Sorry I haven't run into ANY of these problems in multiple environments where I've deployed/run SAV.
Most of my customers are running one or two versions back and they are still updating and protecting against current threats, for most the only reason to upgrade would be to support the Microsoft Security Senter introduced in XP SP2.
Sounds like your experience is unique, or maybe your exxagerating(sp).
I've had pretty good luck with SAV, it doesn't have the same problems that Norton (the consumer product) does. Both resource utilization hasn't been an issue even on our sloweest Celeron 500 running XP and it keeps getting AV updates perpetually.
Lastly, the studios will see no need to turn this on as long as sales are good
The copyright cartel has shown time and again that they are willing to do things that aren't good for their bottom line.
CD sales were never higher than in the heyday of the original Napster, every time the RIAA shuts down a P2P site or sues another group of P2P users their market share goes down, not up, the they continue on this self destructive path.
It won't matter that leaving ICT turned off can only increase sales, there are forced within the studios that are scared to death that people will be pulling unencrypted 1080p video off their component outputs and sticking it straight on the big scary Internet. The only thing that is keeping them from turning on ICT rigt away is they want HD-DVD/Blu-Ray to take off and eventually kill DVD with its easily broken CSS.
This is exactly what Sony is hoping for, sacrificing PS3 sales to try to push their Blu-Ray agenda. Unfortunatley it may be ultimately successful in establishing Blu-Ray as the winner in the next-gen DVD format wars.
Alternatively it could backfire and cause both Blu-Ray as well as the PS3 itself could end up failing.
Sorta offtopic If either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD gain a foothold in the market it's nearly guaranteed that ICT will be coming.
The studios won't be using ICT initially because they don't want to piss off the only people who will be interested in the "negt gen" DVDs to begin with, the early adopters. The people who bought early HDTVs are also likely candidates to purchase early HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players.
My prediction: Once one or the other wins the format war (doesn't matter if it's HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) and next gen DVD adoption starts to rise you will see less and less movies released on regular DVD forcing people to buy into it. Once there is sizable market share, and many of the older HD-DVDs are going out of service they will begin quietly including ICT on new movies, starying with a few test cases to guage backlash.
Eventually (say by 2010-2012) major movies will no longer be offered on DVD and all HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies will have ICT turned on.
Hoipefully by then it will be at least as easy to defeat the DRM in the next gen DVDs as it is to defeat CSS today.
My biggest problem with unions is that when a union comes into a workplace, you aren't giving the option of joining, you are given the option of joining or finding another job. If your field is largely union you can either join or find another line of work.
Now in most cases you don't technically have to "join" the union itself, you can instead pay nearly the same amount that the union member does to the union and recieve none of the actual union benefits or voting rights.
It's simply unfair that if 50%+1 of a workforce votes in a union that 100% of the workforce is forced to be a part of that union, people say it's the same thing with politics but it's not like everybody was forced to join the Republican party after the presidential election.
Of course I have other problems with unions (as they are implemented in the U.S.) other than the compulsory membership/association. They create a culture of entitlement where people act like the main reason the company exists is to provide them with employment. Also they tend to erode any incetive to do good work, if the jackass next to you, who does half as much work as you half as well makes more money just because he's been there longer there's no point to busting your ass.
Well don't tell any of my devices, cause all of them are over 2 years old, many of them over 5 years old.
Heck my "public segment", where the DSL modem (6 years old), broadband router (4 years old) and VPN device (4 years old) connect is a 15 year old 10Base-T ethernet hub.
Your experience must be with Linksys, I always keep a spare D-Link broadband router on a shelf ready for when a friend or relative calls after their "Internet doesn't work" because their Linksys router fried itself.
I'm continually amazed how many people think that because Linksys costs more (and now sports the Cisco logo) that it must be better.
And he should have been paid, he needed to be reimbursed for his costs as well as future costs for the hoardes of D-Link gear already out there with his servers configured in their firmware.
Granted D-Link could and likely will correct the issue with firmware upgrades most people don't upgrade the firmware unless they are having a problem or maybe if they are redeploying a device. It's likely that in 10 years time there will still be D-Link devices out there trying to query his NTP server.
This is nothing new, Dell has always been willing to go through resellers even in the 1990s. There are bsiness customers who have exclusive arrangements with VARs but still want to buy Dell. The solution is for the VAR to buy and resell the Dells, though typically the price was a little more after the VAR added in a percent or two for their troubles.
