Want to know why Australians pay so much more for imported goods? It's because Australians are willing to pay more. If Australians just stopped buying overpriced foreign goods, the manufacturers would start lowering prices. But whinging about the problem is never going to fix it.
"I don't think Stargate is suffering because there are two SG shows. I think it's suffering because it's been around for so long."
Stargate is suffering because it's just a knockoff of those original Star Trek episodes where the crew encounters a planet that happens to represent a static civilization. IIRC, TOS had three such episodes in its entire run, and that was too many. Stargate has been running the gimmick into the ground nearly every episodes for nine seasons, trying to justify it by tossing in guest spots by evil galactic overlors. Of course, there we also the episodes about the replicators, which amounted to almost two seasons of nothing but knocking off the Borg.
I'm not sure if the Stargate shows are a sign of how hard it is to get decent Sci-Fi produced by mainstream American media outlets, or of how pathetic Sci-Fi fans are for continuing to watch that shit in the first place. Either way, it's pretty sad that we aren't getting something better.
"The company hasn't set a timetable for the product launches of its customers."
Given that current neural interfaces only work worth a damn when surgical implantation is involved, not having a timetable is pretty understandable.
What I really want to know is how these companies plan to avoid bankruptcy in the meanwhile. Of course, given what passes for a success in business in twenty-first century America, maybe they aren't.
"...has anyone thought of the payload size needed to implement an entire virtual machine?"
Why does the payload size matter? A worm/virus can be quite tiny to infect the host machine - and only then does it need to download the rest of its bits.
I'm sure that announcements like this make Steve Jobs really happy that he went with AMD. 64-bit dual core? Hey, if intel can make it on time maybe Apple can launch those new desktops in August.
"The Wine guys worked a decade on cloning the Windows API, and there are still more than enough problems. There is no way Apple can do this."
Open source coders hacking something together in their free time can't hope to compare with the efforts of a well-managed corporate team will millions of dollars at their disposal. Open source coders have failed to do a lot of things over the years that the corporate world has done well - for example, making a free *nix based OS that regular people actually want use and enjoy using. Thousands of GNU/Linux/*BSD developers have failed at that one countless times over the years, when Apple attacked the problem they turned out OS X.
"I can imagine if Apple somehow has pulled this off and is ready to roll it out publicly they must be bracing for the Microsoft blitzkrieg, because they're going to get it."
I really doubt that Apple is too worried - Microsoft's failure to beat a competitor at anything other than OS and Office Suite sales makes it pretty clear that Microsoft can't get a damned thing done well or quickly anymore. Microsoft is to big, too clunky, and too busy dealing with all of the different people and agendas inside to handle a big challenge from outside the company.
"Seriously - is this worth Bruce wasting his time on?"
Since when does the open source community, or its leaders, worry about what's actually worth wasting time on? This sort of nonsense shows what a joke most of the open source community has become -- its leaders are more concerned with persuing vendettas against Windows adoption than actually making open source software better and more approachable to end users.
Why is Sony so damned important? It's not like Sony is the only big Japanese electronics manufacturer. Sony isn't a critical to Japan's...anything. Sony makes entertainment products, and if there's one thing Japan isn't short of, it's companies that make entertainment products.
"...I expect a purchase would be blocked by one or more governments."
Why would any government block Microsoft form purchasing a company that does business in arenas that Microsoft doesn't already, especially when there are numerous competitors worldwide? There's a possibility that the EU or US DOJ might get testy and demand that SCEE/SCEA be divested first to keep Microsoft from controlling the Playstation in Europe and the states, but aside from that, Microsoft buying Sony wouldn't really put Microsoft in a position detrimental to consumers. Even the ability to lock all of Sony's content into Microsoft's media/DRM systems wouldn't matter much, because the vast majority of content industries around the world would still be outside of Microsoft's control, and become even less likely to adopt Microsoft's standards just to spite a competitor.
"We are not afraid to take a risk. With Peter Molyneux you have someone who is able to push the boundaries."
Isn't Molyneaux's whole problem that he gets all of these wild ideas and then fails to actually execute them? In which case is he really pushing boundaries, or just being mediocre?
"Since we know it will need DRM to make the labels happy, that pretty much narrows it down to PlaysForSure WMA."
Do we really know that the record labels are still hung up on DRM? The most potent DRM schemes don't seem to be going over well with consumers, and the DRM-lite found in iTunes isn't doing much, if anything, to stop piracy. When Steve Jobs first went to the music industry about the iTunes store they had been sold on Microsoft's DRM snake oil and he managed to talk them down to a saner solution, sp maybe two years later Larry and Sergei can talk them into going DRM-free. I'm not expecting it to actually happen, but at this point I wouldn't really be surprised if it did.
