The tricky part is that Star Control 3 is in the mix, and they seem to have acquired Copyright of *that*, which did not have copyright from Paul and Fred at all.
So either Star Control 3 was illegally produced and Stardock inherited that situation or Star Control 3 is legal and Stardock can get in that way.
The real problem started when Stardock went to try to block Paul and Fred, which was just bad form. They didn't relish the thought of competing with the recognized creative force behind the franchise and went scorched earth and well... things went bad.
Basically, Stardock wanted to do Star Control and paid $400k for what they believed would enable to do it legally from Atari, and reached out to Paul and Fred to get them onboard, but Activision blocked that. Paul and Fred asked they not use the species and such verbatim, though at the time the legal picture is fuzzy (Atari probably sold *all* rights to Star Control 3, which would seem to include most of the species and ships, even if SC1/SC2 picture is fuzzier), so Stardock agreed.
When Paul and Fred *could* do something, things went sour quickly, with Stardock going crazy that they would be *competing* with Paul and Fred rather than cooperating with them.
I think the ownership of the content beyond the brand is fuzzy.
Star Control was owned by Accolade, and didn't go with Paul and Fred. Accolade was able to release Star Control 3 using a different development team as an example of this seeming to be the case, using the brand and the characters. Stardock paid $400k for this.
Also that it started out very respectful and amicable.
The summary is that Stardock really wanted to make a Star Control game with Fred and Paul, and acquired the legal rights to Star Control. They reached out to Fred and Paul.
Fred and Paul wanted to work with them, but were barred by their obligations to be able to commit, and asked for Stardock to at *least* not use the aliens and such verbatim, and Stardock did that.
The tricky part comes when Paul and Fred actually freed up and could actually start working on Star Control, but they didn't line up with Stardock's efforts, so then things just went to hell.
One is the very long and well recognized problem that communication is overhead.
Another is exacerbated by the communication problem, when faced with the depressing reality that you can't do things fast enough, businesses think more people == faster. In pursuit of this ideal, work is forcibly divided into uselessly small chunks, requiring insane amounts of coordination and utterly destroying individual competency across the product.
If you clock in and clock out, you probably would be in the clear legally.
If you are not in such a position and the checks kept coming after you stopped showing up, I could imagine a company coming after the person for wages paid after services stopped being provided.
Now you have. It happens all the time and the fact you don't know that, seems completely out of touch.
I haven't had that displeasure, but one time the person was trying to somehow convince me that a 50% raise would somehow result in me making less money.
I've never had a company escort me out on the day I turned in my two-week notice (at least without paying me).
I've seen two week notice get shown the door immediately, but there was bad blood between management and that person leading to that moment.
Ghosting is sort of the equivalent of showing up at the front door and finding the company is no longer there
I've walked by that happening, when I worked in a shared workspace there were employees milling about a locked door and ultmately someone manages to get a hold of someone and finds out that indeed, the jobs are gone and the company was out of money.
Or, worse yet, not telling you you're fired and hoping you'll just figure it out.
"Dom Portwood: So um, Milton has been let go? Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally."
That goes with his point really, they have one offering where they have the clout to make a paid subscription out of and they have already done it. Even with their overwhelming dominance, most people I know are either just using an old perpetually licensed copy they got along the way or have gone to a free office suite, either libreoffice or google docs depending on whether they want online or offline experience. Those considering that MacOS or ChromeOS might be 'good enough' for their use may jump ship if they are somehow pushed into a monthly subscription to stay on Windows.
Of course, this all may be a branding exercise and might be a bundle of Office365 with free services and no different pricing.
Not technically free, but any customer that would buy such a subscription already has a permanent copy that MS has certainly acted like updates for the OS are free forever...
Office 365 Home,
That would seem to be a given...
Skype,
A free service, so don't see how that makes any sense.
Cortana,
Both free *and* there are signs they are recognizing it as a flop as well...
Bing,
Another free thing...
Outlook Mobile,
As far as I know, free...
Microsoft To-Do
Never heard of it
and maybe MSN apps and services could figure into the picture.
Hahahaha
I'm having a hard time conceiving of a Microsoft 365 offering that includes anything beyond Office 365... I *suppose* they could offer a VDI sort of thing, but I don't see that being popular, particularly since the entire design of OneDrive integration in Windows 10 is meant to provide the biggest benefit, access to data after device has failed, been damaged, or infected.
