First, if anti-trust law made it difficult for the parts of MS to co-operate, then it's doing its job. It wouldn't be an issue if there were 8 different desktop OS providers all in competition.
Secondly, while it could be a vehicle for nuisance litigation, you've moved out of a discussion on fixing "too big to fail" and into one on tort reform. There is already a huge problem with nuisance litigation - I can't imagine that this would make it all that much worse.
It might be, but who would dare get that close? If it means tearing your business in two, I'd imagine that you'd limit yourself to 20% or so, just to be safe. Then we're talking 4 other companies able to pick up any short-term supply issues if one fails. However, it's more likely that you'll have even more businesses, as much more money will be put into running businesses instead of advertising and fighting for more customers. Once the markets realize that businesses can't ever-expand, we're less likely to see the sorts of failure we just did.
It would be good to split up MS into four different companies, because if they are smart, it won't be identical code. One for server, one for home desktop, one for corporate desktop, one for mobile devices. Base each on the underlying code, come up with code sharing agreements between the different companies, and then put your particular polish on top. As long as other companies can get similar terms for licensing the code, you'll have competition.
To decide where to make the splits, I'd assume one would turn to the courts. If a competitor in a market can go in and clearly prove that they are competing against someone with more than 25% of the market share, then that competitor will be forced to split.
After only a short period of time, I think you'll see companies spending more and more time on building quality than on marketing. MS is where it is due to massive marketing. (and illegal tactics) Had it faced a split at a 25% market share, I bet we'd see vastly higher quality in MS products, and far less advertising and illegal tactics. With such a law in place, there wouldn't be a reason to do such tings.
I do wonder how a modified capitalist system would work, where there was a "written in stone" law that as soon as you owned more than 25% of a market, you were automatically required to split your company in half. It seems like this would promote all sorts of competition, and prevent "too big to fail" from ever happening.
If you want good, non-DRM games at reasonable prices, I have two good ones for you:
World of Goo: The demo is the first 1/4 of the game. It's a blast. Silly building/puzzle game. Well worth the $20 they're charging. Made by 2 guys.
Sins of a Solar Empire: A Fantastic RTS game, based on building orbital structures around planets, and massing fleets of spaceships, some with unique abilities and leveling increases. It's got great music, but the controls are the pinnacle of what I've seen in any RTS game, EVER! It's worth buying it just to see how controls should work.
I wonder if relocating all the military bases to surround nuclear power plants would do enough to reassure people that they are safe to allow for reprocessing on site. I have a hard time believing that people won't trust the military with nuclear fuel...
It only breaks it for the existing players, then only if they care. If the game was new then it wouldn't be a big deal, and everyone would go on with life, playing the game, and having fun.
Change is scary, isn't it? Especially if it threatens something you have invested a lot of your life into.
If you don't like it, switch MMOs. There are plenty of other ones out there. If its so important that you can't get over it, seek professional help. It is a game.
I teach a physics class, and ask my students to write a report detailing the construction of a space elevator. It only takes a few classes before they start to realize how unfeasible it is. I go as far as to get them to consider not only the physics behind it, but also the sheer amount of materials needed, and ask for a comparison vs the world output of various materials.
So far, I've yet to have a single class come up with any reasonable way to make it happen. And these are students who don't even have a serious calculus background! Even they can point out some serious issues with a space elevator, and that's without resorting to minor issues like coriolis forces.
That's an interesting comment about Doom - I live in deer country, and have always paid attention to the sides of the road, looking for stuff that's about to jump out in front of me. I wonder how much of that is from Doom? Because I played a *lot* of Doom as a kid, living in a very rural area. Three-four of us would get together, and break up our weekend of gaming every 14 hours or so to get a few hours of sleep.
I don't know that I can directly tie the two together, but I bet you're spot on about encounter-space awareness boosts.
You make a fantastic point. More than once in my life, a day after a long binge on a FPS, I've been hesitant to round corners without peeking around them first. And yes, I've looked up to see if there were snipers in a tall building/on a ridge before going out into the open.
This really isn't all that impressive.
Hell, we did a run of "Assassination" in college freshman year, and it took the better part of a week to get over that paranoia. Subject someone to an imaginary reality for long enough, and it becomes pretty real. This isn't all that surprising.
Solar and Wind? Are you friggin kidding me? I would have guessed that geothermal would have been the number one choice for a.....volcanic island chain. I mean, Iceland can give some pretty big pointers on that front.
