Actually it DOES MATTER what Bill Gates gets out of it, and it DOES MATTER why he's doing it.... Also, look how he distributes the Foundations money. Microsoft wanted to open a campus in India so they buy themselves favor with heavy donations to India. Microsoft wants to open a campus in China so they buy themselves favor with heavy donations to China. And so on. One would have to be a complete imbecile not to get it.
Another bit of trivia that people seem to forget is that Gates is heavily invested in bio-tech. He's building a nice conduit that his chosen investments can utilize to generate sales. Heck he's even talked about! I agree, it matters a lot. I was too short of time to document the currying of favors with "donations". I'm sure someone else has done so though.
As for the bio-tech investments, that's interesting if true. So, as I suspected, his "donations" are nothing more than a means to drive more money for himself while buying "good" PR. (After all, he's "helping" people!) Seems Billy can't get out of the monopoly business. Hopefully MS will die off and someone knocks some sense into the PTO and Congress at the same time.
and it brings up other memories too, of running special boot disks with custom configurations to squeeze out every ounce of potential non-performance from that creaking old system....
Iridium, then Einsteinium. Bonus!: they both make you glow.
After that, you move towards man-made chemicals such as Xalatan [TM], a glaucoma eye medicine that costs $70 for 5ml. (My dog is getting a might expensive these days....):
I think you missed all the major points, but that's not surprising. I even expect to get modded down excessively for my statements.
I'm saying that his donations are less than charitable, which does not refute that he is donating money. You can view the giving money part and be happy, or you can look at the bigger picture and see something less.
Hopefully the horribly large visible imperfections in those close face shots will make the drool either stop or exponentially increase solving the problem either way.
I'll respectfully disagree. Most of the Gates Foundation grants are aimed at treating symptoms, not finding solutions to causes. This just continues a vicious cycle of people needing more treatment. With the amount of money at their disposal, they could actually do some serious good for all people by doing something truly humanitarian such as develop cures and place the IP in the public domain.
As for the "donating at least $1.5 billion per year" what else is he going to do with it? Put it under his mattress? He's only "giving away" that portion of his wealth that he couldn't spend if he tried. From I see, he's spending it^H^H giving it away in such a way to "buy" a nice shiny new reputation as a philanthropist. I wouldn't attribute his goal to greed, but more to megalomania at this point. Perhaps he needs to visit Belgium more often.
Re:The value of good user interface design...
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
Heck, I want your list of a couple dozen bands. I've maybe got a dozen.
Anyways, on the topic of new(er) decent music
She Wants Revenge - I like 3 or 4 from their self titled album
The Music - one song will remind you of someone else - let's see if it does you:)
Franz Ferdinand - I own the first two releases, and I must say, Take Me Out really is the run away best song on both.
Finger Eleven - Therapy is a pretty cool song, got 0 airplay
The Bravery - about half of this CD is excellent. The rest is listenable
Razorlight - Golden Touch from their debut "Up all Night" got me to purchase their sophomore CD and I thought it pretty much stunk, contrary to everyone in the UK:)
The Raconteurs - I like Jack White and I liked "Steady As She Goes" which got airplay. The rest was ok
The Vines - Several songs from "Winning Days" are great. Vision Valley left me disappointed.
There's a short list. Guess I buy more than I think.:) In any case, you may or may not have heard of some of these bands. I've got a few more stashed in boxes, I'll get to them most likely by next week.
Actually, there's an entire slew of things that can be done to create a game wherein cheating becomes somewhat counterproductive. The thing is, it's "hard" to do so.
There's a number of issues in these games already that decrease the "fun". For instance, why are all magic users reduced to basically tender versions of slice and dicers? Don't think so? Try soloing anything without kiting and see how long you last. In the original concept of RPGs, mages were pretty much the most powerful creatures out there (for players, anyways) but were potentially extremely vulnerable. A mage could kill you instantly if they were powerful enough, but they could only do so a limited number of times in a timespan, as they expended their "energy". This left them extremely vulnerable to even a novice thief. Even at full strength, a cunning or lucky swordsman could kill a mage.
