The average 15 year old doesn't know how his IM works behind the scenes? Well no fucking shit -- point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked.
When my peers carry on like Ellen Feiss ("And then it was like, 'bleep bleep bleep'"), I've often said, "I know exactly why that happened, but I don't think you really care to hear the explanation," to have them carry on as if I hadn't spoken. They really don't care, and frankly I don't want to bother trying to explain it to them.
It seems the rub is that consumer electronics are fashion accessories these days, whereas the consumer tech of yesteryear was largely appliances (washers, stereos, televisions, etc). That stuff stayed at home by necessity. Nowadays I have to deal with my friends' nonstop IM conversations on their camera-phones when they're supposedly hanging out with me. They bounce along, listening to the latest NiN album on their iPod Nano, oblivious to me and the world around them. It's not just shallow and bourgeois, it's downright offensive if you're trying to carry on a conversation with one of these little hummingbirds of the iGeneration.
Aside from that, anyone who is actually surprised that people who grew up using a given piece of tech will have different attitudes towards it than the people who've had to adapt to it needs to be locked up someplace where they won't pose a threat to their own well-being. It should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in a coma that this is just how it works.
My uncle is an awesome coder, but he doesn't have the ability to instantly look at an application interface and grok how it works that is second nature to those who grew up with GUIs. He started working with computers in his 20's.
As implied above, I find a lot of this gadget fetish depraved. I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite in that I own a lot of gadgets, including a cel phone and an iPod. I largely understand how they work, but I don't know that that really makes it better.
I believe you're looking for Antediluvian, though you obviously know what it means (Before the Flood for anybody else too lazy to pull up a dictionary).
It's easy to mix up ante, the latin word for "before" and anti, the Greek word for opposite. English has enough spelling inconsistencies that, seeing a word start with Ante-, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to think that it might be just a strange special case. God knows I did before I took Latin 1. It should be a requirement for anybody whose field requires them to read the works of Latinism-addicted scholars (i.e., almost all of them). For instance, a lot of people, even balanced, practical individuals such as anthropologists, will put down "A. 1500 AD," which means "prior to 1500 AD," and is completely inscrutable if you haven't either A) been gutsy enough to ask or B) taken Latin.
They have the same Indo-European root, which is why the definitions are related.
Well, I have a brand new 15", so that soaks up a bit more power I bet. But the big difference, I believe, is that while WoW and Halo are about on par for visual glitz and glamour, WoW has a ton more game data and swaps like a freaking monster when you go into major cities. I bet that has a lot to do with my battery life problems.
2 or 3 hours max while playing something like WoW? No thank you!
That's gobs of time. While I'm usually the biggest Apple fanboy in the whole wide world, try about an hour on my Powerbook running full speed, and less than two if I set it to power-save mode. That, and it produces so much waste heat it's almost as good as getting your tubes tied if you're dumb enough to actually set the thing on your lap. Of course, it gets almost four hours when I'm just editing plain text.
Big fat social liberal here:) I remember Robert Reich, in a guest lecture at my college, claiming that Clinton tried to curtail the growth of the government because he wanted the government to remain sovent and effective. He claimed that Bush was rapidly increasing the size of the government so that the social programs would eventually collapse under their own weight. Weird reverse-psychology, but I think it's right.
Reminds me of a quote from a PTA member in the South about multilingual education: (paraphrase) "If English is good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, then it's good enough for our schools."
Imbeciles. This whole vernacular scripture thing was the worst move the protestants ever made. And the worst thing is that they consider their crappy Good News translations to be as unassailably true as the original, because the people who translated them were divinely inspired.
Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
In some places (major cities in the US and France come to mind), when people want to listen to some music, they go to bar and watch a local band, often free, and very rarely for more than five bucks (excuse me if that sounds patronizing, I don't mean it that way).
Despite what the RIAA would like us to believe, music has been an intrinsic part of human culture for a very, very long time, probably as long as cave painting, making beads and ritual burial in my layman's estimation. And for the vast majority of that time, major record labels did not control the production and distribution of music. You had anonymous musicians who sat around the fire and came up with folk songs, and you had bards who were supported by patrons - paid to make a symphony, but not paid for exclusive rights to the symphony.
The RIAA wants to convince us that music as an idea could not exist without their grubby, bean-counting hands, charging murder for CDs and putting on mega-concerts with $5 water bottles that sell out in an hour, forcing anybody who wasn't standing in line overnight to deal with unscrupulous scalpers halfway across the country. That's a damn, dirty lie. And now that you can record a professional-quality album on commodity equipment and a home PC and put it on the internet, God, there's just no reason for the RIAA to exist anymore.
