seconded and third. I've got the same setup, and friends have copied me and are also happy with it. Also, you can speak to the same speakers from different sources, basically anything that runs iTunes can connect to them (if you let it on your network, and I think you can password-protect each Airport Express, if you want).
Many ISPs do it as well. Right now, my ISP does it, even though I've opted out. Maybe one of these days I'll sue them.
Maybe it's time that the Internet standards get a few clauses added that express these concepts explicitly. Like what Paul said about DNS. A clause like "a nameserver MUST responde truthfully, if technically possible. DNS responses MUST NOT be modified in any way for political, economic or business reasons."
Then these fucked up ISPs would at least be in violation of a standard, which might give me what I need for a violation-of-contract suit.
Remember: These changes are often invented by marketing and then pushed through even against the explicit protest of the technology people.
Though there may be the fear of getting caught but... I doubt it.
And rightly so.
The most beautiful and well-thought-out part of the 9/11 plan was the built-in plausible deniability. If they had been carrying firearms or explosives, being caught at security would have spelt trouble. But with box-cutters (this was before 9/11, remember...)? "Uh, sorry. Must've forgotten that. Yeah I work in the incoming goods department, why do you ask?"
Chances are very high they would've been able to either leave without triggering an alarm, or dump the box-cutter at security and board the flight anyways (and if they were halfway professional, each of them had an extra one just for that case).
business travellers who are afraid of losing their jobs if this meeting doesn't go well
people with connecting flights, afraid of missing it because this one's already delayed half an hour
young people with love trouble, afraid of losing their boy/girlfriend
everyone who's afraid of flying (which are more people than you usually think)
people with valuable data on their notebooks, afraid that the new border laws mean the customs idiots will take the notebook apart for "inspection" and ruin it (or never return it)
and a long list of other people afraid of something that I missed
What they will miss:
frequent travellers who are just bored
terrorists, who aren't afraid but happy to die for their cause as soon as the laughable "security" is over doing cavity searches on all the perfectly innocent people
"Pure" managers are good - if they understand that they know zilch about what the company actually does and leave that to the people who do. Unfortunately, most CEO types don't have the character for that (hard to fight your way to the top when you're conscious of your shortcomings). Balmer certainly isn't one of the guys who knows what not to do himself. If nothing else convinces you of that, consider that he could've hired an actor/dancer for the monkey dance.
In the end, if you can delegate and trust people, you can do anything with any knowledge or lack of that, because in a large enough company, you have people to do the stuff you know nothing about. But you have to trust those people, and that's the hard part.
I thought that info was olds, not news? For at least the past 10 years, anyone who upgrades to a new windos version before the first big patchset is done is roughly on the same risk level as someone going to vacation in Afghanistan. As a woman. In a bikini. Together with your lesbian girlfriend. Who has an "I love USA" tattoo.
First of all, this is, of course, a copyright infringement itself because Amazon does not hold copyright on the books it sells, the authors and/or distributors do.
Two, it's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. One, it will not stop piracy in the least. Contrary to the Canary Trap already pointed out in comments, e-book pirates will very much have access to several versions of the book. A simple diff will fish out the "key" words. Then you can mix them so that at least they don't point to any of your actual sources.
Three, it's another example of reducing the quality of your product in order to max your profits. Also known as "punishing the honest customer". That's a really good idea... not!
Nobody thinks picking a good meal over a bad one is unethical. But most people agree that picking the best parts off a buffet is at least questionable. Yes, it is economically rational, but it violates basic senses of fairness and cooperation that humans (as social animals) have. Corporations do not have such instincts, and that's why they constantly violate what us humans "feel" is right.
This is just one example. Picking up the best parts, maximizing your own profit. Most of us humans somehow "feel" that you have an obligation with a choice. Yet rational argument will lead us to "it's legal, they're a profit-oriented entity, so they should do it". And yet we can't shake the feeling that it's not ok.
Because it isn't. We've just not managed to write good laws that really express what we think society should be about. That's mostly because we let lawyers write laws, but that's a different discussion for a different time.
That 90% figure that gets thrown around all the time includes corporate desktops, which are almost always a MS monoculture. If you'd sample just the machines people have at home, I'm fairly sure the numbers would be different. No question, windos would still be way ahead of everything else, but my estimate is more in the 75%-80% range than 90%. At least as soon as you figure in the many people who dual-boot (which has become quite a large number with Boot Camp on Macs).
Funny how a lot of free speech is commercial, a lot of political books get sold, a lot of political speakers get paid huge sums for speaking, and in general a lot of free speech is not free beer at all.
