While a funny (and significant) comment, I wanted to just point out two things:
it is copyright not copywrite or wright.
it is patent not copyright. A lot of people get these concepts confused, but understanding the differences (including what they can be applied to, and for what term) is important in US law.
Its not just spending the money... nor the company collapsing. Disney shut down their free MMO VMK for no apparently good reason except that they seemed to want to generate bad will among their customers. At least NCSoft is trying to "promote good will".
What the article goes on to say, in more words, is that the trivial response time on certain actions is much faster, and that this is good. As long as its correct, it certainly is good! You want to know when you press a button or click on an icon, and rapid feedback on that is very very important. You don't want to open a window 10 times because you didn't think you opened it the first 9 you tried.
Why mention the ISBN-10? Everyone has moved to ISBN-13 (the one starting with 978). I'm surprised that O'Reilly (not to mention/.) has bothered to list the old one anywhere - nobody cares.
As I noted in my initial post, VMK (a social MMORPG that Disney used to run) allowed its players to create and run quests out of "quest generators". These quests had the same features as the quests provided by the game designers - although they were limited to prizes bought by the quest owner and run out of the players room.
Were these amazingly complex tasks? No. But they were pretty basic tasks that covered most of what you could do in the game, and it was fairly easy to build them up into more. While trivia questions were common, there were many quests built that required more complex tasks such as puzzle or riddle solving or navigating a maze the player built.
It surprises me that more games didn't have this feature already. It hardly seems to be a stretch that a clan would require new members to do something to benefit them, and that these requirements would be something that the game itself would enforce.
Am I missing the point? Granted, I don't play Vendetta, but it seems to me that any modern game where the users aren't creating the real interesting content is... um... lame.
I mean... even the late VMK allowed (even encouraged) its players to create quests, many of which were better than the quests provided by staff and the developers. There were player created games for prizes since the beginning of VMK.
So... can someone actually explain what the big deal here is?
Ignoring if DNSSEC is good or not, this is a pretty bad example of why to do this. Nobody goes to irs.gov to file their taxes. Instead, they go to a third-party (like Quicken, as just one example) who will file their taxes with the IRS. This was part of a deal worked out many years ago - in exchange for the IRS not providing its own e-file solutions, the third-party companies would have to provide free online e-filing (but would still, of course, be able to sell their own software to do the same thing).
I haven't looked at the TOS in question, but its very very VERY common for there to be a clause stating, roughly, "Instead of suing us, you agree that we will settle all issues through arbitration." With the packed and underfunded court systems around the country, arbitration is often an attractive alternative to both sides (at least in theory).
That's brilliant! Just the way to sell fewer desktops!
Dell has had huuuuuge problems fulfilling laptop orders because of supply chain problems. So making their desktops the same (bad) way they make their laptops only makes cents. I mean... sense...
It is a shame so many companies just don't get it, still. Disney recently killed its Virtual Magic Kingdom advergame because the corporate executives didn't understand how it could actually make them money. So while Webkinz cleaned their clock, Disney execs forked over $700M for Club Penguin and ignored the product they already had.
I think this is actually the clue to a good solution to your problem. Don't just say "we have a disconnect between our engineering and software development processes" - show them examples of where this has FAILED in the past.
Ariane 5 is one example. The Therac 25 is another one that comes to mind. You can find many such examples on the Risks forum which has been documenting such issues for YEARS.
This seems like a strange attempt. You mean there aren't already tons of message boards that contains peoples personal experiences, wikis that provide in-game information, and tons of indexing by google of both of these?
The best example of this I've seen was the effort by the Disney's Online Worlds wiki to document information about VMK while it was running, and then the frantic effort to preserve as much as they could before the game was shut down.
I think clearly the scientific community is missing the best solution to addressing these issues. Instead of fighting these groups and the legislatures who listen to them, they should put forth various other "theories" and demand that they be taught in the appropriate places in the curriculum. Some examples, although I'm sure the slashdot community can come up with more:
The Earth is flat.
That 1+1=3 for sufficiently large values of 1.
That the energy produced by a system can be greater than the energy taken in by a system.