That's an interesting factoid. I guess it shouldn't really surprise me after Joel's big rant about APIs, in which he carries on for some time about the MSDN Magazine camp of Microsoft. These are the people who come up with newer, shinier dev tools every quarter whether people actually use them or not. Hell, there was that article a while back about Microsoft just giving away like 20 of their technologies which they're kinda not using.
So, Microsoft creates a lot of technology. They should with that huge, huge R&D budget. But there's an incredible level dissonance in the company, between upper management and workers (Steve Ballmer vs. the World) and between development teams. Maybe that's just a natural byproduct of being the world's largest software company. But it certainly sheds light on why their product development cycle is completely out of whack.
Maybe I should congratulate Ballmer, after all. Since WinFS and Monad have been removed, what you have is Windows XP++: new widgets, not much else. At least if they succeed in this push they can get some value out of those new graphical apis alone.
Google's most exciting technologies are built on AJAX, for cross-platform, web-based, highly responsive user interfaces. This sounds like a bid to beat them at their own game, or force them into irrelivence by making their own technology dominant.
Of course, I wouldn't really believe that they were willing to deliver cross-platform apps. Steve Ballmer just wants to murder Google, and once that's done, they'll abandon the technology.
I've had mixed experiences. Speaking of the past, I know exactly what you're talking about. Those people from Florida and Texas were awesome, and like you say, acknowledged when you really knew what you were talking about. I loved that.
Then, around the same time that I went to college (2003), you could only get through to people in India. I found that 1) the connection was horrible, 2) they refused to talk louder and 3) ignored my pleas for them to do so, not even indicating that they understood (e.g., "My hearing is not perfect and I can't understand you, can you please, please speak louder?" "Sir, please reset your computer. .."). I can track most Indian accents pretty well and I'm not going to grief somebody because they grew up speaking Hindi, but I just couldn't hear them. Secondly, they slavishly, mechanically followed the script, never demonstrating that they knew anything but what the on-screen menus told them, every time.
When people compare macs to pcs, they often compare Macs to Dells. This is a bit like saying, "Well, this chinese-made set of cutlery from Walmart costs $30, but this one made by a German company available only at an upscale cookware store costs $300! Why are they charging so much?" Well, duh, whether the expensive knives are made in Germany or Japan, you pay a bundle on them so they'll stay sharp and they'll cut well. Calculate how often you have to replace that shitty set of cutlery, or those poorly-made designer shoes, and you might find it's worth spending more to get something which will last you a while.
Now, whether that's a loaded Alienware system or a Power Mac, it's your choice. It's still your choice if you buy a Dell. But either way, you get what you pay for (including the tech support; good luck talking to Dell's Bangalore call center).
I think they're mostly trying to take advantage of the Intel compiler for scientific applications, which is where you're more likely to use Fortran. Most Mac developers will use XCode because it's free and it's well-integrated.
They've pitched the Cell processor to Apple before, and Jobs turned it down. He said he wasn't impressed. Frankly, I'm not either. It's a gimmicky processor that's designed to be poetic and sexy rather than practical. Anyway, Apple is clearly moving away from highly vectorized code and has been for some time. The G5 is a great, fast floating point processor with the Altivec instruction set tacked on for backwards-compatibility - it's not the main attraction. I'm sorry, but a move to the Cell arch would be absurd in the extreme, as they'd have to reengineer all of their operating system code again from the ground up, and expect their third party developers to move in lockstep with them. You'd sound like less of a moron if you postulated that they're going to adopt the Itanic.
Parenting really is going downhill. I won't relate the specifics since I get an earfull of it every time my girlfriend comes home from her retail job, but boy-oh-boy, we have a generation being raised by morons who think it's criminal to spank your children, treason to say no to them, and a crime against humanity to pay any good amount of attention to them so they don't run around acting like crazy little monkeys in the first place.
I generally frequent the Daly City Century, the Metreon, that one on Van Ness, and the Bay Street cinema in Emeryville when I'm visiting my girlfriend. I've sort of found that it's not where you go, but when you go that is the determining factor in how many noisy, annoying, wired-to-the-teeth teenagers go. The beginning of the week is generally pretty good, but on a Friday or Saturday night, forget about it.
