I still think you're giving him way too much credit. Microsoft found a greedy, overambitious nitwit, dumped a ton of cash on him, and hooked him up with (at the time) the best lawyers money could buy.
There's nothing admirable about McBride, but let's not go giving him super powers
All that we can be sure of is that several million dollars of Microsoft money will be going to a few private individuals for the fantastic work they have done in destroying the reputation of the open source concept
Waste of money if they do. All this has achieved is to clearly establish that SCO has no claims against Linux users. Well, that's not entirely true; it's also given rise to Groklaw and generally raised awareness of legal matters in the Free Software community. But maybe you're right. Maybe this is the best they could hope to achieve...
Ask any drone in a large company, Open Source is bad news because there are law suits against it.
Which is why those misty-eyed dreamers at the London Stock Exchange recently dumped Windows for Linux. But what do they know about the realities of modern business?
Re:Seven years for eight hours work
on
Novell Wins vs. SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I am pleased to see you taking this with such good grace. A lesser man might well come across as bitter and vindictive under such circumstances as these. How nice that you found it within yourself to rise above all that.
What about when Novell starts abusing their position? Maybe not now, maybe not in a few years, but you never know what happens or who buys what company..
Ah, shaddap and be happy for once. You can go back to playing prophet-of-doom tomorrow:D
This is the problem. We all wanted an RPG FPS like Deus Ex, but no company wanted to put the time or effort into making the RPG element meaningful. Now we have a ton of crummy games with watered down RPG junk in them, like Borderlands. Even Fallout 3 was a major let down in that arena.
So what was it that you thought made Deus Ex shine where Fallout 3 failed? I think they were both excellent games. Deus Ex is probably the better game for its time, but I'd put that down to the depth of the story and the detail in which the game explored the world of conspiracy theory. Fallout's main quest doesn't have anything like that depth of engagement, but it somewhat makes up for that by having something much closer to the truly open ended game world that Deus Ex tried for but couldn't quite manage.
I can see that Deus Ex forced the player to make some character development choices.Two modules for every slot meant that for each power you gained, you had another you could never use. In F3 the you can get almost all the perks so you're never forced to specialize in that respect. There's also the fact that in DeusEx you never get enough xp to max out all your skills, whereas that can be done in F3, albeit with a little effort.
Not a dig, I just don't understand what you're getting at...
Chrome is the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other search engine in use
The problem with Microsoft being a monopoly is not so much that Microsoft's operating system is popular, or even that it is widely deployed. The problem lies in the corporation's history of aggressively using that market dominance in anti-competitive ways. It's not as though Google is serving up search results that only don't appear if you use IE, or pressuring ISPs to restrict access to Bing or risk being cut off by Google.
The only real difference between the two, is Google is newer, smaller, and hasn't tried nearly as many dirty tricks as Microsoft has
Do you think perhaps we could discuss Google based on what they actually have done, rather than what they might possibly do some day? Just a thought.
It's a successful business model so long as he convinces enough in politics that the rest of us are thieves and pirates.
Hmmm... but he's going to have to do a bit more than that. It's not enough for him to stop people linking to his stories. He needs to stop them being quoted, and stop them being paraphrased and ultimately, to stop them reporting news that News Corporation has already covered. Anything less than that and the bloggers and new aggregators will fill the gap he leaves in the market. So he needs for governments to give him effectively the power to control what discussion may and may not be conducted online.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I doubt he's going to find any government willing to commit mass political suicide just so Murdoch can die looking smug.
So far it has done real damage when the UK government listened to Murdoch and insisted that the BBC drasticly cut back BBC-Online.
Yes, agreed.
We can't just ignore him and say the old bastard is out of touch. The old bastard bought his first Internet Service Provider in 1993 and knows exactly what he's doing but just doesn't care who he hurts
I'm not proposing that we ignore him. And... it's not necessarily that he's out of touch. Look at it this way: Murdoch controls the biggest, most prolific monastery in a world that's rapidly adopting the printing press. Murdoch has cornered the market in hand illuminated manuscripts, and until now he's had a large degree of control over what was written down and what was not. But the printing press is about to render hand illumination little more than a historical curiosity. Obviously, he doesn't like this.
What he'd like to do shut down all the presses, so his manuscripts could continue to be the primary data source for the western world. But there are too many presses, and they work too fast, and he's never going to be able to shut them all down, not even if he gets laws passed against them. This is not a fight that can be won.