You should try to not read inbetween the lines. There are no words there.:-)
I didn't say it is acceptable. I said it's the reason. Bush invaded Iraq because he had a mental problem, wanted to complete what dad had started, and needed to keep people's minds off his incompetence. Neither of that is acceptable, but it's probably the reasons for the war. Causation does not equal justification.
All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the Internet.
No, not really. It would turn off maybe 5% of the Internet, namely those servers that a) run windos in the first place and b) have admins stupid enough to roll out without testing.
It would know a whole lot of clients off the Internet. But the only thing the rest of us would notice is that things are faster and there are less dumb comments on the sites we frequent.
Frankly, I never understood why MySpace got anywhere at all. I've yet to see a single page on it where I don't think about slapping the author with a lawsuit for emotional damages.
It is but-ugly, unfriendly and loud (both visually and with all the crappy background music). In short, it's the hip-hop of the web. Uh wait. I think I just answered my question.
This isn't Wikipedia. Do your own research. Or just don't believe me. In the end, whether or not it's true or a false, shared memory doesn't matter to it being the reason pro-MS arguments go ignored.
Granted, there's always been some of it to a greater or lesser degree, but in the past, Slashdot used to be somewhat self-correcting; you'd get a blatant Linux or FSF fanboy making one of their usual insane statements, but then you'd get someone else exposing the first poster as nuts and putting them in their place.
Now, it never happens.
Because back in the days, the MS fanboys were considered a bit foolish, but honest. They were listened to, their arguments usually ripped apart, but if they had a good argument, it was accepted.
Then came the time where it was blatantly obvious that at least some of the "MS fanboys" were in fact paid for making their voices heard. I think I dimly remember that even the PR company doing it was revealed. After that, everyone speaking in favour of MS was accused of being essentially an advertisement on two legs, and ignored.
I've been quite happy to bash MS for almost everything they do for more than 15 years now. I'm quite relaxed. If Win7 is a really good product with no major flaws, it would be a first. If they don't show up now, they will show up later. Maybe they've become better at hiding them.
The people trying to turn the initial positive reviews on their heads are young and stupid. They don't have the experience with hating MS that most of us do. They don't know that MS is expert at disappointing, even if the initial hype is well engineered and the major flaws hidden too deep. Also, they forget that after Vista, it was pretty much impossible to come up with something that wouldn't look good in comparison.
And hey, after almost 20 years of trying, let's give MS the credit for coming up with a halfway acceptable system, shall we? Where's the joy in hating them if they'd produce only crap? No, the substandard-but-acceptable stuff belongs there, too. It makes the next failure more enjoyable.
So in summary: No. You are dead wrong. The real, experienced zealots are quite happy to delay satisfaction and wait until the polish has gone and the hype machine died down, and people start to use Win7 for some serious gaming/work. We know that you can make almost any car look good on the test drive. It's the daily use and the first maintainance where you find out if you've been had.
We'll wait until then. We won't even say "told you so", because that became old with Vista. We'll just smile and shrug.
And if it never happens, if Win7 turns out to be adequate after all, we'll just shrug and wait for Win8.
Because they aren't "american companies". They are multinational corporations. They have offices and subsidaries in Europe and probably a dozen other places all around the world. Their HQs happen to be in the USA, but aside from that they're only "american" when appealing to patriotism serves their bottom line.
The entire philosophical underpinning of free market theory rests on certain assumptions. One of them being that neither a single supplier nor a single consumer has a commanding influence over the market. As soon as that happens, everything you learned about price finding, supply-and-demand, market equilibrium and all the other "magic" breaks down.
These are the people who guard the free market. They may not be perfect, but I'm damn happy we have them. Economics 101 tells you what happens in monopoly or oligopoly markets, and it's certainly not to the advantage of the public.
You're trying to simplify something beyond the point it can be simplified without distortion.
If you are the book's distributor, then the answer is "no, you can set any price you want". If you are a book store, the answer is "yes, it forces you to sell the book at the same price every other bookstore has to sell it at, the price that was chosen by the distributor".
Yes, it is regulation. No, it is not the same as the government determining the price itself.
I did the same experiment with some Unity3D tools/scripts of my own, offering them at four different prices with a suggestion as to what I think they equate to, but a very obvious statement that no matter which price you pay, the download will be the same.
Interestingly, the distribution is 6-2-1-1 over the prices, showing that people do not always pick the lowest price, even if they can. Like the World of Goo makers, I consider the experiment a success and may use the model in the future.
It even checks out economically. I made ~180 US$ this way. If I had offered the scripts for $20 (2nd price), even assuming that half of the $10 buyers would have bought it at that higher price, I would've made only $140.
