I went on a camping trip on Easter weekend and a few of my friends brought our DS's. We set up a network between five of our tents so that we could chat with one another after it was time to "go to bed" and spent an hour drawing picture and playing "hidden information" games like battleship using Pictochat. We were able to chat and play games after dark for two nights on full charges.
A girl who was at the campout also dropped her DS on the asphalt road next to our campsite during a game of tag (I don't know why she had it in her pocket at the time), and the system worked just fine afterwards.
As such, I don't have any reason to regret having a DS.
By the way, I also got to play Yoshi's Touch and Go. There isn't a whole lot to that game that I can see, but the multiplayer races were the most refreshing gaming experience I have had in a few months.
Yes, I don't have a choice of using Linux, BSD, MacOS, etc, I only have the choice of using Windows.
Say for a moment that both you and I own our own firms. You run Linux on your workstations and I run Windows. I have Microsoft Office and you have Open Office. One day, I want to send you a document. Maybe it's a nicely formatted quote for a product or service you wish to purchase from us. Maybe I want to send you a purchase order for something I wish to buy from you. I send the document as an Office 2000 (or 2004 or 2005 or whatever) document.
What's that you say? Can't open.doc's? What's that you say? Can't do business without proper documentation? Looks like you need to get Office for Linux. What's that you say? No Office for Linux? Looks like you'd better go buy Windows.
Before you say it, I am aware that there are other ways of moving documents to and fro besides.doc's or.swx's (the primary Open Office format). I'm not saying that there isn't a solution to the problem you and I are having in this hypothetical situation. What I am saying is that it's not so cut and dry as to what choices you or anyone else actually have.
Because Microsoft workstations account for 90% + of all workstations in business, much of the documentation that is passed back and forth is in Microsoft's proprietary (and closed) format. This is bad because unless someone pays money to Microsoft for a copy of Windows and Office, that person will be severly limited in both the people they can communicate with and the ways in which they can communicate in the business world.
The objection is not that Microsoft makes software that is too good and makes too much money. The objection is that because their software is so pervasive, they are doing harm by not telling others how to interoperate with their software. Since Open Office can not read.doc's, you can't do business if you use Linux on your workstations, even if your business has absolutely nothing to do with computers. That is bad. That is why many people do not have a choice and must pay for Windows and Office even if they don't want to.
Good idea. I think maybe I could improve on it a bit. Here's a rating system that I think would be useful to parents trying to choose a video game for thier child. It consists of five categories of things that may be harmful to children, M-O-D-U-P:
M - Misrepresentation of non-western ideas as being evils.
O - One dimensional characters and/or one-sided plot which may promote the conception that ideas and people are either singularly good or singularly evil.
D - Discourages personal autonomy and encourages mindless groupthink.
U - Unhealthy treatment of sexual themes including but not limited to an aversion to romantic or sexual attraction between characters.
P - Propogation of traditional gender roles including but not limited to submissive women characters which may give young children unreasonable expectations of love and sex.
There is another rating system that I would like to see on games. I would like to see it not to protect children, but to protect adults who know nothing about specific games from buying or renting them if they are bad. I submit the following rating system, A-B-C-D-E:
A - Advertising - Game has had an unusual amount of advertising money put behind it.
B - Bad or Horrible Voice Acting.
C - Cutscenes constitute a statistically significant percentage of game play time.
D - Derivative of well-known first person shooter game.
E - Execution - Loading Times longer than 3 seconds and known glitches at shipping time.
By pressing Select over an ability, weapon, etc, it would let you read a description. The descriptions would say things like "Heals HP with holy power" or "Sword great for cutting things. Katana: 2-hand".
By doing so, it wasn't hard to figure out what was off-limits.
Granted, it was annoying, but it's wasn't impossible.
I think he was trying to point out that the people he talked to could qualify their good opinions of the game, but that their reasons had absolutely nothing to do with the game and everything to do with who made it.
Not only did the AI suck, but eventually you got too powerful, and there was no way to sort of "dial-in" a random scenario suited to your skill level. That was what got me about that game.
Have you ever asked yourself why most people believe that copyrights and trademarks on information and media be assigned to the people who created it?
You did not:
1.) Create the MAME acronym or draw the logo.
2.) Do any work programming MAME.
