An opponent who relies on suicide bombers needs a constant supply of angry youth, or else they quickly run out of martyrs.
That's quite true. Unfortunately, youth are very easily swayed and very easily will hate someone for perceived - true or not - wrongs
mmm... still, it's a matter of degree once again. None of those kids got annoyed enough to set off any bombs. There's a critical threshold here, and it pays to keep as many people on the "non explosive" side of it as possible.
At the end of the day, the planet's getting too small for nations to gothrowing their weight around the way the British Empire did at it's height. Travel is cheap and too many people know how to make explosive devices. The sooner we all learn to be polite to one another, the better for all concerned.
And yet, your post seems to show that advertising was working on you:
Well then, I guess that's a win for the advertiser. As long as they're happy to define win as having one more consumer who hates and publically reviles their product. I know a lot of ad agencies think like that.
It's not a win for Ars, however, since the GP (disgusted with the annoyance factor of the ads in question) has gone back to blocking ads on the site.
Ars are a good site and I care what happens to them. I don't give a wet fart about GQ or Gillette. Ars had a chance to add an increment to their ad revenue and lost it, purely becuase of over aggressive advertising. You say they ads are working, but they're not working to the benefit of Ars Technica. Not in this instance, at least.
In TFA, Ken Fisher makes the point that websites advertising is not like TV advertising. I think maybe the ad agencies need to learn the same lesson: this isn't like broadcast TV where you can pump the most noxious crap into people's homes willy-nilly. On the Internet you advertise at a person largely by their consent. If you over tax the paitence of your target audience, you risk losing it, possibly forever.
There's are lessons for web sites here, too. Fisher says that Ars monitors its web content very carefully, but it seems to me that they dont set the bar high enough. If they forbade animated and flash based-ads from the site, they'd have a far stronger chance of persuading their readers to whitelist the site.
I am not sure, though, that the particular brand of terrorists that we are currently fighting would stop hating us. They hate Israel, they hate the West, they hate Westerners, they hate non-Islamic religions, they hate even fellow Muslims.
Well, yes, up to a point. I mean if you only consider those who are utterly and implacabbly consumed by hate for the US, then you'll probably find they're going to remain consumed with hate no matter what you do. I know you're not trying to condemn all muslims, but you're still assuming that all those that your are "currently fighting" are cut from the same cloth. I think that's probably a mistake.
Look at it this way: even assuming that you're correct in your depiction of current anti-US terrorists, there's a whole generation of kids growing up that haven't yet learned to hate the US. An opponent who relies on suicide bombers needs a constant supply of angry youth, or else they quickly run out of martyrs.
Do I think the US does things wrong? Oh, definitely. But I don't think we can assume terrorists would stop hating the US if the US fixed things they did wrong
I don't think you can assume that all terrorists would stop hating the US if the US were to clean up its act in a few areas. On the other hand, it seems like a fair bet that a lot of them wouldn't hate the US quite so much.
Which could be good. You could probably get quite a lot of them to the point where, while they didn't like you very much, they really weren't upset enough about it to fly a plane into the side of building. Or strap explosives to their chest and look for an inconvenient to place to detonate themselves.
This isn't a case of "either/or". It's not "either they hate us or they don't". It's more "how many" and "how much". The right changes in behaviour could shift a lot of potential terrorists into the disgruntled-but-harmless category. That has to be a good thing, right?
What you're describing (the "Shavaune" effect) is an American peculiarity. Doesn't happen elsewhere.
I live in the UK. It happens here.
Sure it is. When I moved to Italy, the government officials wrote down my name on all official documentation as "Luciano Julio" even though my passport says "Lucian Jules".
I suppose that might be correct in Italian. It's also possible that they wrote down what they thought you'd said, or that they assumed the anglicised form was a nickname. As far as the English Language is concerned however, they spelled your name wrong.
Sure you do. Someone called "William/Bill" in English is called "Guillaume" in French. Someone called "Lucian" in English is called "Lucien" in France and "Luciano" in Italy. And so on.
I think you're muddling usage between general and specific cases.
