I've got a better idea then: Slashdot's Daily Electronic Arts Appreciation Feature. Every day, Slashdot posts a link to some announcement, screenshot, or demo on the EA web site to show our appreciation for all the blood, sweat, and tears EA employees put into their work. When their employees cease producing an extraordinary amount of blood swat and tears, we'll stop Appreciating them.
Because partitioning the market makes the market less efficient. The less efficient a market is, the more it can be exploited for profit. And they can do this because the music copyright holders don't compete based on price. They can maximize profits by charging Canadians one price and Americans a higher price, but only if Americans are barred from shopping in the same store as Canadians.
A bit of a side rant: Is anyone else out there really annoyed that corporations militantly defend their right to source work and materials from wherever's cheapest, but fight tooth and nail to prevent consumers from buying goods from wherever's cheapest? When I try to sell my labor, I have to compete in a global market, but they get to price their music on a country by country basis.
I once met a guy who worked for Yahoo, I think he was in the division that handled Yahoo Groups. He said they had the "sausage factory" analogy to describe their business: they gather ingredients, manufacture sausages, and sell them to customers to eat. The problem with their business is twofold:
1) The process by which sausages are made is very ugly, and it's best to insulate the customer from the process as much as possible.
2) Millions of people who use Yahoo think they're customers when they're actually sausages.
That having been said, the TV stations need to either produce more sausages or higher quality sausages. I fail to see how messing with the schedule helps.
A show that times itself to start and end on the:00 and:30 boundaries allows me to watch other shows that follow the same convention without conflict. If that same show is shifted by a minute or two, I now get the same value from the show, but lose the ability to watch other shows. The value of the show has thus decreased from my point of view. If the network's going to mess with the schedule to screw with my viewing habits, then I just won't watch their stuff.
Re:I Hope not.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, it's a horrible thing to say. And I find it interesting that I've repeatedly heard people praise the population control potential of AIDS, but never the various strains of flu, or other diseases. Read into that what you will.
From the article: "The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood." So the patient could only pass on a prion disease to...himself.
I've had quite a bit of experience on both the job seeking and interverviewing/hiring decisions. I also have a degree from a Prestigious University. My experience:
Name recognition helps in little ways, but every little bit helps in a down market. My company got several hundred good resumes for a developer position we posted, and pedigree was used to help determine who got called in for interviews. In the event of a tight race between two candidates, educational background can be the tiebreaker. But really we only use it for statistical purposes in the absence of empirical data. We assume a person with a prestigious degree is more likely to be the more competent candidate, but it's in no way a guarantee.
But this is only effective in relatively low-level positions and it only helps you get in the door. Once you're here, you'd better dazzle them or the job's gonna go to Mr. Sharp and Enthusiastic from No-Name University. And if your interviewers also happen to have high falutin' degrees, it matters less because we know for a fact that even great universities can graduate some real dumbasses.
And once you get into higher level positions, what you've done is far more important. By that point, you need to have proven yourself in the workplace and nobody cares where you went to school ten years ago.
Every time you show up at Disneyland, they're providing you with a service. You cost them money whenever you set foot in the park, so they're fully justified in checking to make sure you've paid for the right to be there.
If I want to play online, there's nothing wrong with Valve checking to make sure I'm a legit customer before they expend resources to service me.
But I should be able to play offline without having to check in with Valve. This check provides no value to the customer, but can potentially provide significant inconvenience.
Keep in mind, that this policy will affect some of the illegal HL2 users, but it will affect all of the paying customers.
I was wary about Half Life 2's mandatory activation before this. My initial concern was what would happen if I want to load this game up again five years from now to play it again on a new PC? Will Valve be available to activate it?
Apparently I was being too optimistic. Now I have to worry about whether I'll be able to activate it on the day that I buy it.
The whole thing struck me as very silly. If I'm playing online, then I don't have a problem with providing them a CD-key to connect to their server. But if I'm offline, why the hell should I have to register with them? I recently moved and my DSL isn't active yet, so I can't play this game. That's just silly.
