Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.
You have a partial point. From a naive, short-term perspective, it would be easy for Blizzard to make those businesses irrelevant. The administrators of a game server can always undercut a 3rd party seller. Whatever price is offered for gold on ige.com (currently $0.21 each), Blizz can beat with no effort (and, they have untouchable advertising positioning and established billing arrangements with the customers).
But in the longer term, legitimizing the sale of gold (or other in-game resources) will devastate the MMORPG business model. Players are attracted by 3 factors:
1. Artwork. An initial attraction that doesn't last long.
2. Achievement. The virtual Skinner-box model.
3. Association. The 3d-accelerated chat window.
Each stage feeds into the next. If the "Achievement" of step 2 were available on the open market, players will do one of two things depending on their personal wealth: Rich players will pay the money, get the ultimate stuff, and then be bored with the game 2 weeks later. Poor players will look at the effort they're spending, see that rich people can buy past it for a few bucks, get discouraged, and quit the game.
Either way, putting a visible price tag on the results of playtime makes it seem less like entertainment and more like a job. Customers don't pay to work at a job.
In a way, this is just revealing the game for what it is: a non-fun level grind. One might say that the optimal solution would be for Blizzard to publish a better game, that will be enjoyable for the journey itself, and not just the tantalizing destination. But it would take major leaps of artistry and technology to accomplish that, and the development cost would likely appear prohibitive.
Am I one of the few people who think that Tannenbaum won that debate?
That seems slightly more sensible than saying the Confederate States of America won the War of Northern Agression.
Tanenbaum opened the thread with a specific testable claim: that over the next 10 years, microkernel OSes would become dominant. He also said that writing Linux was "a truly poor idea".
Over the 13 years since the thread was posted, both of those predictions have been shown to be flat-out wrong. Maybe, at the time, Linus wasn't able to defend himself in English argument against a prestigious professional lecturer. But time has told who was really right.
Tanenbaum isn't wrong here. He's right to a degree. In the abstract, the microkernels make a lot of sense.
But since Tanenbaum was not talking in the abstract, that makes him completely wrong. His exact words were "I know where operating systems are going in the next ten years or so"- that's not an academic abstraction, but a practical prediction which turned out false.
He further wrote "among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won." That too is a claim of applicability in popular commericial practice, and it too has proved completely false in retrospect.
Those aren't the only places he was wholely wrong...
But, keep in mind the context of that conversation I liked. It was entirely inside an academic community
Wrong. Comp.os.minix was not "entirely academic". It was filling with ever-increasing numbers of hobbyists and even corporate users of commercial Unixes. To both of those groups, Linux was drastically better than Minix, even if only due to the free license.
It's ironic that one of the world's most notable names in operating systems would still have given it an F in a graduate class.
You keep repeating that, almost like you think it's a quote or something- but it's false. Although Tanenbaum wouldn't be impressed with a macrokernel design, it would've been fully adequate to pass any of his classes. He knew better than to expect thesis-quality in single-semester projects.
I experienced the bug with K3b 0.11.20 (from KDE 3.3.2). It seems that -readme won't trigger it, the hyphen must need to come after the 64th character or something.
Re:So... dear Linux community what do YOU want?
on
Nero Burning for Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Someone better tell those MYSQL people that they cannot pratically be commercial and release their software as free software at the same time as they sell boatloads of support contracts.
Already you've contradicted yourself. The MySQL situation you just described is about people who offer commercial support service for non-commercial software. If you're not collecting money in exchange for access to software, then it isn't really commercial. And, the GPL is incompatible with all of the most natural ways to charge money for software. (Unless you can find a GPL loophole, such as hardware key verification, etc)
but a lot of those companies out there are making software which they use to either support their infrastucture and/or sell support for it to their customers.
Such business models aren't long-term viable. You can be a support company, or a software company, or even a support company which does incidental software programming on the side- but a software development company that gets paid through support fees won't last.
