Companies, in this country, enjoy a special status under US law, where they are treated as if they were a person. Companies must maintain records of how decisions were made by more than one individual, so as to retain this special status. As a result, the owners and directors of the company are not held liable for the actions of the company (except in the cases where the individual breaks the law).
Because of this special status offering indemnity to people, by virtue of their free association in a business venture, companies must be held to a higher ethical standard than one would necessarily apply to an individual. Just because something is legal in one corrupt country, doesn't mean that the company should be allowed free reign to do it. If so then the company need only "off-shore" illegal activities to somewhere it is legal, and thereby escape any chance of prosecution.
For example, there are stringent privacy protections under EU law which don't exist in the US. Should it be legal for an EU company to ship that information to their US subsidiary and have their US subsidiary legally sell that personal information? US law has strict controls on medical records. Should your HMO be allowed to ship that information to Dubai, where US citizens have no protection from their information being sold? Yahoo may have followed Chinese law, but may have violated US law and international law in the process.
But irregardless of the legality, what they did was morally and ethically wrong. We provide indemnity to the owners and directors of Yahoo so as to encourage free enterprise. We do not provide them indemnity so that they can collude in human rights violations and partake in inhumane activities.
Now I'm a new father, and you'd think that I'd be sensitive to this issue, and I am. I'm now boycotting all television, music, and movies that do not include swearing or other explicit content. Growing up, I was one of those kids who never swore. When I went to work, that's when I started swearing like a sailor. It wasn't that I was around sailors, and the engineers and MBAs I was working with didn't swear more than the kids on the playgrounds where I grew up. It was because you can't function in business if you can't drink and swear with your boss. So I say think of the children, and teach them useful real world skills, like telling their politicians to fuck off.
This is not about pride, this is about the security of the US. The US primarily bases its security in two thing: military force and national debt. As long as the US maintains an effective military option, and the global economy depends upon the ability of US to repay its enormous debt, the US is secure as a nation. Elected officials may change, but the government will keep right on rolling along as long as the currency is viable.
But as soon as the US loses its ability to maintain a effective military option (due to falling behind technologically) or fails to be able to repay its international debts (due to falling behind economically), US currency and the value of all of the foreign investment in the US, all of those lucrative trade surpluses, and all of the "free" military support disappears.
And when your ability to feed your family is based on the fact that you can trade bits of paper for food and energy, you should care about the continued viability of that currency. And if you are not in the US, but work for a company or country that has heavily invested in the US, you too should worry.
While global society would survive the global depression and resulting "dark age", most of us and our children would not. And the US doesn't exactly have a history of doing anything peacefully.
As we all know, the BSD license has pressured people into not using the GPL at all. Given the greater freedom to the end user it gives, it makes the market for GPL software utterly untenable. That's why Linux has switched to BSD licensing. The public domain, however, is so compelling, given its great degree of freedom and complete removal of all boundaries on use, Microsoft has placed all of Windows in the public domain. In fact, the only thing that stood between Microsoft and total world domination was their licensing which prevents certain people from using their software as they see fit!
Joke Joke!
There's an old rule of marketing which states "You can charge too little for a product". Just look at most people's gut reactions, GPL'd software is more valuable than public domain software. For developers and corporations like IBM, GPL'd software is more valuable than BSD software because of the GPL's additional sine qua non provisions. The spirit of fairness that is at the basis of RMS's 4 freedoms has value to developers and coporations. For most developers, protections against corporate profiteering preserve their personal ability to profit from their labor. The only people alienated are freeloaders.
But assume Intel wins, and produces a sub-standard product that ultimately fails because it was designed to edge the OLPC out of the market (to steal revenue from AMD), and not to meet the needs of children in the 3rd world. Then Intel can cancel the program, drive up costs, and spoil the market. Intel isn't doing it to be philanthropic, they're doing it because it's a business and they can make money from it. The market for this isn't the poor kid after all, it is the politicians, who may very well not want their people more educated and demanding more out of life. Intel makes it easy for them to avoid making a decision to buy either, while looking like they are doing something good for the children. It is more likely that the kids will never see a laptop that meets the humanitarian goals when Intel chooses to compete and not contribute. If Intel were humanitarian it would be giving the OLPC chips, instead it is lobbying.
CLR is the crap that I have read it to be. Look at any modern Smalltalk, and you'll see a runtime that makes the CLR look utterly unimpressive. Some smalltalkers are experimenting with networked images that dynamically discover new code when invoked from other images. Think CPAN or Rubygems on steroids where "method not found" just grabs the necessary modules and keeps chugging along. Nevermind you can always load new code in a running system, and change tracking of code is automatic, the 3D networked interactive environments, drag and drop scripting of objects, and cool 3d graphing of object spaces, etc, etc.
Compare the CLR to Erlang/OTP and its ability to deploy new code into a running system to the CLR and the CLR still seems weak, forget the distributive properties of Erlang. Distributed programming without pain is still under the "comming soon" category for the CLR.