Someone called "Bill" in Engish still has the name "Bill" if he travels to France. The French equivalent of his name might well be "Guillame", but doesn't mean that the correct way to spell the name of this particular Bill is anything other than B-I-L-L.
It's like all the girls that grow up called "Shavaune" because their mums thought it was a pretty but had never seen it written down. The correct spelling in the general case is "Siobhan", but if a particular girl's name is "Shevaune" then that is the correct way to spell it in her case.
I'm not sure I understand your point correctly. You're taking the classic "reason why bloggers are a Bad Thing" as generally offered by conventional media, and then applying it to Fox News (which is definitely in the old media camp, even if it does encapsulate the worst aspects of same).
I'm going to procede on the assumption that you're arguing the dangers of Internet news here. Apologies if I miss the mark.
The problem is that if you believe that socialized medicine == death panels, you're going to exclusively read news sources that tell you that
I suppose you could argue (and many people have) that by the same token, if you dislike Microsoft and think that Free Software is generally a good idea, you're probably going to read Slashdot.
Nobody uis ever exposed to a different viewpoint.
I don't think you could say that about Slashdot readers. I've been exposed to a number of different viewpoints in my time as a reader. Often expressed with considerable force, and sometimes very persuasively. I've even had my mind changed, on occasion. If the model of reality you present was correct, I would not expect this to happen.
To me, it all sounds like a doomsday scenario cobbled together by people who see their jobs threatened by the rise of blogging. And like most such scenarios, while it has an element of truth to it, it wildly exaggerates the problem. I don't think the tendency to seek confirmation bias is that powerful in most people, and the rare few that do tend to get their print news from the sort of newspaper that regularly reports that Elivis has been found alive and well on the Moon.
Not that I disagree with you on the subject of Fox News, you understand.
Sometimes there's big surprises, but there's other times when knowledgeable people can look at something and tell right away that it's going to be a failure.
Yeah. The thing is, the knowledgeable people aren't always right. That's where the big surprises come from. I mean, look at Perl. Who would have thought that a language that tends to look like line noise would go on to become the "the duct tape of the internet". Anybody knowledgeable could have given a dozen reasons why no one would ever use Perl.
And yet, that turns out not to be the case...
Yes, it's a good thing, but that doesn't mean that people should criticize each other for wasting their time on fruitless ventures.
Assuming you mean "should not", isn't that rather presupposing the fruitlessness nature of the project. I mean the entire reason why this sort of parallelism and redundancy is good is that predicting what will and will not work is hard. That said, I'll defend anyone's right to say "in my opinion your time could be more productively spent coding for teh Wine project". I just think there's a world of difference between that, and saying "You SHOULD do this, you SHOULD NOT do that". Maybe it's just me.
I think this project's going to flop (or languish in obscurity) for several reasons:
You might be right. But even if so, so what? It's not like you're paying their salaries.
3) If you like Windows so much, why not just buy a copy of Windows (or download it from BitTorrent)? Why mess around with something that may or may not be compatible?
Well the answer to that probably depends very much on who the hypothetical "you" is in that sentence. Maybe there are people who want to tinker with the O/S in ways of which Microsoft would not approve. Maybe they want a VM image to run games, and they have ethical objections to violating MS' copyright. I can't see how this has any bearing on
the likelihood of success for ReactOS, however.
And that, folks, is why so many open-source projects never get finished, or improved.
Of course, a lot of corporate IT projects fail, too. Software is hard. It's a wonder any of it works at all, sometimes.
He *should* just start working on WINE. Just because he can do whatever he wants, doesn't meant that his choices are good.
It doesn't mean they're bad either. Or indifferent for that matter. Maybe if you had a crystal ball and could reliably foretell which projects will have have been important in five, ten or twenty years time, maybe then you could make that judgment. But without some sort of prescience it's impossible to make reliable judgments. That's why all those corporate projects flop; someone in authority makes a judgment about which strategy to pursue and in five years time one or more of their key assumptions is shown to be false and the software is rendered useless.