Last year when I was trying to install Galleon, though they have recently moved to compiled Java so I can't make the same complaint about that particular product now.
Now I pretty much avoid Java apps like the plague.
Not sure how they did it but the installer said something along the lines of "Sun JRE not detected" and offered to install it for me, wouldn't let me continue if I did not.
Don't reall exactly which JVM I was trying to use at the time, perhaps it was LaTTE?
All joking aside, Windows users actually would stand to benefit the most from open sourcing Java. The Sun JRE, which virtually ALL Java apps are arbitrarily dependent on is one of the worst apps I've ever seen when it comes to memory utilization.
I've seen Win32 apps consuming 150Mb of RAM.
If Sun were to open source Java it could open the door to different, better JVMs that might even be able to spoof itself as "Sun JRE" for the myriad of poorly written Java apps that refuse to run on anything else.
Not sure but last time I checked the RIAA was still only tarketing people who were sharing a largem amount of files, likely because these people are much easier to pursue than someone who simply downloads a file but does not share it out.
If that's what happend in this case (didn't RTFA as it's slashdotted) then she did technically redistribute it, even if it was done without any explicit action on her point (such as sharing her D/L folder through whatever P2P app she was using)
Of course the laws that the RIAA has paid for mean she would be loable regardless of whether she redistributed the content or not.
Oh, thats right the project competes with their own Orgami sub $1000 thingie.
I'll pass up the opportunity to mod this flamebait to reply.
For the record, the Oragami project, AKA the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) is not even close to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Microsoft has said from the beginning that the UMPC will be for tech savvy people to have as their second or third PC, replacing or augmenting a laptop.
Not that I remotely agree with Gates criticisms of the OLPC, or even that his motives in criticising the OLPC aren't selfe serving (I'm sure they are) but they don't have anything to do with the UMPC.
If you are going to criticize Bill Gates & Microsoft, at least pick a legitimate criticism (there are so many after all)
Unfortunately I predict that either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will in fact take over and do to DVD what DVD as done to VHS.
Most people are conditioned to think that newer=better and anything with the words "High Definition" is vastly superior to anything that doesn't.
By initially opting not to use ICT the studios will successfully prevent the public from seeing one of the few noticable negatives of the new formats, people with a 2 year old HDTV won't see a degradation in quality and the people will lap it up.
It will get even wose once the FCC finally kills the NTSC signals and the price of HDTVs drops like a rock (right now they are artificially inflated because they are a premium over SDTVs) people will want new "High Definition" movies to go with their new "High Definition" TVs.
As you said, most studios won't be using ICT for now because it's already gotten a decent amount of attention and they want to make abig deal out of making it a "non issue" so it won't be a barrier to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD adoption.
Once the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war has been won (the only sure thing is the loser will be consumers) and the winner has made significant inroads in the market I don't think there's a chance in hell that the studios won's start turning on ICT, they will do it for a few "select" titles first and before you know it (before 2010) vritually all new movies will:
Only be available on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (whciver one ends up winning), specifically not available on DVD
Have ICT enabled
The only way to prevent this is for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to fail in the market
That's a great idea. Now, which political party has that as part of their platform?
Maybe I'm being dense but I'm not sure if your'e implying that there is one that does. To my knowledge the Democrats aren't interested in anything like this (haven't heard one say anything like that). Obviously the Republicans just want Affirmative Action to go away altogether, and the Libertarians think we shouldn't get involved. Admittedly I don't know as much as I should about the platforms of the Greens, Reforms or other parties that the Republicans & Democrats conspire to keep out of power.
In my case, it was sheer luck that I got anywhere. My mother loved higher education, and always lived in college towns, which was a marked improvement over the inner-city low-income neighborhoods my dad lived in. My high school was one of the early ones to have a fully stocked computer lab and an outstanding teacher for the computer classes. Mostly, I was lucky to be interested, and have some ability, in a subject that turned out to pay pretty well.
Not sure why but my parents always made sure that we had computers around, even when we were broke (or maybe that was why we were broke) they saved and bought a TRS-80 Model 1 (the one with 4k of RAM and a cassette player to load programs) so I was using a computer since I was 7 and this continued until I was putting in networks at 13 (remember Lantastic?).