Before crusading against those who break the law, maybe you should find a method which is more in line with the spirit of the law. Even if what you are trying to do is legal (there is legal precedence that suggests it is not), it does not sit very well with your customers (and potential customers). The sheer volume of comments this atricle has produced should be fairly convincing evidence that what you're doing is pissing a lot of people off. Some of those people are your cusomters / potential customers.
If you want to use the law to save your business, then I'd like to point out that there are already mechanisms in place through which you combat piracy. That's right. You go to the proper copyright holders and request that they protect their copyrights. Since you licence ROM's from many companies, you already have a few contacts to go to. Odds are that their ROM's are among those being pirated. Try explaining to them that the sales of those MAME machines hurts your business, and that you may no longer be able to pay for your licenses if it is allowed to continue.
But if it turns out that you can't find the copyright holders, then it means that they probably aren't being hurt by the sale of those games. And guess what? Copyright is intended to grant temporary monopolies (maybe not so temporary anymore) of reproduction to the creator of a work that they might profit from it. The copyright on the illegal ROMs was not meant to protect you or any business you have. I cannot feel too bad when someone who does not produce anything of their own get screwed by copyright infringement. Why don't you program your own ROM and let it get leaked into illegal circles? I may be more sympathetic then (but I probably won't. Not unless you do it with the intent of making and selling a ROM, not just as a legal tool.)
One more thing. Don't be a moron. Trademarking (Trademarking! Not even copyrighting!) MAME will not stop the sales of arcade cabinets with illegal ROMs on them. They will still be sold and people will still buy them, only it will be done in such a way that the four letters M-A-M-E never get mentioned during the transaction. If the four letters M-A-M-E become bad news for pirates, then they will simply stop using them. Do you really believe that a single trademark (TRADEMARK! not even copyright!) is not enough to stop an entire black market?
Black markets exist because people want things that they cannot get through legal means. If you trademark MAME, it will not change peoples' desires to have cheap, well-stocked arcade machines. They will get them, no matter how many trademarks you have. And if it turns out that by some miracle you actually can stop them from buying them (which would make you the first), what makes you think they will want to buy your higher-priced, less-stocked machines?
What do I suggest? Become a good capitalist. Either do one of the following:
1.) Advertise your plight. Educate people about the illegality of the machines they are buying. Appeal to the hearts and minds of your potential customers. Education can go a long way, and just as some people feel bad for pirating video games, movies and music, so too will some people feel bad for pirating old arcade games. Note that this route isn't likely to work unless you take the moral high ground.
Or (and this is my preference):
2.) Find a way to give people what they want. Make a low cost, well-stocked arcade machine for people to buy. If you can't lower the price or put any more ROM's on your machines, you will have to find some other way to become competitive.
A final request: If you decide that you don't want to evolve to compete with piracy, then try not to hurt too many people as your company tailspins.
I agree 100% with the parent, but one phrase came off as a little weird:
don't give Open Source an unfair advantage
I personally haven't ever heard anyone utter this phrase with regards to file formats or software. But just in case someone actually has said these words and meant what they said, I would like to point out one thing. As a business, your competition does not gain an "unfair advantage" when you do something that your customers don't like and they do things that your customers do like. They don't have an "unfair advantage". You're just being a "bad capitalist".
Remember, businesses are supposed to compete in a free market. If a business suffers and dies because they aren't willing to give their customers what they really want and their competition is willing, then the market does not need them. In a free market, no business is entitled to automatic profits. That's the way it's supposed to be.
Because of its free software and UNIX roots, Linux (and most free software designed for it) has been designed with modularity, portability and standards adherance in mind. Modular and portable software design is more often than not the hallmark of a good programmer. How do you think the relative lack of emphasis on modularity and portability has affected the quality of software written for Windows compared to that written for Linux, if at all? Do you think Windows developers would benefit if Windows was redesigned from the ground up to be more modular in the way Linux is?
A quick follow-up:
If modularity, portability and standards adherance are the most important aspects of software design to UNIX and Linux developers, what aspects are most important to Microsoft at the present time, and which aspects do you think will be the most important to Microsoft and Microsoft developers in the future?
