Ironically, think of the BSD licenses as being gift-culture-centric: when the programmer gives away their work, they have no control over how their gift is used.
The GPL licenses are more of an exchange-culture approach: I give you my code in return for you giving me any code you modify or add to it (if you ever redistribute it).
--LP, putting a different twist on ESR's anthropological gift/exchange culture analogies
P.S. To address your question more specifically, the GPL is basically forced sharing. It inhibits leeching a free resource, which may or may not yield more freedom for a creator, contributor or user of the resource, depending on their goals.
The GPL does raise the costs (barriers to entry) of someone using the 'embrace, extend, extinguish' strategy against you based on the software you built (see: BSD TCP/IP stack). Of course, neither approach eliminates it.
Good example. Kyro is a rev of the tile-based PowerVR technology. (I mentioned them as scanline based on memories of their earliest, earliest stuff but they've clearly been doing tile-based stuff for years now.) If it had ever shown up as faster than NVidia/ATI by an interesting amount, I'd consider it a possible landscape-altering innovation. But they haven't even matched them AFAIK. So they have to charge less for the card in an attempt to make it "faster than comparably priced cards" as even the most flattering reviews linked to by this Kyro website indicate. Which is nice but hardly a compelling technological breakthrough.
Besides what I mentioned earlier, another basic downside is this: a tile based renderer makes sense if there is a lot of 'overdraw' where a given pixel on the screen is redrawn multiple times for each object between eye's viewpoint and the horizon. Then the bandwidth savings of tile-based approaches payoff. But most FPS game and flight simulators have pretty low overdraw as part of the basic tuning process for more conventional architectures. I recall one of the Quakes having average overdraw per pixel of about 1.25, since BSP trees ensured that you only drew the nearest walls, and only a few pixels on average would be drawn multiple times (the portion of the screen filled by bad guys or in-room objects). In such a case, getting tile-based speedups above 25% (and that itself is a best best case) takes some other advantage besides the back-end memory bandwidth one.
First of all, nobody uses scanline rendering. Maybe NEC PowerVR if they're still around. 'Scanline' as most graphics guys use the term means you do hidden surface removal with something like Brezenham's algorithm rather than a Z-buffer. But everybody uses Z buffers and, as far as I can tell, a 'sort-middle' approach.
Second, tile-based rendering has been tried many many times, both by high-end graphics companies (HP's PixelFlow effort a few years back) and by low-end companies (PowerVR's scanline approach, Dynamic Pictures did tiles under the covers IIRC, MS Talisman, PixelFusion, Gigapixel, and others I'm no doubt forgetting of the 40+ PC 3D companies that were around 5 years ago...). Basically it's a loser. It doesn't fit well with DirectX and OpenGL APIs, it creates almost as many problems as it solves (e.g. load-balancing among tiles, bandwidth-sucking data overlap/duplication among tiles), and the marginal improvements it might generate in theory in speed are outweighed by the retraining time required for graphics developers worldwide to learn programming techniques oriented around tile-based hardware. I could describe these problems in more detail if you indicate interest in a follow-up posting, but I don't have the time now in the middle of the day.
Pixel and vertex shaders are at least relatively innovative. If they can figure out how to tie together not just 2 or 4, but 8 or 32 together in a simple, yet flexible and comprehensible way (I saw Pat Hanrahan give a proposal on how to do this at Eurographics a couple years ago) that makes it easier for developers to use them, that'd be an innovation in parallelism that really pays off IMHO.
--LP
Disclaimer: Any 3D expertise I have is a bit rusty. Feel free to correct any technical misstatements.
It's pretty obvious to me that OSDN has a vested interest in making their audience look as professional as possible. They can then justify higher advertising rates on their websites if they can show that open-source people = experienced (high-priced, good purchasing power/influence) IT professionals.
I'm not saying that OSDN slanted the methodology or results. I am saying its in their interest to do so, something worth keeping in mind. I'd agree that a survey is better than wild speculation, and a partner like BCG may help credibility of the results.
