The HP-Compaq fiasco, the AOL-Time Warner debacle, and the dot-com bust all point to one thing: a managerial elite class that is stuffing itself with cash whether the companies, the stocks, the employees, or the customers win or lose. One-million-dollar-a-year golden parachutes, massive management bonuses and the like are part of a huge logrolling scam the is being perpetrated on the economy. And if you get critical of it, you're accused of being hostile to "wealth creators". (What the hell is a "wealth creator"? I can understand "good producer," "value creator," "innovator" and all the rest, but somehow I get the feeling that "wealth creator" is a feel-good word for someone who takes a little bit of everyone else's geld and stuffs it in his pocket, "creating" one wealthy schmuck.)
In my experience, those coding sweatshops actually do use licensed software when they are working with US companies, often enjoying the site licenses that their parent companies have - the big difference between developing and developed nations' costs is mostly labor and overhead for facilities.
That Microsoft could archly give a 5 month amnesty to Internet cafes in the Ukraine and Russia is shocking to me. If the governments of the Ukraine and Russia don't want to enforce IP, that's their business. If they want to grant amnesties for violations of law, that's their business too. Not Microsoft's.
The funny thing is that so many of the fears of a World Government were that it would come from quasi-socialistic NGO's. But here, the multinationals are coming in and dictating the property model for other countries to use. What if a nation doesn't want to recognize IP as property? What does it cost Microsoft if an entire nation opts out? After all, most Russians and Ukrainians probably aren't getting *any* real benefit from intellectual property laws - how much Russian or Ukrainian-owned software do *you* use? (US companies employing coding sweatshops doesn't count - after all, the IP is owned and enforced in the US.)
That's because most Linux advocates have wisely stopped suggesting GIMP as a Photoshop replacement. Don't get me wrong: I use GIMP a lot for consumer-grade tinkering, but it's still not a Photoshop replacement by any means. Even I still find the selection tools clunky and unintuitive compared to Photoshop.
The recent essay contest sponsored by Wipout drove this point home: the license cost for a single seat of, say, Visual Studio is as much as sixty percent of the per capita income of your average Sri Lankan. There's no concievable way that people from those parts of the world can afford to put the software on very many machines legally. The options are to pirate or to do without, and doing without doesn't do much for their software industry, or indeed any industry.
Except I think this trend extends to realms completely outsite of Microsoft. The fact is that the market has spoken, and "cheaper" for the most part has won. How many people here regularly diss Apple products just because, "for the same money," they can get a more powerful (but less or un- supported) PC? Well, the saving come from somewhere, and much of that is QA and tech support.
Just wait till the apply it to portscans. But hey, there's a war against terror! You can be an Enron exec and squander the life savings of thousands of employees away, but I doubt that there will be more than 10 years of jail time done between the lot of them. However, a 19 year old script-kiddie gets a little full of beans and brings down a couple Exchange servers, and it's a lifetime of forced sodomy for him. Yet people still believe in the "justice" system - why the hell not, we get the best justice money can buy!
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
Ironic. Polio and smallpox vaccines were developed in academic settings (Dr. Salk at the University of Pittsburg) or hospitals (Albert Sabin at the Children's Hospital) or by independent researchers (Jenner and the smallpox vaccine.) None of them were developed by drug companies looking for a profit, because vaccines are less profitable than treatment.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
What really worries about the fact that the private sector has pretty much taken over the medical research business is that they have almost no incentive to develop vaccines and cures when selling treatment is so lucrative - and while it's difficult to accumulate hard data about this sort of thing, I do know enough people in the public health sector (including some who did time in places like Genentech) to have heard stories about research going to places that could provide maximum return, rather than maximum benefit. I support "cure bounties" provided to public research facilities to motivate the develop of cures.
I'm really uncomfortable with "one size fits all" models of incentivizing innovation and distributing goods. What may make sense of consumer electronics may very make no sense for food and medicine.
The problem is that corporations may or may not be evil, but they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits, and they also have a competitive pressure: if the cost of ethical behavior is too high, they suffer from the advantage obtained by the unethical behavior of their competititors.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
In case of many women, it's a killer of people who trust their husbands. Or, in some parts of the world, of people who get transfusions. Or who get raped. But of course, in the sort of pluto-Calvinist world you inhabit, everyone is getting just what they deserve, right? Funny how people who are getting what they want tend to sustain that philosophy.
Normally, I would explain to you how pharmaceutical companies realize this: that selling 50 prescriptions for 100 dollars to the 20% who can afford it at that rate is more profitable than selling 200 prescriptions for 10 dollars, even if the marginal cost is only 2 dollars. The power of the first world market steps on the power of the thirld world market. There's a huge market that simply can't afford the first world prices (we are talking about countries where the average daily wage is about a dollar.) The drug companies would make fewer profits by scaling to meet that market, and so they don't.
