I played WoW for a long time (by my standards). It's not too bad to level your character up to 70, and the raid game is entertaining; requires a lot of strategy and some decent skills.
The problem for me is that the game only really rewards time committed. Nothing else. If you put in a ton of time, you get all the rewards.
Glider really exposes that. It is a program that doesn't have any particular skills beyond the ability to spend 24/7 playing the game.
Note that Glider won't get you that raiding play that requires strategy and skill (not to mention gear). And that's really where the big rewards are to be had.
But it will enable you to grind on auto-pilot. The rewards aren't as big. But there are more than a few grinds that will lead to pretty decent rewards. These grinds will also produce items and various tokens other players will gladly buy in WoW's in-game market. Which produces the most versatile in-game token of all: gold. Enter gold sellers.
Just because businesses and proponents want it, doesn't necessarily make it evil or stupid. That's being shoved down my throat and self fulfilled prophecy and... bad stuff...
It doesn't hurt to look at the messenger and consider whether the message is informative or wishful thinking / marketing. Sure - just because someone is backing it doesn't mean it's bad. There's even something admirable about someone invested in their own convictions.
The ultimate decision should be based on the merits of the idea itself. If the idea seems dubious, it's time to ask whether you're missing something or being given a hard sell.
There is something poetic about this; the whole following Dad's footsteps thing (albeit maybe just a taste of what Dad did). I'm also amused by the idea that Richard managed to get to space via the Houston Science Fair... just not quite the route one would expect.
I would expect small local agencies to either not have or ignore proper data scrubbing policies prior to selling old equipment, but national intelligence agencies? That's a whole different kettle of fish.
It is curious. It would be a safe bet that proper procedures exist to handle equipment like this. Obviously they weren't followed.
I would even hazard to guess that not only were safe disposal procedures not followed, but a whole slew of other procedures covering proper equipment were also ignored. It wouldn't surprise me that this was a personal device used on-the-job due to convenience or necessity despite regulations against such use.
Of course, that's just a wild guess. It could also be as mundane as lost / stolen equipment. Or mis-managed inventory that ended up in some government surplus lot. The scenarios are endless.
It also highlights a personal pet peve of mine; policies are not protection. Too often they are given the air of risk mitigation when they are simply documents. Sure - they're good things to have around. You can't expect people to do things right if you can't tell them the right way of doing things. But so much infosec within the belly of such bureaucratic beasts seems to focus on merely generating and checking those policies. There is too little effort in actually implementing them - or improving the environment to limit actual risk.
If this was, in fact, personal gear I would hazard to guess simply making it easier to get official government kit (with all the tracking and control such kit gets) would have eliminated this eventual leak.
That gets me the exact model of the product I'm looking at. Next, I use that information to hit review sites to see if it stacks up. Meanwhile I can also hit a couple price information sources to get an idea of the average price for the item. I'll then have some idea whether the item is something I should consider purchasing (alerted to lemons or major design issues) and whether buying it then and there is worthwhile. If I can't decide, I can then move that bit of data to a wish-list for later consideration - especially if it's a more expensive purchase or I'm just getting an idea of whats available in the market.
Would I do that for a six-pack of beer? Maybe not (although I might if I'm in the mood for an especially good beer). But I would for consumer electronics.
You missed the point. Cuecats were given away with Radio Shack catalogs, which included the bar code for almost every item listed. In a way, it acted as a bridge between old mail-order (catalogs) and e-commerce. They were never intended to be used with anything else (even already purchased items, as they wouldn't read standard barcodes), and I think that there were even some takedown notices regarding the various hacks, at first.
Actually, you're partly wrong on that. Yes - they worked with Radio Shack. They also had advertisements with Cuecat barcodes in several major magazines. Some newspapers included Cuecat barcodes as well. And, finally, the Cuecats COULD read standard barcodes - Coke cans were the common example.
That, in a nutshell, is why the industry isn't taking all the bleating about DRM seriously. DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy. If the world wasn't full of thieves, there would be no DRM.