My (horribly biased) suggestion: Valve should admit they screwed up, and release a patch that activated the game usnig a regular old CD key. If this doesn't get straightened out soon, they may be hearing the phrase "class action" a lot.
Funny, I read that and thought "So if I lived in a dark, dank place with no light or exposure to the outside world, I'd think Strong Bad is awesome. Since I don't, my mileage may vary."
Ignore the summary, read the article. This sentence was not about sending unsolicited emails, it was about fraud.
"During my opening statement, I explained to the jury that sending spam by itself is not a crime, but when you masquerade your identity, you violate Virginia's law..."
"When we read the affidavits, we noticed common themes: unauthorized transaction, double swipe, merchandise not received, and merchandise not as described. We knew that this was the key point to argue in sentencing."
This isn't some legitimate business that accidentally ran afoul of some legal technicality. This was a lucrative, large scale, fraud operation.
Well hell, I guess I'd better hurry up and grab that Fedora Core DVD image before the torrent gets shut down.
BitTorrent != Copyright Infringement.
Besides, it's not like finding the IP address of users on any of the other P2P services is hard. Getting an IP address of an alleged infringer is nowhere near being the biggest barrier to prosecution.
The problem is that people who are genuinely clueless don't know it. You need a certain amount of competency and self-awareness before you can even evaluate youreself accurately enough to say "OK, I don't understand this." By encouraging the clueless to stay home, at best you'll only eliminate the mildly clueless. The true idiots will still show up.
But if the cluesless people vote then there will be an incentive for candidates to give them a clue.
The problem is, nowhere in the Nintendo letter did i say that they'd taken steps to ensure that innocent people weren't harassed by legal threats in the future. They corrected one mistake, not the system that made the mistake. If Nintendo had said "Oh crap, we screwed up! We'll make sure it never happens again," then I'd be in full forgive and forget mode.
Nintendo is a big corporation, so frivolous legal threats don't bother them much. But to the average webmaster who doesn't have a legal team on staff, such threats have to be taken seriously and have the potential to cause serious financial harm even if they're retracted.
The big deal is that, thanks to the demands of the content providers, I can do things with my ten-year old VCR that I couldn't do with a Tivo. That's just sad.
OK, so a character in-game behaved in a manner that many foud offensive. Various people defend the situation, claiming that it is appropriate and realistic within the gaming context. A large number of offended players made their displeasure known, also within the game, and somehow this is inappropriate.
Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of misogynists in ancient Egypt who treated women like slaves. But remember, even in real life, if you treat the wrong people like slaves at the wrong time when the numbers aren't in your favor then they will rise up and riot. It seems that's just what happened here. It's hypocritical to defend one as appropriate game play at the expense of the other.
Who's to say that a riot wasn't the appropriate way to respond? Yes, there may have been other more formalized avenues for addressing people's grievances. But that often doesn't work in the real world, so why shoudl we expect it to work online? Sure the world may have been modeled after ancient Egypt, but it's not going to follow along those because the people populating it aren't ancient Egyptians.
Ballmer's reasoning is pretty simple and clearly self-serving. In Ballmer's dream world, the price of hardware goes down while the price of Windows and Office stay the same. He keeps his fat profit margins, but more people buy his software because the overall cost of owning a computer is lower.
In short, he's saying, "Hardware vendors should sacrifice some of their razor-thin profit margins so that I can keep my ridiculously fat profit margins."
But, as you've noted, this will make things worse in terms of public perception and price tolerance. The first computer my dad bought was a Dell 386 that cost around $6000. I ordered a new machine earlier this week. It has more than 100x the ram, has more than 1500x the disk space, runs at more than 150x the clock speed and cost less than 20% of that price. It includes bells and whistles the 386 didn't like sound, ethernet, modem, video acceleration, CDRW and DVD drives. Hardware vendors have done a phenomenal job of bringing me me more value for less money. If they manage to pull of the miracle of a good, usable machine at $100, people will wonder why the hell Microsoft isn't keeping up.
