Microsoft became the king BECAUSE of piracy. the Dos and windows 3.11 days Microsoft products sucked. but they were the easiest to copy and spread like wildfire because free = better than buying it.
Piracy is the convenient explanation. Microsoft's marketing is the convenient explanation. The truth lies elsewhere.
The IBM-PC and PC clone was an attractive and versatile platform, almost infinitely adaptable. The PC for the shop floor and the loading dock. The office and the den.
Everyone and his brother began building hardware for the platform. Everyone and his brother began writing software for the platform. That is what gave MIcrosoft its dominance.
That and a five year apprenticeship in development for the eight-bit micro.
# Has a bigger spaceship, which can separate into two spaceships.
expensive to animate. eats up story time. gives Riker a chance to prove he's more macho than a computer. manual docking of ships this size by sight alone? give me a break.
# Picard has to contend with the "Prime Directive", a ruling imposed on him by Starfleet after they saw what a complete shambles resulted when they let Kirk meet new alien races.
Picard simply lucks out. meaning the writers give him a convenient escape route from the artificial dilemma they have created. Picard is never more insufferably santimonius than when invoking the prime directive. at least Kirk knew bull---- when he sees it.
# Picard's bridge doesn't sound like an aviary.
no. but on both ships, one sneeze, a slip of the hand, and you've jettisoned a pod or launched a photon torpedo. where are the physical interlocks, the safety mechanisms, to protect any of these systems?
There are already too many n00bs who own a computer and are connected to the internet. Perhaps what is needed is not us changing for them but a "geek test" where in order to qualify for internet access you must pass a series of tests/exams like you do in order to get a radio license.Until this time, the internet will continue to be littered with crap to entertain the vast majority of people who should not be connected.
Living proof that dinosaurs still roam the earth.
The Geek dominated on-line world is that of the eight-bit micro, the floppy disk, the dot-matrix printer and the 300 baud modem.
Conveniently forgotten in the licensing argument is that the radio amateur must demonstrate his understanding and respect for the law, proper procedures, etiquette, and so on
---there is no "get out of jail free" card for the technocratic elite who think that rules are for someone else.
Obviously his admissions so far don't bode well for him being innocent of the charges, but the media (and people in general) need to tone down the pre-guilt.
"Evidence of flight is evidence of guilt." Foley bolted as soon as the story broke on ABC Bews. No one -- not the Speaker of the House --- not Foley's own attorney --- has dared to challenge the authenticity of the IMs.
He said "low-power tv station," so as long as he can either tell that the local used car dealer is still bald or make out the nipple on the feed from the camera he put in his hot neighbor's bookcase, he's probably good.
"LPTV stations are limited to an effective radiated power of 3 kilowatts (VHF) and 150 kilowatts (UHF). There are no limits on transmitter output power and on antenna height..."Low Power Television (LPTV) Service
Nothing Is 'Big Time' About Channel 13 While a story like this make fun reading, it is not typical of the product an LPTV station must deliver to remain commercially viable.
If MS hits people over the head with DRM in Vista the only versions they'll ever sell are in new machines via the Microsoft tax.
The OEM system install is the gold standard for the home and SOHO markets.
No one gives a damn about the Microsoft Tax.
What sells Vista is the thought of your first significant home hardware and software upgrade in five years. The dual core CPU. The big SATA hard drive. The wide-screen monitor. Etc., etc.
And the more annoying and intrusive Vista gets the more people people will consider Mac and Linux.
Activation. One click. Done. Forgotten. Never to be heard from again. Ordinary users rarely crack open the box to do anything more adventurous than snap in more RAM or reset a video card.
Other than those forced to buy Vista with a new machine, who's going to buy it?
Upgrade packages for Windows generally rank high on the software sales charts. The reality is that Windows users do upgrade once a new OS becomes established.
I can't believe why so many Slashdotters are complaining about the decision to limit internet access for a product that isn't activated/paid. Do you get better treatment at Wal-Mart for walking out with products that you ignored to pay for?
The truth is, this is how the average user responds to activation:
One Olick. Done.
He will never swap in new hardware at such a pace to trigger the message again.
It is the same for WGA. One click to validate. One click to dowload. One click to install. Done. The Geek erects barriers to the adoption of Vista that ordinary users don't waste time even thinking about.
MS has partially justified their high OS prices in the past to help cover the costs of sales lost to piracy. If they make it virtually impossible to pirate the OS (which it sounds like their goal is with Vista), will the cost of the OS come down at all?
Adjusted for inflation, how much more is Microsoft charging for retail or OEM Vista than it did for Windows 3.1? More importantly, in the consumer market, who the hell cares?
