to use legal smoke and mirrors to claim it was an integrated part of a product, since tying unrelated products is illegal regarless of whether you're a monopoly.
Capitalism sometimes rewards innovation. The problem is that it some practices allowed in a totally unregeulated market don't demand on capitalism's benefits. They are alternatives to producing the best product and selling it at the best price.
Pricing games are the best example. Netscape's only product is a browser. Microsoft has many products, one of which is a browser. MS can give away the browser without going bankrupt. Netscape can't. You can't compete unless you're already in the business - innovation is prohibited in effect, though not in theory.
But that's only one of the anti-capitalist tricks in MS's bag - bullying OEMs into using only Windows, using vaporware like there's no tommorrow, tying products together, using its applications monopoly to prop up its OS monopoly, none of these tactics are based on market forces - they're dirty tricks to subvert market forces.
2) Netscape had grand visions of a browser-centric model of computing.
3) Microsoft gives away IE. This is a money-losing proposition. It doesn't make sense if you're playing "fair" - not trying to manipulate the market
4) Netscape gets obliterated.
There's nothing wrong with this?
The problem with the MS monopoly is that for average consumers there's no alternative to using MS software. This means that their no longer subject to the pressures of the market - you HAVE to buy Windows, and it can be whatever they want it to be.
The stealth DRM in Windows ME is a good example. MS will eventually disable your machine's ability to play any MP3 you haven't had "blessed" by MS. They plan to activate this feature once they have "acquired sufficent market share" - doubletalk for "once we've driven the competition out of business."
But unless I'm a real geek, I don't have an alternative. In a normal market, the competition would be running adds with slogans like "Don't let Microsoft control your computer. Use Bob's OS instead." But there's no choice. Linux, maybe, but the average person doesn't want to install a frickin shareware program on their machine. They're gonna run Linux?
The only competition that can survive is free software, because MS can't use it's predatory pricing to drive it out of existence.
Did Microsoft get a fair trial? Probably not. Bear in mind this America, you no longer have the right to a fair trial. You can be sentenced to death while your lawyer is taking a nap and that's not grounds for a new trial. Microsoft got something that approximates a fair trial better than a lot of trials. Tactless comments by the judge don't change the facts - they're anticompetitive.
Previous antitrust actions in overly concentrated markets have had the desired effect - Long distance is cheaper now than it was before. Going back to the heydays of antitrust, our petroleum-dependent economy would have been bled to death by Standard Oil. Our information-dependent economy will be bled to death by Microsoft if we let them - subscription software is how they'll suck the life out of you.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 2
I know I'm arguing with a troll, but I just can't resist. (IMHO, the best troll is where you know it's a troll, but you still can't stop yourself from calling him a dumbass.)
The typical *nix sysadmin or Perl hacker has a very specialised set of skills that only counts within the narrow environment in which they are confortable operating in. Take that environment away, and said hacker is like a fish out of water.
The same could of marketers or lawyers or stockbrokers. Or convenience store clerks or any of the thousands of other professions that depend on a well-functioning semi-capitalist society to exist. Most people don't have skills that are useful in a post-apocolyptic world anymore. That's the problem with service economies.
The people "most likely to survive" are farmers, hunters, and soliders- people who are comfortable in primitive environments. Someone to grow the food, someone to hunt it, and someone to hunt people who want to steal it. IIRC, this is how primitive societies work.
And with the vast lack of social skills they possess, they can't even integrate into the hunter-gatherer groups of the post-apocolyptic world.
Social graces and social skills are two different things. Just because you aren't controlled by popular culture doesn't mean that you can't interact with others. Geeks seem to be quite successful at dealing with other geeks - people who have the same problems. Hmm, they also have a generous ability to solve problems. They generally don't prefer manipulating others into doing work over actually doing work. IMHE, I've seen Signal Corps soldiers are much better at resolving problems in the field than say, Finace Corps soldiers. One group is attuned to focusing on problems of a concrete nature, one freaks out when they don't have a regulation to tell them what to do.
Some people would be leaders,
Imagine a group of sales people trapped in a post-apolyptic world. They'd starve to death arguing about who was best qualified to direct the planting and who should actually do the work. The geeks would have already figured out crop rotation by discussing real questions.
We all keep talking about how we'll just move offending stuff to physically offshore locations. Have Napster set up shop in Japan, have DeCSS available for download from Canada.
And there's the old truism that "you can't regulate the internet, it's global". The problem is that when every country in the world has passed the DMCA there's nowhere left to go....
"Diablo" is the Spanish word for "Devil"!!!! This is like trying to trademark the word "Jesus" and demanding that everyone pay for using it. IANAL but my understanding is that you should never name your product after a dictionary noun. When your product is named after a word that is 2000 years older than the product it's awfully hard to claim exclusive ownership.
I don't know if using a non-English noun helps, but in this case, a movie about a Hispanic drug lord, "Diablo" is a perfectly logical name for the (anti)hero and therefore the movie.
By their argument, "Devil in a Blue Dress" cannot be marketed in a Spanish translation - "Diablo en un vestido azul" would violate their trademark. Diablo players in Latin America might think the movie was somehow related. A Hispanic author couldn't publish a book entitled "The Devil Returns" (or anything with "*Devil*") because it violates their trademark.
If New Line can make a movie called "Diablo" without Blizzard's consent, can Blizzard come out with a game called "Nightmare On Elm Street" without New Line's consent?
Can the Catholic Church sue the makers of Deus Ex for using the Latin word for God in their title? Of course not, "Deus" is a dictionary word in Latin, not a created noun.
