Coca-cola actually _unsold_ me, personally, with advertising. Here's the story- I was cheerfully buying 12pack after 12pack of Coke, because I was cheerfully in a rut and didn't want to consider bothering with any other soda, although I periodically got envious that Pepsi drinkers got to buy pepsi by the case, a '24pack'.
Then Coke took to sticking a text area directly on their cans, on every can. I've seen it used for special promotions (like 'win a trip to Disneyland') but 99.99% of the time it was the same advertising blurb- and a horrible one! Hopefully I will soon entirely forget this, but it went, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste. The fizz. It's all there (bits of ad blurb already forgotten, thankfully deleted- culminating in) Coca-cola enjoy.
I could not get away from this freaking, drooling idiocy. It spoke to me every time I tried to drink Coca-cola- I'd lift the can and boom, there was the blurb, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste! The fizz! It's ALL THERE..." I took to reciting it to friends with GREAT SERIOUSNESS, verbatim, to illustrate just how horrible the blurb was. And then, finally, fed up, I taught myself to like Mountain Dew, knowing it was another caffiene-rich soda beverage much smiled on by geek types- and ever since, I get both, the Mountain Dew in 24-packs.
They have ceased running the blurbs, but the damage was already done. I never wrote to Coca-cola and explained, "You guys are making me _embarrassed_ to hold a can of your product in public, and you are un-selling me from it". Seemingly someone did- how many other people went and started drinking Dew or Pepsi or jynnan tonix, however?
Advertising can be damned dangerous. If you annoy people badly enough you UN-SELL them from your product. And it really, really doesn't matter if people remember the name- if they remember it in order to never buy it again!
Try it in a small town and see how well you get along with people when you're inevitably 'outed'. The difference is, _individuals_ attempting to put up a front behind which they can commit horrors end up, not simply in jail or prison, but in solitary confinement in prison for their own protection. Did you know there are classes of criminals that must be protected in prison or they won't live to trial because OTHER CRIMINALS find their acts too repugnant?
The fact is, there's no 'veneer of respectability' durable enough to forever protect against exposure of the horrors beneath. With individuals, this leads to prisons and sometimes to the murder of an offender by other prisoners- for instance, the murder of a cannibal or child molester or some other offense considered so intolerable that the offender needs to be just immediately killed, hell with the courts.
With corporations, this situation cannot occur- even in a case of a Nestle attempting to extort money from mothers by threatening them with the starvation of their infants, or a Monsanto trying to hijack the agricultural production of entire third world countries and replacing self-sustaining crops with sterile genetically engineered poison-emitting crops, people still forget about these things, and there isn't a social context of corporations that would punish such acts, and governments generally find it difficult to do so.
Simple disseminating of information really isn't enough- it just establishes a public expectation that the world is horrible and cynical and destroys everything- there's little reason to work for a better situation there. What would be more effective is establishing situations that _are_ genuinely ethical and fair- in particular, situations that are socially cooperative and constructive such as the Free Software Movement- to contrast with the many situations that are plainly destructive and unethical.
Funny how, just recently, another Slashdotter (in a Katz thread) supplied a link to an article in The Atlantic Monthly on how corporations were buying up academia and censoring research that didn't say happy shiny things about new cancer drugs and the like.
This of course is troubling, since it is the blatant suppression of risk information to the public, but the article and related articles also touched on how, in the new corporately-directed academia, subjects like English, Classics, and yes... Ethics are completely falling by the wayside. Nowhere is this easier to see than in the words of some Slashdot geek posters- technically brilliant, yet ethically illiterate.
In some cases, it's sarcasm- it's hard to tell whether jabber is being intentionally outrageous as a joke, or to provoke a response. In other cases, it's no joke, and the people honestly know no better.
It's very much like the moral/ethical equivalent of a VB programmer (better yet, an HTML 'programmer' doing entirely MSHTML) insisting that there is nothing beyond that level- that what programming _IS_, is clicking buttons and operating 'wizards', and anyone claiming differently are full of themselves.
When viewed in this context, it's easy to see the error- to Slashdot readers like kernel hackers and security gurus and John Carmack, it's obvious that programming does not stop with the operating of Code Wizards, does not stop with Frontpage and HTML. It's glaringly self-evident that there's more to it than that.
To someone who's read a lot of classics, who's _studied_ ethics and morality with a certain amount of academic rigor (such as you don't get from school these days), the claims of slashdottenlibertarians are equally astonishing, and it's just as self-evident that such claims are not simply wrong, but even Considered Harmful (tm). Morals, ethics are _arranged_, they do not simply arise from the interactions of utterly self-interested individuals. They have a societal value that is more powerful than their individual value. Read some real philosophy- Confucius' "The Analects" on ethics, Plato's works involving Socrates for a taste of just how easily your beliefs can be tied in knots when you haven't thought them through, Thoreau for a taste of what it is like to not worship self-interest as a god, for what it's like to seek more than that out of life.
The bottom line is that the ruthless pragmatist approach, personified by the corporate 'persons' that surround us, is only one approach, and it is a destructive approach, with no future in it. Survival dictates that those of us who can, _must_ attempt to fall back on ways of thinking which have better societal survival value. This is very well demonstrated by the free software movement- which very directly places societal wellbeing ahead of the rights of individuals to profit from and withhold their works- and in so doing, tangibly gives all those 'oppressed' individuals access to far more than they could ever generate on their own.
That's the way society has always worked, folks. The future didn't belong to the first guy who made an axe, killed everyone else in his village who made axes, and became the lead hunter. The future went to the villages where everybody was cooperating in making axes, where the social expectations were that people would till the fields, would take care of things that needed doing even if it didn't benefit the individual all that much. Cooperation is a survival trait- a SOCIAL survival trait.
The people who are espousing the 'morality' of the gunpoint, of the 'I win, that is what morality is', are doomed- because yes Virginia, there is a reality, and your decision to place your own profit ahead of any other consideration does not affect this reality one iota, nor protect you from the consequences that you wish to simply ignore. And when the bill comes due, you can rant all you want about how _immoral_ it is for anyone to limit you or restrain you the slightest bit- you can rave about how unfair it is, don't people understand that you WON?
But society must survive- and if you place your interests ahead of society's, you'd just better hope that you don't end up getting in the way, or your protests will be ignored as you get steamrollered- because morality and ethics do NOT boil down to 'he who wins, wins'. Nobody is so completely immune from the requirements of interacting with society as that...
Actually, if they are legally people, it's not at all unreasonable to expect them to live up to the same expectations. People who behave like corporations do are socially unacceptable, even sociopathic, and are shunned or locked up for their inability to understand moral or ethical concepts. Since corporations are given the privilege of being legally counted as people, there is every reason to expect them to suffer the same constraints.
Now, whether you can _make_ them understand this is another matter. Perhaps it is simply impossible to teach corporations morals and ethics. In that case, I'd consider it evidence that perhaps they should _not_ be treated as people under the law...
Absolutely: The Atlantic Monthly makes Katz's point much better than he does. That doesn't invalidate his point. Even if he's phrasing it stupidly, I am grateful Katz is trying to raise this issue at all. How many people really WANT to live in a world in which all research about health risks is censored by corporations before it can be acted on? The world would become a fscking deathtrap- the risks of placing the corporate agenda ahead of public health are catastrophic. But guess what? The corporate agenda IS ahead of public health, companies DO act to censor researchers' findings, and increasingly the only way to get word out about stuff like 'flock workers' lung' is to QUIT and be a whistleblower. In an academic environment increasingly controlled and monopolised by private industry, is that any way to build a career? Is it reasonable to expect that there will be a steady supply of people ready and willing to throw away their LIVES and their whole futures simply to identify catastrophic health hazards for the public good?
If these are not the people responsible for identifying the dangers and risks of the modern world, then who?
Read 'The Kept University' if you couldn't stomach Katz's take on it. This is SERIOUS, dammit. Even ignoring the concerns over wholesale destruction of the cooperative spirit in scientific research, public health matters, and the stats are freaking chilling. "More recently, an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that studies of cancer drugs funded by pharmaceutical companies were roughly one eighth as likely to reach unfavorable conclusions as nonprofit-funded studies.". Read this stuff! This matters. It's not okay to suppress risk information...
