Most companies have stabilized by laying people off or cutting salaries. Mine did the latter because it was basically in the same boat I am, they have their own business loans to pay off.
Inflation will let them raise their prices -> they can better pay their loans -> I can get my 6% back -> I can spend money again -> people can get jobs at the stores I am now buying stuff from.
Rapid inflation is a problem but having such low inflation for so long is also really bad.
Most families are in debt and someone in them has decent job. Some inflation will help them by reducing their existing debt in comparison to their income because it will increase to match inflation. When the recession hit my job not only did not give a 3% pay increase but gave company wide 6% pay cut. This greatly screwed up me paying off college. I for one could use a little inflation.
Honest question: Have you ever seen a candidate who you would rate as not evil? I ask because I think that no one is perfect so if you refuse to vote until you find the perfect politician you will never vote.
For the people I have meet in the past with your stance that was basically the point. They were just after an easy out from the whole political process. In other words they did not want to see the person they support not make it in or worse make it in and then do a horrible job. So order to avoid the painful cognitive dissonance of hating someone they voted for they just don't vote.
I know this sounds harsh but I don't blame you or any from giving up on the system, Politics is a mess. But it's a mess because NO system works not because our system it particularly bad. In order to fix issues in the system people need to vote in every election for people who are closer to what they want. Abstaining until the perfect candidate descends from heaven is not a real plan. Furthermore even if your perfect candidate does arrive and most people think like you your perfect candidate will be the ONLY perfect candidate in the system, an ignored minority. You need to find and vote for the people who are closest to your ideals so that next election the candidates will hopefully be even closer.
James Gosling confirmed this some time ago
"During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code. Alas.... "
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the
I have a Drobo and a DroboShare. The DroboShare runs a slimmed down version of Linux so a network attached Drobo uses typically uses samba. The benefit of having one is NOT the ease of software set up. The reason I love it is the ease of drive management and small hardware size.
Due to the small size and slick style I keep mine in my TV cabinet. I've done the measurements and no PC case on newegg can fit in this same space, never mind something that can house 4 harddrives.
The other thing that is so valuable about a Drobo is how well it manages it's RAID array. They call it BeyondRaid but I hear it's just a as many normal RAID arrays as it needs to organize the drives to both optimize space and maintain redundancy. Also you can pop harddrives in or out while it's on and it will automatically restructure the RAID on the remaining drives to still be redundant with out any need to shutdown or stop sharing data. I recently needed to test this out for my self. I popped out my 4th drive, plugged it in to my PC, formatted it and started moving data from my Drobo to the harddrive I just removed from it while the Drobo was still restructuring. I expected a huge mess, but everything worked exactly like the advertised. I was kinda shocked.
FYI the reason I did that swap out was because I foolishly formatted my Drobo as NTFS. This worked ok but I had one to many problems talking to it from my Linux PC. The permissions were all messed up over samba. New folders and files I created on the Drobo were root access only for some weird reason. So I decided to format it as ext3. Since the DroboShare runs Linux this is the best option for a shared drive and works fine while talking to mac and windows as long as you do so over the network.
You have a point but I find an article like this to be more then reasonable to be called "news for nerds". Geeks have a nice mix of OCD and creativity that result in useful and interesting ideas on a topic like this. This same question asked in another community would result in useless uncreative comments that I expect to all be along the lines of questioning what the big problem is if you lose your keys sometimes and why do you need so many keys anyway.
Now that I think about it, a good idea may be to make a new section for 'life hacking' topics like this.
Release software that's so bad no one wants to use it, is by definition something that is bad for the bottom line. Wasting millions of dollars to
make a product no one buys is always bad for the bottom line; you don't need an MBA to understand that.
Except that 1)They still own most of the OS market so that even when one of there OSes bombs it still rakes in a huge profit. 2)not releasing Vista would have caused
people to think that they just plain gave up thus giving the pretty OS X an even bigger chance to take over. 3)someone at the level we are talking about can't predict
how good or bad your software will be only that it's about 4 years late. 4) despite is huge failures the things they tried to fix in Vista were all right on the money, they just failed to actually reach their goals.
Here's a perfect example: Microsoft SongSmith. If that's not a "shooting yourself in the foot" moment, I don't know what is.
Making a youTube video is hardly what I would call an expensive marketing effort. It's a research project that resulted from them stealing the google
20% time idea. Additionally showing off that you are trying new things is good PR for a business known for stealing the ideas of others.
