...when something comes out cheaper, arguably faster, and more manageable than your $400 piece of gear -without- a credible marketplace threat.
Have you seen the Radeon HD 2900 Pro? Nvidia's been holding back the 8800 GT for almost a year now, and the 2900 Pro is what forced their hand. The $250 segment is hugely important, and Nvidia can't afford the press hit of losing it.
Actually, the 8800 cards are just for playing games. Really. video/graphics/animation pros get something like this or a FireGL.
Luckily for Nvidia, lots of workstation buyers have no idea what they're doing. A programmer buddy of mine recently got a 7950 GT in his new machine at work simply because it had dual DVI out on it and spending $250 on a card "felt right" to the company buyer even though my buddy's requirements would have been totally met by whatever the lowest end discrete card with dual DVI out is (when I looked, I found a 8600 for $100 that would have been fine).
Why are you buying a $250 Wii when you could buy a $99 PS2 that has more games available for less money each? Hell, you could buy an old PC and old PC games for even less money than that.
Easy - you bought a Wii because you have the money for it in your entertainment budget and the Wii meets your entertainment goals. Us PC gamers buy gaming PCs for the same reason. Since I happen to enjoy online first person shooters with nice graphics and I have a decent entertainment budget, my goals are best met by a gaming PC.
There's this neat camera technique called "not zooming in so much". Although more detail in a shot framed the same way is nice, being able to see more context along with extra detail is awesome. This is actually one of the points that's *more* obvious when you think of porn, but it's just as true for conventional movies and TV shows - with higher resolution you can have a scene with someone talking without zooming right up on their face.
The fact that there are thousands of small companies that depend on a single unique product they is protected under patent is your evidence.
That would only count as evidence if you could demonstrate that their patents are actually preventing anyone from competing with them. It seems more likely to me that these companies have simply found a small niche that no larger player cares to fight them for.
Your argument to eliminate patents creates an environment hostile to innovation whereby any small fry trying to get started immediately gets undercut by a bigger business that can copy the product and get it to market first.
That's the standard argument for patents. Like I keep saying, I've seen no evidence that enabling small inventors is a significant effect of patents in practice. Lots of things might have some effect - but something as drastic as patents is only defensible if it actually does have some benefit.
Anyway, for faster speed you can use the 2MB Foxit PDF reader. I don't think an ODF reader would be easy to do in that size/speed, if possible at all. (But who knows - 15 years ago word processors fit on a floppy or two, and a reader would be a subset of its functionality.)
That's what I usually recommend to Windows users who complain about PDFs, but the existence of software that sucks less doesn't change the fact that the "normal" software is horrible - and thus gives the format a bad rep.
Haven't you taken Econ 101? "First Movers" have an advantage when they have proprietary technology.
Yea, I have, and the professor was very careful not to say that government granted patent monopolies have any practical benefits.
I'm entirely aware of the argument that you seem to believe: that inventors need patents to prevent their competitors from leeching their R&D. But I haven't seen any evidence that patents have that effect to a meaningful extent in the real world.
Vague references to places where that argument is stated doesn't count as evidence supporting it. If you can't find any studies that actually show that effect, then just find me one case where a major corporation with a significant patent portfolio stopped producing a product or payed out significant patent license fees to a significantly smaller competitor who sued them for patent infringement. My guess is that it hasn't happened in living memory - in practice, I'm pretty sure the smaller company agrees to pay the larger company for a patent cross-licensing agreement to avoid the counter-suits.
Although PDFs are great when you view them in Xpdf or Evince or the Mac OS X viewer thing, the common PDF viewer for Windows - Adobe Acrobat Reader - is a bloated piece of crap that makes Firefox freeze while it loads as a browser plugin. I'd guess that most of the PDF haters are Windows users, or users who install Acrobat Reader out of habit rather than using the native viewer that their Unixish system provides.
No, you can also have a hybrid that is more efficient than either extreme. One that promotes inventions by granting temporary monopolies. This give the little guy a chance. In either extreme the little guy has no chance, he either gets crushed by big corporations or big government.
