Which has to be balanced against the rather larger economy of not having to write, test and debug 30 million lines of code (in the case of the Linux kernel). I'll grant that this probably doesn't greatly mitigate the corporate disincentives you mention, but "ineconomy of scale" nevertheless seems a little harsh.
So, of course, nobody does -- while the feature might be worth $1,000 to each of the million organisations it's not worth the $10,000 it would cost to develop to any of them. So it never gets developed.
That isn't actually true. Start any discussion on Linux vs Windows, and you'll get a dozen astroturfers queuing up to explain how Linux is mainly written by guys working for Novell and IBM and isn't really an amateur effort any more. (I'm not sure why they think this makes a difference, but they're correct to say that business is funding a lot of linux development).
Probably doesn't happen so much outside the kernel and the big desktop environments, but it does happen.
But developers spent time developing the software. So, if their time is not free, then how did the software come to be free in the first place?
If the developer does it because the developer wants to do it, it's a hobby.
If he does it because you tell him to do it, it's a job.
In the second case, he'll probably expect you to pay him. Bear in mind however that all you're buying his time and the right to direct his efforts.
The software became free because the initial developers chose to release their work under a free software licence. It remains free regardless of whether or not you choose to help fund further development.
I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance that makes people say 'software should be free' but at the same time 'I should get paid to work on that free software for you'.
The software is free, the developer's time is not.
You're free to use the software however you choose, but if you want the developer to spend his time working to your schedule, then you may have to make it worth his while.
Particularly, if the aim is not to make art, it's seldom art.
I don't think that's true. I think art has often been unconscious; created because somebody wanted to do something well, or whole-heartedly, but without any consideration of the artistic merits of their activity.
Furthermore, I have, on occasion, danced through a few game levels with very deliberate artistic intent in my time. So as it applied to games-as-art, your argument falls down either way, or so it seems to me.
Well, where I come from "football" means "soccer". There's a lot of people will tell you artistry in football.
Nope, it don't work like that.
Then you're going to have to tell me how it does work. Specifically, I'm curious as to how you include forms art forms like improvisational dance or jazz but exclude all sports related performances.
Because I don't think art is as clear cut as you'd like to make it.
So I suppose, then, that the blood spewed forth when Chell is shot is just, you know, fake "android blood"? And that GlaDOS put this supposed android in suspended animation just for kicks?
An android is a synthetic human being. The definition encompasses everything from C-3PO on the one hand, through terminators and replicants and up to clones grown from synthetic DNA. It never occurred to me that Chell wasn't organic. She's quite probably human by in most senses of the word. I just think she's synthetic.
As such, yeah she bleeds, and yeah, some sort of suspended animation is probably necessary.
Hell, Valve stated that they added her heel supports because people didn't buy the idea that a human could fall as far as she does in the game (citation).
Actually, that pretty much supports the Android theory. Valve didn't give her the heel supports originally because Chell, (being a synthetic organism), was capable of surviving falls that would seriously harm a normal human. They added them in later when people failed to pick up on the android clues.
I suspect the sticking point here is the definition of "Android". If you're basically saying she's not mechanical, then I agree with you.
The lines GlaDOS delivers would be given to androids being run through the course, but that doesn't mean Chell is an android. It just means GlaDOS is running her "android live fire course" program, which includes that snippet of dialog.
Which would be persuasive if every other comment made wasn't directed directly to Chell. I don't understand how you can be so dogmatic about this. You're entitled to your interpretation, surely, but it's far from the only one possible, or the one that best fits the evidence.
If you had actually listened, the speech at the start of that level mentions the real Test Chamber 16 is currently unavailable due to mandatory scheduled maintenance
Claws kitty kitty!
... and that it has been replaced with "a live-fire course designed for military androids".
Which does nothing to explain why the "android hell" comment makes sense when addressed to Chell. Unless she is in fact an android, of course.
Err... no you don't. Replay the game. This is a common misconception. Chell is human with special "shoes" (whatever they're called) to reinforce her legs so she can fall from great heights.
How can you tell? Your classical android is a robot designed to perfectly resemble a human being. The fact that Chell looks like a human wearing special shoes doesn't mean she isn't an android.
She's definitely *not* an android.
On the other hand, GlaDOS tells her this:
Android Hell is a Real Place, and You Will Be Sent There at the First Sign of Defiance.
Which doesn't really make any sense unless Chell is an android. I suppose you could interpret that as evidence of GlaDOS' insanity, but Chell being an android is as good or better an explanation.
