For example, the pirated version of The Hulk I saw (on a co-worker's laptop, Mr. MPAA Thug) was an early cut, with incomplete special effects and crappy audio. With movies like Cold Mountain and others being shot digitally and edited in Final Cut Pro, with DVD dailies being mastered regularly, it's concievable that the pirates will be soon beat the studios to post-production! Instead of the Special Edition Director's Cut, we could be downloading the Sp3c1@l Ub3r 1337 H@c|3r's Cut.
And of course, who wouldn't want to see Episode III: The Non-Crappy Version, complete with a Star Wars Kid cameo added by the pirate who actually edited together the flick...
You'd be surprised how that (doesn't) work out. Many large companies count on one fact to protect them from lawsuits, and that is that it costs too much in terms of time and money for a small company to sue anyone. We took it to our lawyer, and he told us that we'd be looking to spend $14K to try to recover $10K.
One thing it taught us was to add insurance coverage to all our shipping.
and I've got plenty of advice for those who might want to try it.
1. Don't take on any partners. My company had 3 owners. If it had had one owner and 2 employee's I'd still be in business. Multiple owners means that profit is divided. While you're getting started, you have to live off of whatever miniscule profit you generate. If you have to divide those profits three ways, you're going to have to learn to love Top Ramen.
2. Dealing with local distributors is a great way to get parts quickly, but their prices are awful. Get contacts overseas, and import your own parts, or work with national distributors such as Tech Data or Merisel. Just be aware that their prices will be awful too until your volume comes up.
3. If you're selling computers via mail, etc, be careful with credit cards. Chargebacks come right out of your bank account. Visa/Mastercard/etc. do a great job of protecting the customer because they can steal from the merchants. If you're hit with a chargeback, it doesn't matter that you've been victimized, too. We once had three high-end PCs (marked for signature delivery) "stolen" from a customer's doorstep. Then, when the customer decided he didn't want us to ship replacements and hit us with the chargeback, we were out nearly $10,000. I still believe the customer saw an opening and stole those PCs, but I'll never know for sure.
4. Control support costs. Many small "white-box" PC makers provide top-notch support, but customers will eat you alive if you let them. I realized that when I went over to a good customer's house to help them with a PC problem and ended up looking at a laptop we didn't even sell them. A corollary to this is that if you're going to be providing "personal touch" service, make sure that your pricing reflects it. You can't visit people's houses if you're selling a $500 PC @ 5% margins.
5. Watch inventory. Keep as low a supply on hand as possible, because when component prices drop, customers expect assembled PC prices to drop accordingly, and immediately. Your competitors watch their inventory, too.
6. If you're planning to offer services and support in addition to hardware, consider becoming a VAR instead of a system builder. You can benefit from the marketing opportunities that the Compaqs/IBMs/etc offer, and you don't have to deal with warranty support of your own boxes. If you have a service department, the companies you deal with will pay you to do warranty work.
All in all, I can't say I recommend starting a PC company. Because you're selling what is essentially a commodity, your margins are constantly being squeezed. And that sucks! But, if you have access to Asian manufacturing and can control your costs, you just might prove me wrong. Good luck to all the future captains of industry out there!
I agree 100%...Something along the line of "your right to swing your hands through the air ends at the tip of my nose." People worry too much about how things look - "ohmigod! this video game tells people to kill Haitians!" - to worry about the actual problems in this world - there is an lively international trade in the sex trafficking of children. Now THAT is a problem that there should be more activists working to solve.
Ratings are good. You're saying that parents should be the ones responsible for what their children play? You're quite right. Hey, guess what - that's what ratings are for! And arranging stuff on the shelves according to its rating is just a way of making it easier for parents to choose games that fit what they want their children to see.
I don't take issue with the idea that ratings help parents pick out what children should see/watch/listen to/play. But current ratings systems (ESRB, MPAA, etc) are *privately* run. A goverment mandated ratings system makes content subject to the whims of special interests and big donors of elected officials.
We're talking about a society where the "good" videogames are in a "special" location. I don't see anything there about "the government keeping records of who wants to play the 'good' videogames".
