Any money has _no_ intrinsic value. What matters is what you can buy with that money.
If a country sells you ore for 1 million dollars, the value of that million dollars is _only_ what they can buy in return with it. No more, no less. If they can't buy much, then they're giving away their ore to you for free.
So I wouldn't put much hope in an economy that _only_ exports cash. That's an economy that in reality exports _nothing_.
If all you export is printed bits of paper, expect the value of those to plummet very very fast.
The dollar until now did have the saving grace of being perceived as _the_ international standard, and as something worth having reserves of. But again, on the assumption that they can at some point buy stuff with those dollars.
As that perception starts to fade, well, you're already seeing the effects. A huge trade deficit == a fast drop in currency value, until the value of _real_ exports matches that in imports. If you ever wondered why the dollar took a nose dive recently, now you know why: because of that trade defficit.
Want to export even more money? Well, then be prepared for the dollar value to fall even more.
Just keep it up. By the time your salary will be worth a tenth of what it's worth today, well, maybe you'll see what was wrong with that policy.
"Countries don't refuse to do business with other countries because they don't like them much."
True. But they might limit how much they're willing to sell you, based on how much you can actually afford to buy. And by "afford", I mean the value of your _exports_.
"Money is money"
Precisely because of that. What they're interested is what you can get for that money, not how fast you can print bits of paper.
"America is now and will always be a huge market"
China and India are both even bigger markets, and you don't see them being able to afford the same level of imports as you do.
A huge market that can't pay is not much of a market.
"Fundamentalism" has nothing to do with it. Get a dictionary some day. Might do you a lot of good.
There is really nothing either religious or political involved, so "fundamentalistic" _what_?
I _am_ however firmly against fucktards who think that parenting ends with getting someone impregnated. That they did their job, proved their potence to the world, now it's someone else's job to sort it out.
I don't even care if it's about medication, or because they perceive that overtime/TV/whatever is more important than the child. That's just not what parenting is about. Getting someone impregnated is the _easy_ part. Actually caring for the child is the important part.
"If his spouse, girlfriend or whoever has declared to carry out that child"
A good point and exactly the point that I doubt there.
_If_ his wife/gf/whatever, of her own free will, and without any pressure, decided she wants to be a single mother, sure. It's her body, her life, her decision.
However, I doubt that that's the way it's gonna go. The kind of fucktard that will even throw his own life away, because by jove he must have offspring at all cost, I somehow doubt that he'll let that spouse/gf/whatever reach her _own_ decision there.
I do believe you'd get that thing swatted, stomped and whacked with a hammer/shovel/whatever-is-handy for good measure too. And you might be looking at a lawsuit too.
Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.
You know, there's something I always wanted to ask a real rocket engineer: what's the big advantage of the space shuttle? Not as a flame or anything, I'm just trying to understand.
I mean, sure, the original plan and concept of a reusable vehicle is way cool. On the other hand, the original plans also grossly under-estimated the cost and complexity to do so.
Originally it sounded like we'll have a cheap airplane-like-thing that will do even daily sorties if needed, and even satellites will be brought up and down by shuttle. Needless to say, we still put them up _without_ a shuttle, because it's just not worth lifting a bloody huge airplane-like-thing when you could just lift a small capsule instead.
And that's just the thing. For just about _anything_ I can think of, I just can't see what's the point of lifting a bloody huge shuttle instead of a much smaller capsule. Even for humans. See how even the article does mention the russian Soyuz capsule as an alternative to come down.
So other than national pride, exactly what _is_ the point that justifies using a space shuttle instead? What detail am I missing?
This isn't supposed to be a flame or anything. I'm just trying to understand.
If you have cancer, you'll most likely be dead in less than 3 years.
So start counting from the start of pregnancy, and allowing for a few months to actually get your wife pregnant. It means you'll be dead at the latest when your kid is 2 years old. Probably a lot sooner than that.
So you're basically telling me that you actually _want_ to bring an orphan into this world? And that you actually _want_ to leave your spouse with the additional grief of being a single parent?
Geeze, dude, that's just fucking sick. I wish I could even say "no offense", but in fact please do take offense if you're actually considering such a plan in all seriousness.
Being a parent is not just about shooting your (fertile) sperm into someone and letting them and the child deal with it.
If you're doing IT for a company and end up supporting a bunch of people who don't know to use their computer, congrats you're among the victims of the scam. But you still illustrate the scam I'm talking about. A product was sold in this case not to the end users, but to your management, under blatantly false claims of what it does, how easy it is to use, and how much knowledge is needed.
Frankly, in the enterprise segment the lie only gets far worse. The ads to the end user almost seem tame by comparison. A large company doesn't even get those, it also gets salespeople coming to actively lie about how their product lowers TCO by not needing any knowledge whatsoever.
Next time you see the word TCO, think that that's an essential part of what it says. "Nah, you'll save money by needing even _less_ training to use our product."
So management does just that. And you end up supporting that.
And IMHO you still look like you're missing the point when you say "if a computer's so vital to a Doctor or Lawyer's job". My point was precisely that in most cases it isn't. The marginal benefit of saving maybe an hour a week by searching in a directory instead of in a filing cabinet, is just totally not worth investing thousands of hours in learning to use that tool. We're talking some tens of years before that investment pays off, by which time they have to learn a completely new interface anyway.
And that goes double in the enterprise market. The vast majority of snake oil sold, or produced in-house, is really not really bringing much ROI. In a lot of cases it actually needs more work than doing the same by hand. In other cases it saved the work of maybe 5 secretaries, at the expense of needing 6 higher paid IT people and maintenance programmers, plus some expensive support and maintenance contracts. Either way it's far from worth the costs of retraining everyone.
Which brings me back to the point about marketting. If those salespeople told your management "sure, you just need to retrain some 10,000 employees to use our product" then you wouldn't have to support as many clueless users on your network. But chances are your management would say "No. It's not worth that cost."
I'd blame them all if they just said "have at it! putting your own car together is easy and fun! Everyone can do it!" Which basically is the lie of the computer industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying necessarily computers should become as easy to use as a toaster. (Though it would be nice if they at least were as robust as one.) Maybe it can't. But then marketting should stop claiming basically that.
Either the product should start matching the marketters' claims, or the other way around. That's all I'm saying.
I stand by what I've said: If your company's ads told them "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", then you'd have less of those people calling you. Of course, the company would also have less customers, which is why they prefer to lie instead.
I know it's a surprising concept, but most people have better stuff to do with their time. A doctor or a lawyer's time is better spent, *gasp*, learning more about medicine and law, than becoming an expert in computing. Their time is more valuable than that.
It may come as a blow to your ego, but chances are your program isn't worth the time to go through the learning curve.
Here's some basic economics: The computer is just a tool for them. A tool which requires more time to babysit, than it would take to do the same thing by hand, is a bad tool. And most software falls squarely into that category.
E.g., the time and effort to babysit a computer (virus scanner, firewall, spam, etc) to just send an email is actually a worse use of even _my_ time than just using the post office. Just thinking that Joe Average has to spend some extra months to achieve the level of expertise you demand from him, just leaves me scratching my head: why would he ever want to waste his time like that?
Which, again, is why your marketting dept lies about it. If you told people "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", you'd discover that, plain and simple, your product isn't worth that.
If Joe Average wants to get a car, he's already been told a thousand times basically "cars are a difficult and dangerous thing. Keep your fingers off until you've been through driving school." There's honesty in that.
What the computer industry lacks is precisely this kind of honesty.
Joe Average is _bombarded_ with ads telling him "hey, our computer/program/card/whatever is easy! Grandma could use it! You just plug it in and it runs!" (Runs a DDOS zombie, a spam proxy and a couple of RPC viruses, that is.)
In the computer industry noone gives a fsck about the user. We only care about sales. Products are shipped intentionally with security disabled ever day, because asking Joe to first set his password or generate a WEP key is perceived as too hard.
Nah, let's make it look easy at least until we've got Joe's money. Then, ha ha, sucks to be him. We'll just call him an idiot when he gets bitten by _our_ lack of security.
Joe is also told "nah, you don't need to learn anything! This is so easy even grandma could use it right out of the box!" That's the message that marketting is pumping into Joe. (Because otherwise they might lose sales.) So let's stop with the acting surprised when the product is actually bought by a Joe who isn't interested in becoming a computer expert to use it.
Want less "idiots" using your program? Fine. Tell your boss that your company should stop the lie campaigns. Advertise the product as "not for people without extensive network admin experience" for example. Then I do believe that you'll have a lot less idiots to complain about.
Of course, you'd also have a helluva lot less sales.
And I'll tell you another difference between computers and the car industry. In the car industry they don't act like arrogant "I'm a god because I know how to change oil" idiots. They actually try to make a better product, instead of calling the user names.