Just in case the above is too subtle, I'm discussing the intentional nerfing of characters in MMOs so they are "balanced". I don't want balanced characters. I want characters that play uniquely and have unique abilities. A fighter should be able to plow through enemies, that's what they do. Thieves/assassins should be able to sneak in and steal or assassinate a target. But these games are explicitly setup to prevent this behavior, all in the goal of creating "balanced" play. Their definition of balanced is wrong IMNSHO and creates a relatively boring game. I think Gygax created a much more balanced game, even as it allowed unbalanced play.
Yep, and that can be a seriously painful chore in JavaScript. Sometimes you'll actually have to learn about some of JavaScript's non-Java aspects such as passing functions to functions or dynamically extending objects or even using the built in var args capabilities. It's definitely a slightly different look at the world.
JavaScript is a neat language, there's just no really useful IDEs to go along with it yet in the world of web development, or at least none I've come across. It's still a very manual process developing with it.
Well, having done both across about the last 8 years of development, I can say that it depends upon the application. Data entry/display of server based data? Web App. Much easier to deal with and support, especially with a shifting client base. While a client application is certainly much more capable and responsive, it's overkill for a relatively simple page based data entry type application.
As for JavaScript, it's getting easier to deal with it with some of the addons available for Firefox. I won't touch ASP or PHP or Perl or Python for commercial web apps. There's far too many issues with all of those that are not easily fixable. Java has its issues as well, but they are able to be accommodated for the types of applications I've been writing.
Here's a thought: what if I run WoW in a VM? We should be able to do that soon, the hardware and software are certainly getting to that point. Now that would impose a whole slew of issues to WoW, since they'd have no control outside of their sandbox. They really don't have that control now, honestly, but it's more work than most are willing to put in to make it happen.
The real answer is for Blizzard to make the game enjoyable to play, instead of rewarding "face time grinding".
Disclaimer: No, I don't play WoW, and never have. It didn't interest me in the least. I did play EQ, and tired of its mindless grind. None of the other MMOs seemed any different, not even Eve. I used to play and code for a mud (pre EQ, way way pre) which was quite a bit more fun as being an imp (GM would be the closest thing in MMOs these days) allowed you quite a bit of freedom and create spontaneous changes. Usually that was in concert with players - it gave them a new challenge or two, and kept things fresh. Things like surprise trap door mobs was one of my favorites.
Since I happen to be mostly interested in new music and with the current state of the radio industry, my sole recourse to efficiently finding music is to research a variety of bands and then see what they sound like. There's some that you can't even find online, much less in music stores in the US. Stiltskin is one that I liked in 94 that doesn't exist in the books here and is almost non-existent online. Another more well-known artist would be David Gilmore's About Face, which also doesn't show up in US catalogs, but can mysterious be purchased outside the country.
As for downloading a movie 5 times? Give me a break. I don't know anyone that would bother. With Netflix, there's no reason to except if you can't get a movie at all. (Yes, I'm aware that Netflix is US only at the moment.)
Guess it's been a while since I've downloaded any music...:)
But, when you're looking for something new and on the fringe, you usually don't find FLAC files from what I experienced at the time. But, I would buy what I like anyways, in support of the artists. I bought She Wants Revenge based on three songs I heard, and overall I'm pretty happy with them. There's a couple like the Zutons that made me wish I'd downloaded them first, because the single acceptable song on the CD didn't make it worth buying the entire CD. I could have lived without the single songs.
So far this year there hasn't even been any music interesting enough to download, from my perspective. We're already through a quarter of it, and that's pretty bad.
I believe strongly you're mistaken, or you know a bunch of freeloaders.
I have downloaded content to see if I like it. It's been about 50/50 on whether I like the remaining content enough to buy it. I really wish I'd done that before purchasing "Who Killed the Zutons?". (The answer, btw, is "The Zutons")
Why do I buy it if I already have it? Because MP3s in generally sound like crap. Why do people buy songs they hear on the radio? Same reason. Hint, if you really want to, you can record radio tracks and slice and dice, but the quality's so poor there's no reason to. VHS tapes can easily accommodate 8 hours of FM quality audio.
I'd rather they drop most of the useless extras and concentrate on producing higher quality video with less compression.
As for shuffling of DVDs, this is a problem for you? You will actually sit and watch TV for more than 4 hours? (The roughly maximum time for a single DVD with acceptable quality) I don't know about you, but I generally need a pee break in a 3 hour period. Video isn't like music where you shuffle songs, since generally the running time is much longer than most songs.
