If anything, I believe piracy has progressed the software industry there
'Progress' is an intransitive verb. Using it transitively (i.e. taking an object) makes it sound like part of a business report, and thus that sentence effectively loses all meaning, as no-one believes business reports:)
Interest rates here have been static -- and pretty low -- for a while now. Doesn't stop branch closures and fee rises happening almost in unison -- that's the almighty sharemarket speaking, of course. Pissing your customers off is fine if the competition is doing it to the same degree...
I'm in Australia. We have a 'four pillars' banking policy, with the biggest two continually angling to buy out the smaller two -- probably politically impossible, but it doesn't stop them trying.
Most of the smaller banks are owned by one of these four.:(
Slashdot is a glorified links page. I doubt that the editors even look elsewhere for their stories -- that would be too much like work. They probably just skim the submission queue and pick stories at random... so any lack of originality is more to do with the submissions than the editors. There's only so much news in a limited (conceptual) space that can be circulated at any one time...
They'd be bozos if they were going to trust it to a Linux PC network too. I'd want something a bit more dependable than the average PC containing things like this:)
"If we can come up with a payment method where there's no opportunity for fraud, then our profits are higher" would be closer to the mark.
Why drop fees? People are paying them at the level they are now, and (at least in this country) banking is controlled by a small cartel of banks that strangely enough all raise and lower prices at around the same time.
Yes, but economic organization in itself, while being more or less effective, is not inherently evil. It's merely a choice that people make. And isn't the ultimate proof of the free market the fact that the government will allow one company to dominate and abuse consumers rather than step in and intervene? Sounds like the companies are free to do what they want, which is everything the libertarians are always pushing for. Free in this case means free from government intervention.
Monocultures can work in the short term, anyway -- China might last as long as the US has, and Singapore doesn't seem to be doing too badly.
The USSR failed because it could only exploit its own natural resources, while the US has been able to rape most of the rest of the world as well in order to keep its own system running.
You can't compare sending people to the gulags with forcing monopoly choice of operating systems on them. Well, you can, but you end up looking pretty silly.
I think the point is that when it's used in a derogatory fashion, that reflects that the speaker also thinks little of gay people. Thus there's an implied insult, which members of that social group take as a slur.
I'm not judging anything here, just offering a possile viewpoint.
For a company whose stated ambition was to make video games have the experiences of movies like 'Run Lola Run' and 'The Blair Witch Project', this sounds like a dodge back to the mainstream -- but then the similarity between XBox and PC means that there will be a cultural similarity to the games, with many appearing on one followed by the other (see a cite for that quote here -- I can't find the original article on Gamespot) (this sounds more like the MTV of video games to me, but hardly overly mainstream fare -- even if only because TBWP was so badly shot it was unwatchable).
Besides, look at the costs of production of the most recent Spielberg, Altman and Kubrick films. Could it be that Microsoft would prefer to make more games more cheaply and win a better reputation among hardcore gamers -- something that could be just as important in the long term to the overall success of the platform as initial big-game hype? They can afford to hire all three anyway:)
What we would say is that developers need to find a community willing to support their efforts and help them to grow in their art and to learn from experience.
But that's what the spyware authors were trying to do! Of course in their case, it was the advertising community.:)
Economic darwinism -- these guys thought they'd found the quickest way to "mo' money", but now they find that the market won't tolerate it. People on that moral level will try other objectionable stuff until they find something that doesn't make their customers feel like they're being shafted all *that* hard, and then they'll do their best to exploit that weakness. Grim, but that's "the way life is".
I'm ignoring the possibilities under my own nose.:)
His movies were always about dehumanization though, and video games are often dehumanizing enough anyway... still, a psychological horror game that replicated the experiences of 'The Shining' would be a thing of beauty if done well:)
I think I particularly mentioned Welles and Altman (and Kubrick qualifies in this sphere as well) because of their artifice; their mastery of the technology and their bending of it to artistic (and sometimes commercial) purposes. I'm mainly bored by Spielberg's work because those two categories seem to be reversed, and because the artistic purpose is often a cloying and contrived/sentimentalist one.
Given the production budgets for video games these days, I predict we'll be seeing more of these comparisons, not less...
Really gives the lie to all that Linux 'world domination' talk, doesn't it? Cash reserves like that mean that the people at the top of MS would have to be pretty incompetent to lose their grip on their current income streams, and they're certainly not bad at business. (In fact, their main problems have come through continuing the same actions that made them successful *after* such actions became illegal due to their effective monopoly status. And that doesn't seem to have slowed them down too much in the last decade or so.)
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If anything, I believe piracy has progressed the software industry there
:)
'Progress' is an intransitive verb. Using it transitively (i.e. taking an object) makes it sound like part of a business report, and thus that sentence effectively loses all meaning, as no-one believes business reports
The "biggest threat to security" is almost always the folks working in the Security Department. This has been the case for more than 50 years.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies? loosely, "But who will guard the guards themselves?")
Obviously it's been a problem for a lot longer than 50 years.
'Employee sabotage'. Makes it sound like poisoning your co-workers, or carefully breaking their bones in order to make them unable to do their work. :)
Then they immediately ask me for penetration testing.
;)
Can you sue them for sexual harassment?
[ wink wink nudge nudge ]
the real solution is to disallow all clothing on the premises
:)
I hope we're also making regular visits to the gym a priority for all employees as well.
(Well, maybe not the CD...)
You know, I really could have done without THAT mental image.