Let's say an automobile company finds out that, say, the bucket seats on sports models get worn out because the users put a leg over the raised edge. And I'm picking the bucket seat because that can't be dismissed as "oh, they only do that because cars can kill." No, it just has to do with user comfort. You know what the manufacturer will do? Try to design a better chair, and spend weeks testing it.
Whereas in the computer industry we'd just call the user an "idiot". I mean, geeze, it may not be anywhere in the manual, but the user should have just _known_ to not put a leg over the seat's edge. The user should, in fact, do all sorts of uncomfortable tricks to make up for _our_ failure to design a good product. Otherwise he's an idiot.
You know... maybe in this industry it's not the users who are idiots. Just a thought.
Wow, worst advertising ever: "87% of people thought our game sucked enough to never come back once they tried it!"
Well, that's not _necessarily_ a bad thing (although from experience it _probably_ is). It all depends on why they thought it sucked.
For example think in terms of Bartle's dividing the MMO players into "killers", "achievers", "explorers" and "socializers". If you make a game where it's absolutely impossible to harm or scam other players, you'll lose "killers" within hours. I.e., you've driven away some 25% of your players in one go. On the flip side, though, you may have kept the other 75% happier and longer in your game.
(Much as Bartle does argue about how everyone needs to be bullied by a retard to be happy in a game, practice disproves that. Everquest and Asheron's Call made a killing off basically being the place where you won't get PKed on sight like on Ultima Online. UO invented the genre and ended up in third place precisely by, well, pretending that Bartle is right. Turned out that in reality most people _don't_ see it as cool or fun in a game.)
Conversely, if you make a place that's mostly socializer-oriented, you've made it uninteresting for 75% of the potential market. On the upside, you've made it a lot more interesting for the other 25%.
Most games ignore that segment on the assumption that socializing just happens, and you might just as well focus on everything else. They are only partially right: there are a lot of factors in a game that can make it more or less interesting for someone interested in socializing and/or RP. So one that the reverse is true about focus, could find a very comfortable niche for itself.
E.g., a game focused on crafts would be boring for most players, but would be a damn nice change for those of us who actually like crafting more than mindlessly killing 100,000 random enemies a day.
So basically what I'm saying is that it's not _necessarily_ a bad thing to offend a majority of players, if that means you catter better to the needs of the niche you have in mind.
However, as I've said, from experience most games that do make that kind of a "we're not for everyone" boast, fail to catter to any niche.
E.g., usually it's some "killer" that's frustrated that he can't make life miserable for newbies in other game, so goddammit, he's gonna make his own game where it's open season for any nasty stuff. By jove, he's gonna even put rape in the game, and sneak in perma-death or other disproportionate penalties, so you can really cause grief by hunting down someone.
Should finally be the perfect game for killers, right? Well, actually for anyone who either has a clue or has read Bartle's paper, it's obvious what's wrong with that idea. Killers need victims. A game which doesn't give those potential victims anything but grief and hostility, just drives them away. So the killers get just as bored and leave too.
That's just one of the ways in which the "we're not for everyone" boast usually really means "the game sucks", like you wrote.
That it's mostly useless in real-world terms anyway.
Sure, taking Moore's law literally, computers are 1 million times faster than 30 years ago. Arguably that should translate into _more_ than 1 million times more work per second, because compilers have evolved too, and expensive optimization techniques have become more affordable. (A compiler optimization technique that would have taken a week on a 70's mainframe, now takes seconds.) We also have better tools.
But are we doing 1 million times more with them? Nope.
Every time we get better tools, the accounting dept just get the idea "w00t! Now we can _really_ hire untrained monkeys to use them." In fact, the better tools and computers you get, the worse code you get.
It's not just code _performance_ that went south, any clue about security or good design went south too. Actually analyzing what could go wrong got at some point replaced by magic talismans like "we use Java so we can't possibly have a security problem" or "we use HTTPS, so our site is by definition secure." Too bad that one only has to edit an URL to bypass all those magic talismans.
And then there's the BDA (Buzzword Driven Architecture) effect.
The whole computer industry is one big scam where marketting is in control, and the biggest outright liar and con wins the contract. So every single dud or unfinished (or outright _stupid_) idea is marketted as _the_ second coming of christ, cure for all enterprise problem, cure for cancer, etc. And there's one born every minute who actually believes that drivel... yet again.
So programs are written with the sole purpose of having as many buzzwords in them as possible. Everything _must_ involve a SOAP call, to an EJB, which uses XSLT instead of just processing the damn data, etc.
True story: I've actually benchmarked one such crap buzzword-driven framework we were forced to use here. It took 1.1 seconds for a call to an empty method, on a 2.26 GHz P4 computer. No, not milliseconds. 1.1 _seconds_. A cool 2.5 billion CPU cycles just for a function call to an empty function.
We've actually exceeded Moore's law. A computer in '70 may have been 1 million times slower, but we're taking a _billion_ times more computer cycles to do the same. Yep, the modern version actually runs _slower_.
Being an ex-assembly programmer, that realization hurt. I'm talking physical pain.
So to end this long rant, IMHO I'm not sure that Moore's law will become that irrelevant any time soon. You could increase the CPU speed another 100 times, and someone will just find the monkeys to write 1000 times slower code for it.
"Money and power are universal forces in politics, they just manifest differently in different systems."
Well, the "they manifest differently" is my whole point.
I'm not naive enough to believe that politicians in Europe are any different deep down inside. All I'm saying is that here corruption manifests a lot more subtly. Politicians will _not_ be overt about being on someone's payroll, and will be a lot more moderate and discreet in what they provide for the money.
Basically, could Microsoft gain some benefits by bribing key people here and there? Well, most probably. But not in the way of having someone outright stop an anti-trust lawsuit for the money.
There's entirely too much to lose by doing that kind of an obvious deal.
Stuff like a politician being overtly all about representing a corporation or cartel (*cough* RIAA *cough*), and not even caring about anything else than representing those, is political suicide here. They'll be dropped like a hot potato by even their own party.
Patents are an easy case. The vast majority of populations doesn't even know what a patent is, or what's different for a software patent. (Even on/. look at how many people don't even have a clue WTH is different between patents, copyright and trademarks. Half will argue against trademarks -- i.e., against knowing whether that Nestle chocolate you've bought is really Nestle, or some crap counterfeit -- just because they got the idea that opposing IP raises karma on Slashdot.)
So that particular law is a very safe bet either way.
Second you assume that surely everyone is against patents. Don't extrapolate what's the fashionable karma-whoring moan on/. to mean "that's what everyone wants." That is wrong. Some of us are actually strongly _for_ patents, including, yes, software patents.
I'll even tell you why: I'd rather see more research than everyone hiring half-retarded ex-burger-flippers to copy someone else's algorithm from a book. (That is, if they even bothered reading a book.) Progress comes from research, not from hordes of monkeys copying someone else's work. I'd rather see more of a situation like, yes, in the pharma industry, where billions go into research, than the current situation where everyone implements the 1,000,000th nearly-identical e-commerce site.
But to return to the EU case, the EU did ask and delay several times to get more opinions and to see what the popular opinion about that is. Turns out that other than a few nerds, noone had anything about it.
MS was simply asked to license their APIs and protocols fairly to everyone, without discrimination. (E.g., no pulling a stunt like "nope, we won't license them to Mozilla because we still want to kill that threat to our monopoly.")
That's all its about. APIs and protocol specs. No MS source code has to be involved, other than a few _header_ files. Or not even those, in the case of protocols.
So MS thinks it's smart and comes up with a scheme that says "sure, you can get our specs if you sign this license saying that you can't open source _your_ code that implements those specs."
Basically a way to say "grr, ok, you can see our specs but only as long as you're not one of those OSS commies. Then screw you, you can't interface with our products."
"If these protocols can be implemented in Linux without forcing MS's software to be opened under the GPL, they should be forced to do that."
Which is exactly what the EU asked. That's what this fight is all about.
Noone asked MS to provide implementation code of its own, nor to GPL any of its implementation code. It's just basically saying "let others interface with your code." Including, yes, Linux programs, MacOS programs, or whoever else wants to use those protocols.
And MS is basically saying "Nope, no OSS guys will talk to _our_ servers."
That's what this is all about. MS is trying to kill OSS via a license that discriminates against OSS developpers. The EU says "sorry, you can't do that. We said non-discriminating and we meant it."
But again, that never was about GPL-in any of _Microsoft's_ code. It just has to do with whether MS is allowed to say you can't GPL _your_ code (that incidentally calls their APIs or talks to one of their servers via a proprietary MS protocol.)
And frankly, much as I'm not even pro-OSS, I don't think MS should be allowed to decide that. They (think they) make a good OS. Fine. But they shouldn't be in a position to dictate whose programs are allowed to run on it.
Because allowing that is the shortest way to a monopoly.
You propose, what? That MS bribes every single political party in every single country in Europe?
You may find that "Europe" is not a single state, like the USA. It's a helluva lot of states in what's just slightly more than a diplomatic treaty. So who are you proposing to bribe? _All_ of them?