How has MS changed directions?
They said they would never get in to games. They now have the xbox. They claimed the internet was not important. Yet they won the early browser wars. They admit when they are wrong and change direction as needed.
the upper management at MS are not geniuses, and never have been.
Never said they were but they know how to avoid a colossal ship wrecks that could kill their whole business.
What do you think Microsoft's "selfish actions" would be in that case?
They would try one of the following.
1)Change.Net again so Mono needs to play catch up.
2)Abandon.Net and make something new by ripping off the new flavor of the week.
Killing Mono would cause people to run from.Net much faster then Mono being equal to.Net would cause people to switch off of Windows. To a user an OS is just part of the tool that is their computer. They use it and only care that it works. But to a programmer the language they use is their lively hood, pick a bad one with no future and you can starve. The first sign that their current choice is a dead end will cause most of them to run.
While it is true that many large corporations make bad choices I can not think of anything that Microsoft has done that was bad for the bottom line. Bad for the community? Yes. Bad in the long run do to a lack of foresight? Yes. Releasing software so bad no one wants to use it? Yes. But no clear shooting your self in the foot moments.
I don't think MS's leadership can comprehend not being a monopoly
This might be their true downfall. Their current actions are either the start of a true change or are just a few random attempts at survival for a corporation that is about to start the death spiral.
MS has always been run by the same little gang at the top
I almost think that helps. These are guys that already learned lots of lessons the hard way and have needed to change directions in the past. They are not your typical group of brain dead upper management types.
Microsoft only wants developers to develop for Windows.
True
.NET is an attempt to provide an environment so compelling that people continue to use Windows to get access to it.
True
Mono weakens that case for using Windows, so attacking Mono makes perfect sense.
Not as much as programs written in Java do. Who writes programs in Java? Businesses who think they might want to have their software to be cross platform. I think this is the core reason Java is being used so much right now. Talking to a.NET coder the first thing they talk about when you bring up the MS lock in to them is 'well we have Mono'. But what happens when they actually use Mono? Last I heard Mono, while a great effort, turns out to be a few steps behind MS's.Net implementation. This causes.Net languages to almost always run better on a Windows machine. This is not a new MS trick either. Remember Microsoft Office XML and HTML under the rule of IE6?
In short Mono kills the bigger threat of cross platform languages while allowing Mono to forever be a step behind the real.Net implementation used by MS. This is a threat that will continue to exist unless MS can lock down the OS market again.
That is a very different case. I am well aware that Microsoft can not be trusted when they say they will play nice. My point is that they are predictable in there own selfish actions. Attacking Tom Tom validated the argument that 'Linux is dangerous' that Microsoft has been making while not hurting any of it's own interests.
OTOH if Microsoft attacked Mono it would be basically proving that all the MS haters are right when they say.NET is a language that is only for Windows machines. In a world that is proving again and again to contain more platforms then just windows no developer in their right mind would want to lock them self in with out very good reason. Microsoft knows that killing or even just attacking Mono would result in a exodus from.NET. Less coders means less programs means less reasons to use Windows.
When Microsoft owned the market they could do that where ever and when ever they wished. Now that they are losing ground everyday on almost all fronts trying to do something like that would only give another reason for people who were thinking about using.NET to avoid it. In short, it would be suicide. Microsoft knows this and has already started to change their tune by supporting Mono and by making a very small but growing chunk of code open source. As you correctly stated, this was done solely because they know it will help them. The only way it could be more valuable for Microsoft to go back to their old ways would be if they owned the market again. So could they pull the rug out from under Mono? Yes. Would it ever look like a good idea even to the brain damaged 'we hate open source' higher ups? Unless there was a major disaster in the mac, linux AND unix that gave Microsoft unquestionable control over the OS market again. No.
From what I've seen they do. It's just that they tend to run a C and ASM mix and the chips they are written for are not around long enough and not used enough for people to want to bleed every ounce of power out of them with a perfect compiler. You need tend to need ASM to use special chip features and that gums up the optimizer. On this note some chips are designed to run Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squawk_virtual_machine.
But in general, you're right. You still need ASM for somethings (Microcontrollers) just as you are better off using C instead of Java for somethings(Operating Systems). It's just a matter of the right tool for the right job.