You buy the OS bundled with the latest in OEM hardware and come home with a system that you could not have purchased at any price five years ago.
The more interesting case will be when it is used for monitoring life-support equipment, fire alarms, large machinery, etc
The OS the hospital or the light industrial complex licenses for its mission-critical applications won't be the retail boxed home media-oriented Vista Premium.
When you are ready to sit at the head table with the grown-uos let us know.
This idea that developers are trying to sneak inappropriate material into their games to corrupt children for some nefarious game-industry plot is outright ridiculous.
It is not ridiculous to argue that Rockstar had a reputation for pushing the limits of public tolerance for adult content in sn M rated game. It is not ridiculous to argue that Rockstar was playing with fire.
If it requires additional steps and third party modifications or tools not available in the disk itself to access content beyond what was rated by the ESRB, then that implies willful tampering on the part of the user, and can hardly be used to hold the developers or the ESRB responsible.
You could drive anything through a loophole that big. The easiest way to open up Hot Coffee is for a developer to spread the word that the mini-game exists, and exactly where and how to unlock it.
There is no way a voluntary rating system can survive even the slightest suspicion that it can be so easily subverted.
Great..but thanks for telling me at 22:22 hours. An hour and 38 minutes before its the 4th of October
In rough order these were the stories making news in the states on October 3d:
The Amish school murders in Pennsylvania. Release of the killer's last-minute shopping list of items to be purchased for the rape and torture of the girls.
The Republican House leadership in crisis over its failure to investigate Rep. Foley. The Washington Times calling for Speaker Hastert's resignation. This is on the same order as New Hampshire's ultra-conservative Manchester Guardian coming out in support of Mrs. Clinton in 2008.
The White House still thrown badly off message by Bob Woodward's "State of Denial." Next in line to make headlines, the new biography of Colin Powell.
There are two things to be said about the Geek in politics: His timing is eminently lousy. He doesn't connect intellectually or emotionally with the masees who simply load the disk and watch the movie. Subscribe to XM or Sirius or Live365. The beginning and the end of their experience with DRM.
those who think the big blue "e" on their desktop actually is The Internet.
AOL wasn't the first or last service to drop support for Usenet. FTP, IRC and Telnet clients are as archaic and little known to most users as Archie and Veronica. The big blue e is the gateway to the Internet for the great mass of users.
These are dark times for the modding community too. GTA, Oblivion, TheSims, those controversies popped up because of modders
If modders have become a larger target, it is because Rockstar tried to sell the idea that they were ones to blame for Hot Coffee. That said, I think we can expect gatekeepers like Valve (Steam) and Microsoft (XNA Express) to exert more control.
there is no way to account for material that can be added or unlocked by third party mods.
Mods didn't make headlines for Rockstar.
It began with in game content:
"Kill the Haitians."
Rule No. 1.
If you release a video game that celebrates gun violence and the inner city gang culture you had better be prepared for a gut reaction from the inner city itself.
--- and from the suburban soccer moms whose adolescent boys are your prime market.
It ended in the AO button-mashing sex play of Hot Coffee---which was burnt into three pressings of GTA:SA.
Rule No. 2.
You will be held responsible for what ships, no matter how it got there,
"Copyright is an economic tool for artificially assigning cost to something that inherently has none -- the digital copy
No deposit, no return.
You want the free digital copy you had better find a way of paying for the original. A Pixar feature represents five years of work by four hundred people and an investment of $100 million dollars.
Ask Joe who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's works and he's likely to think it's a reasonable question.
There is an old rule that says a classic must be re-translated and re-intrepreted in each generation to remain attractive and readable to a modern audience. That is why Project Gutenberg is no threat to sales of the Penguin Classics.
I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law...Joe Average isn't stupid...he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it
Joe Average may not own a burner and he may not have any significant involvement eith the P2P nets. Joe is a convenient fiction for the Geek.
But assume, for the moment, that Joe does exist.
Joe hasn't seen any copyrights expire in his lifetime because Joe has no interest in content that hasn't been produced in his lifetime. Joe has damn little interest in content that hasn't been published in the last ten years.
He may, in retro mood, he want Elvis or The Beatles. But not homemade rips from the warped 45s and vinyl LPs to be found in his Grandma's basement. What he wants is expert restoration from the original analog masters.
Skills he does not have. Sources he does not own.
Copyright reform would have NO impact on lawsuits by the rights agencies.
You are never going to get an unrestricted license to redistribute commercially viable content over the Internet.
Not from China, not from Canada, not from Sweden, not from any country with a domestic cultural product to protect, not from any country with a significant export market in culture. There are no safe havens.