You may also find that the political landscape in Europe is a _lot_ different than in the USA. Politicians here actually have to fight for their votes, rather than just sell themselves openly to the highest bidder. The result is a system which is _far_ less inclined to bend over to a corporation and shaft their voters. Au contraire, if in doubt they'll shaft the corporations for extra votes.
Political majority means a fragile alliance of parties, neither of which has the majority, and all of which are trying to exploit their allies mistakes for their own benefit. Any one party who'd publicly bend over to a monopoly, would quickly find themselves switched from leader of the majority coalition to being _the_ opposition, because all their former allies did the populist thing and formed a coalition without them.
More importantly, that wouldn't even buy a whole term for MS. If the political alliances form the other way around, who's the current leader can change right in the middle of a term.
So what do you propose? That MS bribes every single political party, in every single country in Europe? I'm sure you can see how that's impractical.
1. "EU government" really means something fundamentally different than "USA government". No, I'm not gonna bash the USA or anything. The EU just isn't one country. The U stands for UNION, and it's a union of independent nations.
What passes for "EU government" or "EU agency" is just a shifty diplomatic treaty between countries that follow their own interests and have their own population to impress. If you bribe, say, a German bureaucrat in an EU agency, you'll have all the other EU countries screaming bloody murder, if only to push their own bureaucrat in his/her place.
(Which also answers the usual "bet the EU wouldn't do that to their own companies" moans: there isn't such a thing as an EU company. If the EU failed to punish, say, a German monopoly, it would have France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, etc, screaming bloody murder.)
So there isn't just one government to bribe. By the time you went through all the governments to bribe, one of them would have the next election.
2. Speaking of elections, most EU countries have more interesting politics. They don't have two parties, both cattering to the corporations, for a start. Your average European's country's election is "won" by an unstable alliance of parties, neither of which usually has a majority on its own.
It's a system which works precisely _because_ politicians are, well, politicians. (Said in all possible contempt.) It's a system where, in fact, they make populism and demagogy work.
The "winner" doesn't get 4 years in which they can just rake in bribes and catter to the higher bidder with impunity, and the opposition doesn't just wait for their turn to rake in the bribes with impunity. There isn't any such thing as having an almost guaranteed turn at it: lose enough popularity and you can turn from an alliance leader to a minor member of someone else's alliance in the next elections. And even if you "won", the more other parties you need in a coalition for a majority, the more concessions you'll have to make to get them to support you, so better not end up too low.
And more importantly, even if you won, alliances can be formed the other way around at any moment, if that is perceived as the more populist thing to do for those small parties in your coalition. If the "winning" party has, say, 41% of the places in the parliament, they might at any moment find themselves switched from leading a majority coalition of parties, to being the opposition because everyone else made a 59% coalition against them. The small members of a coalition really have nothing to lose from switching sides like that: they'll end up members of the majority coalition either way, so they might as well just pick the side that looks more popular.
Bribery does exist in Europe's politics, but it's usually a lot more subtle than that, and offers more subtle benefits. You won't see a politician just openly being bought by a cartel and lobbying full time for them, or a party just openly forcing the DOJ to bend over for a corporation. That's the kind of thing that's plain political suicide down here, one way or the other: if you don't get kicked out by your party to save face, that party becomes the opposition very quickly as alliances form the other way around.
So basically short of bribing every single political party in Europe, it's not easy for MS to just "give some money to the government" and get a free ride out. And bribing every single political party would be a pretty costly exercise even for MS.
The short answer is that it'll work, but the reason is that in the meantime we've taken an agnostic approach to accessing drive contents.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, we had MFM and RLL drives which (A) required the controller to have a pretty intimate knowledge of a drive's internal workings, and (B) an access scheme that again was tightly coupled to the drive's geometry. It was in fact an addressing where you had to explicitly state the track, sector and head. So if you moved to some other scheme (e.g., adding a 4'th parameter: depth) it would fall flat on its face.
In the meantime, though, technology got smarter. Both problems got solved as follows:
A) IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).
The industry basically moved away from having dumb drives and a controller that needs to know the exact internal workings of the drive. It took a lot of hint from SCSI. Nowadays the real controller is on the HDD itself, and the "IDE controller" on the mobo is merely a bridge to the specialized bus to commnicate with the real controller.
That's why nowadays you can have CD-ROMS, DVD-burners, etc, on an ATA ribbon. Or why you can have cache on the drives nowadays. Or why you don't have to buy a new motherboard each time a HDD vendor comes up with a new encoding.
So the short story is that as long as the drive comes with an ATA or SATA compatible controller in it, it will work.
B) LBA (Logical Block Addressing)
The addressing scheme also got more agnostic. We no longer tell the drive the exact track-sector-head coordinates. We just tell it "give me the 1075'th sector" and let the drive figure out for itself where that sector is. (That's another point where IDE comes in handy.)
So the short story is: as long as the sectors can be numbered, any geometry will work. Adding an extra dimension just means you'll have to number the sectors differently. But as long as you can number them, you're all set.
(Of course, this is assuming your drive doesn't end up bigger than 144 PETAbytes, which is the limit for 48 bit LBA with 512 byte sectors. If it's more than that, well, we'll have to switch to using more bits.)
True, you have a point there. I am aware that there are shades of grey in between thief and non-thief, but it would have made the explanation unnecessarily long winded. ("And if you're only slightly a thief, that, and if you're just mostly a thief, that other thing, and if you're merely a freeloader, then that other thing, etc." You get the idea.) I think people can interpolate between those on their own.
But again, I see your point. The "either or" wording was indeed awfully wrong there.
For starters, you have my sympathy, but I'd exclude childhood and high school indignities from this discussion. Or to put it otherwise, when a 41 year old PHB acts like an asshole, he doesn't have the same kind of excuse as a 14 year old bully. There are a lot of things that are fundamentally different between people's understanding of world and other humans between those ages.
Second, some people are just assholes. That's it. They're mean just because they can be mean, and derive their satisfaction from that.
Or for the longer story, think of Bartle's four types of MMO/MUD players: explorers, achievers, socializers and killers. (Bearing in mind that Bartle's "killer" definition doesn't mean PvP. It means people whose main satisfaction in games is causing stress and torment to others. The people whose biggest satisfaction in a game is to ruin the game for someone to the point where they cancel their account.)
I find that the classification holds true IRL too. Or rather, in games it's merely an extension of someone's RL kind of personality. Even if they don't actually do it IRL, if they derive satisfaction from making someone's life miserable in the anonymity of a virtual world, chances are they'd enjoy it just as much IRL.
So basically if you went into IT because you liked learning new stuff, you're an "explorer". If you went into it because of the money, and count your success purely in promotions, property and status, you're an "achiever". If you went to business school because you saw it as an excuse to show people who's boss and other power trips, you're most likely a "killer".
Some people just are "killers" and that's that. Wiping their shoes all over your dignity is what causes them pleasure. Best you can do is just avoid them if you can. E.g., if you find yourself working for one, best thing to do is learn some marketable skills and find a new job. Seriously.
But there was another point I was really getting to: sometimes it's _you_ that's the problem. Sometimes it's just a case of "what goes around comes around." You may just getting back the disrespect you gave others.
Us nerds, especially the Asperger's Syndrome breed, are naturally good at offending people... and not even realizing it. E.g., going around acting like a King and like doing your job (e.g., configuring a server or fixing a computer, when you're paid to do that) is some undeserved royal favour towards the unwashed masses, is a sure way to offend said masses. Insisting that everyone does things your way, goddamit, and they're idiots if they don't immediately bow to your wisdom, is another one. Doubly so if it involves childish "but I really wanna lollypop NOW" tantrums or beating on a dead horse for hours. Etc.
Honestly, a lot of nerds don't deserve any respect, and have fully earned disrespect. I'm a terminal nerd myself, yet I feel like bashing a few skulls in when dealing with some of the wannabe-BOFHs here. You have to coax them into even doing their job, like restarting a server that's crashed or configuring one for the new applications. In at least one pathologic case one threw a massive tantrum because we dared ask him to restart a server. Another one cut down our connection pools on productive applications on account that "WTH do you need more than 3 connections per server? Those are valuable resources." Sadly, I'm not kidding.
Are _you_ like that? Probably not, and anyway I have no way of knowing. So I'm not accusing you or anything.
I'm just saying that you can know for yourself, though. If in your average day you meet signifficantly more than 25% assholes, well, either you're working for the awfully wrong company, or it's really you. Both are valid possibilities, but it may be time to start seriously thinking which is it.
Showing respect because someone deserves it, is just that. I have no problem with respecting a manager who is actually doing a good job. (In fact, that's the only way to get my genuine respect at work: know your stuff, and do _your_ job well.)
And then there's showing fake respect to an utter incompetent. That's brown nosing.
