So, you don't believe people can be developmentally disabled, they're just not educated right when they're kids? Are you stupid or something? If one brain malfunction can be genetic, why in the hell can't another one?
The copies should be free because the economics work that way. Just like grass should be green. Sure, there are a few exceptions, just like you can sell some copies, but those aren't the rule. You're not an idiot for sinking a cost without expecting a direct return on that product. You're an idiot for sinking a cost with no thought about how you're going to use it to make money. Do you expect to get a return from buying a computer by reselling the parts? Or do you expect a return from the work that the computer enables? Did you go through school expecting to get paid to go to school? Or did you get a degree in order to make money? Same thing with a recording. The free distribution enables you to be popular, it enables you to do other things worth more. Feel free to try charge for copies. But expect to fail because you're spitting into the wind. Don't think the wind is wrong when it changes direction... figure out how to work with it. That's why sailboats can still make headway going into the wind... they just don't attack it directly.
I don't want to do all the parts of my job, either. That doesn't mean I don't get to pick and choose what I do. If you don't want to do the fan service, then you aren't going to be a very successful artist. That's how the real world works. Just because you don't like that a new technology has changed the landscape doesn't mean that the law should limit the technology. It means you should use it to succeed. Or do you think that buggy whip manufacturers should have been legislated into success, and cars should never have been allowed to drive without someone walking in front of them waving a red flag because that protected the way people thought transportation should be done, it protected the horse stables and breeders and street cleaners?
No, it's not a fallacious argument. You just don't understand economics. If the cost of duplication is zero, then there is no way to charge for each incremental copy other than by artificially controlling and distorting the market. Note how I NEVER said that because the PRICE was free that the value was zero. Those are two very different things. The incidental cost has no bearing on the duplication cost. It's a sunk cost, and investment, a write-off, if you will. You use it as the basis, the investment, to make your services and the actually scarce goods that you control that much more valuable.
Let's use a different example... oxygen. It's "free", and for all intents and purposes it's infinite, but we all know it really isn't. Yet, somehow, people make money by compressing it into cylinders and selling those, or adding perfumes to it and selling sniffs. Which are scarce products, built on the free one.
The media market should work in the same way. Once a recording is made, it has no price due to free duplication, but it has great value in getting the creator publicity (assuming it's any good). The creator can then charge for scarce goods tied to that free, yet valuable, infinitely copied data. Signed albums, t-shirts, hanging out with fans, whatever. Lots of things that are scarce that people will pay good money for. The thing missing is that there's no RIAA, no A&R man, nobody being the "gatekeeper" as to what's good and bad, as to who succeeds and who doesn't, as to who gets heard and who doesn't. The economics, if they worked naturally instead of through the distortion of asinine laws, would enrich society as a whole. It'd just make fewer "super stars", and it'd make the people who call themselves artist representatives and such actually work rather than simply act as toll-collecting gatekeepers.
He's actually right. There is no business if everything is for free. But nobody is suggesting that everything be free. Only the things that make sense to be free. When the incremental cost of duplication is nothing, then the price should logically be free. Assuming that you understand supply and demand economics. So what you do is you use your free content to entice people to pay for something. Hell... look at all those free flyers in the supermarket... and they cost money to print! This talking about letting everyone else do the work of copying stuff for you, you don't have to lift a finger. You get people listening, you can find fans who will pay for exclusive access, for tickets, for shows, for new music, for all kinds of things. The problem here is that Eric doesn't want to lost his position of gatekeeper and tollbooth operator between artists and the public. He doesn't want to see his middleman, leech-like business model go by the wayside. Right now, he doesn't have to provide any value to artists or fans because he just controls access due to legal blockades. He contributes nothing to society, to culture, to anything, and he gets paid very well for it.
So let's pick a niche band that is utterly dependent on piracy (their own words). It works for all types of artists, if you do it right. The trick is that you actually have to work and keep writing new songs and doing shows and such instead of writing one hit and sitting on your ass collecting a toll every time someone listens to it somewhere.