Do you have any evidence that this happens in practice? (And by evidence, I mean a link to some sort of economic article.)
Everything that I've seen indicates that patents are only useful for larger players to keep smaller players out of the market, and occasionally for patent trolls that don't produce anything to extract a moderate payout from some unlucky large company.
Therefore, Firewalls are useless and just increase complexity.
That's sometimes true. Your assumption is that two layers means that you have to hack both. In practice, it frequently ends up that hacking *either* is enough to cause security problems.
Using your firewall example, consider the following two setups:
First: A web server machine with HTTP and SSH ports open and a mail server with SMTP, POP3, and SSH ports open.
Second: The above situation with those servers behind a firewall that only allows incoming connections to those ports.
The second situation is arguably *less* secure than the first. The firewall prevents attacks against closed ports (which largely don't exist) and attacks against other services that were left enabled by mistake (which shouldn't be there). In exchange, it's now possible to attack the firewall itself - which is approximately as juicy a target as either server.
Our patent system is certainly flawed, but your argument is exactly what patents are for.
If the patent system is intended to exclude competitors, then even if it works as intended it still squelches any hope of a free market. We can either have free market capitalism or government granted monopolies, not both.
I don't think thats the case. I think its just that culturally we fear what we don't understand and are being taught to be stupid and proud of it. Biology and evolution have nothing to do with it. We can learn these concepts we just willingly refuse to for religious and ideological reasons.
Human culture has evolved right alongside human physiology. I'm not sure that there's any benefit to trying to distinguish between them at this level of discussion.
I'm judging his statements based on his expertise. He has none. That's not "authority" by any measure. His "authority" never entered the equation.
That's exactly how a (fallacious) argument from authority is usually constructed.
You can't reliably judge an argument on the basis of the perceived expertise of the speaker, since it's entirely possible that they may know more than you think.
I bet it'll be 20/20 to the head-end/access router/whatever it's called, then one not-so-big uplink. Few users downloading stuff will saturate it, and then the fun will start.
Sure, they oversell - but you'd be surprised at how many people they can cram on to a reasonably small uplink without you, the end user, even noticing.
I don't know if Flickr has a per-photo size cap, but 500 MB isn't that many photos with a decent quality camera.
Now, it's still unlikely that a photographer produces that many good photos every week, but on the other hand there's no reason not to simply upload every photo and let the viewers pick out the ones they like.
they can't be compared as if they were cars; they are Different Things
They absolutely can be compared like they were cars.
Vista is like a short bed gasoline pickup truck. You can perform most day to day tasks with it, but it gets horrible gas mileage and can't handle edge cases (4 passengers, seven foot long cargo) very well at all.
A distro like Ubuntu is more like a VW Golf TDI that can transform into a panel van or 18 wheeler when necessary. It's obviously superior in every way, but people complain about stupid stuff like gas stations that don't sell diesel and how hard it is to get through a 10' tunnel when you're in 18-wheeler mode.
But they are not a public utility. You still have the option of dial up. High speed internet is not a right.
The municipality has given them an exclusive contract to provide a service - just like the electric company and the phone company. Whether high speed internet is "necessary" or not is irrelevant. They're being given exactly the same market benefits as any other utility, so they have all the responsibilities that go along with those advantages - specifically to provide their service at a reasonable quality level and to not exclude any residents from the service.
Then leave them as a customer and go someplace else.
In most cases the local town or city has contracted with a single cable provider and a single DSL provider. That makes the list of choices very small, and means that it's reasonable to think of Comcast as a contracted public utility rather than a private firm in a competitive market.
In any case, the correct response to poor behavior by a cable or DSL provider is simply to complain to the city or town. Tell them that the providers are abusing their monopoly, and get them to mandate network neutrality in the next contract. If the provider won't play along, replace them. If no replacement is willing to play, create a public internet utility.
