I guess whether that is true or not is entirely dependent upon how narrowly one defines "geek". I was using the loosey-goosey popularized definition, but I'd guess you're using a rather different one.
I might be in the target market of a $100 mouse... if it didn't cost $100.
That would depend upon whether the vendor has socialist or capitalist/Darwinian ethics, wouldn't it? (I'm being kind in allowing that pure capitalism even has any ethics... truly it doesn't: it's only the intrusion of socialism into capitalism that imbues it with any ethics at all.)
My answer is that it should be somewhere in between, but a lot closer to $50.01 than $99.99.
There's quite a bit more that goes into a cell phone, in my estimation. Even so, I have no doubt some of the blingier cell phone are unfairly priced, too.
Because, I'm claiming, it' doesn't cost them anywhere near $100 to made the thing. There are cliches about taking advantage of other people's misfortune, so why is this okay? Need/desire/addiction isn't that far down the road from misfortune, and if it's priced as it is in anticipation of your need/desire/addiction, then that is wrong in my socialist book.
Is it possible that you're assuming there's some enormous expense that goes into them merely based on the price that is demanded? In trying to visualize the process myself, I can't justify what they're asking based on cost alone: they're pricing it based on the anticipated emotional response of consumers ("demand"), not upon the cost to manufacture.
You shouldn't have to pay $100 for that ergonomic mouse just because you need/want it really bad. That would be them profiting from (a) your misfortune or (b) your ignorance. (b) is really a misfortune, too, I suppose.;-)
Is it worth $100? It is to me. Maybe not to you.... I also expect it to last for five years at least, probably more. $20/year is not that bad for something I use every day for long periods of time.
Should how much you personally value or desire a thing really dictate its price, or should it be based on the more objective factors of its actual cost to manufacture?
(Disclaimer: I'm pretty much a socialist and despise subjective valuation.)
It shouldn't be: that ergonomic design "cost" is paid exactly once and then replicated ad infinitum. Further, ergonomics is not rocket science; it's mostly just astute observation, though I concede that is itself a skill largely absent from the general population.:-/
Surely you must acknowledge that your predicament is outside the scope of what would be considered normal? I've been using mice for even longer than you, both professionally and personally; though I had a bit of carpal tunnel pains for a year or so, I remediated that myself and I've experienced nothing like what you described. Your pointing-device purchasing criteria are not the same as mine; your criteria almost define the mouse as a "medical device". I suppose if I were purchasing a medical device (what with medical costs being even more insane) I would expect to pay $100, but I at least am not.
$100 for a mouse seems egregious, considering most keyboards are priced less, for instance. Is a mouse really more expensive to make than even a cheap keyboard?
Who spends $80 to $100 on a mouse? Is there honestly that much "value" going into it, regardless how fancy it is? I'm calling bullshit. Geeks need to reign in their enthusiasm and just say "no" once in while to ridiculous pricing; greedy pricing only works if we're stupid enough to agree to it.
Given how technologically advanced HP printers have become, this presents a huge risk to national security. I'm mortally afraid that my comfy way of life has been jeopardized by HP's actions. President-Elect Obama needs to appoint a special prosecutor ASAP!
Actually, now that I think about it, my comfy life has already been jeopardized by HP products... anyone want a paperweight that just happens to look like a fancy scanner with ADF?
Old news to me... I still play TA regularly and visit the TA Universe forums. Hell, I'm one of the few suckers who is donating a few bucks every month to persuade the site owner to keep it running! I also have SupCom so, yeah, I know.
TA actually DOES have its own peculiar brand of micromanagement, and in large games - on 40x40+ maps with a high unit limit set - there are most definitely micromanagement issues. For instance:
- no context-sensitive menus for factories, to allow selecting a group of the same factory type and ordering ALL of them to build the same thing; - no "policy" options for factory output, construction, or resource management (you have to specifically order the location and construction of every single resource unit, for instance); and - no unit formation controls or engagement policies (beyond the simplistic).
TA is basically just like Sword of the Stars: an empty shell of a game with no real intelligence, such that ALL the burden of management is basically placed on the user's shoulders. Did you ever play board wargames? Do you recall the original promise that migrating those games to "microcomputers" held for gamers? That promise has never really been sufficiently fulfilled, from my perspective (and mine is a LONG one, just over 30 years).
