That's why I think there is something else on the RIAA's mind - Not loss of the customer, but rather loss of the artist...
Yes, but it's a little bigger than that. In the past, they had control over distribution, they could determine what gets played on the radio (through the indie promotion system, which is really payola in disguise). It limits competition, because potential competitors would have to play by their rules, or be locked out of radio, etc.
So as you suspect this oligopoly has a lot of leverage over potential new artists (our way or the highway). This allows industry insiders to get rich off the backs of artists who take on all of the risks (costs for album production, promotion, (videos, whether MTV shows them or not) etc, get charged back to the artist. The artists take most of the risks, but the insiders reap most of the rewards.
So it's a rather unnatural, and I dare say, corrupt business model. It was only sustainable because they had a lock on distribution. Most industries can't thrive on not giving customers what they want, or raise prices in the face of declining sales like the music industry.
Now the internet threatens their lock on distribution, and the insiders fat cat lifestyles are at risk. Many industries have been threatened by technological change in the past, but few have been as determined to not adapt to it and instead stop it in its tracks as the RIAA.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
No, consumers are enticed by the low price of the printer, and then slapped by the huge relative costs of the ink replacement
When I recently purchased a new replacement for my old inkjet, I learned my lesson and paid extra for a printer that has relatively cheap ink replacement costs
If you make TCO a big selling point, you may succeed. For Example, the marketing material placed at POS in the store could point out that our printer may cost $300, and theirs cost $99, but if you spend $90 on ink per year for theirs (assuming two carts/year, kind of conservative) vs. $25/year for ours (rough guess), it pays for itself in three years. If you print more than that, it.
Plus you can also mention the cost of the "special paper" that their ink is formulated for to produce proper results.
It may work. I bought an Epson for this reason (their carts are cheaper because they don't force you to replace the print head every time)
Which scientists say chemical preservatives cause cancer?
Although it's not a preservative, saccharine, for years was considered carcinogenic. Now it no longer is, because the amount of saccharine one must consume to get cancer is well beyond reasonable levels of consumption. I think the same thing happened with some food coloring.
I suspect that you'll find the same thing with preservatives, some fuzzy data indicates possible cancer risk.
Keep in mind, despite all these things that we are subjected to that are supposed to kill us, the human life expectancy is still increasing.
Chernobyl was, shall we say, not the finest example of how to build a nuclear power plant. For instance, there was no containment structure surrounding the reactor.
As for Three Mile Island, it's a much better, though obviously not perfect design. Nobody was killed by Three Mile Island, the land around it is still inhabitable. There isn't even conclusive proof of an increased cancer risk in the area. The plant safety features worked.
Apart from these two instances, only one of which was a true disaster, there are hundreds of reactors that having been running for years without incident. But TMI was the death of the US nuclear power plants, no new ones have been licensed since, instead, we've built many fossil fuel burning plants -- arguably much worse for the environment.
Not only will our food-supply become the intellecutal property of Monsanto (and its ilk) but their SOLE purpose is profit. NOT increased food production... or reduced hunger or some other altruism. those (benefits) are "after effects" of their effort to make cash.
I really can't see how any company can monopolize the food supply. If Monsanto or whomever begins behaving badly, seeds are readily available from elsewhere. Speaking of profit, have you ever noticed how profitable the organic food business is? Organic farmers can, in some cases, charge 3x as much for "Certified Organic" produce. Organic farming is not purely altruistic either. My point is, chasing profits does not automatically = evil.
BTW, IIRC macrovision is a hardware feature, not a software one. There is no 'linux support' to be written, save flipping it on via a hardware register. They're only required that it be present, it can be disabled as easily under windows (a registry tweak for most cards) as it could be under linux.
Macrovision is a joke, You know this, I know this. Most component DVD players also have a (Secret) way of disabling it. But just as you couldn't sell a component DVD player without macrovision without getting into legal trouble, it seems that Matrox chose to avoid potential legal trouble with their Linux driver, because Linux doesn't explicitly enforce Macrovision protection.
