Note that QUALITY_OF_PRODUCT is nowhere to be found in that equation. It doesn't factor in. Completely shitty music yields high profits as long as the industry overprices it and then markets the hell out of it.
This works because most people are stupid, mindless sheep. That's the way it has always been and the way it will continue to be for a very long time. As long as these sheep exist, then pushy brainwashing is all that's necessary to get them to think something is great. These are the same mindless sheep who don't get the joke behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster and who voted for Bush in the last two presidential elections -- in short, complete idiots incapable of critical thinking.
If you're angry at the industry for selling overpriced shit, your anger is misplaced. You should be angry at all the stupid people who fall for it, because the industry is just catering to them. The only solution to the problem is to gather all the stupid people together in one place (preferably by holding some kind of redneck event, such as a rodeo, NASCAR race, or televangelism marathon) and drop a rather large bomb on them.
Allchin's memo about "LH" (Longhorn, aka Vista) was sent in January 2004, several months before "The Reset" that occurred midway through Vista development. He's referring to the earlier, pre-reset Longhorn builds, which were indeed resource hogs (partly due to a C#-developed shell that tied into the SQL-based WinFS filesystem). That memo was probably the beginning of the line of discussion that eventually led to the reset, including the decision to drop WinFS and recode the shell without.NET.
You actually have to give Allchin credit for at least noticing and caring enough about how off-course things had gotten to raise hell and pull a U-turn.
I grew up in Friendswood, Texas and attended public school, K-12, there. I was bullied relentlessly pretty much the entire time, mostly by the same people.
There were many bullies -- probably on the order of 40 or so, but two were especially awful: Jesse Kellum (a reverend's son) and Monier Khalil (a football player). These two bullied me all the way from about 3rd grade through about my junior year of high school, and they did things ranging from stealing my stuff to kicking me in the nuts to punching me in the face (and breaking my glasses) to lighting my hair on fire. These were two of the most rotten human beings I've ever known -- pure evil, no redeeming qualities or goodness in their hearts whatsoever.
No amount of reporting them to teachers, principals, bus drivers, superintendants, or anyone else made a lick of difference. My parents and I were always told that the district couldn't take any action if school staff didn't witness the bad behavior first-hand. Of course no staff ever witnessed it, because bullies only bully when authority figures aren't looking! My dad told me to "stick up for myself" and "punch them in the face", but I knew that would only make things worse: I would get punished by the school, and it would just piss off the bullies and their bully friends even more and they would come at me worse than ever the next day.
The bullying itself isn't the worst part. It's the frustration and helplessness. Literally NO ONE wants to help you, will help you, or can help you, and if you defend yourself, you (not the bully) get punished! It's one of the most unfair situations in the world, and it really does drive a person to truly want to kill people to set things right.
I used to daydream about somehow obtaining a gun and shooting Jesse or Monier. I thought about shooting the teachers and bus driver and principal, too, since they knew damn well that I was being bullied but wouldn't do anything about it like they were supposed to. Of course I never would shoot anyone, because my parents never kept guns and I had no idea how to get one or use one and I would go to prison. But I thought about it a lot and played it out in my head very graphically. I thought about their lifeless bodies, with shocked looks on their bloody faces, collapsing to the floor, and the fantasy gave me some small measure of relief. If my parents had been gun owners and kept guns around the house, I think there's a very real possibility I would have shot a lot of those fuckers right between the eyes like they all deserved.
Fortunately, Jesse ended up shooting himself, and Monier went to prison for murdering a homosexual behind a bar, and many of the other bullies in my life came to other deserving ends, so it all eventually settled itself out. Mostly.
Today I'm an extreme introvert, because I constantly anticipate that everyone I meet is going to be mean to me. I have a fierce temper when it comes to inequality or other people not being accountable to their responsibilities. I empathize very strongly with anyone who is in any way a victim of any kind, which gives rise to most of my political views (I'm way left on the political spectrum because I think it's the government's job to protect people from being wronged). None of this is a conscious thing or something I can control or change. It is my personality, based on social conditioning I received over a course of nearly two decades.
Suppose you're running a one-person business and one of your customers is obnoxious to you. Should you be required to forget all about it and treat them as any new customer next time you see them?
Yes, because it's wrong to punish the vast majority of customers, who are honest, for the wrongful actions of a few.
Requiring businesses to delete records about their customers is essentially enforced amnesia.
Exactly. That's what it's supposed to be.
Whenever there's a transaction, it seems pretty reasonable for both sides to remember what happened.
"Remember", "keep written or electronic records of", and "share written or electronic records with others" are all entirely different things.
And then there's the question not only of what you should remember but who should you tell.
A business shouldn't be allowed to tell anyone anything about a customer without that customer's explicit opted-in consent, because that's the only thing that's fair to the customer.
