Agreed. The Microsoft case is more like Toshiba Televisions (in a theoretical market where Toshiba controls 90% of Televisions) inserting extra ads for Toshiba products and not showing and requiring that any ads for Sony (and worse, any small competitor competing in any area of any of Toshibas products) be programmed in by an expert.
Brand recognition, even on the scale of Google, does not make for market control the same way that hardware compatibility lock-in does. There are plenty of near functionally identical equivalents to both end-users *and* advertisers. Google is leveraging a powerful advantage, but that doesn't mean they're abusing a monopoly.
"Why can't you have both gameplay and graphics? For example, Zelda: Twilight Princess is fun (even though we've all played the game before several times), but it would be better with better graphics. Gears of War has great gameplay and graphics."
Economics. Better graphics means more textures, more complicated models, etc. etc. etc.
You need a bigger team of people working over a longer time. What all this means is that a failed title is a much bigger financial disaster now than it was 15 years ago. This is why there aren't small studios (like Sierra) around anymore.
I'd say console gaming is about as healthy as it has ever been. But PC gaming is a wasteland compared to what it was in the early 90s.
There's a fundamental, mathematical problem for any system that screens large populations looking for a small number of targets.
Let's say your system is 99% reliable, that is to say, 1% of the time it checks a negative it reports a positive and vice versa.
Now you screen 1,000,000 people looking for one suspect, your system turns up 10,001 positives. Which one is it?
This is a problem that has been well-studied in cancer screenings. For certain rare types of cancers, there are nearly 100% reliable tests that nonetheless when they report a positive, are usually wrong.
Now it's fine to say, in the case of the cancer, that the 1% of the population should be informed and then checked via another procedure or something. But when we're talking about a process that fingers potential criminals, and in modern criminal justice where merely being a suspect hurts your life in a myriad of ways (god help you if the information winds up somewhere accessible to google, or worse yet, the case has anything to do with terrorism).
I have the same objection to large-scale wiretapping operations, if anything, the human factor there greatly increases the problem.
No kidding. The naive belief that all human activity can be monetized wouldn't have tipped me off. Even the corporate lawyer (or Bill Gates walking down the street seeing a $100 bill, in another silly and popular example) doesn't work every waking second of his week. There are plenty of hours where his earning potential is the same $0/hour that I'm making as I type this. Even so his actions aren't very economical as he could easily pay some kid $100 to wait in line for him for three or four hours, and he'd find plenty of takers, hell it could be a Craigslist meme.
By your argument, laundry services that charge $10 to do a load for you should be immensely popular, since many people earn more than $10 in an hour and a half. But that's a waste of money for any modest budget, and everyone knows it.
Microeconomics explains the behaviors of small(ish) markets, but not individuals. That's psychology. And psychologically speaking, some people are so habituated to dropping $1000+ at a time on entertainment and luxury items, that doing so for a PS3 even when it doesn't "make sense" is totally in line with normal behavior. It's the same as you or I buying a $7 sandwich at a grocery store deli, when the ingredients for making a better sandwich are right there and cheaper. We feel like doing it and $7 doesn't cross whatever magical mental threshold we have that triggers the thought "bad idea: wasting money." Humans aren't thrifty in their personal habits by nature, just look at any teenager with an allowance, it's a habit that either gets practiced by necessity or doesn't.
The corpus has always had more freedom than a living person.
Imagine this scenario: rather than long imprisonment for manslaughter or criminal negligence, you were guaranteed to only ever face a fine. How would your respect for the law change? Furthermore, suppose you were under constant review and any time you took any action not profitable, you were subject to suit from a group of interested parties?
Since there exist no penalties under law that a private corporation really fears, and there exists active deterrents against a publicly traded corporation for refusing profit for moral reasons, regulation of corporate behavior must be far MORE aggressive than regulation of the behavior of private individuals.