For experienced computer users, the clear separation between the different parts of the operating system, the hardware drivers, and the applications makes a system running Linux feel cleaner and more organized. The inherant transparency in the system makes it easier to secure a Linux machine and keep it secure, but in addition, it is reassuring to the user, who can feel a greater degree of control over their computer.
In Windows, there are user-level applications and drivers intertwined with the base operating system. In what ways do you think this is beneficial or detrimental to the user and the system as a whole? Regarding software design at Microsoft, what is the importance of creating or maintaining system transparency and modularity relative to other things like useability, speed, interface homogeneity, and the like?
Many would argue that the latest incarnations of Windows are not as modular or transparent as a GNU/Linux system. Is Microsoft planning to place more of an emphasis on transparency and modularity in a future version of Windows? If so, in what ways?
Would you say that Linux users are proportionally more educated about computers and technology in general than people who use Windows exclusively?
If so, does Microsoft have a strategy for promoting computer and technological education in the next 5 or 10 years? How important has the lack of education and user know-how been to Microsoft in the past? Has it posed any difficulties or made anything easier for Microsoft than it otherwise would have been?
If you say that Windows users are proportionally more technologically educated than Linux users, does Microsoft have plans to leverage that education and add more complex security and useablility features to Windows? If so, what sorts of features might you add and/or what sorts of requests might be made of the user in the future?
They might write about economic issues one week that would make an American Republican proud, yet in the same publication come out strongly in support of same-sex marriage.
Just as a minor point, I don't think the Republican party (before being comandeered by fundamentalists), really cared either way about social issues like same-sex marriage. I'm sure some people found it distasteful, but being a Republican did not in the past mean that you were anti-same-sex marriages, and even if you didn't like same-sex marriages, you probably didn't think it was the government's place to regulate them.
how would you feel if I redistributed a copy of that very book to every single individual who would've otherwise have to purchase it?
Thanks so much for asking. I wouldn't care one lick. As a producer of information, I have to compete with many other producers. The more raw exposure my work gets, the more sales I will eventually have. That's why some producers pay other people to distribute free copies of their work.
Writing a single book or making a single CD or making a single video game and hoping to make a living off of it is asking to be tossed into the gutter. Entertaiment and the production of information is a continual process that an artist engages in over the course of their life. How many artists who have produced a single piece of work in their life are succsessful? Maybe there are a few "one-hit wonders", but artists that don't continually produce get stomped out by those who do. It's moronic to expect to do one thing and be set for life.
That being said, as a single producer in a sea of producers, I would not have any sort of clout to demand money for my work in its infancy. However, as the body of my work grows and as more people recgonize my talent, I become more valuable. Regardless of what I've done in the past, If anyone wants the latest greatest, they have to come to me. This is the point you seem to be missing. The value of entertainment does not lie in the file or the CD or the movie itself. It lies in the producer's ability to continually produce entertaining things. The value is in the name. You want Jimmy Hendrix? You have to go to Jimmy Hendrix. You want more Tom Waits? There's only one place you can get it. The producers are valuable, not their information.
So it would be with my entertainment. If it turns out I'm not any good at writing books, you should be glad that no one buys from me and I'm forced to stop. That makes room in the book industry for someone more talented than I, and I have the potential to wind up doing something I might actually be good at. I have no God-given right to recieve money for my work, especially if it isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
On the other hand, how eager do you think publishing houses would be to snatch me up if they heard their family members talking about how fun I was to read? How many eBook sales do you think I would get from people saying that my last book made their eyeballs sweat?
I guess I could just whine and stomp my feet and demand my money, but since when has it been a good idea to make oneself irrelevant? The quickest way out the Exit door for a producer is anatagonizing their audience. Don't bite the hand that feeds, as they say.
Since when has stealing EVER been allowed? Yes, it is stealing if you download a song which you have not paid for. You can whine about information wanting to be free and how you wouldn't have bought the album/song anyway but it's still stealing. You didn't pay for it. Period.
What percentage of the people of the USA do you think would walk into a vacant house with its door open and steal something?
What percentage of the people of the USA engage in filesharing?
If these percentages are even 10% different, you might want to rethink your position that file trading and stealing are the same thing. If these percentages are drastically different, it may be a clue that you're missing something fundamental.
