I'm not arguing that the XBox has been profitable overall (because I don't think it has), but, I think its accounting is hard to honestly reduce to a vacuum. For example, the existence of the XBox and it being what it is have surely resulted in games being available on Windows machines that otherwise wouldn't be, which helps perpetuate the niche of (Windows) gaming PCs. That's not worth a billion dollars, but it's worth something.
I mean, even if the PS3 was a money pit for Sony (I have no idea if this is true), I think we could count it as a success for Sony simply on the basis of being instrumental in winning the next-gen-DVD format war.
Sometimes big enough companies involved in enough different markets can win even by losing because their products don't exist in silos separate from each other.
There are only so many bells & whistles you can add to Office, and most users don't use 90% of what's in there anyway
True; however, to sell Office, you don't need the users to use every feature. You just need them to use one feature that OO or Google Docs doesn't have. In my experience, most businesses use just one or two of Office's obscure features, and they're almost never the same feature.
I am not saying that Office will rule the world forever, but we are a long way from seeing the end of its reign. Poll the Fortune 500 and probably 500 of them use Office. Even the death of Windows looks likelier to happen first.
Understand that even something like the huge mindshare in its space that something like the iPhone has (which is enormous) just utterly pales to the mindshare that Office has in its space. It is beyond ubiquitous. I have worked at clients who hated, hated, hated Microsoft and could or would not say one good thing about them, and yet they're still running Outlook.
Sure can, and sometimes you should. But that doesn't mean it's the best tool for every task.
Plus you don't have to worry about which version of.SHIT your client needs to install before it'll work.
I assume you're trolling, but that's a much more trivial problem to address as a developer than, say, memory leaks in C++. (Which is itself a fixable problem -- but still a less trivial one.)
The intent was to get the Xbox into the living room as an entertainment center. How's that working out?
I'd say for the time in which Netflix was streaming on XBox and not yet on PS3/Wii, that was a pretty big coup in that department -- although I can't point to another one, and now the competitors have caught up.
Even when Microsoft actually does something new right, they can't seem to build any momentum off it. Whether that's in part Ballmer's fault or not I'm not sure.
Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.
No wonder nobody bought Office 2007/2010... wait, that's not what happened at all.
Microsoft's produced enough legitimate gaffes and failures to laugh at in the last ten years -- you don't need to try to will a new one into being through extreme wishful thinking.
So I'll add Louisiana students to the list of high maintenance students who I generally avoid
I'd somewhat go the opposite way -- other parts of the country/world will have excellent chances to poach some of Louisiana's best/brightest scientific students, people who might otherwise be inclined to stay there, because the Louisianans who get how backwards this is aren't going to want to stay.
It's more pronounced in the game industry than in many industries, because there are perenially more people who want to make video games than there are decent full-time jobs doing it. Much greater supply of people who will take a job than demand distorts that market and makes abuses that wouldn't be possible in most industries common.
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
1) Science never says that the universe created itself. It does say that something like the big bang theory best explains (so far) some evidence we have of things that have happened. It doesn't claim to know what, if anything, led to that.
The great things about science are that it's flexible and that it's not afraid to say "I don't know, yet." As we learn more, we refine previous theories -- they're not dogma.
This seems much more adaptive and reasonable than trying to live up to the latest translation of a very old book -- which revises itself along the same mechanisms somewhat oddly and imperfectly, e.g. Mormons.
2) Any argument you apply to the universe works little better if you try to apply it to the idea of god. If the universe had to come from somewhere, why doesn't god have to come from somewhere? If god is eternal and infinite, why can't the universe be?
It's fine, even impressive, to out-market the other companies.
However, generally a big marketing success indicates that you've managed to convince a bunch of people for whom your product is not superior to its competitors (what each person needs out of a product is different, and superiority isn't uniform from user to user) that it is.
It's fine for Apple to lie (your choice of words) to sell its products, but it's also fine for people who know better to look down on the people who bought the lies. That's not everyone who buys Apple.
Basically the whole thing makes me feel like I'm in the third grade again, and the whole class has decided that Levis are great and all other kinds of jeans are uncool, except these are supposed to be adults.
You can bet that Microsoft is behind the scenes again, pulling strings at Dell to squash any notion of freedom or choice.