For example, I saw Willy Wonka on a Monday night at Daly City, and aside from one toddler, there was no problem. However, when I saw Batman Begins on a friday at Bay Street, I foamed at the mouth for the first twenty minutes as mob after mob of 14-17 year olds chatted and came and went as they pleased for the first twenty minutes, not even bothering to duck their heads as they did so. Perhaps their rudeness is just more evident since these theaters have entrances at the front rather than the back.
The alternative is just to embrace the fact that the people in the audience are assholes and go to Thrillville (a themed night) at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, which has pizza (really, really good pizza), beer, couches, and costs 5 bucks for two people. And since they card at the door and serve Bass, Guiness, Newcastle and the like, you're not likely to find many teens even trying to sneak in.
Granted I am a firm opponent to outsourcing, but Dells have been getting much cheaper in the past few years. For 1500 two years ago, I got a 2.6GHz/512MB/17" LCD/Radeon 9800 Dell/CDR, and my mother just six months ago got a 3.2GHz/1G/19" LCD DVI/Radeon X300/DVR for significantly less, something like 1200. I don't think that's just because of the natural rate at which technology becomes cheaper.
Cross-platofrm compatibility is not limited to getting the app to compile and run - for anybody to really look at it, it has to run well. Carmack, for example, attributes the PPC-Mac performance shortfall to many things, and one of them is that GCC is not as well-optimized as visual studio or Intel's tools. So, having a really, really good compiler is going to help developers quite a bit.
On windowing, Swing and GTK both run on Win32/Linux/OS X. You're up a river if you develop for Cocoa though. Of course, there's a lot more libraries someone would concievably call than STL and a windowing system.
Laptop users, as well as people running server farms. If they told some enterprise that they could save a few million bucks on power (which is getting more expensive all the time and wil l never stop), they'd net themselves a big fat sale.
For home users, it's more of a reliability/creature comfort thing. More power means more heat, and 1) nobody likes loud computer fans, or wants to buy a liquid cooling system and 2) heat makes chips fry.
Forget buying the stuff. It's gonna take millions of geek-hours to set all of that stuff up. I'm sure most slashdotters have been contracted by friends and family to set up several entertainment centers. In all likelihood the next generation of content devices will only be more tempermental, and then we'll be forced to explain to Aunt Susie that she needs a new reciever as well as a new DVD player and television.
Even though it's considered a softball MMO, I prefer the fact that PvP death really has no consequences in WoW. They can't take you items, and you incur no durability loss (as opposed to 10% in PvE). This does well to counter the fact that PvP is rarely fair, especially when you're (often) competing against crazy, East Asian, gold-farmering power-gamers, the people who also made online W3 and Starcraft not fun for me.
Of course, you're referring to their hardware engineering, not their software engineering. Poopoo on their silicon all you want, I'll even help in a few areas. However, the mere fact that so many geeks are working desparately to run their OS on commodity hardware testifies to the fact that their applications and operating system departments are anything but minor-league.
Your logic is flawed. GP says that P2P grants independent artists exposure that they would not otherwise have, which translates to sales. Label artists already have plenty of exposure - in fact, perfect exposure, because they can partically determine who fails and who succeeds depending on who they decide to promote. Those in a strong or monopolistic market position always use different tactics than those in a weak position.
Certain technologies which the **AA's love attempt to tie your copy of Dirty Harry to your DVD player and your DVD player only. DIVX was the first implementation of this, and it was universally shunned, but don't think for a second that they're not trying to bring it back when the next generation of digital media comes out. I know for a fact that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have embraced digital watermarking - how it is implemented remains to be seen.
Sorry for the plug, but I just finished a delightful series of books by Jasper Fforde. In the third book, The Well of Lost Plots, there is a conspiracy to change the format of books so that only three people can read a given printed copy (by a mechanism too laborious and tangential to explain). This sounded absurd to me until I read some of the DRM conspiracy theories, and it seems that Mr. Fforde has been reading them too.
Now, if you give somebody your CD, that's legal (for now, they want to change this of course). If you give them some MP3's, that's illegal copyright infringement. Now, why is it that when you loan somebody a book, it is legal? If you didn't have the right to let a friend borrow your copy of a given book, you'd be up in arms. Why should music be any different?
3000 may be the comparable amount in terms of purchasing power, but external to those exchange rate differences, your average east asian laborer makes far less proportionally. I think that's what GP was stabbing at.
