Ah, beautiful... mathematics in a vacuum. Sure, look around for resumes of CEOs that can grow a large company but don't pay him. See what kind of useless sack of crap you get to run the company out of business and put ALL of the employees out of work. What brilliant business strategy. Maybe you should start your own multi-billion dollar business venture!
Better yet! Cut marketing by 30% and assume that sales will stay at the same level so they can do more hiring. You should write a book!
Finally, that operating profit will have to be used to continue to grow the business, to war chest against future sales shortfalls, or possibly given to investors as dividends (like Microsoft has been doing). It's not just "free money" that can be used for righting whatever social injustice you think is being done.
These are complicated dynamic systems where you can't just start yanking numbers around as you please. Every dollar you take from one part of the business affects another part of the business, and the NUMEROUS game development companies that went out of business over the last few years is testament to the fact that EA knows how to do something right.
Re:So why the US don't follow Canada's steps...
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
Canada has a high-tech industry?
Huh...
Joking aside: Maybe over-zealous worker "protections" are the reason why Silicon Valley is in the US rather than Canada.
This reminds me of the response that a Canadian coworker gave me when I asked him why he had moved here to the States. He said, "This is where the jobs are."
Any real wonder why?
Re:As an IT Guru
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wow, you're trying to get the most money from your employer and they're trying to get the most work they can out of you? Horrible. Call the NYT right away.
What? You say that some sorry ass Indian is coming here and taking your job? How dare he try to leave a dirt poor country with living conditions that you couldn't even begin to imagine and try to provide a better price/performance solution for potential employers that you were doing your best to gouge. The gall of some Indian guy taking a pay check that he's most likely sending home to relatives who might not even have food. How awful for you and the comfy expectations you had for an easy life with high pay and modest work requirements!
I've been to India and I've seen the dirt and filth a lot of these guys have clawed their way out of to get educated and get to the US. It makes me ill that small-minded whiners take such pains to keep them down so they don't have to work as hard.
The good news is that they might as well be whining about a hurricane headed their way because this global competition thing has just really begun. It's going to change the world like the Industrial Revolution did, and no amount of hand wringing is going to stop it.
You might as well save your breath and spend your time figuring out how you're going to compete in this new global environment. I know I have.
No kidding. If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices. Then when a bunch of Korean/Indian/Chinese workers started producing higher quality games for less money, you'd have to hear these exact same whiners go on about how we're outsourcing.
When will people learn that the globally competitive environment isn't going to provide them the cushy existence for little work that their grandparents got. Get over it. Learn to compete and quit whining.
Actually, not having a new political party recently probably has more to do with the adoption of the "Australian Ballot" where your ballot choices are pre-selected for you and draconian measures have been taken to keep other parties off those ballots.
Yikes, now that's funny... in a scary, experimental, glad-I-don't-live-in-South-Carolina sort of way.
I kind of applaud their stated desire to get government out of their lives, but then they go and want government to support their religion and to poke their noses into peoples' bedrooms. Fucking hypocrites.
There's such a thing as a "win-win" situation where the park gets something (marketing data) and the park visitors get something (tracking their kids).
The "dangerous" situations you mentioned are a bit far-fetched. Is someone really going to hack into the system to track people not in their group? Wouldn't it be even easier to spirit kids out of the park when you didn't have to worry about a tracking system? At worst it sounds like a wash either way. Considering that dozens of children are lost every day in large parks, the benefit clearly outweighs the non-existent risk.
If they figure out a way to get more money out of you, it's likely that it's because they've made the experience somehow better. Considering that we have choices in how we spend our discretionary income in parks, on beaches, at the mall, at theme parks, etc. They can't force you to go there if you don't think the transaction is a fair one.
As I said before, this is a Win-Win situation. Why begrudge them for doing something innovative just because they get something out of it?
People and companies pay for private security guards all of the time to get extra levels of "police support". Extra support fire-wise is normally a part of that package and also purchasable through nicer sprinkler systems.
Not what I said. I said that they're not developing new drugs. If it weren't for the capitalistic societies doing the research, those people wouldn't have the framework for rewarding innovation.
If the research was done at academia and freely available to manufacturers, perheaps their product wouldnt be so overpriced that they cant compete?
Don't you stop to wonder why their academia doesn't create drugs? Capitalism in the West certainly doesn't stop them from innovating in the field. The answer is that their framework is completely blown away by the competition of capitalism.