The intent was to provide for a memory-efficient architecture that availed itself of the richer register space of x86_64. In practice, that's not a widespread interest (limiting to 4GB of ram support on architectures that can fundamentally support a lot more). General distributions wouldn't bother touching it (a lot of work to maintain a distro for users that have *almost* as good experience with an i686 distro), embedded applications may be more interested, but even they are outgrowing 4GB and honestly don't generally need that extra oomph of x32 v. x86 (at least the areas that would even think of using an x86_64 platform in the first place, not a popular embedded choice).
Realistically speaking, he almost certainly got a replacement, but return policy he had required it to be returned.
However for electronics of this class, the manufacturer in all likelihood *could* repair it. The neat thing is if they do repair such a disk, it could come back with the data intact. In practice, I don't think any manufacturer would offer such a service or even try.
Well, old stereos from the 1970s that are still working are still in service. No one talks about the old stereos that died in the 70s because that's boring. SSDs are going to be in the same boat. Like all other electronics, some have a ticking time bomb and will probably fail within the first 5 years or so. Those that have the perfect voltage regulation and capacitors and such will last until their NAND wears out and they could also seem long lived (except the capacity is going to be so pathetic that no one is going to want to hold on to those, while a 1970s stereo is still perfectly capable of putting out good sound).
This is why I shake my head when I see someone going to a lot of trouble to track SMART data to 'know' when a disk is going to fail. It just makes it all the more disappointing when a drive fails and all the early warning effort did nothing.
It is a much more robust approach to be able to not *care* if you don't see the failure coming or not than to try to be able to plan for an outage. SMART has no idea that a component on the controller board is going to burn out suddenly. Yes it can track things with known duty cycles, but with drives nowadays you have probably retired the drive long before that threshold will be reached, and the failure modes likely to smack you in production are ones that SMART will not catch.
Yeah, that was very bizarre. Problem: "People are being sedentary sitting at their desks too much" Answer: "We'll have them be sedentary while standing, which ultimately is just worse on the joints and no better for exercise"
The inconvenient yet obvious "people need to move around" part that doesn't align with productivity was somehow missed.
Interesting part is I believe there was a point where Netflix could have better protected their position as 'source of video from any content provider' with Starz. Starz said 'we are willing to be an add-on' and netflix said 'no, we want a flat rate for all users'. Starz took their ball and went home and the precedent was set for all providers.
So we are going to finally get that 'a la carte' we always wanted back in the cable days, and it's going to be expensive. If NF had been a common provider then maybe the incremental price for each 'channel' would have been lower, but since all of them are independently making their own infrastructure, the costs are going to be high...
While I think this is a bit beside the point of youtube v. netflix, I will say their losses of non-netflix content has been putting a damper on my interest in their selection. The netflix original content has improved in variety thankfully, but still can't easily compete with the plethora of non-netflix content.
I agree that a Google-led stand-in for 'reference' is unfortunate and I would much rather see a reference implementation on neutral ground. I'm also not crazy about two commercial interests, both which have happily engaged in user monitoring for profit being *the* ones. Particularly one with the embrace, extend, extinguish historical strategy and this certainly looks like that game.
I will say in response to the statement "Sure, we could fork it, but what is the likelihood that the fork will get enough adoption to make Google back-off?" the answer is 'at least somewhat higher likelihood than EdgeHTML'. After all, among the technical justifications for Google forking WebKit, a nice side-effect is that even in most technical circles, Google became the one leading the charge and Apple's WebKit is 'different', just like how Apple assumed the leadership role from KDE when they forked WebKit from KHTML. So *if* MS had any hope of being seen as 'the lead of an actually popular engine', it starts here.
True enough, though I really meant to bring up the bigger concern is catering to *mobile* and desktop. I don't think many software vendors are staying up late at night worrying about macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS compared to those worried about supporting Windows, Android, and iPhone.
For physical goods, there's risk and costs associated with keeping and moving actual inventory. Those can be pretty significant.
For an electronic store, the burden is much smaller, and is closer to the role that credit cards play in terms of costs (though the later carries a lot more liability). So a modest percentage beyond what the credit card companies directly charge (since that electronic store is going to be inflicted with that) seems more in line with the costs of that sort of endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Star Control: Origins ditched all the aliens and ships though, so even less related to the assets than Star Control 3?
Stardock did create the mess by trying to block Paul and Fred, but Paul and Fred might be going a bit overboard in their 'counterattack' here.
The tricky part is that Star Control 3 is in the mix, and they seem to have acquired Copyright of *that*, which did not have copyright from Paul and Fred at all.
So either Star Control 3 was illegally produced and Stardock inherited that situation or Star Control 3 is legal and Stardock can get in that way.