It doesn't matter if he's a manager or not. The boss sucking up to an admin that's more of a roadblock than help, as often happened during the dot-con boom, is still brown nosing. Just because it comes in a downwards direction doesn't mean it's not brown nosing.
Managers just happen to get it more often because they're essentially the ones signing one's paycheck. So he can be so incompetent that he's a liability, and people will still pretend to have the deepest respect for him. That's brown nosing.
And, no offense, but _everyone_ claims to not like brown nosers and to empathically detect when they're brown nosed. They don't. In fact, the more one only gets fake respect, the more they'll cling to the idea that it's genuine respect and that they'd know if they were bullshitted.
Because the alternative would be admitting just that: that the only respect they can get is as fake as a hooker's orgasm. (And just like the hooker's orgasm, they paid for that fake show.) That they're incompetent.
Again, that's not meant as an insult or anything. I don't know if _you_ are in that category. Probably not. I don't know.
But I'm just saying that there _are_ a lot who, in fact, are utterly incompetent and who reward brown-nosing. Not everyone. But there are enough of them.
I'm just saying you can't just claim that "brown nosing is just a name for SHOWING RESPECT". No, it's not. It's a name for FAKING UNDESERVED RESPECT. There's a bloody huge difference there.
I remember those times very well, because I was one of the zealots advocating "stay the away from NT." Yeah, with much the same arguments. "Netware is more stable." "Netware doesn't need that ludicriously much memory." Etc.
As usual, we nerds missed the RL point by a mile. We were so focused on arcane technical merits, that we missed the real point.
The invariable actual answer was "Yes, that's true, but NT is cheaper. Even when you factor in the more powerful computer, the extra admin time, etc, NT is still much cheaper."
The Real World was and still is all about TCO, rather than about technical merits.
For most small businesses it was damn hard to justify the price of a Netware license, when NT essentially did the same thing. Sure, it may have required a reboot now and then, but then it's not like you lost millions if one of your 20 employees waited 5 minutes to upload a file. Sure, it required a few extra minutes a day from your admin, but it's not like one or two admins for 2-3 servers were overloaded to start with. Etc.
And it became even harder to justify when you factored in that Netware didn't even offer an upgrade discount. If you wanted to move from Netware 3.x to 4.x, Novell expected you to pay the full price. (I won't go into _why_ would someone want to upgrade each time a new version is available. Cluelessness was a big factor, I would guess.) I personally know people who switched to NT over that. It was cheaper to buy NT _and_ a new computer than to upgrade your Novell server.
And it's not even to watch movies on the road. I don't travel much.
Thing is, I'm lazy. I'm not ashamed to do that. In fact, I'm even proud of it. I even learned good coding patterns and techniques, because it was getting to be too much work to fix a spaghetty mess.
In this case, I'm too lazy to drive through half the town to a DVD rental centre. I'd really like to watch more movies, but I'm hard pressed to justify a 1 hour trip (total for driving both ways) for a 1.5 hour movie. Actually, make that 2 hours, since I'll also have to take a trip the next day to bring the movie back. So it's 2 hours wasted for a 1.5 hour movie. It's not a very efficient use of my time.
Or you could call it "time management" or "planning" instead of "lazy", if that feels any better.
Would I pay a few hundred bucks to save those hours? Damn right. My time is valuable. After the first dozen movies, the PSP and memory stick will have paid for itself.
I suspect there are others like me too.
Pretty much the most successful inventions were those cattering to the lazy. We all have washing machines because we're too lazy to wash clothes by hand. We have vaccuum cleaners because it's less effort (and causes less dust) than using a broom and weekly taking the carpets out to beat the dust out of them. We have remote controlls and digital tuners with memory because we're too lazy to walk to the TV and twist knobs to switch the channel. Etc.
In all those cases, we pay more money to save work and time.
So don't underestimate the market potential of cattering to the lazy:P
Believe it or not, even by BSA's numbers, piracy in the western world isn't that high. No, seriously, look at their breakdown by states in the USA, for example. You'll notice that no state exceeds some 40% and some are in the single digit range.
And bear in mind that the BSA is basically a sock-puppet that exists only to whine about piracy, and how some chinese kid pirating 3DSMax to mod a $40 game actually represents a $6000 loss for a company. (Surely _everyone_ would pay $6000, even in countries where it means 6 years' salary, to mod a $40 game, if it wasn't for piracy. Not.)
BSA's only reason to exist is to cry wolf. So they do it lots. The'll even classify the neighbour's dog as a wolf because it sorta looks like it. Or as I usually say, there's a reason there's BS in BSA.
So if even their inflated numbers don't say 100%, sorry, I don't believe the fallacy that goes "they've all pirated <insert software title>".
The fact which some people fail to understand is that a helluva lot of us actually pay for software. Or, to open that can of worms too, for music.
Why would someone in their right mind pay for commercial software instead of (A) using some free crap, or (B) pirating it?
Well, point A is easy: because often we actually don't find the free one to do the same, or have the same usability. Sometimes it's cheaper to pay for something than to spend weeks making the free version work, or learning its quirks. Time is money, and mine is pretty expensive.
Point B actually boils down to personal ethics: either you're a thief or you aren't. If you are, I don't expect you to understand why someone would prefer buying stuff if shoplifting it was easy. If you aren't, then you can understand that most people wouldn't shoplift even if shops were completely non-supervised.
It also illustrates another point: true, not everyone can afford Photoshop. So some buy Paintshop Pro instead.
The world isn't made of only extremes. In the real world there are a lot of shades of grey in between owning a Ferrari and walking to work.
The same applies or rather should apply to software too: there are (and should be more) choices between the most expensive version (even by piracy) or something free (again, sometimes "free" via piracy, as in using a SN generator on a shareware version.) Paintshop is just one such example of an in-between piece of software. Others include, for example, using Milkshape instead of 3DSMax.
Let me try being more concise for a change: IMHO you mix two very different issues:
1. That someone paid good money for a game prop.
2. That two people fought, and one got killed, for a lot of real money (by Chinese standards.)
All I'm saying is, basically: they're completely separate issues, so try to judge them as such. Try to judge issue 2 as if issue 1 didn't even exist.
So Person A ripped Person B off of 1 year's salary or so for them. They fought, Person B got into a homicidal rage and stabbed Person A to death. Hardly that sensational any more: people get killed for less money every day.
Yes, I know, the sensationalist media mixed them up, because it makes a better headline. "Chinese stabbed for $1000 scam" doesn't have the same punch as "Gamer stabbed over virtual property." Bullshit sells. What else is new? But, you know, you don't have to do the same. That's all I'm saying;)
Believe it or not, we already know that games are just games, and movies are just movies. We all are very much aware that it's just entertainment, and, yes, "consumer circus." And yes, believe it or not, we already know about books and some of us have that too among our many hobbies. No, really, you can stop pretending you're the greatest genius for saying what everyone else already knew.
No, we don't really expect them to be some deep philosophical intellectual exercise. We just expect "entertainment" to actually be, you know, "entertaining." I know, it's a hard to grasp concept. Turn the words "entertainment" and "entertaining" in your head a bit, and I'm sure even you can eventually grasp the connection.
We're not expecting to end up 10 IQ points higher after a game or a movie, nor supremely enlightened. We just expect to not be bored by it. Nothing more.
When we play a game we expect some degree of work to have went into the gameplay. Again, if you'll roll the words around in your head a bit, I'm sure the subtle connection will eventually reveal itself to you.
And the point is that a helluva lot of games forget that. They get so caught up in having a higher polygon count, that they end up with crap controls and crap gameflow. If they even make a half-arsed attempt at catching our attention by means of a story or plot, they either (A) make a quick and uninteresting job of dumping a half-arsed text between missions, or (B) just take some recipe and apply it badly. Etc.
See, for example, CRPGs which just take the hero's journey recipe from Hollywood, make a crap story to fit it, and stretch it linearly all over a game. Except a movie is 1.5 hours, while a game might be 30 hours. What was a brief 10 minutes showing that the hero was an ordinary guy like you and me in the movie, becomes a solid 3.5 hours of pointless boring stuff in the game. Where in the movie you might be guessing the next plot device 10 minutes before it happened, but it still kept you hooked enough, in the game becomes a whole CD worth of the heroes seeming blind and not seeing the obvious. Because they're not yet at the point in the recipe where the hero should find it out, and by jove, they'll stick to that recipe at all cost. Etc.
And it would be nice if more game companies started worrying about these things, than about polygon count.
And in the meantime, we rely on such reviews to weed out the games that make those mistakes, from those who still are any good. Or, yes, go read a book, program something, go out, or whatever hobbies fit. Thank you, Captain Obvious. How would we have ever figured _that_ out without you?
No really, next time you feel like acting like a snotty "I'm superior because my hobby is better than yours" kinda idiot, feel free to leave that attitude at the door. Or put down the crack pipe. Join a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in contact with reality, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Any money has _no_ intrinsic value. What matters is what you can buy with that money.