The healing power of magnets and crude oil.
That storks bring babies.
If these theories aren't presented, then they should raise the same kind of stink that is raised over ID and loudly demand that omitting their inclusion is omitting scientific debate.
They are playing a publicity game - and we have to play the same game or we've already lost.
I suspect that part of the confusion is that we think of ebay as an acution company, just like we used to think of google as a search company or Microsoft as a PC OS company.
It sounds to me like ebay is trying to transform itself into a "business solutions provider" company. Starting a small business? Sell your stuff using ebay with "buy it now". Want to accept credit cards and do other business banking? We can do that. Want to offer a toll-free (or non-toll-free) number to your customers? We can do that, too.
I would not be overly surprised if they went after Quicken or a competitor next. Possibly even a shipping or storage company, too (but less likely since those aren't virtual).
A valid point, but still doesn't fully address the change.
Yes, they would lose their shirts on credit card fees, but originally you had to hook it up to a bank account, not a credit card number.
They also abandoned the fee-free scheme pretty quickly after they started, so I'm assuming either the initial business plan was terribly flawed and they realized the float wasn't enough - or the bank that purchased it didn't want to encourage fee-free behaviour.
It would also be interesting to shift the credit card transaction charge to the purchaser, instead of the vendor (them, and passed on to some customers) as a way of encouraging bank transactions. But thats now drifting off my original point.
About... oh... six or eight years ago, there was a company that was founded which had a great online payment scheme that would handle micropayments without problems. Instead of charging a per-transaction fee, it would make money on the float of withdrawing a larger sum from your bank account, not giving you interest on that ammount, and letting you tap into it whenever. Putting money back in your account that was transferred to you could take a couple of days, since they wanted to earn the float money.
The company even had a way to do micropayments by beaming data from PDA to PDA, and were planning on a cell-phone version of the same thing.
Eventually, they abandoned this system, abandoned the PDA and cell phone systems, and just about abandoned their customers. They switched to a transaction fee system, got bought by a bank, focused on auction transactions, and eventually were bought by eBay.
This company was called PayPal.
An interesting solution to this problem could be to extend the test. For those pages that turn up in one results and not the other, query the other one for that exact page to see if it has it.
Actually, I assumed that "double opt-in" is when you go to a totally insecure form and enter your address. They then send a confirmation message to that address (which makes it a little more trustworthy). Only after you confirm this are you actually added to the list.
Sure, it is standard practice for mailing lists, but it has to have a name and someone using it.
Long ago and not-so-far away, I started with these kits as well. My biggest problem with them was that they were usually structured with the left side of the page containing some text about what the cool project you were doing would do and what you could do with it, and the right was the wiring layout. There was no explanation about why you were hooking up most of the wires, what you were doing, or why if you changed to a different resistor everything stopped working. I never felt like I got anything out of these projects except how to follow instructions.
In the long term, yes. But in the short term it may be desirable for the price-fixers to undercut the price to corner the market. Once they have driven others out of the market, they are free (har har) to set the price to whatever they want.
This is the theoretical problem with a monopoly, or with a small group that are seeking to drive others out of the market.
In that sense, it does seem that the companies that are pushing GPL are attempting to price-fix software at 0 for now, so they can drive other companies out of the software industry so they can make money through software services instead.
No surprise - the credit agencies are offering this now (for a fee) when you get your free credit report.
Experian, for example, offers "unlimited access to your credit report and score" and "email notifications of key changes to your credit report" for $10 a month. I'm sure the others are offering similar services.
The FTC is already requiring the credit agencies to give you a free report every year, with implementation rolling out since 1 Dec 2004 depending on where you live. Some states have required this for years.
You should read more carefully. The RFC does not specify a new protocol, it specifies a new section in RFC documentation, much like the "security implication" sections that started appearing a few years back.
If you're going to try and be funny - at least be correct. That said, your rush to condemn it certainly puts your moral standing in question - eh?
Looney Labs (and their weekly blog) make some excellent games that might fit your audience. They are perhaps best known for their card game Fluxx (my personal favorite), but also have a number of other games which are more board-game like.