Keep in mind that this puppy has a 64-bit RISC processor which was designed without the 20+ years of suffocating backward compatiblity the x86s drag around. Your AMD has a 32-bit CISC processor. The superior architecture should blow away the x86 machines in raw computational power, even if the clock speed is substantially lower. Of course, only way to find out would be to benchmark them.
That said, if you're doing anything that isn't just compute-intensive, this baby looks a bit weak. 30 GB max of HD? 3 PCI slots? This is a work machine, period. You'd still want an x86 box to play MP3s (no mention of sound), play games with an AGP card, plug in all the devices this thing won't recognize, etc.
OK, so how the hell is this gonna work? The MP3 format doesn't have content protection built in. I suppose they could "watermark" (degrade) the files. But the problems are immediate:
1) Someone will reverse-engineer the client as soon as they download it. Illegal in the US, possibly, (not that will stop some people) but there's always overseas users.
2) The decrypted contents of the watermark have to exist in memory. Big problem. If nothing else, an awful lot of sound cards produce digital output. Feed the output back in, endgame.
Why not just give up? Or move to the Cayman Islands? This is a silly game, they should stop now.
It simply isn't realistic. Life doesn't pause for you and let you take a breather. Granted a lot of real time games suck (because they stress building crap and then rushing with everything.)
Actual, life runs closer to turn-based in terms of actual time. "Real" time games are usually accelerated by orders of magnitude, at least in war games like Starcraft.
At operational and strategic levels(battalion and up, for our purposes), an operations order for a single mission is the size of a book - you don't ever want to work on part of one. These behemoths are typed by an entire staff of officers. Yep, we type orders up before we start fighting. The detail involved in planning a real military operation is just staggering.
Turn-based games give you a chance to experience this is in real-life - the sheer complexity of large organizations. A turn-based game is possibly somewhat realistic, just sped up by 10^4 or 10^7. A "real"-time game is completely lacking in realism - your forces appear out of little buildings after 30 seconds, and you all run right at the other side like a bunch of 29th century Soviets. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun. But they're devoid of realism. Turn based games feel more like "the real thing", at least from higher levels.
Yep, the moderators had to go moderating a reasonably-stated but unpopular opinion flamebait.
I think that everyone would agree that the content creator should have the last word over how his content should be used.
I don't think so. The right to control one's content is absolutely artificial - it exists only because someone says so. In the United States, these rights are granted for the public good with certain limitations, specifically fair use. They are supposed to expire eventually, at which time everyone gets equal access to the work. Unfortunately, content-controllers, (distinct from creators, who usually have no say inh the distribution of their content) are afraid of being made irrelevant by advances in technology. So they engage in collusion and deny consumers their rights regarding content. Then they purchase legistlation to prohibit the progress of technology so they don't become obsolete.
Analogy: In 1910 live theaters realize that movies will crush their business - it isn't fair that movies are able to be preformed in one location and shown everywhere!!! And movies can be filmed on location in tropical paradises and shown in Podunk! This is going to destroy the entertainment industry. So they get Congress making it illegal to show a movie more than 30 miles from where it was filmed.
Explain to me how this is any different than content-control technology?
I'm on a one-person crusade to get the phrase "content-control" used for these types of systems. Two reasons:
1)It's more inclusive - it describes all the DMCA-protected "advancements" we hate. In addition to technology which takes away our fair-use rights, it includes the really evil stuff like region-coding, limited usage content, subscription software, and so on. The problem with "copy protection" is that these companies don't want to stop there - they want to control everything we do with content.
2)It's inflammatory. The press picked up the term "partial-birth abortion" even though the medical term is "intact dilation and extraction". The language alone gave an awfully big boost to the prolife side on this one. "Copy control" does the same thing - it has the worst possible connotation and is still accurate. (Not trying to start the abortion debate, this is just an example. I have expressed no opinion on abortion itself, please don't use this thread to do so either. Go to Kuro5hin for that.)
I'm really getting sick of the MPAA trying to pretend like it's some sort of all-powerful organization.
First claim - nobody cracked SDMI. All reports to the contrary are completely false.
Reality - the unwatermarked data has to exist in memory somewhere. It's inherently insecure. And all the claims that the scheme was cracked are falsehoods?
Now - "Meanwhile, Sherman said his group had ideas about ways of dealing with Gnutella, but wouldn't discuss them publicly."
Reality - umm, how? Aaah, so they'll shut down the Internet in the Name of Holy Copyright.
Regarding Karma, I agree. It really doesn't matter a hoot, and 'Karma Whores' appear to be a thing of the past with the advent of the Karma Cap. However, it really would be better for/. if Karma were invisisble to the user, that way the pointless competitive aspect would not occur.
Karma is worthless yet meaningful. Money is an abstraction, and it motivates people to do all kinds of things, partly because it has real value and partly because it's money. You can never have enough money. Karma is like money without tangible value value - it's karma and nothing more - it's the ultimate abstract reward for contributions. It's amazing how much people will do to change an integer value on a server somewhere.
Oh no! We're trapped in Kuro5hin! We're gonna spend the rest of the year talking about how to change the submission process, the comment process, the moderation process, what color the site logo should be, and how many angels can post comments simultanenously.
Let's look at DIVX. Now there was a product that was needlessly complicated and overly restictive and Circuit City probably lost a bundle when it failed. Who, in the tech community _didn't_ see it coming? Not many, I imagine. I have a feeling that this kind of application of technology could backfire immensely on any companies that choose to use it.
If only it always worked that way. DIVX was stupid. Here's how people play the game now:
1. "Industry standards". Actually a form of collusion, all the makers of HDTVs or DVDs or whatever get together and agree to incorporate anti-consumer technology into all their products. This is illegal, the Justice Department should sue their asses into oblivion, but that isn't gonna happen.