And yeah, it's entirely possible that he can see that, too. But it's not in his nature to go down without a fight, so he'll pick the most promising strategy, even if it looks like a losing one, and he'll go with it for all he's worth. And yes, he'll probably do a lot of damage on the way, and no, he probably won't care.
Of course it does. And if the global economy ever contracts to the point where no viable currency remains, and no trusted basis for transaction other than the face-to-face barter of goods... well that'll be the market working too.
The market always works, but I don't think we have any basis to assume that it always works for our benefit. Or that the results of an unregulated market are always desirable.
He would like to be the only source of news on the net and he's busy talking to everyone he can influence to try to make that a reality.
Absolutely right. Like I said elsewhere, it's the same scenario as with the RIAA. People have been paying for distribution, and distribution costs are plummeting, which makes it hard to maintain traditional profit margins.
And so, like the RIAA, we're seeing lobbying (the BBC) and lawsuits (Google) to try and support a failing business model.
What, to explain that a legally binding decision actually is legally binding?
Thank you for that. I think we can safely henceforth assume that all tautologies are, in fact, tautological.
In all seriousness, here's a link that states such a legally binding commitment exists.
In all seriousness, thank you. It nicely illustrates my point. From the linked article:
The Community Promise is a legally binding commitment through which Microsoft pledges to not assert its patents against others who implement certain Microsoft standards and technologies
Now most of the descriptions I've read of the MSCP suggest that it has enough weasel wording in it as to be essentially worthless. As opposed to Sun's clear and unambiguous declaration regarding Java, at any rate. But since the GP was complaining about people spreading FUD, I thought I'd give him a chance to link to the text of the promise he had in mind and then we could discuss that, rather than his, your and my impressions based on second hand evidence.
But how many people have a pressing need to see what the Times has to say on a minute by minute basis?
People who follow a link from a news aggregator and want to make informed comments about the article on the aggregator's comment system.
And that would work if there was no other source for that news. Welcome to the Information Age.
Then explain the major journals published by Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer, which cloak their results on Google and charge an order of magnitude more than this for even a day's access.
Data scarcity. Elsevier publish scientific papers. They get away with charging what they do because of the universities and corporation that subscribe. The Times doesn't have that level of information quality. Also, it's debatable how long the Journals will last in the information age. Check out Citeseer sometime.
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US.
Yeah, in the UK it's the Sun that sells like crazy. But Sun readers as a market segment... they're less interested in up-to-the-minute news than they are a pair of bare boobies on Page Three. His satellite channel, Sky, was quite popular too, although I think that may be on the wane... but again, I can't see a lot of synergy there. Sky has a wider appeal, but on the whole it's the same basic demographic as the Sun readership: blue collar, male, tending toward the political right. I don't think there's a lot of synergy there.
Murdoch may be one Nehru Jacket shy of being a Bond Villain, but he has thought this out
You know, I really don't think he has. I there's a bit of magical thinking at work here. Don't get me wrong, the move is going to have the best tactical support that money can buy. But the strategy is, I think, basically flawed.
Rupert's problem, at heart, is the same problem as the one facing the RIAA. He's made a shitload of money distributing information. The problem he's coming up against now he thinks he's selling news, but what his customers have been paying him to do is distribute the news. And the Internet brings distribution costs way, way down, and simultaneously lowers the barrier to entry to anyone who wants their own news service.
So suddenly Rupert's getting his ass kicked. Not by another paper, which he could understand, but by the Internet. Now no one who wants to keep their job is going to tell him "sorry guv, you're a media baron in a dinosaur medium". So they tell him that it's all Google's fault, and the BBC's fault, and that, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, paywalls really will work, if its done just right and if everyone holds their breath and wishes really, really hard.
Magical thinking. It's not that Murdoch's stupid. It's just that there are no viable, rational strategies and so he's going for the most plausible irrational one.
First of all you are not part of the target audience. You won't pay, the sheep will.
Actually, probably not. The "sheep" as you put it will probably just move to a non-paywalled news outlet. Or go back to buying dead tree versions. It's a path-of-least-resistance thing.
Some people will pay, certainly. Some always do. But how many people have a pressing need to see what the Times has to say on a minute by minute basis? What does the Times offer that they can't get elsewhere, for free? People are going to stay away in droves.
Information must originate from somewhere and somebody has to pay for it.