That fact is, that for high quality software in most fields, the need for support should be low. As software improves over time, it becomes more and more able to run without expert support for normal uses. (Just look at the history of Microsoft's DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows95 to WindowsXP. The degree of support needed to achieve the same results has gone down and down). If the software is any good, there will be other dedicated support companies undercutting the fees charged by the original developers, whose costs are higher.
For the majority of software categories, paid support is not a plausible revenue source- certainly not in the long term. This is the perverse incentive of free software: if programmers earn their money by explaining how to use their software, then improving the software will actually cost the developers money. So they have no financial incentive to fix it.
the former is in accordance with my conclusion (that commercial Free software is widespread and in increasingly heavy use in the industry)
Huh? You actually think that eleven-fingered humans are widespread and an increasingly heavy presecense in the population??
Those two lines are obviously contradictory as the former is in accordance with my conclusion
They're not contradictory, unless you have more precise statistics on what percentage of human beings are born with 11 fingers. I don't know myself (because doctors are so quick to slice off the extra digits, measurement is difficult), so I admit the 99.999% figure was just a guess. The meaning was that the GPL is incompatible with commericial software development in all normal cases, or 99.999% of the time.
my conclusion since the evidence is so overwhelmingly obvious.
Both of those links support my position that Free Software can rarely be commercially marketed.
Funny that nowadays, the Linux video player mplayer gives better compatibility than the commercial alternatives. Just one big codec pack to download, and it handles all AVI/WMV/DIVX/MOV/RMV, so that we hardly notice or care what format a video came as.
but K3b is well superior to the Nero Express 5.5 that came with my CD-R drive.
Because it is built as a shell around command-line tools, k3b still fails on some cases Nero can handle. For example, try burning a file with multiple hypens ("-") in the name: k3b will fail without giving any sensible error message, because the filename it passes to cdrecord will have been interpreted as an (invalid) option.
Which makes it even more probable (and legally defensible) that AOL might someday decide to kick them from the service for transmitting unintelligble messages.
AC: I'd say mathmatics, physics, biology, etc. are all things that would exist without humanity. Seriously, if we weren't here, wouldn't f still equal m a, or wouldn't 2 of one thing added to 2 of another thing still equal 4 total?
It's a matter of sematics, but by definition, a "concept" exists in the mind of an intelligent being. It usually has been inferred by looking at external reality, but "concepts" only come into being when someone thinks of the idea.
Wrong. The only way to steal cable is to cut the wire and run away with it. Nobody has ever been legally prosecuted for theft in a case of unathorized cable access.
AC: theft of service
The "of service" is added to it because it's not really theft, the same way they add "statutory" in front of something that's not really rape. If it were actually theft, existing laws against theft would apply, and there would've been no reason to invent "theft of service"
As has been pointed out quite often this is not the case (Novell Suse, Redhat, IBM etc.).
Claiming that GPL-style "Free" software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that human beings can't have 11 fingers.
Exceptions to the rule have been encountered from time to time, but for the practical needs of daily life, it's perfectly correct. The standard business model for 99.999% of today's commercial software CANNOT work with the GPL.
If your goal was to sell someone who didn't have a computer on having a computer at all, then yes, sell them on Windows.
No! Absolutely wrong. Give them Mandrake (or whatever your favorite Linux distro is) immediately, before they get used to Windows.
Remember that a person who, in 2005, hasn't owned a computer yet is probably going to need an above-average amount of handholding and troubleshooting, and to be especially clueless about security practices. Also, a non-computer user will probably have few application needs outside of web/email/light wordproc, so the limitations of Linux app support won't bother him.
And since YOU will be the one she turns to to fix and maintain everything, you want her on Linux from the start.
It may just have skipped past your attention, but the whole 'trusted computing' initiative is heading to put just those copy controls in every device.
You answered your own question. Since NERO will support trusted computing, it will help accelerate the adoption of TC. And since TC is antithetical to OSS (because TC cannot work if users are able to recompile their own software), then NeroLinux is naturally harmful.
