Well, if EA had been there since day one, maybe they would have missed the importance of the controller and have developed games without taking that into account. Now they have the chance to develop for the platform with some hindsight.
I mean, if I'm paying the tax already, why not copy the music illegally?
Doesn't this just give dis-incentive to people who normally buy legal music and put it on their iPod? All the music on my Nano currently is from legal sources. But as they create a Tax, its doubtfully I'd continue that practice.
And don't even try to say that this hurts the artists. 99% of those guys don't ever make a dime off their music. Most of those are actually helped by P2P as it drives people to go to their shows, for which they actually get paid. Its only the top 1% that makes money of record sales.
Hey, I'm all for the Wii. Love the thing. But I haven't picked a side in the console wars. I don't own any!
As far as the PS3, I only call it a failure because of the lack of content and the far below projected sales numbers. Technically, its a fantastic success! (Especially compared with the 360's problems.)
I don't see Microsoft walking out of the console market for two reasons:
1.) Sony's complete recent failure in the vision for their next generation console.
2.) The fact that the 360 is by far the most adopted "next gen" console and from the looks of Sony's blunders, won't be surpassed.
Even if it did cost them billions, whats that compared to market share and potential revenue? "Oh, we have a winning product with the majority of market share, lets pullout." Doubtfull.
Besides, people are missing the long term view. Microsoft understands the importance of the appliance entertainment computing market, and the 360 ties in perfectly with this.
If BP and other large energy companies fund this type of research because they know it won't ever be practical to grow gasoline. Even the most efficient converters from sunlight to sugar or ethanol aren't even close to what we have for solar cells. Granted, its cheaper to plant grass then build solar farms, but fixed cost will be nominal in the long run.
With Ethonal BP can make money with its current infrastructure, keep positive press about their company, and develop alternatives that will never truly be able to replace fossil fuels.
You work for ODOT? (the other??) I live and work in Oregon and have some experience, believe it or not, programming for traffic counters. It isn't a difficult task to figure these sorts of things out. The difficult task is to get all the traffic counters together talking on a network as most states don't have an ip network running next to all their roads that they can just plug the counters into.
That would be the high infrastructure cost. However the better counter companies offer wireless connections, ethernet...so on.
If you know how far apart two counters are, then watching a single car move down the road, and even change lanes isn't a big deal. Heck, most of the good classifying counters already do many of those things quite well across multiple loops.
Actually, I know there are people who've been doing this sort of things for cities for years, and I didn't really find anything new or ground breaking in this piece at all.
I just usually try to convince them that I have a great "business opportunity" for them in a job that has unlimited potential. And they can do it....part time....
I don't know, I like having a small cell phone, and a small device just for playing music. I can charge one @ home with out having the other around.
-Lower risk of losing one.
-I'm not tied to my MP3 player by a phone contract.
Your goal in these sorts of situations is to give the people interviewing you something to walk away with so that when the thought comes up in their minds "But they got fired at their last job" they automatically have the response you've given them that pops out.
If you have a long explanation when they think of that question, they'll simply hear crickets.
You need a sound bite. Something like: Ya know it was a good project that I enjoyed working on. I got along well with the team members. But when the project failed, they needed to downsize project staff. I had stuck my neck out to try and make sure the project succeeded,...so my head was one of the ones that got rolled when they closed it down.
You changed a negative firing into a positive: "I work hard to make projects succeed." Now when they think, "Well they got fired at the last job;" their brain will respond..."They will stick their neck out to make our project succeed!"
These are the two tactics that Microsoft, typically uses first the Alienate and Crush, and then if that doesn't work they move on to Embrace and Destroy. OpenGL is a great example. Alienate and Crush didn't work becasue it forced a developer to choose: OpenGL or Active X, and enough choose OpenGL that it made graphics card companies provide support for OpenGL. Once they adopted OpenGL support into Active X, graphics card companies had to only support one API: Active X. OpenGL died. Embrace and destroy.
With Open Source they are trying the same tactic, but the situation differers. Sure Open Source companies can make money. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe they even get free development as a result of being Open Source. Great. Let them sell support packages. But what will happen in the long run with open source is the reverse of OpenGL. If Microsoft Embraces Open Source, business will eventually be able to support Microsoft Products with an Open Source infrastructure. I don't need M$ Word anymore because Open office runs on Windows. Or Linux. It reads older formatted Word documents better than Word does. (because the open source communities have incentive to provide this functionality, and Microsoft has dis-incentive.)