Well, yes. But it doesn't originate in factories. It's not like Murdoch has armies of gnomes painstakingly hammering scrap iron into bits and bytes. The information just needs to be collected.
But even setting that aside, it's still far from clear that a paywall will prove a successful business model for financing the collection of information. It didn't work at all for the New York Times IIRC. In fact as far as I can see, the only papers that have ever made a paywall work are the financial papers, and they have hefty corporate subscribers, and offer data that isn't quite so widely available.
Murdochs media imperium is big enough that it will not fall in 5 years
True, but he's quite capable of stripping away what little relevance remains at the once-mighty Times. I mean Alexander Lebedev is most likely about to start distributing the print version of The Independent with a cover price of zero, and Murdoch's choosing this moment to engage in a course of action that is bound to drive away a large number of readers. There's no value in having a newspaper that no one reads.
This is good. Two of Murdoch's outlets have deliberately isolated themselves from the wider discussion. I only wish he'd adopt this strategy more widely.
I enjoyed Neverwinter Nights, a lot. I never did play the second one, and I didn't much get on with Hordes of the Underdark (and that's for all of the "Hall of the Fire Giant King" coolness of the setting). But basic NWN I enjoyed a lot.
Dragon Age on the other hand, irritated me on so many levels that I shall be skipping any other title in the series, and probably the Mass Effect ones as well.
I guess we're look for different things in a cRPG. From my viewpoint, BioWare has gone downhill rapidly of late.
You can't patent that idea. You can only patent an idea that can be used in making a product. FAIL on two counts
You made an overly broad and sweeping statement, and now you're getting all upset because someone called you on it.
The failure is entire on your part.
not understanding what kinds of ideas can be patented, and not providing a source as I requested
Yes, yes. We'd all like to tell our opponents what arguments they could and could not use in the course of a debate, I'm sure.
I don't buy this "ideas can't be patented" argument. Can you give some sources where is seemingly silly idea is discussed at greater length?
I'm sorry, but I think you'll find I've patented the notion of not buying the "ideas can't be patented" argument. You need to either pay me $20,000 dollars to licence your use of the idea for this discussion only, or else retract the comment, admit that you are in error, ad henceforth withdraw from the debate.
And that is one reason why it's dangerous to allow ideas to be patented.
And piracy advocates are teaching that same generation that "if you don't agree with it then it is fine to break the law, even for the flimsiest of excuses".
You don't need advocacy for that to happen. This is a system the only penalises the law-abiding. You won't stop that lesson from being learnt by trying to stop people discussing the problem.
However, most people seem to suggest that fighting DRM with piracy is a good option.
I don't think "most" people suggest that. In fact I can't recall seeing anyone suggest resorting to piracy
as a strategy for changing the behaviour of games publishers.
What I have seen is an awful lot of people declare their intention to download rather than
put up with various DRM schemes. I think that's a difference worth noticing.
The important thing isn't that it's a good idea or a bad idea. The key point here is that the games comnpanies are teaching the wrong lesson here. DRM is teaching a generation of game players that buying games == "problems" while priating games == "it just works".
Slashdot Mirror
If you put it in those terms, I'm not really arguing about who employs him. I'm just quibbling over his job description.
I still think you're giving him way too much credit. Microsoft found a greedy, overambitious nitwit, dumped a ton of cash on him, and hooked him up with (at the time) the best lawyers money could buy.
There's nothing admirable about McBride, but let's not go giving him super powers
Dude, I do believe you just broke the code!
Oh come ON! That's giving him way too much credit.
After all this, he'll be lucky to find employment as a bad smell pixie in the Dimension of Dirty Laundry.
Waste of money if they do. All this has achieved is to clearly establish that SCO has no claims against Linux users. Well, that's not entirely true; it's also given rise to Groklaw and generally raised awareness of legal matters in the Free Software community. But maybe you're right. Maybe this is the best they could hope to achieve...
Which is why those misty-eyed dreamers at the London Stock Exchange recently dumped Windows for Linux. But what do they know about the realities of modern business?
I am pleased to see you taking this with such good grace. A lesser man might well come across as bitter and vindictive under such circumstances as these. How nice that you found it within yourself to rise above all that.