It was precisely this micromanagement problem that drove me to experiment with modding TA, and also to use TA:Mutation as a base platform for playing the game. For years I tweaked the game in various ways and created TA:M mutators, trying to work around the micromanagement issues; since the game was (and STILL is) closed source and the developer defunct, actually fixing the micromanagement problems directly was not even an option. My modding efforts were only marginally successful, and I had to tweak the game and units in bizarre ways to achieve even that.
I have been trying to tweak games to resolve micromanagement issues ever since Master of Orion II, and the effort continues with SotS and other games.:-(
My vehicle doesn't have an integral GPS system. If I lived in Oregon, how would they then track MY mileage? Would they require by law that my vehicle be retrofitted with a GPS system? Who would pay for that? Would they require that I pay for it out of pocket?
Above issues aside, this tax might make some efficiency and environmental sense: people might think twice about making unnecessary trips altogether, or make a more concerted effort (as I do) to delay some trips until I can combine them with other errands and kill several birds with the same gallons of gas.
This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects.
This is virtually impossible when competing factions within the same industry are hellbent on decreasing user knowledge in order to sell product. The pharmaceutical industry is perhaps the poster child of this behavior, using misinformation and misframing to "un-educate" its customers and even its affiliates (university researchers and family doctors), but it's hardly an exception.
Mis-education of consumers, keeping them in the dark, is in fact a primary goal of most corporate advertising campaigns; they do this because it's actually good for business: educated consumers make choices that limit profit margins. Do you honestly think they'll change this behavior because doing so would be good for consumers? The welfare of consumers is the last thing on the minds of corporate execs and mid-level managers. The anti-malware software industry is no exception to this.
I actually have one game on the shelf that attempts a small-scale version of what you describe, so it's not a new concept.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that every new game development team seems to wander into the process with blinders on, and naively begins to repeat every single shortcoming and error of omission that has ever been solved in previous games. It's as if these teams are always comprised, from bottom to top, entirely of people too young to have ever played the older games and thus learned from their mistakes and successes. What's that old cliche about being doomed to repeat history?
There's another more sinister conspiratorial theory to explain this repetition of mistakes, one that theorizes that it's quite deliberate to maximize profit by stringing gamers along with the eternal promise of a better game NEXT year, but corporations would never engage in such behavior!
The way to improve playability in strategy wargames, and so-called 4X games especially, is to use variable degrees of abstraction to address issues of game scale. There is NOTHING more annoying than playing a huge game of, say, Sword of the Stars, with hundreds of stars and countless units and economic factors, AND HAVING TO DEAL WITH ALL OF IT PERSONALLY. So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point. Nowhere is this failure more evident than in so-called "real time strategy" games (which are almost all really "real time tactics"), where not only is the player forced to micromanage but the time required to do so costs him in terms of the game, because the computer AI opponents at least don't suffer from this problem.
Sadly, I know of no single game that employs this level of intelligence in the player interface, and the game I mentioned, Sword of the Stars and its sequels, is actually one of the biggest recent failures in this regard. It also has bugs that persist across sequels and a dev team with no coding discipline, which may or may not be related to the aforementioned failure.
When I read the title of this article, I thought it would discuss playing actual old games in Wine or Mame or some other emulated environment, and debate which ones were worthy of that effort. Sadly, instead it's merely hype for "new" old stuff that publishers want to foist on us to make more money with even less effort than usual.
I think the article that I expected to read would have been more interesting.
Did anyone else notice the last comment attached to the article, which mentioned Mitt Romney in the title and contained gibberish that tried to mimic proper sentence structure? Sadly you won't find it now, because I blinked and refreshed the page and it disappeared before I could copy it. Normally such gibberish posts include a URL linking to a site hawking pharma, sex aids, or malware; this one, however, was JUST text. What could be the point? Are they trying to poison Bayesian filters, in preparation for a later spam attack that does contain URLs?
Good point. It's true that with child porn in particular we're presuming that one specific act which is NOT in and of itself harmful - looking at child porn - will necessarily ALWAYS lead to acts which ARE harmful - namely abusing children.
My cats are little autistic people. They have just as must right to the benefits of "personhood" as you do. Bigoted people that draw the personhood line right at H. sapiens sicken me. Treating other species as chattel merely because they aren't "made in our image" is incredibly ignorant. Perhaps this article will help to further dissuade people from adopting that perverse attitude in the first place?
Unless and until someone can demonstrate, with fMRI scans or similar, that people like Dwight Whorley are completely lacking any conscious volition with respect to this behavior, I see no reason at all to be lenient with such a person. Even then I'm not sure leniency is appropriate.
