I know you're kidding, but I've recently rebelled against a perpetual sense of crisis at the workplace. It's the product of an over-caffienated Calvinism or something, but in many workplaces there's an unfocused and pervasive attitude of constant emergency. When any of it drifts my way, I now have a general response: if there's something actually and concretely urgent that is comparable with a child being trapped under a vehicle, then I'll freak out with the best of them. Otherwise, it's not really an emergency; rather, it's a frantic toadying, and I'll have none of it.
You don't pay the cost of the car, you pay the price of the car, and it may be more profitable for a manufacturer to include a number of goodies as standard in all units of a model in order to attract consumers than to try to charge incrememtnally for including them as options.
Remember, unless you directly pay the actual physical maker of a product for exactly what you order, you are never paying for "just" the cost of something. There's been an entire complicated process involving your expectations, the going market price of a good, the general social consensus for the value of a good (including the "get what you pay for" psychology when leads many consumers to actually be less likely to buy a given good if it is priced for less than they expect. How much time do you spend shopping in the bargain bin at a music store?)
Even from the simpler model the pretends that we actually pay for cost, the realities of manufacturing are such that it can be cheaper to include something initially than to support making it an option.
Yes, with their amazing mind-control satellites, Microsoft Marketing can convince people that they are watching video files that they actually aren't, that CD's are being burned when they are in fact being melted, that they are playing games when in fact they are being eaten by voles. Microsoft Marketing can square the circle, move faster than the speed of light, and transform base metals into purest gold.
Man, if marketing (just what do you mean when you say marketing, anyway?) were even half as powerful and capable of overwhelming human rationality as you say it was, I'd have gone to B-school and conquered the eastern seaboard by now.
You shouldn't post drunk. You should also read Plato - specifically, the Apology. Socrates had the option of exile. He chose death, because exile would have meant contradicting the Law.
Your ignorance is a massive, ballooning thing - it lurches through the dirty streets at dawn, crushing cars and tearing out power lines. It is an impressive ignorance, an intractable one. Yours is the sort of ignorance from which entire empires of stupidity are founded, from which entire religions are crafted whole-cloth. I laud your awesome and formidable ignorance.
The justice is that your Calvinistic sense of entitlement was part of a vast "I got mine, screw you" sense of indifference to those who weren't in the red-hot tech industry.
My family is from Latin America. I have relatives that, I assure, have studied as hard and worked twice as hard as you do, and never even had a chance at the kind of lifestyle you were enjoying. There are physicists and doctors from the former eastern bloc that drive cabs in the US. During the boom, folks like you (although not necessarily you) smugly claimed that they *deserved* their wealth, which (since wealth is relative) is an implicit claim that others deserve their lack of it. That is what makes the comeuppance so sweet.
Just in case anyone may be laboring under the impression that Fatbrain is still a by geeks / for geeks site, I believe that (and their brick and mortar parent, Computer Literacy Books) have been purchased by Barnes and Noble. They are part of the conglomerate now. Which doesn't make them Satan or anything; however, I know that I prefer to go with smaller vendors when possible. And if I had to choose between Barnes and Noble / Fatbrain and Borders / Amazon as far as lesser of megacorp evils go, I'd likely go with the latter.
Because too many people were impervious to research, were too willing to believe the glib "oh, you can make money on suppport!" mantra that legions of non-MBA holding suit-hating techies (few of them, honestly, developers) kept on churning out.
No one is listening to the needs of their would-be customers. People at best are berated for not settling for the Linux solution that apes their existing solution. The industry climate is so contemptuous of the suits that could make it work, that the suits of ability and ambition go elsewhere. The best model hasn't been explored: PSO's working with free tools that bid on contracts. That sort of organization requires a strong sales force, not the "build it and they will come" naive faith that many linux service companies seem to have adopted. Also, add the failure to working with existing IT service companies.
No one sat down and did real market research before this all began. My suspicion is that a bunch of Linux fan-boys, bouyed by a ridiculous capital market, said "let's start a company!" And the rest is farce.
I am opposed to censorship, including censorship of unpopular, unpleasant, and even evil ideas.
But the great crime of Nazism, or even Fascism or Stalinism, wasn't censorship. Censorship was one of the relatively incidental tools they used (frankly, Mussolini's state for a while took some pains to avoid censorship - they believed in a strong corporatist state, but they still fancied themselves as progressive and avant-garde and, for some time, encouraged continued discussion. They didn't even kill Gramsci.) The great crime of Nazism was its doctrine of ethnic superiority and its policy of genocide, of identifying entire populations as suitable for extermination or slavery. This doesn't even require censorship per se - just a critical mass of a populace willing to carry out orders (and lest you claim that it could only be a populace indoctrinated in a censorious society, I would remind you of the openness of Weimar society.)