Acting like DRM will go away if you cry about it is childish. It will only go away by becoming invisible. Nobody seems to know that iPhone apps are protected with DRM, nor that it helps bring prices down (although it certainly doesn't have to; PSP DRM hasn't had any effect on software prices).
Well - thanks for stating the obvious: it's about perception and money. Of course it is. That doesn't mean their strategy is acceptable. The world may be full of thieves but it is also full of customers. DRM is an attempt to shift the numbers between those two camps but it may not end up in the direction intended. That's the issue.
Complaining about this situation is being childish? Obviously everyone should stand back and let decreased sales be interpreted as increased piracy. Or simply make believe that the current situation is acceptable. That makes a lot more sense.
As noted, this is about money. If a customer base can demonstrate that they are unhappy about a product, and ensure the reasons for that discontent is made clear, those who service those customers will change. Or go out of business. Complaining is part of that process.
As for DRM becoming invisible - sure. That helps. It'll help reduce the number of complaints. But it doesn't negate all issues. You're kidding yourself if you think it does.
Yep, there was probably a CP/M-86 vs MS-DOS war happening back in 1981, IBM even tried to license CP/M-86 but failed, then it turned to MS, which purchased 86-DOS from SCP and renamed it MS-DOS. Then, as the IBM PC and it's clones become popular, it automatically handed MS-DOS a victory in that war.
Yup - Digital Research dropped the ball several times (although the facts seem pretty murky as to exactly what was going on at the time). If they hadn't, QDOS wouldn't have been created and wouldn't have been available for Microsoft to pick up and license to IBM. And IBM (probably) would have had to go with CP/M instead of later offering it as an expensive option.
The question, though, is whether DR would have been all that different than MS. Would their business tactics have followed the same path? Would they even have leveraged their position the same way Microsoft had? Is our history today a product of market, personalities, or culture?
I see no reason why a uniform PC architecture and OS, something along the lines of x86 and POSIX except not so shitty, could not have emerged out of the competition of the 80s.
OK, sure. Point to events in history that were going in this direction... or even MIGHT have have produced such a thing.
The IBM PC becoming a commodity platform was a byproduct. Compaq wanted to make a better IBM PC than IBM (I suspect IBM produced the IBM PC because they were surprised by the sudden creation of a new business computing market by Apple and Visicalc). Compaq, and their sudden success, showed the way to others... and the "PC Clone" market was born. And once that genie was released, there was no way for IBM to put it back in the bottle no matter how good a bus they had.
So that's where the commodity hardware market comes from. Where else COULD it come from? Commodore? Tandy? Texas Instruments? Apple? Nothing any of these guys were doing was anywhere near commodity (although there were some interesting similarities between the C=64 and Apple][).
Sun kind of comes close with their workstations. These were (more or less) off-the-shelf components providing a hardware platform for a somewhat commodity OS - Unix. In fact, this kind of thing is what enables them to bury much of their competition (Apollo Computer for example). But Sun doesn't ever produce what we're talking about.
On the Unix front... well... that's mostly proprietary hardware. Different variations of Unix are engineered to be incompatible as various vendors try to make their products unique. Of course, the microcomputer in the form of a commodity x86 platform is about to cause trouble for them.
What if Unix was on the x86? That would be Microsoft's Xenix. Or, more specifically, Microsoft via SCO (not to be confused with The SCO Group). No help there. 386BSD is another candidate but that doesn't show up until the 90s.
We had a perfectly good PC ecosystem in the 80s, with at least half a dozen viable platforms. That is what we should have today.
I find myself torn on this concept. I did like the competition in the 80s. But what you had was a balkanized ecosystem consisting of various proprietary platforms.
This limited interoperability and competition. Equipment was expensive. Moving between platforms was very sketchy. About the only positive thing was that developers wishing to tap in to each market island had to figure out ways to develop for each platform and try to maintain some degree of consistency between them. Which I suppose helped create a few tenuous bridges and some escape from otherwise total vendor lock-in.
