There are even more parallels- media frenzy over consoles was huge just before the 1984 crash. I consider this one of the strongest indicators. It even went to the point where there was a television game show ('Wizards') dedicated to video gaming- which is BORING TO WATCH, yet the hype was so intense that the show actually aired.
If we get a 'PS2 Aces' or 'X-Box Masters' game show on television, we'll _know_ the situation is truly parallel. We have seen PS2 riots, after all.
If you can't put it in a mass market category, you can't get mass market _promotion_ for it. It's that simple- the problem is too many vendors trying to put out the "#1 Selling Game", and as a result the products get totally homogenised. God forbid you should produce something that only some people would really like!
I've heard of this game you mention but always took it for another RTS...
Re:Rubbish - but the industry is still in trouble
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Gaming Crash up Ahead
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· Score: 2
I think it's possible that the industry needs a niche market that's a lot more accessible. I'm thinking of Indrema here, primarily, although X-Box is openly targeted at this. The trouble is, X-Box is targeted at this _but_ expected to be a mass market vehicle at the same time, which I don't think is reasonable. There's a big difference between games with million dollar budgets and Tux Racer, several big differences. Tux Racer can't compete in the mass market worth squat- but YOU CAN PRODUCE Tux Racer, and you simply cannot produce the big-budget games anymore- they are so grandiose that they're breaking the backs of the companies that make them, requiring a cast of thousands and requiring that every single one must make every possible tradeoff to be a blockbuster hit.
After a while they all start to seem the same...
That's where the Tux Racer concept comes in (I would be stunned not to see Tux Racer for the Indrema). If you get an Indrema, the primary reason would be you have the capability for game hacking and are interested in doing that for a very specific target. It's the console advantage for programming, only with open source accessibility- if someone figures out how to handle a technical detail 3X better and shares the hack, all games would benefit. The concept is sort of like an 'art-house' console- if there is ever an 'art of game design' to be found, it will be found there because the obligations to hit a mass-market target are virtually nil, and the games themselves are likely to be virtually un-funded.
I know that it would take very little to persuade me to get an Indrema over a PS2, because I'm not normal- I don't play games much, but I play with writing games sometimes, and the temptingness of such a console sitting there waiting to be coded for is great. I am very dubious that X-Box would be remotely comparable- for one, you don't get a community with it, it's just like trying to be an indie PC game developer without VC support (i.e. suicide). Indrema could end up a completely different situation due to its stated aims. It reminds me of PAiA electronics, or Heathkit in a way- a niche that's from time to time established a lasting position in the world of business. PAiA sells musical electronics kits to this day- effects boxes, tube preamps, a vocoder etc. Dunno if Heathkit's still around but look at their history, who knew such a thing would have done so well for so long? Who knew 'consumers' would assemble their own televisions and ham radios in numbers great enough to sustain a company for thirty years? (They ended up branching out into retail and furniture- perhaps a lesson to heed for Indrema, keep the focus on your niche!)
Apart from that, there's always licensed, substandard, boring hogwash to the point that the mass market implodes... and yes, that could happen. The requirement for mass media frenzy is an absolute warning sign- who's read 'Hackers' and remembers the 'Wizards' section- about a real television game show that did nothing but (boringly) hype and show gamers playing videogames? Shortly thereafter, the industry crashed. I wonder if the industry will survive PS2 and X-Box hype, or whether the overselling of the products will lead to inflated expectations of their success and another industry crash.
I don't even have consoles and am not even PC-based and I still can confirm all you say. I'm running on a Mac, and we _are_ getting a respectable number of games, especially compared to the way things used to be some years ago. But even on the Mac it's tough to keep up with gaming on even a slightly old system- and it's not the system speed as it's up to the task for a lot of games- it's SOFTWARE. Requirements for sys 8.5, system 9- known problems with things like CD-R burning using Toast being problematic under System 9 but there are no other options- versions of Quicktime killing the software for video cameras (Color Quickcam, the old ADB sort with a glass lens)- it becomes just not something you can deal with and keep being productive with the machine.
I agree with you though I might be more inclined to pick up the first Playstation, and see if I can cheaply find certain games that were among the best that console had to offer. The last thing I'll want is expansion. I'd rather wait a couple years and get that PS2 at under a hundred bucks- assuming it's even still possible to get a console that was as direct and unfussy as the Atari 2600 I grew up on, or a Playstation. I wonder if that is becoming a thing of the past, and people will end up grovelling through errata and knowledge bases just to play various simple games on their consoles. "Well, this original X-Box game gets broken by this update that enables this other game, and these two games also get broken, but the latest game won't run without the update though you can run one of the two new games on an older update that I saw on an FTP site somewhere..."
EA was paid. Promised unthinkable sums just to add their name to the roster. It's checkbook competition, and you have only EA to thank that they were not also _forbidden_ to do any other sort of game- MS is eager to get as many publishers locked up and contractually forbidden to release for other systems as they can.