Do I think we're all that different? I see a lot of people who are willing to compromise their nominal principles for a steady paycheck and cheaper goods.
Exploiting our completely reasonable horror of genocide to induce comparable horror of censorship may be effective, but it's intellectually dishonest.
What you've described is the classic model of print advertising. Advertising traditionally doesn't work by immediately creating a sale, it works by building a largely subconscious awareness of the brand and product that is being advertised, and associating that awareness with real (it works!) and imagined (it will make you popular, get you laid, and bring joy to your life!) benefits (also mostly subconciously.)
That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing. In other domains, no one judges the success of print ads by the number of people who stop reading the magazine and rush to the phones, they judge success by the overall increase in business. Likewise, no one judges the success of billboards by how many cars veer off the freeway and head towards the advertiser's business, nor TV advertisement by how many people shut off the TV and run to the mall. However, that is exactly what is used to judge the viability of banner ads - it is expected to provide instant business, and advertisers are loathe to pay for online ad campaigns that don't have a next-click success.
Online publishers are partially to blame for this by promising the moon to their advertising customers, and by selling click-through instead of selling brand awareness. This may be fallout from the heady pre-bust days when no one worried about revenue, anyway - having big accounts (which produced no revenue) was seen as more important to attracting investors than the revenue stream was, so publishers would tell ad sales prospects that they wouldn't have to pay (much) unless there was a click through. Now, they are paying the price for that carelessness.
Friend, I bought my Voodoo 3 specifically because it was the most supported card for Linux at the time, with the most open specifications. Suddenly, it's all shifted, and Voodoo owners are frozen out (at least till the next rev. of X.)
Your attitude is infuriating. It is frankly seriously fucked that a shifting sea of libraries, versions of X, kernels, and the like make Linux support of any given game something of a crap shoot. Read me lips and read them well: this situation is broken and the situation in Windows is far better.
This is only true of the game sector. My Linux machine serves primarily as a SOHO server and development environment, and works really well for that. As a gaming platform, Linux is a bloody mess, and I frankly expect anyone who tries to sell it as one to fail horribly until the situation stabilizes - and there's no reason to believe that it will.
Remember, most Unix vendors charge more for their systems than Windows vendors, and full-on Unix-based solutions are costlier than Windows ones. Virtually all of the examples you are citing come from academic computing - Unix is more respected in academic CS environments, and academic projects are more likely to be released freely. GIMP, Postgres, Linux, BSD, Mosaic and Tex all had roots in academia - the only major open projects I can think of that didn't are Mozilla (which, remember, has some roots in Mosaic) and Apache (which also began life, I think, in the original NCSA httpd, although I may be wrong.)
You want to promote high quality free software? Promote higher education! Make it more exciting to work in academia than in the private sector!
Not blaming the kernel. Blaming maybe a wee bit the variety of dists and libs and environments, but "blame" is a somewhat strong term. I don't *expect* my system to be a game platform, so it's more like it would be nice if I can play games on it without too much hassle, but the inability to play the games I might like to certain doesn't discourage me from using the system as I do (as a SOHO server and development platform - already double duty, so there's no complaints about that here.)
I'm not that big a gamer, but I did have Quake II and III and a couple other games for Linux on my home system. Debian, running Xfree 3.3.x. It took a while to get the 3dfx stuff working. Time I usually don't have to spare, but I thought, what the heck.
I carelessly do a dist-upgrade, and my system migrates to Xfree 4.0.3. I like it for the most part, but it breaks Quake etc. on 3dfx cards (which I had purchased specifically for Linux/Quake compatibility.) I haven't been able to downgrade Xfree back to 3.x for some reason. So, no Quake, nor any other games. I could rebuild the system, but that's a day I just don't have for a while.
I don't really mean to kvetch. It's not like I'm going to give it that much time - it's not what my system is really for - but I don't trust Linux games at this point to be able to handle the relative anarchy of X video. What would make me feel comfortable buying games for Linux is a. some sort of assurance that my distro will be able to handle it, b. fairly painless installation of required libs, and c. *clear* and *definitive* hardware requirements. Otherwise, it's just gambling.
My impression was that the online material was largely posted as a courtesy. The cirriculum is intensive, and the designers of the program were highly skeptical that anyone not completely devoted to the program for a year would be able to complete it, but still shared the material online.