P.S. Declaring that the percentage of people who would steal given the chance is X does not make it X. The number will be what it is regardless of what you say to me or anyone else. I am not asking for your answer, so you have no reason to not be honest when answering these questions for yourself.
I can't imagine any type of hostile purchase in a market setting. How did this perversion of economics take place?
A monopoly occurs when a single firm in a free market gains enough production power to sell (at the market price) to everyone in a given market. A free market is maintained if all of the firms selling in the market remain small enough to compete with each other. Your town setting is a free market, and it is maintained because every entity in the market is one or two people, almost by definition (therefore remaining small). The game changes when people band together and incorporate. In a competitive market, a firm selling below the market price will be flooded with orders and be unable to fill demand. A firm selling above the market price will lose all of their business. These firms are called-price takers, whereas a monopoly (read: large, large company) is a price-giver.
There's nothing saying a small firm can't buy another firm out, but that isn't the only way they have to expand. They can expand by simply entering markets in new areas or by increasing their capacity to produce by buying more capital or hiring more people. However, for a behemoth who already sells to nearly every buyer in a market, they have to pay to get more sales, so they may not have much room to grow by getting new sales. If they can't grow that way, the only thing left is to try to get existing sales into their pockets (read: get rid of or buy out competitors). In EA's case, it may be wiser for them to buy up the shelf space that companies like Ubisoft own rather than try to fill the shelves with more of their games. Hence, the hostile takeover becomes a means of survival for them.
It is important to note that this sort of strategy only makes sense for a very large company. Companies that big can arise out of competitive markets, and most economists believe that monopolies are inevitable in a capatalist economy. So it may be possible that the perversion of economics is natural, and that it could just as easily have been Activision where EA is now, or Acclaim instead of Valve.
most of the software listed there is open source (making a future transition to a UNIX platform much easier)
I understand what you're saying, but just as a note, open source software does not automatically mean *NIX software. There is plenty of open source software available for Windows and Mac, as well as closed-source software that runs on GNU/Linux.
That being said, the more open source software is used in day-to-day life, the more readilly people will accept systems built on it. Effectively, it makes systems which are permeated by open source software less scary to the average end-user.
Since you know a lot about economics, you know that you can only make guesses about an individual's cost/benefit analysis, and that the odds of any blanket statement about programmers being proveable are slim-to-none.
There are many things that motivate people, money is only one of them, and for some people, other factors, such as the allure of having done it all for free in the first place, may actually be enough of a reward to take on and complete a big project.
Your friend might not be programming something of the quality of Doom 3 or San Andreas, but that doesn't mean that others don't have the motivation, inspiration and talent required to do so. If a college student can program an entire operating system from the ground up, there's no reason that a group of similarly talented individuals can't program a graphics engine from the ground up. It's a matter of effort and cost, and it's impossible (due to the economics of the situation) to make reliable blanket statements about it.
Of course, if there is an easy way to get a product free, people are unlikely to demand it at any price other than free
It is true that if you price a product above a person's price point, they will not buy it, but it is not necessarily true that people will always buy a lower priced substitute when there is a higher priced one available. Your claim only holds water if you assume that monetary price is the only motivating factor behind a buying decision. In reality, there are many other factors which determine whether someone is willing to buy a CD or download a song.
For example, going to the store may be a social activity. Some people value having the lyric book, and some people feel its important that they have a physical disc with their music on it. It's even possible that a person may buy a CD realizing that 1 or 2 percent of their money goes into the artist's pockets and would prefer to support their artist of choice. In my case, I buy CD's from non-RIAA artists who liscence their music under the Creative Commons liscence both because I like the music but also because I want to support that specific business model.
All of these other factors effectively raise the price of filesharing, sometimes to the point where the RIAA's business model becomes competitive again. Despite all that, I agree with what you're saying. I don't believe that they are pursuing a viable business model since the scarcity of bits and bytes is unnatural and virtually impossible to maintain, and a distributor relies almost solely on the scarcity of their wares to keep prices near a point where they can survive.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to nitpick, but aren't you supposed to have a semicolon at the end of that line? And how about that line break? :)
I went on a camping trip on Easter weekend and a few of my friends brought our DS's. We set up a network between five of our tents so that we could chat with one another after it was time to "go to bed" and spent an hour drawing picture and playing "hidden information" games like battleship using Pictochat. We were able to chat and play games after dark for two nights on full charges.