Hell for that matter Chuck Moore's Colorforth is more innovative, and his VM complete with hardware drivers is 2056 lines of assembler! Play with a OO Forth like Mops and then look at the CLR and you'll quickly say CLR WTF! Other people have done it better, faster, and simpler.
The CLR is still just the Same Shit Different VM. It is just needlessly complex, wrapping tons of equally overly complex APIs, and still failing to live up to standards of 1980.
Wirth did the first Pascal VM in what 1970? And it took Microsoft 26 years to buy OmniVM (in 1996), and we're supposed to be amazed? Oooh look! A system that still can't do what others could do in the 1970s! Hooray!
Wouldn't knowing about a security exploit and failing to mitigate any damage that may result by failing to disclose to your customers this information make a company liable for any damages done to the customer's systems during the "grace period"?
I mean if I buy something, say a car, and the manufacturer knows about the defect, I can sue them for any damages that may occur as a result of their design flaw. Companies perform recalls because the cost of such suits exceeds the cost of replacing the goods in question. Additionally, if there is a flaw which they know about that results in death or injury, thay may also be found criminally negligent.
Can you sue Microsoft or Oracle for damages if someone exploits a bug they knew about, but didn't tell you about? And what protection could a EULA be for a company if they are found criminally negligent? You don't wave your rights not to be killed or injured or have your house not burnt down buy clicking the EULA.
Amen Amen,
On top of that, just think of all the poor free software developers who can't sit on the information for 120 days and have to fix it ASAP, because the only way to disclose the bug is to post to a::gasp:: public mailing list!
Yes it sucks that people don't patch their systems, yes it is terrible that people can use publically disclosed information to attack systems, but this increased level of secrecy only gives you the illusion of security.
I'm probably not the only person on/. who has had severs hacked with an exploit during the grace period of some low level exploit, and as long as people believe this nonsense about grace periods, more people will be in the same boat with me.
At least with full disclosure there is a clear and immediate danger, where every individual has equal opportunity to mitigate the problem, shutting off unnecessary services, migrating to alternatives, etc. And of course that is why vendors hate the idea, you might switch vendors!
My advice, if they want you, setup an LLC, and have them sign a contract with your LLC. The LLC should be hired to provide consulting and integration services, and you license your code to them under BSD style terms. It's what I do. I retain the rights to the stuff I write, and they get the freedom to do what they want with it. I can reuse it later, and license it to others. Also have each of your employers sign a "cross licensing agreement" where by you agree not to disclose any IP from their company, but any techniques or technologies you develop in conjunction with them are licensed such that you can use them again. In this way, you provide a greater value-add to each "employer" as you can now legally use what you learned elsewhere.
The key is to make sure that your potential employer realizes how much they lose by forcing you to sign a draconian ip disclosure statement.
Simple answer is remove the monopoly powers granted to Microsoft in the first place by copyright.
Place Windows XX in the public domain by voiding their copyrights in the EU.
Abuse the power, lose your rights.
I generally agree with your overall comments, but I do have issue with the statement above. Really, you should say that those "who are interested in a NPOV are outmanned by those with an agenda". Genocide is only one aspect and generally implies that it's people like Hitler (and other dictators) who are really the "bad guys". In the referenced article, the author even mentions that at one point the Hitler page was highly critical of the dictator. Fact is, many people (who are not Jewish) have various personal interests that are negative towards the dictator (justified or not). The key is to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in EITHER direction. If most of the news posted about Hitler is negative (and after all, isn't that the nature of news, if Hitler was humming along not doing anything too bad, then you'd hardly hear anything about him), then does a wiki page that simply accumilates these news articles then also biased towards the negative? Does the NPOV imply that any negative comments should be "evened out" by positive? Sticky issue this, but plese retain a NPOV when it comes to those who would attempt to subvert the wiki concept, it's people/orgs with alterior motives, profit or not.
See how with careful manipulation of a few words you can make any seemingly rational piece of argument into a vircolic bit of anti-Semitic hate speach! We should not attempt to produce a NPOV, such neutrality is a false promise of objectivity. Those of us with an agenda should make that agenda known, and use the tools at our disposal. Remember, good men doing nothing is the easiest way for evil men to win. And NPOV is one of those good intentions that paves a long strech on the road to hell.< RANT OFF >
The question of whether games are art or not is a BS argument. Games are art, interactive, auditory, visually, and tactile. Compare a game to a painting. Both involve composition, use of lighting, and the same techinical skill applied to the subject matter. Some is crap some isn't. No one claims that a Jackson Pollock painting isn't art because it lacks a coherent narative voice. Similarly, no one claims that modern interpretive dance fails to be art, because each dancer contributes their own interpretation of the underlying metaphors, and no two performances are exactly the same.
Games are art, but need to be judged on their own terms. Games must be judged by their tactile aspect, the actual physical game play. Game must secondarily be judged by their visual appeal and cohesion and also by their use of sound to help suspend disbelief and its relationship to game play. Games may be judged by the stories they tell, but the story is tertiary at best to the artform as a whole. A game's mechanics, the way the game plays, the balance between forces, is the primary art. And critics like Eberts just aren't accustomed to judging this form of artistry. They lack the technical familiarty with the subject matter to judge it. The same thing goes for critics of concert violinists, or abstract painters, without the proper context and familiarity you can't accurately judge the relative merits of the works beyond your subjective reaction.