The Air Force beta tests ECERYTHING that comes out of Redmond *extensively* before allowing systems administrators to install, at least a year.
If you think that, then you don't know how non-uniform the AF's IT procedures really are. There are 100s of exceptions all over the place. You can only possibly be talking about a specific subset of the AF's installs.
All significant AOL users do. It stands for America Online. More importantly, all significant languages used on a large ISP can be cataloged and matched with digital dictionary files.
Relying on people who type in an obscure, unrecognizable language to camoflage your own encrypted transmissions is security through obscurity, with all the regular shortcomings thereof.
There is no way to distinguish these from an encrypted message.
You seriously underestimate the abilities of human beings. Randomly read a message, and see if it makes sense. If not, copy some of it into Google and see if there are webpages which use those words. If not, then go through the user's next 10 messages and repeat the process. If none of those are sensible either, then permanently disable IM from that account.
Wrong. We want to prevent changing the crime's name. It is really called "copyright infringement", and those who call it "theft" are being inaccurate.
I find that a far more interesting question than imagining that I can excuse the crime by renaming it.
By renaming "copyright infringement" as "theft", publishing corporations are attempting to avoid that debate entirely: if it's theft, then it's already been illegal for centuries, and there's nothing left to talk about.
The argument that theft should be illegal is much stronger than that copyright infringement should be illegal- therefore, falsly equating the two is an invalid rhetorical way to prove that copyright infringement is wrong. An honest argument against infringment would focus on that specific act, instead of blurring it together with other deeds.
Duplicating his work and distributing it without permission would be copyright infringement.
Theft requires that the victim is loses access to the stolen goods. It is theoretically possible to steal intellectual property if you manage to deny the original author her rights to use it (such as by getting it to the patent office before she does).
On the basis of this, shouldn't DC be suing Pixar? I mean, "Elastigirl" is basically "Plastic Man" with breasts
No, it's totally Marvel's Fantastic 4 there.
A) The Incredibles, a superhero team/family of 4 members, lead by Mr. Incredible, who named the team after himself. It includes a husband/wife and brother/sister. One of them is tough and strong, one is invisble and makes force-field bubbles, one stretches out limbs, and one runs fast. There's also a super-powered baby who's not exactly in the team.
B) The Fantastic Four, a superhero team/family of 4 members, lead by Mr. Fantastic, who named the team after himself. It includes a husband/wife and brother/sister. One of them is tough and strong, one is invisble and makes force-field bubbles, one stretches out limbs, and one shoots fire. There's also a super-powered baby who's not exactly in the team.
In case you missed it, the only difference in those discriptions is running fast vs shooting fire. Oh, and the fact that one of them was published 50 years before the other. In a reasonable copyright system, Fantastic Four would be public domain already.
If you're in front of a comic book store alone cursing out kids, then a reasonable person could infer that you represent marvel and you would in fact be damaging the value of their property.
Ok, that right there shows you have no recognition of what "reasonable" is.
Yes, I know the definition, and I'm using it correctly, unlike you. Just like you pasted, "jumping the shark" means you know the "television show has reached its peak". It is evidence of having passed the climax, but not the climax itself. That came earlier.
On Happy Days, the Shark-Jump was not the climax. It was a dumb, stupid stunt attempting revive a slumping program, and it failed.
Fonzie had done an earlier motorcycle stunt that was far more successful and exciting. It might've been the climax, although arugably, there was no climax at all. Regardless, the shark jump certainly wasn't it. Similarly, the "jump the shark" events that the website is devoted to cataloging are not climactic events.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.
You have a partial point. From a naive, short-term perspective, it would be easy for Blizzard to make those businesses irrelevant. The administrators of a game server can always undercut a 3rd party seller. Whatever price is offered for gold on ige.com (currently $0.21 each), Blizz can beat with no effort (and, they have untouchable advertising positioning and established billing arrangements with the customers).