I thought it wasn't 60k bugs, but 60k "potential bug warnings" that came from a lint-like tool MS used that automates the search for potentially problematic code. It's not clear how many were false alarms and how many were actually bugs.
For under a thousand dollars more (<$3000), you can get nifty Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with a 1600x1200 (UXGA) 15" LCD plus a second 21" monitor with 1600x1200, supported by an Nvidia GeForce 2 Go 32 MB graphics card running in "TwinView" mode either in Windows2000 or X-Windows. I've done that.
Its major focuses are faster geometry and lower price... at the cost of reduced texture and AA features.
...
IP (and future versions of IP) are for folks looking for a lower cost option and not needing all of the bells and whistles of IR... but still wanting something way cooler and way more expandable/scalable than desktop 3D.
Put another way, IP is more for mechanical CAD guys designing precision-shaped parts (who don't care about the colors/textures too much), and IR is for people in the film or flight simulation type crowds (and other markets that I'm conveniently forgetting.)
Look, if you want to condemn the "cult-like" mentality, stop perpetuating it. Specifically by avoiding broad unsubstantiated claims taking on the tone of religious fervor.
Like "GCC isn't the worlds best" (best at what, pray tell? speed? ubiquity? price? portability?)
Like "everyone believed that if you took the money out of programming somehow you magically got software that was faster/better/more innovative" (like those Open Source guys who said it was OK to make money?)
Like "give me stuff for free and feed me a philosophy that lets me pirate everything" (conflating piracy with free software, not recognizing the legitimate desires of people to legally have more control of what they get, and legally paying less?)
Open source is not a panacea. It's a way of licensing technology whose strengths and weaknesses will be more and more recongized over time, but whose pre-eminent virtue of providing greater freedom will offer increasing benefits as software monopolies continue to increase their control and prices so that they can keep their share price going up.
Open Source also has one other long-term, difficult to refute benefit. The fact that Microsoft can't forever grow the software market and must illegally leverage its way into adjacent communications markets (MSN, VoIP), media markets (Slate, Corbis) and consumer services markets (Expedia) is still mostly being glossed over as premature. But it is not being ignored.
--LinuxParanoid, who doesn't think these Linux guys are paranoid enough...;)
It's not exactly new news that Intel's compilers are better than Microsoft's or GCC, as any astute watcher or compiler of SPECbench results can tell you. GCC has never been a performance barn-burner. People who wanted that paid the money, signed the forms, and tweaked their software to run under Intel's compilers.
No, what's great news is that Intel's compilers are available now on Linux. So an ISV like Red Hat can compile the OS (or specific math libraries) on them for either real-user or benchmarking benefits.
"Driving a stake through the heart" of GCC is a gross exaggeration, given the ubiquity, freedom, and free beer nature of GCC. "Giving GCC a kick in the pants" might be more accurate. And a good thing, too.
Keep reading. Verse 5 mentions the that the Sea (a huge bowl) had a rim shaped "like a lily blossom", implying (as seen in one diagram) that the top edge of the bowl, where the diameter would most naturally be measured (by a rod-like device), would be larger than the diameter towards the main part of the bowl, around which the circumference was most likely measured (by a cord or string). Those assumptions are then consistent with a much more accurate value of pi.
The width of the brim, mentioned in verse 5 as being a "handsbreadth in thickness", may also be relevant. If the circumference was measured around the inner rim, and the diameter was measured from outer rim to outer rim, one gets a value of value for pi within a couple percentage points due to the thickness of the 'bowl', something a Jewish rabbi named Nehemiah pointed out around 150 AD.
Not that the bible is a mathematics text. Personally, I suspect they rounded some of those cubit figures off a bit. In science we call that "significant figures", right?
Ironically, the reason why CIOs feel empowered is that they probably have most of what they want out of their PCs; they're "good enough". Improvements post-Win2000 and older Office suites don't look that compelling. So why lock yourself into some unnecessary upgrade stream?
Just remember, when you are subscribing to a service, rather than purchasing an upgrade, you have a lot less leverage as a buyer to control your costs. The CIOs, mostly managers of 'corporate cost centers', obviously recognized that.