If a country sells you ore for 1 million dollars, the value of that million dollars is _only_ what they can buy in return with it. No more, no less. If they can't buy much, then they're giving away their ore to you for free.
So I wouldn't put much hope in an economy that _only_ exports cash. That's an economy that in reality exports _nothing_.
If all you export is printed bits of paper, expect the value of those to plummet very very fast.
The dollar until now did have the saving grace of being perceived as _the_ international standard, and as something worth having reserves of. But again, on the assumption that they can at some point buy stuff with those dollars.
As that perception starts to fade, well, you're already seeing the effects. A huge trade deficit == a fast drop in currency value, until the value of _real_ exports matches that in imports. If you ever wondered why the dollar took a nose dive recently, now you know why: because of that trade defficit.
Want to export even more money? Well, then be prepared for the dollar value to fall even more.
Just keep it up. By the time your salary will be worth a tenth of what it's worth today, well, maybe you'll see what was wrong with that policy.
"Countries don't refuse to do business with other countries because they don't like them much."
True. But they might limit how much they're willing to sell you, based on how much you can actually afford to buy. And by "afford", I mean the value of your _exports_.
"Money is money"
Precisely because of that. What they're interested is what you can get for that money, not how fast you can print bits of paper.
"America is now and will always be a huge market"
China and India are both even bigger markets, and you don't see them being able to afford the same level of imports as you do.
A huge market that can't pay is not much of a market.
"Fundamentalism" has nothing to do with it. Get a dictionary some day. Might do you a lot of good.
There is really nothing either religious or political involved, so "fundamentalistic" _what_?
I _am_ however firmly against fucktards who think that parenting ends with getting someone impregnated. That they did their job, proved their potence to the world, now it's someone else's job to sort it out.
I don't even care if it's about medication, or because they perceive that overtime/TV/whatever is more important than the child. That's just not what parenting is about. Getting someone impregnated is the _easy_ part. Actually caring for the child is the important part.
"If his spouse, girlfriend or whoever has declared to carry out that child"
A good point and exactly the point that I doubt there.
_If_ his wife/gf/whatever, of her own free will, and without any pressure, decided she wants to be a single mother, sure. It's her body, her life, her decision.
However, I doubt that that's the way it's gonna go. The kind of fucktard that will even throw his own life away, because by jove he must have offspring at all cost, I somehow doubt that he'll let that spouse/gf/whatever reach her _own_ decision there.
I do believe you'd get that thing swatted, stomped and whacked with a hammer/shovel/whatever-is-handy for good measure too. And you might be looking at a lawsuit too.
Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.
You know, there's something I always wanted to ask a real rocket engineer: what's the big advantage of the space shuttle? Not as a flame or anything, I'm just trying to understand.
I mean, sure, the original plan and concept of a reusable vehicle is way cool. On the other hand, the original plans also grossly under-estimated the cost and complexity to do so.
Originally it sounded like we'll have a cheap airplane-like-thing that will do even daily sorties if needed, and even satellites will be brought up and down by shuttle. Needless to say, we still put them up _without_ a shuttle, because it's just not worth lifting a bloody huge airplane-like-thing when you could just lift a small capsule instead.
And that's just the thing. For just about _anything_ I can think of, I just can't see what's the point of lifting a bloody huge shuttle instead of a much smaller capsule. Even for humans. See how even the article does mention the russian Soyuz capsule as an alternative to come down.
So other than national pride, exactly what _is_ the point that justifies using a space shuttle instead? What detail am I missing?
This isn't supposed to be a flame or anything. I'm just trying to understand.
If you have cancer, you'll most likely be dead in less than 3 years.
So start counting from the start of pregnancy, and allowing for a few months to actually get your wife pregnant. It means you'll be dead at the latest when your kid is 2 years old. Probably a lot sooner than that.
So you're basically telling me that you actually _want_ to bring an orphan into this world? And that you actually _want_ to leave your spouse with the additional grief of being a single parent?
Geeze, dude, that's just fucking sick. I wish I could even say "no offense", but in fact please do take offense if you're actually considering such a plan in all seriousness.
Being a parent is not just about shooting your (fertile) sperm into someone and letting them and the child deal with it.
It's obviously the general "you".
If you're doing IT for a company and end up supporting a bunch of people who don't know to use their computer, congrats you're among the victims of the scam. But you still illustrate the scam I'm talking about. A product was sold in this case not to the end users, but to your management, under blatantly false claims of what it does, how easy it is to use, and how much knowledge is needed.
Frankly, in the enterprise segment the lie only gets far worse. The ads to the end user almost seem tame by comparison. A large company doesn't even get those, it also gets salespeople coming to actively lie about how their product lowers TCO by not needing any knowledge whatsoever.
Next time you see the word TCO, think that that's an essential part of what it says. "Nah, you'll save money by needing even _less_ training to use our product."
So management does just that. And you end up supporting that.
And IMHO you still look like you're missing the point when you say "if a computer's so vital to a Doctor or Lawyer's job". My point was precisely that in most cases it isn't. The marginal benefit of saving maybe an hour a week by searching in a directory instead of in a filing cabinet, is just totally not worth investing thousands of hours in learning to use that tool. We're talking some tens of years before that investment pays off, by which time they have to learn a completely new interface anyway.
And that goes double in the enterprise market. The vast majority of snake oil sold, or produced in-house, is really not really bringing much ROI. In a lot of cases it actually needs more work than doing the same by hand. In other cases it saved the work of maybe 5 secretaries, at the expense of needing 6 higher paid IT people and maintenance programmers, plus some expensive support and maintenance contracts. Either way it's far from worth the costs of retraining everyone.
Which brings me back to the point about marketting. If those salespeople told your management "sure, you just need to retrain some 10,000 employees to use our product" then you wouldn't have to support as many clueless users on your network. But chances are your management would say "No. It's not worth that cost."
I'd blame them all if they just said "have at it! putting your own car together is easy and fun! Everyone can do it!" Which basically is the lie of the computer industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying necessarily computers should become as easy to use as a toaster. (Though it would be nice if they at least were as robust as one.) Maybe it can't. But then marketting should stop claiming basically that.
Either the product should start matching the marketters' claims, or the other way around. That's all I'm saying.
I stand by what I've said: If your company's ads told them "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", then you'd have less of those people calling you. Of course, the company would also have less customers, which is why they prefer to lie instead.
I know it's a surprising concept, but most people have better stuff to do with their time. A doctor or a lawyer's time is better spent, *gasp*, learning more about medicine and law, than becoming an expert in computing. Their time is more valuable than that.
It may come as a blow to your ego, but chances are your program isn't worth the time to go through the learning curve.
Here's some basic economics: The computer is just a tool for them. A tool which requires more time to babysit, than it would take to do the same thing by hand, is a bad tool. And most software falls squarely into that category.
E.g., the time and effort to babysit a computer (virus scanner, firewall, spam, etc) to just send an email is actually a worse use of even _my_ time than just using the post office. Just thinking that Joe Average has to spend some extra months to achieve the level of expertise you demand from him, just leaves me scratching my head: why would he ever want to waste his time like that?
Which, again, is why your marketting dept lies about it. If you told people "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", you'd discover that, plain and simple, your product isn't worth that.
If Joe Average wants to get a car, he's already been told a thousand times basically "cars are a difficult and dangerous thing. Keep your fingers off until you've been through driving school." There's honesty in that.
What the computer industry lacks is precisely this kind of honesty.
Joe Average is _bombarded_ with ads telling him "hey, our computer/program/card/whatever is easy! Grandma could use it! You just plug it in and it runs!" (Runs a DDOS zombie, a spam proxy and a couple of RPC viruses, that is.)
In the computer industry noone gives a fsck about the user. We only care about sales. Products are shipped intentionally with security disabled ever day, because asking Joe to first set his password or generate a WEP key is perceived as too hard.
Nah, let's make it look easy at least until we've got Joe's money. Then, ha ha, sucks to be him. We'll just call him an idiot when he gets bitten by _our_ lack of security.
Joe is also told "nah, you don't need to learn anything! This is so easy even grandma could use it right out of the box!" That's the message that marketting is pumping into Joe. (Because otherwise they might lose sales.) So let's stop with the acting surprised when the product is actually bought by a Joe who isn't interested in becoming a computer expert to use it.
Want less "idiots" using your program? Fine. Tell your boss that your company should stop the lie campaigns. Advertise the product as "not for people without extensive network admin experience" for example. Then I do believe that you'll have a lot less idiots to complain about.
Of course, you'd also have a helluva lot less sales.
And I'll tell you another difference between computers and the car industry. In the car industry they don't act like arrogant "I'm a god because I know how to change oil" idiots. They actually try to make a better product, instead of calling the user names.