Claiming a game isn't art because it lacks a cohesive narative voice, is no different from saying "a painting isn't art because it isn't a movie", or "a novel isn't art because it doesn't involve flashing lights and people prancing about in skintight pants". It is a new artform, and games like PacMan are obviously art. Beautiful in their simplicity, and evocative of an era. Centuries from now, people will realize some games are crap, and others pure works of beauty. Games are a very complex artform. They require new rules to judge.
Better question is why are you giving a kid $50 to blow on whatever they want?
And if your kid manages to come up with $50 for the latest GTA game, where are you when he's playing it?
And if your kid is hanging out at a friend's house where his parent's don't share your vision for his up-bringing, maybe you shouldn't let your kid go there
Why should a retailer ID everyone, and play parent to every punk ass kid with $50? These substances are not dangerous, and a little bit of guidance goes a long way to mitigating any harmful effects.
why is it so difficult to get parents to take some responsibility?
If retailers have to card kids, then parents should need licenses to have kids, and we should card everyone before letting them have sex. Surely that will prevent bad parenting and keep the kiddies out of trouble...
Anyone going to college because they think they can get a job doing what they study there is going for the wrong reasons. I happen to have worked in online games for the past 4 years, and before that worked in factory automation. My college degree has nothing to do with what I do for a living, but it helped me develop ways of thinking that would never have been available in the working world. My undergraduate degree is History/Mathematics/Classics, my Masters degree is in Late Ancient / Early Medieval History. Thanks to my education I can read a half dozen languages. Due to the work I've done outside of school, I can also program in a dozen programming languages, using a lot of the linguistics I learned studying ancient history.
College is an opportunity to grow as an individual and discover different ways of thinking about things. Trying to teach kids how to produce today's crappy games, is only going to result in kids who have massive ammounts of debt and preconcieved notions of what can be done and how it will be "fun". Many of the worst programmers I've met "in the real world" went to top tier schools, were at the top of their class, knew lots of lovely theory, but had to be totally retrained when it came to making applications actually work. And unlearning is much harder to do..
But that's just my opinion and personal experience, YMMV
First off the numbers that are touted here are 1.) estimates 2.) done by a consulting company charging $1299 to see how the came up with those estimates 3.) totally unsupported. I too can pull numbers out of my ass that sound reasonable, and will prove Microsoft is making $20 per console sold from day 1. And I can make a hypothesis that IBM is covering much of the cost burden initially, in exchange for a 10 year commitment from Microsoft.
Much of the video game accounting has been pure crap over the years. What the press releases say and what the reality of the hardware business are tend to be very different. Like when Sony launched the PS2, all these analysis were rolling the cost of the fab they built up front into the cost of PS2 development, ignoring basic concepts like depreciation.
Now Microsoft can lose money on the xbox 360 launch, but they aren't going to lose money on rev B, and they sure as hell won't lose money on rev D. And saying they can reduce costs 25-50% from some analyst acquired anally, only means that the analyst noted gross inefficiencies in the first batch.
In perspective, I can go buy a AMD based destop at walmart.com for $288, the XBox 360 with similar hardware runs $399. Is walmart.com selling white boxed computers w/ linux to make up the money on some mythical linux game sales? Even adding another $124 at walmart.com for a Radeon 9550 w/ 256MB ram, I've then got a box whose processing specs, both graphics and CPU, Ram are comparable to the Xbox 360. And that is $412 at walmart. To get the same amount of storage space for the Xbox 360, I'd have to spend $498 to get a second harddrive. Oh and btw, these are costs, shopping retail, these aren't manufacture prices, and no one is selling any of this hardware for a loss.
I have my own little indie game company, and I'll produce 2-4 profitable games this year alone, sure we measure our costs in tens of thousands of dollars, but we don't spend more to produce a fun game than we need to. And like the big boys, we develop a lot of our own IP, and then license our tech to bigger companies looking for a cheaper solution. It is amazing how many hours you can waste playing a game where the entire graphics budget was $20k for some custom 3d models done by an artschool kid.
The big boys are suffering from being too big. They spend all this money to keep up with the Jones's throwing more and more tech into the same boring games over and over again. And because it costs so much to produce all that content, you end up with a never ending stream of bugs and patches, and support costs. At somepoint the whole structure collapses under its own weight, and ceases to be fun.
The last two games I've played for fun were Black & White 2 and Darwinia... I terms of pacing, game play, and interface the games tried to do the same thing, but Darwinia actually did it right. Both had clunky interface flaws, but Darwinia's interface suffered only from its intentional quirkiness (a nod to real world OS process management) while B&W2's suffered from intentional crippling (buying broken gesture support, poor palette layout, etc).
Like indy film to hollywood, there is still hope for games.