Of course, the same thing happens to free software projects as well. The difference however is that the Free Software developmental model tends to result in massive parallelism. Lots of projects fail, some are unexpected successes, and the successes aren't always the ones you'd expect. Think of it as a sort of software Darwinism: lots of projects die out, but the ones that thrive are well adapted to the needs of their userbase.
Looked at in that way, the lack of central direction in Free Software isn't the flaw that many perceive it to be. It is something to be celebrated.
On the other hand, locals could report such information, often with far more insight since they actually live there.
But isn't that the point of disruptive technologies? They don't start out better, but simply "good enough". If the free information is of sufficient quality, it won't matter if the paywalled sites are better or not.
It's not unlike the airline industry, which has been in revenue hell forever, being essentially nothing but price competition. Now, they're starting to charge for things they didn't used to. The public is up in arms! But they're all doing it. If you don't like it, you can drive.
Hmmm... but they would all need to do it. And there's nowhere near the level of consolidation in global news sources that there is in airlines. That's going to make it a lot harder to get a cartel together. On top of that, the last few holdouts stand to see some serious traffic, with corresponding potentials for ad revenue. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but I think it would be a lot harder to bring it about.
There are other important differences, as well. If I want a flight from Newcastle to London in the UK, and all the flights are overloaded with surcharges, I can't easily substitute one from, say, Seattle to San Diego. With online news services, I can, at least for stories with more or less global scope, or ones specific to an industry.
And of course, it's a lot harder to get together with about a thousand other travellers and start offering my own flights, which is not the case for online news. Granted, the blogging community are unlikely to finance a reporter who wants to infiltrate the Taliban, at least not any time soon. On the other hand, they probably can supply enough news of good enough standard that very few people will see much of value behind the paywalls. Bloggers, I think, fit the classic disruptive innovation pattern.
Like I say, none of that necessarily means the scenario you describe will not happen. But I don't think it's anywhere near as likely as you make it sound.
Without taking a risk on new franchises, you won't have established franchises you can milk in the future. Which is exactly how EA got into its current hole. They're doing the right thing now, even if it's not producing immediate profits for them.
Sure, in a stable market. And to be fair, I didn't read TFA as saying "EA should not be taking a risk on new franchises".
He's just raising concerns about the budget size vs. the payoff.
I think you have to remember that his comments are all made in the context of a move to digital distribution, which he feels is going to happen a lot faster than
EA are allowing for. Reading between the lines a little, I think he'd like to see more, lower budget games aimed at a cheaper price point.
That doesn't make sense if your retail is through shops because shelf space is expensive, and with a limited number of titles that you can offer, you need to spend money trying to force a blockbuster. But for digital distribution, you can spread your risk a bit more, develop a range of titles and see what catches the public imagination.
This is a business person commenting harshly mostly about how EA is financially ran, and that they haven't been able to grow as fast as Activision Blizzard (which was a one giant merker - like Microsoft and Google getting together). His bashing about the games isn't about gameplay, their originality, or how fun they are for players - it's just seems to be about business
You say that like it's a bad thing. His point is that EA's business strategy is unsustainable, and I think he's got a point.
I actually like the way EA has been taking. They're doing a lot more original, new IP and games than some years ago - last year notably Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Dragon Age Origins.
When you say "way they've been taking", I assume you mean that in the sense of "direction they've chose to head in". As opposed to the way they've been taking money. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced. DA: Origins could have used another six months playtesting on the AI IMHO, and Dead Space sucked like a black hole. Spore was fun however, and I'll concede that I'm not generally representative of the larger gaming community.
The point is, as you rightly point out, he's not criticising the games - he's criticising the business strategy behind them. If Spore, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space and Need for Speed: Undercover were indeed loss makers for EA, then it doesn't matter how good the games were. If they can't make them turn a profit, they soon won't be making any more.
It seems he was more happy when EA was the company that didn't create much of new IP or games, but just milked the old ones every year with new versions
I didn't get that, at all. As I read it, he just thinks the revenue from their established franchises isn't going to be enough to tide them through the changeover to digital distribution. And he thinks that EA are throwing too much money at trying to manufacture blockbusters, and I think he's probably right.