The plan was that after I got out of the Navy I would go to college and get some computer related degree, of course I ended up getting married and starting a family before I got out of the Navy so I ended up going straight to work (that whole putting food on the table thing). I've been fairly successful in my career to date, I made some good decisions, like choosing to specialize in Microsoft technology in 1993 when Netware was still king. Still the lack of a degree has held me back, of course my wife being a teacher, she has ma bachelors and a teaching credential and some more stuff and still makes less than half what I do so I shouldn't complain.
In my case, the Army gave me enough money to pay for college, and a healthy desire to never, ever, be forced to do P.T. again. Ever.
Heh, why do you think I joined the Navy? Once out of boot camp they only make us PT test twice a year, and generally I had to cheat on the measly 1.5 mile run.
Again, agreed. I believe that part of the problem is that the Dems are controlled by big business, and so are unable to significantly differentiate themselves from the Republicans and have failed to give the undecided voters a good reason to vote for them. That, and the fact that the Republicans have Joeseph Goebbels' head in a jar, writing propaganda for them. Christ, I've never seen such good spin doctors, and they're doing an unparalleled job at exploiting the average American's 30 second attention span. The democrats have simply been unable to compete.
I guess it is true that the Democrats have been getting into bed with business as well, that used to be the Republicans, of course it still is the Republicans so I guess it's still OK;-).
Clinton was really really good at spinning, heck he got most of America to believe that the government shutdowns during the last half of his first term were the Republicans fault. There is a guy who is a genius and a moron at the same time. I guess that's why there are so many Democrats wanting to back Hillary in 08, Clinton was a winner even when he was royally fucking up and even the best they have now are losers even when their are doing a good job.
Sadly, the system is so broken, the "leaders" are so entrenched that I fear it will take nothing short of a revolution to fix the problem.
Not much chance of that, if anybody's still reading this article they aren't reading this deep:)
Children from low income families aren't somehow genetically inferior to those from middle-class families; they're just smacked on the head, every day of their lives, with failure. They're surrounded by it, they're taught to expect it by what they see in their neighborhoods and in the media. They're raised with an entirely different set of social values.
I'm not talking entirely about inner city kids. The US is peppered with low-income, quasi-rural, trailer parks and small towns, where the average income is technically poverty level.
This is a good point, and to get completely offtopic (from the original article) this is why I have felt for some time that affirmative action programs shouldn't be abolished but should be restructured to give people preference based on socioeconomic factors instead of purely on race. So if nobody in your family has ever been to college, or if your household income is below X you get extra points towards college admission or whatever.
What I'm saying is that, most of the time, it isn't their fault, except that they've failed to exhibit unusual precociousness and stupendous strength-of-will.
Not sure I 100% agree there, I'd classify my upbringing as lower-middle class, my parents worked their asses off to support my brother and I, we definitely had some lean times where we ate an awful lot of macaroni & cheese, drove around in barely running ex police cars and got our immunizations at the county clinic.
I was very unsuccessful in high school for no other reason than sheer laziness on my part, didn't have the grades to even consider college. At least I had the wherewithall to recognize at the age of 17 that my life was headed nowhere in a hurry so I joined the Navy, which kicked my ass and turned my life around.
Admittedly I can't begin to identify with someone who lives in abject poverty but I just don't buy that you need monumental strength of will to change your situation because I might today be in a dead end McJob if that there were the case.
I'd say their main goal is to line their own pockets, and then cash out as soon as they've riled up the employees so much that they form a union, and Walmart suffers the market death you predict (if that happens).
I don't think that Wal-Mart is in danger of falling victim to unionization anytime soon. Exactly one Wal-Mart in North America voted to organize and Wal-Mart responded by closing the store. For unionization to take hold you would need a large number of stores (at least 25%) to organize at the same time.
I would expect their growth to be slowed by resistance from union controlled government as they attempt to move into more densely populated urban areas.
But, whatever. You're right; we don't reward companies, or executives, for being good social citizens. We reward them for profit, which is why things are so screwed up and we get the Enrons, the Haliburtons, and the Walmarts. Google, as an (arguable) exception, is proof.
Part of that is that the 90's conomy has taught people that a successful stock market means a healthy economy, so we are willing to tolerate all kinds of thing we wouldn't have dreamed of even 20 years ago if it pushes the dow higher.
