In both cases, MS did these things without suing anyone. They used their market clout in a dirty way in both these cases, but that's not as bad as beating the crap out of people with lawsuits. (And it has been noted that the Kerberos affair is often mistated - they correctly used an implementation-defineable field for purposes especially for their implementation. Nothing is broken.)
It's known as the Evil Empire because people sheepishly parrot what they've heard from their friends.
You are insane if you think this is the case. Have you actually used NeXTStep? How are they similar? The model for the objects in the UI is different, the bindings are different, the placement of widgets is different, the integration of file manager and desktop is different. And the lack of originality hasn't kept Apple from patenting theme engines.(It has been pointed out that Apple simply owns the patent - I don't know how to decipher the patent database well enough to determine how they got it, so that element is still in suspense.)
Apple is worse. I've said it elsewhere, I'll say it again. Microsoft has not sued anyone for imitating them - there were no lawsuits against RedHat for having *dead-on Win9x clone* FVWM95 screenshots on their *shrink wrapped products.* Microsoft fights dirty in the market, but they fight *in the market,* not with a mob of lawyers. Apple has a history of doing this sort of litigious crap.
Repeat after me: theming is obvious. There is nothing innovative or complex about it. Theming 'engines' are also obvious. People were and are theming without any reference to Apple at all. And Apple isn't going to be going after Microsoft with a lawsuit (which they would lose) - they are going after the people they can intimidate and overwhelm.
I wish a lot of people would get over their instinctive, blind hatred of MS. I dislike them for the reason that I dislike any closed-source vendor: they are a closed-source vendor relying on the unnatural and invasive enforcement of IP laws against sharing in order to turn their development-service in to a unit-product. But they really are no worse than any of the others that are doing it, and far better than many. Including Apple. (Case in point: we can play Windows media content in Linux using the avifile libraries, but we can't play the Sorensen-codec Quicktime files.)
It is more accurate to say that technology tends to serve the interests of the party that develops it. "Good" and "evil" aren't very useful concepts in that analysis.
What makes something art is that it participates in the cultural institutions and practices of art - that we treat it as art, that we have a relationship to it that is primarily aesthetic, that we create a discourse around the practice that is art-based (yes, that even includes whether it gets talked about in ArtForum or whether someone got a grant to do it or something.)
A lot of things can be aesthetically pleasing - code, buildings (and yes, I think there is architecture-as-art), plumbing, bodies - but there is a difference (with mobility between them) between aesthetically pleasing objects and objects that are designed to be talked about in aesthetic terms.
Now, like the category "game," I think the Wittgensteinian premonition about fuzziness of categories is appropriate here. I would not pretend to have necessary and sufficient conditions for art. But the basis by which even elegant, inspired programming, programming which reveals leaps of insight and intuition, even - is described by art, is IMHO faulty.
As a note, I believe that programming can be art in the context of an art-work, or when it is rehabilitated or recontextualized as art. When someone takes code and exhibits it for its aesthetic properties (even if its only to a limited audience that could understand it) or whether they are doing some conceptual art work that involves programming (I have a work on the back burner that is doing that very thing, using tools that many might think the least qualified to be art-like!) then the programming is, indeed, art.
Hmmmn, darwinistic communism. One centralized provider, selected by a competitive process but then left to service the entire market. Maybe the Marxist dialectic was an accurate prediction, after all. Except that the stockholders, rather than the workers, hold the reins.
The first time you see the pretty graphics, it's nice. Same with cinematics. After I see them, say, three times, I turn them off if I can because the eye candy is not the pleasure of play and has probably begun to interfere with it. The pleasure of play of Civ. type games (among my favorites) is the exploration of the development tree, the attempt to bring together a workable strategy out of thousands of possibilities, and the challenge of marshalling against opponents.
The graphics actually interfere with the game if there by default, and to the point of losing the fun if they are unremoveable. I would like my Civ games to have a setting called "play cinematics once:" the first time I discover a wonder or there's a battle between a roman phalanx and an armor unit (ah, Civ) I wouldn't mind the pretty-pretty, but I want to be given enough attractively designed, cleanly laid out information to understand the game state, and no more as a rule.