If you take a cheap, buggy PC game and port it to X-Box (assuming X-Box even ships, which is not proven), you have a cheap, buggy PC game on a midlevel modern gaming PC, on which MS is dumping money instead of earning it. My suspicion is that the whole thing isn't to produce X-Box, but to kill the console market so people give up and go back to Windows games.
It would be wonderful if gaming was producing a new generation of artists and creative geniuses. This would be great. However, I don't think it's anything like accurate.
The nearest thing I can think of that's like gaming but encourages creativity is social MUDding- the text-based virtual world socialising in which you build an identity and seek friends, sex, whatever. In this arena, creative and expressive abilities are everything and define attractiveness and influence- yet still, people seem to end up with the abilities they bring to the game, they typically don't learn or change from it. And that's in the sort of game _most_ directly rewarding of creative abilities.
No good- this is trivially hackable. Haven't you seen the spams with either alphanumeric gibberish starting them off- or _language_ gibberish in a subparagraph at the bottom? Spam is already avoiding this trap- the whole purpose of randomly generated areas in spam is to bypass any such spamtrapping code. I've seen this over and over.
What if you're a business- or, hell, just _want_ to be a business?
I'm trying to get a recording studio off the ground (obMusicLink), and putting a lot of effort into it. I _have_ to keep airwindows.com out there publically and I get all its email, every dictionary-attack spam on the domain- and I need a solid memorable unsurprising email address to give people if they want one- chrisj@airwindows.com.
It's like some of the mp3-fan reactions to the threat of the format being suppressed- I don't care if you can hide mp3s in zips, or hide email addresses in geeky obfuscation or ever-changing 'stale address discard' rules. I don't have that luxury and never will have it- I'm stuck operating on the outside with my domain and my fledgling business (for which I keep all records of income and expense- not gonna hide from IRS either). I have no option but to use email and web resources straightforwardly and unobfuscatedly- and I won't be able to keep up with the load of spam forever unless the spammers are cracked down on. The spamload could easily just keep accelerating exponentially if nothing is done to stop it- as it seems more mainstream, more will do it, and so on.
(random side note- remember how mp3.com changed its agreement and made it evil? Well, a new music site called ampcast.com recently changed their agreement- and, get this, changed it to be MORE favorable to the artists! Color me flabbergasted. I'm still happy with besonic, myself, but who knew? Kudos to ampcast, just found out about this today:) )
10 secs * 356 days * 50 years = 178000 seconds
178000 secs = 2966 minutes = 49 hours = 2 days
Are you willing to let spammers take 2 days from your life? And in doing so, you are doing nothing to help others. I make more of an effort- I file reports with Spamcop.net. I spend about six times the seconds you do, per day.
What right do you have to say that I should have almost two weeks taken out of my life by spammers? I won't get those two weeks again. You won't get those two days again- and do you think it's going to _stay_ at 10 seconds a day? Soon you'll be spending 45 seconds digging through the spam (nine days out of your life) and I might be spending fifteen minutes a day spamcopping (I have a domain...) and that's SIX MONTHS off my life, just dealing with spammers! Already it seems like I spend many minutes a day on the spam, over and over and over in unending repetition. I wish my ISP used the RBL. They are considering some such action. If they go with the RBL I will fully support it even at its most extreme application.
People won't be using Microsoft software in 6 months
They are _very_ different scenarios. The first is entirely possible depending on just how much they've been 'cooking' the books over there- they're running a stock pyramid and not charging option pay against earnings and the real situation could be absolutely anything- their financial statements should not be considered trustworthy. The second scenario is impossible. No matter what happens to MS, people will be using the software for quite some time, just out of habit and due to the momentum of the platform. This is orthoganal to MS's ability to earn real money- in fact their titanic installed base and interoperability with PC components is their worst enemy as well as Linux's, because they too have to replace all that W95/98 out there in order to maintain a marketshare of _new_ products. It may be mostly Windows out there but they were already paid for it and won't be seeing revenue from all those boxes again- it is a formidable handicap and very expensive proposition to maintain compatability with all the stuff out there.
If MS collapses as a business in 6 months, it'll be because their accounting was even sleazier than I thought. MS as an installed base won't be collapsing anytime soon, but it also isn't necessarily going to do MS the company any good.