Second, the technological rate of progress for a service provider will always be slower because its so much easier for the vendor to retain its existing revenue base than to take the risks of developing new products. For example, I predict that the more you see Microsoft switching to a subscription-based software business model, the less focus you'll see on features (needed to get new business) and the more focus you'll see on risk-averse issues (like security and availability) to insure nothing rocks the revenue boat. Oh wait, Microsoft just announced that, didn't they?
I just hope we don't start designing things such that people say "oh, to do that just reconfigure your kernel with the foobar option". Feature sets should generally not require kernel recompile imho. For a long time, this was a UNIX weakness.
If we can avoid this (which is after all worse than the old "reboot NT to configure something"), I'm for it 100%. I'm not saying that you have to recompile the kernel much nowdays (I had to once to get an unsupported Ethernet driver working), but kernel recompile gets really easy, I'm nervous that people would start to rely on that way of doing things. Which would be bad.
When I joined a web startup a couple years ago, the Perl website was way behind schedule. To hedge its bets, which at the time, seemed reasonable, management tried to outsource our website to another development company that had been using Rational, UML and coding in Java for a year or so. Parallel competing teams, essentially. They promised the site'd be done in 6 weeks with 5 people working on it. While I don't think all 5 worked on it solid over that timeframe, it ended up taking them 4 months and two of us slinging perl were in comparable shape in under 2 months, adding marketing's latest feature requests as we went. (The perl team did use flow diagrams; nothing fancy though.) One may debate quality, but the key criteria clear to all involved for success at the time was 'time to market', and the team using Rational ended up late to market, and their work was abandoned as too little too late. It was a learning experience for all involved.
You somehow missed quoting my second sentence which seems to me completely consistent with your perspective.
"The gold isn't the issue; it's who cares most and who acts most effectively upon it. "
I'm not disputing the perception of reality you describe in your post. Except to add that we can do something about it, if we care enough. Money is not the bottleneck. Interest is. If the American consumer does nothing, he or she is indicating that giving the record companies more control is acceptable. Most consumers do. It's all fine and good for us to whine about corporate money, influence, politicians, etc, but frankly, the power vaccuum is coming from us. Corporations do not vote these guys in office. We do.
Now every once in a while, ignorance of what to do is the bottleneck. Which is why I recommend people check out the EFF. Or a website like NY Fair Use.
Regarding "he-who-has-the-gold-makes-the-rules," remember that the American consumer is the one with the gold, and we give it to record companies and we make the rules. The gold isn't the issue; it's who cares most and who acts most effectively upon it.
Best to do something yourself, but if not, haven't you at least helped support the EFF who is speaking out on this?
--LP (no EFF connection other than as a supporter and fan)
Does this mean I'm ethically challenged if I voted for penguin crackers in that Nabisco "what should the next animal cracker be" poll due to a link I received on some Perl Mongers email list?
Why not? you just spent ~$60 (15B) to bailout the airlines, and you didn't even notice did you.
I get annoyed by critics (and news outlets which seem to me to be slightly liberally biased) who use the term bailout to imply that we gave the airlines $15 billion. What most fail to mention in their rhetorical flourish is that two thirds of that amount is funny money that hasn't been spent- it was "loan guarantees". I dunno, given the circling financial vultures ready to peck airline companies to death by shutting off their lines of credit given materially adverse circumstances, it seems like a reasonably prudent measure to me.
As for the $5 billion, my $20 as you say, I don't begrudge it. We did shut down all the airports in the country in the name of national security for four days or so, right? While one critique I ran across put the four-day cost to airlines at $1.2 billion, I'm sure if airlines (like our local gas stations) had raised prices post-disaster my ticket home for christmas would have gone up a lot more than that. It seemed the same as usual.
Doomsday Book has especially nice resonance when read today, with threats of plagues in the air. (no pun intended)
--LP
Why broadband will be a long time coming
on
Why ADCo?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
MS and Intel gave us enormous improvements in their products over time in order to sell us upgrades. Telcos and Cable companies, who sell you a subscription service, have substantially less incentive to improve their product. Better to charge you the same for the same old service, and keep what profits they can from the underlying semiconductor/optic cost drops.