I would love to see Edward Tufte design a Civ type game.
The point that you implicitly refer to, and was made throughout the article, is that the games that use cinematics to move the narrative along when you reach a certain juncture end up becoming games in which you simply play to get to the next cinematic. We want to be told stories, we don't want to necessarily put them together out of constituent parts. Part of the satisfaction of the narrative experience is its passivity, the pleasure of discovering a thing whole and formed.
However, I think this could be a feature, not a bug. If you don't try pretending that you are constructing the narrative, but are simply unlocking it as you play, the narrative becomes the incentive, like bits of kibble that reward achievement. You want to keep to a minimum, I think, the number of plot elements you have in mind at any given time to navigate the game; then you want a pay-off of narrative (and nice cinematics and sounds and such) that make you feel that you have participated in a narrative without having to create it.
Wrong. We have every right to complain. Especially when failure to complain means the capture of ideas by corporations, the loss of freedom of control over your own past work, and the reigning-in of creative and communication. Contracts that demand control over your past work are going to be harmful to society at large even more than to the people who sign them: they merely suffer a pang of conscience, while the rest of us lose access to an idea. The unfettered circulation of ideas has synergistic benefits that are being scarcer and scarcer as employers continue the IP land-grab.
Your ideological motivation is to get rid of any regulation and make all relationships strictly contractual ones. There are hundreds of historical and hypothetical examples of negative consequences of this sort of system, but you'll just wave your hands and say "oh, if you're exceptional you'll get around that." It should be noted that exceptional people were able to get around slavery and feudalism, but this doesn't justify slavery or feudalism. The working conditions in societies that have implemented standards for workers and protections for employees are far superior to those that haven't (hey, you are free to bargain whatever deal you want to cut in Sierra Leone and Mexico. What's holding you back?)
That is both naive and ideological of you. If you have no viable alternatives, and you don't have capital, or even, god forbid, that you are merely adequate at what you do (most people are not usually in extraordinarily-in-demand positions, and by definition most people are average), you should still not have to submit to onerous conditions.
There are not an infinite number of employers. There is an even smaller number of employers in any given field or domain. There are even fewer employers in a given field or domain that may be looking for someone of a specific skillset. If there are any externalities - e.g., the job seeker has a family to support in the area or other ties that limit mobility, the number of employers may be limited indeed. If unacceptable practices become industry standards, then one has the choice of not working at that profession, or working as, say, a fry chef. The likelihood that someone is more willing to accept onerous conditions than work as a fry cook, and that the employer only need one qualified individual for any given position, creates no incentive for them not to impose those conditions if they can find that one individual who is willing to accept them.
The myth of the free "labor market" omits the realities of the balance of power between employer and employee. If a critical mass of employers make the abrogation of liberties a prerequisite for employment, and one needs that employment to get by, then, essentially, those liberties do not exist.
This was in the 19th century, before the public image industry really existed. And poor PI doesn't matter if people are being for the cheap - which, studies time again demonstrate, they do.
(Many) factory owners were still ethical human beings who did not want to engage in exploitation of children. The only way they can end the practice and survive as a business is if all their competitors do so too. This would mean that no producer would get the labor savings inherent in child labor, and so none of them would get a price advantage in the market. Whether the increased cost was passed on to the consumer or be absorbed as a reduction in profit loss would be a matter of the market for that good, of course.
The point is that the good intentions of even well-intentioned businesses is useless if competitive forces make it impossible to act on them. There is too much incentive for a business to accrue the advantage by taking the cheaper, unethical path to hope that voluntary standards will endure. External enforcement was required in 19th century England, and it will be required today in order to preserve a modicum of labor and environmental standards in multinational trade.
For one thing, mandating labor standards is a different thing from opposing trade a priori. When you claim a transaction "benefits both countries," you are doing a whole lot of hand-waving. It benefits *specific groups and blocs of interests* on both sides of the transaction (including, it is true, the consumer market in the more expensive/developed trade partner.) It does not necessarily benefit the local workers that the local factory owners (who may actually live in Miami) can enjoy a profit.
