If Return of the King was 20 minutes long showing just the Battle of the Pellinor Fields - it could be a great 20 minutes, but if wouldn't be a great film now, would it?
The amount of gameplay offered for a game with this size development budget is unacceptable. It is all about hype and sucking players into paying for DLC. It's a contemptible model under which to design, develop and distribute triple A titles. Developers who do it should not be rewarded for those efforts - they deserve the middle finger and a loud shout of "Where the hell is the rest of the game???"
1 - Mass Effect : Mass Effect, imo, fails the GotY. The beginning of the game is just dreadfully dull, and the abstractions for gameplay purposes served only to yank me out of the story. (Hopping Tanks? Omni-gel? For shame. BioWare can do better than that. The story pacing in BioWare's games is unacceptable and - frankly - the fanbois let them off the hook far too easily. My friends worked on this game and while I respect their efforts - it's too bad that a more discriminating internal QA team did not speak up LOUDER about this game's flaws. there are a lot of designers who have excuses for this - but BioWare isn't one of them.
2 - Halo 3: Halo 3 is a decent game, that fails the test for the same reason: it is too short and offers far too little gameplay value for the dollar. It is saddening that the gaming media did not utterly *savage* Bungie and MS Game Studios - as they so richly deserved to be savaged - over the paltry game length provided for the money. Instead, they got fanboi ooohs and aaahs". Cowardly, uncritical and outright jingoistic glowing reports for a failed execution. The economic reward reaped by MS for Halo 3 will only encourage further erosion of expected play values in the marketplace. If Peter Jackson's The Hobbit was jaw droppingly good for as long as it was on the screen - but only lasted 30 minutes on that screen - you can be damned sure the consumers would storm out FURIOUS. Why the hell should we put up with this? Why do YOU put up with it?
3 - Heavenly Sword: Five hours? See the comments re: Halo 3 and SQUARE the scorn contained therein.
4- Portal: A courageous design and an innovative one. Clever, yes. Fun? Mostly. But "mostly fun" is a far cry from *hellafun*. And GotY needs to be hellafun to walk away with that moniker. There's just not enough there to deserve a GotY award. Nevertheless, it is going to receive it from most games as a not to the "indie" roots of the title and the cleverness in the design. Good reasons to like a game - but poor ones to fawn over it, imo.
5- Team Fortress 2: Team Fortress 2 is a game not ready for consideration. The game is NOT DONE. The offering of a team based shooter without any ability for the player to even try the game or get a feel for how it is played via bots is throwing the player into the deep end of a cold pool, frustrating the game experience for the player and ruining it for his teammates too. "Try to drown less. Try having more fun." are not helpful playing tips. That does not mean that TF2 - **when it is finished** - is not a worthy GotY candidate - but it **isn't finished**. And those suggesting it is are a sad excuse for discriminating consumers of games. Don't you get it? If you don't DEMAND a complete game experience - these sonsofbitches won't deliver one.
6- Wow: Burning Crusade: And we come back to the most successful game - by far - of the year. WoW: Burning Crusade. A game that delivers increased gameplay and game value to millions of fans and makes even a juggernaut like Madden, The Sims and Halo3 look like the chumps they are. WoW:BC made more money this year then all of those- *combined*. Say what you want about WoW, but it delivers a gameplay experience to a massive fanbase that keeps on giving - and on hardware that the vast majority of people reading this thread can play it on. If a game's commercial success is an indication of excellence, than WoW:BC outdistances all competitors by a few parsecs.
7: The Winner: The Witcher by CD Proojeckt Red. If a standard other than overwhelming commercial success is used, I would nominate The Witcher. Games must innovate as well as be able to stand under their own weight and carry the player through, start to finish. Not without some technical problems, the Witcher is a before and after single player CRPG. It's a shame that a console obsessed media in North America paid it short shrift, and that lame-ass reviewers played 12 hours of it and pretended to review it as if they had finished it. Shame on them all. In Europe, especially in Central and Eastern Europe - the game shot to #1 and remains there even now. As usual, European players are less prone to let hype cloud their vision.
Thesis: In the sub-$500 computer market, Linux comes fully featured for most users at a price of FREE. Microsoft cannot compete against this price. The end result will be a loss of market share for MS in this sector of the market.
There is a grain of truth in this... but only a little. Worse, the author then goes on to discuss the cost of IT in an office setting and basically runs off with this data in the exact opposite direction of where he should be taking it. He's missing the point.
When you are talking about ultra- cheap PCs this author is talking about - as currently marketed - you are talking about the lowest-end consumer machines. Up until Vista, the consumer who wanted to run Microsoft products but didn't want to pay for them simply pirated those products, making them "free". That's reality. It continues to be reality.
The problem is that Microsoft sees their largest future growth sector in the consumers who are using their products for free - and want to force them to pay for it. They have been able to ratchet up this strategy because there was no viable competition....until Ubuntu.