That's a good conspiracy theory. Another theory is that linux cant dynamically add/remove display devices in userland at run time the way windows can.
It's not a conspiracy theory, I've seen an admission from Matrox to this effect in their support forums. They did in fact release TVout support for one of their earlier cards (the G400), but at some point decided not to support Linux TVout in post G400 cards even though some of them are technically similar to the G400.
Or it could be that you're looking a gift horse in the mouth. Want all the features of the vid card to work? Fire up emacs and get a-crackin'.
Someone (not Matrox) has come up with a solution to get TV out working. My complaint was that the vendor's (who is willing to support Linux) hands are being tied for political, not technical reasons.
I get around this problem by buying only well supported hardware.
But what's really annoying is when features aren't supported on Linux for non-technical reasons. For example, Matrox has written Linux drivers for their graphics cards, but the Linux drivers don't support TV-out. Why?
It's apparently because Linux doesn't have Macrovision support, and I guess Matrox doesn't want to be sued by the MPAA for releasing drivers that "enable piracy". So Linux users can't have a feature that has many legitimate uses, just because someone might tape a DVD onto a VHS tape with it.
Technically, it's not even a recession. The recession ended over a year ago. It's a "recovery", although a very crappy one so far. The economy has been growing, but job growth has been almost non-existant.
Looking at the two originals, and the altered photo, I fail to see the point in even creating the alteration. It wasn't much more dramatic than the originals (if at all).
The finished product doesn't seem worth the risk of losing your job over. (Which I agree was the right course of action in this case)
With some versions of atari800, you need to use "xl" or "xe" mode. If you try to use the 800 mode, the emulator will sense a phantom third joystick, and this will make it unplayable.
Start out with Food/Energy. The computer players will invariably ignore the market for one or the other and focus on smithore. Then you can price gouge them out of all there money when there's a shortage, and your the only one who has any. Later in the game, I switch to mostly crystite.
Another strategy I've tried of late is "Real Estate Speculator". Don't produce a single thing. Just sell the plots you get for the highest price you can, or cancel the auction and try again later if the price isn't good enough. Also buy smithore and crystite low when the computer players are selling it, and sell high. I've actually won using this strategy, although it can backfire.
BTW, as testament to it's goodness, you see original copies of M.U.L.E. clear $35 on eBay. I've tried to get a copy, just for the manual and been outbid a number of times.
Just press your joystick button at the same time as the ebay seller and you can collude!
One of the few 8-bit games I still enjoy today. It would be great if we had an emulator that supported four joysticks so the game could be played the way it was meant to be.
I've never tried to use XML in a programs, but from a user's standpoint, I hate it.
I've seen many programs start using XML config files. I often have need to automate things, which sometimes involves writing scripts that alter a config file. If the config file is of the VAR=Value type, this is pretty easy to do, but if it's XML, you can either try to fudge it, or have to parse the &#$# thing, which makes the task more complex than it needs to be.
I've also seen a movement to replace EDI with XML. Now EDI standards already do everything that XML is supposed to do, but EDI is compact, and relatively easy to debug. XML explodes the size of these files from a few kilobytes to several meg!
Actually the economy is very close to the late 1930's towards the end of the depression. The stock market has been down 3 years in a row and has not recovered.
The stock market was not the single root cause of the depression. There were several. There were a huge number of bank failures around that time. Back then, when a bank failed, depositors lost their money, so quite a bit of capital was destroyed, this led to deflation, you can't hire workers if the money no longer exists? Also the Fed at that time kept a tight money policy, when it should've loosened. This only made things worse. And you had Smoot-Hawley tariffs which killed overseas demand for your products. Today you only have stock market malaise. Fed policy is very loose, and banks are quite solvent, and FDIC would back them up if they weren't.
This only happened once during the 1930's in American history. Unemployement is rising near %10 and is alot higher for IT workers.