Sigh, here we go again. Cause. Effect. Commercial progress? Cause: capitalism aided by sicence. Scientific progress? Cause: free exchange of information enabling research aided by investment. Remove the "free exchange" part and you have no progress whatsoever.
Says you. Look at the "free exchange" provided in the Indian/SE Asian commercial software and drugs markets. The cause? No one makes a penny off developing new drugs or commercially-sold software. The effect? No significant drug manufacturers. No significant commercial software industry. They buy (or mostly copy) both from Western sources.
I dont know about you, but 20 year patents (currently planned to be extended to 40)
"planned to be"? An unlikely-to-be-enacted proposal does not "planned to be" make.
If the peer-reviewed journals are providing such a great service, then subscribers will continue to pay for them, won't they? Serious scientists will demand that their academic institutions and companies continue to pay for the peer-reviewed and edited versions of the research that's being done. Those who just the raw research should still be able to obtain it without significant cost.
I don't see how some publishers' extra work for peer reviewing and editing should trump the right of those who paid for the research (taxpayers) to see what they've funded.
That is how PC revolution came about. IBM (mistakingly as it turns out) allowed the design information to be released free and the piece that was not (BIOS) was quickly duplicated.
Huh? You're going to argue about the evils of capitalism by giving an example of a company and an industry that operate successfully within the medium of capitalism? A company that has been extremely successful and an industry that has been the greatest technological achievement of mankind? Here's some more rope... go nuts.
Who made up your definitions of what is "subject to Capitalism"? Anything of value is subject to capitalism, whether it be something tangible like a drug or intangible like knowledge of how to make the drug -- or even intangible like the reputation of a brand name. Fortunately, the real world isn't limited by your narrow definitions or we'd be stuck in the typical communist trap where incentive in society has been eliminated so no one takes responsibility for shit.
As the previous poster tried to point out to you, if you make it so that people can't profit by sharing knowledge, they won't share it. They'll attempt to hide it every way they can by concealing how they make drugs, metals, nanofibers, software, etc. If you don't let them even have the ability to protect what they learn by keeping it secret (either through the law or reverse engineering everything that they create), then they'll tend to not even pursue knowledge -- since it won't feed their families.
You have received that memo that Marxism was an utter failure, right?
Incentive to get filthy rich leads to death of science as we know it.
Uh, that's in direct contradiction of reality. One has only to look at the unprecedented progress of the last hundred years in the Western world (particularly in the US) to see the benefits of capitalism. It hardly can be described as "the death of science".
They take what was built up by countless others before them and lock it down as their property.
That's wrong as well. The US patent system only gives you a relatively short window during which you can take advantage of your discovery before others can use it as well. The very act of "locking it down" publishes it for others to use directly when the patent expires and indirectly through related research. And contrary to what you said, you can't "lock down" knowledge gained by those before you (though many try to). Knowledge gained by others before you is prior art and not patentable.
This is going a bit off topic, but yeah, we should go for corporate welfare wherever it's found.
I think the Halliburton issue is a bit more complicated. Didn't a no-bid contract go to Halliburton during the Clinton administration? Maybe they're the only player in their niche, since I doubt that Clinton's administration would have been doing any favors for Cheney? Dunno.
But don't think that it's only about the amount of money involved. In some ways, it's also about the injustice of having publishers charge for information that taxpayers already paid for -- as though they're the "givers of knowledge" or something. As that one woman said who participated in some sort of AIDS testing (I paraphrase): 'I paid for this twice, once with my blood and once with my taxes. Why should I have to pay for it again?'
The arrogance of it sets me off as much as the money does.
It really is funny to read the rationalizations of the publishers. Let them squirm, I say. Every once in a while, businesses suckling from the taxpayer's teat should be cut off just on principle.
While I know that the thought of a wife is foreign to most on/.:), some of us have entire families that want to make use of the PVR. Add to that the fact that I have to work long hours so only get to marathon through recorded stuff every other weekend or so -- and 40 hours just isn't enough.
The jackasses at CompUSA pratically argue with you to get you to buy one. If that doesn't tell you how much they're benefitting from the damned things, I don't know what else would.
The one situation where I'd consider buying one would be for an LCD-based component, where they flake out so easily, it's worth it to be able to point to a few bad pixels and just get a new one.
Of course that argument is obviously bullshit. Since I didn't ever make it in the least, your contribution to this discussion is fallacious and known as a "straw man".