Clearly you have to have a list of the memory in use somewhere, but then you have to clean up that list, too
Stick a layer on top of that with a thread that would wake up every 5 minutes to check if any of those chucks of memory are still in use and you would have a simple garbage collector.
This is why more modern languages have it built in garbage collectors instead of forcing the programmer to do it. Every program needs a way to do it and it's a complex mess in large programs so it makes more sense for the language to handle it behind the scenes in one frame work written by a small group of experts then to force every programmer who would like to write an app to worry about it. Yes, in theory a skilled programmer can do a better job at it but more often then not the reality of human error blows that advantage out of the water both by missing collecting something and by not collecting things as soon as they could.
I see it in the same way it's worth our time to use compilers to write assembly code. Yes people can do it better but some really skilled people can make a computer do it well enough.
I'm willing to bet that for all your talk of just getting to it you still do a lot of thinking about what you are coding, you just do it with the monitor in front of you. It's highly unlikely that you just sit done and start writing the final bug free version of the code. You must have some kind of thought process you use to solve your coding problems. If you don't you are either 1)doing it the hard way by writing first and fixing later 2) programing stuff that is so far beneath you that it's no real challenge for you
nobody knows how to run a household and put healthy food on the table.
Bingo. Learning these things takes time, a teacher and to realize the idea "With some effort I can do this cheaper if I learn how!".
Not to long ago I was reading the book Outliers. One of the things talked about was how people who were raised by unsuccessful families tend to be unsuccessful them self. The reasoning was that if you don't know how to be successful you will not be able to teach your kids to be successful. Eating healthy and cheep is something you not only need to go learn or have taught to you but you also need to realize it's an option when money is tight.
It's all business mess. Interesting note on this topic. I was talking to someone who worked for Cablevision about DVRs. He told me that they were thinking of moving storage in house so that you would not need a HD in your cable box. The obvious way to do this is to just record all channels at all times and then just keep records of what people want to watch later. They could not do this however since this would make them a broadcaster or content provider or something like that. So the current plan to implement this is to just record the same thing once per person. So if 20,000 people want to see the same episode of MythBusters they will have 20,000 copies of it on their servers.
I call it unobtrusive because I have not seen or heard about behavior anywhere close to what you describe. Personally I've been using Firefox, I can't speak for IE since I don't really use it. There is a setting to turn it off for your digg user name, did you try that?
The URL shortening is what was causing the issue. They offered to drop if for sites that ask. For example the new york times.
Personally I like the digg bar. It's as unobtrusive as it can be, gives me a link back to the comments, and lets me digg a page when I'm reading it. I tend to browse diggs main page and open up a bunch of links all at once. Before the digg bar it was pain if I liked anything enough to digg it. Everyone should remember that it can be turned off on a user by user basis. Besides the fact that having it on is the default they are doing everything they can to not be jerks about it.
It started clunky and slow but has gotten better and better with every release. Since many apps started on old versions of Java they contain work arounds and bad practices that cause them to still be slow on newer versions of Java.
The main issue with Java for desktop apps is the GUI. Ever since java got started it's GUI frameworks have been clunky and slow. Eclipse went so far as to write there own GUI frame work, SWT, to deal with these issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit If you look that the Java version history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit) You'll see that just about every major release makes some upgrades to the GUI layer. The most drastic was in the 3ed major release (Java 1.2) where they scraped the existing GUI framework(AWT) and started over (Swing).
I have a nit to pick. I keep seeing the word addiction thrown around. Articles like the one that the parent is talking about show that most people effected by caffeine withdrawal are suffering from dependence and NOT addiction. Dependence is needing something not because you desire it but because you desire it's effects. Addiction is when you desire something just because you want it.
Personally In college I realized that soda and energy drinks were causing my massive headaches. I switched my default soda choice to sprite and only had energy drinks when I needed to stay up. A few minor changes and awareness made me feel far better on a daily basis. Ever since I have been trying to explain to people that having a morning coffee every single day is a bad idea.
The thing is, though--they've already taken it. A rational person who accepts as a postulate the right to take a good for free isn't going to pay for something they already have for free.
Yes and most of those people will NEVER pay for it. But their friends will. I always pay for games but I have a few friends who never play for games. If they play a game that they say is good sometimes I go out and get it my self. Even if I don't buy it I remember it as having a good review from my friend and will keep that in mind if I see a sequel come out or if someone else talks about it.