Cops are never 'off duty', if a serious emergency arises the cop has no freedom to ignore. If you were getting mugged and there was an off-duty cop down the street would you expect help? The cop's job is defined as 'protect and serve' (not rule- the cop doesn't make the rules) which can mean going into deadly situations eyes wide open, of speaking to the guy who looks like he's carrying grenades even if he might _be_ carrying grenades and prepared to use them on a whim. That's the job. The idea is that you, the regular old citizen, get to walk around without routinely considering the possibility that any random passersby will throw a grenade at you or mug you.
The cop's _job_ is social justice, whether done well or poorly- ideally the cop does this well, doesn't step on people's toes too much and successfully stops the people who want to throw grenades/blow up stuff/mug you/con you/etc. There are always going to be people like that, but the only way you'll get decent cops is if people _are_ willing to believe in social justice and willing to sacrifice themselves for it, because I don't think OSHA rules cover 'stopping guys with grenades'- by definition there can't be effective safety rules for cops because the cop's whole job is defusing unsafe situations.
I have to wonder- was the original poster thinking of 'urban guerrillas' sacrificing themselves for social justice- or of cops? It could be read either way. When reading it I immediately thought of a poster I once saw here in Brattleboro (a biggish Vermont town). It said in big letters, PROTEST POLICE BRUTALITY! Then in smaller letters it said, actually here in Brattleboro we're not aware of any police brutality, but we would like to invite any Brattleboro police to come join with us to help protest police brutality in _other_ places...
Fair enough, and an accurate reading of current laws- however, you're missing something on a deeper level.
One shoplifter is a criminal.
A hundred shoplifters is a jail.
A thousand shoplifters is a prison.
A nation of shoplifters- is a new law.
Politicians forget this at their peril. Judges? Judges don't need to understand it- it's not really their place to change the rules so ostentatiously. The politicians are the ones who have to be aware of situations like this.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic-for-the-common-man and great potential-vote-getter. Already politicians are looking askance at the RIAA side for making absurd claims (such as that the Home Recording Act means nothing and conveys no permissions to copy). Add to this the amount of cheap positive publicity available to politicians aligning themselves with that 'nation of shoplifters', many of whom may be perfect selfish one-issue voters, and there's little chance the rules will remain the same.
I'm in the process of refurbishing some mac pluses to do fun things with them- basically fixing them up and painting them black. They boot off floppies (800K only) and have no drives or fans anywhere in them, so they're dead silent. Given a small modem they can happily dial into a shell account- I was reading Slashdot last night on one via lynx- and of course there's text editing using TeachText (very small program), and I am planning to test out whether I can use them and boot into vi- not a joke- the Mac port of Vim is what I'll be testing, to see if the 68K version will cope with a Plus- set it up as a Finder replacement, and presto, a tiny 60W black vi box:)
That's not scary? Correct, the scary bit is this- I doubt I can make a plus boot Linux, because IBM's watch has EIGHT TIMES the ram of these little computers o_O not to mention 8M 'disk' to boot off as opposed to the 800K floppy...
Still, it looks very likely that I can at least get vi onto one of these little buggers eventually. I'll call them linux training boxes, a sort of art project:)
Seriously- I sell CDs myself, through mp3.com (see URL link above- slashdot me, pleeeease;) ). I ask $5.99 for 'em- for reasons of my own I choose to ask the lowest price mp3.com will allow. I get HALF of that. This means mp3.com gets $3 and just manages to make a profit on it. Now, these are BURN TO ORDER CDs with custom four-color CMYK inserts and custom printing on the CD itself! This is not a junk product- yet mp3.com _still_ can put it out for as little as $3 to itself and $2.99 for me. Burn to order is NOT cheaper than mass production. How is it that I can actively be a CD-selling recording artist (I'm expecting upwards of $400 for this quarter and have only been mp3.comming for a couple months) and be undercutting the RIAA labels so brutally and still turn a tidy profit, unless the RIAA labels are an insane, unbelievable ripoff that should be boycotted and fought against on the principle of the thing?
Let them sell their CDs for $5.99 too, and maybe I would buy one. Their artists get LESS than I do per CD. Their production values are worse than what I'm able to put out (in particular, see some of my very recent work like 'B17 Flying Fortress'- you don't get that kind of lushness and fullness out of pop CDs anymore, they are compressed to _death_). Nothing about what they're offering merits prices two and three times what I sell for- it's grotesque. I totally support anybody fighting these creeps by whatever means. And if you want to 'pirate' my mp3s too- *waves* have fun! You have my permission, not that you can't download them from me for free anyhow, and give me the page hit:)
You will very likely be forced to buy another X-Box- at the price of a super fancy video card- to play with your housemate. The goal here is to monopolise the home entertainment system, a larger market than the home computer. This also means taking over from the stereo system- you'll note red book audio (CDs) are not supported on X-Box? Very likely this is collusion with RIAA labels- Microsoft helps them invent a 'secure music' format, and gets dirt cheap licensing in exchange for trying with the X-box to take over from anything else in the home entertainment system. There will be no 'line ins' on the X-Box for hooking up your CD player. There _would_ very plausibly be special digital outs just for hooking up to your new digital amplified speakers- which would sound much better than your usual speakers, except you can't hook your CD player to them, and if you got a new CD player that has the digital outs, you'll be hooking and unhooking SPEAKER wires between CD player and X-Box- which will be handling the latest 'secure music' AND games AND DVDs (no region coding cheats tho! sux to be you!). How long will your CD player last under these conditions? It'll be filed in the closet eventually, and you'll be buying your favorite music over again for the convenience of throwing them in the X-Box, and awaaay we go.
As a content creator type person I am understandably interested in these developments, and very curious about just how locked out I will be from this situation. Clearly the _trend_ is that only the Sonys of the world will get the licensing and 'encoding keys' to distribute to such a platform, but how far will it go? Will there be token means for J.Random Musician or Programmer to get their content onto the planned Home Entertainment System For All, or will it be strictly controlled? That'd be interesting because it would be an experiment- given that the ultra-huge corporations turn out a certain _style_ of media and content, how far would this go toward satisfying all of the people all of the time? My instinct says this is a backward step- like moving back to the predictability of network television after people have a taste of The Net. Of course, the Internet-savvy computer geek is NOT the prime target here- they're after the people who only have cable TV maybe, who have never experienced media as anything other than consumers. The goal is to blow them away with posh media so intensely that they don't notice it's basically one big alliance of conglomerates (MS/RIAA/MPAA/what have you) supplying ALL of it and blocking anyone else from access.
It only stands to reason that these big corporate conglomerates, in their frustrated attempts to fight consumer interests, would eventually notice that they can form alliances with each other to get what they want... informally, but effectively...
At a guess, they are going to try to enlist the support of the RIAA by refusing to support MP3s, user-burned CDRs, _or_ traditional CDs, intentionally supporting only whatever the labels come up with as 'secure music' and trying very hard to leverage X-Box to make the traditional CD obsolete? With lots of support from the RIAA labels, I'm sure.
I see no other sensible reason for scrapping red book audio. People, people, remember: this company, when you look at its corporate actions, is _evil_, it's hostile to consumers. Stop creaming over the words 'nVidia custom chips' for a minute and _think_. Of course they're going to f**k you over and make all your CDs obsolete in collusion with the RIAA labels. They're probably being paid to do just that and you know they want to monopolize the 'home entertainment system' which is certainly due to take over from the 'stereo system'. Do you really want to support these people?
At any rate, I would strongly suggest that this means the traditional CD is being 'deprecated'. It's time to buy ALL YOUR CDs over again! Beat the rush! Run out to the store just as soon as somebody figures out a secure digital music format that degrades after ten plays so you can be put on a _rental_ basis!
