Things like this are actually par the course in Japan, where the yearly salary ratio of the top 10% of wage earners to the bottom 10% is only 4:1. In America it's 15:1, for reference.
Speaking as a Russian, I can at least verify that this man is sane and in full possession of his faculties. Russian TV is just about the most horrid and bleak torrent of dementia ever to spring from the mind of man.
Out of curiosity, has Valve even stated that this was a move to try and prevent piracy? It seems at first glance to be more of an effort to bypass the necessity of a publisher (Vivendi and Valve did not have the best of relations last I checked) and of broadening your customer base by not limiting people in isolated areas to preorders that may or may not arrive on time.
You misunderstand. The missile defense system isn't an insurance against pissing off someone pretty big, it's a validation of pissing off someone pretty big.
The question is, what was the senior Nintendo executive looking for when he "stumbled upon" a reference to Metroid and Zelda?
Re:Great now im going to lose my job
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 1
Kind of a strange tangent, but what have your experiences been so far as a commercial pilot? I'm looking into getting some training done at the local civilian pilot school and was just musing about possibilities. Comes with being young and naive, I suppose.
I'd recommend setting the processor performance level to "reduced" in the options tab of the energy saver system preferences menu, which should cut your processor to roughly half its speed. For me, crippling the processor made my 12" PB run at 50C instead of 65C when playing games with no noticeable drop in performance. The real limitations of laptops are generally HDD speed and RAM, so you may find that in most situations you don't even notice the reduction. I watched most of the Two Towers EE on last night and the fan didn't kick in once.
Alternatively, you could get a stand or something. But that kind of defeats the purpose of having a 12" PB.
Because it doesn't matter how intensely people believe in your dogma; it only matters that more people believe in the faith you espouse than that of the other guy. The sole aim of every politician is to have 51% of the population loathe him slightly less than they loathe his contestant, which is why ambiguously patriotic statements that say nothing whatsoever are a much safer course than actually being, you know, opinionated. The more things you firmly believe in, the more people you estrange. This is further exacerbated by the fact that we have a dual-party system ("don't blame me, I voted for Kodos").
In short: politics are dumb, but at least this way the government mirrors the type of people it serves. Democracy by majority. Welcome to America.
Earlier on in the article with Real's CEO's interview, he compared Real's policies with Microsoft - and a poster commented that comparing something with turd does not make it smell like roses. Comparing Apple with MS does not make it any better. Ofcourse they're better. But that does not mean that their bad policies go away.
You're right, of course. Given that so few companies rise above shareholder nitpicking over stock value, however, even relative morality is at least a step forward. Apple isn't endorsed by God and the angels, but at least they generally have decent to good products whereas frequently hardware locking is used as a way to retain a consumer base with an inferior product.
Ease of use? The fact that it does not tie me down to any one player? They sell just a service, just the music - and leave the choice of the hardware to you (okay, this is arguable, but given Apple's attitude towards Real is quite detestable - interoperability is a good thing, and I can never understand why Apple acts that way).
But then again, like you said, it's about choice and opinions.
I'm only speaking for myself, but iTunes is easier and more streamlined for me to use than any other program. The layout and purchasing is as simple and efficient as anything else out there, though I think it does lack certain features.
On the tie-in issue: I think it depends on how you look at it. Apple has said numerous times that they make very little off iTunes and mainly intend for it to be used as a promotional device for the iPod. In that sense, you can effectively view the service as merely an extension of the actual music player. With that said, iTunes is hardly a lock-in. You can set it to download music in mp3 as well as AAC and then simply export the files to another program. Or alternatively, import files from another program.
Had you included that word - generally - in your previous post, I would not have beleagured on. However, the fact remains that Yahoo has innovated in the past. Yes, they stopped innovating after the dotcom boom. Why? Because when you are under pressure from investors to downsize and optimize your resources to show a bottomline, you do not really have much leeway for innovation. I know, this is not an excuse - but having been up and down in the dotcom era, I've seen it happen and it's sad.