A girl who was at the campout also dropped her DS on the asphalt road next to our campsite during a game of tag (I don't know why she had it in her pocket at the time), and the system worked just fine afterwards.
As such, I don't have any reason to regret having a DS.
By the way, I also got to play Yoshi's Touch and Go. There isn't a whole lot to that game that I can see, but the multiplayer races were the most refreshing gaming experience I have had in a few months.
Yes, I don't have a choice of using Linux, BSD, MacOS, etc, I only have the choice of using Windows.
.doc's? What's that you say? Can't do business without proper documentation? Looks like you need to get Office for Linux. What's that you say? No Office for Linux? Looks like you'd better go buy Windows.
.doc's or .swx's (the primary Open Office format). I'm not saying that there isn't a solution to the problem you and I are having in this hypothetical situation. What I am saying is that it's not so cut and dry as to what choices you or anyone else actually have.
.doc's, you can't do business if you use Linux on your workstations, even if your business has absolutely nothing to do with computers. That is bad. That is why many people do not have a choice and must pay for Windows and Office even if they don't want to.
Say for a moment that both you and I own our own firms. You run Linux on your workstations and I run Windows. I have Microsoft Office and you have Open Office. One day, I want to send you a document. Maybe it's a nicely formatted quote for a product or service you wish to purchase from us. Maybe I want to send you a purchase order for something I wish to buy from you. I send the document as an Office 2000 (or 2004 or 2005 or whatever) document.
What's that you say? Can't open
Before you say it, I am aware that there are other ways of moving documents to and fro besides
Because Microsoft workstations account for 90% + of all workstations in business, much of the documentation that is passed back and forth is in Microsoft's proprietary (and closed) format. This is bad because unless someone pays money to Microsoft for a copy of Windows and Office, that person will be severly limited in both the people they can communicate with and the ways in which they can communicate in the business world.
The objection is not that Microsoft makes software that is too good and makes too much money. The objection is that because their software is so pervasive, they are doing harm by not telling others how to interoperate with their software. Since Open Office can not read
Good idea. I think maybe I could improve on it a bit. Here's a rating system that I think would be useful to parents trying to choose a video game for thier child. It consists of five categories of things that may be harmful to children, M-O-D-U-P:
M - Misrepresentation of non-western ideas as being evils.
O - One dimensional characters and/or one-sided plot which may promote the conception that ideas and people are either singularly good or singularly evil.
D - Discourages personal autonomy and encourages mindless groupthink.
U - Unhealthy treatment of sexual themes including but not limited to an aversion to romantic or sexual attraction between characters.
P - Propogation of traditional gender roles including but not limited to submissive women characters which may give young children unreasonable expectations of love and sex.
There is another rating system that I would like to see on games. I would like to see it not to protect children, but to protect adults who know nothing about specific games from buying or renting them if they are bad. I submit the following rating system, A-B-C-D-E:
A - Advertising - Game has had an unusual amount of advertising money put behind it.
B - Bad or Horrible Voice Acting.
C - Cutscenes constitute a statistically significant percentage of game play time.
D - Derivative of well-known first person shooter game.
E - Execution - Loading Times longer than 3 seconds and known glitches at shipping time.
Fourthed
By pressing Select over an ability, weapon, etc, it would let you read a description. The descriptions would say things like "Heals HP with holy power" or "Sword great for cutting things. Katana: 2-hand".
By doing so, it wasn't hard to figure out what was off-limits.
Granted, it was annoying, but it's wasn't impossible.
I think he was trying to point out that the people he talked to could qualify their good opinions of the game, but that their reasons had absolutely nothing to do with the game and everything to do with who made it.
Not only did the AI suck, but eventually you got too powerful, and there was no way to sort of "dial-in" a random scenario suited to your skill level. That was what got me about that game.
Have you ever asked yourself why most people believe that copyrights and trademarks on information and media be assigned to the people who created it?
You did not:
1.) Create the MAME acronym or draw the logo.
2.) Do any work programming MAME.
