But secondly- if a system has worked for generations, why is it suddenly flawed now?
It's a system that works (albiet suboptimally in terms of generating new wealth), as long as our competitors, namely Europe, don't free up their economies. As the EU gets stronger, our only options are to follow suit, or be left behind anyway.
Don't get things wrong. The US still has the most solid and fastest growing (in absolute terms) economy in the world. It'll take a lot of unseat us from first place. But, if we can't adapt to changing conditions, then decades from now we may look on in envy as we are relegated to "middle of the road" status.
Don't pull that. Sony's track record with OS updates is proven, in the PSP. PSP updates ad features and shut-down homebrew hacks, which is precisely what you'll see Nintendo do. There is little reason to believe the PS3 will be different, aside from blind fanboyism.
1) The PSP's update is pretty painless as well, and it seems the PS3 interface is based on that. 2) Your Famicom didn't *have* an OS, it just had a firmware. And it was effectively updated, since each cart would include its own OS code.
Linking against GPL libraries requires you to release the source (since otherwise the GPL could be circumvented trivially, just by compiling the code you want to steal into a library and calling it). However, applications do not link against the kernel, which is why they're not affected by the licensing condition.
See, from my POV (I'm an engineer), an analytic solution to Navier-Stokes would be far more important. It would mea a huge advance for our understanding of aerodynamics (among other fluid-flow problems).
This must be new? I've never heard of it before. Internet Explorer defaults to www.msn.com, does't it?
Oh, and its a blatent Google rip-off. The layout is the same, and the section headers are even in the same order! Not to mention it commits the criminal sin of having an unlabeled search icon. New computer users can read. What they can't do is decipher tiny, low-contrast icons.
So its late, derivative, and not as good. What's your point?
The economist is very good. They've got something of a libertarian bias, but they're open about it. There analysis is much more in-depth than what you'll see most other places.
Clearly, what the article is referring to is not the efficiency of the turbine, but the efficiency of the generator connected to the turbine. Ie: the turbine is probably very inefficient, but the generator is 95% efficient in converting the mechanical energy of the turbine to electricity.
That's unpossible. The best gas turbines are in the 60-something range for efficiency, and making gas turbines smaller tends to make them less efficient. Clearly, there is something the author of the article is missing.
Interestingly enough, its also the only search engine in existence easy enough for my mom to use. With all the other ones, she doesn't know where to type her query.
"Bullshit! Maximizing total GNP does *not* necessarily maximize other important factors, such as stability and equal distribution."
Sure, this is true. Capitalism doesn't really claim to directly improve anything other than GDP. However, look at the world today. Yes, income disparity is higher than it has ever been, but on the other hand, literacy is up, life expectancy is up, poverty is down, etc.
If a society desires stability and equal distribution, that implies advocacy of social programs that promote these factors. A high GNP goes hand-in-hand with such programs, because all these programs require money.
Ironically, many Americans oppose these social programs. Workers whose jobs have been made irrelevant by globalization don't want society to give them job retraining, they want society to give them their old job back. Of course, both are hand-outs, and the latter is actually more of an economic burden on society than the former, but I suppose pride makes the two seem different.
"There's no real reason why open source necessarily has to lead to loss of jobs. It just requires a change in business model." "There's no real reason why {technological progress, globalization, free trade} has to lead to a loss of jobs. It just requires a change in economic model."
Like open source software and technological progress, globalization is an opportunity for growth. Those that adapt will gain, those that won't will lose, and generally, the gains will outweigh the losses.
The income gap between rich and poor growing is not an indication that the poor are getting poorer. It's just a sign that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer. Of course, that makes sense, because economic growth tends to be exponential, and if you start out with more, you can grow faster than if you start out with less.
Money and goods are interchangable. If I have $10, and you have $10 worth of carrots, and I buy your $10 worth of carrots, neither of us is any less wealthy than when we started. We each have $10 of real value.
Now, what I think you're getting at is the fact that $1000 in cash can be put to more productive uses than a $1000 TV. What you're arguing against, then, is not globalization, but the value judgements of your fellow citizens. They'd rather buy a $1000 TV, then invest the $1000 in something productive. Globalization theory says nothing about "wants". It just gives a template of how to satisfy the highest value of "wants" with a finite set of resources.
Globalization does not tend to cause equillibriation, because, put simply, market economics is not a zero-sum game. In a globalized market, the total wealth of the system is higher than the sum of the individual wealths of the economies involved. Nobody "loses" from trade, its just that one side or the other might benefit more.