But in the longer term, legitimizing the sale of gold (or other in-game resources) will devastate the MMORPG business model. Players are attracted by 3 factors:
1. Artwork. An initial attraction that doesn't last long.
2. Achievement. The virtual Skinner-box model.
3. Association. The 3d-accelerated chat window.
Each stage feeds into the next. If the "Achievement" of step 2 were available on the open market, players will do one of two things depending on their personal wealth: Rich players will pay the money, get the ultimate stuff, and then be bored with the game 2 weeks later. Poor players will look at the effort they're spending, see that rich people can buy past it for a few bucks, get discouraged, and quit the game.
Either way, putting a visible price tag on the results of playtime makes it seem less like entertainment and more like a job. Customers don't pay to work at a job.
In a way, this is just revealing the game for what it is: a non-fun level grind. One might say that the optimal solution would be for Blizzard to publish a better game, that will be enjoyable for the journey itself, and not just the tantalizing destination. But it would take major leaps of artistry and technology to accomplish that, and the development cost would likely appear prohibitive.
Am I one of the few people who think that Tannenbaum won that debate?
That seems slightly more sensible than saying the Confederate States of America won the War of Northern Agression.
Tanenbaum opened the thread with a specific testable claim: that over the next 10 years, microkernel OSes would become dominant. He also said that writing Linux was "a truly poor idea".
Over the 13 years since the thread was posted, both of those predictions have been shown to be flat-out wrong. Maybe, at the time, Linus wasn't able to defend himself in English argument against a prestigious professional lecturer. But time has told who was really right.
It really, really doesn't.
Arguing with dictionaries gets boring fast.
Sounds like on your planet, trespassers can be prosecuted for theft. Sounds cool.
Tanenbaum isn't wrong here. He's right to a degree. In the abstract, the microkernels make a lot of sense.
But since Tanenbaum was not talking in the abstract, that makes him completely wrong. His exact words were "I know where operating systems are going in the next ten years or so"- that's not an academic abstraction, but a practical prediction which turned out false.
He further wrote "among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won." That too is a claim of applicability in popular commericial practice, and it too has proved completely false in retrospect.
Those aren't the only places he was wholely wrong...
But, keep in mind the context of that conversation I liked. It was entirely inside an academic community
Wrong. Comp.os.minix was not "entirely academic". It was filling with ever-increasing numbers of hobbyists and even corporate users of commercial Unixes. To both of those groups, Linux was drastically better than Minix, even if only due to the free license.
It's ironic that one of the world's most notable names in operating systems would still have given it an F in a graduate class.
You keep repeating that, almost like you think it's a quote or something- but it's false. Although Tanenbaum wouldn't be impressed with a macrokernel design, it would've been fully adequate to pass any of his classes. He knew better than to expect thesis-quality in single-semester projects.
Have you ever used a recent version of K3B?
I experienced the bug with K3b 0.11.20 (from KDE 3.3.2). It seems that -readme won't trigger it, the hyphen must need to come after the 64th character or something.
Someone better tell those MYSQL people that they cannot pratically be commercial and release their software as free software at the same time as they sell boatloads of support contracts.
Already you've contradicted yourself. The MySQL situation you just described is about people who offer commercial support service for non-commercial software. If you're not collecting money in exchange for access to software, then it isn't really commercial. And, the GPL is incompatible with all of the most natural ways to charge money for software. (Unless you can find a GPL loophole, such as hardware key verification, etc)
but a lot of those companies out there are making software which they use to either support their infrastucture and/or sell support for it to their customers.
Such business models aren't long-term viable. You can be a support company, or a software company, or even a support company which does incidental software programming on the side- but a software development company that gets paid through support fees won't last.
That fact is, that for high quality software in most fields, the need for support should be low. As software improves over time, it becomes more and more able to run without expert support for normal uses. (Just look at the history of Microsoft's DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows95 to WindowsXP. The degree of support needed to achieve the same results has gone down and down). If the software is any good, there will be other dedicated support companies undercutting the fees charged by the original developers, whose costs are higher.