Slashdot Mirror
seconded and third. I've got the same setup, and friends have copied me and are also happy with it. Also, you can speak to the same speakers from different sources, basically anything that runs iTunes can connect to them (if you let it on your network, and I think you can password-protect each Airport Express, if you want).
Many ISPs do it as well. Right now, my ISP does it, even though I've opted out. Maybe one of these days I'll sue them.
Maybe it's time that the Internet standards get a few clauses added that express these concepts explicitly. Like what Paul said about DNS. A clause like "a nameserver MUST responde truthfully, if technically possible. DNS responses MUST NOT be modified in any way for political, economic or business reasons."
Then these fucked up ISPs would at least be in violation of a standard, which might give me what I need for a violation-of-contract suit.
Remember: These changes are often invented by marketing and then pushed through even against the explicit protest of the technology people.
Though there may be the fear of getting caught but... I doubt it.
And rightly so.
The most beautiful and well-thought-out part of the 9/11 plan was the built-in plausible deniability. If they had been carrying firearms or explosives, being caught at security would have spelt trouble. But with box-cutters (this was before 9/11, remember...)? "Uh, sorry. Must've forgotten that. Yeah I work in the incoming goods department, why do you ask?"
Chances are very high they would've been able to either leave without triggering an alarm, or dump the box-cutter at security and board the flight anyways (and if they were halfway professional, each of them had an extra one just for that case).
What they will miss:
Growing powerful and even having a monopoly is not a problem,
You need to go back to Economy 101. Urgently.
"Pure" managers are good - if they understand that they know zilch about what the company actually does and leave that to the people who do. Unfortunately, most CEO types don't have the character for that (hard to fight your way to the top when you're conscious of your shortcomings). Balmer certainly isn't one of the guys who knows what not to do himself. If nothing else convinces you of that, consider that he could've hired an actor/dancer for the monkey dance.
In the end, if you can delegate and trust people, you can do anything with any knowledge or lack of that, because in a large enough company, you have people to do the stuff you know nothing about. But you have to trust those people, and that's the hard part.
I thought that info was olds, not news? For at least the past 10 years, anyone who upgrades to a new windos version before the first big patchset is done is roughly on the same risk level as someone going to vacation in Afghanistan. As a woman. In a bikini. Together with your lesbian girlfriend. Who has an "I love USA" tattoo.
So, they're not friends of competition, are they?
50-100 years ago we had this collective dream of free markets, capitalism, solving our problems.
Then, corporations found out that the actual free market is bad for profit margins. Once they grew powerful enough, they started changing the game.
Events like this should have the capitalists and free market supporters up in arms. But it doesn't. Why?
First of all, this is, of course, a copyright infringement itself because Amazon does not hold copyright on the books it sells, the authors and/or distributors do.
Two, it's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. One, it will not stop piracy in the least. Contrary to the Canary Trap already pointed out in comments, e-book pirates will very much have access to several versions of the book. A simple diff will fish out the "key" words. Then you can mix them so that at least they don't point to any of your actual sources.
Three, it's another example of reducing the quality of your product in order to max your profits. Also known as "punishing the honest customer". That's a really good idea... not!
Agree. For full clarification I should have added "to the detriment of everyone else", because that's what this is about.
Exactly.
Nobody thinks picking a good meal over a bad one is unethical.
But most people agree that picking the best parts off a buffet is at least questionable. Yes, it is economically rational, but it violates basic senses of fairness and cooperation that humans (as social animals) have. Corporations do not have such instincts, and that's why they constantly violate what us humans "feel" is right.
This is just one example. Picking up the best parts, maximizing your own profit. Most of us humans somehow "feel" that you have an obligation with a choice. Yet rational argument will lead us to "it's legal, they're a profit-oriented entity, so they should do it". And yet we can't shake the feeling that it's not ok.
Because it isn't. We've just not managed to write good laws that really express what we think society should be about. That's mostly because we let lawyers write laws, but that's a different discussion for a different time.
That 90% figure that gets thrown around all the time includes corporate desktops, which are almost always a MS monoculture. If you'd sample just the machines people have at home, I'm fairly sure the numbers would be different. No question, windos would still be way ahead of everything else, but my estimate is more in the 75%-80% range than 90%. At least as soon as you figure in the many people who dual-boot (which has become quite a large number with Boot Camp on Macs).
Funny how a lot of free speech is commercial, a lot of political books get sold, a lot of political speakers get paid huge sums for speaking, and in general a lot of free speech is not free beer at all.
You should try to not read inbetween the lines. There are no words there. :-)
I didn't say it is acceptable. I said it's the reason. Bush invaded Iraq because he had a mental problem, wanted to complete what dad had started, and needed to keep people's minds off his incompetence. Neither of that is acceptable, but it's probably the reasons for the war. Causation does not equal justification.