Let's say an automobile company finds out that, say, the bucket seats on sports models get worn out because the users put a leg over the raised edge. And I'm picking the bucket seat because that can't be dismissed as "oh, they only do that because cars can kill." No, it just has to do with user comfort. You know what the manufacturer will do? Try to design a better chair, and spend weeks testing it.
Whereas in the computer industry we'd just call the user an "idiot". I mean, geeze, it may not be anywhere in the manual, but the user should have just _known_ to not put a leg over the seat's edge. The user should, in fact, do all sorts of uncomfortable tricks to make up for _our_ failure to design a good product. Otherwise he's an idiot.
You know... maybe in this industry it's not the users who are idiots. Just a thought.
Wow, worst advertising ever: "87% of people thought our game sucked enough to never come back once they tried it!"
Well, that's not _necessarily_ a bad thing (although from experience it _probably_ is). It all depends on why they thought it sucked.
For example think in terms of Bartle's dividing the MMO players into "killers", "achievers", "explorers" and "socializers". If you make a game where it's absolutely impossible to harm or scam other players, you'll lose "killers" within hours. I.e., you've driven away some 25% of your players in one go. On the flip side, though, you may have kept the other 75% happier and longer in your game.
(Much as Bartle does argue about how everyone needs to be bullied by a retard to be happy in a game, practice disproves that. Everquest and Asheron's Call made a killing off basically being the place where you won't get PKed on sight like on Ultima Online. UO invented the genre and ended up in third place precisely by, well, pretending that Bartle is right. Turned out that in reality most people _don't_ see it as cool or fun in a game.)
Conversely, if you make a place that's mostly socializer-oriented, you've made it uninteresting for 75% of the potential market. On the upside, you've made it a lot more interesting for the other 25%.
Most games ignore that segment on the assumption that socializing just happens, and you might just as well focus on everything else. They are only partially right: there are a lot of factors in a game that can make it more or less interesting for someone interested in socializing and/or RP. So one that the reverse is true about focus, could find a very comfortable niche for itself.
E.g., a game focused on crafts would be boring for most players, but would be a damn nice change for those of us who actually like crafting more than mindlessly killing 100,000 random enemies a day.
So basically what I'm saying is that it's not _necessarily_ a bad thing to offend a majority of players, if that means you catter better to the needs of the niche you have in mind.
However, as I've said, from experience most games that do make that kind of a "we're not for everyone" boast, fail to catter to any niche.
E.g., usually it's some "killer" that's frustrated that he can't make life miserable for newbies in other game, so goddammit, he's gonna make his own game where it's open season for any nasty stuff. By jove, he's gonna even put rape in the game, and sneak in perma-death or other disproportionate penalties, so you can really cause grief by hunting down someone.
Should finally be the perfect game for killers, right? Well, actually for anyone who either has a clue or has read Bartle's paper, it's obvious what's wrong with that idea. Killers need victims. A game which doesn't give those potential victims anything but grief and hostility, just drives them away. So the killers get just as bored and leave too.
That's just one of the ways in which the "we're not for everyone" boast usually really means "the game sucks", like you wrote.
That it's mostly useless in real-world terms anyway.
Sure, taking Moore's law literally, computers are 1 million times faster than 30 years ago. Arguably that should translate into _more_ than 1 million times more work per second, because compilers have evolved too, and expensive optimization techniques have become more affordable. (A compiler optimization technique that would have taken a week on a 70's mainframe, now takes seconds.) We also have better tools.
But are we doing 1 million times more with them? Nope.
Every time we get better tools, the accounting dept just get the idea "w00t! Now we can _really_ hire untrained monkeys to use them." In fact, the better tools and computers you get, the worse code you get.
It's not just code _performance_ that went south, any clue about security or good design went south too. Actually analyzing what could go wrong got at some point replaced by magic talismans like "we use Java so we can't possibly have a security problem" or "we use HTTPS, so our site is by definition secure." Too bad that one only has to edit an URL to bypass all those magic talismans.
And then there's the BDA (Buzzword Driven Architecture) effect.
The whole computer industry is one big scam where marketting is in control, and the biggest outright liar and con wins the contract. So every single dud or unfinished (or outright _stupid_) idea is marketted as _the_ second coming of christ, cure for all enterprise problem, cure for cancer, etc. And there's one born every minute who actually believes that drivel... yet again.
So programs are written with the sole purpose of having as many buzzwords in them as possible. Everything _must_ involve a SOAP call, to an EJB, which uses XSLT instead of just processing the damn data, etc.
True story: I've actually benchmarked one such crap buzzword-driven framework we were forced to use here. It took 1.1 seconds for a call to an empty method, on a 2.26 GHz P4 computer. No, not milliseconds. 1.1 _seconds_. A cool 2.5 billion CPU cycles just for a function call to an empty function.
We've actually exceeded Moore's law. A computer in '70 may have been 1 million times slower, but we're taking a _billion_ times more computer cycles to do the same. Yep, the modern version actually runs _slower_.
Being an ex-assembly programmer, that realization hurt. I'm talking physical pain.
So to end this long rant, IMHO I'm not sure that Moore's law will become that irrelevant any time soon. You could increase the CPU speed another 100 times, and someone will just find the monkeys to write 1000 times slower code for it.
"Money and power are universal forces in politics, they just manifest differently in different systems."
Well, the "they manifest differently" is my whole point.
I'm not naive enough to believe that politicians in Europe are any different deep down inside. All I'm saying is that here corruption manifests a lot more subtly. Politicians will _not_ be overt about being on someone's payroll, and will be a lot more moderate and discreet in what they provide for the money.
Basically, could Microsoft gain some benefits by bribing key people here and there? Well, most probably. But not in the way of having someone outright stop an anti-trust lawsuit for the money.
There's entirely too much to lose by doing that kind of an obvious deal.
Stuff like a politician being overtly all about representing a corporation or cartel (*cough* RIAA *cough*), and not even caring about anything else than representing those, is political suicide here. They'll be dropped like a hot potato by even their own party.
Patents are an easy case. The vast majority of populations doesn't even know what a patent is, or what's different for a software patent. (Even on /. look at how many people don't even have a clue WTH is different between patents, copyright and trademarks. Half will argue against trademarks -- i.e., against knowing whether that Nestle chocolate you've bought is really Nestle, or some crap counterfeit -- just because they got the idea that opposing IP raises karma on Slashdot.)
/. to mean "that's what everyone wants." That is wrong. Some of us are actually strongly _for_ patents, including, yes, software patents.
So that particular law is a very safe bet either way.
Second you assume that surely everyone is against patents. Don't extrapolate what's the fashionable karma-whoring moan on
I'll even tell you why: I'd rather see more research than everyone hiring half-retarded ex-burger-flippers to copy someone else's algorithm from a book. (That is, if they even bothered reading a book.) Progress comes from research, not from hordes of monkeys copying someone else's work. I'd rather see more of a situation like, yes, in the pharma industry, where billions go into research, than the current situation where everyone implements the 1,000,000th nearly-identical e-commerce site.
But to return to the EU case, the EU did ask and delay several times to get more opinions and to see what the popular opinion about that is. Turns out that other than a few nerds, noone had anything about it.
Seems pretty democratic to me.
MS was simply asked to license their APIs and protocols fairly to everyone, without discrimination. (E.g., no pulling a stunt like "nope, we won't license them to Mozilla because we still want to kill that threat to our monopoly.")
That's all its about. APIs and protocol specs. No MS source code has to be involved, other than a few _header_ files. Or not even those, in the case of protocols.
So MS thinks it's smart and comes up with a scheme that says "sure, you can get our specs if you sign this license saying that you can't open source _your_ code that implements those specs."
Basically a way to say "grr, ok, you can see our specs but only as long as you're not one of those OSS commies. Then screw you, you can't interface with our products."
"If these protocols can be implemented in Linux without forcing MS's software to be opened under the GPL, they should be forced to do that."
Which is exactly what the EU asked. That's what this fight is all about.
Noone asked MS to provide implementation code of its own, nor to GPL any of its implementation code. It's just basically saying "let others interface with your code." Including, yes, Linux programs, MacOS programs, or whoever else wants to use those protocols.
And MS is basically saying "Nope, no OSS guys will talk to _our_ servers."
That's what this is all about. MS is trying to kill OSS via a license that discriminates against OSS developpers. The EU says "sorry, you can't do that. We said non-discriminating and we meant it."
But again, that never was about GPL-in any of _Microsoft's_ code. It just has to do with whether MS is allowed to say you can't GPL _your_ code (that incidentally calls their APIs or talks to one of their servers via a proprietary MS protocol.)
And frankly, much as I'm not even pro-OSS, I don't think MS should be allowed to decide that. They (think they) make a good OS. Fine. But they shouldn't be in a position to dictate whose programs are allowed to run on it.
Because allowing that is the shortest way to a monopoly.
You propose, what? That MS bribes every single political party in every single country in Europe?
You may find that "Europe" is not a single state, like the USA. It's a helluva lot of states in what's just slightly more than a diplomatic treaty. So who are you proposing to bribe? _All_ of them?