The result is monopolization not seen in a generation, Ma Bell is putting herself back together at a breakneck pace, 90% of all radio stations are owned by one of three companies, oil companies are price fixing their way to unholy profits and the government is more concerned with what I might chek out from the library.
I agree that the mobs don't always know what is in their best interests; witness the re-election of G.W. Bush
Actually I blame the Democrats for that, America was good and ready to vote for somebody else, in fact most of the other potential Democratic candidates would have beaten Dubya easily. Instead they nominated Kerry who pretty much ran on a "Vote for me because I'm not George W Bush" platform.
Re:PSP and Playstaion (aka PSOne) aren't the same.
on
PSP Devs Should Pony Up
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Price is also a factor, the GBA costs less than the GameCube, the DS costs a little bit more though.
The PSP is $100 more than the PS2, and twice the price of the DS. People who pay that kind of mony expect a hell of a lot more from the system.
PSP and Playstaion (aka PSOne) aren't the same.
on
PSP Devs Should Pony Up
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I know that the chicken & egg argument could be applied here but it seems that the market for the PSP is a LOT smaller than the market for the foriginal Playstation.
Plus gamers are used to completely different games and gaming experiences, I'd suspect that most people who have a PSP expect the gameplay to be similar to what they have today on the PS2.
That sounds an awful lot like "the executives" and "the worthless, amoral, drug-using employees." They're mostly criminals and dead-beats anyway, so why is anybody complaining about how they get treated?
I was deliberate in my choice of words, but that's not what I meant exactly. To be sure the workers (and in these parts at least also the shoppers) at Wal-Mart are indeed the dregs of society, but at the risk of sounding like a Republican (am a Libertarian) that's really nobody's fault but their own. It's poor life choices that put these people in a position where Wal-Mart or McDonalds are the only places they are employable. These people could have (and in many cases they still can, I myself am a bonafide high school dropout) aquired skills to enable them to get better jobs for better pay.
As for the executives, it's their job to maximize profits for the shareholders, it seems like they are doing their job quite well which is why they are making the money they are. If Wal-Mart didn't pay them outragious amounts of money to screw over their workers, squeeze their suppliers and crush their competition (Excpet for Costco which hands Sams Club it's ass in every market they compete in), some other company would pay them to do the same thing somewhere else.
This is true, and is why I don't like unions. However, I maintain that even a bad union is better than Walmart, and that a union is a democracy, where a company without a union is an autocracy.
I guess we disagree there, because IMO a bad company is better than a union, at least in this country (unions in places like Mexico & Japan don't seem so screwed up). At least with a bad company you can always quit and find a new job, and related to my point above the better your skills the more options you have. In most places where the unions still have a stranglehold foothold they are prevalent throught an entire industry. If you are an auto worker and are in the midwest and don't feel like paying to support the UAW bosses lifestyle you have two choices, you can change careers or move to the south.
Or, put another way: without a union, you're a serf. With a union, even if the vote doesn't always go your way, at least you have one. At least a union is marginally looking out for the employee's best interests; Walmart has proven that upper management is actively hostile to its employees.
Unions don't always look out for them members benefit, the UPS strike I mentioned before was a great example, the UPS workers would have recieved better retirement benefits from what the company had proposed, but the teamsters didn't want to give up control of all that money so they lied to their members to get them to vote to strike and then sold them down the river.
Also, I don't think that Wal-Mart is actively hostile to it's employees, they just could give a shit about them, employees are just a resource, a commodity like the 12 truckloads of censsored CDs that just arrived at the distribution center.
Ok, so I hear you saying that if Walmart were better to their employees in any significant way, then they'd have to raise their prices. You're saying that reducing management salaries and benefits, and reducing the profit margin would not be sufficient to cover the cost. You're also saying that, once Walmart raises their prices, they'll cease to have their "unique" competitive edge, and people will start shopping at Target, and that Walmart will stop being able to breed stores at a fungus-like rate like they currently do. And that a current source of really cheap consumer goods will be less cheap, and fewer Walmarts will mean fewer employment opportunities for the dregs of American society. Is that about right?
That pretty much hits the nail on the head
If so, then I think that's an entirely reasonable way to look at the situation, although I don't entirely agree with your analysis. I do agree that unionizing Walmart is an extreme measure, but I also believe
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I haven't run into ANY of these problems in multiple environments where I've deployed/run SAV.