It's an extended bear market. The stock market was similarly crappy in the 70's. Maybe the loses weren't as big. And where is unemployment at 10%?
I'd venture that many of the people who read slashdot were not in the workforce during the last recession (which WAS worse, btw).
You're right about the Depression, 30% or so unemployment at it's worst, you lost your entire savings because the market crashed and your bank went under. At least today, if you lose your job, you can still find a crappy one to get you by until things improve if your unemployment runs out. Back then, that wasn't even an option.
I know news like this is disturbing, and it gets to me too, but there may be alot of counter-trends that this article does not take into account:
- This is nothing new, and has been going on for at least 15 years according to the chart. The growth rate has been steadily increasing, but so has the US economy. According to the chart, in 1991-1992, about 3% of service imports were business or tech related. In 1998-99 it was almost 5%, yet it was almost certainly easier to get one of these types of jobs in the US during the boom years of 98-99 then it was during the 91-92 recession.
-No country, even India, has an inexhaustible supply of IT labor available for outsourcing. A lot of people are needed to support the infrastructure (networks, etc) of India and jobs like that. It's not just the US looking to these countries for labor. The more demand in those countries, the higher the pay goes, and retention becomes harder. My company has QA people in India, and we've already had some trouble keeping people there. Additionally, third world countries are unlikely to have successful H1-B type programs to attract more labor. In fact there's been somewhat of a brain drain as many of the brightest people from these countries took advantage of H1-B type programs in western countries, and left for good.
- A declining Dollar (as it has been lately) makes overseas salaries more expensive, and American labor more attractive.
- Cost is not the only factor when looking to hire people, if it was, why would companies ever locate to very expensive places like Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston? Businesses go where they can find labor. If an area has been hard-hit by layoffs, then that area will be even more attractive when the economy begins expanding again, because people will be willing to work for less then they used to make.
- It's not as though there is a finite supply of tech jobs. Tech has always had a way of creating lots and lots of jobs that are unfathomable to most people. (You might've wanted to be a fireman when you grew up, but you never would've said web page designer, for instance). Who knows what categories there may be in five to ten years? Smart out of work people can still start amazing companies, with or without venture capital. These new companies can create more categories of work and create new types of jobs. This was happening well before the dot-com boom, so I don't see why it would just stop. So a much larger labor pool may mean a larger number of jobs come into existance, some may have been impossible before because labor costs would've been prohibitive.
- Politicians, even Laissez Faire conservatives are not going to want to face a disgruntled constituency of workers, and lose all that tax revenue because people who used to make 100K/year are now working at McDonalds, and the companies that paid them moved to Hydrabad. This would be especially true of those in hard-hit areas. You would see not just protectionism (rightly or wrongly), but also incentives for businesses to locate.
Also, the article is a bit alarmist in tone, confusing the current downturn with the much longer-term trend of overseas outsourcing. The article makes it sound like this is something new, and you are about to lose your job because of it. They quote an economist from a "Labor think-tank in DC", probably not the most objective person. Also the quote from the woman complaining that jobs are "only" paying $35/hr instead of the $45 she used to make was just silly, that's to be expected because of the current downturn, not this other trend.
So in short, this trend is worth watching, but you probably shouldn't lose sleep over it just yet. Jobs will be available when the economy recovers, they may not pay dot-com era salaries, but they'll be above average.
I remember a news story around 1999sh saying how in the new millinium, the tech savvy people would be the new jet-setters, everything would be so rosy, blah blah blah. Again, they looked at a current trend and assumed that it would go on forever.
wood is soaked in chemicals to withstand water etc, insulation is a whole book in itself on chemical hell.
You're referring to Pressure-treated lumber. At least where I live, that seems to be only used for outdoor structures, like decks, retaining walls, fence posts etc. The lumber inside is untreated.
Mass Pollution is a picnic in the park. We're currently strugling with The Sellafield Nuclear plant in England, as they dump their waste directly out in the sea, killing our coastline.