Someone who wants a Hummer, but still has to pay for gas? Or hell, someone who wants a Hummer that'll just go further on one tank of gas? Lots of good reasons to improve the efficiency of things. Tell me... if there were two Hummers, they both did the same job, cost about the same, and one got better mileage, would you buy the one with the worse efficiency? The only way I would is if it did a job the other one couldn't. Same with this... if this machine will play your games like you want (this is the most important thing to think about), and it costs less to run and isn't significantly different in price, you'd have to be stupid to not buy it.
...have you even looked at the numbers? The 9800GT Eco that they reference uses 40% less power than the "normal" one. The normal one is only 110W so that's what, 66W?. A Core 2 Duo is only 65W flat-out. Then you have an optical drive (25W), a hard drive (10-15W), RAM(10-15W) and other various chips (10-20W). That's only 206W if you run every component flat-out simultaneously and spin up both drives from powered off (which will never happen) and use the worst numbers I give you. The 300W power supply they propose is 80% or more efficient, so that's 240W available at the very lowest, which is still well above what will ever be used in normal circumstances. Don't be a retard... those huge power supplies are not necessary. Hell, you could probably even use a standard 9800GT and maybe kick the PSU up to a 350W if you were really worried.
You don't get out much, do you? There are watches out there that use no electricity. In fact, they were some of the first time-keeping devices that weren't dependent on a sunny day. There are flashlights that you just shake or crank to charge, they use capacitors instead of batteries and LED's for illumination because they use energy so much more efficiently. They're usually billed as emergency flashlights if you want to buy one. A water heater that doesn't require massive resistance coils to heat up water? Gas heaters are quite common, and if you live in a sunny enough place you can use solar heat to boost your water heater. That's been around since, well, forever. Hell, they sell black bags you can fill with water and hang in the sun so you can take a hot shower while camping. And for alternative cooking methods, again, gas. Quite common in many places, and preferred by chefs for more even, controllable heat.
The suggested PS may be 400W, but check the actual power usage of the various components. Don't forget, they're also talking a 300W 80+ PSU, not just any 300W PSU. Absolute worst, it'll supply 300*.8=240W. A Core 2 Duo sinks 65W max, the 9800 Eco they reference (which doesn't have a secondary power connection) should be about 66W full-blast (A regular 9800GT is 110W max, so 110*.6=66W), then you have hard drives (~15W each max) the RAM would be maybe 20W at the very high end, a standard DVD drive is about 25... 65+66+15+20+25 is 191W, only 80% of the capacity of the PSU when the machine is running every component full-bore.
Sure, you can melt gold out of them. At the same time, you aerosolize all kinds of fun chemicals. Especially in older boards, that can include arsenic, mercury, various hydrocarbons, all kinds of stuff that's wonderful to breathe in.
What Microsoft SHOULD have done was not install the add-on automatically at all. Only offer it as an optional update... I know they do that for some things, like.NET in general. Extending.NET to hook into additional software should require additional positive steps.
There seem to be quite a few posts in that article about the Sun extension being bad, how it should have been opt-in rather than opt-out. And the author of the post is obviously not happy with what happened. There were a few people defending Sun in that article, just like you're defending Microsoft.
Really... just because you have a hard-on for MS doesn't mean everyone does. There are quite a few Slashdot users that don't think EITHER of these actions were right.
A used game isn't typically materially different from a new one. Why not charge a substantial portion of the price of a new game? Sans manual and case, sure... but I just don't buy those. But I'll happily pay $5 less for a used than a new game if everything's in good condition. It's still a savings over the new game price.
What exactly is the difference between a used and a new copy of the game? Really... you can check out the case and the instruction booklet before you buy it. If they don't exist, that's a very valid reason for getting a new copy instead of the used one. I buy mostly used games because new ones are way too expensive, but I'll buy new ones if the only used copy is in the crappy case. I have no qualms with saving $5-10 because the gal who bought it the first time didn't realize that she didn't like Final Fantasy games. Or his mom got it for him and he didn't really want that, he wanted Halo.
Right. If they run when you pull the metal bit out, they aren't the type for violent crime. When in the fuck did the entire world become scared of it's own shadow?