Shaking up the status quo was a Good Thing. It opened up the platform to competing hardware manufacturers. This provided ample opportunity for competition. It drove down prices. It distributed influence. Almost.
Enter Microsoft. That's where things fall short. The next phase of the commodity market we enjoy is the very components Microsoft used to harness the disruptive forces that unseated IBM; namely, the OS (IBM's interest in Linux should be no surprise at this point).
It might have been interesting if all this disruption centered on a different platform than the IBM PC. We could have used a better architecture. It might be interesting if it was someone other than Microsoft providing the OS. Would Digital Research done the industry better? Or are we seeing products of the times? The Unix world also saw a lot of effort by vendors to maintain proprietary environments despite the nature of Unix itself and (to a lesser degree) some off-the-shelf hardware components.
It wasn't so much that Microsoft won. It's more along the lines of IBM losing and Apple losing more. Or rather, IBM winning by losing and Apple losing by winning. IBM lost control of its platform which then became a commodity platform to take over the industry. Apple maintained control of their platform(s) and became marginalized players in a market they were a major part in creating.
Microsoft was, of course, a major part of this history. And their role tends to shift over the years. At first they were a key component in allowing Compaq to start the (legal) "IBM clone" market. They then shift to becoming the (or at least one of the very few) common factor to the new commodity market - gatekeepers who in turn begin to influence the direction of that market.
It should be noted that Microsoft's developer-driven focus is part and parcel of the overall market. Proprietary platforms were the old world (something Sun had to re-learn). Microsoft was operating in a commodity world - or at least, riding the wave of commodity hardware. That mindset was in stark contrast to Apple's.
The point isn't "you can't run Skype". That's just the finger. The mountain is "you can't just install anything you want on your open source Android phone".
Note to the dumb: this includes "offensive" speech and yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. Like so many things, it's an all or nothing proposition.
How very interesting. So if a credit reporting agency arbitrarily labels you as high-risk despite an excellent credit history - it's no problem... that's just free speech. Or someone thinks it would be fun to have you included in a registry of sex offenders or felons despite a lack of appropriate criminal prosecution... why that's just free speech as well! After all, accuracy much less responsibility has no role in this. It's all or nothing.
Wallstreet 2. The role of Gordon Gecko is revised by Jar Jar Binks. When asked for comment on initial reaction to the casting, George Lucas claimed "people just don't understand the range of an actor like Jar Jar."
This is simply stating we have a large market share, which everyone already knows, or doesn't care
The Microsoft ad is saying that they have a diverse market share. Again, attempting to counter Apple's elitist spin. (Yeah, a large market share, too; that's an appeal to belonging. That is very powerful in herd animals like Consumers.)
I would also note that there's also a "we're cool too!" part of that message. I'm not sure if it'll catch on or not... but it's there.
Microsoft is battling a negative perception. It becomes really apparent when you look over their latest marketing web site:
This epic struggle explains why we make what we make and do what we do. The thing that gets us out of bed every day is the prospect of creating pathways above, below, around and through walls. To start a dialogue between hundreds of devices, billions of people and a world of ideas. To lift up the smallest of us. And catapult the most audacious of us. But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other. To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff. On our own or together. This is more than software we're talking about. It's an approach to life. An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way...of life. Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows®. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.
horrible? I thought it was really *really* good. Not only does it help kill the stereotype, but makes the Mac commercials much less effective as well.
I'd label the Seinfeld commercials "horrible" and these ones "expected." They only become "good" in the harsh light cast by the Seinfeld part of the campaign.
Do they kill stereotypes? Hmmm. Good question. They might. But then, that's only part of Apple's campaign.
Is it enough to say "we're everywhere"? Is that message strong enough on it's own? And is it strong enough to warrant acknowledging the other guy's message(s)?
Slashdot Mirror
I played WoW for a long time (by my standards). It's not too bad to level your character up to 70, and the raid game is entertaining; requires a lot of strategy and some decent skills.
The problem for me is that the game only really rewards time committed. Nothing else. If you put in a ton of time, you get all the rewards.
