um, ready corys first post...he got that from my article on engadget
That article talks about the problem, i.e. downloading being broken. The one you submitted to Slashdot talks about the solution (hex editing), which was sourced from here, ja? Perhaps they should be getting the ad revenue?
But yes, I am glad you post as yourself; it's a point in your favour.
OK, here's a comparison... I have a blog, on which I post things I find interesting. The blog has a couple of text ads. If I submit an article to Slashdot, it's usually something that's also on my blog. So we are ethically on par at this point, ja? The difference is (if you look at my article history) that when I post an article to Slashdot, it doesn't link to or even mention my blog -- it links directly to the information source.
It's obvious from your article that the original source is the previous day's article from BoingBoing. You even mention in paragraph four that you've been following the story there.
So, if you're excited and want to share this news for nerds with your fellow Slashdotters, then the obvious thing to do in your/. article is to either link to BoingBoing, or link to the place Cory found the info. The fact that you linked to yourself instead -- as you always do -- naturally makes us think you wish to slashdot your ad impressions.
To me, Slashdot is a community for exchanging info, journals etc, and I don't mind that it's ad-supported because it obviously costs them a shitload to run and staff. I'm guessing that the revenue is on the same order of magnitude as the expenses and labor. Likewise, my own blog costs little and brings in little. I don't think that either Slashdot or I am being greedy.
It looks to me like you're not satisfied with building your own community and making a reasonable amount from your advertising. Instead, about twice a month you slashdot your ads to have another big bite of the cherry. This makes me think that a) you're greedy and / or b) you're a business graduate pretending to be a geek like the rest of us.
Then why not link to the original article instead of a paraphrase thereof on your ad-supported site? Pretty much everyone here has a blog or site of some type, yet only you and Roland Pipequalle are ill-mannered enough to direct people to yours instead of the original source. Not only is it deceptive, but it shows a sad lack of creativity. Go off and write some interesting journalism / software / whatever, then you can link to yourself for the right reasons.
one way to combat this problem is look from the other end, we should educate the public and discourage people from doing any business with online sellers.
This sort of educational can prevent rational adults being taken in by spam, but what about the rest of the customers? What about naive teenagers, non-computer savvy old people, the mentally handicapped, the insane, people from a non-English speaking background who may have trouble distinguishing well-written spam from legit email,
people with a low IQ etc?
Con artists have been around for a lot longer than the internet, and there's never been a shortage of suckers. If we're going to beat spam, I suspect the solution will be technological for the most part.
Replying to myself after trying it out on the site. In Firefox, the right click javascript is handled first (in this case, popping up a dialogue box that says nyah nyah no downloads for you), then Firefox goes ahead an opens the right click context menu anyway. I heart Firefox.
If I don't want to vote on November 2, dammit, I don't want to vote. Who's to tell me what I have to do and when I have to do it? I can see it now. US passes law: "All eligible voters must vote or be imprisoned."
I'm an Australian, so I'll explain how it works in over here in practice. You have to show up to the polling booth and have your name marked off, but you don't have to actually pick up a ballot and vote. If you do take a ballot, but don't like any of the candidates, you can vote informally by just sticking a blank ballot in the box.
If you don't get your name marked off, they send you a letter asking you for an excuse. Any excuse will do -- if you write "I felt sick" in crayon, that's fine. If you do ignore the letter they fine you $50 of our worthless plastic money. There's no gaol time. If you complain about the fine (providing an excuse in the process), you don't have to pay it.
So, you don't have to vote, you don't even have to leave the house, you just have to have your name marked off. I can see how one might consider that an infringement of freedoms, but I think on the whole that I feel better living in a country where giving a fuck one way or the other is a requirement of citizenship.
People have seen comparisons to Pynchon (Lot 49 particularly) in William Gibson novels as well. He blogs about it here, if you're interested. Gibson says he thinks it's to do with the abrupt endings, which apply to Stephenson as well (more so, really).
My take is that cyberpunk is an outgrowth of the new wave, and the new wave placed value on non-realistic Pynchon, Kafka etc. (Norman Spinrad talks about this a bit in his book Science Fiction In The Real World).
Quite a few Slashdot readers think Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa is exploiting this site as a way of upping his ad impressions. There's a strong argument that he wants to turn the Slashdot effect into ad money, and this is supported by the habit he has of linking not to the article, but to a verbatim copy posted on his ad-supported blog. Engadget (ptorrone) are pretty dubious too, but at least they bother to write their own content.
Having said that, I don't think Roland etc are bribing the/. editors, and I don't necessarily think that their submissions should be rejected. Whether they are astroturf or not is up to the individual reader to decide, and some people seem to enjoy them. What I would like to see is the ability to let the individual block submissions from particular users somehow, either as a subscription feature (block by UID / foes list), or a Firefox extension (based on NukeAnything perhaps).