Joe Average is confused by this. When my Dad buys a computer, he gets this big, heavy thing that had to be manufactured. It makes sense to him why he has to pay a lot of money for it. He doesn't understand why Windows costs so much. Hell, he remembers getting a pretty hefty manual with DOS, but Windows doesn't even do that any more. He knows that computers are a lot cheaper now in part because a lot more people are buying it. But that means lots more people are buying Windows too, so why isn't it cheaper?
So let me get this straight: SBC and Microsoft want to invest billions of dollars so they can show up late to the HDTV party and compete with cable and satellite TV? This is great for me as a consumer, more competition is better. But what's their upside? I must be missing something here.
My predictions:
The project will be plagued by delays and cost overruns.
Both companies will try to use the network as a means of pushing their own product and service agendas and wind up building something that nobody wants to buy.
SBC and Microsoft will bring their established customer service prowess to the table. People rapidly flock to service providers that actually pick up the goddam phone.
They get creamed by the competition. These are both companies that only do well when they have a tight enough grip on the market that they can screw any potential competition.
You know, I'm one of those condescending geeks, and I was still extremely offended by the ITAA's attitude.
You're building devices that have to be at least as good as the freakin punch cards they're replacing. Very few people have problems figuring out how to get people's votes collected using punch cards.
If you've built a system such that the average Jane has a small chance of screwing it up, you've failed. The average poll worker needs to be able to understand it effortlessly and use it with near perfect reliability because nearly half of the people who will be setting them up are dumber than the average poll worker. This is an election, not an online auction; people have a right to vote. Any significant failure rate because the users didn't understand how to work the machines means that your technology is crap and needs to be fixed.
On a side note, I've been pondering lately whether electronic voting machines could skew the vote towards Democrats. Younger people are more likely to be familiar with dealing with a machine than older people, and thus less likely to make a mistake or be frustrated by them.
It would be a bit more subtle than that. Think along the lines of those "THIS IS NOT A HOAX" virus emails.
Someone just has to get an email going that claims Ebay's server crashed and they lost lots of people's info, but they aren't admitting it. If you have any pending Paypal transactions, they won't go through and it'll ruin your buyer rating. If you don't go in and confirm your info, your reputation will be wrecked. Include links that go to www.ebays-security.com or somesuch. Make sure you say to forward to all of your friends and a certain number of people will comply.
A few years ago we had a ridiculous number of people in the office forwarding virus hoax emails to everyone in the office. It's amazing how many people are willing to believe that some random person knows about this virus and how to remove it, but "NONE OF THE ANTIVIRUS COMPANIES KNOW ABOUT IT YET!!!"
Read the quote to the end: "The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it."
Joe User: "Hey Google Desktop, index and cache all the files on my machine."
Google Desktop: "Ok"
Jane User: [searches for "flowers"] "Joe, you bastard! Who the hell is WyldRoze69??!!"
Joe User: "D'oh!"
As a result, Wal-Mart has now forced Vlasic to cannibalize themselves and they end up having to file bankruptcy.
The management at Vlasic needs to be fired. Sure, Walmart is ruthless, but only and idiot enters a deal where failure is assured. "We have to be in Walmart!" Why? Imagine Walmart said to the Vlasic CEO "Shoot yourself in the head or we won't stock your pickles." That's pretty mcuh what they said, and Vlasic said "Well, OK, we have to be in Walmart." Bang! "Oh crap, now we're dead!"
It's pretty simple: If you can't make money selling a product, you probably shouldn't be selling it. If they'd given up Walmart's business, they could have maintained a higher profit margin on smaller volume. Sure, a competitor could have taken that business form them, but who cares? Selling pickles to Walmart isn't profitable, that competitor would have eventaully gone under as well. Good, let someone else eat that bullet.
But should this be protected speech? I think there's a good case to be made that this is cybersquatting.
Floyd is using the name of his opponent in a manner that's likely to be confusing in order to achieve personal gain.