That was a worst-case scenario thrown in for effect, and you know it. The problem is that once government assumes a power, they almost never give it back. Whether it's a new entitlement or a new regulation, once you create a law, it's really hard to undo it. The fact of the matter it is the tendency of government to become more tryanical with time.
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, our society already segregates books. Or did you think the "adult" section in your local bookstore was full of Thomas the Tank Engine?
Snide comments don't make you any smarter. The classification of books into similar categories is done to make it easier to find those books (or, alternatively, to keep kids from finding them). Again, it's a service that private industry provides to their customers. When the government mandates it, it stops being a service and starts being an undesired form of control.
You mistake guidelines for rules. Guidelines can be ignored. When you break rules, you end up in prison. I think it's fine that society makes the guideline that some videogames are too violent/sexist/racist/whatever. But when government makes rules that prevent people from creating the works that allow them to express themselves, then a tragedy has occurred.
You can dismiss a slippery slope argument as false logic, and you're technically right. A does not necessarily always lead to B. But when the topic is the defense of our rights, why would you take chances? A lot of people like to quote Ben Franklin: "Those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security." That is a *classic* slippery slope argument, but few Americans disagree with it. Look at the outcry over the Patriot Act, etc for details.
I don't disagree with the fact that the children are our future, that we should teach them well, let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside, give them a sense of pride, etc, but I will be damned if I am going to stand by and let my government supress the right that authors, artists, musicians, and yes, even videogame programmers have to create and distribute their work. It isn't the government's place to do so.
The previous poster wonders how this can be a Bad Thing.
Well, imagine a society where instead of just all the "good" videogames being segregated to a single "special" location, that it was a society where all the "good" books were segregated to a single "special" location and the government kept records of who wanted to read the "good" books.
Slippery slope arguments are tiring and boring, but that doesn't make them any less valid. I'm against almost any form of government censorship, and that includes videogames, books, magazines, whatever. If an actual, living, breathing, real human being (and no, the pixelated Haitians in GTA:VC don't count) isn't harmed by some work of art or book or videogame or whatever, then the government doesn't have the right to tell me I can't see it, or restrict how it is available.
And I don't care about how it affects children. Children need to be protected by their parents, not by government. Parents who let television and an anthromorphic mouse raise their children while they go off telling me that the videogames I like to play are harming kids should have painful electrical shocks applied to their naughty bits.
Raise your kids the way you want to raise them, protect them from whatever negative and harmful influences you can. I applaud that, even. But when you insist on using the police power of the state to control my access to the books, movies, and videogames I want, then you've crossed the line - even if all you've done is move the "good" stuff to a "special" part of the store.
But I think that time spent restoring a computer to its formerly working state isn't so much wasted as annoying. Because you're going to waste a lot more time if your computer isn't usable.
Seriously, the downtime plague has gotten better in the past few years. Even Microsoft software is more stable than in the past (gasp!), and switching my personal laptop to an iBook running OS X has made reboots a lot less frequent (although I still have to force quit an app once or twice a week, Apple doesn't go completely blameless here).
All in all, out of the 43,200 minutes in a month w/ 30 days, we're talking about a 1.6% rate of unavailabilty. And no doubt, that's unacceptable, but I bet as far as home computers go, that number is as good as it's ever been.
Re:I think you overrate this SCO thing.
on
The Voice of Groklaw
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Someone making ridiculous claims and wanting a huge heaps of money isn't actually news. Much more people do this for a living than you might guess.
There is no way the KISS Army can withstand the awesome onslaught of the GNU Hurd! RSS will lead the charge against the interlopers, with the battle cry "They're properly called GNU/Linux Systems!" ringing over the Plains...
The problem is that while you can't lose your copyright because of distibution under an invalid license, it's hard to prove damages if you were distributing something essentially for free and someone else comes and packages it and makes money with it. The GPL provides protection because by downloading, using, and modifying GPL software, you are agreeing that you will not redistribute the software without making the source available. That contract between the author and user is what currently "guarantees" that the author's work won't be "stolen" out from under him/her. Again, IANAL, so YMMV...