And I no, I don't have the time / skillset / influence to code the above myself. I'm just putting some ideas out for discussion.
I think, as you say, that marketing and games were a big part of it. People were just sick of Sega releasing systems with only six games, then retiring them and cranking out another. By the time they came out with the Dreamcast (which IMHO was superior to the first few generations of PS2), gamers were too scared to plonk down money for a system that might not be supported.
The Saturn did have some good games (Grandia and Radiant Silvergun spring to mind), but instead of pushing those, retailers had a small shelf with a few copies of Croc. When the PS1 came out with slick launch games and better graphics, the Saturn died horribly (and scuttled the Dreamcast en pasant, maybe).
By buying a used DVD, you are taking a used DVD off the shelf that someone else might have bought, forcing them to buy the original instead.
This assumes that the same people who trawl through ex-rental bargain bins are happy to pay full price for a new copy. I imagine that this isn't the case for most of the '2 for $x' crowd. Also, a 1/4 price DVD is more likely to be an impulse purchase than a full price copy. I just impulse bought a copy of The Thirteenth Floor for AUD$7 -- it's a fun movie but I wouldn't have paid full price for it if the bargain bin was empty.
A less intuitive but more accurate visualization is the understanding that by supporting a market for used DVDs, you push the asking price for brand-new DVDs up past what their price point would otherwise be.
This makes more sense, but unless the price doubles due to the second hand market, one and a bit DVDs are supplying two customers, which is a gain for us and a loss for them (relatively speaking).
What happened to their promise that all new portables would do MP3, and they'd have firmware updates for existing ones?
The article only mentions ATRAC, but from the translation it's hard to tell whether ATRAC is the main format or the only format. This article on the larger model mentions mp3 support.
Yeah, I think it's true that you need to be published to get published. That's why a lot of the well-known SF writers started out with short stories -- it's not such a huge risk for a magazine to include one story by an unknown writer. Even a larger fanzine might be a good place to start.
Hey, do you have any of your writing online where I can take a look at it?
You might like to try Tor also (publishers of Gene Wolfe among others). They seem pretty cool, and have a very honest guide to how they evaluate slushpile submissions, and why manuscripts get rejected:
Author is functionally illiterate.
Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
It's nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it's not the author's, and everybody's already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.
(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)
Someone could publish this book, but we don't see why it should be us.
Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.
If you got a $50 fine tomorrow, you would still get up the next day. That's not the issue.
Fair enough. I'm just saying that the benefits outweigh the cost here.
If there were a large number of people who were just as qualified to do the job, then they wouldn't be making > $150,000 a year.
TV and film aren't much of a meritocracy, really. The people being paid zillions aren't the always the best actors. For example, I'm sure Vin Diesel makes more money than, say, John Malkovich, but he's plainly the lesser actor. Or look at Sir Ian McKellen... he wan't born an old geezer, he's been a good actor all along but has had a low profile and small pay packet.
Microsoft isn't going to spend more on QA. It's not like they are budget limited now. If they wanted to spend the money, they could.
My contention is that there's better places to spend it than Bill's salary. Even if it just sits in the company bank account earning interest, that's a better return for the company than paying it out and never seeing it again. Microsoft is just an example, and the QA a dash of humour; the idea applies to any overpaid CEO and any meaningful reinvestment of the surplus money.
If Bill got paid less, he would be buying less. Further, there would be a strong incentive in that kind of case for him to get more in perks: business lunches, company housing, etc.
True enough, but a real salary cap wouldn't allow hiding the salary in a mountain of perks. There's some precendent for this in the sporting world. As for Bill buying less, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I doubt he spends all of his salary now, whereas if it were used to create lesser salaried jobs the money would be spent on rent / food / whatever (and spent locally too).
As an added bonus, not having all that money concentrated in the hands of CEOs would nicely limit their ability to influence government.
I read an interview with the LoTR sound geeks in Audio Technology (Australia) magazine and they said they'd been working on stuff for the extended edition bundle. All the box art, special features etc are apparently already complete. My guess is that it'll be out next xmas, if this season's product is the stand alone RoTK.
A student I did some group work with (a lovely, gentle guy) told me that the Tiananmen square massacre was an urban myth, and that there was no censorship in China, just a consensus not to view immoral information. And he was a smart guy too, happily wading through the most byzantine of OO designs.
Slashdot Mirror
um, ready corys first post...he got that from my article on engadget
That article talks about the problem, i.e. downloading being broken. The one you submitted to Slashdot talks about the solution (hex editing), which was sourced from here, ja? Perhaps they should be getting the ad revenue?
But yes, I am glad you post as yourself; it's a point in your favour.