The trouble is that for quite a while now, the big games companies have been throwing money at games trying to raise the barrier to entry. They want to be like Hollywood studios where you have a big investment for big returns. So we things like big name voice actors throughout. Or fully orchestral scores for a game. Hollywood gets away with this by sinking a lot of cash into publicity so they can "buy the gross" - cover the bulk of production costs in the first week. That doesn't appear to be working for EA, assuming bizpunk is right about those games being expensive loss makers.
He's not making any judgements about the games themselves, except that they don't seem to be making enough money to recoup their development costs. Which, if true, would be a problem regardless of the game content.
Looks like I picked a good time to never have registered for Facebook.
Well, exactly!
It's as if he was running a site for pet lovers, and then reasoning that since his subscribers were overwhelmingly in favour of dogs, it therefore followed that everyone liked dogs, and therefore that dog ownership should become mandatory.
The reason I don't use social networking sites is precisely because I value my privacy. At best Zuckerberg is extrapolating from a very skewed sample. At worst, his arguments are cynical and self-serving.
Open source is another way to stop malware... not every user looks at the source, but enough curious ones will put out the warning should anything not be as its marked
That's commonly claimed, but there is not much evidence to back it.
Well, there's always the evidence of the Linux and BSD software arena. There are vanishingly few malicious apps for Linux, and when one does appear, there's generally a huge hullaballoo about it. Usually from Windows users saying "Who's laughing now, huh?".
I know the old argument is that "when linux gets as popular as Windows...", but frankly, even with a 1% market share, that's one hell of a lot of computers. And a lot of contact lists, bank account details, potential botnet members... if launching a malicious fork of an app was as easy as has been suggested, you'd think we'd see more malware in the free software world. But we don't.
There just aren't enough people interested in looking at source to cover all the apps if the Android market gets as big as the iPhone market.
You say that, but I bet you haven't got any evidence to back it up.;)
Not particularly, but I'd rather risk it than have some vaguely worded "No throttling" legislation passed.
That's a poor "risk". The Net Neutrality debate kicked off when AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre announced his intention to do exactly what we're talking about. Since then we have seen several cases of large providers unfairly throttling smaller downstream providers.
This is not an abstract doomsday scenario. It's happening.
Your ISP can't shape SSL traffic because they can't inspect the contents
See, this is the point everybody seems to miss. It's not your ISP that causes the problem. And it's not the ISP of the web site at the far end, either. It's all the johnny-in-the-middle provides through whom your packets get routed who decide they want more money, above and beyond the peering arrangements that already compensate them for use of their pipes.
So changing your ISP doesn't help. A community broadband co-op will not help, unless the community in question is Planet Earth.
Market Forces will not ride to the rescue on this one.
The problem starts with the beer bottles. They have this proprietory bottle opener thing that you're supposed to pay money each time you use it. The trouble is that the opener is just taped to the side of the bottle and painted to look like it isn't there. Given that the bottle automatically refills itself, this doesn't seem like a practical business model.
Don't get me wrong - I'm bang alongside Free Beer. I just don't think this is a viable way to finance the notion.
You do not want to know what you'd have to do to get Zombie Mother Theresa's blessing.
Switch to an ISP with a different upstream provider
Which works as long as we only have one "bad guy" ISP trying to supplement their legitimate peering income with arbitrary surcharges on third party traffic. It doesn't mean that allowing those surcharges is a good idea, but it's a viable strategy as long as only ISP decides to charge for services for which they're already being paid.
The trouble is that once the principle is established that this is acceptable behaviour, every cable owner on the planet will want a piece of the action. When that happens, your internet fees go up. They go up regardless of who you're with, because everyone with whom you don't have a contract is charging your ISP a premium not to simply drop their packets.
Or subscribe to a VPN tunneling service.
And they're not going to shape SSL traffic because...?
If the internet ends up crippled, people will promptly build a new one, with hookers and blackjack.
"Promptly" in this context meaning after twenty years of investing in infrastructure that was already largely paid for by government subsidy anyway, I take it.
My point is that as a customer, I don't ever expect to have to do much about it, except maybe put up with no internet for short periods of time (by which I mean, when I switch to the competent ISP, and the only reason any waiting would be involved is the stupid way that the last mile is regulated in the United States).
