The problem with your way of looking at things is that you're thinking of the group of file-sharers as a single, rational entity, that will one day look up and say "Oh, if I keep doing this, it won't last. I should change." But that's not what's going to happen. Individual people might feel that way, but the group as a whole will act more like animals that keep eating and reproducing until they've overrun their food source.
However, the content providers aren't passive - right now they're trying to stop the feeding frenzy, but I don't think that's possible. What they SHOULD be doing is accepting the feeding frenzy as a constant, and adjusting their attitude accordingly, instead of pretending that maybe the animals can be whipped into submission, or maybe they'll just decide they're not hungry any more and things will go back to the way they used to be. That's not going to happen; the landscape has changed and the best way to deal with it is find a new way to survive in the new world.
I think we're already seeing the beginnings of that; I watch more random video off the net than I used to, most of it low-budget and direct from the artist, rather than corporate. Things like Red vs. Blue or Pure Pwnage are taking a little sliver of people's time away from TV and movies - that will grow to more and more time, and eventually we'll have a lot of little artists each making niche art rather than big huge companies creating big huge blockbusters. The long tail strikes again.
However, the anonymous speech that comes with the Internet also has its weak points - it's almost meaningless for a truly anonymous source to say anything about anyone. I was thinking about this as far as rumors or government secrets go - it's easy for someone to anonymously email the NY Times and say "Valerie Plame is a CIA agent, and I know because I'm the Vice President!", but no one will take them seriously.
Wikipedia changes that a little, because the site as a whole can be taken to be trustworthy, while the edits are still anonymous - so people might come to trust Wikipedia even though a given article could be the equivalent of the Enquirer.
There's an even more obvious example of evolution staring most people in the face (especially people in rural areas): domesticated animals. Everyone knows that certain dogs are bred for certain traits, and people who raise animals know a lot about their pedigrees and what traits they'll have. Certain types of dogs are bred for herding, for retrieving, and so forth. Prize racehorses are kept to stud out to people who want to raise racehorses.
Of course, this ignores the "random mutation" part of the theory, but it gets across the "changes over time" part really easily. It's guided evolution, but it's obvious to see that OK racehorses can be changed into good racehorses in a few generations. And once you accept that, you can more easily accept the fact that sometimes these things will happen by nature's pressure, not by man's. And then you've accepted all the important bits of evolution.
In fact, if someone breeds horses, dogs, or cattle or pays for breeding services, they're implicitly accepting the influence of evolutionary forces.
Here is a newsflash for Journalists: The xbox is trivial to manufacture compared to other products. Go tour a plant making large Xerox machines, or a Toyota factory, if you want to see something which actually has a challange to it.
Perhaps that will happen when Toyota or Xerox spend a large amount of money hyping their latest product. If anyone believes this "journalist" is doing this story for anything other than advertising for MS, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Which is why Apple Computer should take the huge profits they've gotten from iPods, cut a check, and acquire Apple Records. They'd take care of the trademark issue AND have a big name to found their own label on.
But they should wait until the labels are hooked on the revenue stream, because if they suspect they're about to be cut out, they'll take their ball and go home.
I don't think it would have much effect. I don't know Microsoft, but I used to work in Sony's "Format" QA department, the last line of testing before games got sent to Sony Disc Manufacturing for reproduction. Our job was basically "certifying" the games - not testing the gameplay, just making sure that it fit all the rules for games released on the platform, about a week-long test cycle.
Frequently, developers would want to hurry the process along so they wouldn't miss their ship date. Mostly, this meant overtime for us to try and get the full test cycle completed in time, but occasionally developers would want to start the print run before we were finished (and this became much more noticable with titles that offered 'patching' functionality over the network, since the feeling was they could fix any serious issues that way. That might be why MS was willing to take the risk, I imagine that Live allows them to patch games to some degree.)