Quite sure they don't have a fan- I have like six, most of which work, all of which have been merrily taken apart right and left:)
No X! I was thinking of console Linux that somehow made use of the stuff in the ROM anyway- yes this would be a _totally_ different display subsystem than Linux would normally have, but that's kind of the idea- what could use as much built into the Plus as possible, and still act like the Linux command line with a good amount of available programs like rm, vi or whatever? (Maybe there'd only be room for ed;) ) X is right out- no way would it fit in the typical Plus. I realise that I'm talking extreme Franken-hacking but I simply don't care because the notion of a Mac Plus cheerfully booting to a white-on-black console Linux prompt is too cool to miss. Three-button mouse? Who needs a mouse? *g* leave it unplugged! The keyboard will suffice! If you _reverse_ the leads on a telephone wire you get a Mac Plus keyboard wire, and can extend it much farther than the little stock wire. (If you don't reverse the wires, the Mac is shorted out into permanent death:) )
Theism of some kind _can_ be a very useful 'meme' when you have the tendency to behave as though you have to control the world and everything around you. You can call that codependency, you can call it typical of drug addicts, you could call it a very common trait that _creates_ drug addicts, but the fact is there are many people who are neither cowardly or stupid, yet who habitually interact with the world in a controlling, manipulative way that just doesn't produce helpful results.
There's a hell of a lot of evidence that, for people whose heads are wired that way, developing a faith in some kind of God is a very helpful 'mental judo' that gets them out of their own way- whether or not this faith is at all logical or provable or justifiable. As a result you get into a situation like this:
I don't know whether there's a guiding power greater than people (i.e. me)
When I act on the basis that I must master my fate, I get hung up and tangled in my own schemes and cause chaos
When I act _as_ _if_ there is a 'God', I cause less chaos, and things mysteriously work out better than when I was mucking them up
When I do this without belief, it's like walking a razorblade and I'm fighting my instincts to muck things up all the time
When I do this with the trick of the mind called 'belief', I likewise avoid mucking things up, but I sleep better and worry less about stuff.
Just how valuable is your pride, anyhow? It may be that controlling your surroundings with cold rationality works dandy for you. Some people don't have the knack of that, which doesn't mean they're dumb- they might be overly stressed, or too perfectionistic, or kind of obsessive- which aren't always bad traits. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that 'theistic faith' can be quite an advantage in these cases- even the humility of accepting that 'the pattern of life' is too complex for one person to grasp can be a real breakthrough, and once you've accepted that you can no longer 'disprove God' any more than you can disprove space aliens or galactic wormholes or anything else that you wouldn't be expected to understand.
It always kind of annoys me to see these fervent attacks on any form of theism. Usually I let it pass. This time, though it's 4 AM and I should be heading to bed, I felt like speaking up just a bit. Yeah, I have vague theistic notions. I consider it an intrinsic quality of my relation to this God that I can't possibly understand it- it is by definition (my definition) entirely beyond my ability to comprehend. It is, however, a pretty good reason for me to leave some things to it, and concentrate on just trying to do the best I can with what I have. I know that this works better than my previous need to be the master of my fate- I do _not_ know that this is because there's an old guy with a beard 'up there'. I could be wrong- I could be looking at pure chaos and projecting an order that doesn't exist (on the other hand, look at the scientific definition of chaos....). But the bottom line is, my relation to the world is saner and less dogmatic when I _do_ have faith in whatever the heck my God is.
If you don't like that, sux to be you;) because your arguments will not change the fact that when I believed as you did, I was _miserable_ and pretty dysfunctional at life. Sorry- atheism didn't work well for me. It didn't tend to make me good at patience or tolerance- never mind peace. I'd rather not know and quietly expect some higher order in the universe, than convince myself that I'm _it_.
Actually, the key computer I'd like to see Linux running on is a Mac Plus. Why? There are _zillions_ of them out there for the taking, they are diskless (meaning they're totally quiet to use- more quiet than a Cube or modern iMac) and they're really cute:)
They would make the ideal little dumb terminal or CLI-based unix toystation, and only pull about as much power as a 60 watt lightbulb:) Mac Pluses rule! I have about six, and one day I _will_ run Linux on 'em- or something much like it. The ROM contains much useful stuff like drivers and the Chicago font (I forget if it also contains Geneva 9 and Monaco 9). You can fit a terminal in _MacOS_ onto one on a floppy complete with MacOS itself (like sys6 or earlier)- it has got to be possible to get one working like a linux terminal, if you use the stuff in ROM and don't bother loading MacOS.
Ideally I'd like to see it run gcc or some ancestor of emacs off a floppy:) however, vi or bash or sh are not to be scorned. The important thing is to get the recognisable environment in there- something that 'speaks Linux'- because it would be ultimately cool, and the cost would be basically nil. There are _so_ _many_ of these little buggers around, most still work fine and the ones that are borken, EVERY failure mode has been mapped out by now and books written on 'em.
I have to wonder, how fatal is the Mac Plus's flaw of not having an MMU? Did the original PDP that unix was written for have an MMU? How far back would you have to go to get a Unix that expected no more hardware than what a Plus has to offer? It'd be a weird combination of ancient code smallness and crudity, and very non-Unix focus on using the contents of the Plus ROM wherever possible.
If all the more suitable, appropriate potential complainers (like OEMS, distributors or what have you) are all too intimidated and cowed to complain, why not Sun? If Sun, too, was so frightened of Microsoft that they dared not open their mouth, would that make it OK?
Funny how this should be a slashdot article all of a sudden. I use NS 4.6 and iCab pre2.0 alternately, because they both go down in flames fairly often. On both of them I see more and more and more pages that render solid areas of blackness- text that's supposed to be white or something and is being drawn black on black. I am increasingly resigned to the idea that the Web is becoming off limits for me, which is a strange idea for anyone who knows me, as I've usually been the token geek to give computer advice etc. to acquaintances.
I wish we _could_ go back to NS2 or whatever. The web has never been a very tidy place, but it is becoming almost uninhabitable unless you use IE5, which I refuse to do on principle. If that means I get cut off entirely so be it...
The weird part is, you will also find Moody making extraordinarily damaging accusations at Microsoft and feebly 'spinning' them as well.
Moody on MS employees newly hosed due to stock corrections: "The best you can say for them is that they made a deal with the Devil, and the Devil reneged".
Moody wrote about how status for management at Microsoft had become a matter of _not_ answering your email, to appear more busy. This is a screaming red flashing warning sign of complacency and corporate rot, and Moody blithely did a column exposing it.
Moody raked IE 4.0 over the coals, pointing out things such as the bug with Compaq Presarios that caused the installation to make the windows desktop a blank. He painted IE4 as an absolute betrayal.
The bottom line isn't simple, but people seldom are when they're as strange as Moody. This is a man who can go to great lengths to persuade the reader that (for instance) Linux needs to put a LOT OF WORK in before it can run for 24 hours at a time without crashing- a concept that is strikingly at variance with reality (as boring as the reality of a Xless webserver might unfortunately be...) And yet he's also capable of exposing some very damaging realities about Microsoft- I'd entirely forgetten that the "MS management intentionally not answering internal emails" story was his. The one consistent line to take through it all is this- Moody is a fanatic, a fanatic Microsoft supporter, but NOT necessarily of the real Microsoft company. He is a fanatic for the ideal Microsoft which he believes once existed, which he feels Bill Gates still personally represents, MS coders still represent. This is his fanaticism.
As such, it's impossible to persuade him otherwise- if you show him that MS management are far gone in corporate rot, he writes a column about that and laments how MS 'lost its way' from the REAL Microsoft which he strongly suggests is still in there plugging away but unaware of all the nastiness. If you show him that IE 4 shipped buggy as hell and caused major problems with top-selling Compaqs, he laments this, wonders what happened to what he describes as the best, most rigorous testing operation anybody's ever had, and in the end blames Netscape for enticing MS marketers to release IE4 too soon- and again, the _ideal_ of Microsoft stays intact, and it's the suits' fault- his hero Microsoft coders and testers can do no wrong.
This is dangerous and quite frustrating, because it's impossible to contend with. You are never going up against Microsoft, in Moody's eyes- instead you are going up against the Ideal Microsoft, the one that delivers on all its promises and works really hard and benefits the consumer and is as tireless as an old-school Ma Bell employee. The one that doesn't exist, and never did...