Ah, shaddap and be happy for once. You can go back to playing prophet-of-doom tomorrow :D
So what was it that you thought made Deus Ex shine where Fallout 3 failed? I think they were both excellent games. Deus Ex is probably the better game for its time, but I'd put that down to the depth of the story and the detail in which the game explored the world of conspiracy theory. Fallout's main quest doesn't have anything like that depth of engagement, but it somewhat makes up for that by having something much closer to the truly open ended game world that Deus Ex tried for but couldn't quite manage.
I can see that Deus Ex forced the player to make some character development choices.Two modules for every slot meant that for each power you gained, you had another you could never use. In F3 the you can get almost all the perks so you're never forced to specialize in that respect. There's also the fact that in DeusEx you never get enough xp to max out all your skills, whereas that can be done in F3, albeit with a little effort.
Not a dig, I just don't understand what you're getting at...
The problem with Microsoft being a monopoly is not so much that Microsoft's operating system is popular, or even that it is widely deployed. The problem lies in the corporation's history of aggressively using that market dominance in anti-competitive ways. It's not as though Google is serving up search results that only don't appear if you use IE, or pressuring ISPs to restrict access to Bing or risk being cut off by Google.
Do you think perhaps we could discuss Google based on what they actually have done, rather than what they might possibly do some day? Just a thought.
Hmmm... but he's going to have to do a bit more than that. It's not enough for him to stop people linking to his stories. He needs to stop them being quoted, and stop them being paraphrased and ultimately, to stop them reporting news that News Corporation has already covered. Anything less than that and the bloggers and new aggregators will fill the gap he leaves in the market. So he needs for governments to give him effectively the power to control what discussion may and may not be conducted online.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I doubt he's going to find any government willing to commit mass political suicide just so Murdoch can die looking smug.
Yes, agreed.
I'm not proposing that we ignore him. And ... it's not necessarily that he's out of touch. Look at it this way: Murdoch controls the biggest, most prolific monastery in a world that's rapidly adopting the printing press. Murdoch has cornered the market in hand illuminated manuscripts, and until now he's had a large degree of control over what was written down and what was not. But the printing press is about to render hand illumination little more than a historical curiosity. Obviously, he doesn't like this.
What he'd like to do shut down all the presses, so his manuscripts could continue to be the primary data source for the western world. But there are too many presses, and they work too fast, and he's never going to be able to shut them all down, not even if he gets laws passed against them. This is not a fight that can be won.
And yeah, it's entirely possible that he can see that, too. But it's not in his nature to go down without a fight, so he'll pick the most promising strategy, even if it looks like a losing one, and he'll go with it for all he's worth. And yes, he'll probably do a lot of damage on the way, and no, he probably won't care.
Of course it does. And if the global economy ever contracts to the point where no viable currency remains, and no trusted basis for transaction other than the face-to-face barter of goods ... well that'll be the market working too.
The market always works, but I don't think we have any basis to assume that it always works for our benefit. Or that the results of an unregulated market are always desirable.
Absolutely right. Like I said elsewhere, it's the same scenario as with the RIAA. People have been paying for distribution, and distribution costs are plummeting, which makes it hard to maintain traditional profit margins.
And so, like the RIAA, we're seeing lobbying (the BBC) and lawsuits (Google) to try and support a failing business model.
Thank you for that. I think we can safely henceforth assume that all tautologies are, in fact, tautological.
In all seriousness, thank you. It nicely illustrates my point. From the linked article:
Now most of the descriptions I've read of the MSCP suggest that it has enough weasel wording in it as to be essentially worthless. As opposed to Sun's clear and unambiguous declaration regarding Java, at any rate. But since the GP was complaining about people spreading FUD, I thought I'd give him a chance to link to the text of the promise he had in mind and then we could discuss that, rather than his, your and my impressions based on second hand evidence.
And that would work if there was no other source for that news. Welcome to the Information Age.
Data scarcity. Elsevier publish scientific papers. They get away with charging what they do because of the universities and corporation that subscribe. The Times doesn't have that level of information quality. Also, it's debatable how long the Journals will last in the information age. Check out Citeseer sometime.
Yeah, in the UK it's the Sun that sells like crazy. But Sun readers as a market segment... they're less interested in up-to-the-minute news than they are a pair of bare boobies on Page Three. His satellite channel, Sky, was quite popular too, although I think that may be on the wane ... but again, I can't see a lot of synergy there. Sky has a wider appeal, but on the whole it's the same basic demographic as the Sun readership: blue collar, male, tending toward the political right. I don't think there's a lot of synergy there.