I don't know the exact numbers but it's less than a dollar in Hollywood-sized volumes. Of course, that adds fast for companies that sell millions of DVDs every year.
"What do you mean by "start reaping huge profits?"
Start reaping huge profits from internet-only movie sales as opposed to losing money when the system is competing with movies delivered on physical media.
They don't want to kill movie downloads - they want to kill physical media and not give consumers a price break. Americans pay far less for movies and music than the rest of the world, and the movie companies would make a hell of a lot more money by narrowing distribution down to a single middleman with no costs for physical media. It would also mean no more movies passed around between friends, shown at parties, schools, etc.. Sure people probably won't pay full price for downloads now, but the service can take a loss for a few years while they work out the bugs, and then Harry Potter six or seven can be released as an internet exclusive, at which point the movie companies start abandoning physical media and start reaping huge profits.
Roomba cockfights sound like a perfect way to not only attract women to gaming, but to do it without distracting them from their God-given task of keeping the floor clean!
There are only a few major theatre chains left in the US, so they could try that approach - unfortunately that would mean incurring huge losses - building and maintain theatres is incredibly expensive - and having to hire a new staff after the theatres' minimum-wage workers all go get new jobs in the interim. And in those few weeks Hollywood could easily rush out the movies to DVD, PPV, and the internet, and probably do just as well as they're doing with the theatrical releases.
Console games have always been buggy - if I had the time I could sit down and write a massive list of all the console games with horrible bugs, even crash bugs, going back to early NES releases. IMHO, finally being able to patch the damned things beats the hell out of paying $50 for a game, not being able to return it, and never being able to do anything with bugs aside from getting used t them.
Sony probably did sell eight million UMD discs - to retailers all over the world, who still have them collecting dust andare now either going to dump them below cost just to get shelf space back, or, if they have the clout to do so, send them right back to Sony.
The author of this piece is using Hotmail's paid whitelisting as an example of why the market doesn't always fix problems because Hotmail users aren't ditching Hotmail. This is logically flawed because the majority of Hotmail users are not customers in the sense that AOL customers are - most Hotmail users are getting the service for free, so they aren't likely to complain about Hotmail's whitelisting policies. AOL is very different - its customers pay a premium for AOL service, and are therefore quite likely to ditch AOL when the service isn't worth the monthly fee; AOL's long decline in subscribers evidences this quite clearly.
People need to stop treating pay-per-email as a market leader trying to shove a bad idea down the collective throat of internet users. AOL is dying - albeit slowly - and AOL users have long been considered the dregs of the internet, not typical users with needs to be catered to. Pay-per-email is just another crappy scheme by AOL to try and survive without having to actually compete by offering quality service at a reasonable price. It won't save AOL, and in the long run, it will be written off as just another crappy idea from a dying tech firm.
You're not really missing much - this is just people in the US Government being pricks. The US Government already has a great relationship with Checkpoint, certifies Checkpoint products for use in classified networks, and Checkpoint products are a common sight in those classified networks of the various US intelligence agencies. Checkpoint taking over Snort wouldn't really change much of anything.
How many businesses are actually using OpenBSD in production anymore? Not counting the people unknowingly using OpenBSD based appliances. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone running production stuff on OpenBSD - at least in part because so many of the OpenBSD teams ideas being adopted by other *nix variants or freely available lockdown scripts.
Maybe the reason OpenBSD isn't getting support from businesses is that the most IT shops never have an OpenBSD box doing anything but acting as someone's pet project in a test lab.
"If they can survive the extremes of air, ocean depth, and heat, why not those of cold and darkness?"
First they have to survive the sudden blast of extreme heat and pressure caused by an asteroid impacting with enough force to send chunks of rock large enough to not burn up on the way out of the atmosphere flying away at speeds greater than escape velocity.
1. Cheap, available readers. Ebook readers have always been too expensive to justify buying one.
2. Overpriced ebooks. It's no secret that paper is the most expensive component of books. Removing paper from the equation should result in a dramatic drop in book prices, but greedy publishers and ebook middlemen have kept prices too high.
3. Too man ebooks are sold with silly DRM systems. I want my ebook DRM to be just like the DRM in iTunes - a perfunctory system that does nothing more than shut up business types who don't know a damned thing about DRM but insist on using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to know why Australians pay so much more for imported goods? It's because Australians are willing to pay more. If Australians just stopped buying overpriced foreign goods, the manufacturers would start lowering prices. But whinging about the problem is never going to fix it.