Before crusading against those who break the law, maybe you should find a method which is more in line with the spirit of the law. Even if what you are trying to do is legal (there is legal precedence that suggests it is not), it does not sit very well with your customers (and potential customers). The sheer volume of comments this atricle has produced should be fairly convincing evidence that what you're doing is pissing a lot of people off. Some of those people are your cusomters / potential customers.
If you want to use the law to save your business, then I'd like to point out that there are already mechanisms in place through which you combat piracy. That's right. You go to the proper copyright holders and request that they protect their copyrights. Since you licence ROM's from many companies, you already have a few contacts to go to. Odds are that their ROM's are among those being pirated. Try explaining to them that the sales of those MAME machines hurts your business, and that you may no longer be able to pay for your licenses if it is allowed to continue.
But if it turns out that you can't find the copyright holders, then it means that they probably aren't being hurt by the sale of those games. And guess what? Copyright is intended to grant temporary monopolies (maybe not so temporary anymore) of reproduction to the creator of a work that they might profit from it. The copyright on the illegal ROMs was not meant to protect you or any business you have. I cannot feel too bad when someone who does not produce anything of their own get screwed by copyright infringement. Why don't you program your own ROM and let it get leaked into illegal circles? I may be more sympathetic then (but I probably won't. Not unless you do it with the intent of making and selling a ROM, not just as a legal tool.)
One more thing. Don't be a moron. Trademarking (Trademarking! Not even copyrighting!) MAME will not stop the sales of arcade cabinets with illegal ROMs on them. They will still be sold and people will still buy them, only it will be done in such a way that the four letters M-A-M-E never get mentioned during the transaction. If the four letters M-A-M-E become bad news for pirates, then they will simply stop using them. Do you really believe that a single trademark (TRADEMARK! not even copyright!) is not enough to stop an entire black market?
Black markets exist because people want things that they cannot get through legal means. If you trademark MAME, it will not change peoples' desires to have cheap, well-stocked arcade machines. They will get them, no matter how many trademarks you have. And if it turns out that by some miracle you actually can stop them from buying them (which would make you the first), what makes you think they will want to buy your higher-priced, less-stocked machines?
What do I suggest? Become a good capitalist. Either do one of the following:
1.) Advertise your plight. Educate people about the illegality of the machines they are buying. Appeal to the hearts and minds of your potential customers. Education can go a long way, and just as some people feel bad for pirating video games, movies and music, so too will some people feel bad for pirating old arcade games. Note that this route isn't likely to work unless you take the moral high ground.
Or (and this is my preference):
2.) Find a way to give people what they want. Make a low cost, well-stocked arcade machine for people to buy. If you can't lower the price or put any more ROM's on your machines, you will have to find some other way to become competitive.
A final request: If you decide that you don't want to evolve to compete with piracy, then try not to hurt too many people as your company tailspins.
I agree 100% with the parent, but one phrase came off as a little weird:
don't give Open Source an unfair advantage
I personally haven't ever heard anyone utter this phrase with regards to file formats or software. But just in case someone actually has said these words and meant what they said, I would like to point out one thing. As a business, your competition does not gain an "unfair advantage" when you do something that your customers don't like and they do things that your customers do like. They don't have an "unfair advantage". You're just being a "bad capitalist".
Remember, businesses are supposed to compete in a free market. If a business suffers and dies because they aren't willing to give their customers what they really want and their competition is willing, then the market does not need them. In a free market, no business is entitled to automatic profits. That's the way it's supposed to be.
Mod parent up!
Because of its free software and UNIX roots, Linux (and most free software designed for it) has been designed with modularity, portability and standards adherance in mind. Modular and portable software design is more often than not the hallmark of a good programmer. How do you think the relative lack of emphasis on modularity and portability has affected the quality of software written for Windows compared to that written for Linux, if at all? Do you think Windows developers would benefit if Windows was redesigned from the ground up to be more modular in the way Linux is?
A quick follow-up:
If modularity, portability and standards adherance are the most important aspects of software design to UNIX and Linux developers, what aspects are most important to Microsoft at the present time, and which aspects do you think will be the most important to Microsoft and Microsoft developers in the future?
For experienced computer users, the clear separation between the different parts of the operating system, the hardware drivers, and the applications makes a system running Linux feel cleaner and more organized. The inherant transparency in the system makes it easier to secure a Linux machine and keep it secure, but in addition, it is reassuring to the user, who can feel a greater degree of control over their computer.