All these models, of course, assume Pac-Man like producer/laborers who do not have to do with local inflation, resource competition, and the increased unattractiveness of local markets in this sort of environment. Nobel economics prize winner Amartya Sen's work "Rational Fools" is the most thorough debunking of these omissions.
The concept of comparative advantage is frankly in some suspense. Yes, it was promalgate by Ricards, and the more formulaic Chicago and Austrian school types cite it (sometimes trying to make it more dynamic in order to make it fit a little less poorly with reality), but it relies on a naive theory of money and omits a lot of costs. It was rejected by Keynes and even some Austrian economists.
Short picture: if goods can be relocated and labor cannot, then capital will move the goods to where they can get optimal returns, yet move production to where costs are minimal. Differences in mobility and the cost of mobility throw out the benefits subsumed under the comparative advantage model.
Because if he is not producing goods for export, he will be producing goods for local consumption. If the land that is being used for a factory is used for food and goods for him and his neighbors that they can afford, then there is a local sustainable economy. Think in terms of total economics, not just in within the bounds of simple monetarism.
You are so blindsided by the idea that "providing jobs" is going to be an economic fix, that you are missing the fact that jobs are only as meaningful as 1. the wages the produce and, more importantly 2. the availability of local goods (esp. food) that can be bought with those wages. What is good for those workers is that people are producing food and goods locally at a price they can afford. The proliferation of sweatshops does nothing to make this happen - the economic benefits occur elsewhere.
My alternatives are either a. wages that allow people who are producing for international markets to also act as consumers in those markets, or b. that the resources of land, labor, and energy be dedicated to local markets, so that they can afford to buy the goods they produce and sell them within their communities. The internationalization of labor (which allows capital to move across borders, but not people) means that the cheapness of local productivity benefits the multinational, and the good which are the product benefit the target markets of the multinational: the multinationals (or the contractors who serve it) are able to buy up resources and infrastructure to make it impossible to maintain a local economy. Mexico is a good example of this: certain regions have kept artisan industry (not crafts, but things like household goods, dental equipment, small mechanical goods) thriving, and these regions have less real poverty than maquiladora regions. I would prefer to stay in the Yucatan rather than Juarez or Tamalipas any day.
I recommend that you investigate the actual history of child labor laws. They were first implemented at the behest of English factory owners who wanted to end the practice but could not do so voluntarily as long as it remained legal for their competition to exploit child labor.
Holding a "candle to the dark" would consist of employing adults who are past school age to work at wages which would allow them to send their children to school. That isn't happening.
And absent multinational labor, local economies exist for local markets.
The problem is that Nike now has a vested interest in making sure that things don't get better. They rely on pennies-an-hour child labor, and they will shop around from country to country to make sure that they get it, and their stockholders will want the corporation to lend political support to those forces in the country that keep child labor laws from getting enacted.
That they are exploiting a bad situation, even if they are acting as the lesser of evils, doesn't keep it from being a bad situations. Your claim is essentially that it is better to be a good slaveholder than to oppose slavery.
I have to absolutely confirm what you say regarding the destructiveness of replacing diverse cultivation of food-crops for local markets with the cultivation of cash crops for trade on the health of developing areas. Members of my family (we are from South America) have been involved in public-information and agricultural cooperative efforts to reintroduce diversity and local-focus into agriculture for just this very reason: depending on trade, especially international trade, for basics such as food overlooks the sensitivity to externalities like poor infrastructure, corruption, and the division of interest between large cash-crop agricultural interests and producers for local markets(agribusiness is concerned about making money, and cash-poor local markets don't offer maximum bang-for-the-buck; they take local lands and produce for global markets, and the 'trickle-down' in terms of wages is miniscule). In the areas where we are able, with government help and, frankly, some outright takeovers of agribusiness-owned land, to reintroduce the cultivation of local crops, hunger decreased, local trade blossomed, and the mass migration to the capital city was checked.
Slashdot Mirror
It's known as the Evil Empire because people sheepishly parrot what they've heard from their friends.