I fear that both these players are going to stick with 1 Megabitish services for a long long time. Video that fills my screen still seems a decade away.
If telcos gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their existing revenue model to VoIP/Microsoft.
If cable companies gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their control over video distribution channels to the surf-anywhere web.
I think broadband will be accessible for nearly anyone who wants it, and at cheaper prices than today (i.e. $20/mo, not $50). But I'm not convinced the bandwidth is going to start going up at Moore's law rates of the underlying semiconductor/optic technology improvements. Not even close. The geographic monopolies are too strong, and the benefits of cable/telco collusion are too profitable for them to not keep us on the leash of slow improvements.
Combining a couple of your observations, the consistent rewards plus the social structure of online games very much provide an environment of "meritocracy". The justice of such an environment has a subtle but remarkable appeal.
EverQuest is a MUD (Multi User Dungeon/dimension); its a game.
Furcadia is really not a MUD; it's a MUSH (Multi User Shared/simulated Hallucination); it's a chat room.
Obviously MUD and MUSH online environments evoke aspects of both game and chat room, but to different degrees.
I still think the "points" orientation is more compelling than the "relationships." Examining the number of commercial companies targetting MUD-like environments vs MUSH-like ones, plus a some pseudo-statistical data would support this view.
Why does the population prefer this? I'll leave that question to your imagination or more followups.
The thing that makes these games so popular and addictive is the human interaction element
Nah, the addictive thing there is the notion of "points", which represent a goal that is easily optimized for. In EverQuest and various muds, the points are "pieces of equipment" or stats or something similar. Your brain likes optimizing for clear goals. Which is why you karma whore on/. Human interaction merely means it takes a little longer to get over your addiction... you excuse mechanisms for not quitting (I have friends there...) are stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, think of the BSD licenses as being gift-culture-centric: when the programmer gives away their work, they have no control over how their gift is used.
The GPL licenses are more of an exchange-culture approach: I give you my code in return for you giving me any code you modify or add to it (if you ever redistribute it).
--LP, putting a different twist on ESR's anthropological gift/exchange culture analogies
P.S. To address your question more specifically, the GPL is basically forced sharing. It inhibits leeching a free resource, which may or may not yield more freedom for a creator, contributor or user of the resource, depending on their goals.
The GPL does raise the costs (barriers to entry) of someone using the 'embrace, extend, extinguish' strategy against you based on the software you built (see: BSD TCP/IP stack). Of course, neither approach eliminates it.
Good example. Kyro is a rev of the tile-based PowerVR technology. (I mentioned them as scanline based on memories of their earliest, earliest stuff but they've clearly been doing tile-based stuff for years now.) If it had ever shown up as faster than NVidia/ATI by an interesting amount, I'd consider it a possible landscape-altering innovation. But they haven't even matched them AFAIK. So they have to charge less for the card in an attempt to make it "faster than comparably priced cards" as even the most flattering reviews linked to by this Kyro website indicate. Which is nice but hardly a compelling technological breakthrough.
Besides what I mentioned earlier, another basic downside is this: a tile based renderer makes sense if there is a lot of 'overdraw' where a given pixel on the screen is redrawn multiple times for each object between eye's viewpoint and the horizon. Then the bandwidth savings of tile-based approaches payoff. But most FPS game and flight simulators have pretty low overdraw as part of the basic tuning process for more conventional architectures. I recall one of the Quakes having average overdraw per pixel of about 1.25, since BSP trees ensured that you only drew the nearest walls, and only a few pixels on average would be drawn multiple times (the portion of the screen filled by bad guys or in-room objects). In such a case, getting tile-based speedups above 25% (and that itself is a best best case) takes some other advantage besides the back-end memory bandwidth one.
--LP
First of all, nobody uses scanline rendering. Maybe NEC PowerVR if they're still around. 'Scanline' as most graphics guys use the term means you do hidden surface removal with something like Brezenham's algorithm rather than a Z-buffer. But everybody uses Z buffers and, as far as I can tell, a 'sort-middle' approach.
