The big savings from Internet distribution aren't from not paying taxes, they are from avoiding the labor and facility and related overhead of running a retail storefront operation.
You've got it spot-on. The Sims is a brilliant game, in that it appealed to non-gamers (or gamers bored of the same-old twitch-'n-kill) that had never thought they'd care about games before. It was huge, and I know dozens of people who were brought into the gaming fold by The Sims. The Sims delivers what sea monkeys only promised.
And that's the basis of the failure of the online version, and it's inability to interest those people who did like The Sims. It wasn't just the virtual-home-decorating bit of the Sims that appealed to players - it's the interaction with the Sims themselves, the algorithmically-controlled pets whose simple interactions generated narratives and situations, sometimes with a little prodding - in fascinating and amusing ways. The ability to change the environment (decorating, building) and then have those changes in environment change the behavior of the Sims in somewhat, but not completely predictable ways was also compelling - most non-autistic adults are more fascinated by stimuli of partial contingency than with stimuli of full contingency (a cause that creates an effect 70% of the time is more interesting to us than one that creates the same effect 100% of the time - unless, interestingly enough, you're autistic. Social interaction is partially, not fully, contingent.)
But the whole thing becomes far less compelling when it's just a wrapper around chat. The toy element of the game becomes lost; the almost-penetrable Sims-speak becomes typical chit-chat; the veiled logic of Sims-motivations becomes replaced with the quite well known logic of the AOL chat room. It's a step backwords.
I'll agree (except to note that it's Roddenberry's diagesis, not his storytelling, that is the strongest element of Star Trek) - particularly with regards to Deep Space 9. I found DS9 to be some of the best SF on TV ever, period - yes, usually better than B5 (don't get me started.) I'm quirky that way, but I'm surprised by how many of the few people I know who weren't Trek/SF fans who still wound up watching DS9 for some reason agree with me on this: it was excellent television with a strong ensemble cast and, frequently, very good stories in a strong arc.
I'm also quirky in that Timothy Dalton is my favorite 007.
Or they can go with Plan B: prosecution of enough music-sharers to scare the others offline, and continued propagandizing of the "copyright is property/sharing is theft" line that seems to have taken hold in a lot of people's moral epistemologies.
It wasn't NASA that was ignoring the warnings - it was Morton Thiokol, the company that was contracted to produce the O-rings. They, against the advice of their own engineers, contacted NASA the day before the launch and recommended that the launch proceed, in fear that they would lose the contract if the launch were delayed.
I don't think bravery or fearlessness or even self-sacrifice is what makes someone a hero. What makes someone a hero is the way that some of their actions, choices and lifework have inspired someone else to do likewise - whether it's some sort of intellectual, creative, or athletic achievement, or some action of moral courage, or a combination of things. The essence of heroism is the way that the idea of a person acts as an inspiration to another.
I would call Christopher Reeve and, suprisingly, Michael J. Fox heroes insofar as they both maintained positive spiritual stances in trying circumstances, choosing to be grateful for what they had rather than resentful for their losses. Seeing that sort of attitude is a direct inspiration to me - I would like, in similar circumstances, to do likewise, and that makes them heroic. It's their attitude, not their condition, that makes them heroic.
I'm building a library of best/classic films from around the world, and so movies from the Criterion Collection are a big part of it (wish they could get Wim Wenders, Kieslowski, Ozu and Jodorowsky films, but that's another story.) I've been impressed with the quality of the pressing from Criterion, and that sort of thing is a big part of my "do I buy or do I rent" determination. Criterion consistently puts together incredibly good DVD's, with excellent video and sound, fascinating background material (the accompanying material for Rashomon was a joy) and high-quality materials.
Fun, dumb, disposable movies like MiB and most SF are definitely in the "rent, not buy" category, so that's one safe way to avoid the rot-factor.
Nolan Bushnell is a big self-promoter. In public, he presents himself as the father of video games. However, at an informal meeting after one conference, he actually introduced Ralph Baer to a group of friends as "the father of video games." Baer responded "I wish you would have said that in public."
An accurate method is usually a combination of examinations, grades in toto, writing, recommendations, personal activities outside of academics, and the like. As far as a grade is concerned, however, forcing a curve is far less fair - if everyone understands that 2+2=4 and gives all the answers correctly, then everyone deserves an A (in a hypothetical "Basic Addition 101"), not a C. An "F" should represent "absolutely no understanding of the material," or "did not do a lick of work," not "90% of the class did somewhat better than him on something."
The "working hard" measure is something else - an honors thesis or independent research will be a better indicator.
Most good graduate programs do not dwell too long on GPA's as it is (not that they are useless by any means, just that they are not completely sufficient.) And B's and C's in challenging courses is more impressive to many admissions committees that A's in easier ones.
That is based on the faulty reasoning that all grades are on a curve, and are inherently competitive. I think it's more valid to use grades to indicate mastery of the material, not your relative position versus other classmates.
In other words, if everyone correctly answers that 2+2=4, everyone deserves an "A" for that problem. Trying to force that into a curve could mean that you end up getting scored on penmanship, or personal hygiene.