When a business gets ripped off, who are they allowed to tell?
No one. Businesses don't need to be helping each other out. They hold too much power over individual customers as things are. Let other businesses find out about bad customers on their own.
Should assholes and deadbeats get a free pass next time?
Yes, if that's what it takes to guarantee that honest customers are treated ethically. You could easily report the assholes and deadbeats to the authorities or a collection agency after the first time they rip you off, and that would solve the problem in the correct way (without harming honest customers).
The other side to this is that we've grown accustomed to a certain amount of anonymity when dealing with larger businesses.
Who has? I sure haven't.
Not to mention that there's an enormous power imbalance when you're dealing with a big business.
Which is exactly why individual consumer interests should always overrule the interests of big businesses, regardless of the situation. Indivdual consumers have enough stacked against them already and are basically at the mercy of the business anyway.
But the question of how long you should remember, what you should forgive and forget, and how that should affect peoples' reputations doesn't have simple answers.
Sure it does -- you just don't like the answers, being a pro-business zealot.
Plus this seems to ignore the fact that Apple can decide to aim for different profit margins per unit in different markets if it wants to, or Apple's costs per unit could vary depending on where the unit was manufactured in the first place, etc. There's no guaranteed constancy about iPod's price/value ratio at all, and so basing relative currency values on it is a flawed exercise.
Still, I don't like having to choose a car based on which satellite radio service comes pre-installed, or considering whether I'd rather have Howard Stern or Oprah, because there is no practical way to get both.
You could solve this with a monopoly offering a single proprietary solution.
Or you could enforce that both Sirius and XM adhere to and publish an open standard, such that a single receiver device can be used to tune in both. If the FCC had balls and were ethical, that's what they'd have done.
I've been a professional software developer for over ten years. Based on my experience, I can say with certainty that there are three main sources of bugs.
In order, they are:
1. Lack of sensible high-level design and architecture. This causes the bugs that require massive amounts of churn or ugly hacks on top of hacks to fix.
2. Source code that was written without regard for human maintainability/understandability/readability. This causes the bugs that take the longest time to investigate and which are the trickiest to fix without breaking something else without realizing it.
3. Lazy developers who neglect to thoroughly self-test their own work before calling it finished. This causes the most bugs in gener, but fortunately most of them are easy and quick to fix as they are mere oversights.
My wife and I just bought the Samsung LN-4695D, which is their new 46" LCD flat-panel 1080p HDTV. We were going to buy plasma (Pioneer) until this particular LCD caught our attention with better picture quality, resolution, and burn-in resistance for the price.
The picture quality is *amazing*. Although most LCDs paled when compared to strong plasmas (Pioneer/ELITE and Samsung plasmas were my basis for comparison), Samsung's latest line of LCD displays beats all the plasmas I saw. When I first saw it in the store, I mistook it for a plasma until I read the product description. When I got up close (6-8 feet away) I really noticed how much crisper the picture was and how much more visible dark images were than on the plasmas. But all the older LCDs I looked at (even the previous model 720p Samsung LCDs) looked like crap next to the plasmas.
I found in my online research that there have apparently been massive improvements (in numerous aspects) to LCD panel technology in just the last year. All of Samsungs new 1080p LCDs clearly use the new technology. They are less prone to burn-in, have better brightness and contrast, and offer higher resolution. And no comparably-priced comparably-sized plasmas currently on the market will do 1080 lines of resolution -- they're all 768.
Although screen burn-in is still more of an issue with LCD than CRT, it's less of an issue than with plasma, and the newest LCD panels are highly resistant to burn-in. The manual for our TV has a few vague disclaimers about not leaving still images or letterboxing on the screen for "too long", but then goes on to recommend a limit of two straight hours of such usage at one sitting and says you can back the brightness/contrast down during such usage to further reduce the odds of burn-in. So you play a single game or watch a 4:3 standard-def feed with left/right letterboxing for a couple hours, and then you either give the TV a rest or switch the image around to something different for a while -- I don't consider that a big deal. Then again, I'm not some hardcore gamer who would spend 8 hours straight playing a single game.
Are LCD screens fragile/delicate? Honestly, yes. This TV has a surface like any other LCD monitor or display -- if you push on it, it gives and exhibits discoloration temporarily just under where you're pressing. If you were to really push it hard or ram things into it, it would get permanently damaged. But honestly, unless you have a beastly cat attacking images on the display, or a rotten little kid who likes beating televisions with plastic golf clubs, or you go insanely wild with your Wiimote and throw it into the screen, it's not an issue. Just treat the thing normally and it does fine. If you need to move the TV in a moving truck or something, you'll probably want to put a soft blanket over the screen and then tape a piece of plywood over that to protect the screen. So definitely not tough like a CRT or plasma screen, but not a big issue to me. The great thing is that you get no glare off the LCD surface. I supposed if you were really worried about protecting the screen, you could attach some kind of plexiglass or glass front over it. Maybe manufacturers of LCD panels will start adding that as an accessory/option in future models.