Second, tile-based rendering has been tried many many times, both by high-end graphics companies (HP's PixelFlow effort a few years back) and by low-end companies (PowerVR's scanline approach, Dynamic Pictures did tiles under the covers IIRC, MS Talisman, PixelFusion, Gigapixel, and others I'm no doubt forgetting of the 40+ PC 3D companies that were around 5 years ago...). Basically it's a loser. It doesn't fit well with DirectX and OpenGL APIs, it creates almost as many problems as it solves (e.g. load-balancing among tiles, bandwidth-sucking data overlap/duplication among tiles), and the marginal improvements it might generate in theory in speed are outweighed by the retraining time required for graphics developers worldwide to learn programming techniques oriented around tile-based hardware. I could describe these problems in more detail if you indicate interest in a follow-up posting, but I don't have the time now in the middle of the day.
Pixel and vertex shaders are at least relatively innovative. If they can figure out how to tie together not just 2 or 4, but 8 or 32 together in a simple, yet flexible and comprehensible way (I saw Pat Hanrahan give a proposal on how to do this at Eurographics a couple years ago) that makes it easier for developers to use them, that'd be an innovation in parallelism that really pays off IMHO.
--LP
Disclaimer: Any 3D expertise I have is a bit rusty. Feel free to correct any technical misstatements.
It's pretty obvious to me that OSDN has a vested interest in making their audience look as professional as possible. They can then justify higher advertising rates on their websites if they can show that open-source people = experienced (high-priced, good purchasing power/influence) IT professionals.
I'm not saying that OSDN slanted the methodology or results. I am saying its in their interest to do so, something worth keeping in mind. I'd agree that a survey is better than wild speculation, and a partner like BCG may help credibility of the results.
--LP
I thought it wasn't 60k bugs, but 60k "potential bug warnings" that came from a lint-like tool MS used that automates the search for potentially problematic code. It's not clear how many were false alarms and how many were actually bugs.
For under a thousand dollars more (<$3000), you can get nifty Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with a 1600x1200 (UXGA) 15" LCD plus a second 21" monitor with 1600x1200, supported by an Nvidia GeForce 2 Go 32 MB graphics card running in "TwinView" mode either in Windows2000 or X-Windows. I've done that.
:-)
3200 x 1200, baby. It's nice.
--LP
Its major focuses are faster geometry and lower price... at the cost of reduced texture and AA features.
...
IP (and future versions of IP) are for folks looking for a lower cost option and not needing all of the bells and whistles of IR... but still wanting something way cooler and way more expandable/scalable than desktop 3D.
Put another way, IP is more for mechanical CAD guys designing precision-shaped parts (who don't care about the colors/textures too much), and IR is for people in the film or flight simulation type crowds (and other markets that I'm conveniently forgetting.)
Like "GCC isn't the worlds best" (best at what, pray tell? speed? ubiquity? price? portability?)
Like "everyone believed that if you took the money out of programming somehow you magically got software that was faster/better/more innovative" (like those Open Source guys who said it was OK to make money?)
Like "give me stuff for free and feed me a philosophy that lets me pirate everything" (conflating piracy with free software, not recognizing the legitimate desires of people to legally have more control of what they get, and legally paying less?)
;)
Open source is not a panacea. It's a way of licensing technology whose strengths and weaknesses will be more and more recongized over time, but whose pre-eminent virtue of providing greater freedom will offer increasing benefits as software monopolies continue to increase their control and prices so that they can keep their share price going up.
Open Source also has one other long-term, difficult to refute benefit. The fact that Microsoft can't forever grow the software market and must illegally leverage its way into adjacent communications markets (MSN, VoIP), media markets (Slate, Corbis) and consumer services markets (Expedia) is still mostly being glossed over as premature. But it is not being ignored.
--LinuxParanoid, who doesn't think these Linux guys are paranoid enough...