C# and.net didn't and won't ever roll Apache and Java. M$ can support that platform and provide the tools in.NET that open source is slow to develop; like accounting software. I don't believe that Microsoft being a single company that operates though the lens of a Monopoly can possibly compete with thousands of developers adding in features they need in the way they need them. Look at Apache, Eclipse and NetBeans. The success of these products has spawned hundreds of other products that aren't even in adolescence yet, but already compete feature for feature with their commercial counterparts.
M$ is going to have to come up with a few new tricks if they want to win this war.
I think your on the right track, though the article does say that "The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density." I haven't evaluated this assertion directly but here's my take on the situation: Comcast and Verison are behaving like monopolies.
There has been so much consolidation going on in the realm of the communications industry it almost makes the mind spin. AT&T has more of a monopoly on the internet bandwidth that MA bell ever had on telephone service, and for high speed to the home, Comcast has the monopoly. DSL isn't really competition.
Because of this, Comcast, AT&T and the others are doing exactly what monopolies do, setting marginal profit = to marginal revenue, or ballenceing the revenue of adding one more client with the ensuing reduction in profit that occurs from lowering the price to entice that next consumer, or adding the infrastructure to support the additional rural areas. Instead, its cheaper to increase your density by advertising and keeping prices high.
The high costs of infrastructure makes this a natural monopoly. Typically, like with utility companies, we are careful as a society to closely regulate these industries because our society, for market stability and business competition rely on this type infrastructure. Bud we don't look at the internet this way and as a result we let these monopolies strangle competition with out facing antitrust violations.
Politically Bush has been about as strict on monopolies as my grandmother was about enforcing the no sweets before dinner policy. ("Oh, okay. But don't tell your mother (the public)....") Not like Clinton was that much better really. The fist of the FCC restrictions about communications companies not being able to own multiple properties in a single market were lifted by the FCC under his watch.
I'm glad we keep seeing this article on slashdot. We need the weight of public opinion to help pressure the enforcement of these types of policies. I'm all for the free market, but its obvious that these companies are behaving as monopolies, and as such making it harder for the US to compete in the world market.
Come on. Everyone loves killing Nazis!There is nothing wrong with shooting Nazi, aliens, mutants, and "bad guys". But the innocent....and especially the already victmized, well that just makes you blink.
It reminds me of an Arnie quote in response to the question..."You've killed people?"
"Yes, but they were all bad."
Re:If Ballmer thinks it's a bad idea
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Cause' Microsoft has such a fantastic track record of finding features that people really need and want, and implementing them in a way that...Oh wait. I'm sorry. I think I must be high.
I'd like to address the fundamental errors:
1. Though money is not zero sum, it is a near zero sum game. If a CEO gets paid $50 mil, its hardly a drop in the bucket to overall GDP. (Of which GDI -Gross Domestic Income - is closely related to.) However if executives on a whole are getting paychecks a significant amount above, it does reduce the overall GDP available to other people in the country. Money supply does fluctuate, but not significantly enough to reduce the effect of the %400 increase in executive paychecks since 95. If the minimum wage increased on the same scale, it would be $35.00 an hour, which would require a 6 fold increase in GDP to support.
2. I completely agree with this statement. But no where is there an assertion that everyone should make the same amount. Its not that there should be no income discrepancy, but the gap historically has been a fantastic prediction for all sorts of social problems. In addition, too great of an income gab creates unstable markets for new products. This is bad for making money.
3. Correlations certainly don't prove cause-effect relations. Which is why modern economic theory is still called theory. Everything about supply, demand, and market theory in general are inferred from correlative data. You can argue that's bad if you want and that wall street should be shut down because we can't prove that markets really work, but there is a lot of correlative data to the contrary.
4. I think the results of strictly the income gap are not an indicator of good/bad on the whole. I also think the author touches on this at several points in the article. And, your right; some good things my result as well, but the bad historically speaking cancels out the good. Crime is not the only problem. I think the author focuses on this topic because it is something we can all look at and say "bad". But there are a wealth (excuse the pun) of other problems. Instable markets, lack of services needed to support products (transportation/customers/technology development) all contribute to why economists use income gap as an indicator.