None of that makes any sense for the game Second Life. There is no market for $50 outfits (or houses or furniture or cars or...). Designers have zero market for their efforts if they can not sell things for $1. Find 50 people who all want the same thing? Perhaps you have a lot more time on your hands than I do.
I think you seriously over-estimate the value of SL items, both in terms of money and effort. A marketplace is possible only because things can be sold cheaply.
The actual amounts and numbers I used were just examples to illustrate the model. Scale up or down to fit the environment (Second Life, the real world, etc) accordingly. It can be applied to any scale.
It's possible that would work, and possible it would not. The problem is that I* may be better off looking around and waiting for something that's close to what I want, and copying it. Totally free and I get basically what I want. In other words, the only incentive to pay for anything is if nothing suitable exists anywhere in the world and the money to pay for it (which would have to be way, way more than it used to be when copying wasn't happening) is worth it. I
It would work, and it would work exactly as you've described. It's a far more efficient model. Tt encourages re-use of existing solutions. It means people only spend money or time creating things that really don't exist yet. And it encourages people to be more creative, because they need to create something truly new to make money from it. It's a system that makes it harder to make money, but rightly so.
Okay, so I've just paid to have some unique content created for me and someone comes along with a copy tool and duplicates it and gives it to all their friends, and puts it in a freebie store for everyone to share.
You're misunderstanding what you paid for.
You didn't pay for the tangible thing. You paid for intangible, but nevertheless valuable, concepts. You paid to be the first to have it. You paid to have someone create exactly what you needed. You paid to get it when you needed it. You paid so that you wouldn't have to wait around (perhaps indefinitely) for someone else to create something that might or might not be what you needed.
Other people making copies of the thing you paid for doesn't go back in time and decrease the worth of those intangible concepts.
I've paid for something that exists elsewhere
Wrong -- you've paid for something that didn't exist elsewhere before you paid someone to create it.
but I've paid (say) $50 instead of $1.
If you only want to pay $1, then you team up with 49 other people who all need the same thing you do. Everyone contributes a dollar, the creator gets paid to create the thing, and then 50 copies of it are given by the creator to the 50 people who paid for it. Those 50 people are then free to give copies away to whoever they want, because the creator has already been paid for their services. The creator can sell ongoing creative services that support the thing (repairs, maintenance, modification, extension, etc), and the creator can try to sell copies of the thing (for people who for whatever reason are unable to make copies for themselves), and those would be fair. But why should the creator get paid over and over and over again for something they already did? That's inflationary economics.
Or suppose you want a cut of things. You figure out that there's a lot of market demand for thing X, but it would cost $500 to create it and no individual wants to pay that much for it. So you sign up 1000 people and tell them that if they commit to pay $1, you'll commit to pool their contributions and pay the creator. You do it, the creator is happy (he/she gt paid), the individuals are happy (they got what they wanted for only $1 whereas it would have cost them $500 before), and you're happy (because you got paid $500 for your organizational and negotiation services to connect the creator to the customers). That's a pretty fair system, and everyone has motivation to participate and make it happen.
This is progress?
Yes. It guarantees that creators get paid squarely for their time and hard work, while also guaranteeing consumers a fair price and total control over what they've paid for. It also is a system that encourages progress by making it legal to spread knowledge, learning from others, build on the ideas and works of others, etc, in a cumulative way.
Some Shmuck is reporting that many musicians are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a technology called "file copying", designed to copy other people's files. From the article: "The night before last, I was looking around a music store, where people buy and sell music, when an argument broke out; a person going by the name Average Joe was copying tracks of musician's CDs, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with the copy command produced by the maker of his operating system. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find in music stores. The RIAA's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by "the copy command", we'll file a lawsuit against the copier and not give you any of the profits from the suit. Musicians started committing suicide moments later."
Seriously... think about it. Music won't stop being created in the real world just because people can copy things. And objects won't stop being created in Second Life just because people can copy them. All it means is that one thing that used to be a valuable service to people (creating copies of things) is no longer valuable because people can do it themselves.
The other thing (creating new content, or unique content (such as live performances)) is still of value, and always will be, as it will never be the case that all people are equally able to be competent creators or artists. Change your business model. Instead of selling copies of your thing, sell your creative services under contract. It's a model where people hire you to create something new that has never existed before, rather than paying you for a copy of something that already exists elsewhere.
This could actually be the best thing that ever happened to Second Life, because it can result in a more innovative and open "society" and a fairer "economy", and serve as an example for the real world.