Glider really exposes that. It is a program that doesn't have any particular skills beyond the ability to spend 24/7 playing the game.
Note that Glider won't get you that raiding play that requires strategy and skill (not to mention gear). And that's really where the big rewards are to be had.
But it will enable you to grind on auto-pilot. The rewards aren't as big. But there are more than a few grinds that will lead to pretty decent rewards. These grinds will also produce items and various tokens other players will gladly buy in WoW's in-game market. Which produces the most versatile in-game token of all: gold. Enter gold sellers.
Just because businesses and proponents want it, doesn't necessarily make it evil or stupid. That's being shoved down my throat and self fulfilled prophecy and ... bad stuff ...
So what you're saying is that suits really ARE making a comeback?
It doesn't hurt to look at the messenger and consider whether the message is informative or wishful thinking / marketing. Sure - just because someone is backing it doesn't mean it's bad. There's even something admirable about someone invested in their own convictions.
The ultimate decision should be based on the merits of the idea itself. If the idea seems dubious, it's time to ask whether you're missing something or being given a hard sell.
There is something poetic about this; the whole following Dad's footsteps thing (albeit maybe just a taste of what Dad did). I'm also amused by the idea that Richard managed to get to space via the Houston Science Fair... just not quite the route one would expect.
I would expect small local agencies to either not have or ignore proper data scrubbing policies prior to selling old equipment, but national intelligence agencies? That's a whole different kettle of fish.
It is curious. It would be a safe bet that proper procedures exist to handle equipment like this. Obviously they weren't followed.
I would even hazard to guess that not only were safe disposal procedures not followed, but a whole slew of other procedures covering proper equipment were also ignored. It wouldn't surprise me that this was a personal device used on-the-job due to convenience or necessity despite regulations against such use.
Of course, that's just a wild guess. It could also be as mundane as lost / stolen equipment. Or mis-managed inventory that ended up in some government surplus lot. The scenarios are endless.
It also highlights a personal pet peve of mine; policies are not protection. Too often they are given the air of risk mitigation when they are simply documents. Sure - they're good things to have around. You can't expect people to do things right if you can't tell them the right way of doing things. But so much infosec within the belly of such bureaucratic beasts seems to focus on merely generating and checking those policies. There is too little effort in actually implementing them - or improving the environment to limit actual risk.
If this was, in fact, personal gear I would hazard to guess simply making it easier to get official government kit (with all the tracking and control such kit gets) would have eliminated this eventual leak.
That would be the standard Support Tech for "I feel threatened by you and your technology."
That gets me the exact model of the product I'm looking at. Next, I use that information to hit review sites to see if it stacks up. Meanwhile I can also hit a couple price information sources to get an idea of the average price for the item. I'll then have some idea whether the item is something I should consider purchasing (alerted to lemons or major design issues) and whether buying it then and there is worthwhile. If I can't decide, I can then move that bit of data to a wish-list for later consideration - especially if it's a more expensive purchase or I'm just getting an idea of whats available in the market.
Would I do that for a six-pack of beer? Maybe not (although I might if I'm in the mood for an especially good beer). But I would for consumer electronics.
You missed the point. Cuecats were given away with Radio Shack catalogs, which included the bar code for almost every item listed. In a way, it acted as a bridge between old mail-order (catalogs) and e-commerce. They were never intended to be used with anything else (even already purchased items, as they wouldn't read standard barcodes), and I think that there were even some takedown notices regarding the various hacks, at first.
Actually, you're partly wrong on that. Yes - they worked with Radio Shack. They also had advertisements with Cuecat barcodes in several major magazines. Some newspapers included Cuecat barcodes as well. And, finally, the Cuecats COULD read standard barcodes - Coke cans were the common example.
That, in a nutshell, is why the industry isn't taking all the bleating about DRM seriously. DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy. If the world wasn't full of thieves, there would be no DRM.
Acting like DRM will go away if you cry about it is childish. It will only go away by becoming invisible. Nobody seems to know that iPhone apps are protected with DRM, nor that it helps bring prices down (although it certainly doesn't have to; PSP DRM hasn't had any effect on software prices).