Anti-science, anti-intellectualism, anti-etc. all stem from people's inability to cope with the rapidly increasing rate of change. Those of us reading/. are those who to some degree have managed to accept change as an ordinary part of daily existence. For the vast majority of humanity, this state of constant uncertainty is scary as all hell. When you've lost your footing because your set of assumptions about the world turn out not to work in daily life anymore, there's nothing like sticking your head in the sand and resting upon the bedrock of ignorance to make you feel safe and secure.
The administration isn't "anti-science" it is simply a bunch of demagogues playing to the masses who are scared to hell of the future. If your world is only 5000 years old, it is easy to imagine things have always been this way. And if there's an all-bearded guy up in the sky who's got your back, you don't have to worry about that beared guy who's cooking up a batch of mutant atomic powered death robots somewhere in the SF Bay Area.
Yeah but you're forgetting that when it comes to IP there is no "fair market price", the patent is a government granted limited time monopoly for the purpose of encouraging development. In a true free market senario, anyone, once they understood the means of production, would be allowed to produce it. At that point the cost of the drug would only reflect what the "fair market price" actually is. Consider the difference in price between generic asprin, and Vicodin. Its not like the raw ingredients for C18H21NO3 are all that much more expensive than C6H4(OCOCH3)CO2H
I telecommute and don't drive a car. I tend to ride a bicycle year round, (even in places with 1' of snow on the ground in January and December, studded tires are your friend). And I have to say, I technically live out of a Chrome messenger bag. They're waterproof, with a double lining, great single shoulder sling, with excellent center of gravity for weaving in and out of traffic. And they have a kick-ass chrome belt buckle across your chest. The large size expands large enough to carry several days of clothes + laptop, and compacts enough to be smaller than most backpacks. Also the Tucano second skins are vital for laptop protection in any back, has kept my powerbook scratch free even though it is typically in a bag filled with tools, teflon lube, cell phones, keys, extra sticks of ram, and whatnot.
YMMV, but between my chrome bag, and the paneers on my touring bike, I can carry nearly all my worldly goods with me:) (I still haven't figured out how to carry the other bicycles with me).
Just on the personal level, I'm involved in a small startup venture. We have three people working here, 2 developers, 1 lawyer, and we also retain an outside counsel as well. We're not facing any lawsuits, and hopefully will never face one. When doing contract work, I'd say we spend more of our time dealing with the client's legal department than with the actual technical specification. Its utterly disgusting.
Yes I agree that software producers should not be exempt from liability. So to should automanufacturers be held accountable when someone else steals my car. I also think the automanufacturers should be forced to replace my car when I crash it into a tree after a night of heavy drinking. In fact, when I leave my keys in the ingition, and the door open, and shout with a bullhorn that anyone can drive my car if they want to, if the car is damaged, and I lose precious hours in which I could have been working, I should be compensated for that too. And I certainly think that Holywood and the publishing industry should be held liable as well. I mean the purpose of a movie is to entertain, and damnit, I deserve several million dollars for all the mental anguish bad movies and novels with gaping plot holes have caused me over the years. And I think airlines should be held responsible for the bad airline food, which is an excellent example of corporate fraud, I mean how can you call that a meal or even a snack, or for that matter food. Yes I agree software should not be free from liability, but seriously, to hold some software producer responsible for the failure to sufficiently prevent some person halfway around the world from taking virtual bolt cutters, to your software brakelines is as idiotic as it would be in the real world, with your spouse taking actual ones to your car's. Though I'm certain your wife will be happy when BMW is found responsible for her murdering you, and collects both your life insurance and the award from the BMW negligence suit!
Why doesn't Rockstar just rename their games to things like "Happy Pony Time" and "Hugs and Kisses Ville" that way the parents organizations would have a reason to be upset. Any idiot who buys their kids a game named after a felony, expecting wholesome family friendly fun, does not deserve to raise children. Now I think its time to take our gelding shears to these peace-nics.
Case in point. I am here almost every day of the week. I spend around $500 a month here. I work from the cafe because of their wireless. If they didn't have it, I wouldn' be here blowing $15 a day on food and drinks. $6000 a year at the cafe. Office away from home. Works for me.
But how is this bill going to help track me, when I don't have a driver's license? I don't own a car and never will. I ride a bike everywhere. I have a touring bike which I am planing on taking cross country. This bill isn't going to help track me! We need more legislation to close up these loopholes. And if we need bicycle licenses, well maybe I'll just walk! And then we should probably have walking licenses too, to close that loophole.
(yes I have a passport, so they can track me that way, but Canada is a short swim away:)
Face it, most people don't NEED more processing power. You can browse the web, send emails, and do your taxes on a Pentium 75, with enough ram, Firefox works just fine. Constantly upgrading is pure consumerist crap. You don't need this. Hell I develop games for a living, and I don't need this sort of processing power. Can a college kid use this stuff? Sure, they can run a P2P tool, download lots of pirated content, play their ripped DVDs/MP3s, all while pretending to do a paper. With a dual core machine, you could even keep your torrents downloading and play Doom3. Granted if you really feel you need to be doing this, you probably have a host of other problems and should probably consider going outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies, in this country, enjoy a special status under US law, where they are treated as if they were a person. Companies must maintain records of how decisions were made by more than one individual, so as to retain this special status. As a result, the owners and directors of the company are not held liable for the actions of the company (except in the cases where the individual breaks the law).