Of course, this is an abstract model, but the point is that it demonstrates a valid trend in real world economics. It also points out the futility of most of the arguments against globalization. For example, anti-globalists like to harp about the US trade deficit with Mexico. The "trade deficit" doesn't imply any loss of value in our economy. If we buy $300bn more of stuff than Mexico buys from us, we haven't "lost" $300bn of value --- we still have an amount of goods worth $300bn. Similarly, they point out the loss in manufacturing jobs after NAFTA. Yes, globalization causes realignment of job sectors, moving jobs from sectors that have less value to the economy to sectors that have more value to the economy. They don't look at the whole picture --- which says that the US GDP post-NAFTA was much higher and unemployment was much lower.
Hence my problem with this article. If you want to argue against globalization, show evidence that a specific globalization agreement caused the loss of X jobs or Y dollars of GDP to the economy as a whole. Don't make specious arguments misleadingly highlighting just one component of an interdependent system.
Are you high? China is a prime example of globalization at work. We get a whole lot more stuff for our money from China than we could produce ourselves for the same cost. At the same time, China gets a lot more money selling to us than it would selling to itself.
Globalization isn't something just corporations are pushing. Most liberal egg-head economists are pushing it too. They push it, because the math works out, it makes sense, and has been demonstrating its usefulness for literally hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Louis XIV drastically turned around the French economy over 300 years ago by breaking down trade barriers, and there are still people who aren't convinced it works...
Saying that outsourcing eliminates jobs because they eliminate jobs in IT is like saying evolution is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics. A global relation (entropy increases or jobs increase), doesn't necessarily hold locally (entropy may decrease in one system, and jobs may decrease in one sector).
Economics doesn't saw anything about whether globalization will preserve jobs in a specific sector. What it does say is that it will tend to create jobs in the economy (both economies involved) as a whole. There isn't a lot of evidence to counter this claim.
Nope, that was US pricing. During the cart era, the cutting-edge games cost $70-$80, because they used big, expensive ROMs. The original price of FF3 was $70, and the original price of Chrono Trigger was $80. Secret of Mana was a cheapie at $60. Most of the early N64 games were $70 - $80 as well. WaveRace was $80, Turok was $80, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was $80. I think Pilot Wings was $70. The cheapest was Mario 64, at merely $60. For a long time, $60 was the cheapest you could get an N64 game for.
During the cart era, the average new game pricing was about $60, depend on the genre. At least this was true for the Nintendo systems (don't remember anything about Sega). The new $60 price point on the 360 corresponds to a $45 price point during the heyday of the SNES. You just couldn't buy new games that cheap back then.
There is no evidence, besides rumors and off-hand statements from various people, that games will cost anywhere near that much. It would be criminally stupid for Sony to take their major advantage, their strong gaming library, then lose it by pricing games higher than XBox 360 games. Now, the prevailing mantra on the rumor mills seems to be that Sony is stupid, but they didn't sell two and a half times as many PS2s as all its competitors combined by being stupid.
The PS3 is $500, and there is no indication that games will be $80. Sony's the one that introduced the $50 price ceiling in the first place, and they'll probably keep with the $60 increment Microsoft has pioneered, but no way are they going to $80.
What the fuck? PS games are the cheapest games have been since the NES. I sure as hell remember paying $70 in the early 1990s for my copy of FF3, nearly $80 in the mid 1990s for my copy of Chrono Trigger, $80 for a used copy of Wave Race 64 right after launch, etc. It was the PS1 that brought games down to $40-$50, and in a decade since then, the price hasn't even kept up with the rate of inflation. Your average PS2 game probably costs 2/3s as much as your average game in the heyday of the SNES. SNES games ranged from $60-$80 new ($78-$105 adjusted for inflation). A $50 price ceiling for games is a substantial price cut from that.
And what track record is that exactly? What is this "track record" of ripping off customers I seem to have completely missed out on? Which of Sony's gaming products out there are rip-offs? The PSP? The PS2? Was the PS1 a rip-off?
Sony's "track record" of late is just frothing at the mouth from internet "journalists" tapped into the rumor mill.
There has been no word on how much the game itself will cost initially, how much content will be pre-provided, wether it will come with credits in the box, etc. Everybody's jumping to a conclusion based on this fantasy image of a bumbling Sony that can't get anything right, despite the fact that they toppled Nintendo's empire, successfully fended off Microsoft, and delivered two every solid consoles that have been the market leaders for more than a decade.
This is a pretty good reference here: Business Week Article.
The article basically says that the XCP copy protection (which contained the rootkit), was created by First4Internet, which is a company that creates DRM solutions for media companies. A company called F-Secure found out about the problem in October and contacted Sony, who seemed to not really know what was going on.
They're clearly legally responsible for the security issue, but it seems their fault was more incompetence (not knowing what a contractor was putting in your CDs, not paying sufficient attention to the security implications), than purposeful malice.
Slashdot Mirror
But secondly- if a system has worked for generations, why is it suddenly flawed now?