2. Stealth mode. Windows XP will keep playing all my MP3s until MS sends the signal to cut off the "illegal content" - the MP3s I got from MP3.com and my own CDs. You can do this with anything - just install a clock that the user can't modify and give it a fixed date to switch to "control mode".
3. The DMCA. Ruthlessly hunt down anyone who tries to give us our rights back, and declare that they are thieves.
You'd be suprised. You can introduce any penalty you want into a contract or license agreement as it is clearly stated . Hotmail now requires you to pay 5-to-1 monetary damages if you use your account to spam. The case would be thrown out in a minute if you wrote the legal briefs yourself, but with enough legal power, anything is possible.
And the same tactics corporate lawyers hold dear can easily be used by counter-lawyers. Two counter-counter-measures:
1) You're packet-sniffing. You're snooping in people's private business. Legal? Unlikely. Admissible in court? Assuming no Supreme Court justices die soon, no.
2) Write the license to prohibit this. You can't derive any work from the protocol or reverse engineer it unless you accept the original terms and clearly cause the terms to be displayed at each usage.
Bear in mind that all of this needs to enter into a court action at some time, where the license violations become awfully strong evidence.
Now the software/protocol is not "free" anymore, like free speech, but I don't see why we shouldn't take advantage of the tricks that the legal system has created.
A better method would be to put a line in the license for the client that goes something like this:
"You agree not to use this software to identify the users of the system. You agree not to actively attempt to discover the actual idenity of a user without his/her written permission. You agree to hold harmless all users. If you violate any of these provisions you are liable to the individual user for invasion for invasion of privacy and agree to compensate him/her not less than $10,000. Click here if you accept. Otherwise, you must delete this software immediately."
Don't need to keep updating the list of companies, doesn't restrict aybody from using the software as designed, etc. Best of all, it's illegal to circumvent the agreement under the DMCA. We can play this game too.
True, it's not a true GPL. The use of the program is restricted. Still, it's awfully fun, isn't it?
This is actually a brilliant idea. The End-User License Agreement can be used both ways. A potential agreement for Gnutella/Freenet:
"By using this system, you agree not to attempt to monitor the action of any user or to discern their actual identity. You agre not to hold harmless all users of this sytem. If you violate the privacy of any user of this system you agree to provide appropriate compensation, not less than $5,000, should the user request it."
So VA Linux doubled its revenue, but it missed its loss projects by $.02/share. This necessitates a 25% cut. Can someone explain why? I've never understood the workings of finance-droids.
There's no reason to subscribe to software. Let's see:
1. improved productivity, thanks to the improvements in software effected between upgrades
There is zero productivity increase involved in upgrading so-called productivity software. Are you really trying to tell me that an office drone is substantially more productive using Office 2000 than Office 97? This technology became mature in the early 90s. As far as creating documents, the MS Works 2.0 on my 486 is almost as adequate as MS Office 2010 - there's no reason to upgrade. The difference between recent Offices is negligble. Face it, we're talking about mature technology here. No one pays perpetually for
This is why Microsoft wants to introduce licensing - so they have a perpetual revenue stream on products that no corporation can justify upgrading. There won't be any upgrades to subscription software because 1)There's no incentive to produce them and 2)There's no incentive to upgrade - word processors and spreadheets are already maxed out.
2. no compatibility issues - again these cost money; by constantly being up-to-date, we have no risk of not being able to read that vital document.
Backward converters always exist. Many major corporations have just skipped Office 2000, which means that people with brains are voluntarily choosing not to be up-to-date. There's so little incentive to upgrade that installing backward-compatiblity utilities would often be a better choice.
3. better budgeting. If we know that our software will cost $x/year, every year, we can budget for that. There is then no risk of unseen costs.
Nonsense. The contract will be 6-12 months long. Once everyone has subscriptions, the price will shoot through the roof. All you know is that there will be a guaranteed outlay for software every year, you have no idea how much that outlay will have to increase.
Also, there's no control over costs. If the budget is tight, an upgrade can be delayed x months in the current model or re-assessed in terms of value entirely. There's no way to reduce software costs under subscriptions.
4. reduced impact on cashflow. Subscriptions mean that there is a lower initial cost - this means there is more money available to develop the business *now*.
Total cost is higher, see above.
The thing is, subscriptions are just being realistic - if you pretend that you're still going to be using those P3's running Office xxxx in 5 years time, you're wrong.
You may not be using the P3's, but why would you want to pay for Office xxxx+n when Office xxxx is a perfectly adequate system?
All the subscription/ASP approach acknowledges is that we have to upgrade anyway - companies are always upgrading hardware and software in order to gain the productivity benefits they attract.
Not completely true anymore. Hardware upgrades are made for largely network connectivity anymore. There's also strong evidence that hardware purchases are slowing since the marginal benefits of upgrading are lessening. Companies have started asking, "Is there any benefit to moving to Office xxxx+n? Is there anything we want to do with Office xxxx that we can't?"
Add some negatives
-1. Productivity depends on connectivity. What if subscriptions expire during a network outage? No memos can be written while the server's down? This is pretty unlikely, but it's the magnitude of risk involved that matters here. What sane person would make all business operations dependent on a somewhat unreliable resource - Internet connectivity?
You assume the subscription system itself will work flawlessly. This is a stupid assumption - someone will need to work on that valuable document one morning only to discover that Word insists it hasn't been resubscribed, despite the invoice indicating that the monthly payment of $20,000 was made last week. Unlikely? Yes. Catastrophic? Potentially. Gonna happen to somebody? Definitely.