Please support this assertion. If I'm not mistaken Steve Ballmer himself has mentioned that Microsoft is overvalued, and there is abundant evidence that Microsoft's accountings are at best fanciful and at worst fraudulent. Check out just the first table in http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html and look at 'wage expense not charged to earnings' and 'wage debt at year-end not booked. An internal auditor at Microsoft was fired after warning the company that what they were doing was illegal and constituted securities fraud. He later was awarded $4 million under the Federal Whistleblowers Act. In an 8/7/99 cover story, The Economist noted that a proper accounting at Microsoft would result in a loss of $18 billion for 1998 rather than the reported
earnings of $4.5 billion. That is just one year and it was a _strong_ year for Microsoft. This cash balance you speak of is more than 65 percent tax benefits associated with the exercise of stock options, employees prepaying their own wages, and the sale of put contracts on its own stock. Microsoft does not charge stock option wage expenses to earnings- and this expense exceeds $9 billion, causing the true expense to be four times as much as they claim.
To underscore this and offer additional explanation supporting this opinion: Dubya is not going to help MS. He might, probably will be seen publically exhorting people to support innovation- that is known as 'politics', he got a great deal of money from Microsoft.
They expect him to spend what little political clout he has (in a deadlocked House and Senate) to bail them out personally. It ain't happening, not when he can just posture and pontificate and do nothing (nada, zip, squat). Any action he takes to bail them out will be immediately used against him politically and will damage his ability to accomplish many other things such as removing the separation of church and state, censoring the Internet, and propping up Texas oil companies.
What does he care about Microsoft, really? He took their money. I seriously doubt he is an honest enough politician to stay bought. For him to start interfering with this very public process... well, I'm making one assumption- I'm assuming he's not crazy. It's possible he is crazy and doesn't understand the damage such interference would do him. If so, life will become _very_ interesting in every respect- and from the strictly Linux perspective the winning strategy would be to widely publicise Microsoft's behavior to its own customers, which would rapidly go beyond abusive. I read in another Slashdot thread of Microsoft threatening a company, saying "You are considered a suspected software pirate because you do not have enough copies of our software for your size of company". This is... not a normal vendor/consumer attitude, and there's no reason to believe they'd stick to threatening large companies. They'll threaten Grandma with her old PII, they'll threaten their entire userbase, and Linux will start to seem a lot more sensible- that or use old or pirate copies of W98 on the reasoning of "if they are going to threaten, extort and raid my physical property why shouldn't I pirate the stuff? They are already treating me as if I am."
Either way, MS actual revenues are severely affected.
Office revenues are down, and I seriously wonder whether your figures take full account of the stock pyramiding Microsoft (and Cisco) does. You've got no idea how expensive MS has become to operate- constantly increasing stock perks to employees to hang onto them, vast nebulous projects like.NET that lead nowhere and are money holes, branching off into completely new areas that are anything but powerbases supported by- you guessed it! spending and more spending and still more spending.
It reminds me of nothing so much as Apple at its deadly worst. Instead of OpenDoc and eWorld, we have SOAP and.NET. Instead of Pippin (remember Pippin?) we have X-Box. And instead of "beleaguered" (which ended up being a darn good wake-up call) we have "MS will never stumble, it always has more than enough money ahahahaha! It will never bobble, never never ahahaha! Here, have some more stock!" which to any normal investor or business person has to set off howling warning klaxons everywhere.
Tell me, if any other company was telling you about.NET, would you say it was even going to _ship_? If any other company told you it was going to expand outward into game consoles and beat hell out of Sony despite having no experience, console marketshare or reputation, would you believe a word of it? Do you seriously think _everyone_ is going to continue to believe black is white, X-Box is progress and.NET is the future just because MS used to have an awful lot of money?
The MS monopoly is outrageously expensive to maintain- they must spend huge amounts on simply maintaining total money hole products like IE to win marketshare and there IS no more marketshare and there aren't any sensible proposals for how they're going to shift to a sustainable profit model not based on continuous exponential growth. If they were forcibly broken up this would be a very good scapegoat for a complete overhaul that would leave them in good shape for years. As it is they are cruising towards a collapse because they insist on treating everything the same way they did when they were unseating Netscape and flooding the world with W95- and they are only the 900lb gorilla in computer software, not consoles or back-ends or servers or media. I don't think they will be able to adapt unless forcibly broken up.
"The only entity in society that can coerce, abuse, or otherwise impress their will on others is the government, as it is the only entity that can legally use force."
This is an astonishing claim. Go read the "Man used innocent company to spam millions of AOLers" story, the "Thomson will crush Xiphophorus/Ogg Vorbis like a bug" story, the "NSI continues to run completely amok" story, and the "Cracker breaks into credit card database and holds company for ransom" story, and then come back here and shut yer pie hole!;P
"Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life."
You are Ayn Rand, and I claim a foolproof definition of Intrinsic Dishonesty:)
Similar thing happened to me and a woman I worked with at a local small business. We bailed the company out of a jam that would've killed it- but we didn't have contracts, it was nod-and-a-handshake, and as soon as someone came along who claimed he could do _everybody's_ job- we were cut loose, see ya. I landed on my feet- I'd been doing GFX work and had always done computer maintenance for them and fell back on that. She didn't, and got hosed for Christmas.