Ahhh, wait a minute, before everyone starts harping on this, notice:
This pledgebank wasn't started by the project and isn't connected to them at all. This is nothing more than a well-intentioned and failed internet petition.
At $300 a pop in a first world country where computers are nearly ubiquitous, their failure to sell isn't really anything of note. It's a failed gadget launch (and a highly underpublicised one, this is the first I've heard of the $300 offer, not that I've got 3 C-notes kicking around)
This doesn't say anything about whether or not the $100 laptops are a good way of spending money to benefit the third world. Just look at how successful cellphones have been at connecting communities in Africa. That's been a grass-roots and locally run campaign, but it has the advantage that cell-phones are already priced at an approachable point. I think this project has a lot of merit. Infrastructure can do a lot to turn communities that are only sinks for aid into self-supporting ones.
Surely there are some folks out there with some deep pockets. Is there anywhere I can toss $20 gratis?
Hear hear! However rotten our government gets, this is the country that gave the world The Blues and Mark Twain. America is a great weird behemoth and I'm damn proud to call it my only culture (as a Mayflower WASP I don't really feel in any meaningful way hyphenated)
Plus if every socially mobile person who cares about their society and community more than their investments leaves, then the USA will just be more evil, more horrible, and still around.
I wasn't aware that it was only 25 iPods; most articles I've read on this haven't stated that figure. That said, it seems like checking the disks against a checksum would be possible -- it's likely that some system insuring that the state of the iPod's disk doesn't change during QC is now in place.
But really by "should have" I didn't really mean that there was an obvious step they missed, but merely that a company is responsible for any faulty product they release. Despite the fact that a problem with Windows enabled this infection, it is still Apple's product in Apple's boxes.
Ipods configured on Windows machines are formatted in a Windows-compatible format (I'm about 90% sure it's Fat32). This is also the format of choice for iPods connecting to non-OS X machines in general.
Apple's QC really really should have caught this, but it's also pretty horrendous that removable storage can be automatically infected by and automatically execute any binary. I'm something of a systems guy, and I really don't have any idea how I would go about purposefully doing something like that on a Unix, even if I were just trying to get something to autorun without root access.
I'm inclined to agree. This thing looks like a classic example of Microsoft "innovation:" it's got a shot-gun spread of bullet-list features (how easy is it to imagine the meeting where someone pitched this thing, I haven't read a single article about it that doesn't read like a powerpoint presentation).
But it's Microsoft, they're going to f**k up the implementation. They always do. The XBox was a clunker of a video game system that "succeeded" (while it has done well, it certainly hasn't given M.S. the Windows-like grip on videogaming that they're clearly hoping for, and it hasn't really taken off as a home media center -- which is how they actually want to make money off of it.) due to its raw specs rather than a classy, slick implementation. It doesn't matter what whiz-bang thing it can do (especially considering that transferring songs to a media player is about the upper ceiling on most customers' technical aptitude) if it feels awkward to use.
Lastly, totally new products that bank on feature convergeance have an abysmal track record launching. Real feature convergeance happens slowly over long product lines, letting users get comfortable. This thing is going to be Microsoft's Newton: a nifty ahead-of-its-time gadget that wasn't actually any joy to use.
Because String theory is a developing model that at the very least (at least in its more popular formulations) has been shown rather thouroughly to match up with real world data. It is entirely conceivable that as technology advances and the theory evolves, testable predictions will be made.
Intelligent Design, is pretty solidly not science. It's a criticism of a science, but it doesn't even provide a space in which to posit new ideas or models and test against data.
I agree that while not outright a bad thing, maybe String Theory is a little too shakey to be getting as much money and attention as it is (surely there are other more promising areas of theoretical physics). But where String Theory might be poor science, I.D. is anti-science. I.D. is a lot more dangerous.
I used to work in a convenience store, and let me tell you, the bulk of lottery income isn't coming from $1 a day dreamers. People -- people with college degrees -- drop hundreds of dollars a week, while I sat there staring at them scratching tickets feeling like a slot machine.
