The only real non-pirate way to get a significant number of ROMs is to buy the physical games and the equipment to image a ROM from them.
A few university libraries have started digitally preserving culturally significant games, and that's what they end up doing, because they can't really pirate the ROMs, yet can't buy legitimate digital copies either.
There's actually considerable criticism of that aspect of university architecture as well, the "playground for educated kids w/o jobs" aspect of the American 4-year residential college. Some universities are more integrated with an urban area, as is more typical in Europe, where e.g. the University of Paris is deeply integrated into Parisian life, both physically and culturally, rather than being located in a separated campus.
That actually is what architecture as a field largely thinks about these days. For the past 90 years or so, at least since the publication of Le Courbusier's Toward an Architecture (1923) if not earlier, architecture is about constructing spaces that enable and shape living, work and leisure, and what effects architectural choices have on individuals and societies. It is, yes, also about the placement of load-bearing walls and whether to include decorative gargoyles on the pediment, but those aren't the main things architects and architecture ctitics study. So this article's criticism seems pretty directly within scope: how architecture shapes work and the interaction of workers with the society around them.
The more relevant comparison seems like it'd be to other commercial users. It's not likely that if Google were disbanded, it would turn into residential population; it's more likely that, if we didn't have Google, we'd have other companies employing these people and occupying a certain niche of the economy.
From that perspective, is Google's energy usage high or low for a company of its market-cap / revenue / profits? For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
Here is Mozilla's page on it. It appears that it just sends a "don't track me, pls" HTTP header if you enable it.
If only a handful of people use it, I can imagine that larger and more-responsible advertisers might interpret that as an opt-out. I can't imagine them agreeing if it gets more pervasive, though. Many currently have opt-out methods, but they're deliberately a bit harder to use and less automatic. I would imagine that at the least, they'll try to set up some requirement for additional confirmation of the opt-out.
And of course many advertisers will just ignore it: voluntary implementation of opt-out functionality will never catch the worst offenders.
Yeah, that's true (and important); I was a bit sloppy with the figures there, in a way that actually is relevant to the point. Theoretically, you can cancel your outgoing signal because it's known to you, but in practice, there is virtually zero margin for error in doing so.
Are you the same Eben Upton who co-wrote the excellent Oxford Rhyming Dictionary? If so, how'd you like that gig compared to your usual, more techie types of endeavors?
Umm, when Russian strong-arms its interest, people attack it in quite harsh terms. Europe was pretty pissed off about that cutting-off-the-gas-in-the-winter fiasco last year, for example.
The whole point of the cooperative is that the stuff you're asking is not supposed to be allowed. Of course nobody inherits it; a company is owned by its workers, not the heirs of its former workers. It's not supposed to be used as capital or collateral for loans, either; it's just a right to a certain % share of the company's profits. New employees don't "buy" shares; they definitionally own a share because they are employees, and the company is owned by its employees. It's not supposed to be seen as an investment; it's a cooperative venture.
Basically you're viewing it from the perspective of capital, but the whole point of it is to oppose the capitalist way of looking at corporations in terms of capital infusion, investment, etc.
One problem it does leave is bootstrapping; how does it get set up in the first place? One way of course is expropriation; the workers oust the capitalist and refound the factory as a cooperative. Other ways involve people provisionally putting in some money that will be paid back out of the initial profits, perhaps with some interest, but not entitling them to permanent extra shares (the whole point is that equity investment and returns on capital simply by owning capital are unethical).
Anyway, there's a lot written about them elsewhere if you really want to read about cooperatives; there are some quite large ones in Spain, and some smaller ones in parts of the U.S.
It's possible to set up a company structure that is, by definition of the company bylaws, owned by its workers. They would own a "share" of the company in a definitional sense, but not in the sense of a stock certificate that they can sell or take with them when they quit the company. In some countries the law provides special status for cooperatives that enables that sort of thing.
The idea, as they mention, has been around for a while, in fact since at least the early 1970s, with some information-theoretic work putting bounds on ideal full-duplex operation. The main idea is that you can cancel your own transmitted signal locally because you know what you're transmitting. The difficulty is that the transmitted signal is much stronger locally than the received signal, so there is little margin for error for imperfect cancellation; even if you cancel out 99.9% of the signal, there might still be too much noise left to decode the incoming signal. Errors can come from nearly anything; slightly imperfect knowledge of the characteristics of your device, changes due to weather or motion, interference from surrounding objects, etc.