However, the comparison is probably not entirely valid, since people who own a computer and spend evenings farming away in WoW probably don't live on unskilled laborer wages.
Slashdot Mirror
*now actually looking at the article* All of these things define me as a techno-geezer, and I'm 22.
When my peers carry on like Ellen Feiss ("And then it was like, 'bleep bleep bleep'"), I've often said, "I know exactly why that happened, but I don't think you really care to hear the explanation," to have them carry on as if I hadn't spoken. They really don't care, and frankly I don't want to bother trying to explain it to them.
It seems the rub is that consumer electronics are fashion accessories these days, whereas the consumer tech of yesteryear was largely appliances (washers, stereos, televisions, etc). That stuff stayed at home by necessity. Nowadays I have to deal with my friends' nonstop IM conversations on their camera-phones when they're supposedly hanging out with me. They bounce along, listening to the latest NiN album on their iPod Nano, oblivious to me and the world around them. It's not just shallow and bourgeois, it's downright offensive if you're trying to carry on a conversation with one of these little hummingbirds of the iGeneration.
My uncle is an awesome coder, but he doesn't have the ability to instantly look at an application interface and grok how it works that is second nature to those who grew up with GUIs. He started working with computers in his 20's.
As implied above, I find a lot of this gadget fetish depraved. I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite in that I own a lot of gadgets, including a cel phone and an iPod. I largely understand how they work, but I don't know that that really makes it better.
I believe you're looking for Antediluvian, though you obviously know what it means (Before the Flood for anybody else too lazy to pull up a dictionary).
It's easy to mix up ante, the latin word for "before" and anti, the Greek word for opposite. English has enough spelling inconsistencies that, seeing a word start with Ante-, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to think that it might be just a strange special case. God knows I did before I took Latin 1. It should be a requirement for anybody whose field requires them to read the works of Latinism-addicted scholars (i.e., almost all of them). For instance, a lot of people, even balanced, practical individuals such as anthropologists, will put down "A. 1500 AD," which means "prior to 1500 AD," and is completely inscrutable if you haven't either A) been gutsy enough to ask or B) taken Latin.
They have the same Indo-European root, which is why the definitions are related.
Well, I have a brand new 15", so that soaks up a bit more power I bet. But the big difference, I believe, is that while WoW and Halo are about on par for visual glitz and glamour, WoW has a ton more game data and swaps like a freaking monster when you go into major cities. I bet that has a lot to do with my battery life problems.
That's gobs of time. While I'm usually the biggest Apple fanboy in the whole wide world, try about an hour on my Powerbook running full speed, and less than two if I set it to power-save mode. That, and it produces so much waste heat it's almost as good as getting your tubes tied if you're dumb enough to actually set the thing on your lap. Of course, it gets almost four hours when I'm just editing plain text.
Big fat social liberal here:) I remember Robert Reich, in a guest lecture at my college, claiming that Clinton tried to curtail the growth of the government because he wanted the government to remain sovent and effective. He claimed that Bush was rapidly increasing the size of the government so that the social programs would eventually collapse under their own weight. Weird reverse-psychology, but I think it's right.
Reminds me of a quote from a PTA member in the South about multilingual education: (paraphrase) "If English is good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, then it's good enough for our schools."
Imbeciles. This whole vernacular scripture thing was the worst move the protestants ever made. And the worst thing is that they consider their crappy Good News translations to be as unassailably true as the original, because the people who translated them were divinely inspired.
In some places (major cities in the US and France come to mind), when people want to listen to some music, they go to bar and watch a local band, often free, and very rarely for more than five bucks (excuse me if that sounds patronizing, I don't mean it that way).
Despite what the RIAA would like us to believe, music has been an intrinsic part of human culture for a very, very long time, probably as long as cave painting, making beads and ritual burial in my layman's estimation. And for the vast majority of that time, major record labels did not control the production and distribution of music. You had anonymous musicians who sat around the fire and came up with folk songs, and you had bards who were supported by patrons - paid to make a symphony, but not paid for exclusive rights to the symphony.
The RIAA wants to convince us that music as an idea could not exist without their grubby, bean-counting hands, charging murder for CDs and putting on mega-concerts with $5 water bottles that sell out in an hour, forcing anybody who wasn't standing in line overnight to deal with unscrupulous scalpers halfway across the country. That's a damn, dirty lie. And now that you can record a professional-quality album on commodity equipment and a home PC and put it on the internet, God, there's just no reason for the RIAA to exist anymore.