Now, if he wants to use VanHollenSucks.com or NoMoreVanHollen.net, then I firmly believe he should be able to. But I don't think we should go about defending his right to deceive the voters.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a better idea then: Slashdot's Daily Electronic Arts Appreciation Feature. Every day, Slashdot posts a link to some announcement, screenshot, or demo on the EA web site to show our appreciation for all the blood, sweat, and tears EA employees put into their work. When their employees cease producing an extraordinary amount of blood swat and tears, we'll stop Appreciating them.
Because partitioning the market makes the market less efficient. The less efficient a market is, the more it can be exploited for profit. And they can do this because the music copyright holders don't compete based on price. They can maximize profits by charging Canadians one price and Americans a higher price, but only if Americans are barred from shopping in the same store as Canadians.
A bit of a side rant: Is anyone else out there really annoyed that corporations militantly defend their right to source work and materials from wherever's cheapest, but fight tooth and nail to prevent consumers from buying goods from wherever's cheapest? When I try to sell my labor, I have to compete in a global market, but they get to price their music on a country by country basis.
I once met a guy who worked for Yahoo, I think he was in the division that handled Yahoo Groups. He said they had the "sausage factory" analogy to describe their business: they gather ingredients, manufacture sausages, and sell them to customers to eat. The problem with their business is twofold:
:00 and :30 boundaries allows me to watch other shows that follow the same convention without conflict. If that same show is shifted by a minute or two, I now get the same value from the show, but lose the ability to watch other shows. The value of the show has thus decreased from my point of view. If the network's going to mess with the schedule to screw with my viewing habits, then I just won't watch their stuff.
1) The process by which sausages are made is very ugly, and it's best to insulate the customer from the process as much as possible.
2) Millions of people who use Yahoo think they're customers when they're actually sausages.
That having been said, the TV stations need to either produce more sausages or higher quality sausages. I fail to see how messing with the schedule helps.
A show that times itself to start and end on the
Yes, it's a horrible thing to say. And I find it interesting that I've repeatedly heard people praise the population control potential of AIDS, but never the various strains of flu, or other diseases. Read into that what you will.
Hooray for alarmism.
From the article: "The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood." So the patient could only pass on a prion disease to...himself.
I've had quite a bit of experience on both the job seeking and interverviewing/hiring decisions. I also have a degree from a Prestigious University. My experience:
Name recognition helps in little ways, but every little bit helps in a down market. My company got several hundred good resumes for a developer position we posted, and pedigree was used to help determine who got called in for interviews. In the event of a tight race between two candidates, educational background can be the tiebreaker. But really we only use it for statistical purposes in the absence of empirical data. We assume a person with a prestigious degree is more likely to be the more competent candidate, but it's in no way a guarantee.
But this is only effective in relatively low-level positions and it only helps you get in the door. Once you're here, you'd better dazzle them or the job's gonna go to Mr. Sharp and Enthusiastic from No-Name University. And if your interviewers also happen to have high falutin' degrees, it matters less because we know for a fact that even great universities can graduate some real dumbasses.
And once you get into higher level positions, what you've done is far more important. By that point, you need to have proven yourself in the workplace and nobody cares where you went to school ten years ago.
Every time you show up at Disneyland, they're providing you with a service. You cost them money whenever you set foot in the park, so they're fully justified in checking to make sure you've paid for the right to be there.
If I want to play online, there's nothing wrong with Valve checking to make sure I'm a legit customer before they expend resources to service me.
But I should be able to play offline without having to check in with Valve. This check provides no value to the customer, but can potentially provide significant inconvenience.
Keep in mind, that this policy will affect some of the illegal HL2 users, but it will affect all of the paying customers.
Maybe cool from a vinctiveness standpoint, but not for notoriety. Who would you brag to?
Script Kiddie #1: Dude, I totally DOS'd Valve. Steam was down for like hours.
Script Kiddies #2-9: You bastard. I spent 3 hours waiting to activate Half Life 2. Your life is now forfeit.