And they allow this? Sheesh, and they say US environmental laws are lax...
Canada gets away with a higher ratio of "clean" to dirty power because their power requirements are so much lower.Coupled with the silly fact that we have a lot of hydro-friendly rivers.
And the tidal power of the Bay of Fundy
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it's a little bigger than that. In the past, they had control over distribution, they could determine what gets played on the radio (through the indie promotion system, which is really payola in disguise). It limits competition, because potential competitors would have to play by their rules, or be locked out of radio, etc.
So as you suspect this oligopoly has a lot of leverage over potential new artists (our way or the highway). This allows industry insiders to get rich off the backs of artists who take on all of the risks (costs for album production, promotion, (videos, whether MTV shows them or not) etc, get charged back to the artist. The artists take most of the risks, but the insiders reap most of the rewards.
So it's a rather unnatural, and I dare say, corrupt business model. It was only sustainable because they had a lock on distribution. Most industries can't thrive on not giving customers what they want, or raise prices in the face of declining sales like the music industry.
Now the internet threatens their lock on distribution, and the insiders fat cat lifestyles are at risk. Many industries have been threatened by technological change in the past, but few have been as determined to not adapt to it and instead stop it in its tracks as the RIAA.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
No, consumers are enticed by the low price of the printer, and then slapped by the huge relative costs of the ink replacement
When I recently purchased a new replacement for my old inkjet, I learned my lesson and paid extra for a printer that has relatively cheap ink replacement costs
If you make TCO a big selling point, you may succeed. For Example, the marketing material placed at POS in the store could point out that our printer may cost $300, and theirs cost $99, but if you spend $90 on ink per year for theirs (assuming two carts/year, kind of conservative) vs. $25/year for ours (rough guess), it pays for itself in three years. If you print more than that, it.
Plus you can also mention the cost of the "special paper" that their ink is formulated for to produce proper results.
It may work. I bought an Epson for this reason (their carts are cheaper because they don't force you to replace the print head every time)
Although it's not a preservative, saccharine, for years was considered carcinogenic. Now it no longer is, because the amount of saccharine one must consume to get cancer is well beyond reasonable levels of consumption. I think the same thing happened with some food coloring.
I suspect that you'll find the same thing with preservatives, some fuzzy data indicates possible cancer risk.
Keep in mind, despite all these things that we are subjected to that are supposed to kill us, the human life expectancy is still increasing.
Chernobyl was, shall we say, not the finest example of how to build a nuclear power plant. For instance, there was no containment structure surrounding the reactor.
As for Three Mile Island, it's a much better, though obviously not perfect design. Nobody was killed by Three Mile Island, the land around it is still inhabitable. There isn't even conclusive proof of an increased cancer risk in the area. The plant safety features worked.
Apart from these two instances, only one of which was a true disaster, there are hundreds of reactors that having been running for years without incident. But TMI was the death of the US nuclear power plants, no new ones have been licensed since, instead, we've built many fossil fuel burning plants -- arguably much worse for the environment.
Round-up is a herbicide, not a pesticide. It kills plants, not plant pests.
I really can't see how any company can monopolize the food supply. If Monsanto or whomever begins behaving badly, seeds are readily available from elsewhere. Speaking of profit, have you ever noticed how profitable the organic food business is? Organic farmers can, in some cases, charge 3x as much for "Certified Organic" produce. Organic farming is not purely altruistic either. My point is, chasing profits does not automatically = evil.
Macrovision is a joke, You know this, I know this. Most component DVD players also have a (Secret) way of disabling it. But just as you couldn't sell a component DVD player without macrovision without getting into legal trouble, it seems that Matrox chose to avoid potential legal trouble with their Linux driver, because Linux doesn't explicitly enforce Macrovision protection.