If you think that piracy isn't a major part of the equation, then you're being hopelessly naive. I'll definitely grant you that the copyright holders (no need to single out "megacorps", since individuals tend to act the same way) are greedy assholes -- but the pirates give the content providers so much ammunition against the cause that they undercut our arguments at every turn. They STEAL. They steal copyrighted material with rampant abandon. Worse, they're so proud of theft that they help others to steal by putting content that they don't own up for others to download.
So yes, like with the Betamax decision -- content providers will always look out for their own financial interests like the greedy bastards that they are. However, all the piracy has made (what should be) ridiculous legislation appear to some lawmakers to be the only solution.
Like the more moderate Islamic people have begun to realize, the only way to strengthen our arguments is to distance ourselves from the "bad" elements and condemn poor behavior.
Yes, it's easy to sit back and be shocked at the draconian measures that even this reduced-scale Induce bill promotes. I'm sure that the/. crowd will do more than an adequate job of pointing out the unfairness of it -- and I don't disagree with their condemnations.
However, for a person like myself who just wishes to lawfully make use of technology, I despise all of you on both extremes of this argument. That includes you fucking jackasses that continue to utterly abuse the rights of copyright holders with your weasely content stealing methods. Yeah, good job setting up your servers with the latest Hollywood movies, Silicon Valley games, etc.
Here's a big thanks from those of us in the middle who are caught up in your arms race of constantly increasing anti-piracy laws and pro-piracy techniques.
I'm kind of surprised to see so many/.ers in support of the guy. I think that it has more to do with his message than with the method that he's using to get his message out there. Their tunes will change as soon as those with the money to really utilize this method get into the act.
Really, the rationale I've seen is very close to that of spammers:
Cheap mass-delivery method
Excuses that "it's easy to wash off" sound a lot like "it's easy to hit delete"
Assumption that everyone's interest or need to see what they have to say surpasses the inconvenience of those who have to clean up after them
Not being content with letting people interested in finding them. Must go out and force people to see what they have to say.
Likely to develop into an arms race of self-important corporate and political interests, if this isn't determined to be illegal
Smells like spamming to me. We of all people should see where this is headed and seek to stop it as soon as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, beautiful... mathematics in a vacuum. Sure, look around for resumes of CEOs that can grow a large company but don't pay him. See what kind of useless sack of crap you get to run the company out of business and put ALL of the employees out of work. What brilliant business strategy. Maybe you should start your own multi-billion dollar business venture!
Better yet! Cut marketing by 30% and assume that sales will stay at the same level so they can do more hiring. You should write a book!
Finally, that operating profit will have to be used to continue to grow the business, to war chest against future sales shortfalls, or possibly given to investors as dividends (like Microsoft has been doing). It's not just "free money" that can be used for righting whatever social injustice you think is being done.
These are complicated dynamic systems where you can't just start yanking numbers around as you please. Every dollar you take from one part of the business affects another part of the business, and the NUMEROUS game development companies that went out of business over the last few years is testament to the fact that EA knows how to do something right.
Canada has a high-tech industry?
Huh...
Joking aside: Maybe over-zealous worker "protections" are the reason why Silicon Valley is in the US rather than Canada.
This reminds me of the response that a Canadian coworker gave me when I asked him why he had moved here to the States. He said, "This is where the jobs are."
Any real wonder why?
Wow, you're trying to get the most money from your employer and they're trying to get the most work they can out of you? Horrible. Call the NYT right away.
What? You say that some sorry ass Indian is coming here and taking your job? How dare he try to leave a dirt poor country with living conditions that you couldn't even begin to imagine and try to provide a better price/performance solution for potential employers that you were doing your best to gouge. The gall of some Indian guy taking a pay check that he's most likely sending home to relatives who might not even have food. How awful for you and the comfy expectations you had for an easy life with high pay and modest work requirements!
I've been to India and I've seen the dirt and filth a lot of these guys have clawed their way out of to get educated and get to the US. It makes me ill that small-minded whiners take such pains to keep them down so they don't have to work as hard.
The good news is that they might as well be whining about a hurricane headed their way because this global competition thing has just really begun. It's going to change the world like the Industrial Revolution did, and no amount of hand wringing is going to stop it.
You might as well save your breath and spend your time figuring out how you're going to compete in this new global environment. I know I have.
No kidding. If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices. Then when a bunch of Korean/Indian/Chinese workers started producing higher quality games for less money, you'd have to hear these exact same whiners go on about how we're outsourcing.
When will people learn that the globally competitive environment isn't going to provide them the cushy existence for little work that their grandparents got. Get over it. Learn to compete and quit whining.