All things being equal, if Microsoft sees that consumers will be moving away from their products in order to become familiar with another product line, MS will pause. The threat is not in losing a sale to a consumer who didn't want to buy your product (and isn't buying somebody else's, either). The threat is allowing a large number of people to become very familiar with a competing product line - to the point where they are comfortable with it and will tell management in the business they work at that they are able to use it without any issues.
And THAT is a BIG problem for Microsoft, long term. That chips away at the superior good/inferior good reputation that has made them market leaders.
The solution to that problem is simply to scale back the anti-piracy measures in the Windows-flavor-of-the-day so that people can continue to choose the superior product at a cost of $0.00. That strategy made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. They are well able to run with the ball in that direction again.
The BIG issue is that software bloat in terms of resource requirements makes running Windows on these very cheap PCs difficult for MS. The Window-flavor-of-the-day - even if pirated - won't run on a eeePC. That's a serious problem for MS.
I predict MS will simply design a less resource intensive home and sub-compact OS that can run on these systems. And it will make the DRM/Piracy protection on it relatively easy to circumvent - and thereby preserves its medium term market share.
If it does not do this - the long terms risks are significant.
In any event - the one thing we have seen over the course of time as a result of MS' monopoly is that hardware prices trend down and software OS prices trend up. That decline in hardware price has now reached a dangerous crossover point. When the hardware comes down in price so far that the software cost of the OS doubles the price of the machine - you reach a crossover point where that whole software cost becomes impossible to justify.
And that trend keeps getting worse for MS. IT does not, under ANY REASONABLE SCENARIO **EVER** get better for MS in the future. It just keeps getting worse and worse...and still worse.
Will MS come crashing down? No. It will simply do the one thing to adapt that it has never really done over the course of its corporate history: it will be forced to lower its prices on its core product lines in order to maintain its market position.
Hence, Microsoft will be less profitable in the future. In the result, Microsoft's best days are , indeed, behind it.
I don't think this minority government will be passing that legislation, ever.
If Harper and his cronies want to suggest supporting DMCA -sans any rights for voters - just to keep Hollywood happy is akin to a non-confidence vote, he's welcome to try that argument with voters.
And a further correction - the latent CF mutation quoted above protects against typhoid, not bubonic plague. When the CF mutation is no longer latent (roughly a 1 in 4 chance if both parents carry the gene) - you die. But the evolutionary strength of the latent mutation if you are in the 3 out of 4 people who simply are carriers is *very* real.
Accordingly, the problem presented by the epidemeology presented by smallpox appears to be a distinctly possible and very slippery genetic slope. Worse, there is no other human population group alive to compare the remaining indigenous peoples too in terms of smallpox resistance. By definition, the survivors don't appear that radically different from other populations - all of which also share the resistance.
We don't know if that's a shared genetic trait among the survivors - and it appears likely that we never will for sure.
"I suppose that DNA samples from those frozen Mayan children (whose genes were not selected in any way by epidemiology) could be illuminating on this issue."
Looks like I was wrong about that part. Those Incan (not Mayan) children were sacrificed in the early 1500s, and do not appear to predate 1492. In fact, they may well have been sacrificed BECAUSE they were healthy at a time when the smallpox virus was otherwise ravaging their people. See link here: http://www.bookofjoe.com/2007/09/la-doncella-fro.html
Unless their DNA can be verified to pre-date Columbian contact, I don't think their DNA would reliably serve to shed any light upon this potential problem.
This study may well be entirely supported and its sample group representative. I have no expertise in this matter at all.
That disclaimer aside, there is a chance that this study's base assumption belies a fatal flaw. The exact percentage of Indigenous peoples to the Americas that survived the epidemics unleashed upon them by the Early Europeans is unknown. The percentage of the survivors may be lower than 10% of the general population after 1492 than existed before that time.
Testing a population after a **massive** cull brought on by an epidemic centuries ago is a very slippery genetic slope.
By way of a poor analogy, Cystic fibrosis is a mutation traceable to Scandanavia in the middle ages where the mutation - as horrible as its longterm effects may be - played a significant role in the carriers of the mutation having a genetic advantage to survive infection by bubonic plague. What means miserable death now meant life, then.
If (and that's a BIG if) the genetic marker they are tracing played a role in the survival of the current population from the epidemic unleashed upon them by the Europeans (believed to be primarily small pox) then what is being studied as a representative sample of an entire population may, in fact, be an isolated view of a trait that the survivors of the smallpox epidemic all shared. As a consequence, this result may have nothing to do with the vastly larger genetic base of the those who died and the migration patterns THEIR genes would have shown.
We simply don't know. I suppose that DNA samples from those frozen Mayan children (whose genes were not selected in any way by epidemiology) could be illuminating on this issue.
If you are, in fact, examining a control group, but believe that biased control group to be a representative sample of a much larger general population, your data may well be fatally flawed.
If your litigation strategy is based upon exploiting your stronger financial position and commensurately greater legal resources, you don't pick a fight with an organization that has - by definition better - and more - legal resources than you do. And make no mistake, that is the war they would start by picking a fight with Harvard.