You are insane if you think this is the case. Have you actually used NeXTStep? How are they similar? The model for the objects in the UI is different, the bindings are different, the placement of widgets is different, the integration of file manager and desktop is different. And the lack of originality hasn't kept Apple from patenting theme engines.(It has been pointed out that Apple simply owns the patent - I don't know how to decipher the patent database well enough to determine how they got it, so that element is still in suspense.)
Repeat after me: theming is obvious. There is nothing innovative or complex about it. Theming 'engines' are also obvious. People were and are theming without any reference to Apple at all. And Apple isn't going to be going after Microsoft with a lawsuit (which they would lose) - they are going after the people they can intimidate and overwhelm.
I wish a lot of people would get over their instinctive, blind hatred of MS. I dislike them for the reason that I dislike any closed-source vendor: they are a closed-source vendor relying on the unnatural and invasive enforcement of IP laws against sharing in order to turn their development-service in to a unit-product. But they really are no worse than any of the others that are doing it, and far better than many. Including Apple. (Case in point: we can play Windows media content in Linux using the avifile libraries, but we can't play the Sorensen-codec Quicktime files.)
It is more accurate to say that technology tends to serve the interests of the party that develops it. "Good" and "evil" aren't very useful concepts in that analysis.
A lot of things can be aesthetically pleasing - code, buildings (and yes, I think there is architecture-as-art), plumbing, bodies - but there is a difference (with mobility between them) between aesthetically pleasing objects and objects that are designed to be talked about in aesthetic terms.
Now, like the category "game," I think the Wittgensteinian premonition about fuzziness of categories is appropriate here. I would not pretend to have necessary and sufficient conditions for art. But the basis by which even elegant, inspired programming, programming which reveals leaps of insight and intuition, even - is described by art, is IMHO faulty.
As a note, I believe that programming can be art in the context of an art-work, or when it is rehabilitated or recontextualized as art. When someone takes code and exhibits it for its aesthetic properties (even if its only to a limited audience that could understand it) or whether they are doing some conceptual art work that involves programming (I have a work on the back burner that is doing that very thing, using tools that many might think the least qualified to be art-like!) then the programming is, indeed, art.
Hmmmn, darwinistic communism. One centralized provider, selected by a competitive process but then left to service the entire market. Maybe the Marxist dialectic was an accurate prediction, after all. Except that the stockholders, rather than the workers, hold the reins.
The graphics actually interfere with the game if there by default, and to the point of losing the fun if they are unremoveable. I would like my Civ games to have a setting called "play cinematics once:" the first time I discover a wonder or there's a battle between a roman phalanx and an armor unit (ah, Civ) I wouldn't mind the pretty-pretty, but I want to be given enough attractively designed, cleanly laid out information to understand the game state, and no more as a rule.
I would love to see Edward Tufte design a Civ type game.
What you would say would be truer if both mainstream movies and mainstream games didn't suck so much.
However, I think this could be a feature, not a bug. If you don't try pretending that you are constructing the narrative, but are simply unlocking it as you play, the narrative becomes the incentive, like bits of kibble that reward achievement. You want to keep to a minimum, I think, the number of plot elements you have in mind at any given time to navigate the game; then you want a pay-off of narrative (and nice cinematics and sounds and such) that make you feel that you have participated in a narrative without having to create it.
I know. I am arguing against those people who want to abrogate those laws and remove any extra-contractual protections.
Your ideological motivation is to get rid of any regulation and make all relationships strictly contractual ones. There are hundreds of historical and hypothetical examples of negative consequences of this sort of system, but you'll just wave your hands and say "oh, if you're exceptional you'll get around that." It should be noted that exceptional people were able to get around slavery and feudalism, but this doesn't justify slavery or feudalism. The working conditions in societies that have implemented standards for workers and protections for employees are far superior to those that haven't (hey, you are free to bargain whatever deal you want to cut in Sierra Leone and Mexico. What's holding you back?)
That is both naive and ideological of you. If you have no viable alternatives, and you don't have capital, or even, god forbid, that you are merely adequate at what you do (most people are not usually in extraordinarily-in-demand positions, and by definition most people are average), you should still not have to submit to onerous conditions.
The myth of the free "labor market" omits the realities of the balance of power between employer and employee. If a critical mass of employers make the abrogation of liberties a prerequisite for employment, and one needs that employment to get by, then, essentially, those liberties do not exist.