You can make all the fancy economic sounding arguments you want about playing the lottery, but most of the money is flowing in for a very simple reason: gambling addiction.
Toyota is the number 1 car manufacturer but that doesn't mean they're BMW or Lexus' primary competition any more so than Futurama was driven off the air by American Idol.
Apple's cheapest products are midrange in the market, and they shine at the high-end. Apple is competing with Lenovo, Toshiba, and Sony for customers with an eye toward total presentation & overall quality, and a bit more flexibility in the pocketbook.
There's this silly horse-race attitude in technology commentary, that any company that doesn't have the largest marketshare in their industry is doing something wrong. Typically in any industry gaining the majority means making certain sacrifices (for instance, Microsoft could never break backwards compatibility as often as Apple does -- their huge installed corporate base would balk) Hence there's a lot of money to be made in targeting niches where one size doesn't fit all.
Apple would have a very rough time becoming Dell and keeping the qualities that make their particular market so lucrative and loyal.
You guys should go read the article. It's a good little essay
One of the points he makes is that without the goofy voiceover and quick cut to a shot of mom hugging the kid, you're really just watching a video of a toddler hurting himself. AFHV upped the dorky and the bland because otherwise you're watching real life, in which people get hurt and their friends stand around laughing with a video camera.
YouTube is to a much greater degree about that depressing reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps an open-source one, which would prevent this sort of thing from happening?
How long is it going to take for people to make the connection between the practices that make the software industry miserable and closedness?
Agreed. The Microsoft case is more like Toshiba Televisions (in a theoretical market where Toshiba controls 90% of Televisions) inserting extra ads for Toshiba products and not showing and requiring that any ads for Sony (and worse, any small competitor competing in any area of any of Toshibas products) be programmed in by an expert.
Brand recognition, even on the scale of Google, does not make for market control the same way that hardware compatibility lock-in does. There are plenty of near functionally identical equivalents to both end-users *and* advertisers. Google is leveraging a powerful advantage, but that doesn't mean they're abusing a monopoly.
"Why can't you have both gameplay and graphics? For example, Zelda: Twilight Princess is fun (even though we've all played the game before several times), but it would be better with better graphics. Gears of War has great gameplay and graphics."
Economics. Better graphics means more textures, more complicated models, etc. etc. etc.
You need a bigger team of people working over a longer time. What all this means is that a failed title is a much bigger financial disaster now than it was 15 years ago. This is why there aren't small studios (like Sierra) around anymore.
I'd say console gaming is about as healthy as it has ever been. But PC gaming is a wasteland compared to what it was in the early 90s.
"A couple of years ago, it took 6 hours to encode a CD to MP3, now it takes just a few minutes."
Sorry to be annoying, but you hit on one of my pet peeves. "A couple" means two. No more, no less.
MP3 encoding hasn't been a multi-hour excursion since the early days of the Pentium-I.
There's a fundamental, mathematical problem for any system that screens large populations looking for a small number of targets.
Let's say your system is 99% reliable, that is to say, 1% of the time it checks a negative it reports a positive and vice versa.
Now you screen 1,000,000 people looking for one suspect, your system turns up 10,001 positives. Which one is it?
This is a problem that has been well-studied in cancer screenings. For certain rare types of cancers, there are nearly 100% reliable tests that nonetheless when they report a positive, are usually wrong.
Now it's fine to say, in the case of the cancer, that the 1% of the population should be informed and then checked via another procedure or something. But when we're talking about a process that fingers potential criminals, and in modern criminal justice where merely being a suspect hurts your life in a myriad of ways (god help you if the information winds up somewhere accessible to google, or worse yet, the case has anything to do with terrorism).
I have the same objection to large-scale wiretapping operations, if anything, the human factor there greatly increases the problem.
RTFA, man.
They have a "special kind of crystal." Duh!