Because of this special status offering indemnity to people, by virtue of their free association in a business venture, companies must be held to a higher ethical standard than one would necessarily apply to an individual. Just because something is legal in one corrupt country, doesn't mean that the company should be allowed free reign to do it. If so then the company need only "off-shore" illegal activities to somewhere it is legal, and thereby escape any chance of prosecution.
For example, there are stringent privacy protections under EU law which don't exist in the US. Should it be legal for an EU company to ship that information to their US subsidiary and have their US subsidiary legally sell that personal information? US law has strict controls on medical records. Should your HMO be allowed to ship that information to Dubai, where US citizens have no protection from their information being sold? Yahoo may have followed Chinese law, but may have violated US law and international law in the process.
But irregardless of the legality, what they did was morally and ethically wrong. We provide indemnity to the owners and directors of Yahoo so as to encourage free enterprise. We do not provide them indemnity so that they can collude in human rights violations and partake in inhumane activities.
Now I'm a new father, and you'd think that I'd be sensitive to this issue, and I am. I'm now boycotting all television, music, and movies that do not include swearing or other explicit content. Growing up, I was one of those kids who never swore. When I went to work, that's when I started swearing like a sailor. It wasn't that I was around sailors, and the engineers and MBAs I was working with didn't swear more than the kids on the playgrounds where I grew up. It was because you can't function in business if you can't drink and swear with your boss. So I say think of the children, and teach them useful real world skills, like telling their politicians to fuck off.
This is not about pride, this is about the security of the US. The US primarily bases its security in two thing: military force and national debt. As long as the US maintains an effective military option, and the global economy depends upon the ability of US to repay its enormous debt, the US is secure as a nation. Elected officials may change, but the government will keep right on rolling along as long as the currency is viable.
But as soon as the US loses its ability to maintain a effective military option (due to falling behind technologically) or fails to be able to repay its international debts (due to falling behind economically), US currency and the value of all of the foreign investment in the US, all of those lucrative trade surpluses, and all of the "free" military support disappears.
And when your ability to feed your family is based on the fact that you can trade bits of paper for food and energy, you should care about the continued viability of that currency. And if you are not in the US, but work for a company or country that has heavily invested in the US, you too should worry.
While global society would survive the global depression and resulting "dark age", most of us and our children would not. And the US doesn't exactly have a history of doing anything peacefully.
As we all know, the BSD license has pressured people into not using the GPL at all. Given the greater freedom to the end user it gives, it makes the market for GPL software utterly untenable. That's why Linux has switched to BSD licensing. The public domain, however, is so compelling, given its great degree of freedom and complete removal of all boundaries on use, Microsoft has placed all of Windows in the public domain. In fact, the only thing that stood between Microsoft and total world domination was their licensing which prevents certain people from using their software as they see fit!
Joke Joke!
There's an old rule of marketing which states "You can charge too little for a product". Just look at most people's gut reactions, GPL'd software is more valuable than public domain software. For developers and corporations like IBM, GPL'd software is more valuable than BSD software because of the GPL's additional sine qua non provisions. The spirit of fairness that is at the basis of RMS's 4 freedoms has value to developers and coporations. For most developers, protections against corporate profiteering preserve their personal ability to profit from their labor. The only people alienated are freeloaders.
But assume Intel wins, and produces a sub-standard product that ultimately fails because it was designed to edge the OLPC out of the market (to steal revenue from AMD), and not to meet the needs of children in the 3rd world. Then Intel can cancel the program, drive up costs, and spoil the market. Intel isn't doing it to be philanthropic, they're doing it because it's a business and they can make money from it. The market for this isn't the poor kid after all, it is the politicians, who may very well not want their people more educated and demanding more out of life. Intel makes it easy for them to avoid making a decision to buy either, while looking like they are doing something good for the children. It is more likely that the kids will never see a laptop that meets the humanitarian goals when Intel chooses to compete and not contribute. If Intel were humanitarian it would be giving the OLPC chips, instead it is lobbying.
ugh! Ignorance of history is painful!
CLR is the crap that I have read it to be. Look at any modern Smalltalk, and you'll see a runtime that makes the CLR look utterly unimpressive. Some smalltalkers are experimenting with networked images that dynamically discover new code when invoked from other images. Think CPAN or Rubygems on steroids where "method not found" just grabs the necessary modules and keeps chugging along. Nevermind you can always load new code in a running system, and change tracking of code is automatic, the 3D networked interactive environments, drag and drop scripting of objects, and cool 3d graphing of object spaces, etc, etc.
Compare the CLR to Erlang/OTP and its ability to deploy new code into a running system to the CLR and the CLR still seems weak, forget the distributive properties of Erlang. Distributed programming without pain is still under the "comming soon" category for the CLR.
Hell for that matter Chuck Moore's Colorforth is more innovative, and his VM complete with hardware drivers is 2056 lines of assembler! Play with a OO Forth like Mops and then look at the CLR and you'll quickly say CLR WTF! Other people have done it better, faster, and simpler.