So to my mind, there are definitely grounds for believing Chell to be an Android. On the other hand, the only point you've offered against is that she's wearing special shoes, which doesn't really prove anything. I think you've got a bit more work to do if you want to make your point stick.
He argues that artistic judgment is the disinterested contemplation of beauty or the sublime
That might have value as a definition of artistic judgement, but seems lacking as a definition for art itself. Otherwise any artist that creates with passion would have his works disqualified as art, and that doesn't seem to accord with the way we understand art.
I suppose if you consider the game creator as the artist and the player as the appreciator, then I can see your point. But suppose you see the player as artist, and the game as his canvas? A good run through a Far Cry level can surely be considered art, at least as much as an improvisational dancer can.
Or maybe we need to look at game playing as an artistic collaboration between the game creator, and the player, producing performance art that arises uniquely from that combination.
The people don't even have to play it. They just have to buy it, and the bad reviews or complaints can be buried in Google or compensated for with advertising, paid reviews, astroturfing, etc
It's kind of short-termist though. I mean three or four over-hyped turkeys, and suddenly no-one's going to get excited, no matter how much money is spent on advertising.
Marketers and admen like to think of people as essentially stateless; that they always respond the same way to the same inputs. I don't think that's true: people learn. Admittedly when it comes to people considered in the aggregate they often learn slowly. But the latency period seems to be getting shorter with the advent of the Internet, and I think people in the aggregate are slow to forget, as well...
If no one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd all be running around on stone wheels.
Furthermore, most of them would be square. Some of them would be triangular. And there'd be all sorts of marketing twonks
saying things like "horsepower's cheap: they'll turn round just fine if you put enough power behind them". And "don't go complaining about
the bumpy ride. It's not our fault if you're too cheap to pay for decent suspension".
Reinventing the wheel is allowed. Just make sure your version has more corners than the one you're replacing
It's worth noting here that the FT is a Murdoch paper, and that Murdoch has a real hate-on for Google at the moment. A pinch of salt may useful for some of the opinions tossed around as fact in TFA.
Also, if Google end up having to pay ISPs in Europe, you can bet lobbyists will use that as a reason to reopen the debate stateside.
Basically your argument amounts to, "I don't like it, so she can suck it."
Well, yes, if you frame it in the most unsympathetic terms possible, you could put it like that. Of course, by that yardstick your own position reduces to "copyright must persist forever or else we may hurt the feelings of dead people", which is scarcely more persuasive.
what argument can we use to help people see that short copyright is good, even though it removes control from the original authors?
In the cases you cited, death has removed control from the original authors. Shortening copyright is not going to upset JRRT one iota. For those folks still alive when copyright expires, I don't see that the situation is any worse that the reams of unlicenced fanfic that get uploaded to the internet daily. The authors will be free to accept any work as cannon or not, and their fans will surely respect that
Everything is a trade-off. In order to lessen the well documented abuses of copyright, it may be necessary to risk having Margaret Mitchell turn in her grave a time or two more. Call me unsympathetic, but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Don't forget that your standard preupdate PS3 was an $800.00 computer that Sony's been eating costs on this entire time.
Yeah, four years ago it was pretty competitive. Meanwhile Moore's Law marches on.
Also, you have to allow for a lot of that $800 going on the BluRay drive they were desperate to get some marketshare at the time. Factor that into the price, and unless you really needed a BluRay player, you got to wonder where the value lay.
I've never understood the appeal of spending money on a machine where you have to fiddle with drivers and software, so I guess we're even...
I probably didn't make this entirely clear, but installing some exotic O/S variant isn't compulsory. This being Slashdot, I can see how you might have formed the wrong impression about that.
The fact is, you can get by very nicely with the drivers that come bundled with the system in the vast majority of cases.
You made it this far without [some] people building custom firmware. Now you've forced [some] people to find ways to put custom firmware on the PS3. Next up is "indie" games followed by pirates followed by the game
industry going back to PCs or over to other consoles.
I was under the impression that one of the things Sony got right with the PS2 and PS3 was the option to install Linux. Not for any reasons of ideology, but just because it isolated separated those who wanted to experiment with their O/S from those who just wanted to defeat the platform's built-in DRM.
As a result, the efforts to crack the Playstation as a platform have been small and ineffective, at least in comparison to the efforts directed at the XBox consoles which has often appeared to be under siege.
Now it seems likely that, as with the XBox consoles, hackers and pirates will find common ground.
So all in all it seems likely that we'll see [more] effort devoted to building custom firmware for the PS3. Which I think was probably the GP's point.