Still, I agree with your point. Once the car infrastructure is there, it's far easier to add in another method (or three) to produce electricity. Hell, people could even invest in their own private generation of choice, if they wanted.
Um....for a government paycheck? Has Haliburton not taught you anything?
ISPs will FLOCK to this, like sharks to a water aerobics class. They'll charge the govt for 3x what they provide, filter it to minimize traffic, use the funds to advertise their services as better alternatives to the free wifi, and use their peering agreements to further reduce their costs.
If the FCC does this, and the large ISPs in the country don't make BILLIONS, I'll be shocked.
I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
That's actually where the netbook shines: I can read and post using mine. Feet up in a recliner, a cat on my lap, a drink in one hand, and a tv show on. Were it a PDA, I wouldn't be able to type well enough. Were it a full sized laptop, it would be a lot harder to balance on the arm of the chair. Or on the cat. Were it a desktop, I'd be missing the feet up and the TV. This is one niche that the netbook fills quite well.
The point is that they're super portable. I can throw mine on my laundry basket with no real noticeable difference in weight. I can balance it on the arm of a recliner and IM/surf while watching TV, and look up more information about the show I'm watching. I can perch it on the toaster with a recipe on screen.
I'm not a big fan of full-sized laptops - they aren't comfortable to type on for long periods, they aren't all that portable, and they cost way too much to justify what limited use I'd make of them. When I want to do *work*, I switch to my desktop. It's fast, powerful, and comfortable.
Netbooks are cheap, they're functional enough for a bit of screwing around on the internet, and they are super portable. I pinch mine between thumb and forefinger on the top corner of the screen and carry it around like that on a regular basis. It's got about three moving parts, and so far has bounced the first dozen or so times I've dropped it.
But the real reason I bought it is that it's an appliance. It's a couple hundred bucks, and I'll never be tempted to upgrade it, as it should always be able to perform its basic functions: Browsing and IM. It's not about to be obsolete anytime soon. My desktop gets regular upgrades. My goal was decidedly not to add a desktop replacement which would require the same. I'd have gone with a PDA, but this wasn't much more expensive, and has far better features such as a full terminal and the ability to handle 90% of the web pretty gracefully.
Well, I've been thinking on one way around this, and while I should save it and make a bazillion dollars off the idea, here it is:
In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.
Make those items easier to get, real, but encumbering, and allow them to be traded. And make it so that at lower levels killing the things would be good XP, but at the level you get the quest they aren't very good XP. At first glance this seems like a stupid idea, but....
The beauty is that there's a good chance you will ask someone lower level to go do your dirty work for you. You'll pay them for the goods, they'll get XP and gold, you'll turn in the quest. Thus, rather than you getting quests from NPCs, you'll get them from PCs. "Damn - that 37th level fighter just came by and offered to pay me a ton of gold to go kill swamp rats, if I bring him the tails. I guess some wizard he knows needs them."
That is far more interesting than going to the tavern master six times in a row, or bouncing from NPC to NPC in town to get and turn in quests. The strength of a MMO is that there are lots of people playing. Make them part of the world, rather than "just another player".
When the 57th level wizard rounds up the n00bs and has them party up to go hunting grass snakes for him, that will make the game far more engaging and interesting. If each one of those n00bs was hunting them for the alchemist next to the baker, it would be far less engaging and interesting.
Thank you. People complain about editing text configurations on linux, but always ignore the hideous beast that is the registry. It's gotten to the point that no more configs need be edited than the registry be edited to run linux. And even then, most config work can be done with a cut & paste into a terminal. This is definitely NOT the case with the registry.
Well, I just posted a mini-rant about the stupid "off" status light far above this comment. Wish I had read down, and I would have posted a link to yours instead. You were far more verbose. (Thus using more electrons, and costing us more money. Environment hater.)
I have to totally agree - A LACK OF STATUS LIGHT MEANS IT'S OFF.
There is no god damn need for a status light for "I'm not using power". Status lights are to indicate that there is power. I've been tempted to take a soldering iron to some of my electronics, to make them be "really off" when I hit the switch. What's stopping me is that a failure in that attempt might cost as much or more than what I'd save with a success.
The Wii Power LED has 3 colors: green - on, yellow - standby, red-off except for the status LED, and maybe some other stuff.[1]
When will manufacturers realize that "it's not glowing" is a pretty good indication of "off". I don't need a status light to tell me something is off. The lack of light is my primary indicator. An really, how many people need the glowing light to find a switch in the dark?[2]
*Disclaimer #1: I don't have a Wii, and thus may be bitching about nothing at all. It still doesn't make up for all the other shit with "I'm off" status lights.