OK, you have low expectations when it comes to corporate ethics. I can see how that might happen.
Thing is, that still doesn't mean that letting third party ISPs play "Stand And Deliver" with your data is a good thing. And it still doesn't mean we should accept arbitrary surcharges to a service for which we have already paid, from parties with whom we have no direct financial arrangement.
And they very much can do something about it, they can route around C.
The point, really, is that you as a customer can't do anything about it. You either accept that ISP C will degrade your traffic, despite having been paid to carry it through existing peering arrangements; or else you go with an ISP that pays a premium to ISP C beyond the peering charge and get shafted.
Or, of course, you move to ISP C and get shafted by ISP A and B's retalliatory surcharges and/or throttling. As a customer, you still end up a loser.
The real problem, of course, is that there are a lot more ISP Cs than there are A and Bs, at least for any given customer. If every owner of every yard of fiber in the Internet decides to add arbitrary surcharges, it could quickly cripple the internet. I can see how that might appeal to the likes of
Sony and Michael Lynton, but for most of us, it there really is no positive outcome.
What if I want to pay for a 'lazy' broadband package, where I agree to be throttled when the network is loaded, in exchange for better throughput when things are less busy?
Cool. What were you going to do if you wanted a package where your packets don't get throttled by third party providers with whom you have no direct financial agreement relationship?
Or at least there needs to be a prior art defence for any patent. If the accused infringer can show that there is in-fact substantial prior art and that the patent is non-novel...yeah I know pipe dream.
The problem isn't so much the defence as the expense of challenging and overturning a patent. The big players can afford to tie the case up in court for years. Meanwhile, the smaller party isn't getting any income, and are bleeding money through legal fees.
And it's hard to see how to fix that in such a way as doesn't lend itself to further abuse.
I think the only solution in the long run will be to for governments to stop telling people what ideas they can and cannot use.
Slashdot Mirror
mmm... still, it's a matter of degree once again. None of those kids got annoyed enough to set off any bombs. There's a critical threshold here, and it pays to keep as many people on the "non explosive" side of it as possible.
At the end of the day, the planet's getting too small for nations to gothrowing their weight around the way the British Empire did at it's height. Travel is cheap and too many people know how to make explosive devices. The sooner we all learn to be polite to one another, the better for all concerned.
Well then, I guess that's a win for the advertiser. As long as they're happy to define win as having one more consumer who hates and publically reviles their product. I know a lot of ad agencies think like that.
It's not a win for Ars, however, since the GP (disgusted with the annoyance factor of the ads in question) has gone back to blocking ads on the site.
Ars are a good site and I care what happens to them. I don't give a wet fart about GQ or Gillette. Ars had a chance to add an increment to their ad revenue and lost it, purely becuase of over aggressive advertising. You say they ads are working, but they're not working to the benefit of Ars Technica. Not in this instance, at least.
In TFA, Ken Fisher makes the point that websites advertising is not like TV advertising. I think maybe the ad agencies need to learn the same lesson: this isn't like broadcast TV where you can pump the most noxious crap into people's homes willy-nilly. On the Internet you advertise at a person largely by their consent. If you over tax the paitence of your target audience, you risk losing it, possibly forever.
There's are lessons for web sites here, too. Fisher says that Ars monitors its web content very carefully, but it seems to me that they dont set the bar high enough. If they forbade animated and flash based-ads from the site, they'd have a far stronger chance of persuading their readers to whitelist the site.
Well, yes, up to a point. I mean if you only consider those who are utterly and implacabbly consumed by hate for the US, then you'll probably find they're going to remain consumed with hate no matter what you do. I know you're not trying to condemn all muslims, but you're still assuming that all those that your are "currently fighting" are cut from the same cloth. I think that's probably a mistake.
Look at it this way: even assuming that you're correct in your depiction of current anti-US terrorists, there's a whole generation of kids growing up that haven't yet learned to hate the US. An opponent who relies on suicide bombers needs a constant supply of angry youth, or else they quickly run out of martyrs.