But you don't actually care about the truth. I'm sure that your dimestore version of classical economics just can't account for such macroeconomic realities. You just want to justify business as usual. So I'm going to simply call you names. You are a blowhard and an ignorant prat.
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
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· Score: 2
And dreams, the oldest form of virtual reality.
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
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· Score: 4, Funny
Well, when all our hair falls out due to ambient toxicity, we will get rid of the "lather, rinse, repeat" part. It'll be "wax on! wax off!" Progress marches on!
A lot of people provide guesswork explanations for consumer behavior, like yours. There are, in fact, serious tools for analyzing consumer habits, and in platform situations, the consumer expectation of longevity is the major one. A consumer will want to know that the platform he has invested in will continue to be supported, that he will be able to purchase games and add-ons in the future - the value of a game system is determined by subsequent purchases, not the original purchase.
3D0 failed to do the things that would be required to create this perception: ubiquity is the most important (if you see 3D0's everywhere, you know that they're getting market penetration, and thus games will be produced); a sense of stability is important (3D0 and indeed everyone else loses to Sony in this regard - Sony's, and to a lesser extent Nintendo's - reputation as a hardware manufacturer is such that no one fears getting "orphaned.") Sega's earliest successes leveraged the relative lack of heavy players in the field, and attested also the their ability to work well with their channel. Unfortunately for them, the other players moved into the field, learned from Sega, and then won with their pre-existing advantages.
Technical details are generally not as important unless there are generational differences in technology.
They are pretty much looking for blue-blooded smart-but-not-bookish ivy-league comes-from-a-good-family globe-trotting outdoors-going art-savvy second-home-in-the-Hamptons liberal-yet-sensible sons-of-the-American-Revolution. Trust me, almost no one posting on this board would qualify. I definitely don't, and I suspect I might be closer to it than most.
This is actually what happens in some industries: publishing, film and the like. That especially in the lower levels, people are willing to work for free or close to it, so that it becomes impossible to make a living in it. (How do they do it? More often than not, the ranks of publishing houses and indie film studios are filled with trust-fund kids and rich kids whose folks are willing and able to underwrite the first few years of their careers. The publishing industry in particular is ripe with rich girls who are keeping busy until they get married.)
I agree that teens shouldn't be subjected to the same sort of censorious watchdog regulations as children. Of course, what you are ultimately saying is that such regulations are perfectly appropraite for children 12 and under - which is something I'm also inclined to agree with. Which means that we both end up agreeing with the legislation in principle, but we just draw the line at a different place.
As far as I'm concerned, if a teen can commit crimes of such heinousness that they can be tried as adults, then they can be capable of acts of maturity which allow them to be treated as adults in other respects.
Video games are a medium. Most medium contains speech. That speech may not be explicity, but can be implicit. I've read interpretations of Pac-Man as a critique of consumerism, of Donkey Kong as cultural conflict and sexual anxiety. This decision must be reversed by a reasonable appeals court - video games, or what they will evolve into, are likely to become as central a medium in the 21st century as film was to the 20th.
This is the first year that I checked the box off. I always thought it was a rip-off before: now I think of it as an essential part of campaign finance reform.
Re:Sickening
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I wasn't around when my employer merged with another company and then liquidated their assets, but I have no difficulties saying "we" did it. There's an institutional "we" by which institutions and organizations can accumulate liabilities and responsibility even though all the individuals involved have changed over.
Slashdot Mirror
The HP-Compaq fiasco, the AOL-Time Warner debacle, and the dot-com bust all point to one thing: a managerial elite class that is stuffing itself with cash whether the companies, the stocks, the employees, or the customers win or lose. One-million-dollar-a-year golden parachutes, massive management bonuses and the like are part of a huge logrolling scam the is being perpetrated on the economy. And if you get critical of it, you're accused of being hostile to "wealth creators". (What the hell is a "wealth creator"? I can understand "good producer," "value creator," "innovator" and all the rest, but somehow I get the feeling that "wealth creator" is a feel-good word for someone who takes a little bit of everyone else's geld and stuffs it in his pocket, "creating" one wealthy schmuck.)
In my experience, those coding sweatshops actually do use licensed software when they are working with US companies, often enjoying the site licenses that their parent companies have - the big difference between developing and developed nations' costs is mostly labor and overhead for facilities.
Man, I'm going to get a beating for this, but there's really just the east coast and the west coast. The rest is flyover country.
The funny thing is that so many of the fears of a World Government were that it would come from quasi-socialistic NGO's. But here, the multinationals are coming in and dictating the property model for other countries to use. What if a nation doesn't want to recognize IP as property? What does it cost Microsoft if an entire nation opts out? After all, most Russians and Ukrainians probably aren't getting *any* real benefit from intellectual property laws - how much Russian or Ukrainian-owned software do *you* use? (US companies employing coding sweatshops doesn't count - after all, the IP is owned and enforced in the US.)