No kidding. The naive belief that all human activity can be monetized wouldn't have tipped me off. Even the corporate lawyer (or Bill Gates walking down the street seeing a $100 bill, in another silly and popular example) doesn't work every waking second of his week. There are plenty of hours where his earning potential is the same $0/hour that I'm making as I type this. Even so his actions aren't very economical as he could easily pay some kid $100 to wait in line for him for three or four hours, and he'd find plenty of takers, hell it could be a Craigslist meme.
By your argument, laundry services that charge $10 to do a load for you should be immensely popular, since many people earn more than $10 in an hour and a half. But that's a waste of money for any modest budget, and everyone knows it.
Microeconomics explains the behaviors of small(ish) markets, but not individuals. That's psychology. And psychologically speaking, some people are so habituated to dropping $1000+ at a time on entertainment and luxury items, that doing so for a PS3 even when it doesn't "make sense" is totally in line with normal behavior. It's the same as you or I buying a $7 sandwich at a grocery store deli, when the ingredients for making a better sandwich are right there and cheaper. We feel like doing it and $7 doesn't cross whatever magical mental threshold we have that triggers the thought "bad idea: wasting money." Humans aren't thrifty in their personal habits by nature, just look at any teenager with an allowance, it's a habit that either gets practiced by necessity or doesn't.
The corpus has always had more freedom than a living person.
Imagine this scenario: rather than long imprisonment for manslaughter or criminal negligence, you were guaranteed to only ever face a fine. How would your respect for the law change? Furthermore, suppose you were under constant review and any time you took any action not profitable, you were subject to suit from a group of interested parties?
Since there exist no penalties under law that a private corporation really fears, and there exists active deterrents against a publicly traded corporation for refusing profit for moral reasons, regulation of corporate behavior must be far MORE aggressive than regulation of the behavior of private individuals.
Ain't the case though.
What does immigration have to do with global overpopulation?
Shipping as many people as possible into the first world (where people have fewer babies) seems like a pretty decent partial fix.
Ahhh, wait a minute, before everyone starts harping on this, notice:
This pledgebank wasn't started by the project and isn't connected to them at all. This is nothing more than a well-intentioned and failed internet petition.
Really, nothing to see here.
At $300 a pop in a first world country where computers are nearly ubiquitous, their failure to sell isn't really anything of note. It's a failed gadget launch (and a highly underpublicised one, this is the first I've heard of the $300 offer, not that I've got 3 C-notes kicking around)
This doesn't say anything about whether or not the $100 laptops are a good way of spending money to benefit the third world. Just look at how successful cellphones have been at connecting communities in Africa. That's been a grass-roots and locally run campaign, but it has the advantage that cell-phones are already priced at an approachable point. I think this project has a lot of merit. Infrastructure can do a lot to turn communities that are only sinks for aid into self-supporting ones.
Surely there are some folks out there with some deep pockets. Is there anywhere I can toss $20 gratis?
Better question -- name me any other platform that *needs* this kind of ass-backwards hack to shore up security.
"Ooooh exclusive SCREENZ!!!" Isn't really reporting.
plus I like America still.
Hear hear! However rotten our government gets, this is the country that gave the world The Blues and Mark Twain. America is a great weird behemoth and I'm damn proud to call it my only culture (as a Mayflower WASP I don't really feel in any meaningful way hyphenated)
Plus if every socially mobile person who cares about their society and community more than their investments leaves, then the USA will just be more evil, more horrible, and still around.
I wasn't aware that it was only 25 iPods; most articles I've read on this haven't stated that figure. That said, it seems like checking the disks against a checksum would be possible -- it's likely that some system insuring that the state of the iPod's disk doesn't change during QC is now in place.
But really by "should have" I didn't really mean that there was an obvious step they missed, but merely that a company is responsible for any faulty product they release. Despite the fact that a problem with Windows enabled this infection, it is still Apple's product in Apple's boxes.
Ipods configured on Windows machines are formatted in a Windows-compatible format (I'm about 90% sure it's Fat32). This is also the format of choice for iPods connecting to non-OS X machines in general.