In a marketplace playing field, "innovation" is a hard word to strictly define. Let's just let this one lie; I don't really feel like squabbling over decades of corporate history right now.
I understand, and my apologies if my post came across as inflammatory. But I'm just tired of Apple users who praise all of Apple's actions, when I find some of their actions just as despicable as anyone else's. I use Apple myself (right tool for the job and stuff like that) - but I do not approve of the way Apple handled the Real rights scenario.
I'm much the same actually. I have a PB because I love OSX and most of the software within it (macs themselves I'm actually rather impartial to), but I think the Real incident was a black mark. No company is perfect, but you just have to grit your teeth and balance the evils.
Your post merely sounded like Apple has complete control over the music market, which I do not quite think is the case. Sure, they have a LOT of users, but other companies have pitched in just recently and it's too soon to say how things will go. Apple has a history of doing the right thing first and then screwing it up. And which is exactly what they are doing now, too.
They don't have complete control, but they are pretty firmly entrenched. So much so, that I think it will take something very groundbreaking on the competitor's part or very stupid on Apple's part to change the percentages anytime soon.
Personally, I think several competitors is a good thing. If not anything, it will lead to competitive pricing and better service to the customers.
Trolling: "The unwanted excessive display of opinion designed to inflame other users."
Nowhere in my post did I say anything about either the quality or the merits of Apple's business model, products, or services. All I said about said company was that they were the dominant player in the distribution and management of online music. And if you think that's merely an opinion and not a fact you need to look at some marketshare numbers.
Concerning the rest of your post:
1) Apple does not tie you into their hardware, or at least not nearly as much as most other companies. Want to use IE instead of Safari or Word instead of Office? Go ahead. Want to upgrade Windows XP with anything but IE? Tough luck.
2) Everyone has their preference about what music service they use. My personal opinion is that Microsoft's is pretty lousy, but if you tell me why you favor them I can debate their merits with you.
3) Yahoo does not generally innovate. They are very good at recognizing a new thing and consolidating several new things together, but actual novel conception isn't their forte. Neither is, historically speaking, refinement of an already existing service. Yahoo bought Geocities. Yahoo consolidated several services (Yellow pages, online maps) that had already existed into one site. This is all very fine, but it is very different from a company like Apple who realized before anyone else had done it that online music purchasing could work or that, yes, people really did like not having to deal with security errors every other day.
I don't mean this as a bashing or fanboy post, but in the spectrum of the points you raised I think Apple does outshine the competitors.
This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Not really. For all practical intents and purposes, Apple has the online music market under its thumb. Barring some very unYahoo-like innovation, the consequences of this sale will likely be nothing more than surface ripples.
Never mind sarongs, what about the banning of thongs in Florida and Louisiana!! this is going to far by the righteous far right.
Obviously you're not thinking this through. With the current banning of thongs in two major states the resulting surplus will no doubt follow the third fundamental law of fashion: "Anything deemed unwearable by the religious right will surface within two weeks in San Francisco like a tidal wave."
Given the concentration of techies in the Bay Area, I'd say we have something to look forward to.
I always find it amusing how top-heavy bureaucratic governments (even 'democratic' ones) always seem to make choices based on common sense and simple efficiency only after the steady stream of free money they're grown accustomed to suddenly dries up. This is why budget spending really should be a lot more open to peer review than it already is.
Not that the average person cares much about trifles like the multi-billion dollar gap between Windows-imbedded programs and open source, but it would be a nice token gesture.
That indicates NWN2 might reuse a lot of stuff from NWN1, which I think would be a good thing.
It also indicates that upgrades to the rendering engine will be minimal, if at all. NWN wasn't exactly the paragon of graphical glory when it was released, and it hasn't aged well. Releasing NWN-style graphics in 2006 (when Doom III graphics will be considered retro) would be downright suicidal.