Windows developers who don't care about lying on their resume. Ever read the Daily WTF? There are a lot of people who don't even know enough to know jack shit about development but lie through their teeth on their resumes, and get jobs because of it. And since they're willing to take less money than qualified devs, the HR buffoons who just hire people and don't actually know anything about the actual job requirements just rubber stamp them through since the resume has all the required bullet points and they've got the lowest salary requirements.
Next time you see a piece of metal in an ATM you should lean up against the wall a few steps away and call the cops, see if they want to catch someone in the act of trying to scam an ATM. If it's a slow night, you might get an officer to respond.
There is some amount of "inducement" that lawyers provide. Get enough lawyers (or people in general), and you are bound to have more than a few that don't give a shit about ethics, even if they pledged to uphold them and know them. The phrase "ambulance chaser" isn't commonly known because it sounds funny... it's commonly known because there are a few lawyers that fuck it up for all the honest ones. Just like it only takes one fucknugget to screw up traffic for everyone else driving. The point is, if you want to sue someone over something, you can almost always find a lawyer to take your case, and places like hospitals make huge targets because of the emotions, physical risk and money involved.
Really? It just doesn't look like what you're used to? You realize that something can't be better without being different, right? Give different a chance... it may grow on you.
If you say "Here's a Sony for $1000, and here's a El-Knockoffo for $800", most people will buy the Sony. For almost all consumers, the brand is important, often more important than the actual quality. Or are you saying that Nike has to have gone out of business years ago since there are cheap knock-offs of their product? The exact same forces would take effect for Nintendo.
Does your hardware include a two or more core CPU? CoreAVC is a multi-threaded decoder that doesn't require GPU support, and if you're using a *nix, you can build mplayer from source and get pretty good multi-threaded performance. The mplayer-mt + the new tear-free Xv in the open-source radeon drivers has made my media center awesome (mmmm, 61" 1080p...)
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So, you don't believe people can be developmentally disabled, they're just not educated right when they're kids? Are you stupid or something? If one brain malfunction can be genetic, why in the hell can't another one?
Where are real cool tech demos? I don't see them.
The copies should be free because the economics work that way. Just like grass should be green. Sure, there are a few exceptions, just like you can sell some copies, but those aren't the rule. You're not an idiot for sinking a cost without expecting a direct return on that product. You're an idiot for sinking a cost with no thought about how you're going to use it to make money. Do you expect to get a return from buying a computer by reselling the parts? Or do you expect a return from the work that the computer enables? Did you go through school expecting to get paid to go to school? Or did you get a degree in order to make money? Same thing with a recording. The free distribution enables you to be popular, it enables you to do other things worth more. Feel free to try charge for copies. But expect to fail because you're spitting into the wind. Don't think the wind is wrong when it changes direction... figure out how to work with it. That's why sailboats can still make headway going into the wind... they just don't attack it directly.
I don't want to do all the parts of my job, either. That doesn't mean I don't get to pick and choose what I do. If you don't want to do the fan service, then you aren't going to be a very successful artist. That's how the real world works. Just because you don't like that a new technology has changed the landscape doesn't mean that the law should limit the technology. It means you should use it to succeed. Or do you think that buggy whip manufacturers should have been legislated into success, and cars should never have been allowed to drive without someone walking in front of them waving a red flag because that protected the way people thought transportation should be done, it protected the horse stables and breeders and street cleaners?
No, it's not a fallacious argument. You just don't understand economics. If the cost of duplication is zero, then there is no way to charge for each incremental copy other than by artificially controlling and distorting the market. Note how I NEVER said that because the PRICE was free that the value was zero. Those are two very different things. The incidental cost has no bearing on the duplication cost. It's a sunk cost, and investment, a write-off, if you will. You use it as the basis, the investment, to make your services and the actually scarce goods that you control that much more valuable.
Let's use a different example... oxygen. It's "free", and for all intents and purposes it's infinite, but we all know it really isn't. Yet, somehow, people make money by compressing it into cylinders and selling those, or adding perfumes to it and selling sniffs. Which are scarce products, built on the free one.