That's one theory. Mine is that probably half of the Ubuntu purchases were followed by a support call (and subsequent return) by the purchaser because the machine wouldn't run new game x / quickbooks / excel / itunes / whatever.
If you're thinking, no, the general public is smarter than that, try working in a games store for a year, especially over Christmas. The number of returns of XBox games because they won't run on a Wii (or whatever system vs. system) will stagger you.
I believe that you're arguing against something other than the point that I was making.
My point is simply that a BSD style license grants me, as a recipient of code, more freedom/permissiveness than a GPL style license.
Whether what the GPL grants me is sufficient, or whether what it grants me is generous, or whether what it grants me is overall a smarter/better idea are all outside of the scope of my argument.
The Hurricane Lantern Effect analogy isn't a bad one, but I think what we tend to see with programming languages/tools is something just a little bit different.
In the HLE, you're trying to perform the exact same task as the person you're replacing/criticizing. And that does happen in development too -- arrogant developer tries to roll his own replacement for existing standard/language/framework X because of its shortcomings, and his solution does fix the exact thing he's upset about, but breaks ten other things.
What I think also happens a lot in development (and is sort of a parallel to this) is that a developer tries to 'correct' a percieved shortcoming in a language/framework/whatever, but in fact his 'fix' only makes the result more suitable for what he's specifically doing and neglects other uses for the tool or why it might be preferred. For example, someone who complains that C is too close to the machine -- well, yeah, it is for some tasks, but other times that's exactly what you need.
How much good is the freedom to have the source code, if the freedom goes away as soon as you want to do something with it? (Yes, I could tinker with the code and never distribute it.)
I'm sorry, but I'm not persuaded. I think there's a lot of good to say about a GPL-style license as opposed to a BSD-style license, but in terms of the specific issue of providing freedom to those I distribute my code to, to say the GPL-style license gives more seems like sophistry to me; it only works by narrowly defining when I am or am not a user in a way that feels artificial to me -- kind of like enshrining a right to own guns but making bullets illegal.
Because no one from India or China could possibly understand all of your requirements, or care about them.
Oh, there absolutely are people who can... but you're probably not going to find them on this kind of crowdsourcing web site.
It's a lot like the height of outsourcing software development to India circa five years ago. Sure, there are development teams in India (or more likely, a blended team of people in India and people on site, who might still themselves be from India) who can understand your business model/needs, overcome the significant hurdles of communication on a project with people half a world away, produce code that's solid and maintainable, and so on.
But the lowest bidder Joe Sixpack CTO picked? Not those guys.
And that, I think, is why a lot of those outsourcing projects went down in flames -- few if any of the managers involved knew how to draw the line of "cheaper, yet, still good enough to get the result I need."
Of course people should be distrustful of their governments.
However, what's the alternative? Placing more trust in their corporations? That's an even worse idea.
The free market solves lots of kinds of efficiency problems elegantly, but it can't do everything. Sometimes government regulation to ensure a more competitive or fairer market is the best of a lot of bad choices.
It's boggling to me that this seems to have gone over the head of most of the people responding to this article.
In addition to everything you said being true, they're also giving their phone to (mostly) a bunch of developers. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them end up writing (as hobby/side projects) whatever key apps are available for Android/iPhone that Windows phone doesn't have -- and I assume there are a lot of them.
If a politician has changed his/her mind for intellectually and politically honest reasons, then they shouldn't have any problem clearly explaining those reasons to the electorate.
In principle I agree with you, but in practice other politicians are extremely quick to demonize them for doing so, and the media and electorate tend to go along with it.
In some ways we (as an electorate) might earn the crappy government that we get.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could mod that post up -- it's an interesting take on the topic and covers ground that no one else in this thread did.
Actually, if you'd stop frothing at the mouth for a moment and read what he read, he said he gets 10 unDRM'd songs a month for his $15.
Which is more expensive than buying 10 songs on Amazon, but still invalidates pretty much everything you said.
I'm not arguing that the XBox has been profitable overall (because I don't think it has), but, I think its accounting is hard to honestly reduce to a vacuum. For example, the existence of the XBox and it being what it is have surely resulted in games being available on Windows machines that otherwise wouldn't be, which helps perpetuate the niche of (Windows) gaming PCs. That's not worth a billion dollars, but it's worth something.
I mean, even if the PS3 was a money pit for Sony (I have no idea if this is true), I think we could count it as a success for Sony simply on the basis of being instrumental in winning the next-gen-DVD format war.