Well - thanks for stating the obvious: it's about perception and money. Of course it is. That doesn't mean their strategy is acceptable. The world may be full of thieves but it is also full of customers. DRM is an attempt to shift the numbers between those two camps but it may not end up in the direction intended. That's the issue.
Complaining about this situation is being childish? Obviously everyone should stand back and let decreased sales be interpreted as increased piracy. Or simply make believe that the current situation is acceptable. That makes a lot more sense.
As noted, this is about money. If a customer base can demonstrate that they are unhappy about a product, and ensure the reasons for that discontent is made clear, those who service those customers will change. Or go out of business. Complaining is part of that process.
As for DRM becoming invisible - sure. That helps. It'll help reduce the number of complaints. But it doesn't negate all issues. You're kidding yourself if you think it does.
I'm sure your gaming rig does real well on space conservation and portability.
Yep, there was probably a CP/M-86 vs MS-DOS war happening back in 1981, IBM even tried to license CP/M-86 but failed, then it turned to MS, which purchased 86-DOS from SCP and renamed it MS-DOS. Then, as the IBM PC and it's clones become popular, it automatically handed MS-DOS a victory in that war.
Yup - Digital Research dropped the ball several times (although the facts seem pretty murky as to exactly what was going on at the time). If they hadn't, QDOS wouldn't have been created and wouldn't have been available for Microsoft to pick up and license to IBM. And IBM (probably) would have had to go with CP/M instead of later offering it as an expensive option.
The question, though, is whether DR would have been all that different than MS. Would their business tactics have followed the same path? Would they even have leveraged their position the same way Microsoft had? Is our history today a product of market, personalities, or culture?
I see no reason why a uniform PC architecture and OS, something along the lines of x86 and POSIX except not so shitty, could not have emerged out of the competition of the 80s.
OK, sure. Point to events in history that were going in this direction... or even MIGHT have have produced such a thing.
The IBM PC becoming a commodity platform was a byproduct. Compaq wanted to make a better IBM PC than IBM (I suspect IBM produced the IBM PC because they were surprised by the sudden creation of a new business computing market by Apple and Visicalc). Compaq, and their sudden success, showed the way to others... and the "PC Clone" market was born. And once that genie was released, there was no way for IBM to put it back in the bottle no matter how good a bus they had.
So that's where the commodity hardware market comes from. Where else COULD it come from? Commodore? Tandy? Texas Instruments? Apple? Nothing any of these guys were doing was anywhere near commodity (although there were some interesting similarities between the C=64 and Apple][).
Sun kind of comes close with their workstations. These were (more or less) off-the-shelf components providing a hardware platform for a somewhat commodity OS - Unix. In fact, this kind of thing is what enables them to bury much of their competition (Apollo Computer for example). But Sun doesn't ever produce what we're talking about.
On the Unix front... well... that's mostly proprietary hardware. Different variations of Unix are engineered to be incompatible as various vendors try to make their products unique. Of course, the microcomputer in the form of a commodity x86 platform is about to cause trouble for them.
What if Unix was on the x86? That would be Microsoft's Xenix. Or, more specifically, Microsoft via SCO (not to be confused with The SCO Group). No help there. 386BSD is another candidate but that doesn't show up until the 90s.
We had a perfectly good PC ecosystem in the 80s, with at least half a dozen viable platforms. That is what we should have today.
I find myself torn on this concept. I did like the competition in the 80s. But what you had was a balkanized ecosystem consisting of various proprietary platforms.
This limited interoperability and competition. Equipment was expensive. Moving between platforms was very sketchy. About the only positive thing was that developers wishing to tap in to each market island had to figure out ways to develop for each platform and try to maintain some degree of consistency between them. Which I suppose helped create a few tenuous bridges and some escape from otherwise total vendor lock-in.
Shaking up the status quo was a Good Thing. It opened up the platform to competing hardware manufacturers. This provided ample opportunity for competition. It drove down prices. It distributed influence. Almost.