So it's impossible for anyone to live up to that standard- it's an imaginary standard, and that is why nothing will ever sway Moody from his MS loyalty and determination to spin everything MSwards. Yet MS itself cannot live up to that standard, never could- it was a hype, a fake. So Moody periodically flames Microsoft itself- and proceeds to spin the flame MSwards, too, and this is why on the one hand he can expose shocking cynicism, contempt for consumers, and rot at the core of Microsoft, and on the other hand keep an unshakable faith that nevertheless, Microsoft is The One Answer. He's not actually hired- if he was he would certainly not expose some of the very embarrassing realities he's exposed. He's a fanatic- he fights for the _ideal_ Microsoft, so his fury is all the more obvious when he sees Microsoft failing to live up to what he sees as their true heart and soul. He blames marketing, Netscape, anyone other than the real coders at MS, the real brain trust, Gates- those he sees as keepers of the faith.
Unfortunately, those are exactly the people who have intentionally done all the things that break his heart. Moody cannot handle the truth- the heart of Microsoft is, and always was, mean, treacherous, and fraudulent. It's always been about the money and never about delivering a quality product. It's always been conflict with the rest of the industry (all the way back to Altair Basic) and dirty tricks and strongarm tactics worthy of Mafiosi. That is how they won. Cheaters do sometimes win, when they aren't punished. Otherwise, why cheat?
In the end, Moody is more to be pitied than censured. A thousand slashdot readers madly rebutting him will not shake his illusions. Not even the failure of his seeming idol will shake his illusions, because they are built on mirages, and you can't tear down a fantasy with real-world arguments.
The reason to pity him is this- the fantasy is all he has.
_Nobody_ puts that much effort into pre-emptively defending their integrity unless they're a con:)
Were it not for that comment I might think he was simply a fool- but fools are less self-aware. Moody's a _con_. He's like a 'mole', can't possibly be saying these things out of genuine sincerity. There's got to be some heavy secrets in there somewhere- though I doubt many people would care. "Fred Moody turned out to be a paid Microsoft employee working undercover!" "Fred who?"
The most touchingly pathetic bit is this- both Moody, and many Slashdotters being alarmed by him, seem to believe that non computer geeks, the un-tech-savvy, have NEVER EXPERIENCED a con before. Um, used car dealers have been around for many years guys- before then you had real estate cons selling you beachfront properties in Florida. Cons are NOT NEW.
A surprisingly large percentage of nongeeks of all ages and walks of life will look at this guy, this 'one journalist, at least, in whom readers could trust absolutely', and _automatically_ go 'shyeeeah right'... correctly spotting the CON of him without even having a technical background to rebut his claims.
Of course, I'm reminded of another phrase by all this: "Then they fight you,"
The thing is, Centipede's _actions_ are as simple as you can get (almost- see 'pong' or 'target fun') but the 'game space' is much more complicated than that. You have the little mushrooms which seriously affect the motion of the centipede, you have spiders, all sorts of things can affect the shape of play. It's like shooting all the invaders in the middle of Space Invaders and then there are only two left on opposite ends of the screen and they rocket downwards at a sickening pace- the _pattern_ of the gameplay can be more involved than your actions.
When you look at a Q3A the complexity is certainly great- it's single combat (or multiple) against other individuals, but that doesn't mean it's a high point in gameplay depth. It's a very well realised but essentially direct sort of game. Compare it to, say, WarBirds (MMOL WWII combatsim) and you see a lot more constraints. In Warbirds you're in a propeller-driven warplane. It's powerful (and very realistically modelled) but it's no F15- you cannot point up and hit 'go', you'll stall and crash- or end up muddling around at low speed, unable to maneuver effectively. When you evaluate an enemy, you gauge their 'e' state (energy) to see whether they are slow or fast, high or low compared to you. You register what plane they're in- if they're in a hot ME109 and you're not, you don't try climbing away from them. If they're in a P51 Mustang you don't dive away from them, etc. These constraints have a profound effect on what you can do and expect to survive- now, imagine 20 different planes all in the sky around you, some nearer, some attacking, some far or fleeing or doing other things. It is called SA, or Situational Awareness. Your ability to survive and fight depends on maintaining a mental model of all these interactions, plus being able to handle a big hunk of steel with a roaring engine whirling a big prop (or two, or four).
Compared to this, Quake is far more physical- in Q3A the differences among players are minimised, it becomes a straight challenge of reflexes. This is one extreme of gameplay- in some ways Warbirds in full realism is another. In Q3A having uber-reflexes may be the ideal quality, in Warbirds a person with uber-reflexes but no SA will typically lose to a person with OK reflexes and greatly superior situational awareness- because that person can get reflex-man into impossible situations. For instance, if the reflex player is in a FW190 pursuing a ME109, he is already hosed by lack of climb ability, and can be doubly hosed by use of a climbing spiral on the ME109's part. The ME can do this- the FW190, on the other hand, not only cannot match the ME but also has very nasty departure characteristics, tending to go into violent spins and sometimes flip into inverted spins spontaneously. All the ME has to do is entice the heavily armed FW to try and pull angles for a desperate shot- and then swoop down on the helpless butcherbird as it tries to recover from the resulting spin.
There is no reason games can't be both simple and possessed of this depth of consequences- but you can't have that level of inner complexity without some very good design. It's a lot easier to set up balanced players to ensure no bitching, and work to make everything equalised. To introduce 'situational' elements such as the realistically modeled warplanes of WarBirds will tend to cause competitive gamers to pile onto what they feel is the strongest 'game piece'- in WWII flightsims, this has changed madly with different sims and versions, with everything from the FW190 to the Spit to the P-38 Lightning being, temporarily, the 'uberplane', sometimes for very dicey reasons (at one point in Air Warrior, you could spin a FW on purpose and recover pointing whatever direction you wanted, in normal flight attitude. This got fixed and the players who racked up high scores doing it got well and truly hosed when the 'bug' got fixed...)
I think perhaps Pac-Man is (in the set-top-score mode) not properly complex in this way. Unless you have to make judgement calls based on how the ghosts are likely to move, it's just a Zenlike repetition of memorised patterns- not SA. Centipede is actually more like SA. Tempest tries to be, but not effectively- (the spikes are mere obstacles to clear). Missile Command is more like situational awareness because of the distributed nature of the bases and the need to focus on protecting certain areas if you start getting flattened:) In general, a game can only have situational awareness if it has a situation. Some games like the descendents of Warcraft are very good at establishing situations beyond the player's ability to fully perceive, and then developing them and forcing re-evaluation (where did that guy come from? For that to happen there would have to be a base over _there_, etc)
Think about designing games not only in terms of defining the neat stuff on screen, but defining what is unseen. For SA, the 'game space' needs to be more complex than the player can entirely grasp- but little bits of it need to be immediately abstracted, formed into concepts or generalisations, ideally so that information leads to better performance. ("That TIE fighter's a long way from home.. how'd it get out here in the first place? Those are only short range! Look, it's heading for that moon..";) )
Ironically, your point is quite strong. This is because the 'glitzy life' is a mirage- the majority of _platinum_ _sellers_ don't make as much money as they might make selling CD-Rs off their own website. Some file for bankruptcy. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds ended up putting his folk music on mp3.com because he couldn't feed his family from his major label career. This is the guy who controlled the band that did "Eight Miles High" and covered "Mr. Tangerine Man", songs that are still in rotation on radio stations _thirty_ years later.
Help educate musicians to NOT SIGN WITH THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! As you say 'don't play the game their way!'. Talking about 'major labels' is deceptive as the same four companies own 95% of the _minor_ labels and 'indie' labels too. Have the musicians read the contracts- you can quickly identify which organisations are part of the music industry and which are not. The music industry contracts are the most brutally, obscenely unbalanced legal documents you'll ever see- genuine alternative resources (like mp3.com, at least so far) have contracts that are actually _fair_. It's _not_ hard to see the difference. Compare mp3.com's contract with farmclub.com's, for example.
Huh? You're confusing me pinkboy;) All I'm saying is that it'd be annoying to have some slimy little bugger charging people for access to the music which I put up for free... screw tips, my CDs cost way less than RIAA ones and if you buy one you actually _get_ something. Charging people to listen to something is stupid, better to give them something real for it:)
I recently spoke to a slashdot reader who'd listened to my music on mp3.com (see URL link above). It turned out the only thing he liked was the one 'Electric Blues' track that I had on the page, a track called 'Alleycat', but he really really liked that one- and he wrote me email saying so, and then wrote more email trying to pay me for just that one mp3.