That is not a smart fight. There is no reason to wage that battle. Nothing to win - and a whole lot to lose.
I hate the RIAA as much as anyone else here - but that's the practice of law - it's not "deliberate concealment". If the lawyers for the RIAA were expected to be impartial and thorough advocates for both the Plaintiff and the Defendant - the people they sue wouldn't need their own counsel, would they?
Of course, submitting a case to a judge and not advising the judge it was overturned tends to make the judge question everything you told him or her from the next moment forward. That's the risk you run when you don't note up your cases or bet the other side won't. Seeing as most lawyers have to appear before the same judge multiple times in other cases over the course of years - it's professionally very unwise to do it. Little more.
The real story is Linux on the Asus Eee PC and on the host of cheap devices that will follow it. When the price of hardware runs so low that the cost of a Microsoft OS being bundled with it doubles the price tag - that's when the OS world changes in a big way. And it's also when it makes it extremely hard for Microsoft to do anything about it. At last, piracy of their product is no longer the way to go that makes the most sense. *click* Now that's a market story.
And it's coming. Soon. As in - next month - and it will begin to have a measurable effect within two years.
Don't get me wrong Microsoft isn't going away and in 40 years - they'll still be around - and probably still be the market leader. But Vista is a Microsoft OS that most people who have computers **don't want**. That's a unique event in MS history. Combine that with the effect that free Linux being bundled on a LOT of subnotebooks over the next 5 years, and my bet is that we will look back at 2005 as the height of Microsoft's industry dominance. From 2005 onward, it's nowhere to go but downhill.
I don't buy this. At all. The methodology of reviewing old wills to glean data of child survival rates, in particular, seems quite specious and misleading.
The decline of interest rates is better explained by a move to urbanization, move to a specie economy, and away from interest measured in bushels of grain and 2 extra chickens in the spring. The Reformation and a move away from Papal decrees against usury had a lot more to do with fractional banking and declining interest rates than sudden "thrift". I just don't buy this at all.
Upper middle class values behind hard work? Or was it just that the only work available was in a dark satanic mill and there were no other options to avoid starvation - save leaving it all behind and heading off to the bogs and wilds of America or Canada where the saving grace was that the slaves had it worse than you did? No way. I'm not buying it - and moreover, I doubt this author has much of an acquaintance with hard physical labor. What - the medieval peasant was a layabout and the industrial middle class was hard-working? Bullshit.
How about this explanation?
England had unique advantages. It had an evolving class system that still made room for urban capitalists and a parliamentary and burroughs system that advanced their interests, relative to those on the Continent. It had significant geopolitical advantages with the English Channel, which allowed it the luxury of developing a superior Navy, and better navigators, explorers - all of which allowed it to increase and exploit merchant shipping - without having to be Napoleon and try to field a massive army at the same time (Which Napoleon, to his credit, almost pulled off).
And how about this?:
England had wrested control of the less immediately valuable land away from the French in 1759, and because it yielded beaver pelts and tabacoco - but no Treasure Ships as Spain's massive holdings supplied - England had to PLAN for Mercantilism to make any of its new holdings worth it in the long run. England's only plan was to make it grow - while Spain's land made it the Superpower of the world for 250 years. England enslaved millions of Africans to work in America - and dumped its own poor and huddled masses in North America, Australia and New Zealand during and thereafter to provide it with more economic breathing room - and Lebenseraum.
I'd say THAT played a far greater role in escaping the Malthusian Trap than the migration of upper middle class values of "hard work". Moreover, a dumping ground for Les Miserables allowed England to progress in its political institutions without the out-and-out class based revolutions, which consumed the energies - and capital - of the French, the Hapsburgs and Prussians. Winning the Napoleonic War and thereby controlling the world and its Oceans for the next 99 years didn't hurt either.
Grand Theories of politic-economic hegemony are hard. I'm interested enough to buy his book - but from the NYT's summation, I don't think this author is collecting the right data, interpreting the data he does collect correctly - or giving plain old dumb-luck geography, technology and institutions their due.
"5. Voldemort's incompetence isn't believable. Okay so she wanted Voldemort's flaw to be his arrogance, but he isn't a moron. He knows Harry will come back to Godric's Hollow and yet lays a pathetic trap. He should have at least made it unapparatable. He doesn't exploit the mind link like he previously did to kill Sirius. He also continues to be outsmarted by a 17 year old with no plan. It is like watching a movie where the superweapon has a giant self-destruct button that the hero pushes and the villian doesn't see it coming!"
I don't think he could exploit the mind link anymore. I think Snape protected Harry against him much better than we are lead to believe directly in the text. It's not credible otherwise. Harry had occlumency lessons from both Snape and Dumbledore. And I think they worked.
To put up a teleportation barrier is to shine like a torch in the darkness screaming "beware of trap".
Look. We should all laugh at this. Such an incredibly provocative position just spells it out as plain as day: this is about the RIAA defending the city at all costs and making the enemy fight em house to house to win.