While I think I'd like a higher quality picture, some HD TV shows have convinced me that perhaps I don't want to see every freckle and pock mark or glistening bit of goo...
who owns these songs? I rather suspect it isn't the artists any more. In many cases they don't. Trent has stated he'd love to do a surround sound version of Pretty hate Machine, but Island? IIRC won't let him.
They expect exclusive ownership of the recordings which they produce. The artist maintains the copyright on the words and music, assuming that they wrote them. There's a big difference between a piece of paper with some words on it, and a finished recording of same. It often takes a lot of money to turn those words into a complete album, and that's why the record companies insist on having exclusive distribution rights: so they can make their money back.
They expect exclusive ownership because they controlled the distribution channels. Think of them as a troll, er, toll, keeper for a bridge crossing a chasm. The artist is on one side of the chasm, their audience on the other. To get their music heard, they have to pay the toll keeper's demands, which are exclusive rights. It has nothing to do with making their money back.
If Trent Reznor and crew produced and funded the recordings themselves (which they may have) and then signed over the distribution rights to a record company, perhaps that was a mistake -- instead, perhaps NIN should have started their own record company. Lots of established artists do.
Trent owns his own record company and every thing he's done since Pretty Hate Machine. To give you an idea of how bad the recording industry is, listen to his music sometime. "StarFuckers" from "The Fragile" should give you an idea, followed by "The Hand That Feeds" from "With Teeth". He sounds like he hates the industry about the same as Prince/The Artist Formerly Known as Prince/Prince does.
Trent also likes to experiment with music. He really appears to like surround sound compositions (With Teeth has a nice surround sound version) and has stated that he'd love to re-release Pretty Hate Machine in surround sound but can't.
p>I certainly understand that it would work much better for the artists if the record companies were to put up the cash to produce the music, without any sort of agreement that they would get the exclusive rights to distribute that music. It would be tough to make this work as a for-profit business. There are plenty of smaller record companies that don't want to own the masters or even have exclusive distribution rights, but the musicians have to pony up the cash to produce the music themselves. Why would it be tough to make it work? You buy shares in the band like any other business, and take a cut of the profit. It'd work precisely like every other damn business in existence. Or even how book publishing works. Even that's better than the current situation with musical artists.
>There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't. And you're the other kind? The one who knows source code instead?
Oh, 10 types of people... Binary... Or 11 types... Roman...
Slashdot Mirror
Also, look how he distributes the Foundations money. Microsoft wanted to open a campus in India so they buy themselves favor with heavy donations to India. Microsoft wants to open a campus in China so they buy themselves favor with heavy donations to China. And so on. One would have to be a complete imbecile not to get it.
Another bit of trivia that people seem to forget is that Gates is heavily invested in bio-tech. He's building a nice conduit that his chosen investments can utilize to generate sales. Heck he's even talked about! I agree, it matters a lot. I was too short of time to document the currying of favors with "donations". I'm sure someone else has done so though.
As for the bio-tech investments, that's interesting if true. So, as I suspected, his "donations" are nothing more than a means to drive more money for himself while buying "good" PR. (After all, he's "helping" people!) Seems Billy can't get out of the monopoly business. Hopefully MS will die off and someone knocks some sense into the PTO and Congress at the same time.
and it brings up other memories too, of running special boot disks with custom configurations to squeeze out every ounce of potential non-performance from that creaking old system....
Iridium, then Einsteinium. Bonus!: they both make you glow.
After that, you move towards man-made chemicals such as Xalatan [TM], a glaucoma eye medicine that costs $70 for 5ml. (My dog is getting a might expensive these days....):
I think you missed all the major points, but that's not surprising. I even expect to get modded down excessively for my statements.
I'm saying that his donations are less than charitable, which does not refute that he is donating money. You can view the giving money part and be happy, or you can look at the bigger picture and see something less.
Hopefully the horribly large visible imperfections in those close face shots will make the drool either stop or exponentially increase solving the problem either way.
I'll respectfully disagree. Most of the Gates Foundation grants are aimed at treating symptoms, not finding solutions to causes. This just continues a vicious cycle of people needing more treatment. With the amount of money at their disposal, they could actually do some serious good for all people by doing something truly humanitarian such as develop cures and place the IP in the public domain.