He wanted to give me a dollar for it, and wasn't sure how that could be arranged. He was quite serious, too- although he had very particular tastes, 'Alleycat' hit him so hard that he felt obliged to pay me for it.
I straightened him out pretty quick;) first of all, the album 'Alleycat' is on is only $5.99. It has a nice attractive cover and includes other worthy tracks (though none of them are Electric Blues but Alleycat). Six bucks is not a huge amount- he could get the CD.
Failing that, I had the option when I uploaded the track to make it 'streaming only'- which is a joke anyway, but theoretically it could be withheld and people prevented from downloading it. I chose to make it freely downloadable on purpose- you simply can't focus entirely on money because as an artist there's an even more important currency, the currency of attention. It may not make sense to everybody, but I WANT my tracks in the hands of people who absolutely love them. I would rather be paid nothing to have my tune in the hands of someone who just loves it than be paid a dollar to have it stuck on some Zip disk somewhere. There's a future in finding the listeners who love what you do- there's no future in being paid money to get filed away as just another musician.
I have a new track up, 'B17 Flying Fortress' (it went live real quick! Gratifying), which illustrates 'what I would do with money': compare the sound of it with the sound of 'DeHavilland Mosquito'. As usual not everybody might like it but some people probably will:) and as usual, it is available for free download with no expectation beyond that. There's no CD for 'Wounded Skies' yet or even cover art, so you can't buy that;)
My point is that it's up to me to decide these things. If I decide I want to give music away and simply allow people to pick up a CD if they want to encourage my making more music (and at that, pricing the CD as low as I'm allowed to do), well then I'll do that. It's not stupid- I rate in the upper percentiles of money earners on mp3.com, because a lot of people try to squeeze money out of every little bit of music they do, pricing their CDs really high (and they're only mp3.com CDs) and making everything streaming only, and that doesn't follow the rules for internet business- the 'shelf' is too big and there are too many more generous musicians on the 'shelf' next to 'em, and they end up getting hurt.
By the same token, this micropayment Napster clone sounds crazy to me. I know I've asked for my stuff to be shared on Napster, very publically and explicitly: I can also say that certainly nobody from this new Napster clone has contacted me asking for payment information and where to send the 25 cents. I can only assume that for the most part it is 'Napster Clone in which you pay THEM per download' and I would ask, what's the point in that? I certainly do not want people being made to pay 1/4 cent to download my music when they can download it for no 'micropayment charge' at mp3.com/chrisj and will always be able to (if mp3.com drops the ball on this I will simply find another place to host my music- or an additional, recommended place to host my music)
I'm sorry, but mp3s are not a profit model. They are a promotion model. The idea of doing micropayments on them is repugnant- next someone will be selling a winamp which charges $0.0001 per song played. Who gets this money? Certainly not the artist. It seems that in some ways Internet independent music will be "meet the new boss- same as the old boss" (no STR for CmdrTaco;) ) and as soon as the old RIAA slimeballs are forced into irrelevance, new slimeballs will be revealed as being there all along, behind the new scene. You'll know them by doing the math- when all the little micropayments add up to $30,000 a day, and the artists get $1000 for Britney Spears, $900 for Backstreet Boys, $800 divided up among everybody else, then you'll know who the new slimeballs are.
I refuse to be a part of the RIAA slimeballs, and I'll refuse to be a part of the replacement slimeballs. If that means crippling my 'career' then so be it. Frankly I doubt it- I think in the modern day being a slimeball becomes a handicap because it's too easily uncovered and the information gets around very quickly. I will be very interested to see if I'm right:)
Slashdot Mirror
Then Coke took to sticking a text area directly on their cans, on every can. I've seen it used for special promotions (like 'win a trip to Disneyland') but 99.99% of the time it was the same advertising blurb- and a horrible one! Hopefully I will soon entirely forget this, but it went, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste. The fizz. It's all there (bits of ad blurb already forgotten, thankfully deleted- culminating in) Coca-cola enjoy.
I could not get away from this freaking, drooling idiocy. It spoke to me every time I tried to drink Coca-cola- I'd lift the can and boom, there was the blurb, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste! The fizz! It's ALL THERE..." I took to reciting it to friends with GREAT SERIOUSNESS, verbatim, to illustrate just how horrible the blurb was. And then, finally, fed up, I taught myself to like Mountain Dew, knowing it was another caffiene-rich soda beverage much smiled on by geek types- and ever since, I get both, the Mountain Dew in 24-packs.
They have ceased running the blurbs, but the damage was already done. I never wrote to Coca-cola and explained, "You guys are making me _embarrassed_ to hold a can of your product in public, and you are un-selling me from it". Seemingly someone did- how many other people went and started drinking Dew or Pepsi or jynnan tonix, however?
Advertising can be damned dangerous. If you annoy people badly enough you UN-SELL them from your product. And it really, really doesn't matter if people remember the name- if they remember it in order to never buy it again!
The fact is, there's no 'veneer of respectability' durable enough to forever protect against exposure of the horrors beneath. With individuals, this leads to prisons and sometimes to the murder of an offender by other prisoners- for instance, the murder of a cannibal or child molester or some other offense considered so intolerable that the offender needs to be just immediately killed, hell with the courts.
With corporations, this situation cannot occur- even in a case of a Nestle attempting to extort money from mothers by threatening them with the starvation of their infants, or a Monsanto trying to hijack the agricultural production of entire third world countries and replacing self-sustaining crops with sterile genetically engineered poison-emitting crops, people still forget about these things, and there isn't a social context of corporations that would punish such acts, and governments generally find it difficult to do so.
Simple disseminating of information really isn't enough- it just establishes a public expectation that the world is horrible and cynical and destroys everything- there's little reason to work for a better situation there. What would be more effective is establishing situations that _are_ genuinely ethical and fair- in particular, situations that are socially cooperative and constructive such as the Free Software Movement- to contrast with the many situations that are plainly destructive and unethical.
This of course is troubling, since it is the blatant suppression of risk information to the public, but the article and related articles also touched on how, in the new corporately-directed academia, subjects like English, Classics, and yes... Ethics are completely falling by the wayside. Nowhere is this easier to see than in the words of some Slashdot geek posters- technically brilliant, yet ethically illiterate.
In some cases, it's sarcasm- it's hard to tell whether jabber is being intentionally outrageous as a joke, or to provoke a response. In other cases, it's no joke, and the people honestly know no better.
It's very much like the moral/ethical equivalent of a VB programmer (better yet, an HTML 'programmer' doing entirely MSHTML) insisting that there is nothing beyond that level- that what programming _IS_, is clicking buttons and operating 'wizards', and anyone claiming differently are full of themselves.
When viewed in this context, it's easy to see the error- to Slashdot readers like kernel hackers and security gurus and John Carmack, it's obvious that programming does not stop with the operating of Code Wizards, does not stop with Frontpage and HTML. It's glaringly self-evident that there's more to it than that.
To someone who's read a lot of classics, who's _studied_ ethics and morality with a certain amount of academic rigor (such as you don't get from school these days), the claims of slashdottenlibertarians are equally astonishing, and it's just as self-evident that such claims are not simply wrong, but even Considered Harmful (tm). Morals, ethics are _arranged_, they do not simply arise from the interactions of utterly self-interested individuals. They have a societal value that is more powerful than their individual value. Read some real philosophy- Confucius' "The Analects" on ethics, Plato's works involving Socrates for a taste of just how easily your beliefs can be tied in knots when you haven't thought them through, Thoreau for a taste of what it is like to not worship self-interest as a god, for what it's like to seek more than that out of life.
The bottom line is that the ruthless pragmatist approach, personified by the corporate 'persons' that surround us, is only one approach, and it is a destructive approach, with no future in it. Survival dictates that those of us who can, _must_ attempt to fall back on ways of thinking which have better societal survival value. This is very well demonstrated by the free software movement- which very directly places societal wellbeing ahead of the rights of individuals to profit from and withhold their works- and in so doing, tangibly gives all those 'oppressed' individuals access to far more than they could ever generate on their own.