Sometime in the near future, the GPL is going to be tested in court. This is a Good Thing, though, because I'm not sure that the Open Source movement can continue its momentum without an absolute guarantee by the courts that the work of developers will not be open to being "stolen" by proprietary software companies.
However, there is the possibility that the GPL is struck down as being untenable. In that case, one of two outcomes exists:
1. All formerly GPL software reverts to merely being copyrighted by the author, who can then do what he wants (close the source, BSD style license, etc.). 2. All formerly GPL software is considered public domain. There is a massive "land grab" as companies snap up the sources out there for use in their closed proprietary products.
IANAL. I want to make that clear. I do believe that the GPL is valid, legal, and will stand up in court. I just hope the court system agrees with me.
and my only comment is (Eric Cartman Voice) "What's the big fucking deal, bitch?" GTA is violent, offensive, and crude. They even make spelling/usage mistakes ("Alright, we're gonna hit the pay role van"). But it's no more violent than "Boyz in The Hood", or "Goodfellas", or most any other "R"-rated movie. People complain that the game is disturbing children. What's disturbing children is a complete lack of responsibility on the part of their parents. If you are the type of person who would buy a game called "Grand Theft Auto" for your children, the problem isn't with the game, it is with the total abscence of parenting skills you're displaying.
And as for the "Kill all the Haitians" controversy - Vice City has been on the market for a year, maybe more for the PS2. I know I got sick of those 80's themed commercials a long time ago. As far as I've noticed in the media, there is no wholesale slaughter of Haitians on America's streets. In fact, it was the hubbub that made me go out and buy the game! I bet executives at Rockstar and Take Two Interactive go home at night and roll naked in piles of cash screaming "Thank you for all the free advertising, Haitian Videogame Activists! It's going to be a Happy New Year after all!"
It's always the same. Whether it's Eminem, GTA, NWA, professional wrestling, or whatever, there will always be some lazy ass parent who would rather trample all over my right as an adult to read the books I want, listen to the music I want, watch the movies I want, and play the video games I want, rather than actually expend the effort to see what their children are reading, listening to, watching, and playing.
No one's talked about it yet, but I find his most interesting comment to be the one about how Wal-Mart's new online music effort will displace the iTunes Music Store as the number one retailer of online music files.
I disagree with this, for a few reasons. One, they're under tremendous pressure from their conservative customer base (lower-income white America) to adhere to a "moral standard". Have you ever bought a CD from Wal-Mart? They only sell "clean" versions of much of the type of music that would be bought online by the younger Internet demographic. If I was going to buy an electronic version of "Straight Outta Comptom", I sure as hell wouldn't buy it from Wal-Mart's online music store.
Second, online music is not an area that plays to Wal-Mart's competitive strength. Not many people think of Wal-Mart as a successful "clicks and mortar" e-commerce company. Wal-Mart makes its money by selling cheap consumer goods at rock-bottom prices. So rock-bottom, that their smaller competitiors can't compete, and are forced out of the market. But digital music is a much more level playing field. Apple can work with its label partners to lower its prices to match Wal-Mart's. But honestly, I don't think they have to. The integration with iTunes, the iTunes product on both Windows and OS X, and the huge mindshare that Apple enjoys make for an ability to sell their music at an 11 cent premium over Wal-Mart if they want to.
Third (and last, I'm getting tired of typing) - can Wal-Mart sustain their price advantage? Or is it like buymusic.com, where the few tracks that were actually available for their advertised 79 cent price were obscure tracks that you wouldn't want, and as some artists complained, weren't legal anyway? Unfortunately for the consumer, I think 99 cents a track is where the industry wants the price for most songs to be.
I guess that my main point is that I just don't believe Wal-Mart is going to steamroll over the music industry with a business plan of "We do what they do, just a bit cheaper." Too many other companies have already established beachheads, and they're actually innovating. My predicition is that Wal-Mart abandons digital music within 18 months.
In "The Cuckoo's Egg", one of Cliff Stoll's key points was that the more secure a network becomes, the less useful it is to its users, because it becomes more inconvenient to work with. In a network where the entire idea is to exchange "personal" data such as contact info, then restrictions placed to enforce good security have a way of reducing the value of the network.