Yeah, and he changes his mind all the time. It's like human beings were making shit up and saying that they were speaking with God's voice.
Good thing we know that God actually did write the Bible.
Actually, not having a new political party recently probably has more to do with the adoption of the "Australian Ballot" where your ballot choices are pre-selected for you and draconian measures have been taken to keep other parties off those ballots.
Yikes, now that's funny... in a scary, experimental, glad-I-don't-live-in-South-Carolina sort of way.
I kind of applaud their stated desire to get government out of their lives, but then they go and want government to support their religion and to poke their noses into peoples' bedrooms. Fucking hypocrites.
There's such a thing as a "win-win" situation where the park gets something (marketing data) and the park visitors get something (tracking their kids).
The "dangerous" situations you mentioned are a bit far-fetched. Is someone really going to hack into the system to track people not in their group? Wouldn't it be even easier to spirit kids out of the park when you didn't have to worry about a tracking system? At worst it sounds like a wash either way. Considering that dozens of children are lost every day in large parks, the benefit clearly outweighs the non-existent risk.
If they figure out a way to get more money out of you, it's likely that it's because they've made the experience somehow better. Considering that we have choices in how we spend our discretionary income in parks, on beaches, at the mall, at theme parks, etc. They can't force you to go there if you don't think the transaction is a fair one.
As I said before, this is a Win-Win situation. Why begrudge them for doing something innovative just because they get something out of it?
People and companies pay for private security guards all of the time to get extra levels of "police support". Extra support fire-wise is normally a part of that package and also purchasable through nicer sprinkler systems.
What's the problem?
You mean there is no drugs sold in India/SE Asia?
Not what I said. I said that they're not developing new drugs. If it weren't for the capitalistic societies doing the research, those people wouldn't have the framework for rewarding innovation.
If the research was done at academia and freely available to manufacturers, perheaps their product wouldnt be so overpriced that they cant compete?
Don't you stop to wonder why their academia doesn't create drugs? Capitalism in the West certainly doesn't stop them from innovating in the field. The answer is that their framework is completely blown away by the competition of capitalism.
Sigh, here we go again. Cause. Effect. Commercial progress? Cause: capitalism aided by sicence. Scientific progress? Cause: free exchange of information enabling research aided by investment. Remove the "free exchange" part and you have no progress whatsoever.
Says you. Look at the "free exchange" provided in the Indian/SE Asian commercial software and drugs markets. The cause? No one makes a penny off developing new drugs or commercially-sold software. The effect? No significant drug manufacturers. No significant commercial software industry. They buy (or mostly copy) both from Western sources.
I dont know about you, but 20 year patents (currently planned to be extended to 40)
"planned to be"? An unlikely-to-be-enacted proposal does not "planned to be" make.
If the peer-reviewed journals are providing such a great service, then subscribers will continue to pay for them, won't they? Serious scientists will demand that their academic institutions and companies continue to pay for the peer-reviewed and edited versions of the research that's being done. Those who just the raw research should still be able to obtain it without significant cost.
I don't see how some publishers' extra work for peer reviewing and editing should trump the right of those who paid for the research (taxpayers) to see what they've funded.
That is how PC revolution came about. IBM (mistakingly as it turns out) allowed the design information to be released free and the piece that was not (BIOS) was quickly duplicated.
Huh? You're going to argue about the evils of capitalism by giving an example of a company and an industry that operate successfully within the medium of capitalism? A company that has been extremely successful and an industry that has been the greatest technological achievement of mankind? Here's some more rope... go nuts.
Who made up your definitions of what is "subject to Capitalism"? Anything of value is subject to capitalism, whether it be something tangible like a drug or intangible like knowledge of how to make the drug -- or even intangible like the reputation of a brand name. Fortunately, the real world isn't limited by your narrow definitions or we'd be stuck in the typical communist trap where incentive in society has been eliminated so no one takes responsibility for shit.
As the previous poster tried to point out to you, if you make it so that people can't profit by sharing knowledge, they won't share it. They'll attempt to hide it every way they can by concealing how they make drugs, metals, nanofibers, software, etc. If you don't let them even have the ability to protect what they learn by keeping it secret (either through the law or reverse engineering everything that they create), then they'll tend to not even pursue knowledge -- since it won't feed their families.
You have received that memo that Marxism was an utter failure, right?
Incentive to get filthy rich leads to death of science as we know it.