I don't think you can assume that all terrorists would stop hating the US if the US were to clean up its act in a few areas. On the other hand, it seems like a fair bet that a lot of them wouldn't hate the US quite so much.
Which could be good. You could probably get quite a lot of them to the point where, while they didn't like you very much, they really weren't upset enough about it to fly a plane into the side of building. Or strap explosives to their chest and look for an inconvenient to place to detonate themselves.
This isn't a case of "either/or". It's not "either they hate us or they don't". It's more "how many" and "how much". The right changes in behaviour could shift a lot of potential terrorists into the disgruntled-but-harmless category. That has to be a good thing, right?
I live in the UK. It happens here.
I suppose that might be correct in Italian. It's also possible that they wrote down what they thought you'd said, or that they assumed the anglicised form was a nickname. As far as the English Language is concerned however, they spelled your name wrong.
I think you're muddling usage between general and specific cases.
Someone called "Bill" in Engish still has the name "Bill" if he travels to France. The French equivalent of his name might well be "Guillame", but doesn't mean that the correct way to spell the name of this particular Bill is anything other than B-I-L-L.
It's like all the girls that grow up called "Shavaune" because their mums thought it was a pretty but had never seen it written down. The correct spelling in the general case is "Siobhan", but if a particular girl's name is "Shevaune" then that is the correct way to spell it in her case.
I'm not sure I understand your point correctly. You're taking the classic "reason why bloggers are a Bad Thing" as generally offered by conventional media, and then applying it to Fox News (which is definitely in the old media camp, even if it does encapsulate the worst aspects of same).
I'm going to procede on the assumption that you're arguing the dangers of Internet news here. Apologies if I miss the mark.
I suppose you could argue (and many people have) that by the same token, if you dislike Microsoft and think that Free Software is generally a good idea, you're probably going to read Slashdot.
I don't think you could say that about Slashdot readers. I've been exposed to a number of different viewpoints in my time as a reader. Often expressed with considerable force, and sometimes very persuasively. I've even had my mind changed, on occasion. If the model of reality you present was correct, I would not expect this to happen.
To me, it all sounds like a doomsday scenario cobbled together by people who see their jobs threatened by the rise of blogging. And like most such scenarios, while it has an element of truth to it, it wildly exaggerates the problem. I don't think the tendency to seek confirmation bias is that powerful in most people, and the rare few that do tend to get their print news from the sort of newspaper that regularly reports that Elivis has been found alive and well on the Moon.
Not that I disagree with you on the subject of Fox News, you understand.
Yeah. The thing is, the knowledgeable people aren't always right. That's where the big surprises come from. I mean, look at Perl. Who would have thought that a language that tends to look like line noise would go on to become the "the duct tape of the internet". Anybody knowledgeable could have given a dozen reasons why no one would ever use Perl. And yet, that turns out not to be the case ...
Assuming you mean "should not", isn't that rather presupposing the fruitlessness nature of the project. I mean the entire reason why this sort of parallelism and redundancy is good is that predicting what will and will not work is hard. That said, I'll defend anyone's right to say "in my opinion your time could be more productively spent coding for teh Wine project". I just think there's a world of difference between that, and saying "You SHOULD do this, you SHOULD NOT do that". Maybe it's just me.
You might be right. But even if so, so what? It's not like you're paying their salaries.
Well the answer to that probably depends very much on who the hypothetical "you" is in that sentence. Maybe there are people who want to tinker with the O/S in ways of which Microsoft would not approve. Maybe they want a VM image to run games, and they have ethical objections to violating MS' copyright. I can't see how this has any bearing on the likelihood of success for ReactOS, however.
Of course, a lot of corporate IT projects fail, too. Software is hard. It's a wonder any of it works at all, sometimes.
It doesn't mean they're bad either. Or indifferent for that matter. Maybe if you had a crystal ball and could reliably foretell which projects will have have been important in five, ten or twenty years time, maybe then you could make that judgment. But without some sort of prescience it's impossible to make reliable judgments. That's why all those corporate projects flop; someone in authority makes a judgment about which strategy to pursue and in five years time one or more of their key assumptions is shown to be false and the software is rendered useless.