Our attitude towards these requests was basically 'OK, but it's on your head!' If the producer chose to push the game through, we all knew that it wouldn't be on OUR heads if we missed something in the abbreviated test cycle. The producer (or whoever) made the decision and chose to take the risks. I imagine the development crew would feel much the same way, although they have a bit more of a personal stake in it.
if we allow it to be regulated, we will have just given something away for nothing -- and it's not something we're ever likely to get back.
I'm wondering about that. It seems like there could be enough technological advancement, plus a large enough number of independent-minded geeks, that some form of "darknet" might be able to always exist. Essentially, using the fact that technology advances will always move faster than bureaucracy.
The one problem I can see is that corporations are the ones making most of the technological advances (because they have the fab plants and R&D labs), and they can be regulated much more easily than your average basement geek.
Of course, it's debatable whether games are still a "geek" thing since the advent of the PlayStation, but in any case I'd personally be happier with more geek games.
Of course, I'm a geek, so I'm biased. But I recently heard a marketing theme from Sony - they're aiming at the "Urban Nomad", which encompasses the underground racing culture, hip-hop, and extreme sports, and the sort of people who like those things.
And it seems to me that a lot of games these days have those sorts of themes. Lots of macho military type games, too, like the Tom Clancy series. All in all, I think there are more underground racing, sports, gangsta, and Tom Clancy-type games than there are fantasy or sci-fi games, especially on consoles. And frankly, since I like dragons better than hip-hop, I wish that weren't true.
Think about what might have happened had tabletop gaming aspired to be "mainstream" like console gaming is. Instead of D&D we'd be playing Streets & Thugs, and we'd have Mountain Dew: The Dominating, a CCG based on extreme sporting events (cards available inside specially marked packages of Code Red). I don't think it would be the same - it might be more popular, but it would have lost everything geeks liked about it at the same time.
But of course it's hard to have a major business catering to just geeks, the occasional LOTR notwithstanding. So it would be a bad business decision to only make video games based on the Elemenstor Saga. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
And they're throwing in the wrong kitchen sink. It's great to have video playback on their device when it can't even play music correctly. (Lack of gapless support)
This one is Not Bloody Likely and hence nothing uses it. Quantum teleportation happens at the scale of electrons tunneling through atoms, not people leaping across lightyears.
I think the Infinite Improbability drive from the Hitchhiker's Guide is something like this, actually. It generates a field in which Not Bloody Likely things happen quite often, including travelling quickly across large swathes of space.
consume numerous products (cereals, beer [used to stop brewing process in American beers], other beverages, plant stores like tea..etc) that contain fluoride compounds,
Am I the only person who liked Quake 3 much better than any previous version?
I mean, yeah, it had bright, futuristic visuals instead of dark gritty ones. We get it, id, you listen to Trent Reznor, wear all black and your geography teacher doesn't understand your tortured soul. And it had no story, but when dealing with id, that's a *bonus*. What it did have was fast-paced arena combat, that no one has quite duplicated since. Unreal Tournament is fantastic, but it's still not quite the same casual, bouncy slaughterfest that Quake 3 was. Quake 3 was like an abstraction of the FPS genre down to its Platonic ideal - no story, no atmosphere, just various weapons, interesting but unrealistically geometrical levels, and your frag count. It was a beautiful thing.
Nintendo's coming out with a new 2D Super Mario Bros. title for the DS, and I'm looking forward to playing all the old NES games on the Revolution (although those don't count as "new", obviously).
I think we're in a bad way here. Recently, especially in the US, everything and everyone has become more conservative - not in the political sense, but in the sense of "I want to maintain the status quo!" Previously, huge advances in technology were liberating, eventually wonderful (albeit disruptive) events for humanity.
However, now whenever we make progress, we try and chain it down as much as possible to avoid anything changing. The Internet and digital content is a great example. Inventing the equivalent of a global Library of Alexandria, where everyone has access to all information, and transferring and copying information from place to place was easy and cheap, should have been a cause for celebration. We should have all rejoiced that now humanity was free to share all its ideas and art with everyone on the planet. But instead, we get legal and technological attempts to hamper that ability as much as possible, because it upsets the status quo. I imagine the same thing would happen if someone had come up with "replicators" that could feed and clothe the needy - they would instantly be controlled and limited so that they didn't disrupt the way things were, despite the obvious boon to humanity.