Enter Microsoft. That's where things fall short. The next phase of the commodity market we enjoy is the very components Microsoft used to harness the disruptive forces that unseated IBM; namely, the OS (IBM's interest in Linux should be no surprise at this point).
It might have been interesting if all this disruption centered on a different platform than the IBM PC. We could have used a better architecture. It might be interesting if it was someone other than Microsoft providing the OS. Would Digital Research done the industry better? Or are we seeing products of the times? The Unix world also saw a lot of effort by vendors to maintain proprietary environments despite the nature of Unix itself and (to a lesser degree) some off-the-shelf hardware components.
Indeed, let us all be glad that Microsoft won the PC war instead of Apple. Jobs would have been worse.
It's more complicated than that. Although I agree with the general sentiment.
It wasn't so much that Microsoft won. It's more along the lines of IBM losing and Apple losing more. Or rather, IBM winning by losing and Apple losing by winning. IBM lost control of its platform which then became a commodity platform to take over the industry. Apple maintained control of their platform(s) and became marginalized players in a market they were a major part in creating.
Microsoft was, of course, a major part of this history. And their role tends to shift over the years. At first they were a key component in allowing Compaq to start the (legal) "IBM clone" market. They then shift to becoming the (or at least one of the very few) common factor to the new commodity market - gatekeepers who in turn begin to influence the direction of that market.
It should be noted that Microsoft's developer-driven focus is part and parcel of the overall market. Proprietary platforms were the old world (something Sun had to re-learn). Microsoft was operating in a commodity world - or at least, riding the wave of commodity hardware. That mindset was in stark contrast to Apple's.
While there may be no Blue Screen of Death, it does appear that it is a Big Blue planet.
He's 42.
I was going to hyperlink "here" so that the "whoosh sound" was inserted appropriately... but I really hate hyperlinks to the word "here."
They feel that you need to learn how to hyperlink properly. If I missed the joke, insert woosh sound here.
The point isn't "you can't run Skype". That's just the finger. The mountain is "you can't just install anything you want on your open source Android phone".
Mt. WildAssSpeculation is in the other direction.
That's already been open sourced.
I'd like to add to your post this
Note to the dumb: this includes "offensive" speech and yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. Like so many things, it's an all or nothing proposition.
How very interesting. So if a credit reporting agency arbitrarily labels you as high-risk despite an excellent credit history - it's no problem... that's just free speech. Or someone thinks it would be fun to have you included in a registry of sex offenders or felons despite a lack of appropriate criminal prosecution... why that's just free speech as well! After all, accuracy much less responsibility has no role in this. It's all or nothing.
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those? Take THAT, big iron.
So, hate is good?
Wallstreet 2. The role of Gordon Gecko is revised by Jar Jar Binks. When asked for comment on initial reaction to the casting, George Lucas claimed "people just don't understand the range of an actor like Jar Jar."
This is simply stating we have a large market share, which everyone already knows, or doesn't care
The Microsoft ad is saying that they have a diverse market share. Again, attempting to counter Apple's elitist spin. (Yeah, a large market share, too; that's an appeal to belonging. That is very powerful in herd animals like Consumers.)
I would also note that there's also a "we're cool too!" part of that message. I'm not sure if it'll catch on or not... but it's there.
Microsoft is battling a negative perception. It becomes really apparent when you look over their latest marketing web site:
-- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vs-walls.aspx
That this message is chock full of irony is another subject.
horrible? I thought it was really *really* good. Not only does it help kill the stereotype, but makes the Mac commercials much less effective as well.
I'd label the Seinfeld commercials "horrible" and these ones "expected." They only become "good" in the harsh light cast by the Seinfeld part of the campaign.
Do they kill stereotypes? Hmmm. Good question. They might. But then, that's only part of Apple's campaign.
Is it enough to say "we're everywhere"? Is that message strong enough on it's own? And is it strong enough to warrant acknowledging the other guy's message(s)?
I'm white - but my Mac aint ;)
Aren't we all just aqua-blue on the inside?