Of course, the same thing happens to free software projects as well. The difference however is that the Free Software developmental model tends to result in massive parallelism. Lots of projects fail, some are unexpected successes, and the successes aren't always the ones you'd expect. Think of it as a sort of software Darwinism: lots of projects die out, but the ones that thrive are well adapted to the needs of their userbase.
Looked at in that way, the lack of central direction in Free Software isn't the flaw that many perceive it to be. It is something to be celebrated.
But isn't that the point of disruptive technologies? They don't start out better, but simply "good enough". If the free information is of sufficient quality, it won't matter if the paywalled sites are better or not.
Hmmm... but they would all need to do it. And there's nowhere near the level of consolidation in global news sources that there is in airlines. That's going to make it a lot harder to get a cartel together. On top of that, the last few holdouts stand to see some serious traffic, with corresponding potentials for ad revenue. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but I think it would be a lot harder to bring it about.
There are other important differences, as well. If I want a flight from Newcastle to London in the UK, and all the flights are overloaded with surcharges, I can't easily substitute one from, say, Seattle to San Diego. With online news services, I can, at least for stories with more or less global scope, or ones specific to an industry.
And of course, it's a lot harder to get together with about a thousand other travellers and start offering my own flights, which is not the case for online news. Granted, the blogging community are unlikely to finance a reporter who wants to infiltrate the Taliban, at least not any time soon. On the other hand, they probably can supply enough news of good enough standard that very few people will see much of value behind the paywalls. Bloggers, I think, fit the classic disruptive innovation pattern.
Like I say, none of that necessarily means the scenario you describe will not happen. But I don't think it's anywhere near as likely as you make it sound.
Sure, in a stable market. And to be fair, I didn't read TFA as saying "EA should not be taking a risk on new franchises". He's just raising concerns about the budget size vs. the payoff.
I think you have to remember that his comments are all made in the context of a move to digital distribution, which he feels is going to happen a lot faster than EA are allowing for. Reading between the lines a little, I think he'd like to see more, lower budget games aimed at a cheaper price point. That doesn't make sense if your retail is through shops because shelf space is expensive, and with a limited number of titles that you can offer, you need to spend money trying to force a blockbuster. But for digital distribution, you can spread your risk a bit more, develop a range of titles and see what catches the public imagination.
You say that like it's a bad thing. His point is that EA's business strategy is unsustainable, and I think he's got a point.
When you say "way they've been taking", I assume you mean that in the sense of "direction they've chose to head in". As opposed to the way they've been taking money. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced. DA: Origins could have used another six months playtesting on the AI IMHO, and Dead Space sucked like a black hole. Spore was fun however, and I'll concede that I'm not generally representative of the larger gaming community.
The point is, as you rightly point out, he's not criticising the games - he's criticising the business strategy behind them. If Spore, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space and Need for Speed: Undercover were indeed loss makers for EA, then it doesn't matter how good the games were. If they can't make them turn a profit, they soon won't be making any more.
I didn't get that, at all. As I read it, he just thinks the revenue from their established franchises isn't going to be enough to tide them through the changeover to digital distribution. And he thinks that EA are throwing too much money at trying to manufacture blockbusters, and I think he's probably right.
The trouble is that for quite a while now, the big games companies have been throwing money at games trying to raise the barrier to entry. They want to be like Hollywood studios where you have a big investment for big returns. So we things like big name voice actors throughout. Or fully orchestral scores for a game. Hollywood gets away with this by sinking a lot of cash into publicity so they can "buy the gross" - cover the bulk of production costs in the first week. That doesn't appear to be working for EA, assuming bizpunk is right about those games being expensive loss makers.
He's not making any judgements about the games themselves, except that they don't seem to be making enough money to recoup their development costs. Which, if true, would be a problem regardless of the game content.
Well, exactly!
It's as if he was running a site for pet lovers, and then reasoning that since his subscribers were overwhelmingly in favour of dogs, it therefore followed that everyone liked dogs, and therefore that dog ownership should become mandatory.
The reason I don't use social networking sites is precisely because I value my privacy. At best Zuckerberg is extrapolating from a very skewed sample. At worst, his arguments are cynical and self-serving.