Most of my customers are running one or two versions back and they are still updating and protecting against current threats, for most the only reason to upgrade would be to support the Microsoft Security Senter introduced in XP SP2.
Sounds like your experience is unique, or maybe your exxagerating(sp).
I've had pretty good luck with SAV, it doesn't have the same problems that Norton (the consumer product) does. Both resource utilization hasn't been an issue even on our sloweest Celeron 500 running XP and it keeps getting AV updates perpetually.
Cost will still be an issue though.
Lastly, the studios will see no need to turn this on as long as sales are good
The copyright cartel has shown time and again that they are willing to do things that aren't good for their bottom line.
CD sales were never higher than in the heyday of the original Napster, every time the RIAA shuts down a P2P site or sues another group of P2P users their market share goes down, not up, the they continue on this self destructive path.
It won't matter that leaving ICT turned off can only increase sales, there are forced within the studios that are scared to death that people will be pulling unencrypted 1080p video off their component outputs and sticking it straight on the big scary Internet. The only thing that is keeping them from turning on ICT rigt away is they want HD-DVD/Blu-Ray to take off and eventually kill DVD with its easily broken CSS.
This is exactly what Sony is hoping for, sacrificing PS3 sales to try to push their Blu-Ray agenda. Unfortunatley it may be ultimately successful in establishing Blu-Ray as the winner in the next-gen DVD format wars.
Alternatively it could backfire and cause both Blu-Ray as well as the PS3 itself could end up failing.
Sorta offtopic If either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD gain a foothold in the market it's nearly guaranteed that ICT will be coming.
The studios won't be using ICT initially because they don't want to piss off the only people who will be interested in the "negt gen" DVDs to begin with, the early adopters. The people who bought early HDTVs are also likely candidates to purchase early HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players.
My prediction: Once one or the other wins the format war (doesn't matter if it's HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) and next gen DVD adoption starts to rise you will see less and less movies released on regular DVD forcing people to buy into it. Once there is sizable market share, and many of the older HD-DVDs are going out of service they will begin quietly including ICT on new movies, starying with a few test cases to guage backlash.
Eventually (say by 2010-2012) major movies will no longer be offered on DVD and all HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies will have ICT turned on.
Hoipefully by then it will be at least as easy to defeat the DRM in the next gen DVDs as it is to defeat CSS today.
My biggest problem with unions is that when a union comes into a workplace, you aren't giving the option of joining, you are given the option of joining or finding another job. If your field is largely union you can either join or find another line of work.
Now in most cases you don't technically have to "join" the union itself, you can instead pay nearly the same amount that the union member does to the union and recieve none of the actual union benefits or voting rights.
It's simply unfair that if 50%+1 of a workforce votes in a union that 100% of the workforce is forced to be a part of that union, people say it's the same thing with politics but it's not like everybody was forced to join the Republican party after the presidential election.
Of course I have other problems with unions (as they are implemented in the U.S.) other than the compulsory membership/association. They create a culture of entitlement where people act like the main reason the company exists is to provide them with employment. Also they tend to erode any incetive to do good work, if the jackass next to you, who does half as much work as you half as well makes more money just because he's been there longer there's no point to busting your ass.
Well don't tell any of my devices, cause all of them are over 2 years old, many of them over 5 years old. Heck my "public segment", where the DSL modem (6 years old), broadband router (4 years old) and VPN device (4 years old) connect is a 15 year old 10Base-T ethernet hub. Your experience must be with Linksys, I always keep a spare D-Link broadband router on a shelf ready for when a friend or relative calls after their "Internet doesn't work" because their Linksys router fried itself. I'm continually amazed how many people think that because Linksys costs more (and now sports the Cisco logo) that it must be better.
And he should have been paid, he needed to be reimbursed for his costs as well as future costs for the hoardes of D-Link gear already out there with his servers configured in their firmware.
Granted D-Link could and likely will correct the issue with firmware upgrades most people don't upgrade the firmware unless they are having a problem or maybe if they are redeploying a device. It's likely that in 10 years time there will still be D-Link devices out there trying to query his NTP server.
This is nothing new, Dell has always been willing to go through resellers even in the 1990s. There are bsiness customers who have exclusive arrangements with VARs but still want to buy Dell. The solution is for the VAR to buy and resell the Dells, though typically the price was a little more after the VAR added in a percent or two for their troubles.