Their failure to provide the courtesy of a graceful transition period has resulted in me deciding to take my dial-up, long-distance, and cellular service away from AT&T, and bringing it elsewhere, as well as deciding to get DirecTV instead of cable.
My personal use of AT&T services comes out to about $3000 a year. Over a ten year period, that's $30,000. Spending a couple hundred dollars to preserve the connections for 30 days to protect a future $30,000 revenue stream sounds like a pretty good business decision to me.
Poaching will continue as long as it is more profitable to poach than not to poach. If natural market forces do not depress prices enough to make poaching profitless, and there is no a priori reason to assume they will, then only continued laws against poaching will have any effectiveness.
Historically, species that are hunted without restriction have gone extinct. The passenger pigeon, (nearly) the bison, the bears of Europe, whales - the idea that some sort of equilibrium exists by strictly market forces is unsupported. It will always be profitable to *someone* to kill any given specimen, more profitable than not killing it. Note that I'm not against hunting per se: I know some of the best conservationists in the world are hunters. I'm critical of the completely unsubstantiated claim that an absence of any regulations on hunting will preserve species.
I oppose the raising of elephants for ivory for the same reasons that I oppose whaling - not just because they are Cute Awe-inspiring animals, but because they are species that are intelligent enough and behaviourally sophisticated enough that I am inclined to give them some sort of rights, rights I would not be inclined to give horses, cows, or chickens, or even dogs. (African grays, the great apes, and some octopi I also put in this category.) Harvesting ivory in a non-destructive way is possible without violating these rights, but not the sort of elephant-ranching you are describing.
It is likely that some influence peddling will continue. The hope of one-hundred-per-cent money-free political processes is unrealistic. The idea is to stigmatize it, to make any known case of it subject to hearings and the associated embarassment, instead of the thriving industry it is now. In Europe, most of the stuff we take for granted would be considered a horrible scandal.
Is it me, or does anyone else notice how contemptuous the geek-consensus is towards marketing, how it is usually painted as a useless endeavour and marketing staff thought of as unnecessary, yet whenever a product fails and the reasons for that failure aren't clearly understood (or when a disliked product - e.g., Microsoft - succeeds), suddenly it's all about marketing?
I've avoided ad hominems. Sad you can't do the same.
Your requirement that all legislation be one hundred percent effective is a straw man. I argue only that it often creates better situations than the absence of legislation. Laws against murder have not stopped murder, and in fact murder continues unabated. Does that mean that laws against murder are ineffective? Your reasoning is specious. There are restrictions against poaching because poaching is a preexisting problem. There is legal harvesting of ivory, incidentally, yet poaching remains profitable.
Your claim that ivory would be harvested profitably omits a number of variables, including the relative profitability of land use and the relative costs of . The very existence of elephants (in a natural habitat) requires the continued existence of large areas of undeveloped land.
Your description of the 3rd World is unrealistic. Essentially, the "governments" are not stable public organs, but simply the infrastructural organs of the most important classes in those countries, except in a few exceptions such as Venezuela (and yes, Venezuela is befuct too, but for different reasons.) The fact is that in practice the 3rd world is much less regulated than the 1st world is - including regulations against graft and extortion.
Do I think it is possible for legislation to be imperfect? Of course, just as it is possible for products to fail. But huge blocs of wealth would not be giving money to candidates if they weren't getting something in return. All you have to do is follow the money and look at the legislation: the DMCA is a fine, fine example.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're kidding, but I've recently rebelled against a perpetual sense of crisis at the workplace. It's the product of an over-caffienated Calvinism or something, but in many workplaces there's an unfocused and pervasive attitude of constant emergency. When any of it drifts my way, I now have a general response: if there's something actually and concretely urgent that is comparable with a child being trapped under a vehicle, then I'll freak out with the best of them. Otherwise, it's not really an emergency; rather, it's a frantic toadying, and I'll have none of it.
Remember, unless you directly pay the actual physical maker of a product for exactly what you order, you are never paying for "just" the cost of something. There's been an entire complicated process involving your expectations, the going market price of a good, the general social consensus for the value of a good (including the "get what you pay for" psychology when leads many consumers to actually be less likely to buy a given good if it is priced for less than they expect. How much time do you spend shopping in the bargain bin at a music store?)
Even from the simpler model the pretends that we actually pay for cost, the realities of manufacturing are such that it can be cheaper to include something initially than to support making it an option.