Sometimes big enough companies involved in enough different markets can win even by losing because their products don't exist in silos separate from each other.
If the developer knows what they're doing, you don't have to.
There isn't a programming language or platform in the world that's proof against shitty developers.
There are only so many bells & whistles you can add to Office, and most users don't use 90% of what's in there anyway
True; however, to sell Office, you don't need the users to use every feature. You just need them to use one feature that OO or Google Docs doesn't have. In my experience, most businesses use just one or two of Office's obscure features, and they're almost never the same feature.
I am not saying that Office will rule the world forever, but we are a long way from seeing the end of its reign. Poll the Fortune 500 and probably 500 of them use Office. Even the death of Windows looks likelier to happen first.
Understand that even something like the huge mindshare in its space that something like the iPhone has (which is enormous) just utterly pales to the mindshare that Office has in its space. It is beyond ubiquitous. I have worked at clients who hated, hated, hated Microsoft and could or would not say one good thing about them, and yet they're still running Outlook.
You can "get shit done" in C++ too you know.
Sure can, and sometimes you should. But that doesn't mean it's the best tool for every task.
Plus you don't have to worry about which version of .SHIT your client needs to install before it'll work.
I assume you're trolling, but that's a much more trivial problem to address as a developer than, say, memory leaks in C++. (Which is itself a fixable problem -- but still a less trivial one.)
The intent was to get the Xbox into the living room as an entertainment center. How's that working out?
I'd say for the time in which Netflix was streaming on XBox and not yet on PS3/Wii, that was a pretty big coup in that department -- although I can't point to another one, and now the competitors have caught up.
Even when Microsoft actually does something new right, they can't seem to build any momentum off it. Whether that's in part Ballmer's fault or not I'm not sure.
Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.
No wonder nobody bought Office 2007/2010... wait, that's not what happened at all.
Microsoft's produced enough legitimate gaffes and failures to laugh at in the last ten years -- you don't need to try to will a new one into being through extreme wishful thinking.
So I'll add Louisiana students to the list of high maintenance students who I generally avoid
I'd somewhat go the opposite way -- other parts of the country/world will have excellent chances to poach some of Louisiana's best/brightest scientific students, people who might otherwise be inclined to stay there, because the Louisianans who get how backwards this is aren't going to want to stay.
The first amendment? Free speech? ????
Also a few other things, such as freedom of religion.
(But cue discussion about the viability of stapling amendments to people as a constitutionally protected form of speech anyway, because it's funny.)
It's more pronounced in the game industry than in many industries, because there are perenially more people who want to make video games than there are decent full-time jobs doing it. Much greater supply of people who will take a job than demand distorts that market and makes abuses that wouldn't be possible in most industries common.
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
1) Science never says that the universe created itself. It does say that something like the big bang theory best explains (so far) some evidence we have of things that have happened. It doesn't claim to know what, if anything, led to that.
The great things about science are that it's flexible and that it's not afraid to say "I don't know, yet." As we learn more, we refine previous theories -- they're not dogma.
This seems much more adaptive and reasonable than trying to live up to the latest translation of a very old book -- which revises itself along the same mechanisms somewhat oddly and imperfectly, e.g. Mormons.
2) Any argument you apply to the universe works little better if you try to apply it to the idea of god. If the universe had to come from somewhere, why doesn't god have to come from somewhere? If god is eternal and infinite, why can't the universe be?
It's fine, even impressive, to out-market the other companies.
However, generally a big marketing success indicates that you've managed to convince a bunch of people for whom your product is not superior to its competitors (what each person needs out of a product is different, and superiority isn't uniform from user to user) that it is.
It's fine for Apple to lie (your choice of words) to sell its products, but it's also fine for people who know better to look down on the people who bought the lies. That's not everyone who buys Apple.
Basically the whole thing makes me feel like I'm in the third grade again, and the whole class has decided that Levis are great and all other kinds of jeans are uncool, except these are supposed to be adults.
You can bet that Microsoft is behind the scenes again, pulling strings at Dell to squash any notion of freedom or choice.
That's one theory. Mine is that probably half of the Ubuntu purchases were followed by a support call (and subsequent return) by the purchaser because the machine wouldn't run new game x / quickbooks / excel / itunes / whatever.