Now it's the same thing with quantum computing - we've eliminated another scarcity (processing power) and instead of celebrating the freedom we go about trying hard to restrict it so that it's like we never made the breakthrough.
There's a part in 1984 where it's revealed that the endless war is really just a means for burning through the surplus of materials and labor that a technologically advanced society has, so that people can be kept poor and overworked. While I doubt there's a conspiracy behind these current restrictions (besides the conspiracy of the status quo) I think the parallels are interesting.
This, to me, is the number one compelling reason for progress - so we can get rid of all the people whose power depends on keeping us from progressing.
Sometimes I wonder about Apple's strategy, though. They make money on hardware, sure, so they don't want to only sell their OS.
However, they're having problems being taken seriously because there's no software that runs on Mac OS, no games, and it's ignored by a large portion of the computing world.
They might consider taking a page from the game console world, specifically the Xbox. Game consoles are sold at a loss, in order to get the platform in the hands of as many consumers as possible. Then usually money is made through selling the software to people that runs on this platform. Obviously, directly adapting this strategy wouldn't work, because Apple would fail if they tried to get a cut of all software written for MacOS. However, getting their software in the hands of more people would certainly help their adoption rates, and would allow them to court developers with a meaningful platform. It's possible that at that point they would have the clout to deal with OEMs, and the adoption rates to be considered viable for business use, where the real money is.
I'm not sure if that would actually work out well, but it does seem like it would behoove Apple to stop making their platform so exclusive, since that's the chicken-and-egg problem they're wrestling.
You are absolutely right of course. I would only add that it is also a futile and self-destructive "defense" in a long-term. It assumes, arrogantly, that the others are too dumb to match your R&D efforts or to produce their own culture. I hope I do not need to explain the frightening idiocy of that folly.
Exactly. I've been saying this for a while - basing an entire country's future on IP is a bad idea, because it's so fragile. There's no cost of entry and no barriers to people "stealing" it. Currently the system holds together because everyone obeys the laws, but if things ever go pear-shaped in the least the whole structure will evaporate. It's a lot harder to lose a manufacturing-based economy, because at least you need factories and raw materials, and without sending in infantry it's impossible to lose those things.
Or all it might take is one country becoming more powerful than the US, to the point where they can say "Oh, we're not obeying your IP laws. What are you going to do about it?"
Hmm, if that's true, that's too bad. The meat of the court case will then revolve around whether or not they are bound by the EULA, not whether or not the EULA sucks donkey balls.
I'd much rather have a decision involving the latter.
Central control is happening, and will happen.. like it or not.
I'm not sure. Central control is possible only because of a quirk of technology and economics, not of design. In the ideal world, the internet would be mostly peer-to-peer and all services and connections would be equal. However, because it used to be expensive to run the sort of bandwidth, power, and storage that that connectivity requires, only certain institutions did it, and then resold access (or gave it away) to the little people.
However, with wireless technology growing, and bandwidth, storage, and processing power prices all coming down, it may soon be possible to run an Internet with a minimum of centralized services. And if there aren't any centralized ISPs, or if there are many of them, control will be very difficult.
I envision the network of the future as a bunch of peer nodes, connected together mostly wirelessly, running encrypted connections between various peers. With no central chokepoints, I don't see it being very easy to control.
Of course, this whole setup might become illegal - when practical control becomes difficult, legislative control always becomes stronger.
It seems like wireless access is becoming more and more prevalent. My mother asked me about getting WiFi when I talked to her last night - sign no. 1 when a technology has hit the mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your way of looking at things is that you're thinking of the group of file-sharers as a single, rational entity, that will one day look up and say "Oh, if I keep doing this, it won't last. I should change." But that's not what's going to happen. Individual people might feel that way, but the group as a whole will act more like animals that keep eating and reproducing until they've overrun their food source.