But the shells keep falling and there is nowhere left for them to retreat. What - they are going to win this fight somehow and hold on? The cartel wins the day and it all goes back the way it was? Is there anybody --anybody at all-- who believes that this is the way the story will end?
It's like the fall of Berlin. The outcome for these bastards is inevitable - and they know it too.
We'll be dancing on their graves in less than a decade.
If the Australians vote in a Howard government again that would enact such a law, then they deserve this crap.
Really - it's time that we stopped blaming lobby groups for promoting their agendas. They do what it is in their nature to do. If the people of Australia are so enamored of PM Howard and his Tories to support this sort of thing (assuming it is implemented) then they get the sort of government - and laws - that they deserve.
Lobbyists further their own agendas. When the voter stops furthering his or her own personal agenda - then they get what they deserve.
(Note to Americans readers: the democracies of most other industrial nations offer more electoral choices and have significantly larger voter turnouts than your own because of compulsory voter registration. There are vast restrictions on election and lobbyist spending during elections in other nations that are not present in your own. Please don't judge "the inherent flaws in the system" within America and suppose it exists everywhere else. It does not. If the Australians re-elect this government - it's their own damn fault.)
Re:Not sure why it's so hard to believe.
on
100 Million iPods
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· Score: 1
And I've bought four 30 gig video Ipods. One for myself and three as gifts, since December 2005. I'm also not made of money - these were the "big" Xmas gifts of their respective years for my wife and daughters.
I have no difficulty accepting those numbers have sold.
And yes - one of those video IPods was replaced under warranty. It was the one given the my youngest daughter - who has probably lost the replacement unit too.
Which just means my daughter drops stuff and loses it - not that Apple is a bad manufacturer.
I have bought FOUR 30 gig video ipods in the pat 15 months. Two for Xmas 2006 (gifts); one for myself in the fall of 2006 and still one more for Xmas 2006 (gift).
Now, I'm just one guy. But that's a whole lot of buying from just one guy. And while I'm different - I'm not *that* different. The number of white ear buds on the TTC when I take the bus or subway says to me: 100 million world wide? Entirely possible.
DRM and Defective by Design has not just ticked off the usual pro-Linus/. crowd.
This time, it scared off a lot of hardcore mainstream computer enthusiasts. When the tech geeks in your lif badmouth the product and don't want to install it unless they have to - what the hell did you expect would happen with the average Joe computer user?
Being involved in Windows development, I can tell you that there is NO WAY we are creating for Vista only. We'll be able to run on it - but there's no way I would bet the company on the success of Vista. Not when I don't have to.
I have purchased one CD - count em - ONE in the past six years. And that one purchase was one I struggled with as I really don't want to support this business anymore because of this nonsense.
This was an offensive litigation strategy when it started - and it's loonier still years later. I simply will not buy this cartel's product. I want them to fail and all of their shareholders to lose every single nickel they have. My bet? I will live to see that day.
Piracy of applications and operating systems removes price as a competitive factor in the market. In a perfect world of free goods, you choose only superior goods, never inferior goods, because price is removed from the decision mechanism. That is a proveable outcome in all microeconomic analysis.
This means that as long as Microsoft can leverage its existing sales from other products to offset losses in emerging applications to out spend and outperform the competition over the long haul so that it their product is viewed as the superior good, it will always be the last company left standing when piracy plays a factor in the marketplace.
RT's Law of Piracy: Piracy in software application and operating systems supports the creation - and maintenance of - a monopoly.
This is not news. It is what made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
While what you are saying is true, it ignores a significant element of peer review: critique of methodology and questioning of inherent assumptions.
Methodology critique can and frequently does lead to rejection of a paper coupled with a request for supplementary data collection and technique to be utilized to confirm the initial methodology used and assumptions made.
While it is true that the data itself is not regathered by the reviewer and the experiment tested all over again again - by downplaying methodology analysis, you do a great disservice to those reading your comments who are unfamiliar with the process.
In short - you are on the fairway - but a 5-iron from the hole sir.
As a Canadian lawyer, to be fair, people should be reminded that the link is just a pleading; it is not a sworn affidavit.
That being said, it is a highly particularized pleading and - I expect - could be sworn without modification as to the allegations in an instant. I thought it was a rather devastating answer to the claim.
Lastly (and I don't expect many people care) - but that pleading is an exemplary statement of defence. You can always tell when the defendant is running away - and when they aren't budging an inch.
And *that* is a statement of defence which is among the most definitive and particularized - and persuasive - that I have ever read.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Portal was sold as part of a bundle of five games, not as as stand alone triple A with a budget of 20 million.
If it was sold as a stand alone Triple A, I'd be shouting "rip-off" too, loud and hard.
Arguably, The Orange Box taken as a whole, deserves to win based on sheer value to the gamer, but that's a different argument.
How about -2 "unacceptably short"?
If Return of the King was 20 minutes long showing just the Battle of the Pellinor Fields - it could be a great 20 minutes, but if wouldn't be a great film now, would it?