The real problem started when Stardock went to try to block Paul and Fred, which was just bad form. They didn't relish the thought of competing with the recognized creative force behind the franchise and went scorched earth and well... things went bad.
Paul and Fred's side: https://www.dogarandkazon.com/
Stardock's side:
https://www.stardock.com/games...
Basically, Stardock wanted to do Star Control and paid $400k for what they believed would enable to do it legally from Atari, and reached out to Paul and Fred to get them onboard, but Activision blocked that. Paul and Fred asked they not use the species and such verbatim, though at the time the legal picture is fuzzy (Atari probably sold *all* rights to Star Control 3, which would seem to include most of the species and ships, even if SC1/SC2 picture is fuzzier), so Stardock agreed.
When Paul and Fred *could* do something, things went sour quickly, with Stardock going crazy that they would be *competing* with Paul and Fred rather than cooperating with them.
I think the ownership of the content beyond the brand is fuzzy.
Star Control was owned by Accolade, and didn't go with Paul and Fred. Accolade was able to release Star Control 3 using a different development team as an example of this seeming to be the case, using the brand and the characters. Stardock paid $400k for this.
It's worth reading both https://www.stardock.com/games... and https://www.dogarandkazon.com/ to see both sides.
Also that it started out very respectful and amicable.
The summary is that Stardock really wanted to make a Star Control game with Fred and Paul, and acquired the legal rights to Star Control. They reached out to Fred and Paul.
Fred and Paul wanted to work with them, but were barred by their obligations to be able to commit, and asked for Stardock to at *least* not use the aliens and such verbatim, and Stardock did that.
The tricky part comes when Paul and Fred actually freed up and could actually start working on Star Control, but they didn't line up with Stardock's efforts, so then things just went to hell.
I thought "eh big deal, it will come with a dongle" when I got a phone without a headphone jack.
After actually having to live with it for a year, it has been far more annoying than I realized it would be.
One is the very long and well recognized problem that communication is overhead.
Another is exacerbated by the communication problem, when faced with the depressing reality that you can't do things fast enough, businesses think more people == faster. In pursuit of this ideal, work is forcibly divided into uselessly small chunks, requiring insane amounts of coordination and utterly destroying individual competency across the product.
If you clock in and clock out, you probably would be in the clear legally.
If you are not in such a position and the checks kept coming after you stopped showing up, I could imagine a company coming after the person for wages paid after services stopped being provided.
Now you have. It happens all the time and the fact you don't know that, seems completely out of touch.
I haven't had that displeasure, but one time the person was trying to somehow convince me that a 50% raise would somehow result in me making less money.
I've never had a company escort me out on the day I turned in my two-week notice (at least without paying me).
I've seen two week notice get shown the door immediately, but there was bad blood between management and that person leading to that moment.
Ghosting is sort of the equivalent of showing up at the front door and finding the company is no longer there
I've walked by that happening, when I worked in a shared workspace there were employees milling about a locked door and ultmately someone manages to get a hold of someone and finds out that indeed, the jobs are gone and the company was out of money.
Or, worse yet, not telling you you're fired and hoping you'll just figure it out.
"Dom Portwood: So um, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally."
At the places I have worked, everyone laid off had 30 days notice and after that severance.
That goes with his point really, they have one offering where they have the clout to make a paid subscription out of and they have already done it. Even with their overwhelming dominance, most people I know are either just using an old perpetually licensed copy they got along the way or have gone to a free office suite, either libreoffice or google docs depending on whether they want online or offline experience. Those considering that MacOS or ChromeOS might be 'good enough' for their use may jump ship if they are somehow pushed into a monthly subscription to stay on Windows.
Of course, this all may be a branding exercise and might be a bundle of Office365 with free services and no different pricing.
Windows 10,
Not technically free, but any customer that would buy such a subscription already has a permanent copy that MS has certainly acted like updates for the OS are free forever...
Office 365 Home,
That would seem to be a given...
Skype,
A free service, so don't see how that makes any sense.
Cortana,
Both free *and* there are signs they are recognizing it as a flop as well...
Bing,
Another free thing...
Outlook Mobile,
As far as I know, free...
Microsoft To-Do
Never heard of it
and maybe MSN apps and services could figure into the picture.
Hahahaha
I'm having a hard time conceiving of a Microsoft 365 offering that includes anything beyond Office 365... I *suppose* they could offer a VDI sort of thing, but I don't see that being popular, particularly since the entire design of OneDrive integration in Windows 10 is meant to provide the biggest benefit, access to data after device has failed, been damaged, or infected.