I'm not arguing some kind of crazy hippie ideal of "just give it all away and it'll work out". You should do what you can to protect your stuff. Nag ware is not the worst thing in the world and a 20% demo is great. Just remember that the people who pirate the game are still people who are playing it. They are all reviewers with a small but very attentive audience. The goal is building a good name for your self not to be nice to pirates.
Your missing the point. It's not a mater of not being an asshole because you want to be nice. It's a matter of not being an ass hole because that is fast becoming an important modern business practice and it will make you more money in the long run. By all means be a jerk behind closed doors but if your customers ask for anything you need to be as nice and helpful as you can. If you don't make money by helping someone today by being the nice guy you will get business from that you would not have in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies have stabilized by laying people off or cutting salaries. Mine did the latter because it was basically in the same boat I am, they have their own business loans to pay off.
Inflation will let them raise their prices -> they can better pay their loans -> I can get my 6% back -> I can spend money again -> people can get jobs at the stores I am now buying stuff from.
Rapid inflation is a problem but having such low inflation for so long is also really bad.
Most families are in debt and someone in them has decent job. Some inflation will help them by reducing their existing debt in comparison to their income because it will increase to match inflation. When the recession hit my job not only did not give a 3% pay increase but gave company wide 6% pay cut. This greatly screwed up me paying off college. I for one could use a little inflation.
Honest question: Have you ever seen a candidate who you would rate as not evil? I ask because I think that no one is perfect so if you refuse to vote until you find the perfect politician you will never vote.
For the people I have meet in the past with your stance that was basically the point. They were just after an easy out from the whole political process. In other words they did not want to see the person they support not make it in or worse make it in and then do a horrible job. So order to avoid the painful cognitive dissonance of hating someone they voted for they just don't vote.
I know this sounds harsh but I don't blame you or any from giving up on the system, Politics is a mess. But it's a mess because NO system works not because our system it particularly bad. In order to fix issues in the system people need to vote in every election for people who are closer to what they want. Abstaining until the perfect candidate descends from heaven is not a real plan. Furthermore even if your perfect candidate does arrive and most people think like you your perfect candidate will be the ONLY perfect candidate in the system, an ignored minority. You need to find and vote for the people who are closest to your ideals so that next election the candidates will hopefully be even closer.
James Gosling confirmed this some time ago "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code. Alas.... " http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the
I have a Drobo and a DroboShare. The DroboShare runs a slimmed down version of Linux so a network attached Drobo uses typically uses samba. The benefit of having one is NOT the ease of software set up. The reason I love it is the ease of drive management and small hardware size.
Due to the small size and slick style I keep mine in my TV cabinet. I've done the measurements and no PC case on newegg can fit in this same space, never mind something that can house 4 harddrives.
The other thing that is so valuable about a Drobo is how well it manages it's RAID array. They call it BeyondRaid but I hear it's just a as many normal RAID arrays as it needs to organize the drives to both optimize space and maintain redundancy. Also you can pop harddrives in or out while it's on and it will automatically restructure the RAID on the remaining drives to still be redundant with out any need to shutdown or stop sharing data. I recently needed to test this out for my self. I popped out my 4th drive, plugged it in to my PC, formatted it and started moving data from my Drobo to the harddrive I just removed from it while the Drobo was still restructuring. I expected a huge mess, but everything worked exactly like the advertised. I was kinda shocked.
FYI the reason I did that swap out was because I foolishly formatted my Drobo as NTFS. This worked ok but I had one to many problems talking to it from my Linux PC. The permissions were all messed up over samba. New folders and files I created on the Drobo were root access only for some weird reason. So I decided to format it as ext3. Since the DroboShare runs Linux this is the best option for a shared drive and works fine while talking to mac and windows as long as you do so over the network.
You have a point but I find an article like this to be more then reasonable to be called "news for nerds". Geeks have a nice mix of OCD and creativity that result in useful and interesting ideas on a topic like this. This same question asked in another community would result in useless uncreative comments that I expect to all be along the lines of questioning what the big problem is if you lose your keys sometimes and why do you need so many keys anyway.
Now that I think about it, a good idea may be to make a new section for 'life hacking' topics like this.
Except that
1)They still own most of the OS market so that even when one of there OSes bombs it still rakes in a huge profit.
2)not releasing Vista would have caused people to think that they just plain gave up thus giving the pretty OS X an even bigger chance to take over.
3)someone at the level we are talking about can't predict how good or bad your software will be only that it's about 4 years late.