The amount of gameplay offered for a game with this size development budget is unacceptable. It is all about hype and sucking players into paying for DLC. It's a contemptible model under which to design, develop and distribute triple A titles. Developers who do it should not be rewarded for those efforts - they deserve the middle finger and a loud shout of "Where the hell is the rest of the game???"
How can a game like Portal - as clever as it is - be "addicting" when it is so short and has essentially "zero" replay value?
To paraphrase Andre the Giant: I don't think that word means what you think it means.
As for the other comments in this thread:
1 - Mass Effect : Mass Effect, imo, fails the GotY. The beginning of the game is just dreadfully dull, and the abstractions for gameplay purposes served only to yank me out of the story. (Hopping Tanks? Omni-gel? For shame. BioWare can do better than that. The story pacing in BioWare's games is unacceptable and - frankly - the fanbois let them off the hook far too easily. My friends worked on this game and while I respect their efforts - it's too bad that a more discriminating internal QA team did not speak up LOUDER about this game's flaws. there are a lot of designers who have excuses for this - but BioWare isn't one of them.
2 - Halo 3: Halo 3 is a decent game, that fails the test for the same reason: it is too short and offers far too little gameplay value for the dollar. It is saddening that the gaming media did not utterly *savage* Bungie and MS Game Studios - as they so richly deserved to be savaged - over the paltry game length provided for the money. Instead, they got fanboi ooohs and aaahs". Cowardly, uncritical and outright jingoistic glowing reports for a failed execution. The economic reward reaped by MS for Halo 3 will only encourage further erosion of expected play values in the marketplace. If Peter Jackson's The Hobbit was jaw droppingly good for as long as it was on the screen - but only lasted 30 minutes on that screen - you can be damned sure the consumers would storm out FURIOUS. Why the hell should we put up with this? Why do YOU put up with it?
3 - Heavenly Sword: Five hours? See the comments re: Halo 3 and SQUARE the scorn contained therein.
4- Portal: A courageous design and an innovative one. Clever, yes. Fun? Mostly. But "mostly fun" is a far cry from *hellafun*. And GotY needs to be hellafun to walk away with that moniker. There's just not enough there to deserve a GotY award. Nevertheless, it is going to receive it from most games as a not to the "indie" roots of the title and the cleverness in the design. Good reasons to like a game - but poor ones to fawn over it, imo.
5- Team Fortress 2: Team Fortress 2 is a game not ready for consideration. The game is NOT DONE. The offering of a team based shooter without any ability for the player to even try the game or get a feel for how it is played via bots is throwing the player into the deep end of a cold pool, frustrating the game experience for the player and ruining it for his teammates too. "Try to drown less. Try having more fun." are not helpful playing tips. That does not mean that TF2 - **when it is finished** - is not a worthy GotY candidate - but it **isn't finished**. And those suggesting it is are a sad excuse for discriminating consumers of games. Don't you get it? If you don't DEMAND a complete game experience - these sonsofbitches won't deliver one.
6- Wow: Burning Crusade: And we come back to the most successful game - by far - of the year. WoW: Burning Crusade. A game that delivers increased gameplay and game value to millions of fans and makes even a juggernaut like Madden, The Sims and Halo3 look like the chumps they are. WoW:BC made more money this year then all of those- *combined*. Say what you want about WoW, but it delivers a gameplay experience to a massive fanbase that keeps on giving - and on hardware that the vast majority of people reading this thread can play it on. If a game's commercial success is an indication of excellence, than WoW:BC outdistances all competitors by a few parsecs.
7: The Winner: The Witcher by CD Proojeckt Red. If a standard other than overwhelming commercial success is used, I would nominate The Witcher. Games must innovate as well as be able to stand under their own weight and carry the player through, start to finish. Not without some technical problems, the Witcher is a before and after single player CRPG. It's a shame that a console obsessed media in North America paid it short shrift, and that lame-ass reviewers played 12 hours of it and pretended to review it as if they had finished it. Shame on them all. In Europe, especially in Central and Eastern Europe - the game shot to #1 and remains there even now. As usual, European players are less prone to let hype cloud their vision.
Exactly so. This is the sort of innovation that patent law was designed to promote and protect.
I hope it works - and I hope the patent holder and researchers become fabulously rich as a result. They would deserve it.
Thesis: In the sub-$500 computer market, Linux comes fully featured for most users at a price of FREE. Microsoft cannot compete against this price. The end result will be a loss of market share for MS in this sector of the market.
There is a grain of truth in this... but only a little. Worse, the author then goes on to discuss the cost of IT in an office setting and basically runs off with this data in the exact opposite direction of where he should be taking it. He's missing the point.
When you are talking about ultra- cheap PCs this author is talking about - as currently marketed - you are talking about the lowest-end consumer machines. Up until Vista, the consumer who wanted to run Microsoft products but didn't want to pay for them simply pirated those products, making them "free". That's reality. It continues to be reality.
The problem is that Microsoft sees their largest future growth sector in the consumers who are using their products for free - and want to force them to pay for it. They have been able to ratchet up this strategy because there was no viable competition....until Ubuntu.