The CLR is still just the Same Shit Different VM. It is just needlessly complex, wrapping tons of equally overly complex APIs, and still failing to live up to standards of 1980.
Wirth did the first Pascal VM in what 1970? And it took Microsoft 26 years to buy OmniVM (in 1996), and we're supposed to be amazed? Oooh look! A system that still can't do what others could do in the 1970s! Hooray!
Wouldn't knowing about a security exploit and failing to mitigate any damage that may result by failing to disclose to your customers this information make a company liable for any damages done to the customer's systems during the "grace period"?
I mean if I buy something, say a car, and the manufacturer knows about the defect, I can sue them for any damages that may occur as a result of their design flaw. Companies perform recalls because the cost of such suits exceeds the cost of replacing the goods in question. Additionally, if there is a flaw which they know about that results in death or injury, thay may also be found criminally negligent.
Can you sue Microsoft or Oracle for damages if someone exploits a bug they knew about, but didn't tell you about? And what protection could a EULA be for a company if they are found criminally negligent? You don't wave your rights not to be killed or injured or have your house not burnt down buy clicking the EULA.
Amen Amen, On top of that, just think of all the poor free software developers who can't sit on the information for 120 days and have to fix it ASAP, because the only way to disclose the bug is to post to a ::gasp:: public mailing list!
Yes it sucks that people don't patch their systems, yes it is terrible that people can use publically disclosed information to attack systems, but this increased level of secrecy only gives you the illusion of security.
I'm probably not the only person on /. who has had severs hacked with an exploit during the grace period of some low level exploit, and as long as people believe this nonsense about grace periods, more people will be in the same boat with me.
At least with full disclosure there is a clear and immediate danger, where every individual has equal opportunity to mitigate the problem, shutting off unnecessary services, migrating to alternatives, etc. And of course that is why vendors hate the idea, you might switch vendors!
My advice, if they want you, setup an LLC, and have them sign a contract with your LLC. The LLC should be hired to provide consulting and integration services, and you license your code to them under BSD style terms. It's what I do. I retain the rights to the stuff I write, and they get the freedom to do what they want with it. I can reuse it later, and license it to others. Also have each of your employers sign a "cross licensing agreement" where by you agree not to disclose any IP from their company, but any techniques or technologies you develop in conjunction with them are licensed such that you can use them again. In this way, you provide a greater value-add to each "employer" as you can now legally use what you learned elsewhere.
The key is to make sure that your potential employer realizes how much they lose by forcing you to sign a draconian ip disclosure statement.
Simple answer is remove the monopoly powers granted to Microsoft in the first place by copyright. Place Windows XX in the public domain by voiding their copyrights in the EU. Abuse the power, lose your rights.
<RANT ON> An Anonymous Coward Spake:
I generally agree with your overall comments, but I do have issue with the statement above. Really, you should say that those "who are interested in a NPOV are outmanned by those with an agenda". Genocide is only one aspect and generally implies that it's people like Hitler (and other dictators) who are really the "bad guys". In the referenced article, the author even mentions that at one point the Hitler page was highly critical of the dictator. Fact is, many people (who are not Jewish) have various personal interests that are negative towards the dictator (justified or not). The key is to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in EITHER direction. If most of the news posted about Hitler is negative (and after all, isn't that the nature of news, if Hitler was humming along not doing anything too bad, then you'd hardly hear anything about him), then does a wiki page that simply accumilates these news articles then also biased towards the negative? Does the NPOV imply that any negative comments should be "evened out" by positive? Sticky issue this, but plese retain a NPOV when it comes to those who would attempt to subvert the wiki concept, it's people/orgs with alterior motives, profit or not.
See how with careful manipulation of a few words you can make any seemingly rational piece of argument into a vircolic bit of anti-Semitic hate speach! We should not attempt to produce a NPOV, such neutrality is a false promise of objectivity. Those of us with an agenda should make that agenda known, and use the tools at our disposal. Remember, good men doing nothing is the easiest way for evil men to win. And NPOV is one of those good intentions that paves a long strech on the road to hell. < RANT OFF >
The question of whether games are art or not is a BS argument. Games are art, interactive, auditory, visually, and tactile. Compare a game to a painting. Both involve composition, use of lighting, and the same techinical skill applied to the subject matter. Some is crap some isn't. No one claims that a Jackson Pollock painting isn't art because it lacks a coherent narative voice. Similarly, no one claims that modern interpretive dance fails to be art, because each dancer contributes their own interpretation of the underlying metaphors, and no two performances are exactly the same.
Games are art, but need to be judged on their own terms. Games must be judged by their tactile aspect, the actual physical game play. Game must secondarily be judged by their visual appeal and cohesion and also by their use of sound to help suspend disbelief and its relationship to game play. Games may be judged by the stories they tell, but the story is tertiary at best to the artform as a whole. A game's mechanics, the way the game plays, the balance between forces, is the primary art. And critics like Eberts just aren't accustomed to judging this form of artistry. They lack the technical familiarty with the subject matter to judge it. The same thing goes for critics of concert violinists, or abstract painters, without the proper context and familiarity you can't accurately judge the relative merits of the works beyond your subjective reaction.