Man, if marketing (just what do you mean when you say marketing, anyway?) were even half as powerful and capable of overwhelming human rationality as you say it was, I'd have gone to B-school and conquered the eastern seaboard by now.
You're having a bad day, aren't you?
Your ignorance is a massive, ballooning thing - it lurches through the dirty streets at dawn, crushing cars and tearing out power lines. It is an impressive ignorance, an intractable one. Yours is the sort of ignorance from which entire empires of stupidity are founded, from which entire religions are crafted whole-cloth. I laud your awesome and formidable ignorance.
Socrates, not Aristotle.
My family is from Latin America. I have relatives that, I assure, have studied as hard and worked twice as hard as you do, and never even had a chance at the kind of lifestyle you were enjoying. There are physicists and doctors from the former eastern bloc that drive cabs in the US. During the boom, folks like you (although not necessarily you) smugly claimed that they *deserved* their wealth, which (since wealth is relative) is an implicit claim that others deserve their lack of it. That is what makes the comeuppance so sweet.
Just in case anyone may be laboring under the impression that Fatbrain is still a by geeks / for geeks site, I believe that (and their brick and mortar parent, Computer Literacy Books) have been purchased by Barnes and Noble. They are part of the conglomerate now. Which doesn't make them Satan or anything; however, I know that I prefer to go with smaller vendors when possible. And if I had to choose between Barnes and Noble / Fatbrain and Borders / Amazon as far as lesser of megacorp evils go, I'd likely go with the latter.
No one is listening to the needs of their would-be customers. People at best are berated for not settling for the Linux solution that apes their existing solution. The industry climate is so contemptuous of the suits that could make it work, that the suits of ability and ambition go elsewhere. The best model hasn't been explored: PSO's working with free tools that bid on contracts. That sort of organization requires a strong sales force, not the "build it and they will come" naive faith that many linux service companies seem to have adopted. Also, add the failure to working with existing IT service companies.
No one sat down and did real market research before this all began. My suspicion is that a bunch of Linux fan-boys, bouyed by a ridiculous capital market, said "let's start a company!" And the rest is farce.
But the great crime of Nazism, or even Fascism or Stalinism, wasn't censorship. Censorship was one of the relatively incidental tools they used (frankly, Mussolini's state for a while took some pains to avoid censorship - they believed in a strong corporatist state, but they still fancied themselves as progressive and avant-garde and, for some time, encouraged continued discussion. They didn't even kill Gramsci.) The great crime of Nazism was its doctrine of ethnic superiority and its policy of genocide, of identifying entire populations as suitable for extermination or slavery. This doesn't even require censorship per se - just a critical mass of a populace willing to carry out orders (and lest you claim that it could only be a populace indoctrinated in a censorious society, I would remind you of the openness of Weimar society.)
Do I think we're all that different? I see a lot of people who are willing to compromise their nominal principles for a steady paycheck and cheaper goods.
Exploiting our completely reasonable horror of genocide to induce comparable horror of censorship may be effective, but it's intellectually dishonest.
That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing. In other domains, no one judges the success of print ads by the number of people who stop reading the magazine and rush to the phones, they judge success by the overall increase in business. Likewise, no one judges the success of billboards by how many cars veer off the freeway and head towards the advertiser's business, nor TV advertisement by how many people shut off the TV and run to the mall. However, that is exactly what is used to judge the viability of banner ads - it is expected to provide instant business, and advertisers are loathe to pay for online ad campaigns that don't have a next-click success.
Online publishers are partially to blame for this by promising the moon to their advertising customers, and by selling click-through instead of selling brand awareness. This may be fallout from the heady pre-bust days when no one worried about revenue, anyway - having big accounts (which produced no revenue) was seen as more important to attracting investors than the revenue stream was, so publishers would tell ad sales prospects that they wouldn't have to pay (much) unless there was a click through. Now, they are paying the price for that carelessness.
Your attitude is infuriating. It is frankly seriously fucked that a shifting sea of libraries, versions of X, kernels, and the like make Linux support of any given game something of a crap shoot. Read me lips and read them well: this situation is broken and the situation in Windows is far better.
This is only true of the game sector. My Linux machine serves primarily as a SOHO server and development environment, and works really well for that. As a gaming platform, Linux is a bloody mess, and I frankly expect anyone who tries to sell it as one to fail horribly until the situation stabilizes - and there's no reason to believe that it will.
There's the rub. If you can get a lot of people on your side, then you don't even need the guns. That's the real battleground - the minds of others.
(Oops.)