The P2P hit list is a mirror reflection of those published by weekly by Billboard and Variety. The artists are still very much alive and active, the content is always derived from contemporary commercial sources.
The Geek doesn't get sued because he uploaded his own scan of Steamboat Willie--nitrate stock, synchronized sound on disk-- the Geek gets sued because he uploaded a screener of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
The rules of entry into the U.S. are defined by the U.S., always have been. You don't like the rules for entry by air? Take the train or take the boat. You are not quaranteed convenience. You are not quaranteed privacy. Least of all in time of war.
AIDS research already recieves a disproportionally large ammount of money, if you look at the number of people who die from it, and the ammount spent on other serious diseases.
Some statistics on AIDs:
Over 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 74 percent of these infected people live in sub-Saharan Africa.
There are 14,000 new infections every day (95 percent in developing countries). HIV/AIDS is a "disease of young people" with half of the 5 million new infections each year occurring among people ages 15 to 24.
The UN estimates that, currently, there are 14 million AIDS orphans and that by 2010 there will be 25 million.
By race, 54 percent of the new infections in the United States occur among African Americans, and 64 percent of the new infections in women occur in African American women.
Half of all new infections in the United States occur in people 25 years of age or younger Vital Statistics
You forgot comic books. People honestly thought Batman comics and True Crime comic books would make kids go out and kill people.
The comic book argument is revisionist history. The true story is something like this:
Sales of comic books like the older pulp magazines sank like a rock after World War Two. There were new and more compelling, forms of entertainment. TV. The paperback novel.
The crime and horror comics were an attempt to recapture that older audience---but, let us be honest here---the cover art and the writing were no match for Mickey Spillane.
You also had the newspaper story strips for comparison. Al Capp. Milton Caniff. Walt Kelly.
The most intractable problem was that comics were only distributed only through standard news outlets.
The cigar store that was hit last week by the vice squad for selling porn out of the back room to minors. The neighborhood drug store where the terror comics shared the rack with Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
I wish they would make a laptop. It needs the clockwork deal, plus a remote solar panel you could stick in the window. Something like the OLPC but for adults, albeit simiar type specs and idea, low power, all solid state, self powered, etc.
You'll find a foot pedal-power dynamo charger at C.C. Crane. Something for the Geek who bikes to work and can take ten flights of stairs without wheezing or a coronary.
The first is in Rockstar's disastrous PR which claimed that Hot Coffee was a third-party mod.
The second is the fact that mini-game could be unlocked in the PC and two console pressings of GTA:SA. That strains coincidence when you have already been caught in a lie.
The third is that you will not be allowed any excuse if you release AO content into the wild. Mark Twain had to pull a first print run of "Huckleberry Finn" because an unknown engraver made pornographic changes to an illustration.
the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence
Rockstar North was based in Scotland, I believe.
But this is precisely why they ran into trouble. You can't exploit the gang violence of the American inner city in a game without expecting a reaction from the inner city itself. Least of all when your core market is the suburban, adolescent, white male.
Rockstar was blind to the realities of the inner city. Blind to the realites of suburbia. Where it is the instincts and passions of the soccer mom which govern, not the gamer.
Thompson is a distraction. Insignificant in the larger scheme of things.
But a gamer cannot afford to ignore Mrs. Clinton, who is very strong in these very different environments.
Slashdot Mirror
Piracy is the convenient explanation. Microsoft's marketing is the convenient explanation. The truth lies elsewhere.
The IBM-PC and PC clone was an attractive and versatile platform, almost infinitely adaptable. The PC for the shop floor and the loading dock. The office and the den.
Everyone and his brother began building hardware for the platform. Everyone and his brother began writing software for the platform. That is what gave MIcrosoft its dominance.
That and a five year apprenticeship in development for the eight-bit micro.
expensive to animate. eats up story time. gives Riker a chance to prove he's more macho than a computer. manual docking of ships this size by sight alone? give me a break.
# Picard has to contend with the "Prime Directive", a ruling imposed on him by Starfleet after they saw what a complete shambles resulted when they let Kirk meet new alien races.
Picard simply lucks out. meaning the writers give him a convenient escape route from the artificial dilemma they have created. Picard is never more insufferably santimonius than when invoking the prime directive. at least Kirk knew bull---- when he sees it.
# Picard's bridge doesn't sound like an aviary.
no. but on both ships, one sneeze, a slip of the hand, and you've jettisoned a pod or launched a photon torpedo. where are the physical interlocks, the safety mechanisms, to protect any of these systems?
Living proof that dinosaurs still roam the earth.
The Geek dominated on-line world is that of the eight-bit micro, the floppy disk, the dot-matrix printer and the 300 baud modem.