The one that sounds most similar to what you're looking for is Chrononauts, the card game of time travel, which involves a time line that you build and control on the table. It also has an "Early American" version.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not just spending the money... nor the company collapsing. Disney shut down their free MMO VMK for no apparently good reason except that they seemed to want to generate bad will among their customers. At least NCSoft is trying to "promote good will".
What the article goes on to say, in more words, is that the trivial response time on certain actions is much faster, and that this is good. As long as its correct, it certainly is good! You want to know when you press a button or click on an icon, and rapid feedback on that is very very important. You don't want to open a window 10 times because you didn't think you opened it the first 9 you tried.
Why mention the ISBN-10? Everyone has moved to ISBN-13 (the one starting with 978). I'm surprised that O'Reilly (not to mention /.) has bothered to list the old one anywhere - nobody cares.
Depends what sorts of content.
As I noted in my initial post, VMK (a social MMORPG that Disney used to run) allowed its players to create and run quests out of "quest generators". These quests had the same features as the quests provided by the game designers - although they were limited to prizes bought by the quest owner and run out of the players room.
Were these amazingly complex tasks? No. But they were pretty basic tasks that covered most of what you could do in the game, and it was fairly easy to build them up into more. While trivia questions were common, there were many quests built that required more complex tasks such as puzzle or riddle solving or navigating a maze the player built.
It surprises me that more games didn't have this feature already. It hardly seems to be a stretch that a clan would require new members to do something to benefit them, and that these requirements would be something that the game itself would enforce.
Am I missing the point? Granted, I don't play Vendetta, but it seems to me that any modern game where the users aren't creating the real interesting content is... um... lame.
I mean... even the late VMK allowed (even encouraged) its players to create quests, many of which were better than the quests provided by staff and the developers. There were player created games for prizes since the beginning of VMK.
So... can someone actually explain what the big deal here is?
Ignoring if DNSSEC is good or not, this is a pretty bad example of why to do this. Nobody goes to irs.gov to file their taxes. Instead, they go to a third-party (like Quicken, as just one example) who will file their taxes with the IRS. This was part of a deal worked out many years ago - in exchange for the IRS not providing its own e-file solutions, the third-party companies would have to provide free online e-filing (but would still, of course, be able to sell their own software to do the same thing).
I haven't looked at the TOS in question, but its very very VERY common for there to be a clause stating, roughly, "Instead of suing us, you agree that we will settle all issues through arbitration." With the packed and underfunded court systems around the country, arbitration is often an attractive alternative to both sides (at least in theory).
That's brilliant! Just the way to sell fewer desktops!
Dell has had huuuuuge problems fulfilling laptop orders because of supply chain problems. So making their desktops the same (bad) way they make their laptops only makes cents. I mean... sense...
It is a shame so many companies just don't get it, still. Disney recently killed its Virtual Magic Kingdom advergame because the corporate executives didn't understand how it could actually make them money. So while Webkinz cleaned their clock, Disney execs forked over $700M for Club Penguin and ignored the product they already had.
I think this is actually the clue to a good solution to your problem. Don't just say "we have a disconnect between our engineering and software development processes" - show them examples of where this has FAILED in the past.
Ariane 5 is one example. The Therac 25 is another one that comes to mind. You can find many such examples on the Risks forum which has been documenting such issues for YEARS.
Good luck.
This seems like a strange attempt. You mean there aren't already tons of message boards that contains peoples personal experiences, wikis that provide in-game information, and tons of indexing by google of both of these? The best example of this I've seen was the effort by the Disney's Online Worlds wiki to document information about VMK while it was running, and then the frantic effort to preserve as much as they could before the game was shut down.
If these theories aren't presented, then they should raise the same kind of stink that is raised over ID and loudly demand that omitting their inclusion is omitting scientific debate. They are playing a publicity game - and we have to play the same game or we've already lost.
I suspect that part of the confusion is that we think of ebay as an acution company, just like we used to think of google as a search company or Microsoft as a PC OS company.