The lawyers and judges (who don't generally understand software development or architecture at all) keep making numerous faulty assumptions. Among them:
1. Companies document everything they do. 2. Documentation is easy and quick to write. 3. There's always some kind of clean, clear line between "interface" and "implementation". 4. No one can figure anything out without documentation.
First off, Microsoft doesn't document everything they do internally. "The code is the documentation" is often true.
Second, documentation is not easy or quick to write. It's very difficult to write comprehensible documentation for a complex interface and it takes a lot of time to write, edit, revise, verify for correctness, and run through the legal department.
Third, unless software was architected up-front explicitly to have an exposed public interface and a hidden private implementation, there's not going to be such a clear distinction. And creating one after-the-fact for pieces of shipped software already in use around the world is not necessarily a feasible task.
Fourth, there's this great thing called reverse-engineering that permits people to play with something until they figure out how it works, and then interface to it any way they please. Tons of people have figured out tons of things without documentation. Just because Microsoft doesn't publish documentation for every conceivable thing they do, it doesn't mean a competitor is incapable of interoperating with their stuff.
You Peak Oil conspiracy theorist! How dare you suggest the world is running out of oil? We'll have enough for the next 120 years! How dare you suggest we change our ways or find alternative sources of energy?!?
(Oh, well, nevermind that we really are going to run out sometime, and that all this means is our children or grandchildren will be stuck with the problem instead of us, or that this now gives us more time to think up solutions that we should take advantage of immediately. You're still a conspiracy nut and you're wrong. So there.)
My gut feeling, of course, is that the statement "I don't pay any attention to politics" is a total cop-out. Do you not watch the news? Do you have absolutely no idea about what's going on in the world and no opinions about it, either? I have a hard time buying this. There's a certain little voice in my gut that thinks that "I don't pay attention to politics" is tantamount to saying "I am a lazy couch potato with no sense of ethics or civic duty, who's totally happy with the status quo because I'm too self centered to ever be involved with my community or care what happens to it."
You must not know very many people. I know plenty of people who are completely caught up in their own lives and have no sense of civic duty. They never watch the news, read a newspaper, or go to news sites online. They can't identify the names or faces of very recognizable political figures (such as the current vice president). They don't know anything about current events or issues, not even the fluff stuff: the vice president shot someone? really? who is the vice president again? stem cell research? are those cells from the stem of a plant? won't all the plants die because of that thing al gore invented? what was it called... global warming, that's it.
And the really scary part is that these are the people who most buy into the "rock the vote" nonsense and go out and vote on things and people they know absolutely nothing about. It's like telling retarded people they need to become gun owners, helping them make it happen, and then turning them loose in the forest, without them really understanding why they are doing it or what they are doing.
And how is a newbie supposed to know to open a command prompt, and know that the magic command they need to type is "apt-get install"? That's far less discoverable or intuitive than downloading and running "setup.exe" (which, BTW, provides you with reasonable defaults for all options, and which has a EULA that most people don't give a shit about and just blindly click "Accept" on).
The fundamental problem with Linux isn't that it's difficult once you already know it. The problem is that it's unnecessarily difficult to learn and discover things, especially for non-techies. You have to hold a tremendous amount of memorized commands in your head and go to a command line to get most anything useful done. And you have to learn about the architectural innards of the system enough to carry around your own mental image of how all the pieces and subsystems fit together, otherwise you risk breaking something or you can't pull of things that ought to be simple like installing a device driver.
Tell me -- if you didn't already know all the common Linux commands, or understand what a "compiler" or a "kernal" was, or have the slightest clue about typical OS architecture, and your first instinct wasn't to go Google every time you ran into trouble, how in the world do you think you would discover how to do things in Linux? You certainly couldn't figure out how to do everything you wanted to do just by poking around in the GNOME or KDE GUI.
You claimed: Windows is "simpler" because people are used to it, not because it's actually easier to use.
But you're wrong. Windows is "simpler" because it's easier to learn, and because you don't have to hold as much memorized information in your head just to do everyday stuff (where "everyday stuff" includes things like installing/uninstalling programs and installing/uninstalling hardware and device drivers -- Linux people who claim these are "admin-only" tasks are full of shit).
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It's time to give you all a reality check.
The RIAA knows from experience that the following formula holds true:
HIGH_PER_UNIT_PRICE + LOTS_OF_PUSHY_MARKETING = PROFIT!!!
Note that QUALITY_OF_PRODUCT is nowhere to be found in that equation. It doesn't factor in. Completely shitty music yields high profits as long as the industry overprices it and then markets the hell out of it.
This works because most people are stupid, mindless sheep. That's the way it has always been and the way it will continue to be for a very long time. As long as these sheep exist, then pushy brainwashing is all that's necessary to get them to think something is great. These are the same mindless sheep who don't get the joke behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster and who voted for Bush in the last two presidential elections -- in short, complete idiots incapable of critical thinking.