You may also find that the political landscape in Europe is a _lot_ different than in the USA. Politicians here actually have to fight for their votes, rather than just sell themselves openly to the highest bidder. The result is a system which is _far_ less inclined to bend over to a corporation and shaft their voters. Au contraire, if in doubt they'll shaft the corporations for extra votes.
Political majority means a fragile alliance of parties, neither of which has the majority, and all of which are trying to exploit their allies mistakes for their own benefit. Any one party who'd publicly bend over to a monopoly, would quickly find themselves switched from leader of the majority coalition to being _the_ opposition, because all their former allies did the populist thing and formed a coalition without them.
More importantly, that wouldn't even buy a whole term for MS. If the political alliances form the other way around, who's the current leader can change right in the middle of a term.
So what do you propose? That MS bribes every single political party, in every single country in Europe? I'm sure you can see how that's impractical.
The problem for MS is that:
1. "EU government" really means something fundamentally different than "USA government". No, I'm not gonna bash the USA or anything. The EU just isn't one country. The U stands for UNION, and it's a union of independent nations.
What passes for "EU government" or "EU agency" is just a shifty diplomatic treaty between countries that follow their own interests and have their own population to impress. If you bribe, say, a German bureaucrat in an EU agency, you'll have all the other EU countries screaming bloody murder, if only to push their own bureaucrat in his/her place.
(Which also answers the usual "bet the EU wouldn't do that to their own companies" moans: there isn't such a thing as an EU company. If the EU failed to punish, say, a German monopoly, it would have France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, etc, screaming bloody murder.)
So there isn't just one government to bribe. By the time you went through all the governments to bribe, one of them would have the next election.
2. Speaking of elections, most EU countries have more interesting politics. They don't have two parties, both cattering to the corporations, for a start. Your average European's country's election is "won" by an unstable alliance of parties, neither of which usually has a majority on its own.
It's a system which works precisely _because_ politicians are, well, politicians. (Said in all possible contempt.) It's a system where, in fact, they make populism and demagogy work.
The "winner" doesn't get 4 years in which they can just rake in bribes and catter to the higher bidder with impunity, and the opposition doesn't just wait for their turn to rake in the bribes with impunity. There isn't any such thing as having an almost guaranteed turn at it: lose enough popularity and you can turn from an alliance leader to a minor member of someone else's alliance in the next elections. And even if you "won", the more other parties you need in a coalition for a majority, the more concessions you'll have to make to get them to support you, so better not end up too low.
And more importantly, even if you won, alliances can be formed the other way around at any moment, if that is perceived as the more populist thing to do for those small parties in your coalition. If the "winning" party has, say, 41% of the places in the parliament, they might at any moment find themselves switched from leading a majority coalition of parties, to being the opposition because everyone else made a 59% coalition against them. The small members of a coalition really have nothing to lose from switching sides like that: they'll end up members of the majority coalition either way, so they might as well just pick the side that looks more popular.
Bribery does exist in Europe's politics, but it's usually a lot more subtle than that, and offers more subtle benefits. You won't see a politician just openly being bought by a cartel and lobbying full time for them, or a party just openly forcing the DOJ to bend over for a corporation. That's the kind of thing that's plain political suicide down here, one way or the other: if you don't get kicked out by your party to save face, that party becomes the opposition very quickly as alliances form the other way around.
So basically short of bribing every single political party in Europe, it's not easy for MS to just "give some money to the government" and get a free ride out. And bribing every single political party would be a pretty costly exercise even for MS.
The short answer is that it'll work, but the reason is that in the meantime we've taken an agnostic approach to accessing drive contents.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, we had MFM and RLL drives which (A) required the controller to have a pretty intimate knowledge of a drive's internal workings, and (B) an access scheme that again was tightly coupled to the drive's geometry. It was in fact an addressing where you had to explicitly state the track, sector and head. So if you moved to some other scheme (e.g., adding a 4'th parameter: depth) it would fall flat on its face.
In the meantime, though, technology got smarter. Both problems got solved as follows:
A) IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).
The industry basically moved away from having dumb drives and a controller that needs to know the exact internal workings of the drive. It took a lot of hint from SCSI. Nowadays the real controller is on the HDD itself, and the "IDE controller" on the mobo is merely a bridge to the specialized bus to commnicate with the real controller.
That's why nowadays you can have CD-ROMS, DVD-burners, etc, on an ATA ribbon. Or why you can have cache on the drives nowadays. Or why you don't have to buy a new motherboard each time a HDD vendor comes up with a new encoding.
So the short story is that as long as the drive comes with an ATA or SATA compatible controller in it, it will work.
B) LBA (Logical Block Addressing)
The addressing scheme also got more agnostic. We no longer tell the drive the exact track-sector-head coordinates. We just tell it "give me the 1075'th sector" and let the drive figure out for itself where that sector is. (That's another point where IDE comes in handy.)
So the short story is: as long as the sectors can be numbered, any geometry will work. Adding an extra dimension just means you'll have to number the sectors differently. But as long as you can number them, you're all set.
(Of course, this is assuming your drive doesn't end up bigger than 144 PETAbytes, which is the limit for 48 bit LBA with 512 byte sectors. If it's more than that, well, we'll have to switch to using more bits.)
True, you have a point there. I am aware that there are shades of grey in between thief and non-thief, but it would have made the explanation unnecessarily long winded. ("And if you're only slightly a thief, that, and if you're just mostly a thief, that other thing, and if you're merely a freeloader, then that other thing, etc." You get the idea.) I think people can interpolate between those on their own.
But again, I see your point. The "either or" wording was indeed awfully wrong there.
For starters, you have my sympathy, but I'd exclude childhood and high school indignities from this discussion. Or to put it otherwise, when a 41 year old PHB acts like an asshole, he doesn't have the same kind of excuse as a 14 year old bully. There are a lot of things that are fundamentally different between people's understanding of world and other humans between those ages.
Second, some people are just assholes. That's it. They're mean just because they can be mean, and derive their satisfaction from that.
Or for the longer story, think of Bartle's four types of MMO/MUD players: explorers, achievers, socializers and killers. (Bearing in mind that Bartle's "killer" definition doesn't mean PvP. It means people whose main satisfaction in games is causing stress and torment to others. The people whose biggest satisfaction in a game is to ruin the game for someone to the point where they cancel their account.)
I find that the classification holds true IRL too. Or rather, in games it's merely an extension of someone's RL kind of personality. Even if they don't actually do it IRL, if they derive satisfaction from making someone's life miserable in the anonymity of a virtual world, chances are they'd enjoy it just as much IRL.
So basically if you went into IT because you liked learning new stuff, you're an "explorer". If you went into it because of the money, and count your success purely in promotions, property and status, you're an "achiever". If you went to business school because you saw it as an excuse to show people who's boss and other power trips, you're most likely a "killer".
Some people just are "killers" and that's that. Wiping their shoes all over your dignity is what causes them pleasure. Best you can do is just avoid them if you can. E.g., if you find yourself working for one, best thing to do is learn some marketable skills and find a new job. Seriously.
But there was another point I was really getting to: sometimes it's _you_ that's the problem. Sometimes it's just a case of "what goes around comes around." You may just getting back the disrespect you gave others.
Us nerds, especially the Asperger's Syndrome breed, are naturally good at offending people... and not even realizing it. E.g., going around acting like a King and like doing your job (e.g., configuring a server or fixing a computer, when you're paid to do that) is some undeserved royal favour towards the unwashed masses, is a sure way to offend said masses. Insisting that everyone does things your way, goddamit, and they're idiots if they don't immediately bow to your wisdom, is another one. Doubly so if it involves childish "but I really wanna lollypop NOW" tantrums or beating on a dead horse for hours. Etc.
Honestly, a lot of nerds don't deserve any respect, and have fully earned disrespect. I'm a terminal nerd myself, yet I feel like bashing a few skulls in when dealing with some of the wannabe-BOFHs here. You have to coax them into even doing their job, like restarting a server that's crashed or configuring one for the new applications. In at least one pathologic case one threw a massive tantrum because we dared ask him to restart a server. Another one cut down our connection pools on productive applications on account that "WTH do you need more than 3 connections per server? Those are valuable resources." Sadly, I'm not kidding.
Are _you_ like that? Probably not, and anyway I have no way of knowing. So I'm not accusing you or anything.
I'm just saying that you can know for yourself, though. If in your average day you meet signifficantly more than 25% assholes, well, either you're working for the awfully wrong company, or it's really you. Both are valid possibilities, but it may be time to start seriously thinking which is it.
Showing respect because someone deserves it, is just that. I have no problem with respecting a manager who is actually doing a good job. (In fact, that's the only way to get my genuine respect at work: know your stuff, and do _your_ job well.)
And then there's showing fake respect to an utter incompetent. That's brown nosing.