-2. No control over upgrade costs and scheduling. In attempt to make so-called "upgrades" seem worthwile, MS will have to redesign products superficially. We'll hear crap like, "we put the Spell-Check function in the File Menu because our million-dollar Human Factors researches tell us that it's more intuitive to put it there." That's all well and fine, but there is a substantial drop-off in immediate productivity, with a very low possiblity of any substantial increase in long-term productivity. And everyone will be told when to upgrade, they won't be able to select an optimal time to migrate anymore. Do you really think a tax law firm wants to upgrade their software in April? They'd most likely prefer September or some other time of year. But they won't have that choice in a subscription system.
-3. TOC will be higher. Assuming I realize that office software undergoes minor incremental changes between versions I'll only purchase every second or third version, at most. The TOC is most likely lowered more by avoiding worthless uprgrades than moving to a subscription model. And if you have to deal with a monopoly, (likely for the forseable future) you're gonna see continous price increases to justify ever-decreasing improvements.
I nosed around in the config file for an in-house piece of software a while back. It had a field labeled password="xxxxx" where 'xxxxxx' was a the user password encrypted with a system one step above ROT13. Like a good user, I emailed People Who Are Paid to Care. Their response: "We've frozen the code. Sorry." After sending another email, trying to explain my 12-year niece could extract a user password from this system, I got very a very defensive response. After a couple emails, I gave up.
It's hard for some admins to be to admit they have security problems. Far from being appreciative, they get very defensive, even if all you do is report a problem.
I was a "bad kid" my first two years of high school. For various reasons, I got very poor grades - I was a classic underachiever.
In my junior year, my attitude changed dramatically, but my GPA was still a piece of crap. I got straight A's the last two terms of that year. My high school suffered from tremendous grade inflation, so I ranked very far down in both GPA and class rank even after getting my act together - something like 20% of the kids had 3.9 GPAs or higher.
Fortunately, I blew the lids off the standardized tests. I don't think I would have been able to go a respectable college if I didn't have a standardized test score to save my ass. From there I was able to throw myself into a CS curriculum and transfer up in the world after two semesters.
Do we really want to determine people's options largely based on whether they didn't give a damn when they were 15 years old?
Re:Next time you have to go to the bathroom at wor
on
Nike: Just Don't Do It
·
· Score: 2
Won't market forces deal with this evenutally? The problem seems to be that the 'sweatshop' jobs are coveted for their comparatively high income levels and low availability. As more companies do this, the dependance on any one 'sweatshop' will decrease, meaning people will have the option of changing jobs, which means the really bad employers won't be able to hire people as readily and will have to improve their conditions?
Time to enter reality - the are no market "forces". This is one of those stupid metaphors the right wing uses to make it sound like economics is a hard science. It's not, it never will be, it's a soft science, with models and predictions only slightly more rigorous than the other soft sciences.
Your so-called 'forces' produce the results you expect them to under a limited set of conditions:
-zero market entry cost
-an extremely large number of producers and consumers
-perfect information available to all agents
-no collusion or government intervention for any agent
-all agents act in a perfectly rational manner
Under these conditions the supply and demand curves would predict prices, wages, and other good distribution with perfect accuracy. These conditions never exist, but some economic situations come close. The further you get from the assumptions of the market model, the less likely 'market forces' are to work.
None of the needed assumptions is remotely valid:
-zero market entry cost
It costs an awful lot of money to open an overseas sweathsop. I think there's a pretty serious barrier here.
-Extremely large number of agents
Maybe. But how many sweatshop operators are there in any particular corner of nowhere? At a global level, the number of agents interested in running sweatshops might approximate a true market, but you still have geographic monopolies and oligopolies that have absurd amounts of bargaining leverage.
-Perfect information to all agents.
Definitely not
-No collusion or government intervention.
This is the big problem. It's illegal to strike in these countries. Try starting a union, or demanding better working conditions, and you'll end up dead. If you have a one-sweatshop town and a second sweatshop opens, do you really think both sweatshops will engage in a wage bidding war? They'll make an agreement to keep wages at $.07/day. This deal is better for both of them. In the US, we call this price-fixing, but in developing countries they call it business as usual.
-All agents are perfectly rational
Do you really think a sweatshop boss confronted with demands for higher wages is going to start drawing supply schedules and demand schedules and find the intersection like a good little economist would? He's gonna hire a death squad...
I think 'market forces' and the 'law of supply and demand' are about as applicable here as classical mechanics and Newton's laws are at relativistic speeds. Sure, we can them to try and describe conditions and predict future conditions, but our predictions are just wrong.
If yous stop to think about it, it's amazing you'd expect markets to correct this situation. Some people refuse to believe that markets ever produce grossly suboptimal results. The "Markets are Always Optimal" school of thought isn't a hard science, it isn't a soft science, it a fucking ideology - an article of faith. You apparently accept even when it's completely wrong.
There's also going to be a tradeoff between complexity, control, and efficiency. You can get the most efficient code possible by writing everything in straight assembly - but no sane person would try it. (I have a friend who claims to know someone who writes Win32 compliant code in straight assembly. Don't believe it....)
In order to design really complex anything, you need more robust and compartmentalized designs - that's what OO gives you. The tradeoff in speed and resource consumption is obvious, but if we didn't make that tradeoff we'd all be stuck with blinding fast BASIC interperters.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets say I create a super file manager, that's way better than Windows Explorer. I try to sell it, but no one buys it. Do I deserve to have the government come in and bail me out?
No, of course not. Microsoft would be correct in claiming that the Windows file manager is "an integral part of the operating system" and they have a reason other than anticompetition to include it in the OS.
IE used to be a separately sold product. Nobody believes that it's part of the OS. I went to a MS recruiting event and the MS guy got a giant laugh out of the audience by mocking the claim that IE is part of the OS. They don't even believe it themselves - except under oath in court.