That's the way society has always worked, folks. The future didn't belong to the first guy who made an axe, killed everyone else in his village who made axes, and became the lead hunter. The future went to the villages where everybody was cooperating in making axes, where the social expectations were that people would till the fields, would take care of things that needed doing even if it didn't benefit the individual all that much. Cooperation is a survival trait- a SOCIAL survival trait.
The people who are espousing the 'morality' of the gunpoint, of the 'I win, that is what morality is', are doomed- because yes Virginia, there is a reality, and your decision to place your own profit ahead of any other consideration does not affect this reality one iota, nor protect you from the consequences that you wish to simply ignore. And when the bill comes due, you can rant all you want about how _immoral_ it is for anyone to limit you or restrain you the slightest bit- you can rave about how unfair it is, don't people understand that you WON?
But society must survive- and if you place your interests ahead of society's, you'd just better hope that you don't end up getting in the way, or your protests will be ignored as you get steamrollered- because morality and ethics do NOT boil down to 'he who wins, wins'. Nobody is so completely immune from the requirements of interacting with society as that...
Now, whether you can _make_ them understand this is another matter. Perhaps it is simply impossible to teach corporations morals and ethics. In that case, I'd consider it evidence that perhaps they should _not_ be treated as people under the law...
If these are not the people responsible for identifying the dangers and risks of the modern world, then who?
Read 'The Kept University' if you couldn't stomach Katz's take on it. This is SERIOUS, dammit. Even ignoring the concerns over wholesale destruction of the cooperative spirit in scientific research, public health matters, and the stats are freaking chilling. "More recently, an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that studies of cancer drugs funded by pharmaceutical companies were roughly one eighth as likely to reach unfavorable conclusions as nonprofit-funded studies.". Read this stuff! This matters. It's not okay to suppress risk information...
o/` somebody wants to hurt sooouuundex.org... o/`
The cop's _job_ is social justice, whether done well or poorly- ideally the cop does this well, doesn't step on people's toes too much and successfully stops the people who want to throw grenades/blow up stuff/mug you/con you/etc. There are always going to be people like that, but the only way you'll get decent cops is if people _are_ willing to believe in social justice and willing to sacrifice themselves for it, because I don't think OSHA rules cover 'stopping guys with grenades'- by definition there can't be effective safety rules for cops because the cop's whole job is defusing unsafe situations.
I have to wonder- was the original poster thinking of 'urban guerrillas' sacrificing themselves for social justice- or of cops? It could be read either way. When reading it I immediately thought of a poster I once saw here in Brattleboro (a biggish Vermont town). It said in big letters, PROTEST POLICE BRUTALITY! Then in smaller letters it said, actually here in Brattleboro we're not aware of any police brutality, but we would like to invite any Brattleboro police to come join with us to help protest police brutality in _other_ places...
One shoplifter is a criminal.
A hundred shoplifters is a jail.
A thousand shoplifters is a prison.
A nation of shoplifters- is a new law.
Politicians forget this at their peril. Judges? Judges don't need to understand it- it's not really their place to change the rules so ostentatiously. The politicians are the ones who have to be aware of situations like this.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic-for-the-common-man and great potential-vote-getter. Already politicians are looking askance at the RIAA side for making absurd claims (such as that the Home Recording Act means nothing and conveys no permissions to copy). Add to this the amount of cheap positive publicity available to politicians aligning themselves with that 'nation of shoplifters', many of whom may be perfect selfish one-issue voters, and there's little chance the rules will remain the same.
That's not scary? Correct, the scary bit is this- I doubt I can make a plus boot Linux, because IBM's watch has EIGHT TIMES the ram of these little computers o_O not to mention 8M 'disk' to boot off as opposed to the 800K floppy...
Still, it looks very likely that I can at least get vi onto one of these little buggers eventually. I'll call them linux training boxes, a sort of art project :)
Let them sell their CDs for $5.99 too, and maybe I would buy one. Their artists get LESS than I do per CD. Their production values are worse than what I'm able to put out (in particular, see some of my very recent work like 'B17 Flying Fortress'- you don't get that kind of lushness and fullness out of pop CDs anymore, they are compressed to _death_). Nothing about what they're offering merits prices two and three times what I sell for- it's grotesque. I totally support anybody fighting these creeps by whatever means. And if you want to 'pirate' my mp3s too- *waves* have fun! You have my permission, not that you can't download them from me for free anyhow, and give me the page hit :)
As a content creator type person I am understandably interested in these developments, and very curious about just how locked out I will be from this situation. Clearly the _trend_ is that only the Sonys of the world will get the licensing and 'encoding keys' to distribute to such a platform, but how far will it go? Will there be token means for J.Random Musician or Programmer to get their content onto the planned Home Entertainment System For All, or will it be strictly controlled? That'd be interesting because it would be an experiment- given that the ultra-huge corporations turn out a certain _style_ of media and content, how far would this go toward satisfying all of the people all of the time? My instinct says this is a backward step- like moving back to the predictability of network television after people have a taste of The Net. Of course, the Internet-savvy computer geek is NOT the prime target here- they're after the people who only have cable TV maybe, who have never experienced media as anything other than consumers. The goal is to blow them away with posh media so intensely that they don't notice it's basically one big alliance of conglomerates (MS/RIAA/MPAA/what have you) supplying ALL of it and blocking anyone else from access.
It only stands to reason that these big corporate conglomerates, in their frustrated attempts to fight consumer interests, would eventually notice that they can form alliances with each other to get what they want... informally, but effectively...
I see no other sensible reason for scrapping red book audio. People, people, remember: this company, when you look at its corporate actions, is _evil_, it's hostile to consumers. Stop creaming over the words 'nVidia custom chips' for a minute and _think_. Of course they're going to f**k you over and make all your CDs obsolete in collusion with the RIAA labels. They're probably being paid to do just that and you know they want to monopolize the 'home entertainment system' which is certainly due to take over from the 'stereo system'. Do you really want to support these people?
At any rate, I would strongly suggest that this means the traditional CD is being 'deprecated'. It's time to buy ALL YOUR CDs over again! Beat the rush! Run out to the store just as soon as somebody figures out a secure digital music format that degrades after ten plays so you can be put on a _rental_ basis!
No X! I was thinking of console Linux that somehow made use of the stuff in the ROM anyway- yes this would be a _totally_ different display subsystem than Linux would normally have, but that's kind of the idea- what could use as much built into the Plus as possible, and still act like the Linux command line with a good amount of available programs like rm, vi or whatever? (Maybe there'd only be room for ed ;) ) X is right out- no way would it fit in the typical Plus. I realise that I'm talking extreme Franken-hacking but I simply don't care because the notion of a Mac Plus cheerfully booting to a white-on-black console Linux prompt is too cool to miss. Three-button mouse? Who needs a mouse? *g* leave it unplugged! The keyboard will suffice! If you _reverse_ the leads on a telephone wire you get a Mac Plus keyboard wire, and can extend it much farther than the little stock wire. (If you don't reverse the wires, the Mac is shorted out into permanent death :) )
Theism of some kind _can_ be a very useful 'meme' when you have the tendency to behave as though you have to control the world and everything around you. You can call that codependency, you can call it typical of drug addicts, you could call it a very common trait that _creates_ drug addicts, but the fact is there are many people who are neither cowardly or stupid, yet who habitually interact with the world in a controlling, manipulative way that just doesn't produce helpful results.
There's a hell of a lot of evidence that, for people whose heads are wired that way, developing a faith in some kind of God is a very helpful 'mental judo' that gets them out of their own way- whether or not this faith is at all logical or provable or justifiable. As a result you get into a situation like this:
- I don't know whether there's a guiding power greater than people (i.e. me)
- When I act on the basis that I must master my fate, I get hung up and tangled in my own schemes and cause chaos
- When I act _as_ _if_ there is a 'God', I cause less chaos, and things mysteriously work out better than when I was mucking them up
- When I do this without belief, it's like walking a razorblade and I'm fighting my instincts to muck things up all the time
- When I do this with the trick of the mind called 'belief', I likewise avoid mucking things up, but I sleep better and worry less about stuff.