It sounds to me like ebay is trying to transform itself into a "business solutions provider" company. Starting a small business? Sell your stuff using ebay with "buy it now". Want to accept credit cards and do other business banking? We can do that. Want to offer a toll-free (or non-toll-free) number to your customers? We can do that, too.
I would not be overly surprised if they went after Quicken or a competitor next. Possibly even a shipping or storage company, too (but less likely since those aren't virtual).
A valid point, but still doesn't fully address the change.
Yes, they would lose their shirts on credit card fees, but originally you had to hook it up to a bank account, not a credit card number.
They also abandoned the fee-free scheme pretty quickly after they started, so I'm assuming either the initial business plan was terribly flawed and they realized the float wasn't enough - or the bank that purchased it didn't want to encourage fee-free behaviour.
It would also be interesting to shift the credit card transaction charge to the purchaser, instead of the vendor (them, and passed on to some customers) as a way of encouraging bank transactions. But thats now drifting off my original point.
About... oh... six or eight years ago, there was a company that was founded which had a great online payment scheme that would handle micropayments without problems. Instead of charging a per-transaction fee, it would make money on the float of withdrawing a larger sum from your bank account, not giving you interest on that ammount, and letting you tap into it whenever. Putting money back in your account that was transferred to you could take a couple of days, since they wanted to earn the float money. The company even had a way to do micropayments by beaming data from PDA to PDA, and were planning on a cell-phone version of the same thing. Eventually, they abandoned this system, abandoned the PDA and cell phone systems, and just about abandoned their customers. They switched to a transaction fee system, got bought by a bank, focused on auction transactions, and eventually were bought by eBay. This company was called PayPal.
An interesting solution to this problem could be to extend the test. For those pages that turn up in one results and not the other, query the other one for that exact page to see if it has it.
Actually, I assumed that "double opt-in" is when you go to a totally insecure form and enter your address. They then send a confirmation message to that address (which makes it a little more trustworthy). Only after you confirm this are you actually added to the list.
Sure, it is standard practice for mailing lists, but it has to have a name and someone using it.
Long ago and not-so-far away, I started with these kits as well. My biggest problem with them was that they were usually structured with the left side of the page containing some text about what the cool project you were doing would do and what you could do with it, and the right was the wiring layout. There was no explanation about why you were hooking up most of the wires, what you were doing, or why if you changed to a different resistor everything stopped working. I never felt like I got anything out of these projects except how to follow instructions.
According to the ACM...
No... Acording to Sleepycat, who have a great name and logo, but an otherwise very annoying data store.
In the long term, yes. But in the short term it may be desirable for the price-fixers to undercut the price to corner the market. Once they have driven others out of the market, they are free (har har) to set the price to whatever they want.
This is the theoretical problem with a monopoly, or with a small group that are seeking to drive others out of the market.
In that sense, it does seem that the companies that are pushing GPL are attempting to price-fix software at 0 for now, so they can drive other companies out of the software industry so they can make money through software services instead.
No surprise - the credit agencies are offering this now (for a fee) when you get your free credit report.
Experian, for example, offers "unlimited access to your credit report and score" and "email notifications of key changes to your credit report" for $10 a month. I'm sure the others are offering similar services.
Somewhere between -5 and 5 months ago/from now.
The FTC is already requiring the credit agencies to give you a free report every year, with implementation rolling out since 1 Dec 2004 depending on where you live. Some states have required this for years.
You should read more carefully. The RFC does not specify a new protocol, it specifies a new section in RFC documentation, much like the "security implication" sections that started appearing a few years back.
If you're going to try and be funny - at least be correct. That said, your rush to condemn it certainly puts your moral standing in question - eh?
Looney Labs (and their weekly blog) make some excellent games that might fit your audience. They are perhaps best known for their card game Fluxx (my personal favorite), but also have a number of other games which are more board-game like.
The one that sounds most similar to what you're looking for is Chrononauts, the card game of time travel, which involves a time line that you build and control on the table. It also has an "Early American" version.
As already noted, they make the Icehouse pyramids which are most noted for games like Zendo and Ice Towers, but are also used for quite a few others.
Enjoy!