Remembering that (x|y)|x=y for any number, the solution is a[x]=a[y]|a[x];a[y]=a[x]|a[y];a[x]=a[y]|a[x]. Try it, it works.
You XOR one with the other.
You want to promote high quality free software? Promote higher education! Make it more exciting to work in academia than in the private sector!
Not blaming the kernel. Blaming maybe a wee bit the variety of dists and libs and environments, but "blame" is a somewhat strong term. I don't *expect* my system to be a game platform, so it's more like it would be nice if I can play games on it without too much hassle, but the inability to play the games I might like to certain doesn't discourage me from using the system as I do (as a SOHO server and development platform - already double duty, so there's no complaints about that here.)
I carelessly do a dist-upgrade, and my system migrates to Xfree 4.0.3. I like it for the most part, but it breaks Quake etc. on 3dfx cards (which I had purchased specifically for Linux/Quake compatibility.) I haven't been able to downgrade Xfree back to 3.x for some reason. So, no Quake, nor any other games. I could rebuild the system, but that's a day I just don't have for a while.
I don't really mean to kvetch. It's not like I'm going to give it that much time - it's not what my system is really for - but I don't trust Linux games at this point to be able to handle the relative anarchy of X video. What would make me feel comfortable buying games for Linux is a. some sort of assurance that my distro will be able to handle it, b. fairly painless installation of required libs, and c. *clear* and *definitive* hardware requirements. Otherwise, it's just gambling.
My impression was that the online material was largely posted as a courtesy. The cirriculum is intensive, and the designers of the program were highly skeptical that anyone not completely devoted to the program for a year would be able to complete it, but still shared the material online.
My personal use of AT&T services comes out to about $3000 a year. Over a ten year period, that's $30,000. Spending a couple hundred dollars to preserve the connections for 30 days to protect a future $30,000 revenue stream sounds like a pretty good business decision to me.
Check out this petition.
Historically, species that are hunted without restriction have gone extinct. The passenger pigeon, (nearly) the bison, the bears of Europe, whales - the idea that some sort of equilibrium exists by strictly market forces is unsupported. It will always be profitable to *someone* to kill any given specimen, more profitable than not killing it. Note that I'm not against hunting per se: I know some of the best conservationists in the world are hunters. I'm critical of the completely unsubstantiated claim that an absence of any regulations on hunting will preserve species.
I oppose the raising of elephants for ivory for the same reasons that I oppose whaling - not just because they are Cute Awe-inspiring animals, but because they are species that are intelligent enough and behaviourally sophisticated enough that I am inclined to give them some sort of rights, rights I would not be inclined to give horses, cows, or chickens, or even dogs. (African grays, the great apes, and some octopi I also put in this category.) Harvesting ivory in a non-destructive way is possible without violating these rights, but not the sort of elephant-ranching you are describing.
It is likely that some influence peddling will continue. The hope of one-hundred-per-cent money-free political processes is unrealistic. The idea is to stigmatize it, to make any known case of it subject to hearings and the associated embarassment, instead of the thriving industry it is now. In Europe, most of the stuff we take for granted would be considered a horrible scandal.
Is it me, or does anyone else notice how contemptuous the geek-consensus is towards marketing, how it is usually painted as a useless endeavour and marketing staff thought of as unnecessary, yet whenever a product fails and the reasons for that failure aren't clearly understood (or when a disliked product - e.g., Microsoft - succeeds), suddenly it's all about marketing?
Your requirement that all legislation be one hundred percent effective is a straw man. I argue only that it often creates better situations than the absence of legislation. Laws against murder have not stopped murder, and in fact murder continues unabated. Does that mean that laws against murder are ineffective? Your reasoning is specious. There are restrictions against poaching because poaching is a preexisting problem. There is legal harvesting of ivory, incidentally, yet poaching remains profitable.
Your claim that ivory would be harvested profitably omits a number of variables, including the relative profitability of land use and the relative costs of . The very existence of elephants (in a natural habitat) requires the continued existence of large areas of undeveloped land.
Your description of the 3rd World is unrealistic. Essentially, the "governments" are not stable public organs, but simply the infrastructural organs of the most important classes in those countries, except in a few exceptions such as Venezuela (and yes, Venezuela is befuct too, but for different reasons.) The fact is that in practice the 3rd world is much less regulated than the 1st world is - including regulations against graft and extortion.
Do I think it is possible for legislation to be imperfect? Of course, just as it is possible for products to fail. But huge blocs of wealth would not be giving money to candidates if they weren't getting something in return. All you have to do is follow the money and look at the legislation: the DMCA is a fine, fine example.