All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the Internet.
No, not really. It would turn off maybe 5% of the Internet, namely those servers that a) run windos in the first place and b) have admins stupid enough to roll out without testing.
It would know a whole lot of clients off the Internet. But the only thing the rest of us would notice is that things are faster and there are less dumb comments on the sites we frequent.
But of course, information wants to be free as in beer at a frat party. Stallman says so.
Except that he doesn't. Software should be free as in speech. Huge difference.
Frankly, I never understood why MySpace got anywhere at all. I've yet to see a single page on it where I don't think about slapping the author with a lawsuit for emotional damages.
It is but-ugly, unfriendly and loud (both visually and with all the crappy background music). In short, it's the hip-hop of the web. Uh wait. I think I just answered my question.
A DB is never free. A large part of Oracle's income isn't from software licensing, but from support contracts. Does that solve your problem?
Give me a citation.
This isn't Wikipedia. Do your own research. Or just don't believe me. In the end, whether or not it's true or a false, shared memory doesn't matter to it being the reason pro-MS arguments go ignored.
Granted, there's always been some of it to a greater or lesser degree, but in the past, Slashdot used to be somewhat self-correcting; you'd get a blatant Linux or FSF fanboy making one of their usual insane statements, but then you'd get someone else exposing the first poster as nuts and putting them in their place.
Now, it never happens.
Because back in the days, the MS fanboys were considered a bit foolish, but honest. They were listened to, their arguments usually ripped apart, but if they had a good argument, it was accepted.
Then came the time where it was blatantly obvious that at least some of the "MS fanboys" were in fact paid for making their voices heard. I think I dimly remember that even the PR company doing it was revealed. After that, everyone speaking in favour of MS was accused of being essentially an advertisement on two legs, and ignored.
Not really.
I've been quite happy to bash MS for almost everything they do for more than 15 years now. I'm quite relaxed. If Win7 is a really good product with no major flaws, it would be a first. If they don't show up now, they will show up later. Maybe they've become better at hiding them.
The people trying to turn the initial positive reviews on their heads are young and stupid. They don't have the experience with hating MS that most of us do. They don't know that MS is expert at disappointing, even if the initial hype is well engineered and the major flaws hidden too deep. Also, they forget that after Vista, it was pretty much impossible to come up with something that wouldn't look good in comparison.
And hey, after almost 20 years of trying, let's give MS the credit for coming up with a halfway acceptable system, shall we? Where's the joy in hating them if they'd produce only crap? No, the substandard-but-acceptable stuff belongs there, too. It makes the next failure more enjoyable.
So in summary: No. You are dead wrong. The real, experienced zealots are quite happy to delay satisfaction and wait until the polish has gone and the hype machine died down, and people start to use Win7 for some serious gaming/work. We know that you can make almost any car look good on the test drive. It's the daily use and the first maintainance where you find out if you've been had.
We'll wait until then. We won't even say "told you so", because that became old with Vista. We'll just smile and shrug.
And if it never happens, if Win7 turns out to be adequate after all, we'll just shrug and wait for Win8.
Because they aren't "american companies". They are multinational corporations. They have offices and subsidaries in Europe and probably a dozen other places all around the world. Their HQs happen to be in the USA, but aside from that they're only "american" when appealing to patriotism serves their bottom line.
Yes, it does good.
The entire philosophical underpinning of free market theory rests on certain assumptions. One of them being that neither a single supplier nor a single consumer has a commanding influence over the market. As soon as that happens, everything you learned about price finding, supply-and-demand, market equilibrium and all the other "magic" breaks down.
These are the people who guard the free market. They may not be perfect, but I'm damn happy we have them. Economics 101 tells you what happens in monopoly or oligopoly markets, and it's certainly not to the advantage of the public.
You're trying to simplify something beyond the point it can be simplified without distortion.
If you are the book's distributor, then the answer is "no, you can set any price you want".
If you are a book store, the answer is "yes, it forces you to sell the book at the same price every other bookstore has to sell it at, the price that was chosen by the distributor".
Yes, it is regulation.
No, it is not the same as the government determining the price itself.
I did the same experiment with some Unity3D tools/scripts of my own, offering them at four different prices with a suggestion as to what I think they equate to, but a very obvious statement that no matter which price you pay, the download will be the same.
Interestingly, the distribution is 6-2-1-1 over the prices, showing that people do not always pick the lowest price, even if they can. Like the World of Goo makers, I consider the experiment a success and may use the model in the future.
It even checks out economically. I made ~180 US$ this way. If I had offered the scripts for $20 (2nd price), even assuming that half of the $10 buyers would have bought it at that higher price, I would've made only $140.