OK, here's a comparison... I have a blog, on which I post things I find interesting. The blog has a couple of text ads. If I submit an article to Slashdot, it's usually something that's also on my blog. So we are ethically on par at this point, ja? The difference is (if you look at my article history) that when I post an article to Slashdot, it doesn't link to or even mention my blog -- it links directly to the information source.
/. article is to either link to BoingBoing, or link to the place Cory found the info. The fact that you linked to yourself instead -- as you always do -- naturally makes us think you wish to slashdot your ad impressions.
It's obvious from your article that the original source is the previous day's article from BoingBoing. You even mention in paragraph four that you've been following the story there.
So, if you're excited and want to share this news for nerds with your fellow Slashdotters, then the obvious thing to do in your
To me, Slashdot is a community for exchanging info, journals etc, and I don't mind that it's ad-supported because it obviously costs them a shitload to run and staff. I'm guessing that the revenue is on the same order of magnitude as the expenses and labor. Likewise, my own blog costs little and brings in little. I don't think that either Slashdot or I am being greedy.
It looks to me like you're not satisfied with building your own community and making a reasonable amount from your advertising. Instead, about twice a month you slashdot your ads to have another big bite of the cherry. This makes me think that a) you're greedy and / or b) you're a business graduate pretending to be a geek like the rest of us.
Then why not link to the original article instead of a paraphrase thereof on your ad-supported site? Pretty much everyone here has a blog or site of some type, yet only you and Roland Pipequalle are ill-mannered enough to direct people to yours instead of the original source. Not only is it deceptive, but it shows a sad lack of creativity. Go off and write some interesting journalism / software / whatever, then you can link to yourself for the right reasons.
one way to combat this problem is look from the other end, we should educate the public and discourage people from doing any business with online sellers.
This sort of educational can prevent rational adults being taken in by spam, but what about the rest of the customers? What about naive teenagers, non-computer savvy old people, the mentally handicapped, the insane, people from a non-English speaking background who may have trouble distinguishing well-written spam from legit email, people with a low IQ etc?
Con artists have been around for a lot longer than the internet, and there's never been a shortage of suckers. If we're going to beat spam, I suspect the solution will be technological for the most part.
I get 10 hours with backlight on from my SP, so this seems reasonable. (I have the sound off, tho', 'cos there's no sodding headphone jack).
That's a very strange (but highly amusing) site. Check out their graphic of the IE logo dressed as Bin Laden.
Replying to myself after trying it out on the site. In Firefox, the right click javascript is handled first (in this case, popping up a dialogue box that says nyah nyah no downloads for you), then Firefox goes ahead an opens the right click context menu anyway. I heart Firefox.
Do you just diable Javascript? 'Cause the Allow Right Click extension isn't compatible with 1.0PR1.
I'm hardcore, man, I listen to heavy et al.
If I don't want to vote on November 2, dammit, I don't want to vote. Who's to tell me what I have to do and when I have to do it? I can see it now. US passes law: "All eligible voters must vote or be imprisoned."
I'm an Australian, so I'll explain how it works in over here in practice. You have to show up to the polling booth and have your name marked off, but you don't have to actually pick up a ballot and vote. If you do take a ballot, but don't like any of the candidates, you can vote informally by just sticking a blank ballot in the box.
If you don't get your name marked off, they send you a letter asking you for an excuse. Any excuse will do -- if you write "I felt sick" in crayon, that's fine. If you do ignore the letter they fine you $50 of our worthless plastic money. There's no gaol time. If you complain about the fine (providing an excuse in the process), you don't have to pay it.
So, you don't have to vote, you don't even have to leave the house, you just have to have your name marked off. I can see how one might consider that an infringement of freedoms, but I think on the whole that I feel better living in a country where giving a fuck one way or the other is a requirement of citizenship.
People have seen comparisons to Pynchon (Lot 49 particularly) in William Gibson novels as well. He blogs about it here, if you're interested. Gibson says he thinks it's to do with the abrupt endings, which apply to Stephenson as well (more so, really).
My take is that cyberpunk is an outgrowth of the new wave, and the new wave placed value on non-realistic Pynchon, Kafka etc. (Norman Spinrad talks about this a bit in his book Science Fiction In The Real World).
Roland's UID is rpiquepa -- that should get you started : )
Quite a few Slashdot readers think Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa is exploiting this site as a way of upping his ad impressions. There's a strong argument that he wants to turn the Slashdot effect into ad money, and this is supported by the habit he has of linking not to the article, but to a verbatim copy posted on his ad-supported blog. Engadget (ptorrone) are pretty dubious too, but at least they bother to write their own content.
/. editors, and I don't necessarily think that their submissions should be rejected. Whether they are astroturf or not is up to the individual reader to decide, and some people seem to enjoy them. What I would like to see is the ability to let the individual block submissions from particular users somehow, either as a subscription feature (block by UID / foes list), or a Firefox extension (based on NukeAnything perhaps).