Basically, looking at the big picture, you can't have things like inflation, and wage stagnation, (the things that typically drive income gap) for a long period of time without facing economic decline and major social issues. This is my own personal largest concern: large companies that develop market power that have only a yearly view of the world who drive their business on creating crisis.
Don't say it won't happen. The colluding oligopolies that artificially inflate oil prices and hording the resulting wealth have created the huge income gaps in the middle east providing both the money and the willing participants in terrorist actions. The destablization drives oil prices higher. Wash, rinse repeat.
2.) Online Buying Clarity: You'll be able to view all charges you make on the internet individually and not have it mixed in with your regular credit card bill.
1.) Privacy: You can use a Credit Card online with it it showing up on your Credit Card Bill. It will be BIG in the online porn world.
Well if their refusal to go online went so far as to cause life threating damage to themselves, then likely it would be classified a phobia. I understand your illustration that doing something, or not doing something doesn't make it an addiction; but the hallmark of addiction is that those engaging in it continue to engage themselves in the behavior despite detrimental effects on their own well being. The examples of "listening to what others are saying to them" or "paying attention to where they are walking;' don't have these characteristics. Now if the person walking watches closely to not step where other people walk, and this results in them being unable to go outside, or to care for themselves, they would be classified as having a mental disorder.
This goes beyond simply "liking the internet" or feeling like they have to use the internet every day. This isn't classified as addiction. However, if they isolate themselves/lose their job/ or do things that damage their lives repeatedly as a result of of internet use, then it could be classified as addiction.
Hey, I played X-com in college for days at a time. I didn't sleep much and my grades suffered. But eventually I quit playing it. I joked about it being an addiction, and in some ways it was. But it lacked the long term, and self-endangering, effects of addiction. Mostly, I just didn't like going to class. For obvious reasons I've avoided World of Warcraft. DII was bad enough.
There was an interesting piece on slashdot here a while ago (2+ years) on people who got hooked on checking their e-mail. They got small bursts of adrenalin released just by clicking the send/receive button. Their bodies became chemically dependent on these adrenalin bursts and suffered withdrawal symptoms including depression and anxiety when not able to check their e-mail for more than a very short period of time. (30 mins I think it was).
I think the long and the short of it is that we have amazingly adaptive bodies that can be trained into all sorts of behaviors. If these are healthy, socially acceptable and normalized behaviors such as feeling like we have to shower every day, or wanting enough food to not feel hungry they are normal. If however the behaviors result in withdrawal, self destruction, or extreme socially unacceptable behavior, which the individual doesn't seem to be able to stop despite their own repeated attempts, they will need treatment. If they get to the point where they are willing to seek this treatment, who is anyone to tell them they aren't really addicted. Their symptoms are more tangible than depression which is a well accepted medical condition.
Slashdot Mirror
Who are you? Rowdy Roddy Piper? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/
Well, if EA had been there since day one, maybe they would have missed the importance of the controller and have developed games without taking that into account. Now they have the chance to develop for the platform with some hindsight.
Doesn't this just give dis-incentive to people who normally buy legal music and put it on their iPod? All the music on my Nano currently is from legal sources. But as they create a Tax, its doubtfully I'd continue that practice.
And don't even try to say that this hurts the artists. 99% of those guys don't ever make a dime off their music. Most of those are actually helped by P2P as it drives people to go to their shows, for which they actually get paid. Its only the top 1% that makes money of record sales.
I expect the neo-con's to swoop in any day now and stop this in the name of spreading the free market!
As far as the PS3, I only call it a failure because of the lack of content and the far below projected sales numbers. Technically, its a fantastic success! (Especially compared with the 360's problems.)
I don't see Microsoft walking out of the console market for two reasons:
1.) Sony's complete recent failure in the vision for their next generation console.
2.) The fact that the 360 is by far the most adopted "next gen" console and from the looks of Sony's blunders, won't be surpassed.
Even if it did cost them billions, whats that compared to market share and potential revenue? "Oh, we have a winning product with the majority of market share, lets pullout." Doubtfull.
Besides, people are missing the long term view. Microsoft understands the importance of the appliance entertainment computing market, and the 360 ties in perfectly with this.
Now, the Zune...that may get dumped.