Claiming a game isn't art because it lacks a cohesive narative voice, is no different from saying "a painting isn't art because it isn't a movie", or "a novel isn't art because it doesn't involve flashing lights and people prancing about in skintight pants". It is a new artform, and games like PacMan are obviously art. Beautiful in their simplicity, and evocative of an era. Centuries from now, people will realize some games are crap, and others pure works of beauty. Games are a very complex artform. They require new rules to judge.
But that's just my 2 credits worth..
Better question is why are you giving a kid $50 to blow on whatever they want?
And if your kid manages to come up with $50 for the latest GTA game, where are you when he's playing it?
And if your kid is hanging out at a friend's house where his parent's don't share your vision for his up-bringing, maybe you shouldn't let your kid go there
Why should a retailer ID everyone, and play parent to every punk ass kid with $50? These substances are not dangerous, and a little bit of guidance goes a long way to mitigating any harmful effects.
why is it so difficult to get parents to take some responsibility?
If retailers have to card kids, then parents should need licenses to have kids, and we should card everyone before letting them have sex. Surely that will prevent bad parenting and keep the kiddies out of trouble...
Anyone going to college because they think they can get a job doing what they study there is going for the wrong reasons. I happen to have worked in online games for the past 4 years, and before that worked in factory automation. My college degree has nothing to do with what I do for a living, but it helped me develop ways of thinking that would never have been available in the working world. My undergraduate degree is History/Mathematics/Classics, my Masters degree is in Late Ancient / Early Medieval History. Thanks to my education I can read a half dozen languages. Due to the work I've done outside of school, I can also program in a dozen programming languages, using a lot of the linguistics I learned studying ancient history.
College is an opportunity to grow as an individual and discover different ways of thinking about things. Trying to teach kids how to produce today's crappy games, is only going to result in kids who have massive ammounts of debt and preconcieved notions of what can be done and how it will be "fun". Many of the worst programmers I've met "in the real world" went to top tier schools, were at the top of their class, knew lots of lovely theory, but had to be totally retrained when it came to making applications actually work. And unlearning is much harder to do..
But that's just my opinion and personal experience, YMMV
First off the numbers that are touted here are 1.) estimates 2.) done by a consulting company charging $1299 to see how the came up with those estimates 3.) totally unsupported. I too can pull numbers out of my ass that sound reasonable, and will prove Microsoft is making $20 per console sold from day 1. And I can make a hypothesis that IBM is covering much of the cost burden initially, in exchange for a 10 year commitment from Microsoft.
Much of the video game accounting has been pure crap over the years. What the press releases say and what the reality of the hardware business are tend to be very different. Like when Sony launched the PS2, all these analysis were rolling the cost of the fab they built up front into the cost of PS2 development, ignoring basic concepts like depreciation.
Now Microsoft can lose money on the xbox 360 launch, but they aren't going to lose money on rev B, and they sure as hell won't lose money on rev D. And saying they can reduce costs 25-50% from some analyst acquired anally, only means that the analyst noted gross inefficiencies in the first batch.
In perspective, I can go buy a AMD based destop at walmart.com for $288, the XBox 360 with similar hardware runs $399. Is walmart.com selling white boxed computers w/ linux to make up the money on some mythical linux game sales? Even adding another $124 at walmart.com for a Radeon 9550 w/ 256MB ram, I've then got a box whose processing specs, both graphics and CPU, Ram are comparable to the Xbox 360. And that is $412 at walmart. To get the same amount of storage space for the Xbox 360, I'd have to spend $498 to get a second harddrive. Oh and btw, these are costs, shopping retail, these aren't manufacture prices, and no one is selling any of this hardware for a loss.
I'd be very suspicious of these analyst numbers.
I have my own little indie game company, and I'll produce 2-4 profitable games this year alone, sure we measure our costs in tens of thousands of dollars, but we don't spend more to produce a fun game than we need to. And like the big boys, we develop a lot of our own IP, and then license our tech to bigger companies looking for a cheaper solution. It is amazing how many hours you can waste playing a game where the entire graphics budget was $20k for some custom 3d models done by an artschool kid.
:)
The big boys are suffering from being too big. They spend all this money to keep up with the Jones's throwing more and more tech into the same boring games over and over again. And because it costs so much to produce all that content, you end up with a never ending stream of bugs and patches, and support costs. At somepoint the whole structure collapses under its own weight, and ceases to be fun.
The last two games I've played for fun were Black & White 2 and Darwinia... I terms of pacing, game play, and interface the games tried to do the same thing, but Darwinia actually did it right. Both had clunky interface flaws, but Darwinia's interface suffered only from its intentional quirkiness (a nod to real world OS process management) while B&W2's suffered from intentional crippling (buying broken gesture support, poor palette layout, etc).