Too bad. I actually liked by PS3. Hopefully something new will come along soon so I won't have to buy an xbox...
There's a little known platform called a "personal computer". It works a lot like a gaming console, except that it isn't crippled at the hardware level by the OEM and has a wider range of software available. You can even install Linux on it:)
Seriously, I've never understood the appeal of spending serious money on a deliberately crippled computer, when I have a perfectly good one already. Doubly so from a company that even rootkits their audio CDs.
Not for my money. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes I loved it. But the main characters only appear for about three minutes in total, and it gives a pretty misleading idea of what DW is like if you don't already know what to expect.
I'd start with the first of the Eccleston episodes: relaunches the series, doesn't assume any prior knowledge, decent story and a lot of energy. Move forward from there.
I said "once you prove". If you *can* *prove* that, the non-existence proof trivially follows.
I do believe they call that "begging the question".
Proving that "For all X that exist, A is true" is logically the same thing as proving that "No X exists for which A is not true".
You haven't demonstrated anything with your triangles. All you've done is shifted the hard work to one of your starting assumptions, and then said Q.E.D.
Slashdot Mirror
Which has to be balanced against the rather larger economy of not having to write, test and debug 30 million lines of code (in the case of the Linux kernel). I'll grant that this probably doesn't greatly mitigate the corporate disincentives you mention, but "ineconomy of scale" nevertheless seems a little harsh.
That isn't actually true. Start any discussion on Linux vs Windows, and you'll get a dozen astroturfers queuing up to explain how Linux is mainly written by guys working for Novell and IBM and isn't really an amateur effort any more. (I'm not sure why they think this makes a difference, but they're correct to say that business is funding a lot of linux development).
Probably doesn't happen so much outside the kernel and the big desktop environments, but it does happen.
If the developer does it because the developer wants to do it, it's a hobby. If he does it because you tell him to do it, it's a job. In the second case, he'll probably expect you to pay him. Bear in mind however that all you're buying his time and the right to direct his efforts.
The software became free because the initial developers chose to release their work under a free software licence. It remains free regardless of whether or not you choose to help fund further development.
The software is free, the developer's time is not.
You're free to use the software however you choose, but if you want the developer to spend his time working to your schedule, then you may have to make it worth his while.
Not where I come from it doesn't :)
I don't think that's true. I think art has often been unconscious; created because somebody wanted to do something well, or whole-heartedly, but without any consideration of the artistic merits of their activity.
Furthermore, I have, on occasion, danced through a few game levels with very deliberate artistic intent in my time. So as it applied to games-as-art, your argument falls down either way, or so it seems to me.
Well, where I come from "football" means "soccer". There's a lot of people will tell you artistry in football.
Then you're going to have to tell me how it does work. Specifically, I'm curious as to how you include forms art forms like improvisational dance or jazz but exclude all sports related performances.
Because I don't think art is as clear cut as you'd like to make it.
An android is a synthetic human being. The definition encompasses everything from C-3PO on the one hand, through terminators and replicants and up to clones grown from synthetic DNA. It never occurred to me that Chell wasn't organic. She's quite probably human by in most senses of the word. I just think she's synthetic.
As such, yeah she bleeds, and yeah, some sort of suspended animation is probably necessary.
Actually, that pretty much supports the Android theory. Valve didn't give her the heel supports originally because Chell, (being a synthetic organism), was capable of surviving falls that would seriously harm a normal human. They added them in later when people failed to pick up on the android clues.
I suspect the sticking point here is the definition of "Android". If you're basically saying she's not mechanical, then I agree with you.
Which would be persuasive if every other comment made wasn't directed directly to Chell. I don't understand how you can be so dogmatic about this. You're entitled to your interpretation, surely, but it's far from the only one possible, or the one that best fits the evidence.
Claws kitty kitty!
Because a good enough synthetic human would be able to eat human foodstuff?
How can you tell? Your classical android is a robot designed to perfectly resemble a human being. The fact that Chell looks like a human wearing special shoes doesn't mean she isn't an android.
On the other hand, GlaDOS tells her this:
Which doesn't really make any sense unless Chell is an android. I suppose you could interpret that as evidence of GlaDOS' insanity, but Chell being an android is as good or better an explanation.
So to my mind, there are definitely grounds for believing Chell to be an Android. On the other hand, the only point you've offered against is that she's wearing special shoes, which doesn't really prove anything. I think you've got a bit more work to do if you want to make your point stick.
That might have value as a definition of artistic judgement, but seems lacking as a definition for art itself. Otherwise any artist that creates with passion would have his works disqualified as art, and that doesn't seem to accord with the way we understand art.