There's a lesson in that, we could have demanded paper contracts (I actually asked about this several times but it was so smalltown a company that I produced a certain amount of shock merely asking) and as we didn't we depended on setting up a social relationship with an employer- who turned out to place no value on this. But there's a reverse lesson too- this employer uses software in violation of license agreements- not massively, but here and there- and it's just not smart of them to (a) do that and (b) piss employees off.
In the final analysis the lesson to be learned is, don't trust untrustworthy people. In this case I'm not going to trust that they're going to be around indefinitely because they're vulnerable several crucial ways. I'll keep in touch and see if they hose themselves more- and if they get sufficiently hosed I'll bail them out again- this time charging all I can reasonably get. I went easy on them before, thinking that I was establishing a working relationship- and that is a good strategy with trustworthy people. It didn't mean squat this time so I shan't bother if the situation recurs. I made quite a bit of an effort to build for myself a reliable, useful role in a team situation. Firing half of the team made this useless, did not impress me and I won't make that effort twice for those people.
Yes, but it's far too easy. Spamming requires nowhere near the effort of burglary, nothing like the directness of assault. The problem is that it is a very socially dangerous behavior that doesn't bear consequences. If you add forgery of electronic messages the 'cost' of spamming goes down so low that just about any half-slime greedhead can convince him or herself that they're doing nothing wrong- and flood the world with the stuff.
It's pure 'tragedy of the commons'- the resource being obliterated is not simply people's attention (and computer resources) but their ability to believe a thing they're told. Before the net, you didn't have ten people lying to you and trying to con you a day. Now you can have ten a minute, never ceasing to try to fool you in new and unforeseen ways. I think this situation is very harmful to society in general. There is no 'honesty zone' or neighborhood where you can trust the people, if you're constantly forced to make judgement calls like 'liar- liar- liar- Khouri- liar- friend- liar- language I can't read- liar...'. It affects you.
Seven years seems right to me. I would hesitate to say the guy should be tortured or put to death simply because I don't consider him mentally fit- I think he is insane to consider his behavior socially acceptable, if he feels that is morally OK he is unfit for society. He's not, for instance, doing lots of drugs and frying his brain- that would be his problem. Instead he's directly affecting millions and causing them all to be a little bit more hostile, a little bit less capable of trust- and forging electronic mail to do it, placing the blame on others.
The DA said this: "This office will not relinquish the vanguard of technology to those whose intent and purpose is to commit old crimes in new ways". DAMN straight. This is nothing but an old crime done on an incomprehensibly vaster scale. Con artists are NOT NEW. Having con artists in your face no matter what you do, and being unable to escape them or shield people you care about (your kids?) from them- is new.
No parole. Make him serve all 7 years- and he'd better have got a clue by then.
"but as long as the 900-lb gorilla pushes it, it will achieve something"
Microsoft will never fail!
Here is another way they will not fail.
(insert statement here)
Be more cautious of your statements. "but" roughly translates to, "here is where I start conning myself about something". At least in your statement above, you're talking yourself into "Microsoft will never fail!" again. That is not only a religious belief, it's not a particularly _interesting_ or _justifiable_ religious belief.
Microsoft will either be broken up and use the opportunity to build a business model not based on uncontrolled growth, or it will be a trainwreck. There is no third option, and there is no 'but'.
I can believe that. I keep seeing the _same_ _ones_ over and over.
Spam reminds me of someone breaking into my house to write commercial messaages on my sticky-notes and paste them to the middle of my monitor, and then yelling at me because my pen's running out of ink. "How dare you let your pen run out of ink? I need to use that pen to save trees and exercise my right of free speech!":P
When I read this article, what jumped out for me was the following thought:
"Wow- some people will believe _any_ old nonsense to back up the idea, 'Microsoft will never fail'."
Honestly, has anyone noticed the sheer madness of this suggestion? For one, it totally ignores W2K- for the idea to make sense it almost accepts that W2K will be a total wreck. It ignores the very real issue that a lot of Linux (or Mac for that matter) is 'not Microsoft' by choice. It ignores the serious risk MS runs in their stock strategy (you'd think a stock reporter would be paying attention to this) and the uncontrolled spending MS is doing. All to prop up the following syllogism:
Microsoft will never fail!
Here are some ways they might not fail.
(insert speculation here)
The fact is, companies fail. They fail when they overspend, like Apple- when they build stock valuation bubbles that burst, like dotcoms- when they try to sell crappy ideas, like other dotcoms. Microsoft has risk for _all_ those reasons- in fact at this point I find it hard to worry about them anymore. Years ago I was desperately worried about them, because I thought they'd seize all the mindshare in the world and refuse to let anyone else into the market. Sure enough, they did, but I had no way of knowing they'd be quite _this_ overextended, dumping their entire fortune into dippy ideas like.NET (which is like an idea without a product: "Let's do something that is THE FUTURE!" "OK, what exactly?" "Um, dunno. But it's THE FUTURE!") and trying to expand a stock bubble that is still so overinflated. It's circular thinking- MS is valuable because it can't fail because it's valuable because it can't fail etc etc.