It's not a conspiracy theory, I've seen an admission from Matrox to this effect in their support forums. They did in fact release TVout support for one of their earlier cards (the G400), but at some point decided not to support Linux TVout in post G400 cards even though some of them are technically similar to the G400.
Or it could be that you're looking a gift horse in the mouth. Want all the features of the vid card to work? Fire up emacs and get a-crackin'.
Someone (not Matrox) has come up with a solution to get TV out working. My complaint was that the vendor's (who is willing to support Linux) hands are being tied for political, not technical reasons.
I get around this problem by buying only well supported hardware.
But what's really annoying is when features aren't supported on Linux for non-technical reasons. For example, Matrox has written Linux drivers for their graphics cards, but the Linux drivers don't support TV-out. Why?
It's apparently because Linux doesn't have Macrovision support, and I guess Matrox doesn't want to be sued by the MPAA for releasing drivers that "enable piracy". So Linux users can't have a feature that has many legitimate uses, just because someone might tape a DVD onto a VHS tape with it.
Technically, it's not even a recession. The recession ended over a year ago. It's a "recovery", although a very crappy one so far. The economy has been growing, but job growth has been almost non-existant.
Looking at the two originals, and the altered photo, I fail to see the point in even creating the alteration. It wasn't much more dramatic than the originals (if at all).
The finished product doesn't seem worth the risk of losing your job over. (Which I agree was the right course of action in this case)
MULE ran on an Atari 800, so it only needed 48K RAM!
With some versions of atari800, you need to use "xl" or "xe" mode. If you try to use the 800 mode, the emulator will sense a phantom third joystick, and this will make it unplayable.
Start out with Food/Energy. The computer players will invariably ignore the market for one or the other and focus on smithore. Then you can price gouge them out of all there money when there's a shortage, and your the only one who has any. Later in the game, I switch to mostly crystite.
Another strategy I've tried of late is "Real Estate Speculator". Don't produce a single thing. Just sell the plots you get for the highest price you can, or cancel the auction and try again later if the price isn't good enough. Also buy smithore and crystite low when the computer players are selling it, and sell high. I've actually won using this strategy, although it can backfire.
Just press your joystick button at the same time as the ebay seller and you can collude!
One of the few 8-bit games I still enjoy today. It would be great if we had an emulator that supported four joysticks so the game could be played the way it was meant to be.
I've never tried to use XML in a programs, but from a user's standpoint, I hate it.
I've seen many programs start using XML config files. I often have need to automate things, which sometimes involves writing scripts that alter a config file. If the config file is of the VAR=Value type, this is pretty easy to do, but if it's XML, you can either try to fudge it, or have to parse the &#$# thing, which makes the task more complex than it needs to be.
I've also seen a movement to replace EDI with XML. Now EDI standards already do everything that XML is supposed to do, but EDI is compact, and relatively easy to debug. XML explodes the size of these files from a few kilobytes to several meg!
Actually the economy is very close to the late 1930's towards the end of the depression. The stock market has been down 3 years in a row and has not recovered.
The stock market was not the single root cause of the depression. There were several. There were a huge number of bank failures around that time. Back then, when a bank failed, depositors lost their money, so quite a bit of capital was destroyed, this led to deflation, you can't hire workers if the money no longer exists? Also the Fed at that time kept a tight money policy, when it should've loosened. This only made things worse. And you had Smoot-Hawley tariffs which killed overseas demand for your products. Today you only have stock market malaise. Fed policy is very loose, and banks are quite solvent, and FDIC would back them up if they weren't.
This only happened once during the 1930's in American history. Unemployement is rising near %10 and is alot higher for IT workers.
It's an extended bear market. The stock market was similarly crappy in the 70's. Maybe the loses weren't as big. And where is unemployment at 10%?
I'd venture that many of the people who read slashdot were not in the workforce during the last recession (which WAS worse, btw).
You're right about the Depression, 30% or so unemployment at it's worst, you lost your entire savings because the market crashed and your bank went under. At least today, if you lose your job, you can still find a crappy one to get you by until things improve if your unemployment runs out. Back then, that wasn't even an option.