It's not exactly new news that Intel's compilers are better than Microsoft's or GCC, as any astute watcher or compiler of SPECbench results can tell you. GCC has never been a performance barn-burner. People who wanted that paid the money, signed the forms, and tweaked their software to run under Intel's compilers.
No, what's great news is that Intel's compilers are available now on Linux. So an ISV like Red Hat can compile the OS (or specific math libraries) on them for either real-user or benchmarking benefits.
"Driving a stake through the heart" of GCC is a gross exaggeration, given the ubiquity, freedom, and free beer nature of GCC. "Giving GCC a kick in the pants" might be more accurate. And a good thing, too.
--LP
Keep reading. Verse 5 mentions the that the Sea (a huge bowl) had a rim shaped "like a lily blossom", implying (as seen in one diagram) that the top edge of the bowl, where the diameter would most naturally be measured (by a rod-like device), would be larger than the diameter towards the main part of the bowl, around which the circumference was most likely measured (by a cord or string). Those assumptions are then consistent with a much more accurate value of pi.
The width of the brim, mentioned in verse 5 as being a "handsbreadth in thickness", may also be relevant. If the circumference was measured around the inner rim, and the diameter was measured from outer rim to outer rim, one gets a value of value for pi within a couple percentage points due to the thickness of the 'bowl', something a Jewish rabbi named Nehemiah pointed out around 150 AD.
Not that the bible is a mathematics text. Personally, I suspect they rounded some of those cubit figures off a bit. In science we call that "significant figures", right?
--LP
Ironically, the reason why CIOs feel empowered is that they probably have most of what they want out of their PCs; they're "good enough". Improvements post-Win2000 and older Office suites don't look that compelling. So why lock yourself into some unnecessary upgrade stream?
--LP
Just remember, when you are subscribing to a service, rather than purchasing an upgrade, you have a lot less leverage as a buyer to control your costs. The CIOs, mostly managers of 'corporate cost centers', obviously recognized that.
Second, the technological rate of progress for a service provider will always be slower because its so much easier for the vendor to retain its existing revenue base than to take the risks of developing new products. For example, I predict that the more you see Microsoft switching to a subscription-based software business model, the less focus you'll see on features (needed to get new business) and the more focus you'll see on risk-averse issues (like security and availability) to insure nothing rocks the revenue boat. Oh wait, Microsoft just announced that, didn't they?
--LP
Easier to use tools are great.
I just hope we don't start designing things such that people say "oh, to do that just reconfigure your kernel with the foobar option". Feature sets should generally not require kernel recompile imho. For a long time, this was a UNIX weakness.
If we can avoid this (which is after all worse than the old "reboot NT to configure something"), I'm for it 100%. I'm not saying that you have to recompile the kernel much nowdays (I had to once to get an unsupported Ethernet driver working), but kernel recompile gets really easy, I'm nervous that people would start to rely on that way of doing things. Which would be bad.
--LP
A quick real-life anecdote to affirm your point.
When I joined a web startup a couple years ago, the Perl website was way behind schedule. To hedge its bets, which at the time, seemed reasonable, management tried to outsource our website to another development company that had been using Rational, UML and coding in Java for a year or so. Parallel competing teams, essentially. They promised the site'd be done in 6 weeks with 5 people working on it. While I don't think all 5 worked on it solid over that timeframe, it ended up taking them 4 months and two of us slinging perl were in comparable shape in under 2 months, adding marketing's latest feature requests as we went. (The perl team did use flow diagrams; nothing fancy though.) One may debate quality, but the key criteria clear to all involved for success at the time was 'time to market', and the team using Rational ended up late to market, and their work was abandoned as too little too late. It was a learning experience for all involved.
--LP
CmdrTaco is a publisher, not a journalist.
Was the publication of Hearst's editorials in his paper a journalistic travesty?
--LP
You somehow missed quoting my second sentence which seems to me completely consistent with your perspective.
"The gold isn't the issue; it's who cares most and who acts most effectively upon it. "
I'm not disputing the perception of reality you describe in your post. Except to add that we can do something about it, if we care enough. Money is not the bottleneck. Interest is. If the American consumer does nothing, he or she is indicating that giving the record companies more control is acceptable. Most consumers do. It's all fine and good for us to whine about corporate money, influence, politicians, etc, but frankly, the power vaccuum is coming from us. Corporations do not vote these guys in office. We do.