As for the "donating at least $1.5 billion per year" what else is he going to do with it? Put it under his mattress? He's only "giving away" that portion of his wealth that he couldn't spend if he tried. From I see, he's spending it^H^H giving it away in such a way to "buy" a nice shiny new reputation as a philanthropist. I wouldn't attribute his goal to greed, but more to megalomania at this point. Perhaps he needs to visit Belgium more often.
Ah good! A place to forward all those AOL CDs to.
Anyways, on the topic of new(er) decent music
There's a short list. Guess I buy more than I think.
But we'd do that under the guise of benevolence and for their own good. Great link btw, gave me a good chuckle.
Ahh, I wasn't a B5 fan. So that particular reference escaped me. Sound interesting though.
Remind me again, who are the Shadows? (It's been a while, and the reference is weak due to all the watering down of "shadows" in other stories)
Perhaps we're the fortunate "Ancients" or "Progenitor" race should we ever start traveling the stars?
No kidding. This article should be renamed:
What users need to do to maximize our cashflow.
Actually, there's an entire slew of things that can be done to create a game wherein cheating becomes somewhat counterproductive. The thing is, it's "hard" to do so.
There's a number of issues in these games already that decrease the "fun". For instance, why are all magic users reduced to basically tender versions of slice and dicers? Don't think so? Try soloing anything without kiting and see how long you last. In the original concept of RPGs, mages were pretty much the most powerful creatures out there (for players, anyways) but were potentially extremely vulnerable. A mage could kill you instantly if they were powerful enough, but they could only do so a limited number of times in a timespan, as they expended their "energy". This left them extremely vulnerable to even a novice thief. Even at full strength, a cunning or lucky swordsman could kill a mage.
Just in case the above is too subtle, I'm discussing the intentional nerfing of characters in MMOs so they are "balanced". I don't want balanced characters. I want characters that play uniquely and have unique abilities. A fighter should be able to plow through enemies, that's what they do. Thieves/assassins should be able to sneak in and steal or assassinate a target. But these games are explicitly setup to prevent this behavior, all in the goal of creating "balanced" play. Their definition of balanced is wrong IMNSHO and creates a relatively boring game. I think Gygax created a much more balanced game, even as it allowed unbalanced play.
Yep, and that can be a seriously painful chore in JavaScript. Sometimes you'll actually have to learn about some of JavaScript's non-Java aspects such as passing functions to functions or dynamically extending objects or even using the built in var args capabilities. It's definitely a slightly different look at the world.
JavaScript is a neat language, there's just no really useful IDEs to go along with it yet in the world of web development, or at least none I've come across. It's still a very manual process developing with it.
Well, having done both across about the last 8 years of development, I can say that it depends upon the application. Data entry/display of server based data? Web App. Much easier to deal with and support, especially with a shifting client base. While a client application is certainly much more capable and responsive, it's overkill for a relatively simple page based data entry type application.
As for JavaScript, it's getting easier to deal with it with some of the addons available for Firefox. I won't touch ASP or PHP or Perl or Python for commercial web apps. There's far too many issues with all of those that are not easily fixable. Java has its issues as well, but they are able to be accommodated for the types of applications I've been writing.
But does google even have to care if it's not located in Utah?
IIRC, Utah cannot regulate an out of state company nor intrastate commerce, so this law would apply to Utah based companies only.
Maybe so. But copyright doesn't apply here.
Here's a thought: what if I run WoW in a VM? We should be able to do that soon, the hardware and software are certainly getting to that point. Now that would impose a whole slew of issues to WoW, since they'd have no control outside of their sandbox. They really don't have that control now, honestly, but it's more work than most are willing to put in to make it happen.
The real answer is for Blizzard to make the game enjoyable to play, instead of rewarding "face time grinding".
Disclaimer: No, I don't play WoW, and never have. It didn't interest me in the least. I did play EQ, and tired of its mindless grind. None of the other MMOs seemed any different, not even Eve. I used to play and code for a mud (pre EQ, way way pre) which was quite a bit more fun as being an imp (GM would be the closest thing in MMOs these days) allowed you quite a bit of freedom and create spontaneous changes. Usually that was in concert with players - it gave them a new challenge or two, and kept things fresh. Things like surprise trap door mobs was one of my favorites.