In Windows, there are user-level applications and drivers intertwined with the base operating system. In what ways do you think this is beneficial or detrimental to the user and the system as a whole? Regarding software design at Microsoft, what is the importance of creating or maintaining system transparency and modularity relative to other things like useability, speed, interface homogeneity, and the like?
Many would argue that the latest incarnations of Windows are not as modular or transparent as a GNU/Linux system. Is Microsoft planning to place more of an emphasis on transparency and modularity in a future version of Windows? If so, in what ways?
Would you say that Linux users are proportionally more educated about computers and technology in general than people who use Windows exclusively?
If so, does Microsoft have a strategy for promoting computer and technological education in the next 5 or 10 years? How important has the lack of education and user know-how been to Microsoft in the past? Has it posed any difficulties or made anything easier for Microsoft than it otherwise would have been?
If you say that Windows users are proportionally more technologically educated than Linux users, does Microsoft have plans to leverage that education and add more complex security and useablility features to Windows? If so, what sorts of features might you add and/or what sorts of requests might be made of the user in the future?
They might write about economic issues one week that would make an American Republican proud, yet in the same publication come out strongly in support of same-sex marriage.
Just as a minor point, I don't think the Republican party (before being comandeered by fundamentalists), really cared either way about social issues like same-sex marriage. I'm sure some people found it distasteful, but being a Republican did not in the past mean that you were anti-same-sex marriages, and even if you didn't like same-sex marriages, you probably didn't think it was the government's place to regulate them.
how would you feel if I redistributed a copy of that very book to every single individual who would've otherwise have to purchase it?
Thanks so much for asking. I wouldn't care one lick. As a producer of information, I have to compete with many other producers. The more raw exposure my work gets, the more sales I will eventually have. That's why some producers pay other people to distribute free copies of their work.
Writing a single book or making a single CD or making a single video game and hoping to make a living off of it is asking to be tossed into the gutter. Entertaiment and the production of information is a continual process that an artist engages in over the course of their life. How many artists who have produced a single piece of work in their life are succsessful? Maybe there are a few "one-hit wonders", but artists that don't continually produce get stomped out by those who do. It's moronic to expect to do one thing and be set for life.
That being said, as a single producer in a sea of producers, I would not have any sort of clout to demand money for my work in its infancy. However, as the body of my work grows and as more people recgonize my talent, I become more valuable. Regardless of what I've done in the past, If anyone wants the latest greatest, they have to come to me. This is the point you seem to be missing. The value of entertainment does not lie in the file or the CD or the movie itself. It lies in the producer's ability to continually produce entertaining things. The value is in the name. You want Jimmy Hendrix? You have to go to Jimmy Hendrix. You want more Tom Waits? There's only one place you can get it. The producers are valuable, not their information.
So it would be with my entertainment. If it turns out I'm not any good at writing books, you should be glad that no one buys from me and I'm forced to stop. That makes room in the book industry for someone more talented than I, and I have the potential to wind up doing something I might actually be good at. I have no God-given right to recieve money for my work, especially if it isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
On the other hand, how eager do you think publishing houses would be to snatch me up if they heard their family members talking about how fun I was to read? How many eBook sales do you think I would get from people saying that my last book made their eyeballs sweat?
I guess I could just whine and stomp my feet and demand my money, but since when has it been a good idea to make oneself irrelevant? The quickest way out the Exit door for a producer is anatagonizing their audience. Don't bite the hand that feeds, as they say.
Since when has stealing EVER been allowed? Yes, it is stealing if you download a song which you have not paid for. You can whine about information wanting to be free and how you wouldn't have bought the album/song anyway but it's still stealing. You didn't pay for it. Period.
What percentage of the people of the USA do you think would walk into a vacant house with its door open and steal something?
What percentage of the people of the USA engage in filesharing?
If these percentages are even 10% different, you might want to rethink your position that file trading and stealing are the same thing. If these percentages are drastically different, it may be a clue that you're missing something fundamental.
P.S. Declaring that the percentage of people who would steal given the chance is X does not make it X. The number will be what it is regardless of what you say to me or anyone else. I am not asking for your answer, so you have no reason to not be honest when answering these questions for yourself.