All things being equal, if Microsoft sees that consumers will be moving away from their products in order to become familiar with another product line, MS will pause. The threat is not in losing a sale to a consumer who didn't want to buy your product (and isn't buying somebody else's, either). The threat is allowing a large number of people to become very familiar with a competing product line - to the point where they are comfortable with it and will tell management in the business they work at that they are able to use it without any issues.
And THAT is a BIG problem for Microsoft, long term. That chips away at the superior good/inferior good reputation that has made them market leaders.
The solution to that problem is simply to scale back the anti-piracy measures in the Windows-flavor-of-the-day so that people can continue to choose the superior product at a cost of $0.00. That strategy made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. They are well able to run with the ball in that direction again.
The BIG issue is that software bloat in terms of resource requirements makes running Windows on these very cheap PCs difficult for MS. The Window-flavor-of-the-day - even if pirated - won't run on a eeePC. That's a serious problem for MS.
I predict MS will simply design a less resource intensive home and sub-compact OS that can run on these systems. And it will make the DRM/Piracy protection on it relatively easy to circumvent - and thereby preserves its medium term market share.
If it does not do this - the long terms risks are significant.
In any event - the one thing we have seen over the course of time as a result of MS' monopoly is that hardware prices trend down and software OS prices trend up. That decline in hardware price has now reached a dangerous crossover point. When the hardware comes down in price so far that the software cost of the OS doubles the price of the machine - you reach a crossover point where that whole software cost becomes impossible to justify.
And that trend keeps getting worse for MS. IT does not, under ANY REASONABLE SCENARIO **EVER** get better for MS in the future. It just keeps getting worse and worse...and still worse.
Will MS come crashing down? No. It will simply do the one thing to adapt that it has never really done over the course of its corporate history: it will be forced to lower its prices on its core product lines in order to maintain its market position.
Hence, Microsoft will be less profitable in the future. In the result, Microsoft's best days are , indeed, behind it.
I don't think this minority government will be passing that legislation, ever.
If Harper and his cronies want to suggest supporting DMCA -sans any rights for voters - just to keep Hollywood happy is akin to a non-confidence vote, he's welcome to try that argument with voters.
I'm guessing that won't happen.
And a further correction - the latent CF mutation quoted above protects against typhoid, not bubonic plague. When the CF mutation is no longer latent (roughly a 1 in 4 chance if both parents carry the gene) - you die. But the evolutionary strength of the latent mutation if you are in the 3 out of 4 people who simply are carriers is *very* real.
Accordingly, the problem presented by the epidemeology presented by smallpox appears to be a distinctly possible and very slippery genetic slope. Worse, there is no other human population group alive to compare the remaining indigenous peoples too in terms of smallpox resistance. By definition, the survivors don't appear that radically different from other populations - all of which also share the resistance.
We don't know if that's a shared genetic trait among the survivors - and it appears likely that we never will for sure.
"I suppose that DNA samples from those frozen Mayan children (whose genes were not selected in any way by epidemiology) could be illuminating on this issue."
Looks like I was wrong about that part. Those Incan (not Mayan) children were sacrificed in the early 1500s, and do not appear to predate 1492. In fact, they may well have been sacrificed BECAUSE they were healthy at a time when the smallpox virus was otherwise ravaging their people. See link here: http://www.bookofjoe.com/2007/09/la-doncella-fro.html
Unless their DNA can be verified to pre-date Columbian contact, I don't think their DNA would reliably serve to shed any light upon this potential problem.
This study may well be entirely supported and its sample group representative. I have no expertise in this matter at all.
That disclaimer aside, there is a chance that this study's base assumption belies a fatal flaw. The exact percentage of Indigenous peoples to the Americas that survived the epidemics unleashed upon them by the Early Europeans is unknown. The percentage of the survivors may be lower than 10% of the general population after 1492 than existed before that time.
Testing a population after a **massive** cull brought on by an epidemic centuries ago is a very slippery genetic slope.
By way of a poor analogy, Cystic fibrosis is a mutation traceable to Scandanavia in the middle ages where the mutation - as horrible as its longterm effects may be - played a significant role in the carriers of the mutation having a genetic advantage to survive infection by bubonic plague. What means miserable death now meant life, then.
If (and that's a BIG if) the genetic marker they are tracing played a role in the survival of the current population from the epidemic unleashed upon them by the Europeans (believed to be primarily small pox) then what is being studied as a representative sample of an entire population may, in fact, be an isolated view of a trait that the survivors of the smallpox epidemic all shared. As a consequence, this result may have nothing to do with the vastly larger genetic base of the those who died and the migration patterns THEIR genes would have shown.
We simply don't know. I suppose that DNA samples from those frozen Mayan children (whose genes were not selected in any way by epidemiology) could be illuminating on this issue.
If you are, in fact, examining a control group, but believe that biased control group to be a representative sample of a much larger general population, your data may well be fatally flawed.