The actual event goes like this: MS sold products at a loss to drive away competition. They just tried to use legal smoke and mirrors to claim it was an integrated part of a product, since tying unrelated products is illegal regarless of whether you're a monopoly.
Capitalism sometimes rewards innovation. The problem is that it some practices allowed in a totally unregeulated market don't demand on capitalism's benefits. They are alternatives to producing the best product and selling it at the best price.
Pricing games are the best example. Netscape's only product is a browser. Microsoft has many products, one of which is a browser. MS can give away the browser without going bankrupt. Netscape can't. You can't compete unless you're already in the business - innovation is prohibited in effect, though not in theory.
But that's only one of the anti-capitalist tricks in MS's bag - bullying OEMs into using only Windows, using vaporware like there's no tommorrow, tying products together, using its applications monopoly to prop up its OS monopoly, none of these tactics are based on market forces - they're dirty tricks to subvert market forces.
Lets see here:
1) Microsoft makes money charging for software.
2) Netscape had grand visions of a browser-centric model of computing.
3) Microsoft gives away IE. This is a money-losing proposition. It doesn't make sense if you're playing "fair" - not trying to manipulate the market
4) Netscape gets obliterated.
There's nothing wrong with this?
The problem with the MS monopoly is that for average consumers there's no alternative to using MS software. This means that their no longer subject to the pressures of the market - you HAVE to buy Windows, and it can be whatever they want it to be.
The stealth DRM in Windows ME is a good example. MS will eventually disable your machine's ability to play any MP3 you haven't had "blessed" by MS. They plan to activate this feature once they have "acquired sufficent market share" - doubletalk for "once we've driven the competition out of business."
But unless I'm a real geek, I don't have an alternative. In a normal market, the competition would be running adds with slogans like "Don't let Microsoft control your computer. Use Bob's OS instead." But there's no choice. Linux, maybe, but the average person doesn't want to install a frickin shareware program on their machine. They're gonna run Linux?
The only competition that can survive is free software, because MS can't use it's predatory pricing to drive it out of existence.
Did Microsoft get a fair trial? Probably not. Bear in mind this America, you no longer have the right to a fair trial. You can be sentenced to death while your lawyer is taking a nap and that's not grounds for a new trial. Microsoft got something that approximates a fair trial better than a lot of trials. Tactless comments by the judge don't change the facts - they're anticompetitive.
Previous antitrust actions in overly concentrated markets have had the desired effect - Long distance is cheaper now than it was before. Going back to the heydays of antitrust, our petroleum-dependent economy would have been bled to death by Standard Oil. Our information-dependent economy will be bled to death by Microsoft if we let them - subscription software is how they'll suck the life out of you.
I know I'm arguing with a troll, but I just can't resist. (IMHO, the best troll is where you know it's a troll, but you still can't stop yourself from calling him a dumbass.)
The typical *nix sysadmin or Perl hacker has a very specialised set of skills that only counts within the narrow environment in which they are confortable operating in. Take that environment away, and said hacker is like a fish out of water.
The same could of marketers or lawyers or stockbrokers. Or convenience store clerks or any of the thousands of other professions that depend on a well-functioning semi-capitalist society to exist. Most people don't have skills that are useful in a post-apocolyptic world anymore. That's the problem with service economies.
The people "most likely to survive" are farmers, hunters, and soliders- people who are comfortable in primitive environments. Someone to grow the food, someone to hunt it, and someone to hunt people who want to steal it. IIRC, this is how primitive societies work.
And with the vast lack of social skills they possess, they can't even integrate into the hunter-gatherer groups of the post-apocolyptic world.
Social graces and social skills are two different things. Just because you aren't controlled by popular culture doesn't mean that you can't interact with others. Geeks seem to be quite successful at dealing with other geeks - people who have the same problems. Hmm, they also have a generous ability to solve problems. They generally don't prefer manipulating others into doing work over actually doing work. IMHE, I've seen Signal Corps soldiers are much better at resolving problems in the field than say, Finace Corps soldiers. One group is attuned to focusing on problems of a concrete nature, one freaks out when they don't have a regulation to tell them what to do.
Some people would be leaders,
Imagine a group of sales people trapped in a post-apolyptic world. They'd starve to death arguing about who was best qualified to direct the planting and who should actually do the work. The geeks would have already figured out crop rotation by discussing real questions.
We all keep talking about how we'll just move offending stuff to physically offshore locations. Have Napster set up shop in Japan, have DeCSS available for download from Canada.
And there's the old truism that "you can't regulate the internet, it's global". The problem is that when every country in the world has passed the DMCA there's nowhere left to go....
"Diablo" is the Spanish word for "Devil"!!!! This is like trying to trademark the word "Jesus" and demanding that everyone pay for using it. IANAL but my understanding is that you should never name your product after a dictionary noun. When your product is named after a word that is 2000 years older than the product it's awfully hard to claim exclusive ownership.
I don't know if using a non-English noun helps, but in this case, a movie about a Hispanic drug lord, "Diablo" is a perfectly logical name for the (anti)hero and therefore the movie.
By their argument, "Devil in a Blue Dress" cannot be marketed in a Spanish translation - "Diablo en un vestido azul" would violate their trademark. Diablo players in Latin America might think the movie was somehow related. A Hispanic author couldn't publish a book entitled "The Devil Returns" (or anything with "*Devil*") because it violates their trademark.
If New Line can make a movie called "Diablo" without Blizzard's consent, can Blizzard come out with a game called "Nightmare On Elm Street" without New Line's consent?
Can the Catholic Church sue the makers of Deus Ex for using the Latin word for God in their title? Of course not, "Deus" is a dictionary word in Latin, not a created noun.