Like indy film to hollywood, there is still hope for games.
the little guy
Anti-science, anti-intellectualism, anti-etc. all stem from people's inability to cope with the rapidly increasing rate of change. Those of us reading /. are those who to some degree have managed to accept change as an ordinary part of daily existence. For the vast majority of humanity, this state of constant uncertainty is scary as all hell. When you've lost your footing because your set of assumptions about the world turn out not to work in daily life anymore, there's nothing like sticking your head in the sand and resting upon the bedrock of ignorance to make you feel safe and secure.
The administration isn't "anti-science" it is simply a bunch of demagogues playing to the masses who are scared to hell of the future. If your world is only 5000 years old, it is easy to imagine things have always been this way. And if there's an all-bearded guy up in the sky who's got your back, you don't have to worry about that beared guy who's cooking up a batch of mutant atomic powered death robots somewhere in the SF Bay Area.
Yeah but you're forgetting that when it comes to IP there is no "fair market price", the patent is a government granted limited time monopoly for the purpose of encouraging development. In a true free market senario, anyone, once they understood the means of production, would be allowed to produce it. At that point the cost of the drug would only reflect what the "fair market price" actually is. Consider the difference in price between generic asprin, and Vicodin. Its not like the raw ingredients for C18H21NO3 are all that much more expensive than C6H4(OCOCH3)CO2H
I telecommute and don't drive a car. I tend to ride a bicycle year round, (even in places with 1' of snow on the ground in January and December, studded tires are your friend). And I have to say, I technically live out of a Chrome messenger bag. They're waterproof, with a double lining, great single shoulder sling, with excellent center of gravity for weaving in and out of traffic. And they have a kick-ass chrome belt buckle across your chest. The large size expands large enough to carry several days of clothes + laptop, and compacts enough to be smaller than most backpacks. Also the Tucano second skins are vital for laptop protection in any back, has kept my powerbook scratch free even though it is typically in a bag filled with tools, teflon lube, cell phones, keys, extra sticks of ram, and whatnot. YMMV, but between my chrome bag, and the paneers on my touring bike, I can carry nearly all my worldly goods with me :) (I still haven't figured out how to carry the other bicycles with me).
Just on the personal level, I'm involved in a small startup venture. We have three people working here, 2 developers, 1 lawyer, and we also retain an outside counsel as well. We're not facing any lawsuits, and hopefully will never face one. When doing contract work, I'd say we spend more of our time dealing with the client's legal department than with the actual technical specification. Its utterly disgusting.
Yes I agree that software producers should not be exempt from liability. So to should automanufacturers be held accountable when someone else steals my car. I also think the automanufacturers should be forced to replace my car when I crash it into a tree after a night of heavy drinking. In fact, when I leave my keys in the ingition, and the door open, and shout with a bullhorn that anyone can drive my car if they want to, if the car is damaged, and I lose precious hours in which I could have been working, I should be compensated for that too. And I certainly think that Holywood and the publishing industry should be held liable as well. I mean the purpose of a movie is to entertain, and damnit, I deserve several million dollars for all the mental anguish bad movies and novels with gaping plot holes have caused me over the years. And I think airlines should be held responsible for the bad airline food, which is an excellent example of corporate fraud, I mean how can you call that a meal or even a snack, or for that matter food. Yes I agree software should not be free from liability, but seriously, to hold some software producer responsible for the failure to sufficiently prevent some person halfway around the world from taking virtual bolt cutters, to your software brakelines is as idiotic as it would be in the real world, with your spouse taking actual ones to your car's. Though I'm certain your wife will be happy when BMW is found responsible for her murdering you, and collects both your life insurance and the award from the BMW negligence suit!
Why doesn't Rockstar just rename their games to things like "Happy Pony Time" and "Hugs and Kisses Ville" that way the parents organizations would have a reason to be upset. Any idiot who buys their kids a game named after a felony, expecting wholesome family friendly fun, does not deserve to raise children. Now I think its time to take our gelding shears to these peace-nics.
Case in point. I am here almost every day of the week. I spend around $500 a month here. I work from the cafe because of their wireless. If they didn't have it, I wouldn' be here blowing $15 a day on food and drinks. $6000 a year at the cafe. Office away from home. Works for me.
But how is this bill going to help track me, when I don't have a driver's license? I don't own a car and never will. I ride a bike everywhere. I have a touring bike which I am planing on taking cross country. This bill isn't going to help track me! We need more legislation to close up these loopholes. And if we need bicycle licenses, well maybe I'll just walk! And then we should probably have walking licenses too, to close that loophole. (yes I have a passport, so they can track me that way, but Canada is a short swim away :)
Face it, most people don't NEED more processing power. You can browse the web, send emails, and do your taxes on a Pentium 75, with enough ram, Firefox works just fine. Constantly upgrading is pure consumerist crap. You don't need this. Hell I develop games for a living, and I don't need this sort of processing power. Can a college kid use this stuff? Sure, they can run a P2P tool, download lots of pirated content, play their ripped DVDs/MP3s, all while pretending to do a paper. With a dual core machine, you could even keep your torrents downloading and play Doom3. Granted if you really feel you need to be doing this, you probably have a host of other problems and should probably consider going outside.