If your litigation strategy is based upon exploiting your stronger financial position and commensurately greater legal resources, you don't pick a fight with an organization that has - by definition better - and more - legal resources than you do. And make no mistake, that is the war they would start by picking a fight with Harvard.
That is not a smart fight. There is no reason to wage that battle. Nothing to win - and a whole lot to lose.
I hate the RIAA as much as anyone else here - but that's the practice of law - it's not "deliberate concealment". If the lawyers for the RIAA were expected to be impartial and thorough advocates for both the Plaintiff and the Defendant - the people they sue wouldn't need their own counsel, would they?
/.
Of course, submitting a case to a judge and not advising the judge it was overturned tends to make the judge question everything you told him or her from the next moment forward. That's the risk you run when you don't note up your cases or bet the other side won't. Seeing as most lawyers have to appear before the same judge multiple times in other cases over the course of years - it's professionally very unwise to do it. Little more.
Lighten up
Meh.
The real story is Linux on the Asus Eee PC and on the host of cheap devices that will follow it. When the price of hardware runs so low that the cost of a Microsoft OS being bundled with it doubles the price tag - that's when the OS world changes in a big way. And it's also when it makes it extremely hard for Microsoft to do anything about it. At last, piracy of their product is no longer the way to go that makes the most sense. *click* Now that's a market story.
And it's coming. Soon. As in - next month - and it will begin to have a measurable effect within two years.
Don't get me wrong Microsoft isn't going away and in 40 years - they'll still be around - and probably still be the market leader. But Vista is a Microsoft OS that most people who have computers **don't want**. That's a unique event in MS history. Combine that with the effect that free Linux being bundled on a LOT of subnotebooks over the next 5 years, and my bet is that we will look back at 2005 as the height of Microsoft's industry dominance. From 2005 onward, it's nowhere to go but downhill.
I don't buy this. At all. The methodology of reviewing old wills to glean data of child survival rates, in particular, seems quite specious and misleading.
The decline of interest rates is better explained by a move to urbanization, move to a specie economy, and away from interest measured in bushels of grain and 2 extra chickens in the spring. The Reformation and a move away from Papal decrees against usury had a lot more to do with fractional banking and declining interest rates than sudden "thrift". I just don't buy this at all.
Upper middle class values behind hard work? Or was it just that the only work available was in a dark satanic mill and there were no other options to avoid starvation - save leaving it all behind and heading off to the bogs and wilds of America or Canada where the saving grace was that the slaves had it worse than you did? No way. I'm not buying it - and moreover, I doubt this author has much of an acquaintance with hard physical labor. What - the medieval peasant was a layabout and the industrial middle class was hard-working? Bullshit.
How about this explanation?
England had unique advantages. It had an evolving class system that still made room for urban capitalists and a parliamentary and burroughs system that advanced their interests, relative to those on the Continent. It had significant geopolitical advantages with the English Channel, which allowed it the luxury of developing a superior Navy, and better navigators, explorers - all of which allowed it to increase and exploit merchant shipping - without having to be Napoleon and try to field a massive army at the same time (Which Napoleon, to his credit, almost pulled off).
And how about this?:
England had wrested control of the less immediately valuable land away from the French in 1759, and because it yielded beaver pelts and tabacoco - but no Treasure Ships as Spain's massive holdings supplied - England had to PLAN for Mercantilism to make any of its new holdings worth it in the long run. England's only plan was to make it grow - while Spain's land made it the Superpower of the world for 250 years. England enslaved millions of Africans to work in America - and dumped its own poor and huddled masses in North America, Australia and New Zealand during and thereafter to provide it with more economic breathing room - and Lebenseraum.
I'd say THAT played a far greater role in escaping the Malthusian Trap than the migration of upper middle class values of "hard work". Moreover, a dumping ground for Les Miserables allowed England to progress in its political institutions without the out-and-out class based revolutions, which consumed the energies - and capital - of the French, the Hapsburgs and Prussians. Winning the Napoleonic War and thereby controlling the world and its Oceans for the next 99 years didn't hurt either.
Grand Theories of politic-economic hegemony are hard. I'm interested enough to buy his book - but from the NYT's summation, I don't think this author is collecting the right data, interpreting the data he does collect correctly - or giving plain old dumb-luck geography, technology and institutions their due.
"5. Voldemort's incompetence isn't believable. Okay so she wanted Voldemort's flaw to be his arrogance, but he isn't a moron. He knows Harry will come back to Godric's Hollow and yet lays a pathetic trap. He should have at least made it unapparatable. He doesn't exploit the mind link like he previously did to kill Sirius. He also continues to be outsmarted by a 17 year old with no plan. It is like watching a movie where the superweapon has a giant self-destruct button that the hero pushes and the villian doesn't see it coming!"
I don't think he could exploit the mind link anymore. I think Snape protected Harry against him much better than we are lead to believe directly in the text. It's not credible otherwise. Harry had occlumency lessons from both Snape and Dumbledore. And I think they worked.
To put up a teleportation barrier is to shine like a torch in the darkness screaming "beware of trap".