The intent was to provide for a memory-efficient architecture that availed itself of the richer register space of x86_64. In practice, that's not a widespread interest (limiting to 4GB of ram support on architectures that can fundamentally support a lot more). General distributions wouldn't bother touching it (a lot of work to maintain a distro for users that have *almost* as good experience with an i686 distro), embedded applications may be more interested, but even they are outgrowing 4GB and honestly don't generally need that extra oomph of x32 v. x86 (at least the areas that would even think of using an x86_64 platform in the first place, not a popular embedded choice).
Realistically speaking, he almost certainly got a replacement, but return policy he had required it to be returned.
However for electronics of this class, the manufacturer in all likelihood *could* repair it. The neat thing is if they do repair such a disk, it could come back with the data intact. In practice, I don't think any manufacturer would offer such a service or even try.
Old stereos from
the 1970's are still in service
Well, old stereos from the 1970s that are still working are still in service. No one talks about the old stereos that died in the 70s because that's boring.
SSDs are going to be in the same boat. Like all other electronics, some have a ticking time bomb and will probably fail within the first 5 years or so. Those that have the perfect voltage regulation and capacitors and such will last until their NAND wears out and they could also seem long lived (except the capacity is going to be so pathetic that no one is going to want to hold on to those, while a 1970s stereo is still perfectly capable of putting out good sound).
This is why I shake my head when I see someone going to a lot of trouble to track SMART data to 'know' when a disk is going to fail. It just makes it all the more disappointing when a drive fails and all the early warning effort did nothing.
It is a much more robust approach to be able to not *care* if you don't see the failure coming or not than to try to be able to plan for an outage. SMART has no idea that a component on the controller board is going to burn out suddenly. Yes it can track things with known duty cycles, but with drives nowadays you have probably retired the drive long before that threshold will be reached, and the failure modes likely to smack you in production are ones that SMART will not catch.
Yeah, that was very bizarre.
Problem: "People are being sedentary sitting at their desks too much"
Answer: "We'll have them be sedentary while standing, which ultimately is just worse on the joints and no better for exercise"
The inconvenient yet obvious "people need to move around" part that doesn't align with productivity was somehow missed.
Yep, more that they see most small businesses are overwhelmed by big chains.
VC may also be taking a dive, but by number of people by far more are involved in those other sorts of businesses.
Interesting part is I believe there was a point where Netflix could have better protected their position as 'source of video from any content provider' with Starz. Starz said 'we are willing to be an add-on' and netflix said 'no, we want a flat rate for all users'. Starz took their ball and went home and the precedent was set for all providers.
So we are going to finally get that 'a la carte' we always wanted back in the cable days, and it's going to be expensive. If NF had been a common provider then maybe the incremental price for each 'channel' would have been lower, but since all of them are independently making their own infrastructure, the costs are going to be high...
While I think this is a bit beside the point of youtube v. netflix, I will say their losses of non-netflix content has been putting a damper on my interest in their selection. The netflix original content has improved in variety thankfully, but still can't easily compete with the plethora of non-netflix content.
You mean to tell me a free video website has more reach than one that requires a monthly payment? I would never have guessed that...
I agree that a Google-led stand-in for 'reference' is unfortunate and I would much rather see a reference implementation on neutral ground. I'm also not crazy about two commercial interests, both which have happily engaged in user monitoring for profit being *the* ones. Particularly one with the embrace, extend, extinguish historical strategy and this certainly looks like that game.
I will say in response to the statement "Sure, we could fork it, but what is the likelihood that the fork will get enough adoption to make Google back-off?" the answer is 'at least somewhat higher likelihood than EdgeHTML'. After all, among the technical justifications for Google forking WebKit, a nice side-effect is that even in most technical circles, Google became the one leading the charge and Apple's WebKit is 'different', just like how Apple assumed the leadership role from KDE when they forked WebKit from KHTML. So *if* MS had any hope of being seen as 'the lead of an actually popular engine', it starts here.
True enough, though I really meant to bring up the bigger concern is catering to *mobile* and desktop. I don't think many software vendors are staying up late at night worrying about macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS compared to those worried about supporting Windows, Android, and iPhone.
For physical goods, there's risk and costs associated with keeping and moving actual inventory. Those can be pretty significant.
For an electronic store, the burden is much smaller, and is closer to the role that credit cards play in terms of costs (though the later carries a lot more liability). So a modest percentage beyond what the credit card companies directly charge (since that electronic store is going to be inflicted with that) seems more in line with the costs of that sort of endeavor.