But without such security, you have a "tragedy of the commons" type effect where the greedy among us abuse the good nature of others, again, reducing the value of the network.
Seems like a rather immutable Catch-22 to me...
So how long before SCO gets ahold of this?
on
Sun Opens Cobalt Code
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· Score: 0, Troll
I mean, think of all the $$$ in license fees that can be extorted, I mean, earned from users of this newly open sourced platform that probably steals heavily from UNIX contributions by licensees and not actual work performed by SCO...
I think it's similar to the logic that open containers of alcoholic beverages (in some states, at least), are allowed in the backseat of a car, but neither the driver or the front seat passenger may have an open container, because otherwise if you're pulled over, you just hand the drink to the front seat passenger.
I suppose, using similar logic, if I got pulled over for using my laptop while driving (what TLA are they gonna call this, anyway? DWC, for Driving While Computing?), and I hand the laptop to my front seat passenger, then I'm in the clear, unless computers are banned from the frontseat altogether...
...and I'll freely admit that I haven't RTFA yet...
but Rambus surreptitiously cuts a deal with Intel to make their patented technology the new industry standard for memory, and when it backfires, the rest of the industry is guilty of collusion against Rambus?
The inmates are running the asylum, kiddos, and it's getting nuttier by the minute!
Yeah, but it's hard to masturbate when the object of your affection is covered by so much body armor. I think we're all aware of the fact that "number one video game heroine" is industry code for "number one character video game geeks imagine while jerking it".
I guess that the reason people forget about Samus is that the Metroid games were for consoles, hence no, "Nude 'Troid" mods for Metroid.
Of course, someone will prove me wrong and post a link to a modded Metroid where Samus is naked...
I remember not long after I got my first PC (a PS/2 Model 30 with an 8086 CPU and kick-ass MCGA graphics) being handed a list of phone numbers to local and semi local BBSs.
Logged onto a few, mostly WWIV systems, and finally found a couple that were to my tastes, like Online's Place and the Alchemist's Lab. I remember mainly how even though there were a lot of massive flamewars between fifteen year old boys, how for the most part the entire community was accepting and friendly - we'd even have real parties. And by "real" parties, I mean wake-up-in-the-bathtub, dude-where's-my-pants, I'll-never-drink-again masterpieces.
One memory of those parties was being able to log on to the BBS from the console, always had a feeling of "power" when I was logged on locally - God knows why, it's not like I had anymore privileges there than over the phone line.
But I guess I remember the sense of community and the parties more than anything else, I mean, when't the last time you went to a Slashdot party?
but it will make the biggest difference in Europe, where the state controlled telecom monopolies have made voice service so expensive that an entire generation is coming up knowing only cell phones. VoIP may bring "wired" phones back in Europe.
I'd like to nominate the Longhorn hype machine for worst technology. All the press garnered by an OS we won't see until 2006 at the earliest is stupifying at best, and patently annoying at the worst.
Plus, with OS X Panther, I have 95%+ of the Longhorn "Innovation" today - tell me why I should wait three years?
The actual Dewey Defeats Truman headline was based more on early election returns than skewed polling. The famous error made concerning polling in the 1948 election was that Gallup simply stopped doing polls two weeks before the election and proclaimed that Dewey would win, not taking into account the massive sea change in public opinion that can occur over a two week span.
The famous example of a poll gone bad because of telephone ownership statistics was the poll used by the magazine The Literary Digest to predict the 1936 presidential election between FDR and Al Landon. The magazine mailed ballots to 10 million individuals with listed phone numbers and/or car registrations, and tallied up roughly 2 million returned ballots. Based on the results, the magazine predicted a Landon victory, while in fact the result was a 46-state landslide for FDR (and remember, there were only 48 states in 1936)!
The sample error in this survey was that telephone ownership and car ownership did not correlate to likeliness to vote in 1936. In 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, telephones and cars were luxury items that few people besides the wealthiest Americans could afford. The poor and lower class who were more likely to vote for FDR were not even sent ballots, so there was no way for their voices to be heard in this survey.