Also note that terminology here is a bit confusing. In some uses (esp. radio), "full-duplex" just means any system that is capable of having people speak in both directions simultaneously, even if it's done by using separate frequencies for each direction, or by using a multiplexing scheme. In contrast, this usage of full-duplex means that both directions are transmitting simultaneously on the same channel, without segmenting or multiplexing it.
I don't actually know how they solved the problem, though, and the article is light on details.
The USPS is losing a long, drown-out battle against the impossibility that it's supposed to be both an unsubsidized "private-sector" corporation that's "run like a business", but also is micromanaged by Congress and not permitted to make sane business decisions. They are required to deliver six days a week; have exact stamp prices down to the penny for many services mandated by Congress; are required to provide certain extra-subsidized services, e.g. cheap shipping at "media mail" rates; are not permitted to levy surcharges for delivery to expensive locations (e.g. remote areas); and they even have their pension plan micromanaged by Congress, which is one of the current cash-flow pressures (Congress changed how the pension accounting has to work).
Basically Congress needs to decide if the USPS is going to be a government-mandated service that delivers flat-rate mail to every corner of the country six days a week, and subsidize it accordingly, or if it's going to be a private-sector business that will neither be subsidized nor micromanaged.
It's similar in a way, and they already have been trying to push that (all the registrars nag, sometimes insistently, about registering variants). At first glance this raises the stakes by putting forth the possibility of someone not only squatting on a variant of your name, but an "unsavory" version of it. disney.info is squatting, but disney.xxx maybe would damage the brand. Like if there were a.felon domain name and someone registered your full name dot felon or something.
On the other hand, it's long been possible to convert a non-offensive domain name into an offensive domain-squat by just putting up unsavory content on the domain, like in the ol' whitehouse.gov/whitehouse.com thing.
Yeah, it's more problematic mostly in that they can now sell an individualized product with your specific details. Television sells an aggregate product instead. They need to know something about their demographics in order to sell you to advertisers, but they only need to know the information in aggregate, because: 1) they can't separately target different ads to different viewers, only on a per-show basis; and 2) they can't get detailed information anyway, but only samples and extrapolations from things like Nielsen viewers and telephone surveys.
Yeah, this analysis goes back to analysis of TV, and is around 40 years old at least. A 1973 broadcast by artist Richard Serra, entitled "Television Delivers People" is one early use of the concept:
The product of television, commercial television, is the audience.
Television delivers people to an advertiser.
[...]
You are the product of T.V.
You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.
He consumes you.
The viewer is not responsible for programming--
You are the end product.
(For those interested, he discusses the concept and the reaction it got when it was actually broadcast on TV in this book.)
I'm not sure if you meant this specifically, but as a nitpick, https itself is hardly CPU-intensive these days. GitHub might be doing CPU-intensive stuff to service requests, but if so, it's more likely to have something to do with their backend than with https.
Well, this is sort of a reverse exclusive. It's an interesting question whether the same considerations apply.
With an exclusive, the platform/publisher pays a developer $X, or otherwise gives them some special consideration, to only publish on the platform, or at least to publish there first. So e.g. Sony pays Rockstar something to launch first (or perhaps only) on PSX.
But with this, a platform/publisher punishes a developer for publishing first on another platform, so they say that if you launched on PSX, well then you can't also publish here 2nd.
What's particularly interesting is that in the case where a publisher wanted an exclusive, they shouldn't object at all to the 2nd one, because it's just giving them an exclusive for free! They don't even have to pay a dev to publish only on PSX, because Microsoft is exclusive-izing the release for them, by refusing to become a 2nd platform for it.
However the dynamics are a bit different with smaller devs, where this sort of thing can feel like a minefield of blacklists.
Channel stuffing is the business practice where a company, or a sales force within a company, inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling to the world at large.
Sounds analogous to the common practice in the book-publishing industry of quoting "100,000 copies shipped" or whatever, which may or may not bear much relationship to how many books have been sold. In fact, some of the strange practices in book retailing, like publishers' willingness to give a credit to bookstores for unsold books without even having them returned, are in part aimed at making it easier to shovel a bunch of books down the distribution channels.
Slashdot Mirror
The game industry is not too bad in that regard; they outsource much less of their development than someone like IBM.