That wacky AT&T, keeping prices high and passing the savings onto us!
With Ethonal BP can make money with its current infrastructure, keep positive press about their company, and develop alternatives that will never truly be able to replace fossil fuels.
That would be the high infrastructure cost. However the better counter companies offer wireless connections, ethernet...so on.
If you know how far apart two counters are, then watching a single car move down the road, and even change lanes isn't a big deal. Heck, most of the good classifying counters already do many of those things quite well across multiple loops.
Actually, I know there are people who've been doing this sort of things for cities for years, and I didn't really find anything new or ground breaking in this piece at all.
I did. Damn those fake Sumerian gods....I should have Guugled it.
There is only Zuel.....
I just usually try to convince them that I have a great "business opportunity" for them in a job that has unlimited potential. And they can do it....part time....
I don't know, I like having a small cell phone, and a small device just for playing music. I can charge one @ home with out having the other around. -Lower risk of losing one. -I'm not tied to my MP3 player by a phone contract.
If you have a long explanation when they think of that question, they'll simply hear crickets.
You need a sound bite. Something like:
Ya know it was a good project that I enjoyed working on. I got along well with the team members. But when the project failed, they needed to downsize project staff. I had stuck my neck out to try and make sure the project succeeded,
You changed a negative firing into a positive: "I work hard to make projects succeed." Now when they think, "Well they got fired at the last job;" their brain will respond..."They will stick their neck out to make our project succeed!"
With Open Source they are trying the same tactic, but the situation differers. Sure Open Source companies can make money. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe they even get free development as a result of being Open Source. Great. Let them sell support packages. But what will happen in the long run with open source is the reverse of OpenGL. If Microsoft Embraces Open Source, business will eventually be able to support Microsoft Products with an Open Source infrastructure. I don't need M$ Word anymore because Open office runs on Windows. Or Linux. It reads older formatted Word documents better than Word does. (because the open source communities have incentive to provide this functionality, and Microsoft has dis-incentive.)
C# and .net didn't and won't ever roll Apache and Java. M$ can support that platform and provide the tools in .NET that open source is slow to develop; like accounting software. I don't believe that Microsoft being a single company that operates though the lens of a Monopoly can possibly compete with thousands of developers adding in features they need in the way they need them. Look at Apache, Eclipse and NetBeans. The success of these products has spawned hundreds of other products that aren't even in adolescence yet, but already compete feature for feature with their commercial counterparts.
M$ is going to have to come up with a few new tricks if they want to win this war.
There has been so much consolidation going on in the realm of the communications industry it almost makes the mind spin. AT&T has more of a monopoly on the internet bandwidth that MA bell ever had on telephone service, and for high speed to the home, Comcast has the monopoly. DSL isn't really competition.
Because of this, Comcast, AT&T and the others are doing exactly what monopolies do, setting marginal profit = to marginal revenue, or ballenceing the revenue of adding one more client with the ensuing reduction in profit that occurs from lowering the price to entice that next consumer, or adding the infrastructure to support the additional rural areas. Instead, its cheaper to increase your density by advertising and keeping prices high.
The high costs of infrastructure makes this a natural monopoly. Typically, like with utility companies, we are careful as a society to closely regulate these industries because our society, for market stability and business competition rely on this type infrastructure. Bud we don't look at the internet this way and as a result we let these monopolies strangle competition with out facing antitrust violations.
Politically Bush has been about as strict on monopolies as my grandmother was about enforcing the no sweets before dinner policy. ("Oh, okay. But don't tell your mother (the public)....") Not like Clinton was that much better really. The fist of the FCC restrictions about communications companies not being able to own multiple properties in a single market were lifted by the FCC under his watch.
I'm glad we keep seeing this article on slashdot. We need the weight of public opinion to help pressure the enforcement of these types of policies. I'm all for the free market, but its obvious that these companies are behaving as monopolies, and as such making it harder for the US to compete in the world market.
Come on. Everyone loves killing Nazis!There is nothing wrong with shooting Nazi, aliens, mutants, and "bad guys". But the innocent....and especially the already victmized, well that just makes you blink. It reminds me of an Arnie quote in response to the question..."You've killed people?" "Yes, but they were all bad."