Conveniently forgotten in the licensing argument is that the radio amateur must demonstrate his understanding and respect for the law, proper procedures, etiquette, and so on
---there is no "get out of jail free" card for the technocratic elite who think that rules are for someone else.
"Evidence of flight is evidence of guilt." Foley bolted as soon as the story broke on ABC Bews. No one -- not the Speaker of the House --- not Foley's own attorney --- has dared to challenge the authenticity of the IMs.
"LPTV stations are limited to an effective radiated power of 3 kilowatts (VHF) and 150 kilowatts (UHF). There are no limits on transmitter output power and on antenna height..."Low Power Television (LPTV) Service
Nothing Is 'Big Time' About Channel 13 While a story like this make fun reading, it is not typical of the product an LPTV station must deliver to remain commercially viable.
The OEM system install is the gold standard for the home and SOHO markets.
No one gives a damn about the Microsoft Tax.
What sells Vista is the thought of your first significant home hardware and software upgrade in five years. The dual core CPU. The big SATA hard drive. The wide-screen monitor. Etc., etc.
And the more annoying and intrusive Vista gets the more people people will consider Mac and Linux.
Activation. One click. Done. Forgotten. Never to be heard from again. Ordinary users rarely crack open the box to do anything more adventurous than snap in more RAM or reset a video card.
Other than those forced to buy Vista with a new machine, who's going to buy it?
Upgrade packages for Windows generally rank high on the software sales charts. The reality is that Windows users do upgrade once a new OS becomes established.
The truth is, this is how the average user responds to activation:
One Olick. Done.
He will never swap in new hardware at such a pace to trigger the message again.
It is the same for WGA. One click to validate. One click to dowload. One click to install. Done. The Geek erects barriers to the adoption of Vista that ordinary users don't waste time even thinking about.
Adjusted for inflation, how much more is Microsoft charging for retail or OEM Vista than it did for Windows 3.1? More importantly, in the consumer market, who the hell cares? You buy the OS bundled with the latest in OEM hardware and come home with a system that you could not have purchased at any price five years ago.
The OS the hospital or the light industrial complex licenses for its mission-critical applications won't be the retail boxed home media-oriented Vista Premium.
When you are ready to sit at the head table with the grown-uos let us know.
You can't have it both ways. No sanctioned nude skins. Except in the Easter Eggs left behind by your own developers.
It is not ridiculous to argue that Rockstar had a reputation for pushing the limits of public tolerance for adult content in sn M rated game. It is not ridiculous to argue that Rockstar was playing with fire.
If it requires additional steps and third party modifications or tools not available in the disk itself to access content beyond what was rated by the ESRB, then that implies willful tampering on the part of the user, and can hardly be used to hold the developers or the ESRB responsible.
You could drive anything through a loophole that big. The easiest way to open up Hot Coffee is for a developer to spread the word that the mini-game exists, and exactly where and how to unlock it.
There is no way a voluntary rating system can survive even the slightest suspicion that it can be so easily subverted.
In rough order these were the stories making news in the states on October 3d:
The Amish school murders in Pennsylvania.
Release of the killer's last-minute shopping list of items to be purchased for the rape and torture of the girls.
The Republican House leadership in crisis over its failure to investigate Rep. Foley.
The Washington Times calling for Speaker Hastert's resignation. This is on the same order as New Hampshire's ultra-conservative Manchester Guardian coming out in support of Mrs. Clinton in 2008.
The White House still thrown badly off message by Bob Woodward's "State of Denial."
Next in line to make headlines, the new biography of Colin Powell.
There are two things to be said about the Geek in politics:
His timing is eminently lousy. He doesn't connect intellectually or emotionally with the masees who simply load the disk and watch the movie. Subscribe to XM or Sirius or Live365. The beginning and the end of their experience with DRM.
AOL wasn't the first or last service to drop support for Usenet. FTP, IRC and Telnet clients are as archaic and little known to most users as Archie and Veronica. The big blue e is the gateway to the Internet for the great mass of users.
If modders have become a larger target, it is because Rockstar tried to sell the idea that they were ones to blame for Hot Coffee. That said, I think we can expect gatekeepers like Valve (Steam) and Microsoft (XNA Express) to exert more control.
more efficient does not necessarily mean cheaper.
you have the expense of building, maintaining, and powering the mass driver, payloads designed for the 2,000g launch and so on.
rockets are off-the-shelf-technology. we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the first satellite launches.
Mods didn't make headlines for Rockstar.
It began with in game content: "Kill the Haitians."
Rule No. 1.