Some people are going to be _very_ surprised when MS crashes and burns- might take some IRS audits or investigation of their financial practices because they _will_ lie as a last resort and may already be lying like rugs. However, at this point I wouldn't be surprised.
The DoJ is not needed to destroy the monopoly- that would just be nice, as a matter of procedure and law enforcement. The monopoly has destroyed itself in the traditional way- complacency, just as Gates has always desperately feared. It now presides over flagship products that are losing money, and wild new experiments that will never congeal into products. Microsoft's heart has stopped, and it has only a few steps remaining before it falls, DoJ or no DoJ. It might fall harder if there is NO DoJ or breakup, because that action could have provided vitally needed 'surgery'. A breakup is the only thing that can save MS because it's an outside action that could serve as an excuse for serious re-organisation and re-valuation. Without it- they are compelled to keep bluffing until it all collapses.
Because they are basing most of their revenue on a stock pyramid scheme very like Cisco's approach, are suffering declining revenues on Office and hemorhaging money on projects like the abortive collaboration with SGI (anyone even remember what that was called?), X-Box, and.NET which is almost impossible to define in technical terms.
They also cannot derive revenue from product sectors they've integrated such as IE, and are trapped maintaining those without hope of being paid for it.
They are in very bad trouble. Their only hope of avoiding a bloodbath over their stock pyramiding is for people to continue to believe, as you believe, 'it's MS, so it can't possibly fail'. However, the reality of the situation is so ugly that blind faith only buys them some time. Technically, what's happening is that while they spend more and more on upcoming projects (much like Apple at its worst, flushing money away), they rely more and more heavily on the stock side of their balance sheet. Unfortunately, that is the side that will collapse because it has nothing backing it but collective belief.
It is very possible that Microsoft will see the antitrust case totally (and illegally) abandoned, be cleared of all wrongdoing and _then_ collapse completely. At this point winning in court cannot save them, because they are just spending too much and earning too little- the earning is all paper, all stock, and revenues from actual products are both declining and insufficient to support the projects MS is undertaking.
Most of that is paper revenue- Microsoft is mostly an investment engine at this point, most notably issuing buttloads of their own stock. Office revenue is actually down over last year. MS has been publically recognised as running a stock pyramid like Cisco: this is bound to fail. They do need saving. (deserve, on the other hand..)
I suggest a one-word change, then I'll agree
on
Profit vs. Science
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· Score: 2
I suggest the following one word change- then you'll be talking sense.
"This is decision by one of the most influential journals to develop new ways of dealing with intellectual property so that the results of research can be published and knowledge controlled."
Slashdot Mirror
If we get a 'PS2 Aces' or 'X-Box Masters' game show on television, we'll _know_ the situation is truly parallel. We have seen PS2 riots, after all.
I've heard of this game you mention but always took it for another RTS...
After a while they all start to seem the same...
That's where the Tux Racer concept comes in (I would be stunned not to see Tux Racer for the Indrema). If you get an Indrema, the primary reason would be you have the capability for game hacking and are interested in doing that for a very specific target. It's the console advantage for programming, only with open source accessibility- if someone figures out how to handle a technical detail 3X better and shares the hack, all games would benefit. The concept is sort of like an 'art-house' console- if there is ever an 'art of game design' to be found, it will be found there because the obligations to hit a mass-market target are virtually nil, and the games themselves are likely to be virtually un-funded.
I know that it would take very little to persuade me to get an Indrema over a PS2, because I'm not normal- I don't play games much, but I play with writing games sometimes, and the temptingness of such a console sitting there waiting to be coded for is great. I am very dubious that X-Box would be remotely comparable- for one, you don't get a community with it, it's just like trying to be an indie PC game developer without VC support (i.e. suicide). Indrema could end up a completely different situation due to its stated aims. It reminds me of PAiA electronics, or Heathkit in a way- a niche that's from time to time established a lasting position in the world of business. PAiA sells musical electronics kits to this day- effects boxes, tube preamps, a vocoder etc. Dunno if Heathkit's still around but look at their history, who knew such a thing would have done so well for so long? Who knew 'consumers' would assemble their own televisions and ham radios in numbers great enough to sustain a company for thirty years? (They ended up branching out into retail and furniture- perhaps a lesson to heed for Indrema, keep the focus on your niche!)