I know news like this is disturbing, and it gets to me too, but there may be alot of counter-trends that this article does not take into account:
- This is nothing new, and has been going on for at least 15 years according to the chart. The growth rate has been steadily increasing, but so has the US economy. According to the chart, in 1991-1992, about 3% of service imports were business or tech related. In 1998-99 it was almost 5%, yet it was almost certainly easier to get one of these types of jobs in the US during the boom years of 98-99 then it was during the 91-92 recession.
-No country, even India, has an inexhaustible supply of IT labor available for outsourcing. A lot of people are needed to support the infrastructure (networks, etc) of India and jobs like that. It's not just the US looking to these countries for labor. The more demand in those countries, the higher the pay goes, and retention becomes harder. My company has QA people in India, and we've already had some trouble keeping people there. Additionally, third world countries are unlikely to have successful H1-B type programs to attract more labor. In fact there's been somewhat of a brain drain as many of the brightest people from these countries took advantage of H1-B type programs in western countries, and left for good.
- A declining Dollar (as it has been lately) makes overseas salaries more expensive, and American labor more attractive.
- Cost is not the only factor when looking to hire people, if it was, why would companies ever locate to very expensive places like Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston? Businesses go where they can find labor. If an area has been hard-hit by layoffs, then that area will be even more attractive when the economy begins expanding again, because people will be willing to work for less then they used to make.
- It's not as though there is a finite supply of tech jobs. Tech has always had a way of creating lots and lots of jobs that are unfathomable to most people. (You might've wanted to be a fireman when you grew up, but you never would've said web page designer, for instance). Who knows what categories there may be in five to ten years? Smart out of work people can still start amazing companies, with or without venture capital. These new companies can create more categories of work and create new types of jobs. This was happening well before the dot-com boom, so I don't see why it would just stop. So a much larger labor pool may mean a larger number of jobs come into existance, some may have been impossible before because labor costs would've been prohibitive.
- Politicians, even Laissez Faire conservatives are not going to want to face a disgruntled constituency of workers, and lose all that tax revenue because people who used to make 100K/year are now working at McDonalds, and the companies that paid them moved to Hydrabad. This would be especially true of those in hard-hit areas. You would see not just protectionism (rightly or wrongly), but also incentives for businesses to locate.
Also, the article is a bit alarmist in tone, confusing the current downturn with the much longer-term trend of overseas outsourcing. The article makes it sound like this is something new, and you are about to lose your job because of it. They quote an economist from a "Labor think-tank in DC", probably not the most objective person. Also the quote from the woman complaining that jobs are "only" paying $35/hr instead of the $45 she used to make was just silly, that's to be expected because of the current downturn, not this other trend.
So in short, this trend is worth watching, but you probably shouldn't lose sleep over it just yet. Jobs will be available when the economy recovers, they may not pay dot-com era salaries, but they'll be above average.
So true...
I remember a news story around 1999sh saying how in the new millinium, the tech savvy people would be the new jet-setters, everything would be so rosy, blah blah blah. Again, they looked at a current trend and assumed that it would go on forever.
wood is soaked in chemicals to withstand water etc, insulation is a whole book in itself on chemical hell.
You're referring to Pressure-treated lumber. At least where I live, that seems to be only used for outdoor structures, like decks, retaining walls, fence posts etc. The lumber inside is untreated.
Mass Pollution is a picnic in the park. We're currently strugling with The Sellafield Nuclear plant in England, as they dump their waste directly out in the sea, killing our coastline.
And they allow this? Sheesh, and they say US environmental laws are lax...
I also get to sleep with the woman in my home office - my wife. While you are working?
Canada gets away with a higher ratio of "clean" to dirty power because their power requirements are so much lower. Coupled with the silly fact that we have a lot of hydro-friendly rivers. And the tidal power of the Bay of Fundy