With respect to the cartoon-versus-photograph argument, again an fMRI scan might settle the issue if it can be demonstrated that the erotic cartoons stimulate activity in exactly the same brain region(s) as do the photographs (I suspect that in fact they do). Up to this point we've merely assumed that is the case and used it as justification for things like the Protect Act.
Not to be condescending: the proper cliched phrase is "case IN point". It's a linking preposition, not a conjunction, in the phrase. I'm not sure of the historical evolution of the phrase.
You're more than a bit late to this party. You might want to read the rest of the thread. Maybe you wouldn't have bothered to make those comments if you'd read the direct exchange between Mr. Beckerman and I, in which he persuaded me that he is one of the good guys. Crow meat really doesn't taste all that bad.
But thanks for the lovely sentiment nonetheless, calling me a troll merely for expressing an unpopular dissenting opinion. In the future I'll remember to place precisely the same value on your speech that you have on mine here, if we ever cross paths again.
Slashdot SHOULD be a place where unpopular opinions are at least respected if not favored or accepted, I have always thought, but this incident has taught me otherwise. People have been unnecessarily malicious here, both in comments and especially in anonymous modding. I won't think as highly of Slashdot as a community ever again; it's not so much a community as it is a street gang.
I've got almost three decades of intensive introspection under my belt (and it's ongoing), so your challenge is an easy one. I've read his direct reply to me and, yes, he's pretty much convinced me that he does in fact "get it" (doing things because they're right and not because they're profitable). It was the anecdote he mentioned in particular, because if he didn't "get it" I don't think it would have even occurred to him to mention it.
I told him I regretted the unnecessary stink it caused, and thanked him for the unpaid effort to reply. Will that satisfy the requirements of the challenge?
No information is "personal" with me, BTW. The Scientific Method (and Backpackers' Ethic) is my Gospel. I simply don't make the strong distorting emotional attachments to ideas that other people make (and which were in ample evidence in the modding behavior in this comment thread). Dogma? That's for other people, not me. Even though I know emotional investments like that are typical, I'm still blindsided by it more often than I should be... like last night and today. I didn't see any of this coming. There's a reason I call myself the Vulcan Tourist.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess whether that is true or not is entirely dependent upon how narrowly one defines "geek". I was using the loosey-goosey popularized definition, but I'd guess you're using a rather different one.
I might be in the target market of a $100 mouse... if it didn't cost $100.
We ARE a socialist country, at least to the degree that it definitely ain't pure capitalism nor anarchy we're practicing.
That would depend upon whether the vendor has socialist or capitalist/Darwinian ethics, wouldn't it? (I'm being kind in allowing that pure capitalism even has any ethics... truly it doesn't: it's only the intrusion of socialism into capitalism that imbues it with any ethics at all.)
My answer is that it should be somewhere in between, but a lot closer to $50.01 than $99.99.
There's quite a bit more that goes into a cell phone, in my estimation. Even so, I have no doubt some of the blingier cell phone are unfairly priced, too.
Because, I'm claiming, it' doesn't cost them anywhere near $100 to made the thing. There are cliches about taking advantage of other people's misfortune, so why is this okay? Need/desire/addiction isn't that far down the road from misfortune, and if it's priced as it is in anticipation of your need/desire/addiction, then that is wrong in my socialist book.
Ever read much about subjective valuation?
Is it possible that you're assuming there's some enormous expense that goes into them merely based on the price that is demanded? In trying to visualize the process myself, I can't justify what they're asking based on cost alone: they're pricing it based on the anticipated emotional response of consumers ("demand"), not upon the cost to manufacture.
You shouldn't have to pay $100 for that ergonomic mouse just because you need/want it really bad. That would be them profiting from (a) your misfortune or (b) your ignorance. (b) is really a misfortune, too, I suppose. ;-)
Should how much you personally value or desire a thing really dictate its price, or should it be based on the more objective factors of its actual cost to manufacture?
(Disclaimer: I'm pretty much a socialist and despise subjective valuation.)
It shouldn't be: that ergonomic design "cost" is paid exactly once and then replicated ad infinitum. Further, ergonomics is not rocket science; it's mostly just astute observation, though I concede that is itself a skill largely absent from the general population. :-/
Surely you must acknowledge that your predicament is outside the scope of what would be considered normal? I've been using mice for even longer than you, both professionally and personally; though I had a bit of carpal tunnel pains for a year or so, I remediated that myself and I've experienced nothing like what you described. Your pointing-device purchasing criteria are not the same as mine; your criteria almost define the mouse as a "medical device". I suppose if I were purchasing a medical device (what with medical costs being even more insane) I would expect to pay $100, but I at least am not.