Lets me tag stores like this with "asshole attentionwhore bullshit esrb fud"
/offtopic
Even if it doesn't accomplish anything it makes me feel better
Last year when I was trying to install Galleon, though they have recently moved to compiled Java so I can't make the same complaint about that particular product now.
Now I pretty much avoid Java apps like the plague.
Not sure how they did it but the installer said something along the lines of "Sun JRE not detected" and offered to install it for me, wouldn't let me continue if I did not.
Don't reall exactly which JVM I was trying to use at the time, perhaps it was LaTTE?
Now I just avoid Java apps if possible.
All joking aside, Windows users actually would stand to benefit the most from open sourcing Java. The Sun JRE, which virtually ALL Java apps are arbitrarily dependent on is one of the worst apps I've ever seen when it comes to memory utilization.
I've seen Win32 apps consuming 150Mb of RAM.
If Sun were to open source Java it could open the door to different, better JVMs that might even be able to spoof itself as "Sun JRE" for the myriad of poorly written Java apps that refuse to run on anything else.
Hey I'm in The Valley so I know all about bleak wilderness :)
/. readers knew what Page 3 was.
In any case I'd be surprised if half of all
Actually I knew what it was without even clicking on it, but I suspect there more than a few US-centric people who have no idea what's there.
A NSFW warning might be helpful on that link.
(not trying to be an ass)
Not sure but last time I checked the RIAA was still only tarketing people who were sharing a largem amount of files, likely because these people are much easier to pursue than someone who simply downloads a file but does not share it out.
If that's what happend in this case (didn't RTFA as it's slashdotted) then she did technically redistribute it, even if it was done without any explicit action on her point (such as sharing her D/L folder through whatever P2P app she was using)
Of course the laws that the RIAA has paid for mean she would be loable regardless of whether she redistributed the content or not.
Oh, thats right the project competes with their own Orgami sub $1000 thingie.
I'll pass up the opportunity to mod this flamebait to reply.
For the record, the Oragami project, AKA the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) is not even close to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Microsoft has said from the beginning that the UMPC will be for tech savvy people to have as their second or third PC, replacing or augmenting a laptop.
Not that I remotely agree with Gates criticisms of the OLPC, or even that his motives in criticising the OLPC aren't selfe serving (I'm sure they are) but they don't have anything to do with the UMPC.
If you are going to criticize Bill Gates & Microsoft, at least pick a legitimate criticism (there are so many after all)
Unfortunately I predict that either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will in fact take over and do to DVD what DVD as done to VHS.
Most people are conditioned to think that newer=better and anything with the words "High Definition" is vastly superior to anything that doesn't.
By initially opting not to use ICT the studios will successfully prevent the public from seeing one of the few noticable negatives of the new formats, people with a 2 year old HDTV won't see a degradation in quality and the people will lap it up.
It will get even wose once the FCC finally kills the NTSC signals and the price of HDTVs drops like a rock (right now they are artificially inflated because they are a premium over SDTVs) people will want new "High Definition" movies to go with their new "High Definition" TVs.
As you said, most studios won't be using ICT for now because it's already gotten a decent amount of attention and they want to make abig deal out of making it a "non issue" so it won't be a barrier to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD adoption.
Once the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war has been won (the only sure thing is the loser will be consumers) and the winner has made significant inroads in the market I don't think there's a chance in hell that the studios won's start turning on ICT, they will do it for a few "select" titles first and before you know it (before 2010) vritually all new movies will:
The only way to prevent this is for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to fail in the market
That's a great idea. Now, which political party has that as part of their platform?
Maybe I'm being dense but I'm not sure if your'e implying that there is one that does. To my knowledge the Democrats aren't interested in anything like this (haven't heard one say anything like that). Obviously the Republicans just want Affirmative Action to go away altogether, and the Libertarians think we shouldn't get involved. Admittedly I don't know as much as I should about the platforms of the Greens, Reforms or other parties that the Republicans & Democrats conspire to keep out of power.
In my case, it was sheer luck that I got anywhere. My mother loved higher education, and always lived in college towns, which was a marked improvement over the inner-city low-income neighborhoods my dad lived in. My high school was one of the early ones to have a fully stocked computer lab and an outstanding teacher for the computer classes. Mostly, I was lucky to be interested, and have some ability, in a subject that turned out to pay pretty well.