It doesn't matter if he's a manager or not. The boss sucking up to an admin that's more of a roadblock than help, as often happened during the dot-con boom, is still brown nosing. Just because it comes in a downwards direction doesn't mean it's not brown nosing.
Managers just happen to get it more often because they're essentially the ones signing one's paycheck. So he can be so incompetent that he's a liability, and people will still pretend to have the deepest respect for him. That's brown nosing.
And, no offense, but _everyone_ claims to not like brown nosers and to empathically detect when they're brown nosed. They don't. In fact, the more one only gets fake respect, the more they'll cling to the idea that it's genuine respect and that they'd know if they were bullshitted.
Because the alternative would be admitting just that: that the only respect they can get is as fake as a hooker's orgasm. (And just like the hooker's orgasm, they paid for that fake show.) That they're incompetent.
Again, that's not meant as an insult or anything. I don't know if _you_ are in that category. Probably not. I don't know.
But I'm just saying that there _are_ a lot who, in fact, are utterly incompetent and who reward brown-nosing. Not everyone. But there are enough of them.
I'm just saying you can't just claim that "brown nosing is just a name for SHOWING RESPECT". No, it's not. It's a name for FAKING UNDESERVED RESPECT. There's a bloody huge difference there.
I remember those times very well, because I was one of the zealots advocating "stay the away from NT." Yeah, with much the same arguments. "Netware is more stable." "Netware doesn't need that ludicriously much memory." Etc.
As usual, we nerds missed the RL point by a mile. We were so focused on arcane technical merits, that we missed the real point.
The invariable actual answer was "Yes, that's true, but NT is cheaper. Even when you factor in the more powerful computer, the extra admin time, etc, NT is still much cheaper."
The Real World was and still is all about TCO, rather than about technical merits.
For most small businesses it was damn hard to justify the price of a Netware license, when NT essentially did the same thing. Sure, it may have required a reboot now and then, but then it's not like you lost millions if one of your 20 employees waited 5 minutes to upload a file. Sure, it required a few extra minutes a day from your admin, but it's not like one or two admins for 2-3 servers were overloaded to start with. Etc.
And it became even harder to justify when you factored in that Netware didn't even offer an upgrade discount. If you wanted to move from Netware 3.x to 4.x, Novell expected you to pay the full price. (I won't go into _why_ would someone want to upgrade each time a new version is available. Cluelessness was a big factor, I would guess.) I personally know people who switched to NT over that. It was cheaper to buy NT _and_ a new computer than to upgrade your Novell server.
And it's not even to watch movies on the road. I don't travel much.
:P
Thing is, I'm lazy. I'm not ashamed to do that. In fact, I'm even proud of it. I even learned good coding patterns and techniques, because it was getting to be too much work to fix a spaghetty mess.
In this case, I'm too lazy to drive through half the town to a DVD rental centre. I'd really like to watch more movies, but I'm hard pressed to justify a 1 hour trip (total for driving both ways) for a 1.5 hour movie. Actually, make that 2 hours, since I'll also have to take a trip the next day to bring the movie back. So it's 2 hours wasted for a 1.5 hour movie. It's not a very efficient use of my time.
Or you could call it "time management" or "planning" instead of "lazy", if that feels any better.
Would I pay a few hundred bucks to save those hours? Damn right. My time is valuable. After the first dozen movies, the PSP and memory stick will have paid for itself.
I suspect there are others like me too.
Pretty much the most successful inventions were those cattering to the lazy. We all have washing machines because we're too lazy to wash clothes by hand. We have vaccuum cleaners because it's less effort (and causes less dust) than using a broom and weekly taking the carpets out to beat the dust out of them. We have remote controlls and digital tuners with memory because we're too lazy to walk to the TV and twist knobs to switch the channel. Etc.
In all those cases, we pay more money to save work and time.
So don't underestimate the market potential of cattering to the lazy
Believe it or not, even by BSA's numbers, piracy in the western world isn't that high. No, seriously, look at their breakdown by states in the USA, for example. You'll notice that no state exceeds some 40% and some are in the single digit range.
And bear in mind that the BSA is basically a sock-puppet that exists only to whine about piracy, and how some chinese kid pirating 3DSMax to mod a $40 game actually represents a $6000 loss for a company. (Surely _everyone_ would pay $6000, even in countries where it means 6 years' salary, to mod a $40 game, if it wasn't for piracy. Not.)
BSA's only reason to exist is to cry wolf. So they do it lots. The'll even classify the neighbour's dog as a wolf because it sorta looks like it. Or as I usually say, there's a reason there's BS in BSA.
So if even their inflated numbers don't say 100%, sorry, I don't believe the fallacy that goes "they've all pirated <insert software title>".
The fact which some people fail to understand is that a helluva lot of us actually pay for software. Or, to open that can of worms too, for music.
Why would someone in their right mind pay for commercial software instead of (A) using some free crap, or (B) pirating it?
Well, point A is easy: because often we actually don't find the free one to do the same, or have the same usability. Sometimes it's cheaper to pay for something than to spend weeks making the free version work, or learning its quirks. Time is money, and mine is pretty expensive.
Point B actually boils down to personal ethics: either you're a thief or you aren't. If you are, I don't expect you to understand why someone would prefer buying stuff if shoplifting it was easy. If you aren't, then you can understand that most people wouldn't shoplift even if shops were completely non-supervised.
It also illustrates another point: true, not everyone can afford Photoshop. So some buy Paintshop Pro instead.
The world isn't made of only extremes. In the real world there are a lot of shades of grey in between owning a Ferrari and walking to work.
The same applies or rather should apply to software too: there are (and should be more) choices between the most expensive version (even by piracy) or something free (again, sometimes "free" via piracy, as in using a SN generator on a shareware version.) Paintshop is just one such example of an in-between piece of software. Others include, for example, using Milkshape instead of 3DSMax.
Let me try being more concise for a change: IMHO you mix two very different issues:
;)
1. That someone paid good money for a game prop.
2. That two people fought, and one got killed, for a lot of real money (by Chinese standards.)
All I'm saying is, basically: they're completely separate issues, so try to judge them as such. Try to judge issue 2 as if issue 1 didn't even exist.
So Person A ripped Person B off of 1 year's salary or so for them. They fought, Person B got into a homicidal rage and stabbed Person A to death. Hardly that sensational any more: people get killed for less money every day.
Yes, I know, the sensationalist media mixed them up, because it makes a better headline. "Chinese stabbed for $1000 scam" doesn't have the same punch as "Gamer stabbed over virtual property." Bullshit sells. What else is new? But, you know, you don't have to do the same. That's all I'm saying
Believe it or not, we already know that games are just games, and movies are just movies. We all are very much aware that it's just entertainment, and, yes, "consumer circus." And yes, believe it or not, we already know about books and some of us have that too among our many hobbies. No, really, you can stop pretending you're the greatest genius for saying what everyone else already knew.
No, we don't really expect them to be some deep philosophical intellectual exercise. We just expect "entertainment" to actually be, you know, "entertaining." I know, it's a hard to grasp concept. Turn the words "entertainment" and "entertaining" in your head a bit, and I'm sure even you can eventually grasp the connection.
We're not expecting to end up 10 IQ points higher after a game or a movie, nor supremely enlightened. We just expect to not be bored by it. Nothing more.
When we play a game we expect some degree of work to have went into the gameplay. Again, if you'll roll the words around in your head a bit, I'm sure the subtle connection will eventually reveal itself to you.
And the point is that a helluva lot of games forget that. They get so caught up in having a higher polygon count, that they end up with crap controls and crap gameflow. If they even make a half-arsed attempt at catching our attention by means of a story or plot, they either (A) make a quick and uninteresting job of dumping a half-arsed text between missions, or (B) just take some recipe and apply it badly. Etc.
See, for example, CRPGs which just take the hero's journey recipe from Hollywood, make a crap story to fit it, and stretch it linearly all over a game. Except a movie is 1.5 hours, while a game might be 30 hours. What was a brief 10 minutes showing that the hero was an ordinary guy like you and me in the movie, becomes a solid 3.5 hours of pointless boring stuff in the game. Where in the movie you might be guessing the next plot device 10 minutes before it happened, but it still kept you hooked enough, in the game becomes a whole CD worth of the heroes seeming blind and not seeing the obvious. Because they're not yet at the point in the recipe where the hero should find it out, and by jove, they'll stick to that recipe at all cost. Etc.
And it would be nice if more game companies started worrying about these things, than about polygon count.
And in the meantime, we rely on such reviews to weed out the games that make those mistakes, from those who still are any good. Or, yes, go read a book, program something, go out, or whatever hobbies fit. Thank you, Captain Obvious. How would we have ever figured _that_ out without you?
No really, next time you feel like acting like a snotty "I'm superior because my hobby is better than yours" kinda idiot, feel free to leave that attitude at the door. Or put down the crack pipe. Join a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in contact with reality, really.