If you're angry at the industry for selling overpriced shit, your anger is misplaced. You should be angry at all the stupid people who fall for it, because the industry is just catering to them. The only solution to the problem is to gather all the stupid people together in one place (preferably by holding some kind of redneck event, such as a rodeo, NASCAR race, or televangelism marathon) and drop a rather large bomb on them.
Allchin's memo about "LH" (Longhorn, aka Vista) was sent in January 2004, several months before "The Reset" that occurred midway through Vista development. He's referring to the earlier, pre-reset Longhorn builds, which were indeed resource hogs (partly due to a C#-developed shell that tied into the SQL-based WinFS filesystem). That memo was probably the beginning of the line of discussion that eventually led to the reset, including the decision to drop WinFS and recode the shell without .NET.
You actually have to give Allchin credit for at least noticing and caring enough about how off-course things had gotten to raise hell and pull a U-turn.
Seriously, is it that hard to understand that ITS is the possessive, and that IT'S is a contraction for IT IS???
What, you mean "More seriously, does the DMCA have any limit on it is scope?" doesn't make any sense to you?
I grew up in Friendswood, Texas and attended public school, K-12, there. I was bullied relentlessly pretty much the entire time, mostly by the same people.
There were many bullies -- probably on the order of 40 or so, but two were especially awful: Jesse Kellum (a reverend's son) and Monier Khalil (a football player). These two bullied me all the way from about 3rd grade through about my junior year of high school, and they did things ranging from stealing my stuff to kicking me in the nuts to punching me in the face (and breaking my glasses) to lighting my hair on fire. These were two of the most rotten human beings I've ever known -- pure evil, no redeeming qualities or goodness in their hearts whatsoever.
No amount of reporting them to teachers, principals, bus drivers, superintendants, or anyone else made a lick of difference. My parents and I were always told that the district couldn't take any action if school staff didn't witness the bad behavior first-hand. Of course no staff ever witnessed it, because bullies only bully when authority figures aren't looking! My dad told me to "stick up for myself" and "punch them in the face", but I knew that would only make things worse: I would get punished by the school, and it would just piss off the bullies and their bully friends even more and they would come at me worse than ever the next day.
The bullying itself isn't the worst part. It's the frustration and helplessness. Literally NO ONE wants to help you, will help you, or can help you, and if you defend yourself, you (not the bully) get punished! It's one of the most unfair situations in the world, and it really does drive a person to truly want to kill people to set things right.
I used to daydream about somehow obtaining a gun and shooting Jesse or Monier. I thought about shooting the teachers and bus driver and principal, too, since they knew damn well that I was being bullied but wouldn't do anything about it like they were supposed to. Of course I never would shoot anyone, because my parents never kept guns and I had no idea how to get one or use one and I would go to prison. But I thought about it a lot and played it out in my head very graphically. I thought about their lifeless bodies, with shocked looks on their bloody faces, collapsing to the floor, and the fantasy gave me some small measure of relief. If my parents had been gun owners and kept guns around the house, I think there's a very real possibility I would have shot a lot of those fuckers right between the eyes like they all deserved.
Fortunately, Jesse ended up shooting himself, and Monier went to prison for murdering a homosexual behind a bar, and many of the other bullies in my life came to other deserving ends, so it all eventually settled itself out. Mostly.
Today I'm an extreme introvert, because I constantly anticipate that everyone I meet is going to be mean to me. I have a fierce temper when it comes to inequality or other people not being accountable to their responsibilities. I empathize very strongly with anyone who is in any way a victim of any kind, which gives rise to most of my political views (I'm way left on the political spectrum because I think it's the government's job to protect people from being wronged). None of this is a conscious thing or something I can control or change. It is my personality, based on social conditioning I received over a course of nearly two decades.
Most believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles.
Whereas I believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in John Malkovich's moods, known as the Malkovich cycles.
Suppose you're running a one-person business and one of your customers is obnoxious to you. Should you be required to forget all about it and treat them as any new customer next time you see them?
Yes, because it's wrong to punish the vast majority of customers, who are honest, for the wrongful actions of a few.
Requiring businesses to delete records about their customers is essentially enforced amnesia.
Exactly. That's what it's supposed to be.
Whenever there's a transaction, it seems pretty reasonable for both sides to remember what happened.
"Remember", "keep written or electronic records of", and "share written or electronic records with others" are all entirely different things.
And then there's the question not only of what you should remember but who should you tell.
A business shouldn't be allowed to tell anyone anything about a customer without that customer's explicit opted-in consent, because that's the only thing that's fair to the customer.
When a business gets ripped off, who are they allowed to tell?
No one. Businesses don't need to be helping each other out. They hold too much power over individual customers as things are. Let other businesses find out about bad customers on their own.