However, the content providers aren't passive - right now they're trying to stop the feeding frenzy, but I don't think that's possible. What they SHOULD be doing is accepting the feeding frenzy as a constant, and adjusting their attitude accordingly, instead of pretending that maybe the animals can be whipped into submission, or maybe they'll just decide they're not hungry any more and things will go back to the way they used to be. That's not going to happen; the landscape has changed and the best way to deal with it is find a new way to survive in the new world.
I think we're already seeing the beginnings of that; I watch more random video off the net than I used to, most of it low-budget and direct from the artist, rather than corporate. Things like Red vs. Blue or Pure Pwnage are taking a little sliver of people's time away from TV and movies - that will grow to more and more time, and eventually we'll have a lot of little artists each making niche art rather than big huge companies creating big huge blockbusters. The long tail strikes again.
However, the anonymous speech that comes with the Internet also has its weak points - it's almost meaningless for a truly anonymous source to say anything about anyone. I was thinking about this as far as rumors or government secrets go - it's easy for someone to anonymously email the NY Times and say "Valerie Plame is a CIA agent, and I know because I'm the Vice President!", but no one will take them seriously.
Wikipedia changes that a little, because the site as a whole can be taken to be trustworthy, while the edits are still anonymous - so people might come to trust Wikipedia even though a given article could be the equivalent of the Enquirer.
There's an even more obvious example of evolution staring most people in the face (especially people in rural areas): domesticated animals. Everyone knows that certain dogs are bred for certain traits, and people who raise animals know a lot about their pedigrees and what traits they'll have. Certain types of dogs are bred for herding, for retrieving, and so forth. Prize racehorses are kept to stud out to people who want to raise racehorses.
Of course, this ignores the "random mutation" part of the theory, but it gets across the "changes over time" part really easily. It's guided evolution, but it's obvious to see that OK racehorses can be changed into good racehorses in a few generations. And once you accept that, you can more easily accept the fact that sometimes these things will happen by nature's pressure, not by man's. And then you've accepted all the important bits of evolution.
In fact, if someone breeds horses, dogs, or cattle or pays for breeding services, they're implicitly accepting the influence of evolutionary forces.
Well, some games support patching to the PS2 8MB memory card (Everquest Online Adventures, Killzone, and some others), so it's possible :-)
Here is a newsflash for Journalists: The xbox is trivial to manufacture compared to other products. Go tour a plant making large Xerox machines, or a Toyota factory, if you want to see something which actually has a challange to it.
Perhaps that will happen when Toyota or Xerox spend a large amount of money hyping their latest product. If anyone believes this "journalist" is doing this story for anything other than advertising for MS, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Which is why Apple Computer should take the huge profits they've gotten from iPods, cut a check, and acquire Apple Records. They'd take care of the trademark issue AND have a big name to found their own label on.
But they should wait until the labels are hooked on the revenue stream, because if they suspect they're about to be cut out, they'll take their ball and go home.
Ahh, but is the Xbox powerful enough to parse whatever the hell you just said?
Say what you will, but he's a good security researcher.
He finds a lot of backdoors.
*badoom-ching*
I don't think it would have much effect. I don't know Microsoft, but I used to work in Sony's "Format" QA department, the last line of testing before games got sent to Sony Disc Manufacturing for reproduction. Our job was basically "certifying" the games - not testing the gameplay, just making sure that it fit all the rules for games released on the platform, about a week-long test cycle.
Frequently, developers would want to hurry the process along so they wouldn't miss their ship date. Mostly, this meant overtime for us to try and get the full test cycle completed in time, but occasionally developers would want to start the print run before we were finished (and this became much more noticable with titles that offered 'patching' functionality over the network, since the feeling was they could fix any serious issues that way. That might be why MS was willing to take the risk, I imagine that Live allows them to patch games to some degree.)
Our attitude towards these requests was basically 'OK, but it's on your head!' If the producer chose to push the game through, we all knew that it wouldn't be on OUR heads if we missed something in the abbreviated test cycle. The producer (or whoever) made the decision and chose to take the risks. I imagine the development crew would feel much the same way, although they have a bit more of a personal stake in it.