Script Kiddie #1: Aaauugh! Somebody help! Gaaah! My eye!
I was wary about Half Life 2's mandatory activation before this. My initial concern was what would happen if I want to load this game up again five years from now to play it again on a new PC? Will Valve be available to activate it? Apparently I was being too optimistic. Now I have to worry about whether I'll be able to activate it on the day that I buy it.
The whole thing struck me as very silly. If I'm playing online, then I don't have a problem with providing them a CD-key to connect to their server. But if I'm offline, why the hell should I have to register with them? I recently moved and my DSL isn't active yet, so I can't play this game. That's just silly.
My (horribly biased) suggestion: Valve should admit they screwed up, and release a patch that activated the game usnig a regular old CD key. If this doesn't get straightened out soon, they may be hearing the phrase "class action" a lot.
Funny, I read that and thought "So if I lived in a dark, dank place with no light or exposure to the outside world, I'd think Strong Bad is awesome. Since I don't, my mileage may vary."
This isn't some legitimate business that accidentally ran afoul of some legal technicality. This was a lucrative, large scale, fraud operation.
I was going to look at it more from the security lockout standpoint...
In Soviet Russia, the hardware boots you!
Well hell, I guess I'd better hurry up and grab that Fedora Core DVD image before the torrent gets shut down.
BitTorrent != Copyright Infringement.
Besides, it's not like finding the IP address of users on any of the other P2P services is hard. Getting an IP address of an alleged infringer is nowhere near being the biggest barrier to prosecution.
The problem is that people who are genuinely clueless don't know it. You need a certain amount of competency and self-awareness before you can even evaluate youreself accurately enough to say "OK, I don't understand this." By encouraging the clueless to stay home, at best you'll only eliminate the mildly clueless. The true idiots will still show up.
But if the cluesless people vote then there will be an incentive for candidates to give them a clue.
The problem is, nowhere in the Nintendo letter did i say that they'd taken steps to ensure that innocent people weren't harassed by legal threats in the future. They corrected one mistake, not the system that made the mistake. If Nintendo had said "Oh crap, we screwed up! We'll make sure it never happens again," then I'd be in full forgive and forget mode.
Nintendo is a big corporation, so frivolous legal threats don't bother them much. But to the average webmaster who doesn't have a legal team on staff, such threats have to be taken seriously and have the potential to cause serious financial harm even if they're retracted.
The big deal is that, thanks to the demands of the content providers, I can do things with my ten-year old VCR that I couldn't do with a Tivo. That's just sad.
OK, so a character in-game behaved in a manner that many foud offensive. Various people defend the situation, claiming that it is appropriate and realistic within the gaming context. A large number of offended players made their displeasure known, also within the game, and somehow this is inappropriate.
Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of misogynists in ancient Egypt who treated women like slaves. But remember, even in real life, if you treat the wrong people like slaves at the wrong time when the numbers aren't in your favor then they will rise up and riot. It seems that's just what happened here. It's hypocritical to defend one as appropriate game play at the expense of the other.
Who's to say that a riot wasn't the appropriate way to respond? Yes, there may have been other more formalized avenues for addressing people's grievances. But that often doesn't work in the real world, so why shoudl we expect it to work online? Sure the world may have been modeled after ancient Egypt, but it's not going to follow along those because the people populating it aren't ancient Egyptians.
Ballmer's reasoning is pretty simple and clearly self-serving. In Ballmer's dream world, the price of hardware goes down while the price of Windows and Office stay the same. He keeps his fat profit margins, but more people buy his software because the overall cost of owning a computer is lower.
In short, he's saying, "Hardware vendors should sacrifice some of their razor-thin profit margins so that I can keep my ridiculously fat profit margins."