For the majority of software categories, paid support is not a plausible revenue source- certainly not in the long term. This is the perverse incentive of free software: if programmers earn their money by explaining how to use their software, then improving the software will actually cost the developers money. So they have no financial incentive to fix it.
the former is in accordance with my conclusion (that commercial Free software is widespread and in increasingly heavy use in the industry)
Huh? You actually think that eleven-fingered humans are widespread and an increasingly heavy presecense in the population??
Those two lines are obviously contradictory as the former is in accordance with my conclusion
They're not contradictory, unless you have more precise statistics on what percentage of human beings are born with 11 fingers. I don't know myself (because doctors are so quick to slice off the extra digits, measurement is difficult), so I admit the 99.999% figure was just a guess. The meaning was that the GPL is incompatible with commericial software development in all normal cases, or 99.999% of the time.
my conclusion since the evidence is so overwhelmingly obvious.
Both of those links support my position that Free Software can rarely be commercially marketed.
Here's the contraption I experienced:
Funny that nowadays, the Linux video player mplayer gives better compatibility than the commercial alternatives. Just one big codec pack to download, and it handles all AVI/WMV/DIVX/MOV/RMV, so that we hardly notice or care what format a video came as.
Too bad it is illegal.
but K3b is well superior to the Nero Express 5.5 that came with my CD-R drive.
Because it is built as a shell around command-line tools, k3b still fails on some cases Nero can handle. For example, try burning a file with multiple hypens ("-") in the name: k3b will fail without giving any sensible error message, because the filename it passes to cdrecord will have been interpreted as an (invalid) option.
Not a SINGLE one is an AOL subscriber.
Which makes it even more probable (and legally defensible) that AOL might someday decide to kick them from the service for transmitting unintelligble messages.
AC: I'd say mathmatics, physics, biology, etc. are all things that would exist without humanity. Seriously, if we weren't here, wouldn't f still equal m a, or wouldn't 2 of one thing added to 2 of another thing still equal 4 total?
It's a matter of sematics, but by definition, a "concept" exists in the mind of an intelligent being. It usually has been inferred by looking at external reality, but "concepts" only come into being when someone thinks of the idea.
AC: Plenty of people "steal cable".
Wrong. The only way to steal cable is to cut the wire and run away with it. Nobody has ever been legally prosecuted for theft in a case of unathorized cable access.
AC: theft of service
The "of service" is added to it because it's not really theft, the same way they add "statutory" in front of something that's not really rape. If it were actually theft, existing laws against theft would apply, and there would've been no reason to invent "theft of service"
As has been pointed out quite often this is not the case (Novell Suse, Redhat, IBM etc.).
Claiming that GPL-style "Free" software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that human beings can't have 11 fingers.
Exceptions to the rule have been encountered from time to time, but for the practical needs of daily life, it's perfectly correct. The standard business model for 99.999% of today's commercial software CANNOT work with the GPL.
Hopefully you were joking/trolling, right?
If your goal was to sell someone who didn't have a computer on having a computer at all, then yes, sell them on Windows.
No! Absolutely wrong. Give them Mandrake (or whatever your favorite Linux distro is) immediately, before they get used to Windows.
Remember that a person who, in 2005, hasn't owned a computer yet is probably going to need an above-average amount of handholding and troubleshooting, and to be especially clueless about security practices. Also, a non-computer user will probably have few application needs outside of web/email/light wordproc, so the limitations of Linux app support won't bother him.
And since YOU will be the one she turns to to fix and maintain everything, you want her on Linux from the start.
It may just have skipped past your attention, but the whole 'trusted computing' initiative is heading to put just those copy controls in every device.
You answered your own question. Since NERO will support trusted computing, it will help accelerate the adoption of TC. And since TC is antithetical to OSS (because TC cannot work if users are able to recompile their own software), then NeroLinux is naturally harmful.
The Air Force beta tests ECERYTHING that comes out of Redmond *extensively* before allowing systems administrators to install, at least a year.