Should assholes and deadbeats get a free pass next time?
Yes, if that's what it takes to guarantee that honest customers are treated ethically. You could easily report the assholes and deadbeats to the authorities or a collection agency after the first time they rip you off, and that would solve the problem in the correct way (without harming honest customers).
The other side to this is that we've grown accustomed to a certain amount of anonymity when dealing with larger businesses.
Who has? I sure haven't.
Not to mention that there's an enormous power imbalance when you're dealing with a big business.
Which is exactly why individual consumer interests should always overrule the interests of big businesses, regardless of the situation. Indivdual consumers have enough stacked against them already and are basically at the mercy of the business anyway.
But the question of how long you should remember, what you should forgive and forget, and how that should affect peoples' reputations doesn't have simple answers.
Sure it does -- you just don't like the answers, being a pro-business zealot.
Plus this seems to ignore the fact that Apple can decide to aim for different profit margins per unit in different markets if it wants to, or Apple's costs per unit could vary depending on where the unit was manufactured in the first place, etc. There's no guaranteed constancy about iPod's price/value ratio at all, and so basing relative currency values on it is a flawed exercise.
Still, I don't like having to choose a car based on which satellite radio service comes pre-installed, or considering whether I'd rather have Howard Stern or Oprah, because there is no practical way to get both.
You could solve this with a monopoly offering a single proprietary solution.
Or you could enforce that both Sirius and XM adhere to and publish an open standard, such that a single receiver device can be used to tune in both. If the FCC had balls and were ethical, that's what they'd have done.
Why would digital pirates want to own and operate an aquatic theme park?
Are you kidding me? You could have asked for Jenna Jameson, and instead you asked for a pony?!?
You are feeling very sleepy... repeat after me:
Steve Jobs is a superior race of omnicient overload and will rule Apple forever.
"Human Intelligence Only a Theory, Says Global Warming"
I've been a professional software developer for over ten years. Based on my experience, I can say with certainty that there are three main sources of bugs.
In order, they are:
1. Lack of sensible high-level design and architecture. This causes the bugs that require massive amounts of churn or ugly hacks on top of hacks to fix.
2. Source code that was written without regard for human maintainability/understandability/readability. This causes the bugs that take the longest time to investigate and which are the trickiest to fix without breaking something else without realizing it.
3. Lazy developers who neglect to thoroughly self-test their own work before calling it finished. This causes the most bugs in gener, but fortunately most of them are easy and quick to fix as they are mere oversights.
My wife and I just bought the Samsung LN-4695D, which is their new 46" LCD flat-panel 1080p HDTV. We were going to buy plasma (Pioneer) until this particular LCD caught our attention with better picture quality, resolution, and burn-in resistance for the price.
The picture quality is *amazing*. Although most LCDs paled when compared to strong plasmas (Pioneer/ELITE and Samsung plasmas were my basis for comparison), Samsung's latest line of LCD displays beats all the plasmas I saw. When I first saw it in the store, I mistook it for a plasma until I read the product description. When I got up close (6-8 feet away) I really noticed how much crisper the picture was and how much more visible dark images were than on the plasmas. But all the older LCDs I looked at (even the previous model 720p Samsung LCDs) looked like crap next to the plasmas.
I found in my online research that there have apparently been massive improvements (in numerous aspects) to LCD panel technology in just the last year. All of Samsungs new 1080p LCDs clearly use the new technology. They are less prone to burn-in, have better brightness and contrast, and offer higher resolution. And no comparably-priced comparably-sized plasmas currently on the market will do 1080 lines of resolution -- they're all 768.
Although screen burn-in is still more of an issue with LCD than CRT, it's less of an issue than with plasma, and the newest LCD panels are highly resistant to burn-in. The manual for our TV has a few vague disclaimers about not leaving still images or letterboxing on the screen for "too long", but then goes on to recommend a limit of two straight hours of such usage at one sitting and says you can back the brightness/contrast down during such usage to further reduce the odds of burn-in. So you play a single game or watch a 4:3 standard-def feed with left/right letterboxing for a couple hours, and then you either give the TV a rest or switch the image around to something different for a while -- I don't consider that a big deal. Then again, I'm not some hardcore gamer who would spend 8 hours straight playing a single game.
Are LCD screens fragile/delicate? Honestly, yes. This TV has a surface like any other LCD monitor or display -- if you push on it, it gives and exhibits discoloration temporarily just under where you're pressing. If you were to really push it hard or ram things into it, it would get permanently damaged. But honestly, unless you have a beastly cat attacking images on the display, or a rotten little kid who likes beating televisions with plastic golf clubs, or you go insanely wild with your Wiimote and throw it into the screen, it's not an issue. Just treat the thing normally and it does fine. If you need to move the TV in a moving truck or something, you'll probably want to put a soft blanket over the screen and then tape a piece of plywood over that to protect the screen. So definitely not tough like a CRT or plasma screen, but not a big issue to me. The great thing is that you get no glare off the LCD surface. I supposed if you were really worried about protecting the screen, you could attach some kind of plexiglass or glass front over it. Maybe manufacturers of LCD panels will start adding that as an accessory/option in future models.