The impact of this flawed survey was such that within a short time after the publication of the survey, The Literary Digest would go out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, this guy has never seen a slashdotter putting the moves on a lady!
For example, the pirated version of The Hulk I saw (on a co-worker's laptop, Mr. MPAA Thug) was an early cut, with incomplete special effects and crappy audio. With movies like Cold Mountain and others being shot digitally and edited in Final Cut Pro, with DVD dailies being mastered regularly, it's concievable that the pirates will be soon beat the studios to post-production! Instead of the Special Edition Director's Cut, we could be downloading the Sp3c1@l Ub3r 1337 H@c|3r's Cut.
And of course, who wouldn't want to see Episode III: The Non-Crappy Version, complete with a Star Wars Kid cameo added by the pirate who actually edited together the flick...
You'd be surprised how that (doesn't) work out. Many large companies count on one fact to protect them from lawsuits, and that is that it costs too much in terms of time and money for a small company to sue anyone. We took it to our lawyer, and he told us that we'd be looking to spend $14K to try to recover $10K.
One thing it taught us was to add insurance coverage to all our shipping.
and I've got plenty of advice for those who might want to try it.
1. Don't take on any partners. My company had 3 owners. If it had had one owner and 2 employee's I'd still be in business. Multiple owners means that profit is divided. While you're getting started, you have to live off of whatever miniscule profit you generate. If you have to divide those profits three ways, you're going to have to learn to love Top Ramen.
2. Dealing with local distributors is a great way to get parts quickly, but their prices are awful. Get contacts overseas, and import your own parts, or work with national distributors such as Tech Data or Merisel. Just be aware that their prices will be awful too until your volume comes up.
3. If you're selling computers via mail, etc, be careful with credit cards. Chargebacks come right out of your bank account. Visa/Mastercard/etc. do a great job of protecting the customer because they can steal from the merchants. If you're hit with a chargeback, it doesn't matter that you've been victimized, too. We once had three high-end PCs (marked for signature delivery) "stolen" from a customer's doorstep. Then, when the customer decided he didn't want us to ship replacements and hit us with the chargeback, we were out nearly $10,000. I still believe the customer saw an opening and stole those PCs, but I'll never know for sure.
4. Control support costs. Many small "white-box" PC makers provide top-notch support, but customers will eat you alive if you let them. I realized that when I went over to a good customer's house to help them with a PC problem and ended up looking at a laptop we didn't even sell them. A corollary to this is that if you're going to be providing "personal touch" service, make sure that your pricing reflects it. You can't visit people's houses if you're selling a $500 PC @ 5% margins.
5. Watch inventory. Keep as low a supply on hand as possible, because when component prices drop, customers expect assembled PC prices to drop accordingly, and immediately. Your competitors watch their inventory, too.
6. If you're planning to offer services and support in addition to hardware, consider becoming a VAR instead of a system builder. You can benefit from the marketing opportunities that the Compaqs/IBMs/etc offer, and you don't have to deal with warranty support of your own boxes. If you have a service department, the companies you deal with will pay you to do warranty work.
All in all, I can't say I recommend starting a PC company. Because you're selling what is essentially a commodity, your margins are constantly being squeezed. And that sucks! But, if you have access to Asian manufacturing and can control your costs, you just might prove me wrong. Good luck to all the future captains of industry out there!
I agree 100%...Something along the line of "your right to swing your hands through the air ends at the tip of my nose." People worry too much about how things look - "ohmigod! this video game tells people to kill Haitians!" - to worry about the actual problems in this world - there is an lively international trade in the sex trafficking of children. Now THAT is a problem that there should be more activists working to solve.
Ratings are good. You're saying that parents should be the ones responsible for what their children play? You're quite right. Hey, guess what - that's what ratings are for! And arranging stuff on the shelves according to its rating is just a way of making it easier for parents to choose games that fit what they want their children to see.
I don't take issue with the idea that ratings help parents pick out what children should see/watch/listen to/play. But current ratings systems (ESRB, MPAA, etc) are *privately* run. A goverment mandated ratings system makes content subject to the whims of special interests and big donors of elected officials.
We're talking about a society where the "good" videogames are in a "special" location. I don't see anything there about "the government keeping records of who wants to play the 'good' videogames".