Comcast has 1.) advertised full-function internet service 2.) contracted with municipalities to provide that service to residents. Sending out spoofed packets to disrupt users internet usage simply isn't reasonable behavior for a company claiming to provide internet service.
Comcast does have the right to modify traffic on the network they own.
As long as they have a government granted monopoly on local cable service, they have the right to provide fully functional cable internet service to any resident who requests it and is willing to pay the fee specified in the contract between Comcast and the municipality.
Companies getting to chose who they do business with is great - I kicked people out occasionally when I owned a retail store - but it simply doesn't apply to utility companies with government granted monopolies or government subsidized infrastructure.
In this case, bandwidth is a smaller expense than credit card processing fees - if they got a decent price for their bandwidth, by an order of magnitude. Remember that sites like Youtube exist - the larger videos on their approach the size of a music album, and *none* of their users pay money.
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Have you seen the Radeon HD 2900 Pro? Nvidia's been holding back the 8800 GT for almost a year now, and the 2900 Pro is what forced their hand. The $250 segment is hugely important, and Nvidia can't afford the press hit of losing it.
Luckily for Nvidia, lots of workstation buyers have no idea what they're doing. A programmer buddy of mine recently got a 7950 GT in his new machine at work simply because it had dual DVI out on it and spending $250 on a card "felt right" to the company buyer even though my buddy's requirements would have been totally met by whatever the lowest end discrete card with dual DVI out is (when I looked, I found a 8600 for $100 that would have been fine).
Why are you buying a $250 Wii when you could buy a $99 PS2 that has more games available for less money each? Hell, you could buy an old PC and old PC games for even less money than that.
Easy - you bought a Wii because you have the money for it in your entertainment budget and the Wii meets your entertainment goals. Us PC gamers buy gaming PCs for the same reason. Since I happen to enjoy online first person shooters with nice graphics and I have a decent entertainment budget, my goals are best met by a gaming PC.
There's this neat camera technique called "not zooming in so much". Although more detail in a shot framed the same way is nice, being able to see more context along with extra detail is awesome. This is actually one of the points that's *more* obvious when you think of porn, but it's just as true for conventional movies and TV shows - with higher resolution you can have a scene with someone talking without zooming right up on their face.
It may not show up clearly in the pics, but that's where the speakers live.
That would only count as evidence if you could demonstrate that their patents are actually preventing anyone from competing with them. It seems more likely to me that these companies have simply found a small niche that no larger player cares to fight them for.
That's the standard argument for patents. Like I keep saying, I've seen no evidence that enabling small inventors is a significant effect of patents in practice. Lots of things might have some effect - but something as drastic as patents is only defensible if it actually does have some benefit.
That's what I usually recommend to Windows users who complain about PDFs, but the existence of software that sucks less doesn't change the fact that the "normal" software is horrible - and thus gives the format a bad rep.
Yea, I have, and the professor was very careful not to say that government granted patent monopolies have any practical benefits.
I'm entirely aware of the argument that you seem to believe: that inventors need patents to prevent their competitors from leeching their R&D. But I haven't seen any evidence that patents have that effect to a meaningful extent in the real world.
Vague references to places where that argument is stated doesn't count as evidence supporting it. If you can't find any studies that actually show that effect, then just find me one case where a major corporation with a significant patent portfolio stopped producing a product or payed out significant patent license fees to a significantly smaller competitor who sued them for patent infringement. My guess is that it hasn't happened in living memory - in practice, I'm pretty sure the smaller company agrees to pay the larger company for a patent cross-licensing agreement to avoid the counter-suits.
Although PDFs are great when you view them in Xpdf or Evince or the Mac OS X viewer thing, the common PDF viewer for Windows - Adobe Acrobat Reader - is a bloated piece of crap that makes Firefox freeze while it loads as a browser plugin. I'd guess that most of the PDF haters are Windows users, or users who install Acrobat Reader out of habit rather than using the native viewer that their Unixish system provides.
Do you have any evidence that this happens in practice? (And by evidence, I mean a link to some sort of economic article.)