The media market should work in the same way. Once a recording is made, it has no price due to free duplication, but it has great value in getting the creator publicity (assuming it's any good). The creator can then charge for scarce goods tied to that free, yet valuable, infinitely copied data. Signed albums, t-shirts, hanging out with fans, whatever. Lots of things that are scarce that people will pay good money for. The thing missing is that there's no RIAA, no A&R man, nobody being the "gatekeeper" as to what's good and bad, as to who succeeds and who doesn't, as to who gets heard and who doesn't. The economics, if they worked naturally instead of through the distortion of asinine laws, would enrich society as a whole. It'd just make fewer "super stars", and it'd make the people who call themselves artist representatives and such actually work rather than simply act as toll-collecting gatekeepers.
He's actually right. There is no business if everything is for free. But nobody is suggesting that everything be free. Only the things that make sense to be free. When the incremental cost of duplication is nothing, then the price should logically be free. Assuming that you understand supply and demand economics. So what you do is you use your free content to entice people to pay for something. Hell... look at all those free flyers in the supermarket... and they cost money to print! This talking about letting everyone else do the work of copying stuff for you, you don't have to lift a finger. You get people listening, you can find fans who will pay for exclusive access, for tickets, for shows, for new music, for all kinds of things. The problem here is that Eric doesn't want to lost his position of gatekeeper and tollbooth operator between artists and the public. He doesn't want to see his middleman, leech-like business model go by the wayside. Right now, he doesn't have to provide any value to artists or fans because he just controls access due to legal blockades. He contributes nothing to society, to culture, to anything, and he gets paid very well for it.
So let's pick a niche band that is utterly dependent on piracy (their own words). It works for all types of artists, if you do it right. The trick is that you actually have to work and keep writing new songs and doing shows and such instead of writing one hit and sitting on your ass collecting a toll every time someone listens to it somewhere.
Someone who wants a Hummer, but still has to pay for gas? Or hell, someone who wants a Hummer that'll just go further on one tank of gas? Lots of good reasons to improve the efficiency of things. Tell me... if there were two Hummers, they both did the same job, cost about the same, and one got better mileage, would you buy the one with the worse efficiency? The only way I would is if it did a job the other one couldn't. Same with this... if this machine will play your games like you want (this is the most important thing to think about), and it costs less to run and isn't significantly different in price, you'd have to be stupid to not buy it.
...have you even looked at the numbers? The 9800GT Eco that they reference uses 40% less power than the "normal" one. The normal one is only 110W so that's what, 66W?. A Core 2 Duo is only 65W flat-out. Then you have an optical drive (25W), a hard drive (10-15W), RAM(10-15W) and other various chips (10-20W). That's only 206W if you run every component flat-out simultaneously and spin up both drives from powered off (which will never happen) and use the worst numbers I give you. The 300W power supply they propose is 80% or more efficient, so that's 240W available at the very lowest, which is still well above what will ever be used in normal circumstances. Don't be a retard... those huge power supplies are not necessary. Hell, you could probably even use a standard 9800GT and maybe kick the PSU up to a 350W if you were really worried.
You don't get out much, do you? There are watches out there that use no electricity. In fact, they were some of the first time-keeping devices that weren't dependent on a sunny day. There are flashlights that you just shake or crank to charge, they use capacitors instead of batteries and LED's for illumination because they use energy so much more efficiently. They're usually billed as emergency flashlights if you want to buy one. A water heater that doesn't require massive resistance coils to heat up water? Gas heaters are quite common, and if you live in a sunny enough place you can use solar heat to boost your water heater. That's been around since, well, forever. Hell, they sell black bags you can fill with water and hang in the sun so you can take a hot shower while camping. And for alternative cooking methods, again, gas. Quite common in many places, and preferred by chefs for more even, controllable heat.
The suggested PS may be 400W, but check the actual power usage of the various components. Don't forget, they're also talking a 300W 80+ PSU, not just any 300W PSU. Absolute worst, it'll supply 300*.8=240W. A Core 2 Duo sinks 65W max, the 9800 Eco they reference (which doesn't have a secondary power connection) should be about 66W full-blast (A regular 9800GT is 110W max, so 110*.6=66W), then you have hard drives (~15W each max) the RAM would be maybe 20W at the very high end, a standard DVD drive is about 25... 65+66+15+20+25 is 191W, only 80% of the capacity of the PSU when the machine is running every component full-bore.