Apple's QC really really should have caught this, but it's also pretty horrendous that removable storage can be automatically infected by and automatically execute any binary. I'm something of a systems guy, and I really don't have any idea how I would go about purposefully doing something like that on a Unix, even if I were just trying to get something to autorun without root access.
I'm inclined to agree. This thing looks like a classic example of Microsoft "innovation:" it's got a shot-gun spread of bullet-list features (how easy is it to imagine the meeting where someone pitched this thing, I haven't read a single article about it that doesn't read like a powerpoint presentation).
But it's Microsoft, they're going to f**k up the implementation. They always do. The XBox was a clunker of a video game system that "succeeded" (while it has done well, it certainly hasn't given M.S. the Windows-like grip on videogaming that they're clearly hoping for, and it hasn't really taken off as a home media center -- which is how they actually want to make money off of it.) due to its raw specs rather than a classy, slick implementation. It doesn't matter what whiz-bang thing it can do (especially considering that transferring songs to a media player is about the upper ceiling on most customers' technical aptitude) if it feels awkward to use.
Lastly, totally new products that bank on feature convergeance have an abysmal track record launching. Real feature convergeance happens slowly over long product lines, letting users get comfortable. This thing is going to be Microsoft's Newton: a nifty ahead-of-its-time gadget that wasn't actually any joy to use.
Because String theory is a developing model that at the very least (at least in its more popular formulations) has been shown rather thouroughly to match up with real world data. It is entirely conceivable that as technology advances and the theory evolves, testable predictions will be made.
Intelligent Design, is pretty solidly not science. It's a criticism of a science, but it doesn't even provide a space in which to posit new ideas or models and test against data.
I agree that while not outright a bad thing, maybe String Theory is a little too shakey to be getting as much money and attention as it is (surely there are other more promising areas of theoretical physics). But where String Theory might be poor science, I.D. is anti-science. I.D. is a lot more dangerous.
I think that would have been 1976's an open letter to hobbyists.
I used to work in a convenience store, and let me tell you, the bulk of lottery income isn't coming from $1 a day dreamers. People -- people with college degrees -- drop hundreds of dollars a week, while I sat there staring at them scratching tickets feeling like a slot machine.
You can make all the fancy economic sounding arguments you want about playing the lottery, but most of the money is flowing in for a very simple reason: gambling addiction.
Walk right out your door and start hitch-hiking, or something man, you just made me want to shoot myself. Please do something dangerous.
This all sounds terribly complicated. People who spend thousands of dollars to be entertained sure are going to have headaches.
Toyota is the number 1 car manufacturer but that doesn't mean they're BMW or Lexus' primary competition any more so than Futurama was driven off the air by American Idol.
Apple's cheapest products are midrange in the market, and they shine at the high-end. Apple is competing with Lenovo, Toshiba, and Sony for customers with an eye toward total presentation & overall quality, and a bit more flexibility in the pocketbook.
There's this silly horse-race attitude in technology commentary, that any company that doesn't have the largest marketshare in their industry is doing something wrong. Typically in any industry gaining the majority means making certain sacrifices (for instance, Microsoft could never break backwards compatibility as often as Apple does -- their huge installed corporate base would balk) Hence there's a lot of money to be made in targeting niches where one size doesn't fit all.
Apple would have a very rough time becoming Dell and keeping the qualities that make their particular market so lucrative and loyal.
You guys should go read the article. It's a good little essay
One of the points he makes is that without the goofy voiceover and quick cut to a shot of mom hugging the kid, you're really just watching a video of a toddler hurting himself. AFHV upped the dorky and the bland because otherwise you're watching real life, in which people get hurt and their friends stand around laughing with a video camera.
YouTube is to a much greater degree about that depressing reality.
Friends of mine who work for tips in restaurants and coffee shops tell me that the Sunday afternoon crowd is invariable the stingiest.