Uh, that's in direct contradiction of reality. One has only to look at the unprecedented progress of the last hundred years in the Western world (particularly in the US) to see the benefits of capitalism. It hardly can be described as "the death of science".
They take what was built up by countless others before them and lock it down as their property.
That's wrong as well. The US patent system only gives you a relatively short window during which you can take advantage of your discovery before others can use it as well. The very act of "locking it down" publishes it for others to use directly when the patent expires and indirectly through related research. And contrary to what you said, you can't "lock down" knowledge gained by those before you (though many try to). Knowledge gained by others before you is prior art and not patentable.
This is going a bit off topic, but yeah, we should go for corporate welfare wherever it's found.
I think the Halliburton issue is a bit more complicated. Didn't a no-bid contract go to Halliburton during the Clinton administration? Maybe they're the only player in their niche, since I doubt that Clinton's administration would have been doing any favors for Cheney? Dunno.
But don't think that it's only about the amount of money involved. In some ways, it's also about the injustice of having publishers charge for information that taxpayers already paid for -- as though they're the "givers of knowledge" or something. As that one woman said who participated in some sort of AIDS testing (I paraphrase): 'I paid for this twice, once with my blood and once with my taxes. Why should I have to pay for it again?'
The arrogance of it sets me off as much as the money does.
It really is funny to read the rationalizations of the publishers. Let them squirm, I say. Every once in a while, businesses suckling from the taxpayer's teat should be cut off just on principle.
Don't you think it's rather curious that those Western countries are the ones that make most of the medical/scientific progress?
Maybe the incentive to get filthy rich is what's needed in order to get the byproducts that benefit the world as a whole... eventually?
Don't know, just pondering.
I just took a quick look at the link, and it's quite excellent. Jarod Wilson has done an excellent job putting all of that information together.
While I know that the thought of a wife is foreign to most on /. :), some of us have entire families that want to make use of the PVR. Add to that the fact that I have to work long hours so only get to marathon through recorded stuff every other weekend or so -- and 40 hours just isn't enough.
The jackasses at CompUSA pratically argue with you to get you to buy one. If that doesn't tell you how much they're benefitting from the damned things, I don't know what else would.
The one situation where I'd consider buying one would be for an LCD-based component, where they flake out so easily, it's worth it to be able to point to a few bad pixels and just get a new one.
Of course that argument is obviously bullshit. Since I didn't ever make it in the least, your contribution to this discussion is fallacious and known as a "straw man".
If you think that piracy isn't a major part of the equation, then you're being hopelessly naive. I'll definitely grant you that the copyright holders (no need to single out "megacorps", since individuals tend to act the same way) are greedy assholes -- but the pirates give the content providers so much ammunition against the cause that they undercut our arguments at every turn. They STEAL. They steal copyrighted material with rampant abandon. Worse, they're so proud of theft that they help others to steal by putting content that they don't own up for others to download.
So yes, like with the Betamax decision -- content providers will always look out for their own financial interests like the greedy bastards that they are. However, all the piracy has made (what should be) ridiculous legislation appear to some lawmakers to be the only solution.
Like the more moderate Islamic people have begun to realize, the only way to strengthen our arguments is to distance ourselves from the "bad" elements and condemn poor behavior.
Yes, it's easy to sit back and be shocked at the draconian measures that even this reduced-scale Induce bill promotes. I'm sure that the /. crowd will do more than an adequate job of pointing out the unfairness of it -- and I don't disagree with their condemnations.
However, for a person like myself who just wishes to lawfully make use of technology, I despise all of you on both extremes of this argument. That includes you fucking jackasses that continue to utterly abuse the rights of copyright holders with your weasely content stealing methods. Yeah, good job setting up your servers with the latest Hollywood movies, Silicon Valley games, etc.
Here's a big thanks from those of us in the middle who are caught up in your arms race of constantly increasing anti-piracy laws and pro-piracy techniques.
Thanks. Thanks a fucking lot.
Really, the rationale I've seen is very close to that of spammers:
- Cheap mass-delivery method
- Excuses that "it's easy to wash off" sound a lot like "it's easy to hit delete"
- Assumption that everyone's interest or need to see what they have to say surpasses the inconvenience of those who have to clean up after them
- Not being content with letting people interested in finding them. Must go out and force people to see what they have to say.
- Likely to develop into an arms race of self-important corporate and political interests, if this isn't determined to be illegal
Smells like spamming to me. We of all people should see where this is headed and seek to stop it as soon as possible.