Just how valuable is your pride, anyhow? It may be that controlling your surroundings with cold rationality works dandy for you. Some people don't have the knack of that, which doesn't mean they're dumb- they might be overly stressed, or too perfectionistic, or kind of obsessive- which aren't always bad traits. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that 'theistic faith' can be quite an advantage in these cases- even the humility of accepting that 'the pattern of life' is too complex for one person to grasp can be a real breakthrough, and once you've accepted that you can no longer 'disprove God' any more than you can disprove space aliens or galactic wormholes or anything else that you wouldn't be expected to understand.It always kind of annoys me to see these fervent attacks on any form of theism. Usually I let it pass. This time, though it's 4 AM and I should be heading to bed, I felt like speaking up just a bit. Yeah, I have vague theistic notions. I consider it an intrinsic quality of my relation to this God that I can't possibly understand it- it is by definition (my definition) entirely beyond my ability to comprehend. It is, however, a pretty good reason for me to leave some things to it, and concentrate on just trying to do the best I can with what I have. I know that this works better than my previous need to be the master of my fate- I do _not_ know that this is because there's an old guy with a beard 'up there'. I could be wrong- I could be looking at pure chaos and projecting an order that doesn't exist (on the other hand, look at the scientific definition of chaos....). But the bottom line is, my relation to the world is saner and less dogmatic when I _do_ have faith in whatever the heck my God is.
If you don't like that, sux to be you ;) because your arguments will not change the fact that when I believed as you did, I was _miserable_ and pretty dysfunctional at life. Sorry- atheism didn't work well for me. It didn't tend to make me good at patience or tolerance- never mind peace. I'd rather not know and quietly expect some higher order in the universe, than convince myself that I'm _it_.
They would make the ideal little dumb terminal or CLI-based unix toystation, and only pull about as much power as a 60 watt lightbulb :) Mac Pluses rule! I have about six, and one day I _will_ run Linux on 'em- or something much like it. The ROM contains much useful stuff like drivers and the Chicago font (I forget if it also contains Geneva 9 and Monaco 9). You can fit a terminal in _MacOS_ onto one on a floppy complete with MacOS itself (like sys6 or earlier)- it has got to be possible to get one working like a linux terminal, if you use the stuff in ROM and don't bother loading MacOS.
Ideally I'd like to see it run gcc or some ancestor of emacs off a floppy :) however, vi or bash or sh are not to be scorned. The important thing is to get the recognisable environment in there- something that 'speaks Linux'- because it would be ultimately cool, and the cost would be basically nil. There are _so_ _many_ of these little buggers around, most still work fine and the ones that are borken, EVERY failure mode has been mapped out by now and books written on 'em.
I have to wonder, how fatal is the Mac Plus's flaw of not having an MMU? Did the original PDP that unix was written for have an MMU? How far back would you have to go to get a Unix that expected no more hardware than what a Plus has to offer? It'd be a weird combination of ancient code smallness and crudity, and very non-Unix focus on using the contents of the Plus ROM wherever possible.
If all the more suitable, appropriate potential complainers (like OEMS, distributors or what have you) are all too intimidated and cowed to complain, why not Sun? If Sun, too, was so frightened of Microsoft that they dared not open their mouth, would that make it OK?
I wish we _could_ go back to NS2 or whatever. The web has never been a very tidy place, but it is becoming almost uninhabitable unless you use IE5, which I refuse to do on principle. If that means I get cut off entirely so be it...
Most record companies are controlled by the RIAA major labels, whether they admit it or not. More's the pity.
- Moody on MS employees newly hosed due to stock corrections: "The best you can say for them is that they made a deal with the Devil, and the Devil reneged".
- Moody wrote about how status for management at Microsoft had become a matter of _not_ answering your email, to appear more busy. This is a screaming red flashing warning sign of complacency and corporate rot, and Moody blithely did a column exposing it.
- Moody raked IE 4.0 over the coals, pointing out things such as the bug with Compaq Presarios that caused the installation to make the windows desktop a blank. He painted IE4 as an absolute betrayal.
The bottom line isn't simple, but people seldom are when they're as strange as Moody. This is a man who can go to great lengths to persuade the reader that (for instance) Linux needs to put a LOT OF WORK in before it can run for 24 hours at a time without crashing- a concept that is strikingly at variance with reality (as boring as the reality of a Xless webserver might unfortunately be...) And yet he's also capable of exposing some very damaging realities about Microsoft- I'd entirely forgetten that the "MS management intentionally not answering internal emails" story was his. The one consistent line to take through it all is this- Moody is a fanatic, a fanatic Microsoft supporter, but NOT necessarily of the real Microsoft company. He is a fanatic for the ideal Microsoft which he believes once existed, which he feels Bill Gates still personally represents, MS coders still represent. This is his fanaticism.As such, it's impossible to persuade him otherwise- if you show him that MS management are far gone in corporate rot, he writes a column about that and laments how MS 'lost its way' from the REAL Microsoft which he strongly suggests is still in there plugging away but unaware of all the nastiness. If you show him that IE 4 shipped buggy as hell and caused major problems with top-selling Compaqs, he laments this, wonders what happened to what he describes as the best, most rigorous testing operation anybody's ever had, and in the end blames Netscape for enticing MS marketers to release IE4 too soon- and again, the _ideal_ of Microsoft stays intact, and it's the suits' fault- his hero Microsoft coders and testers can do no wrong.
This is dangerous and quite frustrating, because it's impossible to contend with. You are never going up against Microsoft, in Moody's eyes- instead you are going up against the Ideal Microsoft, the one that delivers on all its promises and works really hard and benefits the consumer and is as tireless as an old-school Ma Bell employee. The one that doesn't exist, and never did...
So it's impossible for anyone to live up to that standard- it's an imaginary standard, and that is why nothing will ever sway Moody from his MS loyalty and determination to spin everything MSwards. Yet MS itself cannot live up to that standard, never could- it was a hype, a fake. So Moody periodically flames Microsoft itself- and proceeds to spin the flame MSwards, too, and this is why on the one hand he can expose shocking cynicism, contempt for consumers, and rot at the core of Microsoft, and on the other hand keep an unshakable faith that nevertheless, Microsoft is The One Answer. He's not actually hired- if he was he would certainly not expose some of the very embarrassing realities he's exposed. He's a fanatic- he fights for the _ideal_ Microsoft, so his fury is all the more obvious when he sees Microsoft failing to live up to what he sees as their true heart and soul. He blames marketing, Netscape, anyone other than the real coders at MS, the real brain trust, Gates- those he sees as keepers of the faith.
Unfortunately, those are exactly the people who have intentionally done all the things that break his heart. Moody cannot handle the truth- the heart of Microsoft is, and always was, mean, treacherous, and fraudulent. It's always been about the money and never about delivering a quality product. It's always been conflict with the rest of the industry (all the way back to Altair Basic) and dirty tricks and strongarm tactics worthy of Mafiosi. That is how they won. Cheaters do sometimes win, when they aren't punished. Otherwise, why cheat?
In the end, Moody is more to be pitied than censured. A thousand slashdot readers madly rebutting him will not shake his illusions. Not even the failure of his seeming idol will shake his illusions, because they are built on mirages, and you can't tear down a fantasy with real-world arguments.
The reason to pity him is this- the fantasy is all he has.
_Nobody_ puts that much effort into pre-emptively defending their integrity unless they're a con :)
Were it not for that comment I might think he was simply a fool- but fools are less self-aware. Moody's a _con_. He's like a 'mole', can't possibly be saying these things out of genuine sincerity. There's got to be some heavy secrets in there somewhere- though I doubt many people would care. "Fred Moody turned out to be a paid Microsoft employee working undercover!" "Fred who?"
The most touchingly pathetic bit is this- both Moody, and many Slashdotters being alarmed by him, seem to believe that non computer geeks, the un-tech-savvy, have NEVER EXPERIENCED a con before. Um, used car dealers have been around for many years guys- before then you had real estate cons selling you beachfront properties in Florida. Cons are NOT NEW.
A surprisingly large percentage of nongeeks of all ages and walks of life will look at this guy, this 'one journalist, at least, in whom readers could trust absolutely', and _automatically_ go 'shyeeeah right'... correctly spotting the CON of him without even having a technical background to rebut his claims.