Well, there's always the evidence of the Linux and BSD software arena. There are vanishingly few malicious apps for Linux, and when one does appear, there's generally a huge hullaballoo about it. Usually from Windows users saying "Who's laughing now, huh?".
I know the old argument is that "when linux gets as popular as Windows...", but frankly, even with a 1% market share, that's one hell of a lot of computers. And a lot of contact lists, bank account details, potential botnet members ... if launching a malicious fork of an app was as easy as has been suggested, you'd think we'd see more malware in the free software world. But we don't.
You say that, but I bet you haven't got any evidence to back it up. ;)
That's a poor "risk". The Net Neutrality debate kicked off when AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre announced his intention to do exactly what we're talking about. Since then we have seen several cases of large providers unfairly throttling smaller downstream providers.
This is not an abstract doomsday scenario. It's happening.
See, this is the point everybody seems to miss. It's not your ISP that causes the problem. And it's not the ISP of the web site at the far end, either. It's all the johnny-in-the-middle provides through whom your packets get routed who decide they want more money, above and beyond the peering arrangements that already compensate them for use of their pipes.
So changing your ISP doesn't help. A community broadband co-op will not help, unless the community in question is Planet Earth.
Market Forces will not ride to the rescue on this one.
The problem starts with the beer bottles. They have this proprietory bottle opener thing that you're supposed to pay money each time you use it. The trouble is that the opener is just taped to the side of the bottle and painted to look like it isn't there. Given that the bottle automatically refills itself, this doesn't seem like a practical business model.
Don't get me wrong - I'm bang alongside Free Beer. I just don't think this is a viable way to finance the notion.
You do not want to know what you'd have to do to get Zombie Mother Theresa's blessing.
Which works as long as we only have one "bad guy" ISP trying to supplement their legitimate peering income with arbitrary surcharges on third party traffic. It doesn't mean that allowing those surcharges is a good idea, but it's a viable strategy as long as only ISP decides to charge for services for which they're already being paid.
The trouble is that once the principle is established that this is acceptable behaviour, every cable owner on the planet will want a piece of the action. When that happens, your internet fees go up. They go up regardless of who you're with, because everyone with whom you don't have a contract is charging your ISP a premium not to simply drop their packets.
And they're not going to shape SSL traffic because ...?
Do you think it would be a good thing if they did?
"Promptly" in this context meaning after twenty years of investing in infrastructure that was already largely paid for by government subsidy anyway, I take it.
OK, you have low expectations when it comes to corporate ethics. I can see how that might happen.
Thing is, that still doesn't mean that letting third party ISPs play "Stand And Deliver" with your data is a good thing. And it still doesn't mean we should accept arbitrary surcharges to a service for which we have already paid, from parties with whom we have no direct financial arrangement.
The point, really, is that you as a customer can't do anything about it. You either accept that ISP C will degrade your traffic, despite having been paid to carry it through existing peering arrangements; or else you go with an ISP that pays a premium to ISP C beyond the peering charge and get shafted.
Or, of course, you move to ISP C and get shafted by ISP A and B's retalliatory surcharges and/or throttling. As a customer, you still end up a loser.
The real problem, of course, is that there are a lot more ISP Cs than there are A and Bs, at least for any given customer. If every owner of every yard of fiber in the Internet decides to add arbitrary surcharges, it could quickly cripple the internet. I can see how that might appeal to the likes of Sony and Michael Lynton, but for most of us, it there really is no positive outcome.
Cool. What were you going to do if you wanted a package where your packets don't get throttled by third party providers with whom you have no direct financial agreement relationship?
The problem isn't so much the defence as the expense of challenging and overturning a patent. The big players can afford to tie the case up in court for years. Meanwhile, the smaller party isn't getting any income, and are bleeding money through legal fees.
And it's hard to see how to fix that in such a way as doesn't lend itself to further abuse.
I think the only solution in the long run will be to for governments to stop telling people what ideas they can and cannot use.
DRM beer: the brewery goes bankrupt and all their customers instantly get hangovers that never go away.