Look. We should all laugh at this. Such an incredibly provocative position just spells it out as plain as day: this is about the RIAA defending the city at all costs and making the enemy fight em house to house to win.
But the shells keep falling and there is nowhere left for them to retreat. What - they are going to win this fight somehow and hold on? The cartel wins the day and it all goes back the way it was? Is there anybody --anybody at all-- who believes that this is the way the story will end?
It's like the fall of Berlin. The outcome for these bastards is inevitable - and they know it too.
We'll be dancing on their graves in less than a decade.
If the Australians vote in a Howard government again that would enact such a law, then they deserve this crap.
Really - it's time that we stopped blaming lobby groups for promoting their agendas. They do what it is in their nature to do. If the people of Australia are so enamored of PM Howard and his Tories to support this sort of thing (assuming it is implemented) then they get the sort of government - and laws - that they deserve.
Lobbyists further their own agendas. When the voter stops furthering his or her own personal agenda - then they get what they deserve.
(Note to Americans readers: the democracies of most other industrial nations offer more electoral choices and have significantly larger voter turnouts than your own because of compulsory voter registration. There are vast restrictions on election and lobbyist spending during elections in other nations that are not present in your own. Please don't judge "the inherent flaws in the system" within America and suppose it exists everywhere else. It does not. If the Australians re-elect this government - it's their own damn fault.)
And I've bought four 30 gig video Ipods. One for myself and three as gifts, since December 2005. I'm also not made of money - these were the "big" Xmas gifts of their respective years for my wife and daughters.
I have no difficulty accepting those numbers have sold.
And yes - one of those video IPods was replaced under warranty. It was the one given the my youngest daughter - who has probably lost the replacement unit too.
Which just means my daughter drops stuff and loses it - not that Apple is a bad manufacturer.
I don't think it's loonie.
I have bought FOUR 30 gig video ipods in the pat 15 months. Two for Xmas 2006 (gifts); one for myself in the fall of 2006 and still one more for Xmas 2006 (gift).
Now, I'm just one guy. But that's a whole lot of buying from just one guy. And while I'm different - I'm not *that* different. The number of white ear buds on the TTC when I take the bus or subway says to me: 100 million world wide? Entirely possible.
Execute people in the street? Gee - good thing those Religious freaks have never been a part of that huh?
I'm guessing this wing-nut statistic has a lot more to do with the fact that 34% of Americans self-identify as conservative or evangelical Christians.
In the part of the industrialized world that ISN'T crazy, (meaning - basically everywhere else in the West) it's a very different story.
DRM and Defective by Design has not just ticked off the usual pro-Linus /. crowd.
This time, it scared off a lot of hardcore mainstream computer enthusiasts. When the tech geeks in your lif badmouth the product and don't want to install it unless they have to - what the hell did you expect would happen with the average Joe computer user?
Being involved in Windows development, I can tell you that there is NO WAY we are creating for Vista only. We'll be able to run on it - but there's no way I would bet the company on the success of Vista. Not when I don't have to.
I have purchased one CD - count em - ONE in the past six years. And that one purchase was one I struggled with as I really don't want to support this business anymore because of this nonsense.
This was an offensive litigation strategy when it started - and it's loonier still years later. I simply will not buy this cartel's product. I want them to fail and all of their shareholders to lose every single nickel they have. My bet? I will live to see that day.
And maybe not too far off, either.
But of course this is so; It has always been so.
Piracy of applications and operating systems removes price as a competitive factor in the market. In a perfect world of free goods, you choose only superior goods, never inferior goods, because price is removed from the decision mechanism. That is a proveable outcome in all microeconomic analysis.
This means that as long as Microsoft can leverage its existing sales from other products to offset losses in emerging applications to out spend and outperform the competition over the long haul so that it their product is viewed as the superior good, it will always be the last company left standing when piracy plays a factor in the marketplace.
RT's Law of Piracy: Piracy in software application and operating systems supports the creation - and maintenance of - a monopoly.
This is not news. It is what made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
While what you are saying is true, it ignores a significant element of peer review: critique of methodology and questioning of inherent assumptions.
Methodology critique can and frequently does lead to rejection of a paper coupled with a request for supplementary data collection and technique to be utilized to confirm the initial methodology used and assumptions made.
While it is true that the data itself is not regathered by the reviewer and the experiment tested all over again again - by downplaying methodology analysis, you do a great disservice to those reading your comments who are unfamiliar with the process.
In short - you are on the fairway - but a 5-iron from the hole sir.
As a Canadian lawyer, to be fair, people should be reminded that the link is just a pleading; it is not a sworn affidavit.
That being said, it is a highly particularized pleading and - I expect - could be sworn without modification as to the allegations in an instant. I thought it was a rather devastating answer to the claim.
Lastly (and I don't expect many people care) - but that pleading is an exemplary statement of defence. You can always tell when the defendant is running away - and when they aren't budging an inch.
And *that* is a statement of defence which is among the most definitive and particularized - and persuasive - that I have ever read.
Damn good work for Borden, Ladner.