Keep in mind that this puppy has a 64-bit RISC processor which was designed without the 20+ years of suffocating backward compatiblity the x86s drag around. Your AMD has a 32-bit CISC processor. The superior architecture should blow away the x86 machines in raw computational power, even if the clock speed is substantially lower. Of course, only way to find out would be to benchmark them.
That said, if you're doing anything that isn't just compute-intensive, this baby looks a bit weak. 30 GB max of HD? 3 PCI slots? This is a work machine, period. You'd still want an x86 box to play MP3s (no mention of sound), play games with an AGP card, plug in all the devices this thing won't recognize, etc.
OK, so how the hell is this gonna work? The MP3 format doesn't have content protection built in. I suppose they could "watermark" (degrade) the files. But the problems are immediate:
1) Someone will reverse-engineer the client as soon as they download it. Illegal in the US, possibly, (not that will stop some people) but there's always overseas users.
2) The decrypted contents of the watermark have to exist in memory. Big problem. If nothing else, an awful lot of sound cards produce digital output. Feed the output back in, endgame.
Why not just give up? Or move to the Cayman Islands? This is a silly game, they should stop now.
It simply isn't realistic. Life doesn't pause for you and let you take a breather. Granted a lot of real time games suck (because they stress building crap and then rushing with everything.)
Actual, life runs closer to turn-based in terms of actual time. "Real" time games are usually accelerated by orders of magnitude, at least in war games like Starcraft.
At operational and strategic levels(battalion and up, for our purposes), an operations order for a single mission is the size of a book - you don't ever want to work on part of one. These behemoths are typed by an entire staff of officers. Yep, we type orders up before we start fighting. The detail involved in planning a real military operation is just staggering.
Turn-based games give you a chance to experience this is in real-life - the sheer complexity of large organizations. A turn-based game is possibly somewhat realistic, just sped up by 10^4 or 10^7. A "real"-time game is completely lacking in realism - your forces appear out of little buildings after 30 seconds, and you all run right at the other side like a bunch of 29th century Soviets. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun. But they're devoid of realism. Turn based games feel more like "the real thing", at least from higher levels.
Yep, the moderators had to go moderating a reasonably-stated but unpopular opinion flamebait.
I think that everyone would agree that the content creator should have the last word over how his content should be used.
I don't think so. The right to control one's content is absolutely artificial - it exists only because someone says so. In the United States, these rights are granted for the public good with certain limitations, specifically fair use. They are supposed to expire eventually, at which time everyone gets equal access to the work. Unfortunately, content-controllers, (distinct from creators, who usually have no say inh the distribution of their content) are afraid of being made irrelevant by advances in technology. So they engage in collusion and deny consumers their rights regarding content. Then they purchase legistlation to prohibit the progress of technology so they don't become obsolete.
Analogy: In 1910 live theaters realize that movies will crush their business - it isn't fair that movies are able to be preformed in one location and shown everywhere!!! And movies can be filmed on location in tropical paradises and shown in Podunk! This is going to destroy the entertainment industry. So they get Congress making it illegal to show a movie more than 30 miles from where it was filmed.
Explain to me how this is any different than content-control technology?
I'm on a one-person crusade to get the phrase "content-control" used for these types of systems. Two reasons:
1)It's more inclusive - it describes all the DMCA-protected "advancements" we hate. In addition to technology which takes away our fair-use rights, it includes the really evil stuff like region-coding, limited usage content, subscription software, and so on. The problem with "copy protection" is that these companies don't want to stop there - they want to control everything we do with content.
2)It's inflammatory. The press picked up the term "partial-birth abortion" even though the medical term is "intact dilation and extraction". The language alone gave an awfully big boost to the prolife side on this one. "Copy control" does the same thing - it has the worst possible connotation and is still accurate. (Not trying to start the abortion debate, this is just an example. I have expressed no opinion on abortion itself, please don't use this thread to do so either. Go to Kuro5hin for that.)
I'm really getting sick of the MPAA trying to pretend like it's some sort of all-powerful organization.
First claim - nobody cracked SDMI. All reports to the contrary are completely false.
Reality - the unwatermarked data has to exist in memory somewhere. It's inherently insecure. And all the claims that the scheme was cracked are falsehoods?
Now - "Meanwhile, Sherman said his group had ideas about ways of dealing with Gnutella, but wouldn't discuss them publicly."
Reality - umm, how? Aaah, so they'll shut down the Internet in the Name of Holy Copyright.
Regarding Karma, I agree. It really doesn't matter a hoot, and 'Karma Whores' appear to be a thing of the past with the advent of the Karma Cap. However, it really would be better for /. if Karma were invisisble to the user, that way the pointless competitive aspect would not occur.
Karma is worthless yet meaningful. Money is an abstraction, and it motivates people to do all kinds of things, partly because it has real value and partly because it's money. You can never have enough money. Karma is like money without tangible value value - it's karma and nothing more - it's the ultimate abstract reward for contributions. It's amazing how much people will do to change an integer value on a server somewhere.
Oh no! We're trapped in Kuro5hin! We're gonna spend the rest of the year talking about how to change the submission process, the comment process, the moderation process, what color the site logo should be, and how many angels can post comments simultanenously.
Let's look at DIVX. Now there was a product that was needlessly complicated and overly restictive and Circuit City probably lost a bundle when it failed. Who, in the tech community _didn't_ see it coming? Not many, I imagine. I have a feeling that this kind of application of technology could backfire immensely on any companies that choose to use it.