But, as you've noted, this will make things worse in terms of public perception and price tolerance. The first computer my dad bought was a Dell 386 that cost around $6000. I ordered a new machine earlier this week. It has more than 100x the ram, has more than 1500x the disk space, runs at more than 150x the clock speed and cost less than 20% of that price. It includes bells and whistles the 386 didn't like sound, ethernet, modem, video acceleration, CDRW and DVD drives. Hardware vendors have done a phenomenal job of bringing me me more value for less money. If they manage to pull of the miracle of a good, usable machine at $100, people will wonder why the hell Microsoft isn't keeping up.
Joe Average is confused by this. When my Dad buys a computer, he gets this big, heavy thing that had to be manufactured. It makes sense to him why he has to pay a lot of money for it. He doesn't understand why Windows costs so much. Hell, he remembers getting a pretty hefty manual with DOS, but Windows doesn't even do that any more. He knows that computers are a lot cheaper now in part because a lot more people are buying it. But that means lots more people are buying Windows too, so why isn't it cheaper?
My predictions:
You know, I'm one of those condescending geeks, and I was still extremely offended by the ITAA's attitude.
You're building devices that have to be at least as good as the freakin punch cards they're replacing. Very few people have problems figuring out how to get people's votes collected using punch cards.
If you've built a system such that the average Jane has a small chance of screwing it up, you've failed. The average poll worker needs to be able to understand it effortlessly and use it with near perfect reliability because nearly half of the people who will be setting them up are dumber than the average poll worker. This is an election, not an online auction; people have a right to vote. Any significant failure rate because the users didn't understand how to work the machines means that your technology is crap and needs to be fixed.
On a side note, I've been pondering lately whether electronic voting machines could skew the vote towards Democrats. Younger people are more likely to be familiar with dealing with a machine than older people, and thus less likely to make a mistake or be frustrated by them.
Damp patch? You're worried about a damp patch??
I'd be more worried about having blades rotating a million times a minute right next to my genitals!
It would be a bit more subtle than that. Think along the lines of those "THIS IS NOT A HOAX" virus emails.
Someone just has to get an email going that claims Ebay's server crashed and they lost lots of people's info, but they aren't admitting it. If you have any pending Paypal transactions, they won't go through and it'll ruin your buyer rating. If you don't go in and confirm your info, your reputation will be wrecked. Include links that go to www.ebays-security.com or somesuch. Make sure you say to forward to all of your friends and a certain number of people will comply.
A few years ago we had a ridiculous number of people in the office forwarding virus hoax emails to everyone in the office. It's amazing how many people are willing to believe that some random person knows about this virus and how to remove it, but "NONE OF THE ANTIVIRUS COMPANIES KNOW ABOUT IT YET!!!"
Read the quote to the end: "The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it."
Joe User: "Hey Google Desktop, index and cache all the files on my machine."
Google Desktop: "Ok"
Jane User: [searches for "flowers"] "Joe, you bastard! Who the hell is WyldRoze69??!!"
Joe User: "D'oh!"
As a result, Wal-Mart has now forced Vlasic to cannibalize themselves and they end up having to file bankruptcy.
The management at Vlasic needs to be fired. Sure, Walmart is ruthless, but only and idiot enters a deal where failure is assured. "We have to be in Walmart!" Why? Imagine Walmart said to the Vlasic CEO "Shoot yourself in the head or we won't stock your pickles." That's pretty mcuh what they said, and Vlasic said "Well, OK, we have to be in Walmart." Bang! "Oh crap, now we're dead!"
It's pretty simple: If you can't make money selling a product, you probably shouldn't be selling it. If they'd given up Walmart's business, they could have maintained a higher profit margin on smaller volume. Sure, a competitor could have taken that business form them, but who cares? Selling pickles to Walmart isn't profitable, that competitor would have eventaully gone under as well. Good, let someone else eat that bullet.
But should this be protected speech? I think there's a good case to be made that this is cybersquatting.
Floyd is using the name of his opponent in a manner that's likely to be confusing in order to achieve personal gain.
Now, if he wants to use VanHollenSucks.com or NoMoreVanHollen.net, then I firmly believe he should be able to. But I don't think we should go about defending his right to deceive the voters.