I'm more than a little leery of this announcement. Obsidian Entertainment has been in existence for less than a year, yet they are already trying to develop sequels to two of the best games to come out in the last three years. This seems to me at least as another instance of publishers demanding sequels to known brands and outsourcing the work when the original developer is occupied with other titles.
Moreover, NWN2 is scheduled to be released in late 2006. That's less than half of the time Bioware had to develop the original title, and Bioware had both more expertise and more manpower.
All of the files are cross-platform. If you have the mac version of NWN, you could have installed the PC expansions and had it work flawlessly months ago. More information can be found here.
Slashdot... where lifting something directly out of the article, making the punctuation worse, and asking if the original author mentioned it is modded +5 insightful.
Dear God, I'm beginning to see parallels between this place and our political system. I need a drink...
I think the fact that middle management has nothing better to do than attempt to halt the clocks for a couple minutes every day strongly indicates that their little niche in the corporate world is just a trifle overbloated.:)
Seriously though, I wonder at the effectiveness and pragmatism of such tactics. While it can be profitable to attempt stunts like these in large factories with hundreds of employees where a couple added minutes every day can add up, having so many people constantly look at their watches in perplexement is bound to rebound on you eventually when they sue and some overzealous jury takes the moral high ground. Not that it matters to the manager who actually perpetrated the crime since the verdict won't come out of his skin, but the company itself should probably be more vigilant in such matters. History is rife corporations being fined exhorbitant amount due to the actions of employees harassed by the bottom line.
There is a very similar story already in print. I read it many years ago on a whim so I can't remember either the author or title (possibly Clarke?), but you might want to search around before lunging fanatically at the pen.:)
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us unable to listen to auditory files for whatever reason, could someone write up a transcript of some sort?
Many thanks.
Things like this are actually par the course in Japan, where the yearly salary ratio of the top 10% of wage earners to the bottom 10% is only 4:1. In America it's 15:1, for reference.
In short: yay for work ethic.
Speaking as a Russian, I can at least verify that this man is sane and in full possession of his faculties. Russian TV is just about the most horrid and bleak torrent of dementia ever to spring from the mind of man.
,They were arrested for being idiots.
Would that such laws applied to administrative as well as clerical staff.
I imagine British colonists first arriving in the Americas has similar ideas concerning the native population.
Out of curiosity, has Valve even stated that this was a move to try and prevent piracy? It seems at first glance to be more of an effort to bypass the necessity of a publisher (Vivendi and Valve did not have the best of relations last I checked) and of broadening your customer base by not limiting people in isolated areas to preorders that may or may not arrive on time.
You misunderstand. The missile defense system isn't an insurance against pissing off someone pretty big, it's a validation of pissing off someone pretty big.
Welcome to big stick foreign policy.
The question is, what was the senior Nintendo executive looking for when he "stumbled upon" a reference to Metroid and Zelda?
Kind of a strange tangent, but what have your experiences been so far as a commercial pilot? I'm looking into getting some training done at the local civilian pilot school and was just musing about possibilities. Comes with being young and naive, I suppose.
Any stories you'd like to share?
It's called Temperature Monitor and is freeware. Do a google search.
I'd recommend setting the processor performance level to "reduced" in the options tab of the energy saver system preferences menu, which should cut your processor to roughly half its speed. For me, crippling the processor made my 12" PB run at 50C instead of 65C when playing games with no noticeable drop in performance. The real limitations of laptops are generally HDD speed and RAM, so you may find that in most situations you don't even notice the reduction. I watched most of the Two Towers EE on last night and the fan didn't kick in once.
Alternatively, you could get a stand or something. But that kind of defeats the purpose of having a 12" PB.
Because it doesn't matter how intensely people believe in your dogma; it only matters that more people believe in the faith you espouse than that of the other guy. The sole aim of every politician is to have 51% of the population loathe him slightly less than they loathe his contestant, which is why ambiguously patriotic statements that say nothing whatsoever are a much safer course than actually being, you know, opinionated. The more things you firmly believe in, the more people you estrange. This is further exacerbated by the fact that we have a dual-party system ("don't blame me, I voted for Kodos").