Star Wars Virgin Takes the Plunge
The headline made it sound like a Star Wars-loving virgin who had actually gotten laid was going to tell us what it was like to finally score.
None of that makes any sense for the game Second Life. There is no market for $50 outfits (or houses or furniture or cars or...). Designers have zero market for their efforts if they can not sell things for $1. Find 50 people who all want the same thing? Perhaps you have a lot more time on your hands than I do.
I think you seriously over-estimate the value of SL items, both in terms of money and effort. A marketplace is possible only because things can be sold cheaply.
The actual amounts and numbers I used were just examples to illustrate the model. Scale up or down to fit the environment (Second Life, the real world, etc) accordingly. It can be applied to any scale.
It's possible that would work, and possible it would not. The problem is that I* may be better off looking around and waiting for something that's close to what I want, and copying it. Totally free and I get basically what I want. In other words, the only incentive to pay for anything is if nothing suitable exists anywhere in the world and the money to pay for it (which would have to be way, way more than it used to be when copying wasn't happening) is worth it. I
It would work, and it would work exactly as you've described. It's a far more efficient model. Tt encourages re-use of existing solutions. It means people only spend money or time creating things that really don't exist yet. And it encourages people to be more creative, because they need to create something truly new to make money from it. It's a system that makes it harder to make money, but rightly so.
Someone was asked to put together a Christmas list, weren't they?
Okay, so I've just paid to have some unique content created for me and someone comes along with a copy tool and duplicates it and gives it to all their friends, and puts it in a freebie store for everyone to share.
You're misunderstanding what you paid for.
You didn't pay for the tangible thing. You paid for intangible, but nevertheless valuable, concepts. You paid to be the first to have it. You paid to have someone create exactly what you needed. You paid to get it when you needed it. You paid so that you wouldn't have to wait around
(perhaps indefinitely) for someone else to create something that might or might not be what you needed.
Other people making copies of the thing you paid for doesn't go back in time and decrease the worth of those intangible concepts.
I've paid for something that exists elsewhere
Wrong -- you've paid for something that didn't exist elsewhere before you paid someone to create it.
but I've paid (say) $50 instead of $1.
If you only want to pay $1, then you team up with 49 other people who all need the same thing you do. Everyone contributes a dollar, the creator gets paid to create the thing, and then 50 copies of it are given by the creator to the 50 people who paid for it. Those 50 people are then free to give copies away to whoever they want, because the creator has already been paid for their services. The creator can sell ongoing creative services that support the thing (repairs, maintenance, modification, extension, etc), and the creator can try to sell copies of the thing (for people who for whatever reason are unable to make copies for themselves), and those would be fair. But why should the creator get paid over and over and over again for something they already did? That's inflationary economics.
Or suppose you want a cut of things. You figure out that there's a lot of market demand for thing X, but it would cost $500 to create it and no individual wants to pay that much for it. So you sign up 1000 people and tell them that if they commit to pay $1, you'll commit to pool their contributions and pay the creator. You do it, the creator is happy (he/she gt paid), the individuals are happy (they got what they wanted for only $1 whereas it would have cost them $500 before), and you're happy (because you got paid $500 for your organizational and negotiation services to connect the creator to the customers). That's a pretty fair system, and everyone has motivation to participate and make it happen.
This is progress?
Yes. It guarantees that creators get paid squarely for their time and hard work, while also guaranteeing consumers a fair price and total control over what they've paid for. It also is a system that encourages progress by making it legal to spread knowledge, learning from others, build on the ideas and works of others, etc, in a cumulative way.
Some Shmuck is reporting that many musicians are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a technology called "file copying", designed to copy other people's files. From the article:
"The night before last, I was looking around a music store, where people buy and sell music, when an argument broke out; a person going by the name Average Joe was copying tracks of musician's CDs, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with the copy command produced by the maker of his operating system. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find in music stores. The RIAA's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by "the copy command", we'll file a lawsuit against the copier and not give you any of the profits from the suit. Musicians started committing suicide moments later."
Seriously... think about it. Music won't stop being created in the real world just because people can copy things. And objects won't stop being created in Second Life just because people can copy them. All it means is that one thing that used to be a valuable service to people (creating copies of things) is no longer valuable because people can do it themselves.