That was a worst-case scenario thrown in for effect, and you know it. The problem is that once government assumes a power, they almost never give it back. Whether it's a new entitlement or a new regulation, once you create a law, it's really hard to undo it. The fact of the matter it is the tendency of government to become more tryanical with time.
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, our society already segregates books. Or did you think the "adult" section in your local bookstore was full of Thomas the Tank Engine?
Snide comments don't make you any smarter. The classification of books into similar categories is done to make it easier to find those books (or, alternatively, to keep kids from finding them). Again, it's a service that private industry provides to their customers. When the government mandates it, it stops being a service and starts being an undesired form of control.
You mistake guidelines for rules. Guidelines can be ignored. When you break rules, you end up in prison. I think it's fine that society makes the guideline that some videogames are too violent/sexist/racist/whatever. But when government makes rules that prevent people from creating the works that allow them to express themselves, then a tragedy has occurred.
You can dismiss a slippery slope argument as false logic, and you're technically right. A does not necessarily always lead to B. But when the topic is the defense of our rights, why would you take chances? A lot of people like to quote Ben Franklin: "Those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security." That is a *classic* slippery slope argument, but few Americans disagree with it. Look at the outcry over the Patriot Act, etc for details.
I don't disagree with the fact that the children are our future, that we should teach them well, let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside, give them a sense of pride, etc, but I will be damned if I am going to stand by and let my government supress the right that authors, artists, musicians, and yes, even videogame programmers have to create and distribute their work. It isn't the government's place to do so.
The previous poster wonders how this can be a Bad Thing.
Well, imagine a society where instead of just all the "good" videogames being segregated to a single "special" location, that it was a society where all the "good" books were segregated to a single "special" location and the government kept records of who wanted to read the "good" books.
Slippery slope arguments are tiring and boring, but that doesn't make them any less valid. I'm against almost any form of government censorship, and that includes videogames, books, magazines, whatever. If an actual, living, breathing, real human being (and no, the pixelated Haitians in GTA:VC don't count) isn't harmed by some work of art or book or videogame or whatever, then the government doesn't have the right to tell me I can't see it, or restrict how it is available.
And I don't care about how it affects children. Children need to be protected by their parents, not by government. Parents who let television and an anthromorphic mouse raise their children while they go off telling me that the videogames I like to play are harming kids should have painful electrical shocks applied to their naughty bits.
Raise your kids the way you want to raise them, protect them from whatever negative and harmful influences you can. I applaud that, even. But when you insist on using the police power of the state to control my access to the books, movies, and videogames I want, then you've crossed the line - even if all you've done is move the "good" stuff to a "special" part of the store.
But I think that time spent restoring a computer to its formerly working state isn't so much wasted as annoying. Because you're going to waste a lot more time if your computer isn't usable.
Seriously, the downtime plague has gotten better in the past few years. Even Microsoft software is more stable than in the past (gasp!), and switching my personal laptop to an iBook running OS X has made reboots a lot less frequent (although I still have to force quit an app once or twice a week, Apple doesn't go completely blameless here).
All in all, out of the 43,200 minutes in a month w/ 30 days, we're talking about a 1.6% rate of unavailabilty. And no doubt, that's unacceptable, but I bet as far as home computers go, that number is as good as it's ever been.
Yes, they're called trial lawyers...and one of them wants to be your next president
...going to get away with this.
There is no way the KISS Army can withstand the awesome onslaught of the GNU Hurd! RSS will lead the charge against the interlopers, with the battle cry "They're properly called GNU/Linux Systems!" ringing over the Plains...
The problem is that while you can't lose your copyright because of distibution under an invalid license, it's hard to prove damages if you were distributing something essentially for free and someone else comes and packages it and makes money with it. The GPL provides protection because by downloading, using, and modifying GPL software, you are agreeing that you will not redistribute the software without making the source available. That contract between the author and user is what currently "guarantees" that the author's work won't be "stolen" out from under him/her. Again, IANAL, so YMMV...