In short: politics are dumb, but at least this way the government mirrors the type of people it serves. Democracy by majority. Welcome to America.
Earlier on in the article with Real's CEO's interview, he compared Real's policies with Microsoft - and a poster commented that comparing something with turd does not make it smell like roses. Comparing Apple with MS does not make it any better. Ofcourse they're better. But that does not mean that their bad policies go away.
You're right, of course. Given that so few companies rise above shareholder nitpicking over stock value, however, even relative morality is at least a step forward. Apple isn't endorsed by God and the angels, but at least they generally have decent to good products whereas frequently hardware locking is used as a way to retain a consumer base with an inferior product.
Ease of use? The fact that it does not tie me down to any one player? They sell just a service, just the music - and leave the choice of the hardware to you (okay, this is arguable, but given Apple's attitude towards Real is quite detestable - interoperability is a good thing, and I can never understand why Apple acts that way).
But then again, like you said, it's about choice and opinions.
I'm only speaking for myself, but iTunes is easier and more streamlined for me to use than any other program. The layout and purchasing is as simple and efficient as anything else out there, though I think it does lack certain features.
On the tie-in issue: I think it depends on how you look at it. Apple has said numerous times that they make very little off iTunes and mainly intend for it to be used as a promotional device for the iPod. In that sense, you can effectively view the service as merely an extension of the actual music player. With that said, iTunes is hardly a lock-in. You can set it to download music in mp3 as well as AAC and then simply export the files to another program. Or alternatively, import files from another program.
Had you included that word - generally - in your previous post, I would not have beleagured on. However, the fact remains that Yahoo has innovated in the past. Yes, they stopped innovating after the dotcom boom. Why? Because when you are under pressure from investors to downsize and optimize your resources to show a bottomline, you do not really have much leeway for innovation. I know, this is not an excuse - but having been up and down in the dotcom era, I've seen it happen and it's sad.
In a marketplace playing field, "innovation" is a hard word to strictly define. Let's just let this one lie; I don't really feel like squabbling over decades of corporate history right now.
I understand, and my apologies if my post came across as inflammatory. But I'm just tired of Apple users who praise all of Apple's actions, when I find some of their actions just as despicable as anyone else's. I use Apple myself (right tool for the job and stuff like that) - but I do not approve of the way Apple handled the Real rights scenario.
I'm much the same actually. I have a PB because I love OSX and most of the software within it (macs themselves I'm actually rather impartial to), but I think the Real incident was a black mark. No company is perfect, but you just have to grit your teeth and balance the evils.
Your post merely sounded like Apple has complete control over the music market, which I do not quite think is the case. Sure, they have a LOT of users, but other companies have pitched in just recently and it's too soon to say how things will go. Apple has a history of doing the right thing first and then screwing it up. And which is exactly what they are doing now, too.
They don't have complete control, but they are pretty firmly entrenched. So much so, that I think it will take something very groundbreaking on the competitor's part or very stupid on Apple's part to change the percentages anytime soon.
Personally, I think several competitors is a good thing. If not anything, it will lead to competitive pricing and better service to the customers.
I'm pretty sure Walmart is se
Trolling: "The unwanted excessive display of opinion designed to inflame other users."
Nowhere in my post did I say anything about either the quality or the merits of Apple's business model, products, or services. All I said about said company was that they were the dominant player in the distribution and management of online music. And if you think that's merely an opinion and not a fact you need to look at some marketshare numbers.
Concerning the rest of your post:
1) Apple does not tie you into their hardware, or at least not nearly as much as most other companies. Want to use IE instead of Safari or Word instead of Office? Go ahead. Want to upgrade Windows XP with anything but IE? Tough luck.
2) Everyone has their preference about what music service they use. My personal opinion is that Microsoft's is pretty lousy, but if you tell me why you favor them I can debate their merits with you.