Not sure why but my parents always made sure that we had computers around, even when we were broke (or maybe that was why we were broke) they saved and bought a TRS-80 Model 1 (the one with 4k of RAM and a cassette player to load programs) so I was using a computer since I was 7 and this continued until I was putting in networks at 13 (remember Lantastic?).
The plan was that after I got out of the Navy I would go to college and get some computer related degree, of course I ended up getting married and starting a family before I got out of the Navy so I ended up going straight to work (that whole putting food on the table thing). I've been fairly successful in my career to date, I made some good decisions, like choosing to specialize in Microsoft technology in 1993 when Netware was still king. Still the lack of a degree has held me back, of course my wife being a teacher, she has ma bachelors and a teaching credential and some more stuff and still makes less than half what I do so I shouldn't complain.
In my case, the Army gave me enough money to pay for college, and a healthy desire to never, ever, be forced to do P.T. again. Ever.
Heh, why do you think I joined the Navy? Once out of boot camp they only make us PT test twice a year, and generally I had to cheat on the measly 1.5 mile run.
Again, agreed. I believe that part of the problem is that the Dems are controlled by big business, and so are unable to significantly differentiate themselves from the Republicans and have failed to give the undecided voters a good reason to vote for them. That, and the fact that the Republicans have Joeseph Goebbels' head in a jar, writing propaganda for them. Christ, I've never seen such good spin doctors, and they're doing an unparalleled job at exploiting the average American's 30 second attention span. The democrats have simply been unable to compete.
I guess it is true that the Democrats have been getting into bed with business as well, that used to be the Republicans, of course it still is the Republicans so I guess it's still OK ;-).
Clinton was really really good at spinning, heck he got most of America to believe that the government shutdowns during the last half of his first term were the Republicans fault. There is a guy who is a genius and a moron at the same time. I guess that's why there are so many Democrats wanting to back Hillary in 08, Clinton was a winner even when he was royally fucking up and even the best they have now are losers even when their are doing a good job.
Sadly, the system is so broken, the "leaders" are so entrenched that I fear it will take nothing short of a revolution to fix the problem.
What was this article about again? ;-)
At the risk of being modded -1 (Offtopic)
Not much chance of that, if anybody's still reading this article they aren't reading this deep :)
Children from low income families aren't somehow genetically inferior to those from middle-class families; they're just smacked on the head, every day of their lives, with failure. They're surrounded by it, they're taught to expect it by what they see in their neighborhoods and in the media. They're raised with an entirely different set of social values.
I'm not talking entirely about inner city kids. The US is peppered with low-income, quasi-rural, trailer parks and small towns, where the average income is technically poverty level.
This is a good point, and to get completely offtopic (from the original article) this is why I have felt for some time that affirmative action programs shouldn't be abolished but should be restructured to give people preference based on socioeconomic factors instead of purely on race. So if nobody in your family has ever been to college, or if your household income is below X you get extra points towards college admission or whatever.
What I'm saying is that, most of the time, it isn't their fault, except that they've failed to exhibit unusual precociousness and stupendous strength-of-will.
Not sure I 100% agree there, I'd classify my upbringing as lower-middle class, my parents worked their asses off to support my brother and I, we definitely had some lean times where we ate an awful lot of macaroni & cheese, drove around in barely running ex police cars and got our immunizations at the county clinic.
I was very unsuccessful in high school for no other reason than sheer laziness on my part, didn't have the grades to even consider college. At least I had the wherewithall to recognize at the age of 17 that my life was headed nowhere in a hurry so I joined the Navy, which kicked my ass and turned my life around.
Admittedly I can't begin to identify with someone who lives in abject poverty but I just don't buy that you need monumental strength of will to change your situation because I might today be in a dead end McJob if that there were the case.
I'd say their main goal is to line their own pockets, and then cash out as soon as they've riled up the employees so much that they form a union, and Walmart suffers the market death you predict (if that happens).
I don't think that Wal-Mart is in danger of falling victim to unionization anytime soon. Exactly one Wal-Mart in North America voted to organize and Wal-Mart responded by closing the store. For unionization to take hold you would need a large number of stores (at least 25%) to organize at the same time. I would expect their growth to be slowed by resistance from union controlled government as they attempt to move into more densely populated urban areas.But, whatever. You're right; we don't reward companies, or executives, for being good social citizens. We reward them for profit, which is why things are so screwed up and we get the Enrons, the Haliburtons, and the Walmarts. Google, as an (arguable) exception, is proof.