I suppose if you consider the game creator as the artist and the player as the appreciator, then I can see your point. But suppose you see the player as artist, and the game as his canvas? A good run through a Far Cry level can surely be considered art, at least as much as an improvisational dancer can.
Or maybe we need to look at game playing as an artistic collaboration between the game creator, and the player, producing performance art that arises uniquely from that combination.
Interesting.
It's kind of short-termist though. I mean three or four over-hyped turkeys, and suddenly no-one's going to get excited, no matter how much money is spent on advertising.
Marketers and admen like to think of people as essentially stateless; that they always respond the same way to the same inputs. I don't think that's true: people learn. Admittedly when it comes to people considered in the aggregate they often learn slowly. But the latency period seems to be getting shorter with the advent of the Internet, and I think people in the aggregate are slow to forget, as well...
Furthermore, most of them would be square. Some of them would be triangular. And there'd be all sorts of marketing twonks saying things like "horsepower's cheap: they'll turn round just fine if you put enough power behind them". And "don't go complaining about the bumpy ride. It's not our fault if you're too cheap to pay for decent suspension".
Reinventing the wheel is allowed. Just make sure your version has more corners than the one you're replacing
Yep, my mistake.
You're right. I'm getting it mixed up with WSJ. My bad :(
It's worth noting here that the FT is a Murdoch paper, and that Murdoch has a real hate-on for Google at the moment. A pinch of salt may useful for some of the opinions tossed around as fact in TFA.
Also, if Google end up having to pay ISPs in Europe, you can bet lobbyists will use that as a reason to reopen the debate stateside.
Well, yes, if you frame it in the most unsympathetic terms possible, you could put it like that. Of course, by that yardstick your own position reduces to "copyright must persist forever or else we may hurt the feelings of dead people", which is scarcely more persuasive.
In the cases you cited, death has removed control from the original authors. Shortening copyright is not going to upset JRRT one iota. For those folks still alive when copyright expires, I don't see that the situation is any worse that the reams of unlicenced fanfic that get uploaded to the internet daily. The authors will be free to accept any work as cannon or not, and their fans will surely respect that
Everything is a trade-off. In order to lessen the well documented abuses of copyright, it may be necessary to risk having Margaret Mitchell turn in her grave a time or two more. Call me unsympathetic, but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Yeah, four years ago it was pretty competitive. Meanwhile Moore's Law marches on.
Also, you have to allow for a lot of that $800 going on the BluRay drive they were desperate to get some marketshare at the time. Factor that into the price, and unless you really needed a BluRay player, you got to wonder where the value lay.
I probably didn't make this entirely clear, but installing some exotic O/S variant isn't compulsory. This being Slashdot, I can see how you might have formed the wrong impression about that.
The fact is, you can get by very nicely with the drivers that come bundled with the system in the vast majority of cases.
I was under the impression that one of the things Sony got right with the PS2 and PS3 was the option to install Linux. Not for any reasons of ideology, but just because it isolated separated those who wanted to experiment with their O/S from those who just wanted to defeat the platform's built-in DRM.
As a result, the efforts to crack the Playstation as a platform have been small and ineffective, at least in comparison to the efforts directed at the XBox consoles which has often appeared to be under siege.
Now it seems likely that, as with the XBox consoles, hackers and pirates will find common ground. So all in all it seems likely that we'll see [more] effort devoted to building custom firmware for the PS3. Which I think was probably the GP's point.
There's a little known platform called a "personal computer". It works a lot like a gaming console, except that it isn't crippled at the hardware level by the OEM and has a wider range of software available. You can even install Linux on it :)
Seriously, I've never understood the appeal of spending serious money on a deliberately crippled computer, when I have a perfectly good one already. Doubly so from a company that even rootkits their audio CDs.
I hereby propose a new moderation option: "-1 Shouts Too Much".
Not for my money. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes I loved it. But the main characters only appear for about three minutes in total, and it gives a pretty misleading idea of what DW is like if you don't already know what to expect.
I'd start with the first of the Eccleston episodes: relaunches the series, doesn't assume any prior knowledge, decent story and a lot of energy. Move forward from there.
I do believe they call that "begging the question".
Proving that "For all X that exist, A is true" is logically the same thing as proving that "No X exists for which A is not true".
You haven't demonstrated anything with your triangles. All you've done is shifted the hard work to one of your starting assumptions, and then said Q.E.D.
So the case is still about Linux.
Well, possibly. In the same sort of way that putting a tooth under your pillow is about becoming a billionaire.