Fish Guts Trump Bird Flu. - Film @ 11:00
Cause' Microsoft has such a fantastic track record of finding features that people really need and want, and implementing them in a way that...Oh wait. I'm sorry. I think I must be high.
I'd like to address the fundamental errors: 1. Though money is not zero sum, it is a near zero sum game. If a CEO gets paid $50 mil, its hardly a drop in the bucket to overall GDP. (Of which GDI -Gross Domestic Income - is closely related to.) However if executives on a whole are getting paychecks a significant amount above, it does reduce the overall GDP available to other people in the country. Money supply does fluctuate, but not significantly enough to reduce the effect of the %400 increase in executive paychecks since 95. If the minimum wage increased on the same scale, it would be $35.00 an hour, which would require a 6 fold increase in GDP to support. 2. I completely agree with this statement. But no where is there an assertion that everyone should make the same amount. Its not that there should be no income discrepancy, but the gap historically has been a fantastic prediction for all sorts of social problems. In addition, too great of an income gab creates unstable markets for new products. This is bad for making money. 3. Correlations certainly don't prove cause-effect relations. Which is why modern economic theory is still called theory. Everything about supply, demand, and market theory in general are inferred from correlative data. You can argue that's bad if you want and that wall street should be shut down because we can't prove that markets really work, but there is a lot of correlative data to the contrary. 4. I think the results of strictly the income gap are not an indicator of good/bad on the whole. I also think the author touches on this at several points in the article. And, your right; some good things my result as well, but the bad historically speaking cancels out the good. Crime is not the only problem. I think the author focuses on this topic because it is something we can all look at and say "bad". But there are a wealth (excuse the pun) of other problems. Instable markets, lack of services needed to support products (transportation/customers/technology development) all contribute to why economists use income gap as an indicator. Basically, looking at the big picture, you can't have things like inflation, and wage stagnation, (the things that typically drive income gap) for a long period of time without facing economic decline and major social issues. This is my own personal largest concern: large companies that develop market power that have only a yearly view of the world who drive their business on creating crisis. Don't say it won't happen. The colluding oligopolies that artificially inflate oil prices and hording the resulting wealth have created the huge income gaps in the middle east providing both the money and the willing participants in terrorist actions. The destablization drives oil prices higher. Wash, rinse repeat.
2.) Online Buying Clarity: You'll be able to view all charges you make on the internet individually and not have it mixed in with your regular credit card bill.
1.) Privacy: You can use a Credit Card online with it it showing up on your Credit Card Bill. It will be BIG in the online porn world.
Minority Report? How about A Clockwork Orange?
Hey, they didn't try to accidentally kill it. I mean, it put up a fight. I'm sure they expected it to come along peacefully.
This goes beyond simply "liking the internet" or feeling like they have to use the internet every day. This isn't classified as addiction. However, if they isolate themselves/lose their job/ or do things that damage their lives repeatedly as a result of of internet use, then it could be classified as addiction.
Hey, I played X-com in college for days at a time. I didn't sleep much and my grades suffered. But eventually I quit playing it. I joked about it being an addiction, and in some ways it was. But it lacked the long term, and self-endangering, effects of addiction. Mostly, I just didn't like going to class. For obvious reasons I've avoided World of Warcraft. DII was bad enough.
There was an interesting piece on slashdot here a while ago (2+ years) on people who got hooked on checking their e-mail. They got small bursts of adrenalin released just by clicking the send/receive button. Their bodies became chemically dependent on these adrenalin bursts and suffered withdrawal symptoms including depression and anxiety when not able to check their e-mail for more than a very short period of time. (30 mins I think it was).
I think the long and the short of it is that we have amazingly adaptive bodies that can be trained into all sorts of behaviors. If these are healthy, socially acceptable and normalized behaviors such as feeling like we have to shower every day, or wanting enough food to not feel hungry they are normal. If however the behaviors result in withdrawal, self destruction, or extreme socially unacceptable behavior, which the individual doesn't seem to be able to stop despite their own repeated attempts, they will need treatment. If they get to the point where they are willing to seek this treatment, who is anyone to tell them they aren't really addicted. Their symptoms are more tangible than depression which is a well accepted medical condition.
var human = new Object();
var ass = new Object();
var head = new Object();
human.ass = ass;
human.head = head;
human.ass.head = head;
Perfectly valid in Javascript, and in the real world.