Part of that is that the 90's conomy has taught people that a successful stock market means a healthy economy, so we are willing to tolerate all kinds of thing we wouldn't have dreamed of even 20 years ago if it pushes the dow higher.
The result is monopolization not seen in a generation, Ma Bell is putting herself back together at a breakneck pace, 90% of all radio stations are owned by one of three companies, oil companies are price fixing their way to unholy profits and the government is more concerned with what I might chek out from the library.
I agree that the mobs don't always know what is in their best interests; witness the re-election of G.W. Bush
Actually I blame the Democrats for that, America was good and ready to vote for somebody else, in fact most of the other potential Democratic candidates would have beaten Dubya easily. Instead they nominated Kerry who pretty much ran on a "Vote for me because I'm not George W Bush" platform.
Price is also a factor, the GBA costs less than the GameCube, the DS costs a little bit more though.
The PSP is $100 more than the PS2, and twice the price of the DS. People who pay that kind of mony expect a hell of a lot more from the system.
I know that the chicken & egg argument could be applied here but it seems that the market for the PSP is a LOT smaller than the market for the foriginal Playstation.
Plus gamers are used to completely different games and gaming experiences, I'd suspect that most people who have a PSP expect the gameplay to be similar to what they have today on the PS2.
That sounds an awful lot like "the executives" and "the worthless, amoral, drug-using employees." They're mostly criminals and dead-beats anyway, so why is anybody complaining about how they get treated?
I was deliberate in my choice of words, but that's not what I meant exactly. To be sure the workers (and in these parts at least also the shoppers) at Wal-Mart are indeed the dregs of society, but at the risk of sounding like a Republican (am a Libertarian) that's really nobody's fault but their own. It's poor life choices that put these people in a position where Wal-Mart or McDonalds are the only places they are employable. These people could have (and in many cases they still can, I myself am a bonafide high school dropout) aquired skills to enable them to get better jobs for better pay.
As for the executives, it's their job to maximize profits for the shareholders, it seems like they are doing their job quite well which is why they are making the money they are. If Wal-Mart didn't pay them outragious amounts of money to screw over their workers, squeeze their suppliers and crush their competition (Excpet for Costco which hands Sams Club it's ass in every market they compete in), some other company would pay them to do the same thing somewhere else.
This is true, and is why I don't like unions. However, I maintain that even a bad union is better than Walmart, and that a union is a democracy, where a company without a union is an autocracy.
I guess we disagree there, because IMO a bad company is better than a union, at least in this country (unions in places like Mexico & Japan don't seem so screwed up). At least with a bad company you can always quit and find a new job, and related to my point above the better your skills the more options you have. In most places where the unions still have a stranglehold foothold they are prevalent throught an entire industry. If you are an auto worker and are in the midwest and don't feel like paying to support the UAW bosses lifestyle you have two choices, you can change careers or move to the south.
Or, put another way: without a union, you're a serf. With a union, even if the vote doesn't always go your way, at least you have one. At least a union is marginally looking out for the employee's best interests; Walmart has proven that upper management is actively hostile to its employees.
Unions don't always look out for them members benefit, the UPS strike I mentioned before was a great example, the UPS workers would have recieved better retirement benefits from what the company had proposed, but the teamsters didn't want to give up control of all that money so they lied to their members to get them to vote to strike and then sold them down the river.
Also, I don't think that Wal-Mart is actively hostile to it's employees, they just could give a shit about them, employees are just a resource, a commodity like the 12 truckloads of censsored CDs that just arrived at the distribution center.
Ok, so I hear you saying that if Walmart were better to their employees in any significant way, then they'd have to raise their prices. You're saying that reducing management salaries and benefits, and reducing the profit margin would not be sufficient to cover the cost. You're also saying that, once Walmart raises their prices, they'll cease to have their "unique" competitive edge, and people will start shopping at Target, and that Walmart will stop being able to breed stores at a fungus-like rate like they currently do. And that a current source of really cheap consumer goods will be less cheap, and fewer Walmarts will mean fewer employment opportunities for the dregs of American society. Is that about right?
That pretty much hits the nail on the head
If so, then I think that's an entirely reasonable way to look at the situation, although I don't entirely agree with your analysis. I do agree that unionizing Walmart is an extreme measure, but I also believe