Apart from that, there's always licensed, substandard, boring hogwash to the point that the mass market implodes... and yes, that could happen. The requirement for mass media frenzy is an absolute warning sign- who's read 'Hackers' and remembers the 'Wizards' section- about a real television game show that did nothing but (boringly) hype and show gamers playing videogames? Shortly thereafter, the industry crashed. I wonder if the industry will survive PS2 and X-Box hype, or whether the overselling of the products will lead to inflated expectations of their success and another industry crash.
I agree with you though I might be more inclined to pick up the first Playstation, and see if I can cheaply find certain games that were among the best that console had to offer. The last thing I'll want is expansion. I'd rather wait a couple years and get that PS2 at under a hundred bucks- assuming it's even still possible to get a console that was as direct and unfussy as the Atari 2600 I grew up on, or a Playstation. I wonder if that is becoming a thing of the past, and people will end up grovelling through errata and knowledge bases just to play various simple games on their consoles. "Well, this original X-Box game gets broken by this update that enables this other game, and these two games also get broken, but the latest game won't run without the update though you can run one of the two new games on an older update that I saw on an FTP site somewhere..."
If you take a cheap, buggy PC game and port it to X-Box (assuming X-Box even ships, which is not proven), you have a cheap, buggy PC game on a midlevel modern gaming PC, on which MS is dumping money instead of earning it. My suspicion is that the whole thing isn't to produce X-Box, but to kill the console market so people give up and go back to Windows games.
The nearest thing I can think of that's like gaming but encourages creativity is social MUDding- the text-based virtual world socialising in which you build an identity and seek friends, sex, whatever. In this arena, creative and expressive abilities are everything and define attractiveness and influence- yet still, people seem to end up with the abilities they bring to the game, they typically don't learn or change from it. And that's in the sort of game _most_ directly rewarding of creative abilities.
No good- this is trivially hackable. Haven't you seen the spams with either alphanumeric gibberish starting them off- or _language_ gibberish in a subparagraph at the bottom? Spam is already avoiding this trap- the whole purpose of randomly generated areas in spam is to bypass any such spamtrapping code. I've seen this over and over.
I'm trying to get a recording studio off the ground (obMusicLink), and putting a lot of effort into it. I _have_ to keep airwindows.com out there publically and I get all its email, every dictionary-attack spam on the domain- and I need a solid memorable unsurprising email address to give people if they want one- chrisj@airwindows.com.
It's like some of the mp3-fan reactions to the threat of the format being suppressed- I don't care if you can hide mp3s in zips, or hide email addresses in geeky obfuscation or ever-changing 'stale address discard' rules. I don't have that luxury and never will have it- I'm stuck operating on the outside with my domain and my fledgling business (for which I keep all records of income and expense- not gonna hide from IRS either). I have no option but to use email and web resources straightforwardly and unobfuscatedly- and I won't be able to keep up with the load of spam forever unless the spammers are cracked down on. The spamload could easily just keep accelerating exponentially if nothing is done to stop it- as it seems more mainstream, more will do it, and so on.
(random side note- remember how mp3.com changed its agreement and made it evil? Well, a new music site called ampcast.com recently changed their agreement- and, get this, changed it to be MORE favorable to the artists! Color me flabbergasted. I'm still happy with besonic, myself, but who knew? Kudos to ampcast, just found out about this today :) )
10 secs * 356 days * 50 years = 178000 seconds
178000 secs = 2966 minutes = 49 hours = 2 days
Are you willing to let spammers take 2 days from your life? And in doing so, you are doing nothing to help others. I make more of an effort- I file reports with Spamcop.net. I spend about six times the seconds you do, per day.
What right do you have to say that I should have almost two weeks taken out of my life by spammers? I won't get those two weeks again. You won't get those two days again- and do you think it's going to _stay_ at 10 seconds a day? Soon you'll be spending 45 seconds digging through the spam (nine days out of your life) and I might be spending fifteen minutes a day spamcopping (I have a domain...) and that's SIX MONTHS off my life, just dealing with spammers! Already it seems like I spend many minutes a day on the spam, over and over and over in unending repetition. I wish my ISP used the RBL. They are considering some such action. If they go with the RBL I will fully support it even at its most extreme application.
They are _very_ different scenarios. The first is entirely possible depending on just how much they've been 'cooking' the books over there- they're running a stock pyramid and not charging option pay against earnings and the real situation could be absolutely anything- their financial statements should not be considered trustworthy. The second scenario is impossible. No matter what happens to MS, people will be using the software for quite some time, just out of habit and due to the momentum of the platform. This is orthoganal to MS's ability to earn real money- in fact their titanic installed base and interoperability with PC components is their worst enemy as well as Linux's, because they too have to replace all that W95/98 out there in order to maintain a marketshare of _new_ products. It may be mostly Windows out there but they were already paid for it and won't be seeing revenue from all those boxes again- it is a formidable handicap and very expensive proposition to maintain compatability with all the stuff out there.