Having said that, I don't think Roland etc are bribing the
And I no, I don't have the time / skillset / influence to code the above myself. I'm just putting some ideas out for discussion.
I think, as you say, that marketing and games were a big part of it. People were just sick of Sega releasing systems with only six games, then retiring them and cranking out another. By the time they came out with the Dreamcast (which IMHO was superior to the first few generations of PS2), gamers were too scared to plonk down money for a system that might not be supported.
The Saturn did have some good games (Grandia and Radiant Silvergun spring to mind), but instead of pushing those, retailers had a small shelf with a few copies of Croc. When the PS1 came out with slick launch games and better graphics, the Saturn died horribly (and scuttled the Dreamcast en pasant, maybe).
You might be on to something with the Dreamcast, but I think the Saturn failed on its own lack of merit. The Saturn wiki entry is very enlightening.
By buying a used DVD, you are taking a used DVD off the shelf that someone else might have bought, forcing them to buy the original instead.
This assumes that the same people who trawl through ex-rental bargain bins are happy to pay full price for a new copy. I imagine that this isn't the case for most of the '2 for $x' crowd. Also, a 1/4 price DVD is more likely to be an impulse purchase than a full price copy. I just impulse bought a copy of The Thirteenth Floor for AUD$7 -- it's a fun movie but I wouldn't have paid full price for it if the bargain bin was empty.
A less intuitive but more accurate visualization is the understanding that by supporting a market for used DVDs, you push the asking price for brand-new DVDs up past what their price point would otherwise be.
This makes more sense, but unless the price doubles due to the second hand market, one and a bit DVDs are supplying two customers, which is a gain for us and a loss for them (relatively speaking).
What happened to their promise that all new portables would do MP3, and they'd have firmware updates for existing ones?
The article only mentions ATRAC, but from the translation it's hard to tell whether ATRAC is the main format or the only format. This article on the larger model mentions mp3 support.
Yeah, I think it's true that you need to be published to get published. That's why a lot of the well-known SF writers started out with short stories -- it's not such a huge risk for a magazine to include one story by an unknown writer. Even a larger fanzine might be a good place to start.
Hey, do you have any of your writing online where I can take a look at it?
This makes sense if you think of the Democrats as a centrist party. 'Liberal' more accurately describes a party like the Greens.
(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)
- Someone could publish this book, but we don't see why it should be us.
- Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
- It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.
- Buy this book.
Full article here.Unfortunately, the solution is going to have to be different.
Awww. I was looking forward to teleporting teenage girls into my futuristic rotating prison complex.
If you got a $50 fine tomorrow, you would still get up the next day. That's not the issue.
Fair enough. I'm just saying that the benefits outweigh the cost here.
If there were a large number of people who were just as qualified to do the job, then they wouldn't be making > $150,000 a year.
TV and film aren't much of a meritocracy, really. The people being paid zillions aren't the always the best actors. For example, I'm sure Vin Diesel makes more money than, say, John Malkovich, but he's plainly the lesser actor. Or look at Sir Ian McKellen... he wan't born an old geezer, he's been a good actor all along but has had a low profile and small pay packet.
Microsoft isn't going to spend more on QA. It's not like they are budget limited now. If they wanted to spend the money, they could.
My contention is that there's better places to spend it than Bill's salary. Even if it just sits in the company bank account earning interest, that's a better return for the company than paying it out and never seeing it again. Microsoft is just an example, and the QA a dash of humour; the idea applies to any overpaid CEO and any meaningful reinvestment of the surplus money.
If Bill got paid less, he would be buying less. Further, there would be a strong incentive in that kind of case for him to get more in perks: business lunches, company housing, etc.
True enough, but a real salary cap wouldn't allow hiding the salary in a mountain of perks. There's some precendent for this in the sporting world. As for Bill buying less, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I doubt he spends all of his salary now, whereas if it were used to create lesser salaried jobs the money would be spent on rent / food / whatever (and spent locally too).
As an added bonus, not having all that money concentrated in the hands of CEOs would nicely limit their ability to influence government.
In which city? I've never heard anything of sprinkler systems being permanently banned, can't see that going down well.
The ban comes in next year; it was mentioned vaguely in the SMH on Saturday and Sunday.
I read an interview with the LoTR sound geeks in Audio Technology (Australia) magazine and they said they'd been working on stuff for the extended edition bundle. All the box art, special features etc are apparently already complete. My guess is that it'll be out next xmas, if this season's product is the stand alone RoTK.
A student I did some group work with (a lovely, gentle guy) told me that the Tiananmen square massacre was an urban myth, and that there was no censorship in China, just a consensus not to view immoral information. And he was a smart guy too, happily wading through the most byzantine of OO designs.