If you think that, then you don't know how non-uniform the AF's IT procedures really are. There are 100s of exceptions all over the place. You can only possibly be talking about a specific subset of the AF's installs.
Mathematics. Logic. Memes. Animals are capable of communication and even thinking up new ideas--for instance
All those are manmade. Even if non-human animals discovered them first, they are still manmade- because concepts can be made more than once.
The only people who can logically believe there exists non-manmade concepts are theists believing in divine revelation.
No, since not everyone IMs in English
All significant AOL users do. It stands for America Online. More importantly, all significant languages used on a large ISP can be cataloged and matched with digital dictionary files.
Relying on people who type in an obscure, unrecognizable language to camoflage your own encrypted transmissions is security through obscurity, with all the regular shortcomings thereof.
There is no way to distinguish these from an encrypted message.
You seriously underestimate the abilities of human beings. Randomly read a message, and see if it makes sense. If not, copy some of it into Google and see if there are webpages which use those words. If not, then go through the user's next 10 messages and repeat the process. If none of those are sensible either, then permanently disable IM from that account.
Easy.
Changing the name of the crime?
Wrong. We want to prevent changing the crime's name. It is really called "copyright infringement", and those who call it "theft" are being inaccurate.
I find that a far more interesting question than imagining that I can excuse the crime by renaming it.
By renaming "copyright infringement" as "theft", publishing corporations are attempting to avoid that debate entirely: if it's theft, then it's already been illegal for centuries, and there's nothing left to talk about.
The argument that theft should be illegal is much stronger than that copyright infringement should be illegal- therefore, falsly equating the two is an invalid rhetorical way to prove that copyright infringement is wrong. An honest argument against infringment would focus on that specific act, instead of blurring it together with other deeds.
Duplicating his work and distributing it without permission would be copyright infringement.
Theft requires that the victim is loses access to the stolen goods. It is theoretically possible to steal intellectual property if you manage to deny the original author her rights to use it (such as by getting it to the patent office before she does).
On the basis of this, shouldn't DC be suing Pixar? I mean, "Elastigirl" is basically "Plastic Man" with breasts
No, it's totally Marvel's Fantastic 4 there.
A) The Incredibles, a superhero team/family of 4 members, lead by Mr. Incredible, who named the team after himself. It includes a husband/wife and brother/sister. One of them is tough and strong, one is invisble and makes force-field bubbles, one stretches out limbs, and one runs fast. There's also a super-powered baby who's not exactly in the team.
B) The Fantastic Four, a superhero team/family of 4 members, lead by Mr. Fantastic, who named the team after himself. It includes a husband/wife and brother/sister. One of them is tough and strong, one is invisble and makes force-field bubbles, one stretches out limbs, and one shoots fire. There's also a super-powered baby who's not exactly in the team.
In case you missed it, the only difference in those discriptions is running fast vs shooting fire. Oh, and the fact that one of them was published 50 years before the other. In a reasonable copyright system, Fantastic Four would be public domain already.
If you're in front of a comic book store alone cursing out kids, then a reasonable person could infer that you represent marvel and you would in fact be damaging the value of their property.
Ok, that right there shows you have no recognition of what "reasonable" is.
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger"
Like how in "Million Dollar Baby", when that woman boxer got beat up, and it just made her stronger!
But jumping the shark means
Yes, I know the definition, and I'm using it correctly, unlike you. Just like you pasted, "jumping the shark" means you know the "television show has reached its peak". It is evidence of having passed the climax, but not the climax itself. That came earlier.
On Happy Days, the Shark-Jump was not the climax. It was a dumb, stupid stunt attempting revive a slumping program, and it failed.
Fonzie had done an earlier motorcycle stunt that was far more successful and exciting. It might've been the climax, although arugably, there was no climax at all. Regardless, the shark jump certainly wasn't it. Similarly, the "jump the shark" events that the website is devoted to cataloging are not climactic events.