If MS collapses as a business in 6 months, it'll be because their accounting was even sleazier than I thought. MS as an installed base won't be collapsing anytime soon, but it also isn't necessarily going to do MS the company any good.
I don't think you are correct.
They expect him to spend what little political clout he has (in a deadlocked House and Senate) to bail them out personally. It ain't happening, not when he can just posture and pontificate and do nothing (nada, zip, squat). Any action he takes to bail them out will be immediately used against him politically and will damage his ability to accomplish many other things such as removing the separation of church and state, censoring the Internet, and propping up Texas oil companies.
What does he care about Microsoft, really? He took their money. I seriously doubt he is an honest enough politician to stay bought. For him to start interfering with this very public process... well, I'm making one assumption- I'm assuming he's not crazy. It's possible he is crazy and doesn't understand the damage such interference would do him. If so, life will become _very_ interesting in every respect- and from the strictly Linux perspective the winning strategy would be to widely publicise Microsoft's behavior to its own customers, which would rapidly go beyond abusive. I read in another Slashdot thread of Microsoft threatening a company, saying "You are considered a suspected software pirate because you do not have enough copies of our software for your size of company". This is... not a normal vendor/consumer attitude, and there's no reason to believe they'd stick to threatening large companies. They'll threaten Grandma with her old PII, they'll threaten their entire userbase, and Linux will start to seem a lot more sensible- that or use old or pirate copies of W98 on the reasoning of "if they are going to threaten, extort and raid my physical property why shouldn't I pirate the stuff? They are already treating me as if I am."
Either way, MS actual revenues are severely affected.
It reminds me of nothing so much as Apple at its deadly worst. Instead of OpenDoc and eWorld, we have SOAP and .NET. Instead of Pippin (remember Pippin?) we have X-Box. And instead of "beleaguered" (which ended up being a darn good wake-up call) we have "MS will never stumble, it always has more than enough money ahahahaha! It will never bobble, never never ahahaha! Here, have some more stock!" which to any normal investor or business person has to set off howling warning klaxons everywhere.
Tell me, if any other company was telling you about .NET, would you say it was even going to _ship_? If any other company told you it was going to expand outward into game consoles and beat hell out of Sony despite having no experience, console marketshare or reputation, would you believe a word of it? Do you seriously think _everyone_ is going to continue to believe black is white, X-Box is progress and .NET is the future just because MS used to have an awful lot of money?
The MS monopoly is outrageously expensive to maintain- they must spend huge amounts on simply maintaining total money hole products like IE to win marketshare and there IS no more marketshare and there aren't any sensible proposals for how they're going to shift to a sustainable profit model not based on continuous exponential growth. If they were forcibly broken up this would be a very good scapegoat for a complete overhaul that would leave them in good shape for years. As it is they are cruising towards a collapse because they insist on treating everything the same way they did when they were unseating Netscape and flooding the world with W95- and they are only the 900lb gorilla in computer software, not consoles or back-ends or servers or media. I don't think they will be able to adapt unless forcibly broken up.
Wake up: things don't last forever. If Microsoft is 'broken up' I give them ten years before they become irrelevant.
If they are not 'broken up'- I give them three years.
This is an astonishing claim. Go read the "Man used innocent company to spam millions of AOLers" story, the "Thomson will crush Xiphophorus/Ogg Vorbis like a bug" story, the "NSI continues to run completely amok" story, and the "Cracker breaks into credit card database and holds company for ransom" story, and then come back here and shut yer pie hole! ;P
You are Ayn Rand, and I claim a foolproof definition of Intrinsic Dishonesty :)
Similar thing happened to me and a woman I worked with at a local small business. We bailed the company out of a jam that would've killed it- but we didn't have contracts, it was nod-and-a-handshake, and as soon as someone came along who claimed he could do _everybody's_ job- we were cut loose, see ya. I landed on my feet- I'd been doing GFX work and had always done computer maintenance for them and fell back on that. She didn't, and got hosed for Christmas.
There's a lesson in that, we could have demanded paper contracts (I actually asked about this several times but it was so smalltown a company that I produced a certain amount of shock merely asking) and as we didn't we depended on setting up a social relationship with an employer- who turned out to place no value on this. But there's a reverse lesson too- this employer uses software in violation of license agreements- not massively, but here and there- and it's just not smart of them to (a) do that and (b) piss employees off.
In the final analysis the lesson to be learned is, don't trust untrustworthy people. In this case I'm not going to trust that they're going to be around indefinitely because they're vulnerable several crucial ways. I'll keep in touch and see if they hose themselves more- and if they get sufficiently hosed I'll bail them out again- this time charging all I can reasonably get. I went easy on them before, thinking that I was establishing a working relationship- and that is a good strategy with trustworthy people. It didn't mean squat this time so I shan't bother if the situation recurs. I made quite a bit of an effort to build for myself a reliable, useful role in a team situation. Firing half of the team made this useless, did not impress me and I won't make that effort twice for those people.