Only in the game media could you have 15 people all choose games they are looking forward to and have none of them be the same.
Also, wasn't Nokia dropping support for the NGage? There were quite a few NGage games listed.
I can't imagine any type of hostile purchase in a market setting. How did this perversion of economics take place?
A monopoly occurs when a single firm in a free market gains enough production power to sell (at the market price) to everyone in a given market. A free market is maintained if all of the firms selling in the market remain small enough to compete with each other. Your town setting is a free market, and it is maintained because every entity in the market is one or two people, almost by definition (therefore remaining small). The game changes when people band together and incorporate. In a competitive market, a firm selling below the market price will be flooded with orders and be unable to fill demand. A firm selling above the market price will lose all of their business. These firms are called-price takers, whereas a monopoly (read: large, large company) is a price-giver.
There's nothing saying a small firm can't buy another firm out, but that isn't the only way they have to expand. They can expand by simply entering markets in new areas or by increasing their capacity to produce by buying more capital or hiring more people. However, for a behemoth who already sells to nearly every buyer in a market, they have to pay to get more sales, so they may not have much room to grow by getting new sales. If they can't grow that way, the only thing left is to try to get existing sales into their pockets (read: get rid of or buy out competitors). In EA's case, it may be wiser for them to buy up the shelf space that companies like Ubisoft own rather than try to fill the shelves with more of their games. Hence, the hostile takeover becomes a means of survival for them.
It is important to note that this sort of strategy only makes sense for a very large company. Companies that big can arise out of competitive markets, and most economists believe that monopolies are inevitable in a capatalist economy. So it may be possible that the perversion of economics is natural, and that it could just as easily have been Activision where EA is now, or Acclaim instead of Valve.
Think about it like this. It isn't "Your online rights" as much as "Your rights, discussed online."
most of the software listed there is open source (making a future transition to a UNIX platform much easier)
I understand what you're saying, but just as a note, open source software does not automatically mean *NIX software. There is plenty of open source software available for Windows and Mac, as well as closed-source software that runs on GNU/Linux.
That being said, the more open source software is used in day-to-day life, the more readilly people will accept systems built on it. Effectively, it makes systems which are permeated by open source software less scary to the average end-user.
Since you know a lot about economics, you know that you can only make guesses about an individual's cost/benefit analysis, and that the odds of any blanket statement about programmers being proveable are slim-to-none.
There are many things that motivate people, money is only one of them, and for some people, other factors, such as the allure of having done it all for free in the first place, may actually be enough of a reward to take on and complete a big project.
Your friend might not be programming something of the quality of Doom 3 or San Andreas, but that doesn't mean that others don't have the motivation, inspiration and talent required to do so. If a college student can program an entire operating system from the ground up, there's no reason that a group of similarly talented individuals can't program a graphics engine from the ground up. It's a matter of effort and cost, and it's impossible (due to the economics of the situation) to make reliable blanket statements about it.
Whether or not the Gameboy kicks ass in terms of cash it makes Nintendo does not matter.
Except for all that cash.
Good economic analysis. One part bugs me, though:
Of course, if there is an easy way to get a product free, people are unlikely to demand it at any price other than free
It is true that if you price a product above a person's price point, they will not buy it, but it is not necessarily true that people will always buy a lower priced substitute when there is a higher priced one available. Your claim only holds water if you assume that monetary price is the only motivating factor behind a buying decision. In reality, there are many other factors which determine whether someone is willing to buy a CD or download a song.
For example, going to the store may be a social activity. Some people value having the lyric book, and some people feel its important that they have a physical disc with their music on it. It's even possible that a person may buy a CD realizing that 1 or 2 percent of their money goes into the artist's pockets and would prefer to support their artist of choice. In my case, I buy CD's from non-RIAA artists who liscence their music under the Creative Commons liscence both because I like the music but also because I want to support that specific business model.
All of these other factors effectively raise the price of filesharing, sometimes to the point where the RIAA's business model becomes competitive again. Despite all that, I agree with what you're saying. I don't believe that they are pursuing a viable business model since the scarcity of bits and bytes is unnatural and virtually impossible to maintain, and a distributor relies almost solely on the scarcity of their wares to keep prices near a point where they can survive.
Self respecting gamer here. Don't own an Xbox.