"I don't think Stargate is suffering because there are two SG shows. I think it's suffering because it's been around for so long."
Stargate is suffering because it's just a knockoff of those original Star Trek episodes where the crew encounters a planet that happens to represent a static civilization. IIRC, TOS had three such episodes in its entire run, and that was too many. Stargate has been running the gimmick into the ground nearly every episodes for nine seasons, trying to justify it by tossing in guest spots by evil galactic overlors. Of course, there we also the episodes about the replicators, which amounted to almost two seasons of nothing but knocking off the Borg.
I'm not sure if the Stargate shows are a sign of how hard it is to get decent Sci-Fi produced by mainstream American media outlets, or of how pathetic Sci-Fi fans are for continuing to watch that shit in the first place. Either way, it's pretty sad that we aren't getting something better.
"The company hasn't set a timetable for the product launches of its customers."
Given that current neural interfaces only work worth a damn when surgical implantation is involved, not having a timetable is pretty understandable.
What I really want to know is how these companies plan to avoid bankruptcy in the meanwhile. Of course, given what passes for a success in business in twenty-first century America, maybe they aren't.
"...has anyone thought of the payload size needed to implement an entire virtual machine?"
Why does the payload size matter? A worm/virus can be quite tiny to infect the host machine - and only then does it need to download the rest of its bits.
I'm sure that announcements like this make Steve Jobs really happy that he went with AMD. 64-bit dual core? Hey, if intel can make it on time maybe Apple can launch those new desktops in August.
"The Wine guys worked a decade on cloning the Windows API, and there are still more than enough problems. There is no way Apple can do this."
Open source coders hacking something together in their free time can't hope to compare with the efforts of a well-managed corporate team will millions of dollars at their disposal. Open source coders have failed to do a lot of things over the years that the corporate world has done well - for example, making a free *nix based OS that regular people actually want use and enjoy using. Thousands of GNU/Linux/*BSD developers have failed at that one countless times over the years, when Apple attacked the problem they turned out OS X.
"I can imagine if Apple somehow has pulled this off and is ready to roll it out publicly they must be bracing for the Microsoft blitzkrieg, because they're going to get it."
I really doubt that Apple is too worried - Microsoft's failure to beat a competitor at anything other than OS and Office Suite sales makes it pretty clear that Microsoft can't get a damned thing done well or quickly anymore. Microsoft is to big, too clunky, and too busy dealing with all of the different people and agendas inside to handle a big challenge from outside the company.
"Seriously - is this worth Bruce wasting his time on?"
Since when does the open source community, or its leaders, worry about what's actually worth wasting time on? This sort of nonsense shows what a joke most of the open source community has become -- its leaders are more concerned with persuing vendettas against Windows adoption than actually making open source software better and more approachable to end users.
"Sony is too important to Japan."
Why is Sony so damned important? It's not like Sony is the only big Japanese electronics manufacturer. Sony isn't a critical to Japan's...anything. Sony makes entertainment products, and if there's one thing Japan isn't short of, it's companies that make entertainment products.
"...I expect a purchase would be blocked by one or more governments."
Why would any government block Microsoft form purchasing a company that does business in arenas that Microsoft doesn't already, especially when there are numerous competitors worldwide? There's a possibility that the EU or US DOJ might get testy and demand that SCEE/SCEA be divested first to keep Microsoft from controlling the Playstation in Europe and the states, but aside from that, Microsoft buying Sony wouldn't really put Microsoft in a position detrimental to consumers. Even the ability to lock all of Sony's content into Microsoft's media/DRM systems wouldn't matter much, because the vast majority of content industries around the world would still be outside of Microsoft's control, and become even less likely to adopt Microsoft's standards just to spite a competitor.
"We are not afraid to take a risk. With Peter Molyneux you have someone who is able to push the boundaries."
Isn't Molyneaux's whole problem that he gets all of these wild ideas and then fails to actually execute them? In which case is he really pushing boundaries, or just being mediocre?
"Since we know it will need DRM to make the labels happy, that pretty much narrows it down to PlaysForSure WMA."
Do we really know that the record labels are still hung up on DRM? The most potent DRM schemes don't seem to be going over well with consumers, and the DRM-lite found in iTunes isn't doing much, if anything, to stop piracy. When Steve Jobs first went to the music industry about the iTunes store they had been sold on Microsoft's DRM snake oil and he managed to talk them down to a saner solution, sp maybe two years later Larry and Sergei can talk them into going DRM-free. I'm not expecting it to actually happen, but at this point I wouldn't really be surprised if it did.