If only it always worked that way. DIVX was stupid. Here's how people play the game now:
1. "Industry standards". Actually a form of collusion, all the makers of HDTVs or DVDs or whatever get together and agree to incorporate anti-consumer technology into all their products. This is illegal, the Justice Department should sue their asses into oblivion, but that isn't gonna happen.
2. Stealth mode. Windows XP will keep playing all my MP3s until MS sends the signal to cut off the "illegal content" - the MP3s I got from MP3.com and my own CDs. You can do this with anything - just install a clock that the user can't modify and give it a fixed date to switch to "control mode".
3. The DMCA. Ruthlessly hunt down anyone who tries to give us our rights back, and declare that they are thieves.
You'd be suprised. You can introduce any penalty you want into a contract or license agreement as it is clearly stated . Hotmail now requires you to pay 5-to-1 monetary damages if you use your account to spam. The case would be thrown out in a minute if you wrote the legal briefs yourself, but with enough legal power, anything is possible.
Here we go down shitty analogy blvd.
No, we're going down paranoid-but-somewhat-plausible rd. Hypothetical situation:
moviereviews.com sez "Traffic is horrible movie. This part especially sucked...."
Big Studio goes to the ISP and says, "moviereviews.com has infrininging material. They die now."
ISP bends over, Big Movie Studio is assured that nobody can critically review its product again. Paranoid, but possible.
And the same tactics corporate lawyers hold dear can easily be used by counter-lawyers. Two counter-counter-measures:
1) You're packet-sniffing. You're snooping in people's private business. Legal? Unlikely. Admissible in court? Assuming no Supreme Court justices die soon, no.
2) Write the license to prohibit this. You can't derive any work from the protocol or reverse engineer it unless you accept the original terms and clearly cause the terms to be displayed at each usage.
Bear in mind that all of this needs to enter into a court action at some time, where the license violations become awfully strong evidence.
Now the software/protocol is not "free" anymore, like free speech, but I don't see why we shouldn't take advantage of the tricks that the legal system has created.
A better method would be to put a line in the license for the client that goes something like this:
"You agree not to use this software to identify the users of the system. You agree not to actively attempt to discover the actual idenity of a user without his/her written permission. You agree to hold harmless all users. If you violate any of these provisions you are liable to the individual user for invasion for invasion of privacy and agree to compensate him/her not less than $10,000. Click here if you accept. Otherwise, you must delete this software immediately."
Don't need to keep updating the list of companies, doesn't restrict aybody from using the software as designed, etc. Best of all, it's illegal to circumvent the agreement under the DMCA. We can play this game too.
True, it's not a true GPL. The use of the program is restricted. Still, it's awfully fun, isn't it?
This is actually a brilliant idea. The End-User License Agreement can be used both ways. A potential agreement for Gnutella/Freenet:
"By using this system, you agree not to attempt to monitor the action of any user or to discern their actual identity. You agre not to hold harmless all users of this sytem. If you violate the privacy of any user of this system you agree to provide appropriate compensation, not less than $5,000, should the user request it."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
So VA Linux doubled its revenue, but it missed its loss projects by $.02/share. This necessitates a 25% cut. Can someone explain why? I've never understood the workings of finance-droids.
There's no reason to subscribe to software. Let's see:
1. improved productivity, thanks to the improvements in software effected between upgrades
There is zero productivity increase involved in upgrading so-called productivity software. Are you really trying to tell me that an office drone is substantially more productive using Office 2000 than Office 97? This technology became mature in the early 90s. As far as creating documents, the MS Works 2.0 on my 486 is almost as adequate as MS Office 2010 - there's no reason to upgrade. The difference between recent Offices is negligble. Face it, we're talking about mature technology here. No one pays perpetually for
This is why Microsoft wants to introduce licensing - so they have a perpetual revenue stream on products that no corporation can justify upgrading. There won't be any upgrades to subscription software because 1)There's no incentive to produce them and 2)There's no incentive to upgrade - word processors and spreadheets are already maxed out.
2. no compatibility issues - again these cost money; by constantly being up-to-date, we have no risk of not being able to read that vital document.
Backward converters always exist. Many major corporations have just skipped Office 2000, which means that people with brains are voluntarily choosing not to be up-to-date. There's so little incentive to upgrade that installing backward-compatiblity utilities would often be a better choice.
3. better budgeting. If we know that our software will cost $x/year, every year, we can budget for that. There is then no risk of unseen costs.
Nonsense. The contract will be 6-12 months long. Once everyone has subscriptions, the price will shoot through the roof. All you know is that there will be a guaranteed outlay for software every year, you have no idea how much that outlay will have to increase.
Also, there's no control over costs. If the budget is tight, an upgrade can be delayed x months in the current model or re-assessed in terms of value entirely. There's no way to reduce software costs under subscriptions.
4. reduced impact on cashflow. Subscriptions mean that there is a lower initial cost - this means there is more money available to develop the business *now*.
Total cost is higher, see above.
The thing is, subscriptions are just being realistic - if you pretend that you're still going to be using those P3's running Office xxxx in 5 years time, you're wrong.
You may not be using the P3's, but why would you want to pay for Office xxxx+n when Office xxxx is a perfectly adequate system?
All the subscription/ASP approach acknowledges is that we have to upgrade anyway - companies are always upgrading hardware and software in order to gain the productivity benefits they attract.
Not completely true anymore. Hardware upgrades are made for largely network connectivity anymore. There's also strong evidence that hardware purchases are slowing since the marginal benefits of upgrading are lessening. Companies have started asking, "Is there any benefit to moving to Office xxxx+n? Is there anything we want to do with Office xxxx that we can't?"
Add some negatives
-1. Productivity depends on connectivity. What if subscriptions expire during a network outage? No memos can be written while the server's down? This is pretty unlikely, but it's the magnitude of risk involved that matters here. What sane person would make all business operations dependent on a somewhat unreliable resource - Internet connectivity?