Interest rates here have been static -- and pretty low -- for a while now. Doesn't stop branch closures and fee rises happening almost in unison -- that's the almighty sharemarket speaking, of course. Pissing your customers off is fine if the competition is doing it to the same degree...
I'm in Australia. We have a 'four pillars' banking policy, with the biggest two continually angling to buy out the smaller two -- probably politically impossible, but it doesn't stop them trying.
:(
Most of the smaller banks are owned by one of these four.
Maybe human efficiency declines in a direct proportion to improvements in machine efficiency?
Less exercise of the body and the brain... hmmmm.
Slashdot is a glorified links page. I doubt that the editors even look elsewhere for their stories -- that would be too much like work. They probably just skim the submission queue and pick stories at random... so any lack of originality is more to do with the submissions than the editors. There's only so much news in a limited (conceptual) space that can be circulated at any one time...
They'd be bozos if they were going to trust it to a Linux PC network too. I'd want something a bit more dependable than the average PC containing things like this :)
when they take them from my cold, dead hands.
Wait a minute -- this makes credit fraud potentially lethal, instead of just extremely inconvenient!
"If we can come up with a payment method where there's no opportunity for fraud, then our profits are higher" would be closer to the mark.
Why drop fees? People are paying them at the level they are now, and (at least in this country) banking is controlled by a small cartel of banks that strangely enough all raise and lower prices at around the same time.
Yes, but economic organization in itself, while being more or less effective, is not inherently evil. It's merely a choice that people make. And isn't the ultimate proof of the free market the fact that the government will allow one company to dominate and abuse consumers rather than step in and intervene? Sounds like the companies are free to do what they want, which is everything the libertarians are always pushing for. Free in this case means free from government intervention.
Monocultures can work in the short term, anyway -- China might last as long as the US has, and Singapore doesn't seem to be doing too badly.
The USSR failed because it could only exploit its own natural resources, while the US has been able to rape most of the rest of the world as well in order to keep its own system running.
Is there a USSR-specific version of Godwin's Law?
You can't compare sending people to the gulags with forcing monopoly choice of operating systems on them. Well, you can, but you end up looking pretty silly.
I think the point is that when it's used in a derogatory fashion, that reflects that the speaker also thinks little of gay people. Thus there's an implied insult, which members of that social group take as a slur.
I'm not judging anything here, just offering a possile viewpoint.
Sigh... how about just not buying Windows instead?
For a while there you were paying for Windows with a new computer, whether or not you actually bought it. That fits my definition of a monopoly.
Does AI: Artificial Intelligence count? :)
:)
For a company whose stated ambition was to make video games have the experiences of movies like 'Run Lola Run' and 'The Blair Witch Project', this sounds like a dodge back to the mainstream -- but then the similarity between XBox and PC means that there will be a cultural similarity to the games, with many appearing on one followed by the other (see a cite for that quote here -- I can't find the original article on Gamespot) (this sounds more like the MTV of video games to me, but hardly overly mainstream fare -- even if only because TBWP was so badly shot it was unwatchable).
Besides, look at the costs of production of the most recent Spielberg, Altman and Kubrick films. Could it be that Microsoft would prefer to make more games more cheaply and win a better reputation among hardcore gamers -- something that could be just as important in the long term to the overall success of the platform as initial big-game hype? They can afford to hire all three anyway
Perhaps if they included some sort of advertising program with ad-aware, they could make some real money!
:)
But then the first time the program was run it would uninstall itself. Where's the benefit in that?
What we would say is that developers need to find a community willing to support their efforts and help them to grow in their art and to learn from experience.
:)
But that's what the spyware authors were trying to do! Of course in their case, it was the advertising community.
Economic darwinism -- these guys thought they'd found the quickest way to "mo' money", but now they find that the market won't tolerate it. People on that moral level will try other objectionable stuff until they find something that doesn't make their customers feel like they're being shafted all *that* hard, and then they'll do their best to exploit that weakness. Grim, but that's "the way life is".
I'm ignoring the possibilities under my own nose. :)
:)
His movies were always about dehumanization though, and video games are often dehumanizing enough anyway... still, a psychological horror game that replicated the experiences of 'The Shining' would be a thing of beauty if done well
I think I particularly mentioned Welles and Altman (and Kubrick qualifies in this sphere as well) because of their artifice; their mastery of the technology and their bending of it to artistic (and sometimes commercial) purposes. I'm mainly bored by Spielberg's work because those two categories seem to be reversed, and because the artistic purpose is often a cloying and contrived/sentimentalist one.
Given the production budgets for video games these days, I predict we'll be seeing more of these comparisons, not less...
He's the Steven Spielberg of video games
:)
Hardly high praise in my book. I'd rather buy games by the Orson Welles or Robert Altman of video games (any ideas?
I think that qualifies as devolution. Are we not men? We are DEVO! :)
but the domain namespace is the sole property of ICANN, to be leased as they allow.
<sarcasm>Thanks a lot, Vint.</sarcasm>
You have nearly 0 chance of getting HE to re-think his position
:)
I'd say you've probably got just as much chance as you do with Wagner, knowing what Harlan's like
Really gives the lie to all that Linux 'world domination' talk, doesn't it? Cash reserves like that mean that the people at the top of MS would have to be pretty incompetent to lose their grip on their current income streams, and they're certainly not bad at business. (In fact, their main problems have come through continuing the same actions that made them successful *after* such actions became illegal due to their effective monopoly status. And that doesn't seem to have slowed them down too much in the last decade or so.)