I don't know the exact numbers but it's less than a dollar in Hollywood-sized volumes. Of course, that adds fast for companies that sell millions of DVDs every year.
"What do you mean by "start reaping huge profits?"
Start reaping huge profits from internet-only movie sales as opposed to losing money when the system is competing with movies delivered on physical media.
They don't want to kill movie downloads - they want to kill physical media and not give consumers a price break. Americans pay far less for movies and music than the rest of the world, and the movie companies would make a hell of a lot more money by narrowing distribution down to a single middleman with no costs for physical media. It would also mean no more movies passed around between friends, shown at parties, schools, etc.. Sure people probably won't pay full price for downloads now, but the service can take a loss for a few years while they work out the bugs, and then Harry Potter six or seven can be released as an internet exclusive, at which point the movie companies start abandoning physical media and start reaping huge profits.
Roomba cockfights sound like a perfect way to not only attract women to gaming, but to do it without distracting them from their God-given task of keeping the floor clean!
There are only a few major theatre chains left in the US, so they could try that approach - unfortunately that would mean incurring huge losses - building and maintain theatres is incredibly expensive - and having to hire a new staff after the theatres' minimum-wage workers all go get new jobs in the interim. And in those few weeks Hollywood could easily rush out the movies to DVD, PPV, and the internet, and probably do just as well as they're doing with the theatrical releases.
Console games have always been buggy - if I had the time I could sit down and write a massive list of all the console games with horrible bugs, even crash bugs, going back to early NES releases. IMHO, finally being able to patch the damned things beats the hell out of paying $50 for a game, not being able to return it, and never being able to do anything with bugs aside from getting used t them.
Sony probably did sell eight million UMD discs - to retailers all over the world, who still have them collecting dust andare now either going to dump them below cost just to get shelf space back, or, if they have the clout to do so, send them right back to Sony.
The author of this piece is using Hotmail's paid whitelisting as an example of why the market doesn't always fix problems because Hotmail users aren't ditching Hotmail. This is logically flawed because the majority of Hotmail users are not customers in the sense that AOL customers are - most Hotmail users are getting the service for free, so they aren't likely to complain about Hotmail's whitelisting policies. AOL is very different - its customers pay a premium for AOL service, and are therefore quite likely to ditch AOL when the service isn't worth the monthly fee; AOL's long decline in subscribers evidences this quite clearly.
People need to stop treating pay-per-email as a market leader trying to shove a bad idea down the collective throat of internet users. AOL is dying - albeit slowly - and AOL users have long been considered the dregs of the internet, not typical users with needs to be catered to. Pay-per-email is just another crappy scheme by AOL to try and survive without having to actually compete by offering quality service at a reasonable price. It won't save AOL, and in the long run, it will be written off as just another crappy idea from a dying tech firm.
You're not really missing much - this is just people in the US Government being pricks. The US Government already has a great relationship with Checkpoint, certifies Checkpoint products for use in classified networks, and Checkpoint products are a common sight in those classified networks of the various US intelligence agencies. Checkpoint taking over Snort wouldn't really change much of anything.
How many businesses are actually using OpenBSD in production anymore? Not counting the people unknowingly using OpenBSD based appliances. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone running production stuff on OpenBSD - at least in part because so many of the OpenBSD teams ideas being adopted by other *nix variants or freely available lockdown scripts.
Maybe the reason OpenBSD isn't getting support from businesses is that the most IT shops never have an OpenBSD box doing anything but acting as someone's pet project in a test lab.
Does anyone else spot a little bit of irony in a show titled "Futurama" being shown on network television before moving on to non-obsolete formats?
"If they can survive the extremes of air, ocean depth, and heat, why not those of cold and darkness?"
First they have to survive the sudden blast of extreme heat and pressure caused by an asteroid impacting with enough force to send chunks of rock large enough to not burn up on the way out of the atmosphere flying away at speeds greater than escape velocity.
1. Cheap, available readers. Ebook readers have always been too expensive to justify buying one.
2. Overpriced ebooks. It's no secret that paper is the most expensive component of books. Removing paper from the equation should result in a dramatic drop in book prices, but greedy publishers and ebook middlemen have kept prices too high.
3. Too man ebooks are sold with silly DRM systems. I want my ebook DRM to be just like the DRM in iTunes - a perfunctory system that does nothing more than shut up business types who don't know a damned thing about DRM but insist on using it.