It's a system that works (albiet suboptimally in terms of generating new wealth), as long as our competitors, namely Europe, don't free up their economies. As the EU gets stronger, our only options are to follow suit, or be left behind anyway.
Don't get things wrong. The US still has the most solid and fastest growing (in absolute terms) economy in the world. It'll take a lot of unseat us from first place. But, if we can't adapt to changing conditions, then decades from now we may look on in envy as we are relegated to "middle of the road" status.
Don't pull that. Sony's track record with OS updates is proven, in the PSP. PSP updates ad features and shut-down homebrew hacks, which is precisely what you'll see Nintendo do. There is little reason to believe the PS3 will be different, aside from blind fanboyism.
1) The PSP's update is pretty painless as well, and it seems the PS3 interface is based on that.
2) Your Famicom didn't *have* an OS, it just had a firmware. And it was effectively updated, since each cart would include its own OS code.
Linking against GPL libraries requires you to release the source (since otherwise the GPL could be circumvented trivially, just by compiling the code you want to steal into a library and calling it). However, applications do not link against the kernel, which is why they're not affected by the licensing condition.
See, from my POV (I'm an engineer), an analytic solution to Navier-Stokes would be far more important. It would mea a huge advance for our understanding of aerodynamics (among other fluid-flow problems).
This must be new? I've never heard of it before. Internet Explorer defaults to www.msn.com, does't it?
Oh, and its a blatent Google rip-off. The layout is the same, and the section headers are even in the same order! Not to mention it commits the criminal sin of having an unlabeled search icon. New computer users can read. What they can't do is decipher tiny, low-contrast icons.
So its late, derivative, and not as good. What's your point?
The economist is very good. They've got something of a libertarian bias, but they're open about it. There analysis is much more in-depth than what you'll see most other places.
It's a generator powered by a gas turbine.
Clearly, what the article is referring to is not the efficiency of the turbine, but the efficiency of the generator connected to the turbine. Ie: the turbine is probably very inefficient, but the generator is 95% efficient in converting the mechanical energy of the turbine to electricity.
That's unpossible. The best gas turbines are in the 60-something range for efficiency, and making gas turbines smaller tends to make them less efficient. Clearly, there is something the author of the article is missing.
Interestingly enough, its also the only search engine in existence easy enough for my mom to use. With all the other ones, she doesn't know where to type her query.
"Bullshit! Maximizing total GNP does *not* necessarily maximize other important factors, such as stability and equal distribution."
Sure, this is true. Capitalism doesn't really claim to directly improve anything other than GDP. However, look at the world today. Yes, income disparity is higher than it has ever been, but on the other hand, literacy is up, life expectancy is up, poverty is down, etc.
If a society desires stability and equal distribution, that implies advocacy of social programs that promote these factors. A high GNP goes hand-in-hand with such programs, because all these programs require money.
Ironically, many Americans oppose these social programs. Workers whose jobs have been made irrelevant by globalization don't want society to give them job retraining, they want society to give them their old job back. Of course, both are hand-outs, and the latter is actually more of an economic burden on society than the former, but I suppose pride makes the two seem different.
"There's no real reason why open source necessarily has to lead to loss of jobs. It just requires a change in business model." "There's no real reason why {technological progress, globalization, free trade} has to lead to a loss of jobs. It just requires a change in economic model."
Like open source software and technological progress, globalization is an opportunity for growth. Those that adapt will gain, those that won't will lose, and generally, the gains will outweigh the losses.
The income gap between rich and poor growing is not an indication that the poor are getting poorer. It's just a sign that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer. Of course, that makes sense, because economic growth tends to be exponential, and if you start out with more, you can grow faster than if you start out with less.
Bullshit. US per-capita income is growing faster than inflation, which means the real purchasing-power equivalent income of people is getting larger.
Money and goods are interchangable. If I have $10, and you have $10 worth of carrots, and I buy your $10 worth of carrots, neither of us is any less wealthy than when we started. We each have $10 of real value.
Now, what I think you're getting at is the fact that $1000 in cash can be put to more productive uses than a $1000 TV. What you're arguing against, then, is not globalization, but the value judgements of your fellow citizens. They'd rather buy a $1000 TV, then invest the $1000 in something productive. Globalization theory says nothing about "wants". It just gives a template of how to satisfy the highest value of "wants" with a finite set of resources.
Globalization does not tend to cause equillibriation, because, put simply, market economics is not a zero-sum game. In a globalized market, the total wealth of the system is higher than the sum of the individual wealths of the economies involved. Nobody "loses" from trade, its just that one side or the other might benefit more.