*Disclaimer #2:Yes, I know it's dark in the basement. Turn on a light, grope for the switch, or ask mom to bring you a flashlight. Or just don't turn it off.
It's not just preference for text - books are far less expensive, durable, and have lower black-market value than electronic devices. My school tried to look at some sort of e-textbook usage as a cost saving device, and quickly came to the realization that textbooks generally last a decade in our school, and they bounce. An e-book reader would do neither, and that alone makes them more expensive. Even if the e-textbooks cost lest, all the other costs far overshadow a textbook.
It's actually a long-standing hoax among people who know how to make fruitcake. You see, if you make fruitcake with quality dried fruit, (not the chemicalized gooey shit in plastic tubs that comes pre-mixed) spice it well, and let it age in the fridge wrapped in a cotton wrapper soaked in liquor (spiced rum ftw) it's pretty friggin fantastic. It's those people, talking about fantastic fruitcakes, which indirectly convince the ignorant suckers to make it. Not knowing what they're doing, they choose the crap from the store which tastes like shit.
Of course, I'm violating the unwritten rule of those who-know-how-to-make-it: Don't tell people - it's better they think all fruitcakes are shit. More for us.
The same reason you keep some backups off-site, as well as some on-site. If you have an emergency, you pick up the phone and call the person who does the backups, and they restore the info. It's quick. But if your building gets destroyed by vengeful employees who are missing staplers, you still have your off-site backups to rely upon.
Getting a message to a sub in the middle of the ocean, near its maximum depth, is not anywhere near as easy, fast, or as guaranteed as picking up the phone and calling the guy at the hanger who's job it is to sit next to the phone waiting for that call. But if that guy just got nuked, your sub will still be there.
Sorry that I couldn't find a suitable car analogy.
Slashdot Mirror
First, if anti-trust law made it difficult for the parts of MS to co-operate, then it's doing its job. It wouldn't be an issue if there were 8 different desktop OS providers all in competition.
Secondly, while it could be a vehicle for nuisance litigation, you've moved out of a discussion on fixing "too big to fail" and into one on tort reform. There is already a huge problem with nuisance litigation - I can't imagine that this would make it all that much worse.
It might be, but who would dare get that close? If it means tearing your business in two, I'd imagine that you'd limit yourself to 20% or so, just to be safe. Then we're talking 4 other companies able to pick up any short-term supply issues if one fails. However, it's more likely that you'll have even more businesses, as much more money will be put into running businesses instead of advertising and fighting for more customers. Once the markets realize that businesses can't ever-expand, we're less likely to see the sorts of failure we just did.
It would be good to split up MS into four different companies, because if they are smart, it won't be identical code. One for server, one for home desktop, one for corporate desktop, one for mobile devices. Base each on the underlying code, come up with code sharing agreements between the different companies, and then put your particular polish on top. As long as other companies can get similar terms for licensing the code, you'll have competition.
To decide where to make the splits, I'd assume one would turn to the courts. If a competitor in a market can go in and clearly prove that they are competing against someone with more than 25% of the market share, then that competitor will be forced to split.
After only a short period of time, I think you'll see companies spending more and more time on building quality than on marketing. MS is where it is due to massive marketing. (and illegal tactics) Had it faced a split at a 25% market share, I bet we'd see vastly higher quality in MS products, and far less advertising and illegal tactics. With such a law in place, there wouldn't be a reason to do such tings.
I do wonder how a modified capitalist system would work, where there was a "written in stone" law that as soon as you owned more than 25% of a market, you were automatically required to split your company in half. It seems like this would promote all sorts of competition, and prevent "too big to fail" from ever happening.
If you want good, non-DRM games at reasonable prices, I have two good ones for you:
World of Goo: The demo is the first 1/4 of the game. It's a blast. Silly building/puzzle game. Well worth the $20 they're charging. Made by 2 guys.
Sins of a Solar Empire: A Fantastic RTS game, based on building orbital structures around planets, and massing fleets of spaceships, some with unique abilities and leveling increases. It's got great music, but the controls are the pinnacle of what I've seen in any RTS game, EVER! It's worth buying it just to see how controls should work.
I wonder if relocating all the military bases to surround nuclear power plants would do enough to reassure people that they are safe to allow for reprocessing on site. I have a hard time believing that people won't trust the military with nuclear fuel...