$100 for a mouse seems egregious, considering most keyboards are priced less, for instance. Is a mouse really more expensive to make than even a cheap keyboard?
Who spends $80 to $100 on a mouse? Is there honestly that much "value" going into it, regardless how fancy it is? I'm calling bullshit. Geeks need to reign in their enthusiasm and just say "no" once in while to ridiculous pricing; greedy pricing only works if we're stupid enough to agree to it.
Given how technologically advanced HP printers have become, this presents a huge risk to national security. I'm mortally afraid that my comfy way of life has been jeopardized by HP's actions. President-Elect Obama needs to appoint a special prosecutor ASAP!
Actually, now that I think about it, my comfy life has already been jeopardized by HP products... anyone want a paperweight that just happens to look like a fancy scanner with ADF?
Old news to me... I still play TA regularly and visit the TA Universe forums. Hell, I'm one of the few suckers who is donating a few bucks every month to persuade the site owner to keep it running! I also have SupCom so, yeah, I know.
TA actually DOES have its own peculiar brand of micromanagement, and in large games - on 40x40+ maps with a high unit limit set - there are most definitely micromanagement issues. For instance:
- no context-sensitive menus for factories, to allow selecting a group of the same factory type and ordering ALL of them to build the same thing;
- no "policy" options for factory output, construction, or resource management (you have to specifically order the location and construction of every single resource unit, for instance); and
- no unit formation controls or engagement policies (beyond the simplistic).
TA is basically just like Sword of the Stars: an empty shell of a game with no real intelligence, such that ALL the burden of management is basically placed on the user's shoulders. Did you ever play board wargames? Do you recall the original promise that migrating those games to "microcomputers" held for gamers? That promise has never really been sufficiently fulfilled, from my perspective (and mine is a LONG one, just over 30 years).
It was precisely this micromanagement problem that drove me to experiment with modding TA, and also to use TA:Mutation as a base platform for playing the game. For years I tweaked the game in various ways and created TA:M mutators, trying to work around the micromanagement issues; since the game was (and STILL is) closed source and the developer defunct, actually fixing the micromanagement problems directly was not even an option. My modding efforts were only marginally successful, and I had to tweak the game and units in bizarre ways to achieve even that.
I have been trying to tweak games to resolve micromanagement issues ever since Master of Orion II, and the effort continues with SotS and other games. :-(
My vehicle doesn't have an integral GPS system. If I lived in Oregon, how would they then track MY mileage? Would they require by law that my vehicle be retrofitted with a GPS system? Who would pay for that? Would they require that I pay for it out of pocket?
Above issues aside, this tax might make some efficiency and environmental sense: people might think twice about making unnecessary trips altogether, or make a more concerted effort (as I do) to delay some trips until I can combine them with other errands and kill several birds with the same gallons of gas.
This is virtually impossible when competing factions within the same industry are hellbent on decreasing user knowledge in order to sell product. The pharmaceutical industry is perhaps the poster child of this behavior, using misinformation and misframing to "un-educate" its customers and even its affiliates (university researchers and family doctors), but it's hardly an exception.
Mis-education of consumers, keeping them in the dark, is in fact a primary goal of most corporate advertising campaigns; they do this because it's actually good for business: educated consumers make choices that limit profit margins. Do you honestly think they'll change this behavior because doing so would be good for consumers? The welfare of consumers is the last thing on the minds of corporate execs and mid-level managers. The anti-malware software industry is no exception to this.
I actually have one game on the shelf that attempts a small-scale version of what you describe, so it's not a new concept.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that every new game development team seems to wander into the process with blinders on, and naively begins to repeat every single shortcoming and error of omission that has ever been solved in previous games. It's as if these teams are always comprised, from bottom to top, entirely of people too young to have ever played the older games and thus learned from their mistakes and successes. What's that old cliche about being doomed to repeat history?
There's another more sinister conspiratorial theory to explain this repetition of mistakes, one that theorizes that it's quite deliberate to maximize profit by stringing gamers along with the eternal promise of a better game NEXT year, but corporations would never engage in such behavior!