Of course, this is an abstract model, but the point is that it demonstrates a valid trend in real world economics. It also points out the futility of most of the arguments against globalization. For example, anti-globalists like to harp about the US trade deficit with Mexico. The "trade deficit" doesn't imply any loss of value in our economy. If we buy $300bn more of stuff than Mexico buys from us, we haven't "lost" $300bn of value --- we still have an amount of goods worth $300bn. Similarly, they point out the loss in manufacturing jobs after NAFTA. Yes, globalization causes realignment of job sectors, moving jobs from sectors that have less value to the economy to sectors that have more value to the economy. They don't look at the whole picture --- which says that the US GDP post-NAFTA was much higher and unemployment was much lower.
Hence my problem with this article. If you want to argue against globalization, show evidence that a specific globalization agreement caused the loss of X jobs or Y dollars of GDP to the economy as a whole. Don't make specious arguments misleadingly highlighting just one component of an interdependent system.
Are you high? China is a prime example of globalization at work. We get a whole lot more stuff for our money from China than we could produce ourselves for the same cost. At the same time, China gets a lot more money selling to us than it would selling to itself.
Globalization isn't something just corporations are pushing. Most liberal egg-head economists are pushing it too. They push it, because the math works out, it makes sense, and has been demonstrating its usefulness for literally hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Louis XIV drastically turned around the French economy over 300 years ago by breaking down trade barriers, and there are still people who aren't convinced it works...
Saying that outsourcing eliminates jobs because they eliminate jobs in IT is like saying evolution is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics. A global relation (entropy increases or jobs increase), doesn't necessarily hold locally (entropy may decrease in one system, and jobs may decrease in one sector).
Economics doesn't saw anything about whether globalization will preserve jobs in a specific sector. What it does say is that it will tend to create jobs in the economy (both economies involved) as a whole. There isn't a lot of evidence to counter this claim.
Nope, that was US pricing. During the cart era, the cutting-edge games cost $70-$80, because they used big, expensive ROMs. The original price of FF3 was $70, and the original price of Chrono Trigger was $80. Secret of Mana was a cheapie at $60. Most of the early N64 games were $70 - $80 as well. WaveRace was $80, Turok was $80, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was $80. I think Pilot Wings was $70. The cheapest was Mario 64, at merely $60. For a long time, $60 was the cheapest you could get an N64 game for.
During the cart era, the average new game pricing was about $60, depend on the genre. At least this was true for the Nintendo systems (don't remember anything about Sega). The new $60 price point on the 360 corresponds to a $45 price point during the heyday of the SNES. You just couldn't buy new games that cheap back then.
There is no evidence, besides rumors and off-hand statements from various people, that games will cost anywhere near that much. It would be criminally stupid for Sony to take their major advantage, their strong gaming library, then lose it by pricing games higher than XBox 360 games. Now, the prevailing mantra on the rumor mills seems to be that Sony is stupid, but they didn't sell two and a half times as many PS2s as all its competitors combined by being stupid.
The PS3 is $500, and there is no indication that games will be $80. Sony's the one that introduced the $50 price ceiling in the first place, and they'll probably keep with the $60 increment Microsoft has pioneered, but no way are they going to $80.
What the fuck? PS games are the cheapest games have been since the NES. I sure as hell remember paying $70 in the early 1990s for my copy of FF3, nearly $80 in the mid 1990s for my copy of Chrono Trigger, $80 for a used copy of Wave Race 64 right after launch, etc. It was the PS1 that brought games down to $40-$50, and in a decade since then, the price hasn't even kept up with the rate of inflation. Your average PS2 game probably costs 2/3s as much as your average game in the heyday of the SNES. SNES games ranged from $60-$80 new ($78-$105 adjusted for inflation). A $50 price ceiling for games is a substantial price cut from that.
And what track record is that exactly? What is this "track record" of ripping off customers I seem to have completely missed out on? Which of Sony's gaming products out there are rip-offs? The PSP? The PS2? Was the PS1 a rip-off?
Sony's "track record" of late is just frothing at the mouth from internet "journalists" tapped into the rumor mill.
Ah, I love how rumors get started.
There has been no word on how much the game itself will cost initially, how much content will be pre-provided, wether it will come with credits in the box, etc. Everybody's jumping to a conclusion based on this fantasy image of a bumbling Sony that can't get anything right, despite the fact that they toppled Nintendo's empire, successfully fended off Microsoft, and delivered two every solid consoles that have been the market leaders for more than a decade.
This is a pretty good reference here: Business Week Article.
The article basically says that the XCP copy protection (which contained the rootkit), was created by First4Internet, which is a company that creates DRM solutions for media companies. A company called F-Secure found out about the problem in October and contacted Sony, who seemed to not really know what was going on.
They're clearly legally responsible for the security issue, but it seems their fault was more incompetence (not knowing what a contractor was putting in your CDs, not paying sufficient attention to the security implications), than purposeful malice.