If you release a video game that celebrates gun violence and the inner city gang culture you had better be prepared for a gut reaction from the inner city itself.
--- and from the suburban soccer moms whose adolescent boys are your prime market.
It ended in the AO button-mashing sex play of Hot Coffee---which was burnt into three pressings of GTA:SA.
Rule No. 2.
You will be held responsible for what ships, no matter how it got there,
No deposit, no return.
You want the free digital copy you had better find a way of paying for the original. A Pixar feature represents five years of work by four hundred people and an investment of $100 million dollars.
I doubt that. Familiarity breeds acceptance more often than contempt.
There is an old rule that says a classic must be re-translated and re-intrepreted in each generation to remain attractive and readable to a modern audience. That is why Project Gutenberg is no threat to sales of the Penguin Classics.
I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law...Joe Average isn't stupid...he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it
Joe Average may not own a burner and he may not have any significant involvement eith the P2P nets. Joe is a convenient fiction for the Geek.
But assume, for the moment, that Joe does exist.
Joe hasn't seen any copyrights expire in his lifetime because Joe has no interest in content that hasn't been produced in his lifetime. Joe has damn little interest in content that hasn't been published in the last ten years.
He may, in retro mood, he want Elvis or The Beatles. But not homemade rips from the warped 45s and vinyl LPs to be found in his Grandma's basement. What he wants is expert restoration from the original analog masters.
Skills he does not have. Sources he does not own.
Copyright reform would have NO impact on lawsuits by the rights agencies.
You are never going to get an unrestricted license to redistribute commercially viable content over the Internet.
Not from China, not from Canada, not from Sweden, not from any country with a domestic cultural product to protect, not from any country with a significant export market in culture. There are no safe havens.
The P2P hit list is a mirror reflection of those published by weekly by Billboard and Variety. The artists are still very much alive and active, the content is always derived from contemporary commercial sources.
The Geek doesn't get sued because he uploaded his own scan of Steamboat Willie--nitrate stock, synchronized sound on disk-- the Geek gets sued because he uploaded a screener of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
The rules of entry into the U.S. are defined by the U.S., always have been. You don't like the rules for entry by air? Take the train or take the boat. You are not quaranteed convenience. You are not quaranteed privacy.
Least of all in time of war.
Some statistics on AIDs:
Over 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 74 percent of these infected people live in sub-Saharan Africa.
There are 14,000 new infections every day (95 percent in developing countries). HIV/AIDS is a "disease of young people" with half of the 5 million new infections each year occurring among people ages 15 to 24.
The UN estimates that, currently, there are 14 million AIDS orphans and that by 2010 there will be 25 million.
By race, 54 percent of the new infections in the United States occur among African Americans, and 64 percent of the new infections in women occur in African American women.
Half of all new infections in the United States occur in people 25 years of age or younger Vital Statistics
when that business has a 95% share of the home PC market and a very substantial presence in other consumer markets.
The comic book argument is revisionist history. The true story is something like this:
Sales of comic books like the older pulp magazines sank like a rock after World War Two. There were new and more compelling, forms of entertainment. TV. The paperback novel.
The crime and horror comics were an attempt to recapture that older audience---but, let us be honest here---the cover art and the writing were no match for Mickey Spillane.
You also had the newspaper story strips for comparison. Al Capp. Milton Caniff. Walt Kelly.
The most intractable problem was that comics were only distributed only through standard news outlets.
The cigar store that was hit last week by the vice squad for selling porn out of the back room to minors. The neighborhood drug store where the terror comics shared the rack with Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
You'll find a foot pedal-power dynamo charger at C.C. Crane.
Something for the Geek who bikes to work and can take ten flights of stairs without wheezing or a coronary.
There are three problems with this argument.
The first is in Rockstar's disastrous PR which claimed that Hot Coffee was a third-party mod.
The second is the fact that mini-game could be unlocked in the PC and two console pressings of GTA:SA. That strains coincidence when you have already been caught in a lie.
The third is that you will not be allowed any excuse if you release AO content into the wild. Mark Twain had to pull a first print run of "Huckleberry Finn" because an unknown engraver made pornographic changes to an illustration.
the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence
Rockstar North was based in Scotland, I believe.
But this is precisely why they ran into trouble. You can't exploit the gang violence of the American inner city in a game without expecting a reaction from the inner city itself. Least of all when your core market is the suburban, adolescent, white male.
Rockstar was blind to the realities of the inner city. Blind to the realites of suburbia. Where it is the instincts and passions of the soccer mom which govern, not the gamer.
Thompson is a distraction. Insignificant in the larger scheme of things.
But a gamer cannot afford to ignore Mrs. Clinton, who is very strong in these very different environments.