You know, I really don't think he has. I there's a bit of magical thinking at work here. Don't get me wrong, the move is going to have the best tactical support that money can buy. But the strategy is, I think, basically flawed.
Rupert's problem, at heart, is the same problem as the one facing the RIAA. He's made a shitload of money distributing information. The problem he's coming up against now he thinks he's selling news, but what his customers have been paying him to do is distribute the news. And the Internet brings distribution costs way, way down, and simultaneously lowers the barrier to entry to anyone who wants their own news service.
So suddenly Rupert's getting his ass kicked. Not by another paper, which he could understand, but by the Internet. Now no one who wants to keep their job is going to tell him "sorry guv, you're a media baron in a dinosaur medium". So they tell him that it's all Google's fault, and the BBC's fault, and that, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, paywalls really will work, if its done just right and if everyone holds their breath and wishes really, really hard.
Magical thinking. It's not that Murdoch's stupid. It's just that there are no viable, rational strategies and so he's going for the most plausible irrational one.
Actually, probably not. The "sheep" as you put it will probably just move to a non-paywalled news outlet. Or go back to buying dead tree versions. It's a path-of-least-resistance thing.
Some people will pay, certainly. Some always do. But how many people have a pressing need to see what the Times has to say on a minute by minute basis? What does the Times offer that they can't get elsewhere, for free? People are going to stay away in droves.
Well, yes. But it doesn't originate in factories. It's not like Murdoch has armies of gnomes painstakingly hammering scrap iron into bits and bytes. The information just needs to be collected.
But even setting that aside, it's still far from clear that a paywall will prove a successful business model for financing the collection of information. It didn't work at all for the New York Times IIRC. In fact as far as I can see, the only papers that have ever made a paywall work are the financial papers, and they have hefty corporate subscribers, and offer data that isn't quite so widely available.
True, but he's quite capable of stripping away what little relevance remains at the once-mighty Times. I mean Alexander Lebedev is most likely about to start distributing the print version of The Independent with a cover price of zero, and Murdoch's choosing this moment to engage in a course of action that is bound to drive away a large number of readers. There's no value in having a newspaper that no one reads.
This is good. Two of Murdoch's outlets have deliberately isolated themselves from the wider discussion. I only wish he'd adopt this strategy more widely.
Got a link?
Hmmm... dropping poison pellets into a rabbit hutch gives the rabbit more choice. On its own "choice" isn't necessarily a good thing.
Which if they're Linux devs, they probably haven't, on the whole. Not counting mono devs, of course.
I guess that depends (hypothetically speaking) on why I'm moving to Linux.
I enjoyed Neverwinter Nights, a lot. I never did play the second one, and I didn't much get on with Hordes of the Underdark (and that's for all of the "Hall of the Fire Giant King" coolness of the setting). But basic NWN I enjoyed a lot.
Dragon Age on the other hand, irritated me on so many levels that I shall be skipping any other title in the series, and probably the Mass Effect ones as well.
I guess we're look for different things in a cRPG. From my viewpoint, BioWare has gone downhill rapidly of late.
The statement I apparently misread, and to which I responded was:
I don't see any mention of invention there.
You made an overly broad and sweeping statement, and now you're getting all upset because someone called you on it. The failure is entire on your part.
Yes, yes. We'd all like to tell our opponents what arguments they could and could not use in the course of a debate, I'm sure.
I'm sorry, but I think you'll find I've patented the notion of not buying the "ideas can't be patented" argument. You need to either pay me $20,000 dollars to licence your use of the idea for this discussion only, or else retract the comment, admit that you are in error, ad henceforth withdraw from the debate.
And that is one reason why it's dangerous to allow ideas to be patented.
You don't need advocacy for that to happen. This is a system the only penalises the law-abiding. You won't stop that lesson from being learnt by trying to stop people discussing the problem.
I don't think "most" people suggest that. In fact I can't recall seeing anyone suggest resorting to piracy as a strategy for changing the behaviour of games publishers. What I have seen is an awful lot of people declare their intention to download rather than put up with various DRM schemes. I think that's a difference worth noticing.
The important thing isn't that it's a good idea or a bad idea. The key point here is that the games comnpanies are teaching the wrong lesson here. DRM is teaching a generation of game players that buying games == "problems" while priating games == "it just works".