Try Discworld MUD. Much, much better than Medievia.
if we allow it to be regulated, we will have just given something away for nothing -- and it's not something we're ever likely to get back.
I'm wondering about that. It seems like there could be enough technological advancement, plus a large enough number of independent-minded geeks, that some form of "darknet" might be able to always exist. Essentially, using the fact that technology advances will always move faster than bureaucracy.
The one problem I can see is that corporations are the ones making most of the technological advances (because they have the fab plants and R&D labs), and they can be regulated much more easily than your average basement geek.
Of course, it's debatable whether games are still a "geek" thing since the advent of the PlayStation, but in any case I'd personally be happier with more geek games.
Of course, I'm a geek, so I'm biased. But I recently heard a marketing theme from Sony - they're aiming at the "Urban Nomad", which encompasses the underground racing culture, hip-hop, and extreme sports, and the sort of people who like those things.
And it seems to me that a lot of games these days have those sorts of themes. Lots of macho military type games, too, like the Tom Clancy series. All in all, I think there are more underground racing, sports, gangsta, and Tom Clancy-type games than there are fantasy or sci-fi games, especially on consoles. And frankly, since I like dragons better than hip-hop, I wish that weren't true.
Think about what might have happened had tabletop gaming aspired to be "mainstream" like console gaming is. Instead of D&D we'd be playing Streets & Thugs, and we'd have Mountain Dew: The Dominating, a CCG based on extreme sporting events (cards available inside specially marked packages of Code Red). I don't think it would be the same - it might be more popular, but it would have lost everything geeks liked about it at the same time.
But of course it's hard to have a major business catering to just geeks, the occasional LOTR notwithstanding. So it would be a bad business decision to only make video games based on the Elemenstor Saga. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
And they're throwing in the wrong kitchen sink. It's great to have video playback on their device when it can't even play music correctly. (Lack of gapless support)
This one is Not Bloody Likely and hence nothing uses it. Quantum teleportation happens at the scale of electrons tunneling through atoms, not people leaping across lightyears.
I think the Infinite Improbability drive from the Hitchhiker's Guide is something like this, actually. It generates a field in which Not Bloody Likely things happen quite often, including travelling quickly across large swathes of space.
consume numerous products (cereals, beer [used to stop brewing process in American beers], other beverages, plant stores like tea..etc) that contain fluoride compounds,
Ice cream, Mandrake! Childrens' ice cream!
Am I the only person who liked Quake 3 much better than any previous version?
I mean, yeah, it had bright, futuristic visuals instead of dark gritty ones. We get it, id, you listen to Trent Reznor, wear all black and your geography teacher doesn't understand your tortured soul. And it had no story, but when dealing with id, that's a *bonus*. What it did have was fast-paced arena combat, that no one has quite duplicated since. Unreal Tournament is fantastic, but it's still not quite the same casual, bouncy slaughterfest that Quake 3 was. Quake 3 was like an abstraction of the FPS genre down to its Platonic ideal - no story, no atmosphere, just various weapons, interesting but unrealistically geometrical levels, and your frag count. It was a beautiful thing.
Nintendo's coming out with a new 2D Super Mario Bros. title for the DS, and I'm looking forward to playing all the old NES games on the Revolution (although those don't count as "new", obviously).
Monarch PC also sells no-OS and Linux-installed systems (even laptops!)
I haven't ordered from them, but I'm very intrigued by their build-your-own-but-let-us-assemble-it model. I think I'll get my next PC there.
I think we're in a bad way here. Recently, especially in the US, everything and everyone has become more conservative - not in the political sense, but in the sense of "I want to maintain the status quo!" Previously, huge advances in technology were liberating, eventually wonderful (albeit disruptive) events for humanity.