If you're thinking, no, the general public is smarter than that, try working in a games store for a year, especially over Christmas. The number of returns of XBox games because they won't run on a Wii (or whatever system vs. system) will stagger you.
I believe that you're arguing against something other than the point that I was making.
My point is simply that a BSD style license grants me, as a recipient of code, more freedom/permissiveness than a GPL style license.
Whether what the GPL grants me is sufficient, or whether what it grants me is generous, or whether what it grants me is overall a smarter/better idea are all outside of the scope of my argument.
The Hurricane Lantern Effect analogy isn't a bad one, but I think what we tend to see with programming languages/tools is something just a little bit different.
In the HLE, you're trying to perform the exact same task as the person you're replacing/criticizing. And that does happen in development too -- arrogant developer tries to roll his own replacement for existing standard/language/framework X because of its shortcomings, and his solution does fix the exact thing he's upset about, but breaks ten other things.
What I think also happens a lot in development (and is sort of a parallel to this) is that a developer tries to 'correct' a percieved shortcoming in a language/framework/whatever, but in fact his 'fix' only makes the result more suitable for what he's specifically doing and neglects other uses for the tool or why it might be preferred. For example, someone who complains that C is too close to the machine -- well, yeah, it is for some tasks, but other times that's exactly what you need.
How much good is the freedom to have the source code, if the freedom goes away as soon as you want to do something with it? (Yes, I could tinker with the code and never distribute it.)
I'm sorry, but I'm not persuaded. I think there's a lot of good to say about a GPL-style license as opposed to a BSD-style license, but in terms of the specific issue of providing freedom to those I distribute my code to, to say the GPL-style license gives more seems like sophistry to me; it only works by narrowly defining when I am or am not a user in a way that feels artificial to me -- kind of like enshrining a right to own guns but making bullets illegal.
Because no one from India or China could possibly understand all of your requirements, or care about them.
Oh, there absolutely are people who can... but you're probably not going to find them on this kind of crowdsourcing web site.
It's a lot like the height of outsourcing software development to India circa five years ago. Sure, there are development teams in India (or more likely, a blended team of people in India and people on site, who might still themselves be from India) who can understand your business model/needs, overcome the significant hurdles of communication on a project with people half a world away, produce code that's solid and maintainable, and so on.
But the lowest bidder Joe Sixpack CTO picked? Not those guys.
And that, I think, is why a lot of those outsourcing projects went down in flames -- few if any of the managers involved knew how to draw the line of "cheaper, yet, still good enough to get the result I need."
There is no conflict, both are done to maximize the users freedom.
How does a license which specifies what I may or may not do with something maximize my freedom?
I think there's value in the GPL, but I don't see how a coherent argument can be made that it maximizes the user's freedom.
People claiming the FCC should do it are offering the best solution they see.
You, in turn, are offering no solution. In essence you're arguing for doing nothing.
To beat that argument, it's only necessary to argue that having the FCC do it beats doing nothing, which people have elsewhere in this thread.
To beat them in turn, yes, you need to offer an actual solution.
I'm not convinced this would happen the same way today -- the parties have shifted a bit on social policy in a quarter century.
(I'm also not sure it wouldn't happen the same way today, but that's not a short time to dig back.)
... and yet, 'who better' is a fair and entirely pragmatic question, and one that one would need to answer to put together a real criticism.
"This terrible idea is the best idea we have so far" isn't a stupid justification; it's how things get done in the real world.
Of course people should be distrustful of their governments.
However, what's the alternative? Placing more trust in their corporations? That's an even worse idea.
The free market solves lots of kinds of efficiency problems elegantly, but it can't do everything. Sometimes government regulation to ensure a more competitive or fairer market is the best of a lot of bad choices.
It's call "eating your own dog food".
It's boggling to me that this seems to have gone over the head of most of the people responding to this article.
In addition to everything you said being true, they're also giving their phone to (mostly) a bunch of developers. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them end up writing (as hobby/side projects) whatever key apps are available for Android/iPhone that Windows phone doesn't have -- and I assume there are a lot of them.
If a politician has changed his/her mind for intellectually and politically honest reasons, then they shouldn't have any problem clearly explaining those reasons to the electorate.
In principle I agree with you, but in practice other politicians are extremely quick to demonize them for doing so, and the media and electorate tend to go along with it.
In some ways we (as an electorate) might earn the crappy government that we get.