3) Yahoo does not generally innovate. They are very good at recognizing a new thing and consolidating several new things together, but actual novel conception isn't their forte. Neither is, historically speaking, refinement of an already existing service. Yahoo bought Geocities. Yahoo consolidated several services (Yellow pages, online maps) that had already existed into one site. This is all very fine, but it is very different from a company like Apple who realized before anyone else had done it that online music purchasing could work or that, yes, people really did like not having to deal with security errors every other day.
I don't mean this as a bashing or fanboy post, but in the spectrum of the points you raised I think Apple does outshine the competitors.
This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Not really. For all practical intents and purposes, Apple has the online music market under its thumb. Barring some very unYahoo-like innovation, the consequences of this sale will likely be nothing more than surface ripples.
Never mind sarongs, what about the banning of thongs in Florida and Louisiana!! this is going to far by the righteous far right.
Obviously you're not thinking this through. With the current banning of thongs in two major states the resulting surplus will no doubt follow the third fundamental law of fashion: "Anything deemed unwearable by the religious right will surface within two weeks in San Francisco like a tidal wave."
Given the concentration of techies in the Bay Area, I'd say we have something to look forward to.
Well duh. I'm going to do what any self-respecting geek would and pirate the thing, just out of spite.
Oh, wait.
According to Microsoft, this limitation "helps [users] stay organized and reduces confusion."
:)
Anyone willing to take bets on how many posts making bad puns about this statement will be modded insightful instead of funny?
I love Slashdot, really.
I always find it amusing how top-heavy bureaucratic governments (even 'democratic' ones) always seem to make choices based on common sense and simple efficiency only after the steady stream of free money they're grown accustomed to suddenly dries up. This is why budget spending really should be a lot more open to peer review than it already is.
Not that the average person cares much about trifles like the multi-billion dollar gap between Windows-imbedded programs and open source, but it would be a nice token gesture.
That indicates NWN2 might reuse a lot of stuff from NWN1, which I think would be a good thing.
It also indicates that upgrades to the rendering engine will be minimal, if at all. NWN wasn't exactly the paragon of graphical glory when it was released, and it hasn't aged well. Releasing NWN-style graphics in 2006 (when Doom III graphics will be considered retro) would be downright suicidal.
I'm more than a little leery of this announcement. Obsidian Entertainment has been in existence for less than a year, yet they are already trying to develop sequels to two of the best games to come out in the last three years. This seems to me at least as another instance of publishers demanding sequels to known brands and outsourcing the work when the original developer is occupied with other titles.
Moreover, NWN2 is scheduled to be released in late 2006. That's less than half of the time Bioware had to develop the original title, and Bioware had both more expertise and more manpower.
All of the files are cross-platform. If you have the mac version of NWN, you could have installed the PC expansions and had it work flawlessly months ago. More information can be found here.
Slashdot... where lifting something directly out of the article, making the punctuation worse, and asking if the original author mentioned it is modded +5 insightful.
Dear God, I'm beginning to see parallels between this place and our political system. I need a drink...
I think the fact that middle management has nothing better to do than attempt to halt the clocks for a couple minutes every day strongly indicates that their little niche in the corporate world is just a trifle overbloated. :)
Seriously though, I wonder at the effectiveness and pragmatism of such tactics. While it can be profitable to attempt stunts like these in large factories with hundreds of employees where a couple added minutes every day can add up, having so many people constantly look at their watches in perplexement is bound to rebound on you eventually when they sue and some overzealous jury takes the moral high ground. Not that it matters to the manager who actually perpetrated the crime since the verdict won't come out of his skin, but the company itself should probably be more vigilant in such matters. History is rife corporations being fined exhorbitant amount due to the actions of employees harassed by the bottom line.
There is a very similar story already in print. I read it many years ago on a whim so I can't remember either the author or title (possibly Clarke?), but you might want to search around before lunging fanatically at the pen. :)