*jaw hits the floor*
That's an interesting factoid. I guess it shouldn't really surprise me after Joel's big rant about APIs, in which he carries on for some time about the MSDN Magazine camp of Microsoft. These are the people who come up with newer, shinier dev tools every quarter whether people actually use them or not. Hell, there was that article a while back about Microsoft just giving away like 20 of their technologies which they're kinda not using.
So, Microsoft creates a lot of technology. They should with that huge, huge R&D budget. But there's an incredible level dissonance in the company, between upper management and workers (Steve Ballmer vs. the World) and between development teams. Maybe that's just a natural byproduct of being the world's largest software company. But it certainly sheds light on why their product development cycle is completely out of whack.
Maybe I should congratulate Ballmer, after all. Since WinFS and Monad have been removed, what you have is Windows XP++: new widgets, not much else. At least if they succeed in this push they can get some value out of those new graphical apis alone.
Google's most exciting technologies are built on AJAX, for cross-platform, web-based, highly responsive user interfaces. This sounds like a bid to beat them at their own game, or force them into irrelivence by making their own technology dominant.
Of course, I wouldn't really believe that they were willing to deliver cross-platform apps. Steve Ballmer just wants to murder Google, and once that's done, they'll abandon the technology.
I've had mixed experiences. Speaking of the past, I know exactly what you're talking about. Those people from Florida and Texas were awesome, and like you say, acknowledged when you really knew what you were talking about. I loved that.
Then, around the same time that I went to college (2003), you could only get through to people in India. I found that 1) the connection was horrible, 2) they refused to talk louder and 3) ignored my pleas for them to do so, not even indicating that they understood (e.g., "My hearing is not perfect and I can't understand you, can you please, please speak louder?" "Sir, please reset your computer. . ."). I can track most Indian accents pretty well and I'm not going to grief somebody because they grew up speaking Hindi, but I just couldn't hear them. Secondly, they slavishly, mechanically followed the script, never demonstrating that they knew anything but what the on-screen menus told them, every time.
When people compare macs to pcs, they often compare Macs to Dells. This is a bit like saying, "Well, this chinese-made set of cutlery from Walmart costs $30, but this one made by a German company available only at an upscale cookware store costs $300! Why are they charging so much?" Well, duh, whether the expensive knives are made in Germany or Japan, you pay a bundle on them so they'll stay sharp and they'll cut well. Calculate how often you have to replace that shitty set of cutlery, or those poorly-made designer shoes, and you might find it's worth spending more to get something which will last you a while.
Now, whether that's a loaded Alienware system or a Power Mac, it's your choice. It's still your choice if you buy a Dell. But either way, you get what you pay for (including the tech support; good luck talking to Dell's Bangalore call center).
I think they're mostly trying to take advantage of the Intel compiler for scientific applications, which is where you're more likely to use Fortran. Most Mac developers will use XCode because it's free and it's well-integrated.
They've pitched the Cell processor to Apple before, and Jobs turned it down. He said he wasn't impressed. Frankly, I'm not either. It's a gimmicky processor that's designed to be poetic and sexy rather than practical. Anyway, Apple is clearly moving away from highly vectorized code and has been for some time. The G5 is a great, fast floating point processor with the Altivec instruction set tacked on for backwards-compatibility - it's not the main attraction. I'm sorry, but a move to the Cell arch would be absurd in the extreme, as they'd have to reengineer all of their operating system code again from the ground up, and expect their third party developers to move in lockstep with them. You'd sound like less of a moron if you postulated that they're going to adopt the Itanic.
Parenting really is going downhill. I won't relate the specifics since I get an earfull of it every time my girlfriend comes home from her retail job, but boy-oh-boy, we have a generation being raised by morons who think it's criminal to spank your children, treason to say no to them, and a crime against humanity to pay any good amount of attention to them so they don't run around acting like crazy little monkeys in the first place.
Oh yeah, but ritalin and antidepressants are OK.
I generally frequent the Daly City Century, the Metreon, that one on Van Ness, and the Bay Street cinema in Emeryville when I'm visiting my girlfriend. I've sort of found that it's not where you go, but when you go that is the determining factor in how many noisy, annoying, wired-to-the-teeth teenagers go. The beginning of the week is generally pretty good, but on a Friday or Saturday night, forget about it.