Ever hear of 'hyperinflation?' It's made life savings essentially worthless overnight in places like Argentina, Peru, and Weimar Germany. It could happen here someday.
One of the differences I've always noted between Latin America and the US, is that in Latin America people build and rely on relationships with other people, especially family. In the US, there's an ongoing illusion that you can trust money - that money is secure and will take care of you and all you have to do is make more of it. Countries that have experienced hyperinflation somewhere along the line know better than to trust money more than people.
No, he's not biting the hand that feeds him. Predatory use of patent laws is so engrained in Silicon Valley culture, that for him to call things as they really are would alienate a lot of his core readers.
While I do think the war on drugs is a fraud, and a violation of basic human freedoms (ultimately, to do what you want with your own body) I really don't think it's comparable with P2P - I think far more people will be dissuaded by enforcement in this case, since the rewards are far less and the risk of being caught is somewhat greater.
The point is that most distro-manufacturers are selling a product largely consisting of work done for free by people "scratching an itch" or just helping out. If they can add value in a way that's worthwhile - providing services and support or documentation and training or the like - and sustain their businesses, that's great. Good for them. But if they can't, the open source projects will carry on without them - after all, free software came before them, and Debian looks like it's doing just fine with any for-profit company behind it.
You probably should learn a lot more about the history of free software. The "open source companies" are a late development, and hardly as crucial to the survival and well-being of free software as your post would imply.
Re:For the most part, looks like the exhibit sucks
on
Review: Illegal Art
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I don't think art necessarily has anything to do with effort, and not that much to do with originality. Art is a constellation of practices as discourses - conversations - that use aesthetics as a touch point. Effort and novelty are irrelevant.
I don't care about being a power user or not. I want to be on as diverse a P2P network as possible, to have the best chance of find relatively obscure work. Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
The problem for Linux advocates (specifically, those people who for some reason or another are either trying to get other people to run Linux, or at least convince other people how clever they are for running Linux) is that they don't get what you said. When the choice comes between acknowledging and addressing the problems in user experience or calling the user a moron, too many soi-dissant advocates choose the latter.
At a certain point, things are only interesting when they are too complicated to be understood. The neural input/output of, say, a squid is simple enough to be understood in a fairly straightforward way. The neural network for a human is not. Which would you rather have?
I haven't known military personnel who explicitly say they want to kill people, but I've known many who said that they wanted "action" and were bored. Especially if they are actually deployed, since much of the work at that point is just - waiting. The fact that "action" consists of killing other people goes unsaid.
It's based on my manipulation of a 3-dimensional object with an array of 3-dimensional objects on a 2-dimensional space. A TV remote is very much NOT a command-line interface. It is *not* typing a string of text into a console - it is mostly single-purpose buttons, most of which have intuitively understandable functions.
You need to read, well, a lot more. Edward Tufte could be a starting point. You could probably stand to read about cognition and useability.
I can figure out a command line. I can type "man foo" or "foo -h" and get a general sense of what I'm supposed to do, and if it's only a matter of a couple flags and args, it may only be twice as long as it would take for me to look at a page of prefs and checked settings.
JWZ is, I believe, somewhat smarter than I am, and far more technically sophisticated, and he's sick of having to do that. He *can*, of course, and if you knew jack shit, you'd know that he probably is much better at programming, unix, and the like than you are, but the point is that like everyone with better things to learn than command line switches if we have to do this with every command in a series of commands that are being piped into each other, we're going to get sick of it - especially with plenty of alternatives (MS, Apple, etc.) available.
A well-designed GUI will present far more information far more quickly than a CLI. Processing visual information is a parallel process - scanning text is a serial one. Looking at a single window, being able to check 6 or 7 checkboxes and hit the "enter" button is more efficient than trying to figure out which of 6 or 7 flags to use, their arguments if necessary, and then enter a string on a command line.
When the software at hand is a media playback software, where you may have to go back and rescan the text and edit the command string if things aren't right, the inefficiences of a CLI are even more striking.
Slashdot Mirror
The big savings from Internet distribution aren't from not paying taxes, they are from avoiding the labor and facility and related overhead of running a retail storefront operation.
I can play a GBA on an airplane. Would I be able to turn on my N-Gage?
And that's the basis of the failure of the online version, and it's inability to interest those people who did like The Sims. It wasn't just the virtual-home-decorating bit of the Sims that appealed to players - it's the interaction with the Sims themselves, the algorithmically-controlled pets whose simple interactions generated narratives and situations, sometimes with a little prodding - in fascinating and amusing ways. The ability to change the environment (decorating, building) and then have those changes in environment change the behavior of the Sims in somewhat, but not completely predictable ways was also compelling - most non-autistic adults are more fascinated by stimuli of partial contingency than with stimuli of full contingency (a cause that creates an effect 70% of the time is more interesting to us than one that creates the same effect 100% of the time - unless, interestingly enough, you're autistic. Social interaction is partially, not fully, contingent.)