Of course, I'm reminded of another phrase by all this: "Then they fight you,"
You know what comes next ;)
When you look at a Q3A the complexity is certainly great- it's single combat (or multiple) against other individuals, but that doesn't mean it's a high point in gameplay depth. It's a very well realised but essentially direct sort of game. Compare it to, say, WarBirds (MMOL WWII combatsim) and you see a lot more constraints. In Warbirds you're in a propeller-driven warplane. It's powerful (and very realistically modelled) but it's no F15- you cannot point up and hit 'go', you'll stall and crash- or end up muddling around at low speed, unable to maneuver effectively. When you evaluate an enemy, you gauge their 'e' state (energy) to see whether they are slow or fast, high or low compared to you. You register what plane they're in- if they're in a hot ME109 and you're not, you don't try climbing away from them. If they're in a P51 Mustang you don't dive away from them, etc. These constraints have a profound effect on what you can do and expect to survive- now, imagine 20 different planes all in the sky around you, some nearer, some attacking, some far or fleeing or doing other things. It is called SA, or Situational Awareness. Your ability to survive and fight depends on maintaining a mental model of all these interactions, plus being able to handle a big hunk of steel with a roaring engine whirling a big prop (or two, or four).
Compared to this, Quake is far more physical- in Q3A the differences among players are minimised, it becomes a straight challenge of reflexes. This is one extreme of gameplay- in some ways Warbirds in full realism is another. In Q3A having uber-reflexes may be the ideal quality, in Warbirds a person with uber-reflexes but no SA will typically lose to a person with OK reflexes and greatly superior situational awareness- because that person can get reflex-man into impossible situations. For instance, if the reflex player is in a FW190 pursuing a ME109, he is already hosed by lack of climb ability, and can be doubly hosed by use of a climbing spiral on the ME109's part. The ME can do this- the FW190, on the other hand, not only cannot match the ME but also has very nasty departure characteristics, tending to go into violent spins and sometimes flip into inverted spins spontaneously. All the ME has to do is entice the heavily armed FW to try and pull angles for a desperate shot- and then swoop down on the helpless butcherbird as it tries to recover from the resulting spin.
There is no reason games can't be both simple and possessed of this depth of consequences- but you can't have that level of inner complexity without some very good design. It's a lot easier to set up balanced players to ensure no bitching, and work to make everything equalised. To introduce 'situational' elements such as the realistically modeled warplanes of WarBirds will tend to cause competitive gamers to pile onto what they feel is the strongest 'game piece'- in WWII flightsims, this has changed madly with different sims and versions, with everything from the FW190 to the Spit to the P-38 Lightning being, temporarily, the 'uberplane', sometimes for very dicey reasons (at one point in Air Warrior, you could spin a FW on purpose and recover pointing whatever direction you wanted, in normal flight attitude. This got fixed and the players who racked up high scores doing it got well and truly hosed when the 'bug' got fixed...)
I think perhaps Pac-Man is (in the set-top-score mode) not properly complex in this way. Unless you have to make judgement calls based on how the ghosts are likely to move, it's just a Zenlike repetition of memorised patterns- not SA. Centipede is actually more like SA. Tempest tries to be, but not effectively- (the spikes are mere obstacles to clear). Missile Command is more like situational awareness because of the distributed nature of the bases and the need to focus on protecting certain areas if you start getting flattened :) In general, a game can only have situational awareness if it has a situation. Some games like the descendents of Warcraft are very good at establishing situations beyond the player's ability to fully perceive, and then developing them and forcing re-evaluation (where did that guy come from? For that to happen there would have to be a base over _there_, etc)
Think about designing games not only in terms of defining the neat stuff on screen, but defining what is unseen. For SA, the 'game space' needs to be more complex than the player can entirely grasp- but little bits of it need to be immediately abstracted, formed into concepts or generalisations, ideally so that information leads to better performance. ("That TIE fighter's a long way from home.. how'd it get out here in the first place? Those are only short range! Look, it's heading for that moon.." ;) )
Help educate musicians to NOT SIGN WITH THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! As you say 'don't play the game their way!'. Talking about 'major labels' is deceptive as the same four companies own 95% of the _minor_ labels and 'indie' labels too. Have the musicians read the contracts- you can quickly identify which organisations are part of the music industry and which are not. The music industry contracts are the most brutally, obscenely unbalanced legal documents you'll ever see- genuine alternative resources (like mp3.com, at least so far) have contracts that are actually _fair_. It's _not_ hard to see the difference. Compare mp3.com's contract with farmclub.com's, for example.
Just get to the part where we eat record company execs! ;)
Huh? You're confusing me pinkboy ;) All I'm saying is that it'd be annoying to have some slimy little bugger charging people for access to the music which I put up for free... screw tips, my CDs cost way less than RIAA ones and if you buy one you actually _get_ something. Charging people to listen to something is stupid, better to give them something real for it :)
He wanted to give me a dollar for it, and wasn't sure how that could be arranged. He was quite serious, too- although he had very particular tastes, 'Alleycat' hit him so hard that he felt obliged to pay me for it.
I straightened him out pretty quick ;) first of all, the album 'Alleycat' is on is only $5.99. It has a nice attractive cover and includes other worthy tracks (though none of them are Electric Blues but Alleycat). Six bucks is not a huge amount- he could get the CD.
Failing that, I had the option when I uploaded the track to make it 'streaming only'- which is a joke anyway, but theoretically it could be withheld and people prevented from downloading it. I chose to make it freely downloadable on purpose- you simply can't focus entirely on money because as an artist there's an even more important currency, the currency of attention. It may not make sense to everybody, but I WANT my tracks in the hands of people who absolutely love them. I would rather be paid nothing to have my tune in the hands of someone who just loves it than be paid a dollar to have it stuck on some Zip disk somewhere. There's a future in finding the listeners who love what you do- there's no future in being paid money to get filed away as just another musician.
I have a new track up, 'B17 Flying Fortress' (it went live real quick! Gratifying), which illustrates 'what I would do with money': compare the sound of it with the sound of 'DeHavilland Mosquito'. As usual not everybody might like it but some people probably will :) and as usual, it is available for free download with no expectation beyond that. There's no CD for 'Wounded Skies' yet or even cover art, so you can't buy that ;)
My point is that it's up to me to decide these things. If I decide I want to give music away and simply allow people to pick up a CD if they want to encourage my making more music (and at that, pricing the CD as low as I'm allowed to do), well then I'll do that. It's not stupid- I rate in the upper percentiles of money earners on mp3.com, because a lot of people try to squeeze money out of every little bit of music they do, pricing their CDs really high (and they're only mp3.com CDs) and making everything streaming only, and that doesn't follow the rules for internet business- the 'shelf' is too big and there are too many more generous musicians on the 'shelf' next to 'em, and they end up getting hurt.
By the same token, this micropayment Napster clone sounds crazy to me. I know I've asked for my stuff to be shared on Napster, very publically and explicitly: I can also say that certainly nobody from this new Napster clone has contacted me asking for payment information and where to send the 25 cents. I can only assume that for the most part it is 'Napster Clone in which you pay THEM per download' and I would ask, what's the point in that? I certainly do not want people being made to pay 1/4 cent to download my music when they can download it for no 'micropayment charge' at mp3.com/chrisj and will always be able to (if mp3.com drops the ball on this I will simply find another place to host my music- or an additional, recommended place to host my music)
I'm sorry, but mp3s are not a profit model. They are a promotion model. The idea of doing micropayments on them is repugnant- next someone will be selling a winamp which charges $0.0001 per song played. Who gets this money? Certainly not the artist. It seems that in some ways Internet independent music will be "meet the new boss- same as the old boss" (no STR for CmdrTaco ;) ) and as soon as the old RIAA slimeballs are forced into irrelevance, new slimeballs will be revealed as being there all along, behind the new scene. You'll know them by doing the math- when all the little micropayments add up to $30,000 a day, and the artists get $1000 for Britney Spears, $900 for Backstreet Boys, $800 divided up among everybody else, then you'll know who the new slimeballs are.
I refuse to be a part of the RIAA slimeballs, and I'll refuse to be a part of the replacement slimeballs. If that means crippling my 'career' then so be it. Frankly I doubt it- I think in the modern day being a slimeball becomes a handicap because it's too easily uncovered and the information gets around very quickly. I will be very interested to see if I'm right :)