Now every once in a while, ignorance of what to do is the bottleneck. Which is why I recommend people check out the EFF. Or a website like NY Fair Use.
--LP
Regarding "he-who-has-the-gold-makes-the-rules," remember that the American consumer is the one with the gold, and we give it to record companies and we make the rules. The gold isn't the issue; it's who cares most and who acts most effectively upon it.
Best to do something yourself, but if not, haven't you at least helped support the EFF who is speaking out on this?
--LP (no EFF connection other than as a supporter and fan)
Does this mean I'm ethically challenged if I voted for penguin crackers in that Nabisco "what should the next animal cracker be" poll due to a link I received on some Perl Mongers email list?
;-)
--LP
Why not? you just spent ~$60 (15B) to bailout the airlines, and you didn't even notice did you.
I get annoyed by critics (and news outlets which seem to me to be slightly liberally biased) who use the term bailout to imply that we gave the airlines $15 billion. What most fail to mention in their rhetorical flourish is that two thirds of that amount is funny money that hasn't been spent- it was "loan guarantees". I dunno, given the circling financial vultures ready to peck airline companies to death by shutting off their lines of credit given materially adverse circumstances, it seems like a reasonably prudent measure to me.
As for the $5 billion, my $20 as you say, I don't begrudge it. We did shut down all the airports in the country in the name of national security for four days or so, right? While one critique I ran across put the four-day cost to airlines at $1.2 billion, I'm sure if airlines (like our local gas stations) had raised prices post-disaster my ticket home for christmas would have gone up a lot more than that. It seemed the same as usual.
--LP
How about calling it "Defenestration"?
Nah, too subtle.
--LP
Doomsday Book has especially nice resonance when read today, with threats of plagues in the air. (no pun intended)
--LP
MS and Intel gave us enormous improvements in their products over time in order to sell us upgrades. Telcos and Cable companies, who sell you a subscription service, have substantially less incentive to improve their product. Better to charge you the same for the same old service, and keep what profits they can from the underlying semiconductor/optic cost drops.
I fear that both these players are going to stick with 1 Megabitish services for a long long time. Video that fills my screen still seems a decade away.
If telcos gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their existing revenue model to VoIP/Microsoft.
If cable companies gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their control over video distribution channels to the surf-anywhere web.
I think broadband will be accessible for nearly anyone who wants it, and at cheaper prices than today (i.e. $20/mo, not $50). But I'm not convinced the bandwidth is going to start going up at Moore's law rates of the underlying semiconductor/optic technology improvements. Not even close. The geographic monopolies are too strong, and the benefits of cable/telco collusion are too profitable for them to not keep us on the leash of slow improvements.
--LP
You make good points; I'd basically agree.
Combining a couple of your observations, the consistent rewards plus the social structure of online games very much provide an environment of "meritocracy". The justice of such an environment has a subtle but remarkable appeal.
--LP
EverQuest is a MUD (Multi User Dungeon/dimension); its a game.
Furcadia is really not a MUD; it's a MUSH (Multi User Shared/simulated Hallucination); it's a chat room.
Obviously MUD and MUSH online environments evoke aspects of both game and chat room, but to different degrees.
I still think the "points" orientation is more compelling than the "relationships." Examining the number of commercial companies targetting MUD-like environments vs MUSH-like ones, plus a some pseudo-statistical data would support this view.
Why does the population prefer this? I'll leave that question to your imagination or more followups.
--LP
The thing that makes these games so popular and addictive is the human interaction element
/. Human interaction merely means it takes a little longer to get over your addiction... you excuse mechanisms for not quitting (I have friends there...) are stronger.
;)
Nah, the addictive thing there is the notion of "points", which represent a goal that is easily optimized for. In EverQuest and various muds, the points are "pieces of equipment" or stats or something similar. Your brain likes optimizing for clear goals. Which is why you karma whore on
--LP