The way to improve playability in strategy wargames, and so-called 4X games especially, is to use variable degrees of abstraction to address issues of game scale. There is NOTHING more annoying than playing a huge game of, say, Sword of the Stars, with hundreds of stars and countless units and economic factors, AND HAVING TO DEAL WITH ALL OF IT PERSONALLY. So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point. Nowhere is this failure more evident than in so-called "real time strategy" games (which are almost all really "real time tactics"), where not only is the player forced to micromanage but the time required to do so costs him in terms of the game, because the computer AI opponents at least don't suffer from this problem.
Sadly, I know of no single game that employs this level of intelligence in the player interface, and the game I mentioned, Sword of the Stars and its sequels, is actually one of the biggest recent failures in this regard. It also has bugs that persist across sequels and a dev team with no coding discipline, which may or may not be related to the aforementioned failure.
When I read the title of this article, I thought it would discuss playing actual old games in Wine or Mame or some other emulated environment, and debate which ones were worthy of that effort. Sadly, instead it's merely hype for "new" old stuff that publishers want to foist on us to make more money with even less effort than usual.
I think the article that I expected to read would have been more interesting.
Did anyone else notice the last comment attached to the article, which mentioned Mitt Romney in the title and contained gibberish that tried to mimic proper sentence structure? Sadly you won't find it now, because I blinked and refreshed the page and it disappeared before I could copy it. Normally such gibberish posts include a URL linking to a site hawking pharma, sex aids, or malware; this one, however, was JUST text. What could be the point? Are they trying to poison Bayesian filters, in preparation for a later spam attack that does contain URLs?
John McCain, of course, because he's a fat cat himself and gives free room and board to another cat. And then there's this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguQGP4p-Dk
Good point. It's true that with child porn in particular we're presuming that one specific act which is NOT in and of itself harmful - looking at child porn - will necessarily ALWAYS lead to acts which ARE harmful - namely abusing children.
Shades of Minority Report?
My cats are little autistic people. They have just as must right to the benefits of "personhood" as you do. Bigoted people that draw the personhood line right at H. sapiens sicken me. Treating other species as chattel merely because they aren't "made in our image" is incredibly ignorant. Perhaps this article will help to further dissuade people from adopting that perverse attitude in the first place?
Unless and until someone can demonstrate, with fMRI scans or similar, that people like Dwight Whorley are completely lacking any conscious volition with respect to this behavior, I see no reason at all to be lenient with such a person. Even then I'm not sure leniency is appropriate.
With respect to the cartoon-versus-photograph argument, again an fMRI scan might settle the issue if it can be demonstrated that the erotic cartoons stimulate activity in exactly the same brain region(s) as do the photographs (I suspect that in fact they do). Up to this point we've merely assumed that is the case and used it as justification for things like the Protect Act.
Not to be condescending: the proper cliched phrase is "case IN point". It's a linking preposition, not a conjunction, in the phrase. I'm not sure of the historical evolution of the phrase.
Ah, here we go:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cas1.htm
You're more than a bit late to this party. You might want to read the rest of the thread. Maybe you wouldn't have bothered to make those comments if you'd read the direct exchange between Mr. Beckerman and I, in which he persuaded me that he is one of the good guys. Crow meat really doesn't taste all that bad.
But thanks for the lovely sentiment nonetheless, calling me a troll merely for expressing an unpopular dissenting opinion. In the future I'll remember to place precisely the same value on your speech that you have on mine here, if we ever cross paths again.
Slashdot SHOULD be a place where unpopular opinions are at least respected if not favored or accepted, I have always thought, but this incident has taught me otherwise. People have been unnecessarily malicious here, both in comments and especially in anonymous modding. I won't think as highly of Slashdot as a community ever again; it's not so much a community as it is a street gang.
I've got almost three decades of intensive introspection under my belt (and it's ongoing), so your challenge is an easy one. I've read his direct reply to me and, yes, he's pretty much convinced me that he does in fact "get it" (doing things because they're right and not because they're profitable). It was the anecdote he mentioned in particular, because if he didn't "get it" I don't think it would have even occurred to him to mention it.
I told him I regretted the unnecessary stink it caused, and thanked him for the unpaid effort to reply. Will that satisfy the requirements of the challenge?
No information is "personal" with me, BTW. The Scientific Method (and Backpackers' Ethic) is my Gospel. I simply don't make the strong distorting emotional attachments to ideas that other people make (and which were in ample evidence in the modding behavior in this comment thread). Dogma? That's for other people, not me. Even though I know emotional investments like that are typical, I'm still blindsided by it more often than I should be... like last night and today. I didn't see any of this coming. There's a reason I call myself the Vulcan Tourist.