Heh....and I bet it won't work under linux....NOTHING works under linux....
*Disclaimer: Most everything on my linux box works.
It only breaks it for the existing players, then only if they care. If the game was new then it wouldn't be a big deal, and everyone would go on with life, playing the game, and having fun.
Change is scary, isn't it? Especially if it threatens something you have invested a lot of your life into.
If you don't like it, switch MMOs. There are plenty of other ones out there. If its so important that you can't get over it, seek professional help. It is a game.
I teach a physics class, and ask my students to write a report detailing the construction of a space elevator. It only takes a few classes before they start to realize how unfeasible it is. I go as far as to get them to consider not only the physics behind it, but also the sheer amount of materials needed, and ask for a comparison vs the world output of various materials.
So far, I've yet to have a single class come up with any reasonable way to make it happen. And these are students who don't even have a serious calculus background! Even they can point out some serious issues with a space elevator, and that's without resorting to minor issues like coriolis forces.
That's an interesting comment about Doom - I live in deer country, and have always paid attention to the sides of the road, looking for stuff that's about to jump out in front of me. I wonder how much of that is from Doom? Because I played a *lot* of Doom as a kid, living in a very rural area. Three-four of us would get together, and break up our weekend of gaming every 14 hours or so to get a few hours of sleep.
I don't know that I can directly tie the two together, but I bet you're spot on about encounter-space awareness boosts.
You make a fantastic point. More than once in my life, a day after a long binge on a FPS, I've been hesitant to round corners without peeking around them first. And yes, I've looked up to see if there were snipers in a tall building/on a ridge before going out into the open.
This really isn't all that impressive.
Hell, we did a run of "Assassination" in college freshman year, and it took the better part of a week to get over that paranoia. Subject someone to an imaginary reality for long enough, and it becomes pretty real. This isn't all that surprising.
Solar and Wind? Are you friggin kidding me? I would have guessed that geothermal would have been the number one choice for a.....volcanic island chain. I mean, Iceland can give some pretty big pointers on that front.
Still, I agree with your point. Once the car infrastructure is there, it's far easier to add in another method (or three) to produce electricity. Hell, people could even invest in their own private generation of choice, if they wanted.
It seems that if a school accepts this, they open themselves up to requests from ANYONE to collect a similar tax.
Software producers
TV studios
Indie music publishers
Book publishers
And if they refuse, they open themselves up to lawsuits. I can't see this flying for this reason alone.
Um....for a government paycheck? Has Haliburton not taught you anything?
ISPs will FLOCK to this, like sharks to a water aerobics class. They'll charge the govt for 3x what they provide, filter it to minimize traffic, use the funds to advertise their services as better alternatives to the free wifi, and use their peering agreements to further reduce their costs.
If the FCC does this, and the large ISPs in the country don't make BILLIONS, I'll be shocked.
I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
That's actually where the netbook shines: I can read and post using mine. Feet up in a recliner, a cat on my lap, a drink in one hand, and a tv show on. Were it a PDA, I wouldn't be able to type well enough. Were it a full sized laptop, it would be a lot harder to balance on the arm of the chair. Or on the cat. Were it a desktop, I'd be missing the feet up and the TV. This is one niche that the netbook fills quite well.
The point is that they're super portable. I can throw mine on my laundry basket with no real noticeable difference in weight. I can balance it on the arm of a recliner and IM/surf while watching TV, and look up more information about the show I'm watching. I can perch it on the toaster with a recipe on screen.
I'm not a big fan of full-sized laptops - they aren't comfortable to type on for long periods, they aren't all that portable, and they cost way too much to justify what limited use I'd make of them. When I want to do *work*, I switch to my desktop. It's fast, powerful, and comfortable.
Netbooks are cheap, they're functional enough for a bit of screwing around on the internet, and they are super portable. I pinch mine between thumb and forefinger on the top corner of the screen and carry it around like that on a regular basis. It's got about three moving parts, and so far has bounced the first dozen or so times I've dropped it.
But the real reason I bought it is that it's an appliance. It's a couple hundred bucks, and I'll never be tempted to upgrade it, as it should always be able to perform its basic functions: Browsing and IM. It's not about to be obsolete anytime soon. My desktop gets regular upgrades. My goal was decidedly not to add a desktop replacement which would require the same. I'd have gone with a PDA, but this wasn't much more expensive, and has far better features such as a full terminal and the ability to handle 90% of the web pretty gracefully.