Sometime in the near future, the GPL is going to be tested in court. This is a Good Thing, though, because I'm not sure that the Open Source movement can continue its momentum without an absolute guarantee by the courts that the work of developers will not be open to being "stolen" by proprietary software companies.
However, there is the possibility that the GPL is struck down as being untenable. In that case, one of two outcomes exists:
1. All formerly GPL software reverts to merely being copyrighted by the author, who can then do what he wants (close the source, BSD style license, etc.).
2. All formerly GPL software is considered public domain. There is a massive "land grab" as companies snap up the sources out there for use in their closed proprietary products.
IANAL. I want to make that clear. I do believe that the GPL is valid, legal, and will stand up in court. I just hope the court system agrees with me.
and my only comment is (Eric Cartman Voice) "What's the big fucking deal, bitch?" GTA is violent, offensive, and crude. They even make spelling/usage mistakes ("Alright, we're gonna hit the pay role van"). But it's no more violent than "Boyz in The Hood", or "Goodfellas", or most any other "R"-rated movie. People complain that the game is disturbing children. What's disturbing children is a complete lack of responsibility on the part of their parents. If you are the type of person who would buy a game called "Grand Theft Auto" for your children, the problem isn't with the game, it is with the total abscence of parenting skills you're displaying.
And as for the "Kill all the Haitians" controversy - Vice City has been on the market for a year, maybe more for the PS2. I know I got sick of those 80's themed commercials a long time ago. As far as I've noticed in the media, there is no wholesale slaughter of Haitians on America's streets. In fact, it was the hubbub that made me go out and buy the game! I bet executives at Rockstar and Take Two Interactive go home at night and roll naked in piles of cash screaming "Thank you for all the free advertising, Haitian Videogame Activists! It's going to be a Happy New Year after all!"
It's always the same. Whether it's Eminem, GTA, NWA, professional wrestling, or whatever, there will always be some lazy ass parent who would rather trample all over my right as an adult to read the books I want, listen to the music I want, watch the movies I want, and play the video games I want, rather than actually expend the effort to see what their children are reading, listening to, watching, and playing.
No one's talked about it yet, but I find his most interesting comment to be the one about how Wal-Mart's new online music effort will displace the iTunes Music Store as the number one retailer of online music files.
I disagree with this, for a few reasons. One, they're under tremendous pressure from their conservative customer base (lower-income white America) to adhere to a "moral standard". Have you ever bought a CD from Wal-Mart? They only sell "clean" versions of much of the type of music that would be bought online by the younger Internet demographic. If I was going to buy an electronic version of "Straight Outta Comptom", I sure as hell wouldn't buy it from Wal-Mart's online music store.
Second, online music is not an area that plays to Wal-Mart's competitive strength. Not many people think of Wal-Mart as a successful "clicks and mortar" e-commerce company. Wal-Mart makes its money by selling cheap consumer goods at rock-bottom prices. So rock-bottom, that their smaller competitiors can't compete, and are forced out of the market. But digital music is a much more level playing field. Apple can work with its label partners to lower its prices to match Wal-Mart's. But honestly, I don't think they have to. The integration with iTunes, the iTunes product on both Windows and OS X, and the huge mindshare that Apple enjoys make for an ability to sell their music at an 11 cent premium over Wal-Mart if they want to.
Third (and last, I'm getting tired of typing) - can Wal-Mart sustain their price advantage? Or is it like buymusic.com, where the few tracks that were actually available for their advertised 79 cent price were obscure tracks that you wouldn't want, and as some artists complained, weren't legal anyway? Unfortunately for the consumer, I think 99 cents a track is where the industry wants the price for most songs to be.
I guess that my main point is that I just don't believe Wal-Mart is going to steamroll over the music industry with a business plan of "We do what they do, just a bit cheaper." Too many other companies have already established beachheads, and they're actually innovating. My predicition is that Wal-Mart abandons digital music within 18 months.
But no, a version that requires you to load an X server doesn't count.
Congratulations to everyone who's worked on this.
In "The Cuckoo's Egg", one of Cliff Stoll's key points was that the more secure a network becomes, the less useful it is to its users, because it becomes more inconvenient to work with. In a network where the entire idea is to exchange "personal" data such as contact info, then restrictions placed to enforce good security have a way of reducing the value of the network.