For example, I saw Willy Wonka on a Monday night at Daly City, and aside from one toddler, there was no problem. However, when I saw Batman Begins on a friday at Bay Street, I foamed at the mouth for the first twenty minutes as mob after mob of 14-17 year olds chatted and came and went as they pleased for the first twenty minutes, not even bothering to duck their heads as they did so. Perhaps their rudeness is just more evident since these theaters have entrances at the front rather than the back.
The alternative is just to embrace the fact that the people in the audience are assholes and go to Thrillville (a themed night) at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, which has pizza (really, really good pizza), beer, couches, and costs 5 bucks for two people. And since they card at the door and serve Bass, Guiness, Newcastle and the like, you're not likely to find many teens even trying to sneak in.
Granted I am a firm opponent to outsourcing, but Dells have been getting much cheaper in the past few years. For 1500 two years ago, I got a 2.6GHz/512MB/17" LCD/Radeon 9800 Dell/CDR, and my mother just six months ago got a 3.2GHz/1G/19" LCD DVI/Radeon X300/DVR for significantly less, something like 1200. I don't think that's just because of the natural rate at which technology becomes cheaper.
Cross-platofrm compatibility is not limited to getting the app to compile and run - for anybody to really look at it, it has to run well. Carmack, for example, attributes the PPC-Mac performance shortfall to many things, and one of them is that GCC is not as well-optimized as visual studio or Intel's tools. So, having a really, really good compiler is going to help developers quite a bit.
On windowing, Swing and GTK both run on Win32/Linux/OS X. You're up a river if you develop for Cocoa though. Of course, there's a lot more libraries someone would concievably call than STL and a windowing system.
Laptop users, as well as people running server farms. If they told some enterprise that they could save a few million bucks on power (which is getting more expensive all the time and wil l never stop), they'd net themselves a big fat sale.
For home users, it's more of a reliability/creature comfort thing. More power means more heat, and 1) nobody likes loud computer fans, or wants to buy a liquid cooling system and 2) heat makes chips fry.
Forget buying the stuff. It's gonna take millions of geek-hours to set all of that stuff up. I'm sure most slashdotters have been contracted by friends and family to set up several entertainment centers. In all likelihood the next generation of content devices will only be more tempermental, and then we'll be forced to explain to Aunt Susie that she needs a new reciever as well as a new DVD player and television.
Even though it's considered a softball MMO, I prefer the fact that PvP death really has no consequences in WoW. They can't take you items, and you incur no durability loss (as opposed to 10% in PvE). This does well to counter the fact that PvP is rarely fair, especially when you're (often) competing against crazy, East Asian, gold-farmering power-gamers, the people who also made online W3 and Starcraft not fun for me.
Of course, you're referring to their hardware engineering, not their software engineering. Poopoo on their silicon all you want, I'll even help in a few areas. However, the mere fact that so many geeks are working desparately to run their OS on commodity hardware testifies to the fact that their applications and operating system departments are anything but minor-league.
Your logic is flawed. GP says that P2P grants independent artists exposure that they would not otherwise have, which translates to sales. Label artists already have plenty of exposure - in fact, perfect exposure, because they can partically determine who fails and who succeeds depending on who they decide to promote. Those in a strong or monopolistic market position always use different tactics than those in a weak position.
Certain technologies which the **AA's love attempt to tie your copy of Dirty Harry to your DVD player and your DVD player only. DIVX was the first implementation of this, and it was universally shunned, but don't think for a second that they're not trying to bring it back when the next generation of digital media comes out. I know for a fact that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have embraced digital watermarking - how it is implemented remains to be seen.
Sorry for the plug, but I just finished a delightful series of books by Jasper Fforde. In the third book, The Well of Lost Plots, there is a conspiracy to change the format of books so that only three people can read a given printed copy (by a mechanism too laborious and tangential to explain). This sounded absurd to me until I read some of the DRM conspiracy theories, and it seems that Mr. Fforde has been reading them too.
Now, if you give somebody your CD, that's legal (for now, they want to change this of course). If you give them some MP3's, that's illegal copyright infringement. Now, why is it that when you loan somebody a book, it is legal? If you didn't have the right to let a friend borrow your copy of a given book, you'd be up in arms. Why should music be any different?
3000 may be the comparable amount in terms of purchasing power, but external to those exchange rate differences, your average east asian laborer makes far less proportionally. I think that's what GP was stabbing at.
However, the comparison is probably not entirely valid, since people who own a computer and spend evenings farming away in WoW probably don't live on unskilled laborer wages.