However, now whenever we make progress, we try and chain it down as much as possible to avoid anything changing. The Internet and digital content is a great example. Inventing the equivalent of a global Library of Alexandria, where everyone has access to all information, and transferring and copying information from place to place was easy and cheap, should have been a cause for celebration. We should have all rejoiced that now humanity was free to share all its ideas and art with everyone on the planet. But instead, we get legal and technological attempts to hamper that ability as much as possible, because it upsets the status quo. I imagine the same thing would happen if someone had come up with "replicators" that could feed and clothe the needy - they would instantly be controlled and limited so that they didn't disrupt the way things were, despite the obvious boon to humanity.
Now it's the same thing with quantum computing - we've eliminated another scarcity (processing power) and instead of celebrating the freedom we go about trying hard to restrict it so that it's like we never made the breakthrough.
There's a part in 1984 where it's revealed that the endless war is really just a means for burning through the surplus of materials and labor that a technologically advanced society has, so that people can be kept poor and overworked. While I doubt there's a conspiracy behind these current restrictions (besides the conspiracy of the status quo) I think the parallels are interesting.
This, to me, is the number one compelling reason for progress - so we can get rid of all the people whose power depends on keeping us from progressing.
Sometimes I wonder about Apple's strategy, though. They make money on hardware, sure, so they don't want to only sell their OS.
However, they're having problems being taken seriously because there's no software that runs on Mac OS, no games, and it's ignored by a large portion of the computing world.
They might consider taking a page from the game console world, specifically the Xbox. Game consoles are sold at a loss, in order to get the platform in the hands of as many consumers as possible. Then usually money is made through selling the software to people that runs on this platform. Obviously, directly adapting this strategy wouldn't work, because Apple would fail if they tried to get a cut of all software written for MacOS. However, getting their software in the hands of more people would certainly help their adoption rates, and would allow them to court developers with a meaningful platform. It's possible that at that point they would have the clout to deal with OEMs, and the adoption rates to be considered viable for business use, where the real money is.
I'm not sure if that would actually work out well, but it does seem like it would behoove Apple to stop making their platform so exclusive, since that's the chicken-and-egg problem they're wrestling.
You are absolutely right of course. I would only add that it is also a futile and self-destructive "defense" in a long-term. It assumes, arrogantly, that the others are too dumb to match your R&D efforts or to produce their own culture. I hope I do not need to explain the frightening idiocy of that folly.
Exactly. I've been saying this for a while - basing an entire country's future on IP is a bad idea, because it's so fragile. There's no cost of entry and no barriers to people "stealing" it. Currently the system holds together because everyone obeys the laws, but if things ever go pear-shaped in the least the whole structure will evaporate. It's a lot harder to lose a manufacturing-based economy, because at least you need factories and raw materials, and without sending in infantry it's impossible to lose those things.
Or all it might take is one country becoming more powerful than the US, to the point where they can say "Oh, we're not obeying your IP laws. What are you going to do about it?"
Hmm, if that's true, that's too bad. The meat of the court case will then revolve around whether or not they are bound by the EULA, not whether or not the EULA sucks donkey balls.
I'd much rather have a decision involving the latter.
Central control is happening, and will happen .. like it or not.
I'm not sure. Central control is possible only because of a quirk of technology and economics, not of design. In the ideal world, the internet would be mostly peer-to-peer and all services and connections would be equal. However, because it used to be expensive to run the sort of bandwidth, power, and storage that that connectivity requires, only certain institutions did it, and then resold access (or gave it away) to the little people.
However, with wireless technology growing, and bandwidth, storage, and processing power prices all coming down, it may soon be possible to run an Internet with a minimum of centralized services. And if there aren't any centralized ISPs, or if there are many of them, control will be very difficult.
I envision the network of the future as a bunch of peer nodes, connected together mostly wirelessly, running encrypted connections between various peers. With no central chokepoints, I don't see it being very easy to control.
Of course, this whole setup might become illegal - when practical control becomes difficult, legislative control always becomes stronger.
It seems like wireless access is becoming more and more prevalent. My mother asked me about getting WiFi when I talked to her last night - sign no. 1 when a technology has hit the mainstream.
I've noticed this with a lot of anti-IP sort of stories. I think media companies are loath to cover anything like that.
Just another reason why corporate censorship is as bad as government censorship.