Everything that I've seen indicates that patents are only useful for larger players to keep smaller players out of the market, and occasionally for patent trolls that don't produce anything to extract a moderate payout from some unlucky large company.
That's sometimes true. Your assumption is that two layers means that you have to hack both. In practice, it frequently ends up that hacking *either* is enough to cause security problems.
Using your firewall example, consider the following two setups:
First: A web server machine with HTTP and SSH ports open and a mail server with SMTP, POP3, and SSH ports open.
Second: The above situation with those servers behind a firewall that only allows incoming connections to those ports.
The second situation is arguably *less* secure than the first. The firewall prevents attacks against closed ports (which largely don't exist) and attacks against other services that were left enabled by mistake (which shouldn't be there). In exchange, it's now possible to attack the firewall itself - which is approximately as juicy a target as either server.
If the patent system is intended to exclude competitors, then even if it works as intended it still squelches any hope of a free market. We can either have free market capitalism or government granted monopolies, not both.
Human culture has evolved right alongside human physiology. I'm not sure that there's any benefit to trying to distinguish between them at this level of discussion.
That's exactly how a (fallacious) argument from authority is usually constructed.
You can't reliably judge an argument on the basis of the perceived expertise of the speaker, since it's entirely possible that they may know more than you think.
Sure, they oversell - but you'd be surprised at how many people they can cram on to a reasonably small uplink without you, the end user, even noticing.
I don't know if Flickr has a per-photo size cap, but 500 MB isn't that many photos with a decent quality camera.
Now, it's still unlikely that a photographer produces that many good photos every week, but on the other hand there's no reason not to simply upload every photo and let the viewers pick out the ones they like.
They absolutely can be compared like they were cars.
Vista is like a short bed gasoline pickup truck. You can perform most day to day tasks with it, but it gets horrible gas mileage and can't handle edge cases (4 passengers, seven foot long cargo) very well at all.
A distro like Ubuntu is more like a VW Golf TDI that can transform into a panel van or 18 wheeler when necessary. It's obviously superior in every way, but people complain about stupid stuff like gas stations that don't sell diesel and how hard it is to get through a 10' tunnel when you're in 18-wheeler mode.
Good job. You're taking the appropriate action to accomplish something on this issue. If more people did that, the world would have less problems.
The municipality has given them an exclusive contract to provide a service - just like the electric company and the phone company. Whether high speed internet is "necessary" or not is irrelevant. They're being given exactly the same market benefits as any other utility, so they have all the responsibilities that go along with those advantages - specifically to provide their service at a reasonable quality level and to not exclude any residents from the service.
In most cases the local town or city has contracted with a single cable provider and a single DSL provider. That makes the list of choices very small, and means that it's reasonable to think of Comcast as a contracted public utility rather than a private firm in a competitive market.
In any case, the correct response to poor behavior by a cable or DSL provider is simply to complain to the city or town. Tell them that the providers are abusing their monopoly, and get them to mandate network neutrality in the next contract. If the provider won't play along, replace them. If no replacement is willing to play, create a public internet utility.
Comcast has 1.) advertised full-function internet service 2.) contracted with municipalities to provide that service to residents. Sending out spoofed packets to disrupt users internet usage simply isn't reasonable behavior for a company claiming to provide internet service.
As long as they have a government granted monopoly on local cable service, they have the right to provide fully functional cable internet service to any resident who requests it and is willing to pay the fee specified in the contract between Comcast and the municipality.
Companies getting to chose who they do business with is great - I kicked people out occasionally when I owned a retail store - but it simply doesn't apply to utility companies with government granted monopolies or government subsidized infrastructure.
In this case, bandwidth is a smaller expense than credit card processing fees - if they got a decent price for their bandwidth, by an order of magnitude. Remember that sites like Youtube exist - the larger videos on their approach the size of a music album, and *none* of their users pay money.
Restoring something to the way it was initially experienced is different from trying to enhance it beyond what it originally was.
Both are culturally beneficial, but the enhancement is more like a new work than an authentic reproduction of the old work.