Since I happen to be mostly interested in new music and with the current state of the radio industry, my sole recourse to efficiently finding music is to research a variety of bands and then see what they sound like. There's some that you can't even find online, much less in music stores in the US. Stiltskin is one that I liked in 94 that doesn't exist in the books here and is almost non-existent online. Another more well-known artist would be David Gilmore's About Face, which also doesn't show up in US catalogs, but can mysterious be purchased outside the country.
As for downloading a movie 5 times? Give me a break. I don't know anyone that would bother. With Netflix, there's no reason to except if you can't get a movie at all. (Yes, I'm aware that Netflix is US only at the moment.)
Guess it's been a while since I've downloaded any music... :)
But, when you're looking for something new and on the fringe, you usually don't find FLAC files from what I experienced at the time. But, I would buy what I like anyways, in support of the artists. I bought She Wants Revenge based on three songs I heard, and overall I'm pretty happy with them. There's a couple like the Zutons that made me wish I'd downloaded them first, because the single acceptable song on the CD didn't make it worth buying the entire CD. I could have lived without the single songs.
So far this year there hasn't even been any music interesting enough to download, from my perspective. We're already through a quarter of it, and that's pretty bad.
I believe strongly you're mistaken, or you know a bunch of freeloaders.
I have downloaded content to see if I like it. It's been about 50/50 on whether I like the remaining content enough to buy it. I really wish I'd done that before purchasing "Who Killed the Zutons?". (The answer, btw, is "The Zutons")
Why do I buy it if I already have it? Because MP3s in generally sound like crap. Why do people buy songs they hear on the radio? Same reason. Hint, if you really want to, you can record radio tracks and slice and dice, but the quality's so poor there's no reason to. VHS tapes can easily accommodate 8 hours of FM quality audio.
I'd rather they drop most of the useless extras and concentrate on producing higher quality video with less compression.
As for shuffling of DVDs, this is a problem for you? You will actually sit and watch TV for more than 4 hours? (The roughly maximum time for a single DVD with acceptable quality) I don't know about you, but I generally need a pee break in a 3 hour period. Video isn't like music where you shuffle songs, since generally the running time is much longer than most songs.
While I think I'd like a higher quality picture, some HD TV shows have convinced me that perhaps I don't want to see every freckle and pock mark or glistening bit of goo...
They expect exclusive ownership of the recordings which they produce. The artist maintains the copyright on the words and music, assuming that they wrote them. There's a big difference between a piece of paper with some words on it, and a finished recording of same. It often takes a lot of money to turn those words into a complete album, and that's why the record companies insist on having exclusive distribution rights: so they can make their money back.
They expect exclusive ownership because they controlled the distribution channels. Think of them as a troll, er, toll, keeper for a bridge crossing a chasm. The artist is on one side of the chasm, their audience on the other. To get their music heard, they have to pay the toll keeper's demands, which are exclusive rights. It has nothing to do with making their money back.If Trent Reznor and crew produced and funded the recordings themselves (which they may have) and then signed over the distribution rights to a record company, perhaps that was a mistake -- instead, perhaps NIN should have started their own record company. Lots of established artists do.
Trent owns his own record company and every thing he's done since Pretty Hate Machine. To give you an idea of how bad the recording industry is, listen to his music sometime. "StarFuckers" from "The Fragile" should give you an idea, followed by "The Hand That Feeds" from "With Teeth". He sounds like he hates the industry about the same as Prince/The Artist Formerly Known as Prince/Prince does.Trent also likes to experiment with music. He really appears to like surround sound compositions (With Teeth has a nice surround sound version) and has stated that he'd love to re-release Pretty Hate Machine in surround sound but can't.
p>I certainly understand that it would work much better for the artists if the record companies were to put up the cash to produce the music, without any sort of agreement that they would get the exclusive rights to distribute that music. It would be tough to make this work as a for-profit business. There are plenty of smaller record companies that don't want to own the masters or even have exclusive distribution rights, but the musicians have to pony up the cash to produce the music themselves. Why would it be tough to make it work? You buy shares in the band like any other business, and take a cut of the profit. It'd work precisely like every other damn business in existence. Or even how book publishing works. Even that's better than the current situation with musical artists.
And you're the other kind? The one who knows source code instead?
Oh, 10 types of people... Binary... Or 11 types... Roman...