The only real non-pirate way to get a significant number of ROMs is to buy the physical games and the equipment to image a ROM from them.
A few university libraries have started digitally preserving culturally significant games, and that's what they end up doing, because they can't really pirate the ROMs, yet can't buy legitimate digital copies either.
There's actually considerable criticism of that aspect of university architecture as well, the "playground for educated kids w/o jobs" aspect of the American 4-year residential college. Some universities are more integrated with an urban area, as is more typical in Europe, where e.g. the University of Paris is deeply integrated into Parisian life, both physically and culturally, rather than being located in a separated campus.
That actually is what architecture as a field largely thinks about these days. For the past 90 years or so, at least since the publication of Le Courbusier's Toward an Architecture (1923) if not earlier, architecture is about constructing spaces that enable and shape living, work and leisure, and what effects architectural choices have on individuals and societies. It is, yes, also about the placement of load-bearing walls and whether to include decorative gargoyles on the pediment, but those aren't the main things architects and architecture ctitics study. So this article's criticism seems pretty directly within scope: how architecture shapes work and the interaction of workers with the society around them.
clearly you need to find some Oskar Blues
I thought its "thing" was the weirdly shaped bottle.
The more relevant comparison seems like it'd be to other commercial users. It's not likely that if Google were disbanded, it would turn into residential population; it's more likely that, if we didn't have Google, we'd have other companies employing these people and occupying a certain niche of the economy.
From that perspective, is Google's energy usage high or low for a company of its market-cap / revenue / profits? For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
Here is Mozilla's page on it. It appears that it just sends a "don't track me, pls" HTTP header if you enable it.
If only a handful of people use it, I can imagine that larger and more-responsible advertisers might interpret that as an opt-out. I can't imagine them agreeing if it gets more pervasive, though. Many currently have opt-out methods, but they're deliberately a bit harder to use and less automatic. I would imagine that at the least, they'll try to set up some requirement for additional confirmation of the opt-out.
And of course many advertisers will just ignore it: voluntary implementation of opt-out functionality will never catch the worst offenders.
They own Flickr, which is pretty widely used. It might be a good candidate to be spun back off, though.
Yeah, that's true (and important); I was a bit sloppy with the figures there, in a way that actually is relevant to the point. Theoretically, you can cancel your outgoing signal because it's known to you, but in practice, there is virtually zero margin for error in doing so.
Are you the same Eben Upton who co-wrote the excellent Oxford Rhyming Dictionary ? If so, how'd you like that gig compared to your usual, more techie types of endeavors?
Umm, when Russian strong-arms its interest, people attack it in quite harsh terms. Europe was pretty pissed off about that cutting-off-the-gas-in-the-winter fiasco last year, for example.
The whole point of the cooperative is that the stuff you're asking is not supposed to be allowed. Of course nobody inherits it; a company is owned by its workers, not the heirs of its former workers. It's not supposed to be used as capital or collateral for loans, either; it's just a right to a certain % share of the company's profits. New employees don't "buy" shares; they definitionally own a share because they are employees, and the company is owned by its employees. It's not supposed to be seen as an investment; it's a cooperative venture.
Basically you're viewing it from the perspective of capital, but the whole point of it is to oppose the capitalist way of looking at corporations in terms of capital infusion, investment, etc.
One problem it does leave is bootstrapping; how does it get set up in the first place? One way of course is expropriation; the workers oust the capitalist and refound the factory as a cooperative. Other ways involve people provisionally putting in some money that will be paid back out of the initial profits, perhaps with some interest, but not entitling them to permanent extra shares (the whole point is that equity investment and returns on capital simply by owning capital are unethical).
Anyway, there's a lot written about them elsewhere if you really want to read about cooperatives; there are some quite large ones in Spain, and some smaller ones in parts of the U.S.
It's possible to set up a company structure that is, by definition of the company bylaws, owned by its workers. They would own a "share" of the company in a definitional sense, but not in the sense of a stock certificate that they can sell or take with them when they quit the company. In some countries the law provides special status for cooperatives that enables that sort of thing.
The idea, as they mention, has been around for a while, in fact since at least the early 1970s, with some information-theoretic work putting bounds on ideal full-duplex operation. The main idea is that you can cancel your own transmitted signal locally because you know what you're transmitting. The difficulty is that the transmitted signal is much stronger locally than the received signal, so there is little margin for error for imperfect cancellation; even if you cancel out 99.9% of the signal, there might still be too much noise left to decode the incoming signal. Errors can come from nearly anything; slightly imperfect knowledge of the characteristics of your device, changes due to weather or motion, interference from surrounding objects, etc.