I for one find it hard to picture 'government bureaucracy' being more actively malicious...
Seven years seems right to me. I would hesitate to say the guy should be tortured or put to death simply because I don't consider him mentally fit- I think he is insane to consider his behavior socially acceptable, if he feels that is morally OK he is unfit for society. He's not, for instance, doing lots of drugs and frying his brain- that would be his problem. Instead he's directly affecting millions and causing them all to be a little bit more hostile, a little bit less capable of trust- and forging electronic mail to do it, placing the blame on others.
The DA said this: "This office will not relinquish the vanguard of technology to those whose intent and purpose is to commit old crimes in new ways". DAMN straight. This is nothing but an old crime done on an incomprehensibly vaster scale. Con artists are NOT NEW. Having con artists in your face no matter what you do, and being unable to escape them or shield people you care about (your kids?) from them- is new.
No parole. Make him serve all 7 years- and he'd better have got a clue by then.
Be more cautious of your statements. "but" roughly translates to, "here is where I start conning myself about something". At least in your statement above, you're talking yourself into "Microsoft will never fail!" again. That is not only a religious belief, it's not a particularly _interesting_ or _justifiable_ religious belief.
Microsoft will either be broken up and use the opportunity to build a business model not based on uncontrolled growth, or it will be a trainwreck. There is no third option, and there is no 'but'.
Spam reminds me of someone breaking into my house to write commercial messaages on my sticky-notes and paste them to the middle of my monitor, and then yelling at me because my pen's running out of ink. "How dare you let your pen run out of ink? I need to use that pen to save trees and exercise my right of free speech!" :P
Honestly, has anyone noticed the sheer madness of this suggestion? For one, it totally ignores W2K- for the idea to make sense it almost accepts that W2K will be a total wreck. It ignores the very real issue that a lot of Linux (or Mac for that matter) is 'not Microsoft' by choice. It ignores the serious risk MS runs in their stock strategy (you'd think a stock reporter would be paying attention to this) and the uncontrolled spending MS is doing. All to prop up the following syllogism:
- Microsoft will never fail!
- Here are some ways they might not fail.
- (insert speculation here)
The fact is, companies fail. They fail when they overspend, like Apple- when they build stock valuation bubbles that burst, like dotcoms- when they try to sell crappy ideas, like other dotcoms. Microsoft has risk for _all_ those reasons- in fact at this point I find it hard to worry about them anymore. Years ago I was desperately worried about them, because I thought they'd seize all the mindshare in the world and refuse to let anyone else into the market. Sure enough, they did, but I had no way of knowing they'd be quite _this_ overextended, dumping their entire fortune into dippy ideas likeSome people are going to be _very_ surprised when MS crashes and burns- might take some IRS audits or investigation of their financial practices because they _will_ lie as a last resort and may already be lying like rugs. However, at this point I wouldn't be surprised.
The DoJ is not needed to destroy the monopoly- that would just be nice, as a matter of procedure and law enforcement. The monopoly has destroyed itself in the traditional way- complacency, just as Gates has always desperately feared. It now presides over flagship products that are losing money, and wild new experiments that will never congeal into products. Microsoft's heart has stopped, and it has only a few steps remaining before it falls, DoJ or no DoJ. It might fall harder if there is NO DoJ or breakup, because that action could have provided vitally needed 'surgery'. A breakup is the only thing that can save MS because it's an outside action that could serve as an excuse for serious re-organisation and re-valuation. Without it- they are compelled to keep bluffing until it all collapses.
They also cannot derive revenue from product sectors they've integrated such as IE, and are trapped maintaining those without hope of being paid for it.
They are in very bad trouble. Their only hope of avoiding a bloodbath over their stock pyramiding is for people to continue to believe, as you believe, 'it's MS, so it can't possibly fail'. However, the reality of the situation is so ugly that blind faith only buys them some time. Technically, what's happening is that while they spend more and more on upcoming projects (much like Apple at its worst, flushing money away), they rely more and more heavily on the stock side of their balance sheet. Unfortunately, that is the side that will collapse because it has nothing backing it but collective belief.
It is very possible that Microsoft will see the antitrust case totally (and illegally) abandoned, be cleared of all wrongdoing and _then_ collapse completely. At this point winning in court cannot save them, because they are just spending too much and earning too little- the earning is all paper, all stock, and revenues from actual products are both declining and insufficient to support the projects MS is undertaking.
Result: splat.
Most of that is paper revenue- Microsoft is mostly an investment engine at this point, most notably issuing buttloads of their own stock. Office revenue is actually down over last year. MS has been publically recognised as running a stock pyramid like Cisco: this is bound to fail. They do need saving. (deserve, on the other hand..)