But without such security, you have a "tragedy of the commons" type effect where the greedy among us abuse the good nature of others, again, reducing the value of the network.
Seems like a rather immutable Catch-22 to me...
I mean, think of all the $$$ in license fees that can be extorted, I mean, earned from users of this newly open sourced platform that probably steals heavily from UNIX contributions by licensees and not actual work performed by SCO...
I think it's similar to the logic that open containers of alcoholic beverages (in some states, at least), are allowed in the backseat of a car, but neither the driver or the front seat passenger may have an open container, because otherwise if you're pulled over, you just hand the drink to the front seat passenger.
I suppose, using similar logic, if I got pulled over for using my laptop while driving (what TLA are they gonna call this, anyway? DWC, for Driving While Computing?), and I hand the laptop to my front seat passenger, then I'm in the clear, unless computers are banned from the frontseat altogether...
...and I'll freely admit that I haven't RTFA yet...
but Rambus surreptitiously cuts a deal with Intel to make their patented technology the new industry standard for memory, and when it backfires, the rest of the industry is guilty of collusion against Rambus?
The inmates are running the asylum, kiddos, and it's getting nuttier by the minute!
Yeah, but it's hard to masturbate when the object of your affection is covered by so much body armor. I think we're all aware of the fact that "number one video game heroine" is industry code for "number one character video game geeks imagine while jerking it".
I guess that the reason people forget about Samus is that the Metroid games were for consoles, hence no, "Nude 'Troid" mods for Metroid.
Of course, someone will prove me wrong and post a link to a modded Metroid where Samus is naked...
I remember not long after I got my first PC (a PS/2 Model 30 with an 8086 CPU and kick-ass MCGA graphics) being handed a list of phone numbers to local and semi local BBSs.
Logged onto a few, mostly WWIV systems, and finally found a couple that were to my tastes, like Online's Place and the Alchemist's Lab. I remember mainly how even though there were a lot of massive flamewars between fifteen year old boys, how for the most part the entire community was accepting and friendly - we'd even have real parties. And by "real" parties, I mean wake-up-in-the-bathtub, dude-where's-my-pants, I'll-never-drink-again masterpieces.
One memory of those parties was being able to log on to the BBS from the console, always had a feeling of "power" when I was logged on locally - God knows why, it's not like I had anymore privileges there than over the phone line.
But I guess I remember the sense of community and the parties more than anything else, I mean, when't the last time you went to a Slashdot party?
but it will make the biggest difference in Europe, where the state controlled telecom monopolies have made voice service so expensive that an entire generation is coming up knowing only cell phones. VoIP may bring "wired" phones back in Europe.
I'd like to nominate the Longhorn hype machine for worst technology. All the press garnered by an OS we won't see until 2006 at the earliest is stupifying at best, and patently annoying at the worst.
Plus, with OS X Panther, I have 95%+ of the Longhorn "Innovation" today - tell me why I should wait three years?
The actual Dewey Defeats Truman headline was based more on early election returns than skewed polling. The famous error made concerning polling in the 1948 election was that Gallup simply stopped doing polls two weeks before the election and proclaimed that Dewey would win, not taking into account the massive sea change in public opinion that can occur over a two week span.
The famous example of a poll gone bad because of telephone ownership statistics was the poll used by the magazine The Literary Digest to predict the 1936 presidential election between FDR and Al Landon. The magazine mailed ballots to 10 million individuals with listed phone numbers and/or car registrations, and tallied up roughly 2 million returned ballots. Based on the results, the magazine predicted a Landon victory, while in fact the result was a 46-state landslide for FDR (and remember, there were only 48 states in 1936)!
The sample error in this survey was that telephone ownership and car ownership did not correlate to likeliness to vote in 1936. In 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, telephones and cars were luxury items that few people besides the wealthiest Americans could afford. The poor and lower class who were more likely to vote for FDR were not even sent ballots, so there was no way for their voices to be heard in this survey.
The impact of this flawed survey was such that within a short time after the publication of the survey, The Literary Digest would go out of business.