My Corolla gets 0-60 in 9.5 seconds, and it gets less than 40MPG with the new ratings. I wouldn't mind a car that went faster and used less fuel.
Sure, you can melt gold out of them. At the same time, you aerosolize all kinds of fun chemicals. Especially in older boards, that can include arsenic, mercury, various hydrocarbons, all kinds of stuff that's wonderful to breathe in.
What Microsoft SHOULD have done was not install the add-on automatically at all. Only offer it as an optional update... I know they do that for some things, like .NET in general. Extending .NET to hook into additional software should require additional positive steps.
There seem to be quite a few posts in that article about the Sun extension being bad, how it should have been opt-in rather than opt-out. And the author of the post is obviously not happy with what happened. There were a few people defending Sun in that article, just like you're defending Microsoft.
Really... just because you have a hard-on for MS doesn't mean everyone does. There are quite a few Slashdot users that don't think EITHER of these actions were right.
A used game isn't typically materially different from a new one. Why not charge a substantial portion of the price of a new game? Sans manual and case, sure... but I just don't buy those. But I'll happily pay $5 less for a used than a new game if everything's in good condition. It's still a savings over the new game price.
What exactly is the difference between a used and a new copy of the game? Really... you can check out the case and the instruction booklet before you buy it. If they don't exist, that's a very valid reason for getting a new copy instead of the used one. I buy mostly used games because new ones are way too expensive, but I'll buy new ones if the only used copy is in the crappy case. I have no qualms with saving $5-10 because the gal who bought it the first time didn't realize that she didn't like Final Fantasy games. Or his mom got it for him and he didn't really want that, he wanted Halo.
Right. If they run when you pull the metal bit out, they aren't the type for violent crime. When in the fuck did the entire world become scared of it's own shadow?
I concur. Especially after having read Not Always Right lately.
Windows developers who don't care about lying on their resume. Ever read the Daily WTF? There are a lot of people who don't even know enough to know jack shit about development but lie through their teeth on their resumes, and get jobs because of it. And since they're willing to take less money than qualified devs, the HR buffoons who just hire people and don't actually know anything about the actual job requirements just rubber stamp them through since the resume has all the required bullet points and they've got the lowest salary requirements.
Why no, I'm not a cynic. Why do you ask?
Next time you see a piece of metal in an ATM you should lean up against the wall a few steps away and call the cops, see if they want to catch someone in the act of trying to scam an ATM. If it's a slow night, you might get an officer to respond.
There is some amount of "inducement" that lawyers provide. Get enough lawyers (or people in general), and you are bound to have more than a few that don't give a shit about ethics, even if they pledged to uphold them and know them. The phrase "ambulance chaser" isn't commonly known because it sounds funny... it's commonly known because there are a few lawyers that fuck it up for all the honest ones. Just like it only takes one fucknugget to screw up traffic for everyone else driving. The point is, if you want to sue someone over something, you can almost always find a lawyer to take your case, and places like hospitals make huge targets because of the emotions, physical risk and money involved.
Really? It just doesn't look like what you're used to? You realize that something can't be better without being different, right? Give different a chance... it may grow on you.
Gotta hate wasting good money on a shitty product, eh? Caveat emptor.
If you say "Here's a Sony for $1000, and here's a El-Knockoffo for $800", most people will buy the Sony. For almost all consumers, the brand is important, often more important than the actual quality. Or are you saying that Nike has to have gone out of business years ago since there are cheap knock-offs of their product? The exact same forces would take effect for Nintendo.
Does your hardware include a two or more core CPU? CoreAVC is a multi-threaded decoder that doesn't require GPU support, and if you're using a *nix, you can build mplayer from source and get pretty good multi-threaded performance. The mplayer-mt + the new tear-free Xv in the open-source radeon drivers has made my media center awesome (mmmm, 61" 1080p...)