But the whole thing becomes far less compelling when it's just a wrapper around chat. The toy element of the game becomes lost; the almost-penetrable Sims-speak becomes typical chit-chat; the veiled logic of Sims-motivations becomes replaced with the quite well known logic of the AOL chat room. It's a step backwords.
I'm also quirky in that Timothy Dalton is my favorite 007.
Or they can go with Plan B: prosecution of enough music-sharers to scare the others offline, and continued propagandizing of the "copyright is property/sharing is theft" line that seems to have taken hold in a lot of people's moral epistemologies.
It wasn't NASA that was ignoring the warnings - it was Morton Thiokol, the company that was contracted to produce the O-rings. They, against the advice of their own engineers, contacted NASA the day before the launch and recommended that the launch proceed, in fear that they would lose the contract if the launch were delayed.
I would call Christopher Reeve and, suprisingly, Michael J. Fox heroes insofar as they both maintained positive spiritual stances in trying circumstances, choosing to be grateful for what they had rather than resentful for their losses. Seeing that sort of attitude is a direct inspiration to me - I would like, in similar circumstances, to do likewise, and that makes them heroic. It's their attitude, not their condition, that makes them heroic.
Fun, dumb, disposable movies like MiB and most SF are definitely in the "rent, not buy" category, so that's one safe way to avoid the rot-factor.
Nolan Bushnell is a big self-promoter. In public, he presents himself as the father of video games. However, at an informal meeting after one conference, he actually introduced Ralph Baer to a group of friends as "the father of video games." Baer responded "I wish you would have said that in public."
The "working hard" measure is something else - an honors thesis or independent research will be a better indicator.
Most good graduate programs do not dwell too long on GPA's as it is (not that they are useless by any means, just that they are not completely sufficient.) And B's and C's in challenging courses is more impressive to many admissions committees that A's in easier ones.
In other words, if everyone correctly answers that 2+2=4, everyone deserves an "A" for that problem. Trying to force that into a curve could mean that you end up getting scored on penmanship, or personal hygiene.
One of the differences I've always noted between Latin America and the US, is that in Latin America people build and rely on relationships with other people, especially family. In the US, there's an ongoing illusion that you can trust money - that money is secure and will take care of you and all you have to do is make more of it. Countries that have experienced hyperinflation somewhere along the line know better than to trust money more than people.
No, he's not biting the hand that feeds him. Predatory use of patent laws is so engrained in Silicon Valley culture, that for him to call things as they really are would alienate a lot of his core readers.
While I do think the war on drugs is a fraud, and a violation of basic human freedoms (ultimately, to do what you want with your own body) I really don't think it's comparable with P2P - I think far more people will be dissuaded by enforcement in this case, since the rewards are far less and the risk of being caught is somewhat greater.
You probably should learn a lot more about the history of free software. The "open source companies" are a late development, and hardly as crucial to the survival and well-being of free software as your post would imply.
I don't think art necessarily has anything to do with effort, and not that much to do with originality. Art is a constellation of practices as discourses - conversations - that use aesthetics as a touch point. Effort and novelty are irrelevant.
I don't care about being a power user or not. I want to be on as diverse a P2P network as possible, to have the best chance of find relatively obscure work. Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
The problem for Linux advocates (specifically, those people who for some reason or another are either trying to get other people to run Linux, or at least convince other people how clever they are for running Linux) is that they don't get what you said. When the choice comes between acknowledging and addressing the problems in user experience or calling the user a moron, too many soi-dissant advocates choose the latter.
At a certain point, things are only interesting when they are too complicated to be understood. The neural input/output of, say, a squid is simple enough to be understood in a fairly straightforward way. The neural network for a human is not. Which would you rather have?
I haven't known military personnel who explicitly say they want to kill people, but I've known many who said that they wanted "action" and were bored. Especially if they are actually deployed, since much of the work at that point is just - waiting. The fact that "action" consists of killing other people goes unsaid.
I'm pretty sure that the Al Qaeda and North Korea are happy with underfunded, understaffed schools creating an illiterate, uneducated population.
You need to read, well, a lot more. Edward Tufte could be a starting point. You could probably stand to read about cognition and useability.
You know, .elvis resolves to a gas station on a lonely Arizona highway. Hmmmn.
Says who? A gui panel can say "output to..." and have another application or standard output as an option.
JWZ is, I believe, somewhat smarter than I am, and far more technically sophisticated, and he's sick of having to do that. He *can*, of course, and if you knew jack shit, you'd know that he probably is much better at programming, unix, and the like than you are, but the point is that like everyone with better things to learn than command line switches if we have to do this with every command in a series of commands that are being piped into each other, we're going to get sick of it - especially with plenty of alternatives (MS, Apple, etc.) available.
A well-designed GUI will present far more information far more quickly than a CLI. Processing visual information is a parallel process - scanning text is a serial one. Looking at a single window, being able to check 6 or 7 checkboxes and hit the "enter" button is more efficient than trying to figure out which of 6 or 7 flags to use, their arguments if necessary, and then enter a string on a command line.
When the software at hand is a media playback software, where you may have to go back and rescan the text and edit the command string if things aren't right, the inefficiences of a CLI are even more striking.