4) despite is huge failures the things they tried to fix in Vista were all right on the money, they just failed to actually reach their goals.
Making a youTube video is hardly what I would call an expensive marketing effort. It's a research project that resulted from them stealing the google 20% time idea. Additionally showing off that you are trying new things is good PR for a business known for stealing the ideas of others.
They said they would never get in to games. They now have the xbox. They claimed the internet was not important. Yet they won the early browser wars. They admit when they are wrong and change direction as needed.
Never said they were but they know how to avoid a colossal ship wrecks that could kill their whole business.
They would try one of the following. .Net again so Mono needs to play catch up.
.Net and make something new by ripping off the new flavor of the week.
.Net much faster then Mono being equal to .Net would cause people to switch off of Windows. To a user an OS is just part of the tool that is their computer. They use it and only care that it works. But to a programmer the language they use is their lively hood, pick a bad one with no future and you can starve. The first sign that their current choice is a dead end will cause most of them to run.
1)Change
2)Abandon
Killing Mono would cause people to run from
This might be their true downfall. Their current actions are either the start of a true change or are just a few random attempts at survival for a corporation that is about to start the death spiral.
I almost think that helps. These are guys that already learned lots of lessons the hard way and have needed to change directions in the past. They are not your typical group of brain dead upper management types.
True
True
Not as much as programs written in Java do. Who writes programs in Java? Businesses who think they might want to have their software to be cross platform. I think this is the core reason Java is being used so much right now. Talking to a .NET coder the first thing they talk about when you bring up the MS lock in to them is 'well we have Mono'. But what happens when they actually use Mono? Last I heard Mono, while a great effort, turns out to be a few steps behind MS's .Net implementation. This causes .Net languages to almost always run better on a Windows machine. This is not a new MS trick either. Remember Microsoft Office XML and HTML under the rule of IE6?
.Net implementation used by MS. This is a threat that will continue to exist unless MS can lock down the OS market again.
In short Mono kills the bigger threat of cross platform languages while allowing Mono to forever be a step behind the real
That is a very different case. I am well aware that Microsoft can not be trusted when they say they will play nice. My point is that they are predictable in there own selfish actions. Attacking Tom Tom validated the argument that 'Linux is dangerous' that Microsoft has been making while not hurting any of it's own interests.
.NET is a language that is only for Windows machines. In a world that is proving again and again to contain more platforms then just windows no developer in their right mind would want to lock them self in with out very good reason. Microsoft knows that killing or even just attacking Mono would result in a exodus from .NET. Less coders means less programs means less reasons to use Windows.
OTOH if Microsoft attacked Mono it would be basically proving that all the MS haters are right when they say
When Microsoft owned the market they could do that where ever and when ever they wished. Now that they are losing ground everyday on almost all fronts trying to do something like that would only give another reason for people who were thinking about using .NET to avoid it. In short, it would be suicide. Microsoft knows this and has already started to change their tune by supporting Mono and by making a very small but growing chunk of code open source. As you correctly stated, this was done solely because they know it will help them. The only way it could be more valuable for Microsoft to go back to their old ways would be if they owned the market again. So could they pull the rug out from under Mono? Yes. Would it ever look like a good idea even to the brain damaged 'we hate open source' higher ups? Unless there was a major disaster in the mac, linux AND unix that gave Microsoft unquestionable control over the OS market again. No.
From what I've seen they do. It's just that they tend to run a C and ASM mix and the chips they are written for are not around long enough and not used enough for people to want to bleed every ounce of power out of them with a perfect compiler. You need tend to need ASM to use special chip features and that gums up the optimizer. On this note some chips are designed to run Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squawk_virtual_machine.
But in general, you're right. You still need ASM for somethings (Microcontrollers) just as you are better off using C instead of Java for somethings(Operating Systems). It's just a matter of the right tool for the right job.
Stick a layer on top of that with a thread that would wake up every 5 minutes to check if any of those chucks of memory are still in use and you would have a simple garbage collector.
This is why more modern languages have it built in garbage collectors instead of forcing the programmer to do it. Every program needs a way to do it and it's a complex mess in large programs so it makes more sense for the language to handle it behind the scenes in one frame work written by a small group of experts then to force every programmer who would like to write an app to worry about it. Yes, in theory a skilled programmer can do a better job at it but more often then not the reality of human error blows that advantage out of the water both by missing collecting something and by not collecting things as soon as they could.