You assume the subscription system itself will work flawlessly. This is a stupid assumption - someone will need to work on that valuable document one morning only to discover that Word insists it hasn't been resubscribed, despite the invoice indicating that the monthly payment of $20,000 was made last week. Unlikely? Yes. Catastrophic? Potentially. Gonna happen to somebody? Definitely.
-2. No control over upgrade costs and scheduling. In attempt to make so-called "upgrades" seem worthwile, MS will have to redesign products superficially. We'll hear crap like, "we put the Spell-Check function in the File Menu because our million-dollar Human Factors researches tell us that it's more intuitive to put it there." That's all well and fine, but there is a substantial drop-off in immediate productivity, with a very low possiblity of any substantial increase in long-term productivity. And everyone will be told when to upgrade, they won't be able to select an optimal time to migrate anymore. Do you really think a tax law firm wants to upgrade their software in April? They'd most likely prefer September or some other time of year. But they won't have that choice in a subscription system.
-3. TOC will be higher. Assuming I realize that office software undergoes minor incremental changes between versions I'll only purchase every second or third version, at most. The TOC is most likely lowered more by avoiding worthless uprgrades than moving to a subscription model. And if you have to deal with a monopoly, (likely for the forseable future) you're gonna see continous price increases to justify ever-decreasing improvements.
I nosed around in the config file for an in-house piece of software a while back. It had a field labeled password="xxxxx" where 'xxxxxx' was a the user password encrypted with a system one step above ROT13. Like a good user, I emailed People Who Are Paid to Care. Their response: "We've frozen the code. Sorry." After sending another email, trying to explain my 12-year niece could extract a user password from this system, I got very a very defensive response. After a couple emails, I gave up.
It's hard for some admins to be to admit they have security problems. Far from being appreciative, they get very defensive, even if all you do is report a problem.
I was a "bad kid" my first two years of high school. For various reasons, I got very poor grades - I was a classic underachiever.
In my junior year, my attitude changed dramatically, but my GPA was still a piece of crap. I got straight A's the last two terms of that year. My high school suffered from tremendous grade inflation, so I ranked very far down in both GPA and class rank even after getting my act together - something like 20% of the kids had 3.9 GPAs or higher.
Fortunately, I blew the lids off the standardized tests. I don't think I would have been able to go a respectable college if I didn't have a standardized test score to save my ass. From there I was able to throw myself into a CS curriculum and transfer up in the world after two semesters.
Do we really want to determine people's options largely based on whether they didn't give a damn when they were 15 years old?
Won't market forces deal with this evenutally? The problem seems to be that the 'sweatshop' jobs are coveted for their comparatively high income levels and low availability. As more companies do this, the dependance on any one 'sweatshop' will decrease, meaning people will have the option of changing jobs, which means the really bad employers won't be able to hire people as readily and will have to improve their conditions?
Time to enter reality - the are no market "forces". This is one of those stupid metaphors the right wing uses to make it sound like economics is a hard science. It's not, it never will be, it's a soft science, with models and predictions only slightly more rigorous than the other soft sciences.
Your so-called 'forces' produce the results you expect them to under a limited set of conditions:
-zero market entry cost
-an extremely large number of producers and consumers
-perfect information available to all agents
-no collusion or government intervention for any agent
-all agents act in a perfectly rational manner
Under these conditions the supply and demand curves would predict prices, wages, and other good distribution with perfect accuracy. These conditions never exist, but some economic situations come close. The further you get from the assumptions of the market model, the less likely 'market forces' are to work.
None of the needed assumptions is remotely valid:
-zero market entry cost
It costs an awful lot of money to open an overseas sweathsop. I think there's a pretty serious barrier here.
-Extremely large number of agents
Maybe. But how many sweatshop operators are there in any particular corner of nowhere? At a global level, the number of agents interested in running sweatshops might approximate a true market, but you still have geographic monopolies and oligopolies that have absurd amounts of bargaining leverage.
-Perfect information to all agents.
Definitely not
-No collusion or government intervention.
This is the big problem. It's illegal to strike in these countries. Try starting a union, or demanding better working conditions, and you'll end up dead. If you have a one-sweatshop town and a second sweatshop opens, do you really think both sweatshops will engage in a wage bidding war? They'll make an agreement to keep wages at $.07/day. This deal is better for both of them. In the US, we call this price-fixing, but in developing countries they call it business as usual.
-All agents are perfectly rational
Do you really think a sweatshop boss confronted with demands for higher wages is going to start drawing supply schedules and demand schedules and find the intersection like a good little economist would? He's gonna hire a death squad...
I think 'market forces' and the 'law of supply and demand' are about as applicable here as classical mechanics and Newton's laws are at relativistic speeds. Sure, we can them to try and describe conditions and predict future conditions, but our predictions are just wrong.
If yous stop to think about it, it's amazing you'd expect markets to correct this situation. Some people refuse to believe that markets ever produce grossly suboptimal results. The "Markets are Always Optimal" school of thought isn't a hard science, it isn't a soft science, it a fucking ideology - an article of faith. You apparently accept even when it's completely wrong.
There's also going to be a tradeoff between complexity, control, and efficiency. You can get the most efficient code possible by writing everything in straight assembly - but no sane person would try it. (I have a friend who claims to know someone who writes Win32 compliant code in straight assembly. Don't believe it....)
In order to design really complex anything, you need more robust and compartmentalized designs - that's what OO gives you. The tradeoff in speed and resource consumption is obvious, but if we didn't make that tradeoff we'd all be stuck with blinding fast BASIC interperters.