Also note that terminology here is a bit confusing. In some uses (esp. radio), "full-duplex" just means any system that is capable of having people speak in both directions simultaneously, even if it's done by using separate frequencies for each direction, or by using a multiplexing scheme. In contrast, this usage of full-duplex means that both directions are transmitting simultaneously on the same channel, without segmenting or multiplexing it.
I don't actually know how they solved the problem, though, and the article is light on details.
The USPS is losing a long, drown-out battle against the impossibility that it's supposed to be both an unsubsidized "private-sector" corporation that's "run like a business", but also is micromanaged by Congress and not permitted to make sane business decisions. They are required to deliver six days a week; have exact stamp prices down to the penny for many services mandated by Congress; are required to provide certain extra-subsidized services, e.g. cheap shipping at "media mail" rates; are not permitted to levy surcharges for delivery to expensive locations (e.g. remote areas); and they even have their pension plan micromanaged by Congress, which is one of the current cash-flow pressures (Congress changed how the pension accounting has to work).
Basically Congress needs to decide if the USPS is going to be a government-mandated service that delivers flat-rate mail to every corner of the country six days a week, and subsidize it accordingly, or if it's going to be a private-sector business that will neither be subsidized nor micromanaged.
It's similar in a way, and they already have been trying to push that (all the registrars nag, sometimes insistently, about registering variants). At first glance this raises the stakes by putting forth the possibility of someone not only squatting on a variant of your name, but an "unsavory" version of it. disney.info is squatting, but disney.xxx maybe would damage the brand. Like if there were a .felon domain name and someone registered your full name dot felon or something.
On the other hand, it's long been possible to convert a non-offensive domain name into an offensive domain-squat by just putting up unsavory content on the domain, like in the ol' whitehouse.gov/whitehouse.com thing.
How about Singularity, Microsoft's own attempt to write an OS in an extended dialect of C#? Is this aiming at similar goals in any way?
Yeah, it's more problematic mostly in that they can now sell an individualized product with your specific details. Television sells an aggregate product instead. They need to know something about their demographics in order to sell you to advertisers, but they only need to know the information in aggregate, because: 1) they can't separately target different ads to different viewers, only on a per-show basis; and 2) they can't get detailed information anyway, but only samples and extrapolations from things like Nielsen viewers and telephone surveys.
Yeah, this analysis goes back to analysis of TV, and is around 40 years old at least. A 1973 broadcast by artist Richard Serra, entitled "Television Delivers People" is one early use of the concept:
(For those interested, he discusses the concept and the reaction it got when it was actually broadcast on TV in this book.)
I'm not sure if you meant this specifically, but as a nitpick, https itself is hardly CPU-intensive these days. GitHub might be doing CPU-intensive stuff to service requests, but if so, it's more likely to have something to do with their backend than with https.
Well, this is sort of a reverse exclusive. It's an interesting question whether the same considerations apply.
With an exclusive, the platform/publisher pays a developer $X, or otherwise gives them some special consideration, to only publish on the platform, or at least to publish there first. So e.g. Sony pays Rockstar something to launch first (or perhaps only) on PSX.
But with this, a platform/publisher punishes a developer for publishing first on another platform, so they say that if you launched on PSX, well then you can't also publish here 2nd.
What's particularly interesting is that in the case where a publisher wanted an exclusive, they shouldn't object at all to the 2nd one, because it's just giving them an exclusive for free! They don't even have to pay a dev to publish only on PSX, because Microsoft is exclusive-izing the release for them, by refusing to become a 2nd platform for it.
However the dynamics are a bit different with smaller devs, where this sort of thing can feel like a minefield of blacklists.
From Wikipedia,
Sounds analogous to the common practice in the book-publishing industry of quoting "100,000 copies shipped" or whatever, which may or may not bear much relationship to how many books have been sold. In fact, some of the strange practices in book retailing, like publishers' willingness to give a credit to bookstores for unsold books without even having them returned, are in part aimed at making it easier to shovel a bunch of books down the distribution channels.
I use mine mainly to rip audio CDs.
That's true for K-12 education in the U.S. as well, but university students must purchase their own books.