I see it in the same way it's worth our time to use compilers to write assembly code. Yes people can do it better but some really skilled people can make a computer do it well enough.
I'm willing to bet that for all your talk of just getting to it you still do a lot of thinking about what you are coding, you just do it with the monitor in front of you. It's highly unlikely that you just sit done and start writing the final bug free version of the code. You must have some kind of thought process you use to solve your coding problems. If you don't you are either 1)doing it the hard way by writing first and fixing later 2) programing stuff that is so far beneath you that it's no real challenge for you
From my link
The problem is that at this point is been over a year and we have seen no progress. So it's hard to say if they are hard at work or gave up for now.
Bingo. Learning these things takes time, a teacher and to realize the idea "With some effort I can do this cheaper if I learn how!".
Not to long ago I was reading the book Outliers. One of the things talked about was how people who were raised by unsuccessful families tend to be unsuccessful them self. The reasoning was that if you don't know how to be successful you will not be able to teach your kids to be successful. Eating healthy and cheep is something you not only need to go learn or have taught to you but you also need to realize it's an option when money is tight.
It's all business mess. Interesting note on this topic. I was talking to someone who worked for Cablevision about DVRs. He told me that they were thinking of moving storage in house so that you would not need a HD in your cable box. The obvious way to do this is to just record all channels at all times and then just keep records of what people want to watch later. They could not do this however since this would make them a broadcaster or content provider or something like that. So the current plan to implement this is to just record the same thing once per person. So if 20,000 people want to see the same episode of MythBusters they will have 20,000 copies of it on their servers.
I call it unobtrusive because I have not seen or heard about behavior anywhere close to what you describe. Personally I've been using Firefox, I can't speak for IE since I don't really use it. There is a setting to turn it off for your digg user name, did you try that?
The URL shortening is what was causing the issue. They offered to drop if for sites that ask. For example the new york times.
Personally I like the digg bar. It's as unobtrusive as it can be, gives me a link back to the comments, and lets me digg a page when I'm reading it. I tend to browse diggs main page and open up a bunch of links all at once. Before the digg bar it was pain if I liked anything enough to digg it. Everyone should remember that it can be turned off on a user by user basis. Besides the fact that having it on is the default they are doing everything they can to not be jerks about it.
It started clunky and slow but has gotten better and better with every release. Since many apps started on old versions of Java they contain work arounds and bad practices that cause them to still be slow on newer versions of Java.
The main issue with Java for desktop apps is the GUI. Ever since java got started it's GUI frameworks have been clunky and slow. Eclipse went so far as to write there own GUI frame work, SWT, to deal with these issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit If you look that the Java version history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit) You'll see that just about every major release makes some upgrades to the GUI layer. The most drastic was in the 3ed major release (Java 1.2) where they scraped the existing GUI framework(AWT) and started over (Swing).
I have a nit to pick. I keep seeing the word addiction thrown around. Articles like the one that the parent is talking about show that most people effected by caffeine withdrawal are suffering from dependence and NOT addiction. Dependence is needing something not because you desire it but because you desire it's effects. Addiction is when you desire something just because you want it.
Personally In college I realized that soda and energy drinks were causing my massive headaches. I switched my default soda choice to sprite and only had energy drinks when I needed to stay up. A few minor changes and awareness made me feel far better on a daily basis. Ever since I have been trying to explain to people that having a morning coffee every single day is a bad idea.
Yes and most of those people will NEVER pay for it. But their friends will. I always pay for games but I have a few friends who never play for games. If they play a game that they say is good sometimes I go out and get it my self. Even if I don't buy it I remember it as having a good review from my friend and will keep that in mind if I see a sequel come out or if someone else talks about it.
I'm not arguing some kind of crazy hippie ideal of "just give it all away and it'll work out". You should do what you can to protect your stuff. Nag ware is not the worst thing in the world and a 20% demo is great. Just remember that the people who pirate the game are still people who are playing it. They are all reviewers with a small but very attentive audience. The goal is building a good name for your self not to be nice to pirates.
Your missing the point. It's not a mater of not being an asshole because you want to be nice. It's a matter of not being an ass hole because that is fast becoming an important modern business practice and it will make you more money in the long run. By all means be a jerk behind closed doors but if your customers ask for anything you need to be as nice and helpful as you can. If you don't make money by helping someone today by being the nice guy you will get business from that you would not have in the future.