Well, I've been thinking on one way around this, and while I should save it and make a bazillion dollars off the idea, here it is:
In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.
Make those items easier to get, real, but encumbering, and allow them to be traded. And make it so that at lower levels killing the things would be good XP, but at the level you get the quest they aren't very good XP. At first glance this seems like a stupid idea, but....
The beauty is that there's a good chance you will ask someone lower level to go do your dirty work for you. You'll pay them for the goods, they'll get XP and gold, you'll turn in the quest. Thus, rather than you getting quests from NPCs, you'll get them from PCs. "Damn - that 37th level fighter just came by and offered to pay me a ton of gold to go kill swamp rats, if I bring him the tails. I guess some wizard he knows needs them."
That is far more interesting than going to the tavern master six times in a row, or bouncing from NPC to NPC in town to get and turn in quests. The strength of a MMO is that there are lots of people playing. Make them part of the world, rather than "just another player".
When the 57th level wizard rounds up the n00bs and has them party up to go hunting grass snakes for him, that will make the game far more engaging and interesting. If each one of those n00bs was hunting them for the alchemist next to the baker, it would be far less engaging and interesting.
It does?
Hell, that's enough that I might go back and take a second look at it....
Thank you. People complain about editing text configurations on linux, but always ignore the hideous beast that is the registry. It's gotten to the point that no more configs need be edited than the registry be edited to run linux. And even then, most config work can be done with a cut & paste into a terminal. This is definitely NOT the case with the registry.
No mod points for me, so "ditto". I've been wondering if I should take the effort to post that very thing, or just hope someone else would do so.
So thanks for letting me be lazy.
Well, I just posted a mini-rant about the stupid "off" status light far above this comment. Wish I had read down, and I would have posted a link to yours instead. You were far more verbose. (Thus using more electrons, and costing us more money. Environment hater.)
I have to totally agree - A LACK OF STATUS LIGHT MEANS IT'S OFF.
There is no god damn need for a status light for "I'm not using power". Status lights are to indicate that there is power. I've been tempted to take a soldering iron to some of my electronics, to make them be "really off" when I hit the switch. What's stopping me is that a failure in that attempt might cost as much or more than what I'd save with a success.
The Wii Power LED has 3 colors: green - on, yellow - standby, red-off except for the status LED, and maybe some other stuff.[1]
When will manufacturers realize that "it's not glowing" is a pretty good indication of "off". I don't need a status light to tell me something is off. The lack of light is my primary indicator. An really, how many people need the glowing light to find a switch in the dark?[2]
*Disclaimer #1: I don't have a Wii, and thus may be bitching about nothing at all. It still doesn't make up for all the other shit with "I'm off" status lights.
*Disclaimer #2:Yes, I know it's dark in the basement. Turn on a light, grope for the switch, or ask mom to bring you a flashlight. Or just don't turn it off.
It's not just preference for text - books are far less expensive, durable, and have lower black-market value than electronic devices. My school tried to look at some sort of e-textbook usage as a cost saving device, and quickly came to the realization that textbooks generally last a decade in our school, and they bounce. An e-book reader would do neither, and that alone makes them more expensive. Even if the e-textbooks cost lest, all the other costs far overshadow a textbook.
It's actually a long-standing hoax among people who know how to make fruitcake. You see, if you make fruitcake with quality dried fruit, (not the chemicalized gooey shit in plastic tubs that comes pre-mixed) spice it well, and let it age in the fridge wrapped in a cotton wrapper soaked in liquor (spiced rum ftw) it's pretty friggin fantastic. It's those people, talking about fantastic fruitcakes, which indirectly convince the ignorant suckers to make it. Not knowing what they're doing, they choose the crap from the store which tastes like shit.
Of course, I'm violating the unwritten rule of those who-know-how-to-make-it: Don't tell people - it's better they think all fruitcakes are shit. More for us.
The same reason you keep some backups off-site, as well as some on-site. If you have an emergency, you pick up the phone and call the person who does the backups, and they restore the info. It's quick. But if your building gets destroyed by vengeful employees who are missing staplers, you still have your off-site backups to rely upon.
Getting a message to a sub in the middle of the ocean, near its maximum depth, is not anywhere near as easy, fast, or as guaranteed as picking up the phone and calling the guy at the hanger who's job it is to sit next to the phone waiting for that call. But if that guy just got nuked, your sub will still be there.
Sorry that I couldn't find a suitable car analogy.