That's because most Linux advocates have wisely stopped suggesting GIMP as a Photoshop replacement. Don't get me wrong: I use GIMP a lot for consumer-grade tinkering, but it's still not a Photoshop replacement by any means. Even I still find the selection tools clunky and unintuitive compared to Photoshop.
The recent essay contest sponsored by Wipout drove this point home: the license cost for a single seat of, say, Visual Studio is as much as sixty percent of the per capita income of your average Sri Lankan. There's no concievable way that people from those parts of the world can afford to put the software on very many machines legally. The options are to pirate or to do without, and doing without doesn't do much for their software industry, or indeed any industry.
You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!
Except I think this trend extends to realms completely outsite of Microsoft. The fact is that the market has spoken, and "cheaper" for the most part has won. How many people here regularly diss Apple products just because, "for the same money," they can get a more powerful (but less or un- supported) PC? Well, the saving come from somewhere, and much of that is QA and tech support.
Just wait till the apply it to portscans. But hey, there's a war against terror! You can be an Enron exec and squander the life savings of thousands of employees away, but I doubt that there will be more than 10 years of jail time done between the lot of them. However, a 19 year old script-kiddie gets a little full of beans and brings down a couple Exchange servers, and it's a lifetime of forced sodomy for him. Yet people still believe in the "justice" system - why the hell not, we get the best justice money can buy!
Ironic. Polio and smallpox vaccines were developed in academic settings (Dr. Salk at the University of Pittsburg) or hospitals (Albert Sabin at the Children's Hospital) or by independent researchers (Jenner and the smallpox vaccine.) None of them were developed by drug companies looking for a profit, because vaccines are less profitable than treatment.
I'm really uncomfortable with "one size fits all" models of incentivizing innovation and distributing goods. What may make sense of consumer electronics may very make no sense for food and medicine.
The problem is that corporations may or may not be evil, but they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits, and they also have a competitive pressure: if the cost of ethical behavior is too high, they suffer from the advantage obtained by the unethical behavior of their competititors.
In case of many women, it's a killer of people who trust their husbands. Or, in some parts of the world, of people who get transfusions. Or who get raped. But of course, in the sort of pluto-Calvinist world you inhabit, everyone is getting just what they deserve, right? Funny how people who are getting what they want tend to sustain that philosophy.
But you don't actually care about the truth. I'm sure that your dimestore version of classical economics just can't account for such macroeconomic realities. You just want to justify business as usual. So I'm going to simply call you names. You are a blowhard and an ignorant prat.
And dreams, the oldest form of virtual reality.
Well, when all our hair falls out due to ambient toxicity, we will get rid of the "lather, rinse, repeat" part. It'll be "wax on! wax off!" Progress marches on!
I wouldn't blame Strom for his ignorance. He got the best education the Holy Roman Empire could provide!
3D0 failed to do the things that would be required to create this perception: ubiquity is the most important (if you see 3D0's everywhere, you know that they're getting market penetration, and thus games will be produced); a sense of stability is important (3D0 and indeed everyone else loses to Sony in this regard - Sony's, and to a lesser extent Nintendo's - reputation as a hardware manufacturer is such that no one fears getting "orphaned.") Sega's earliest successes leveraged the relative lack of heavy players in the field, and attested also the their ability to work well with their channel. Unfortunately for them, the other players moved into the field, learned from Sega, and then won with their pre-existing advantages.
Technical details are generally not as important unless there are generational differences in technology.
And a guy name Qrlx does?
They are pretty much looking for blue-blooded smart-but-not-bookish ivy-league comes-from-a-good-family globe-trotting outdoors-going art-savvy second-home-in-the-Hamptons liberal-yet-sensible sons-of-the-American-Revolution. Trust me, almost no one posting on this board would qualify. I definitely don't, and I suspect I might be closer to it than most.
This is actually what happens in some industries: publishing, film and the like. That especially in the lower levels, people are willing to work for free or close to it, so that it becomes impossible to make a living in it. (How do they do it? More often than not, the ranks of publishing houses and indie film studios are filled with trust-fund kids and rich kids whose folks are willing and able to underwrite the first few years of their careers. The publishing industry in particular is ripe with rich girls who are keeping busy until they get married.)
As far as I'm concerned, if a teen can commit crimes of such heinousness that they can be tried as adults, then they can be capable of acts of maturity which allow them to be treated as adults in other respects.
Video games are a medium. Most medium contains speech. That speech may not be explicity, but can be implicit. I've read interpretations of Pac-Man as a critique of consumerism, of Donkey Kong as cultural conflict and sexual anxiety. This decision must be reversed by a reasonable appeals court - video games, or what they will evolve into, are likely to become as central a medium in the 21st century as film was to the 20th.
This is the first year that I checked the box off. I always thought it was a rip-off before: now I think of it as an essential part of campaign finance reform.
I wasn't around when my employer merged with another company and then liquidated their assets, but I have no difficulties saying "we" did it. There's an institutional "we" by which institutions and organizations can accumulate liabilities and responsibility even though all the individuals involved have changed over.