(Many) factory owners were still ethical human beings who did not want to engage in exploitation of children. The only way they can end the practice and survive as a business is if all their competitors do so too. This would mean that no producer would get the labor savings inherent in child labor, and so none of them would get a price advantage in the market. Whether the increased cost was passed on to the consumer or be absorbed as a reduction in profit loss would be a matter of the market for that good, of course.
The point is that the good intentions of even well-intentioned businesses is useless if competitive forces make it impossible to act on them. There is too much incentive for a business to accrue the advantage by taking the cheaper, unethical path to hope that voluntary standards will endure. External enforcement was required in 19th century England, and it will be required today in order to preserve a modicum of labor and environmental standards in multinational trade.
Aphasia.
All these models, of course, assume Pac-Man like producer/laborers who do not have to do with local inflation, resource competition, and the increased unattractiveness of local markets in this sort of environment. Nobel economics prize winner Amartya Sen's work "Rational Fools" is the most thorough debunking of these omissions.
Short picture: if goods can be relocated and labor cannot, then capital will move the goods to where they can get optimal returns, yet move production to where costs are minimal. Differences in mobility and the cost of mobility throw out the benefits subsumed under the comparative advantage model.
Because if he is not producing goods for export, he will be producing goods for local consumption. If the land that is being used for a factory is used for food and goods for him and his neighbors that they can afford, then there is a local sustainable economy. Think in terms of total economics, not just in within the bounds of simple monetarism.
You are so blindsided by the idea that "providing jobs" is going to be an economic fix, that you are missing the fact that jobs are only as meaningful as 1. the wages the produce and, more importantly 2. the availability of local goods (esp. food) that can be bought with those wages. What is good for those workers is that people are producing food and goods locally at a price they can afford. The proliferation of sweatshops does nothing to make this happen - the economic benefits occur elsewhere.
My alternatives are either a. wages that allow people who are producing for international markets to also act as consumers in those markets, or b. that the resources of land, labor, and energy be dedicated to local markets, so that they can afford to buy the goods they produce and sell them within their communities. The internationalization of labor (which allows capital to move across borders, but not people) means that the cheapness of local productivity benefits the multinational, and the good which are the product benefit the target markets of the multinational: the multinationals (or the contractors who serve it) are able to buy up resources and infrastructure to make it impossible to maintain a local economy. Mexico is a good example of this: certain regions have kept artisan industry (not crafts, but things like household goods, dental equipment, small mechanical goods) thriving, and these regions have less real poverty than maquiladora regions. I would prefer to stay in the Yucatan rather than Juarez or Tamalipas any day.
Holding a "candle to the dark" would consist of employing adults who are past school age to work at wages which would allow them to send their children to school. That isn't happening.
And absent multinational labor, local economies exist for local markets.
That they are exploiting a bad situation, even if they are acting as the lesser of evils, doesn't keep it from being a bad situations. Your claim is essentially that it is better to be a good slaveholder than to oppose slavery.
I have to absolutely confirm what you say regarding the destructiveness of replacing diverse cultivation of food-crops for local markets with the cultivation of cash crops for trade on the health of developing areas. Members of my family (we are from South America) have been involved in public-information and agricultural cooperative efforts to reintroduce diversity and local-focus into agriculture for just this very reason: depending on trade, especially international trade, for basics such as food overlooks the sensitivity to externalities like poor infrastructure, corruption, and the division of interest between large cash-crop agricultural interests and producers for local markets(agribusiness is concerned about making money, and cash-poor local markets don't offer maximum bang-for-the-buck; they take local lands and produce for global markets, and the 'trickle-down' in terms of wages is miniscule). In the areas where we are able, with government help and, frankly, some outright takeovers of agribusiness-owned land, to reintroduce the cultivation of local crops, hunger decreased, local trade blossomed, and the mass migration to the capital city was checked.
P(2h)+ P(2t)=P(h+t)
Which is to say that, given two coin tosses, your odds of splitting the results is the same as your odds of having the same result twice.
Yeah, we needn't bother ourselves at all, things will just work themselves out.