The other thing (creating new content, or unique content (such as live performances)) is still of value, and always will be, as it will never be the case that all people are equally able to be competent creators or artists. Change your business model. Instead of selling copies of your thing, sell your creative services under contract. It's a model where people hire you to create something new that has never existed before, rather than paying you for a copy of something that already exists elsewhere.
This could actually be the best thing that ever happened to Second Life, because it can result in a more innovative and open "society" and a fairer "economy", and serve as an example for the real world.
The lawyers and judges (who don't generally understand software development or architecture at all) keep making numerous faulty assumptions. Among them:
1. Companies document everything they do.
2. Documentation is easy and quick to write.
3. There's always some kind of clean, clear line between "interface" and "implementation".
4. No one can figure anything out without documentation.
First off, Microsoft doesn't document everything they do internally. "The code is the documentation" is often true.
Second, documentation is not easy or quick to write. It's very difficult to write comprehensible documentation for a complex interface and it takes a lot of time to write, edit, revise, verify for correctness, and run through the legal department.
Third, unless software was architected up-front explicitly to have an exposed public interface and a hidden private implementation, there's not going to be such a clear distinction. And creating one after-the-fact for pieces of shipped software already in use around the world is not necessarily a feasible task.
Fourth, there's this great thing called reverse-engineering that permits people to play with something until they figure out how it works, and then interface to it any way they please. Tons of people have figured out tons of things without documentation. Just because Microsoft doesn't publish documentation for every conceivable thing they do, it doesn't mean a competitor is incapable of interoperating with their stuff.
You Peak Oil conspiracy theorist! How dare you suggest the world is running out of oil? We'll have enough for the next 120 years! How dare you suggest we change our ways or find alternative sources of energy?!?
(Oh, well, nevermind that we really are going to run out sometime, and that all this means is our children or grandchildren will be stuck with the problem instead of us, or that this now gives us more time to think up solutions that we should take advantage of immediately. You're still a conspiracy nut and you're wrong. So there.)
My gut feeling, of course, is that the statement "I don't pay any attention to politics" is a total cop-out. Do you not watch the news? Do you have absolutely no idea about what's going on in the world and no opinions about it, either? I have a hard time buying this. There's a certain little voice in my gut that thinks that "I don't pay attention to politics" is tantamount to saying "I am a lazy couch potato with no sense of ethics or civic duty, who's totally happy with the status quo because I'm too self centered to ever be involved with my community or care what happens to it."
You must not know very many people. I know plenty of people who are completely caught up in their own lives and have no sense of civic duty. They never watch the news, read a newspaper, or go to news sites online. They can't identify the names or faces of very recognizable political figures (such as the current vice president). They don't know anything about current events or issues, not even the fluff stuff: the vice president shot someone? really? who is the vice president again? stem cell research? are those cells from the stem of a plant? won't all the plants die because of that thing al gore invented? what was it called... global warming, that's it.
And the really scary part is that these are the people who most buy into the "rock the vote" nonsense and go out and vote on things and people they know absolutely nothing about. It's like telling retarded people they need to become gun owners, helping them make it happen, and then turning them loose in the forest, without them really understanding why they are doing it or what they are doing.
some ISPs want the government to go further and to ban some people from being able to log onto the internet at all.
Hell, that's a great idea -- I definitely know several people who should be banned from logging onto the internet at all...
(This is a joke, for all you "Flamebait" and "Troll" moderators devoid of any sense of humor).
And how is a newbie supposed to know to open a command prompt, and know that the magic command they need to type is "apt-get install"? That's far less discoverable or intuitive than downloading and running "setup.exe" (which, BTW, provides you with reasonable defaults for all options, and which has a EULA that most people don't give a shit about and just blindly click "Accept" on).
The fundamental problem with Linux isn't that it's difficult once you already know it. The problem is that it's unnecessarily difficult to learn and discover things, especially for non-techies. You have to hold a tremendous amount of memorized commands in your head and go to a command line to get most anything useful done. And you have to learn about the architectural innards of the system enough to carry around your own mental image of how all the pieces and subsystems fit together, otherwise you risk breaking something or you can't pull of things that ought to be simple like installing a device driver.
Tell me -- if you didn't already know all the common Linux commands, or understand what a "compiler" or a "kernal" was, or have the slightest clue about typical OS architecture, and your first instinct wasn't to go Google every time you ran into trouble, how in the world do you think you would discover how to do things in Linux? You certainly couldn't figure out how to do everything you wanted to do just by poking around in the GNOME or KDE GUI.
You claimed: Windows is "simpler" because people are used to it, not because it's actually easier to use.
But you're wrong. Windows is "simpler" because it's easier to learn, and because you don't have to hold as much memorized information in your head just to do everyday stuff (where "everyday stuff" includes things like installing/uninstalling programs and installing/uninstalling hardware and device drivers -- Linux people who claim these are "admin-only" tasks are full of shit).