TFA is quite right - Sony execs have been too full of themselves for too long, and it's hurt them again and again. My favorite arrogant Sony moment was a rather infamous interview that Sony did in boot magazine about how Vaio systems were about to conquer the desktop market, because Sony had realized that Moore's law needed to "be thrown out the window" and consumers really just needed high-margin, overdesigned PCs that did what big manufacturing companies like Sony wanted them too. The new Vaio desktops were then launched, immediately bombed, and within a month of the magazine hitting the stands Sony had publicly announced that it was going to be scaling back its desktop line and being just another PC manufacturer, instead of conquering the world with the Vaio concept.
Earlier this year a report about Google in the Economist claimed that some analysts felt that the high share price of Google was justified simply because they expected Google to end up with a minimum of 1% of the market for all internet distribution of video content. That was before YouTube caught on. Given that YouTube is now in a good position to grab onto a very large chunk of online video sales, and because many of YouTube's customers are young people who can easily be developed into a long-term loyal customer base, I think that 1.5 billion is a steal.
"Thanks for showing your bias submitter. The story stood up on its own without you injecting partisan hackery into the summary."
Thank's for posting a brain-dead response to my submission. My statement about the reversal of usual political roles regarding this issue is in no way biased! It was simply me pointing out that the situation in Maryland is interestingly different from the national situation regarding electronic voting.
"I think what's really going on is that people can see the obvious: the price structure (digital vs. physical medium) is currently way out of whack. You don't save anything by buying the digital version!"
I agree that the pricing is screwed up, but not because it's more than retail. I find that I often would save by purchasing albums on iTunes, as most of the albums I want are $9.99 - but $9.99 is too much to pay for 128kb AAC files. Too many of the albums I purchased with iTunes sound like crap - so I'm done with iTunes until Apple upgrades to losses audio.
This writers seem to be focused on Leave it to Beaver and Dick and Jane concepts of childhood. In the minds of the writers, a childhood that only existed for children in some of Western Europe, the USA and Canada for a portion of the twentieth century is what we should be striving for. This is the childhood of a strange era where the psyches of civilization were ripped apart by two world wars, one of which involved the largest genocide in human history. Following those wars, the children were raised in the shadow of communism, in which the two most murderous states to ever exist (murderous in terms of the number of citizens killed by their governments) were attempting to expand their totalitarian ideals across the globe, creating a cold war that spawned two massive arsenals of nuclear weapons that on at least one occasion were nearly, and quite publicly, pushed the world to the edge of Armageddon.
Now the childhood of that era was not bad - it was certainly an improvement over the child labor that was prevalent in Europe throughout the middle ages and in Europe and the US during the industrial revolution. It was better than the lives of most children in the developing world (the majority of the world's children) are now, or are likely to be any time in the near future. However, it was still an exceptional time in history and should by no means be accepted as a period that should set the norms for childhood.
And also, on what basis do these writers state that children are losing their imaginations? Are they unaware of the adult artists and designers who have re-imagined the video games of their youth into the new books, artwork, clothing, and video games of today? What is it about the imaginings of the video game generation that makes them any less valid than the imaginings of creators like Mister Pullman? I get the impression that these authors are just jerking their proverbial knees and protesting against what they see as a threat to their livelihoods, and hoping to sell a lot of books to British libraries in the process.
(disclaimer - I am singling out the Microsoft/Google approach to China, it is in no way intended to represent the overall efforts of American businesses in China, especially the loathsome actions of Cisco and Yahoo.)
The problem here is that Wikipedia's approach accomplishes nothing - although neither does it compromise the organization's stated principles. Microsoft and Google's approach of censoring on request has still created a raging torrent of information within, into, and out of China, one that the Chinese government can only barely police. Wikipedia's outdated reactionary protest model will not coax China to change anything, after all, China has the resources to churn out competing products with ease. Microsoft and Google are showing China the rest of the world, and giving Chinese dissidents great, albeit limited, tools for proactively attacking totalitarianism.
If you want to impress the MBA crowd with ideas, the ideas need to either earn more money (by increasing productivity for example) or save money (by preventing repetitive motion injuries.). The reason user experiences have gotten so bad is that purchasing decisions are often based on cost - which is why offices are full of uncomfortable chairs, cheap CRT monitors, bland cubicles, and bad software. Whatever you do, find a way to frame it around money. That's all MBA's really worry about.
"Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers."
Just think about it this way - posting garbage like this keeps Zonk off the streets, where he's sit around all day leeching power to code useless PPC linux F/OSS apps on a used toilet-seat iBook in-between bottles of Mad Dog 20/20. Be sure to respond to stories like this, or he might go the way of John Katz, and end up out in the real world inflicting himself upon the rest of us.
I wouldn't expect anything original from any of these guys - aside from realizing that there was a market for high-end action figures, Todd McFarlane hasn't been involved in anything interested since the early to mid 1990's when Spawn was still new and different. RA Salvatore is just a guy who writes the same book over and over, changing the location - his work is so formulaic that he could be replaced by a shell script that added a lot of simple words and fight scenes to anything involving Norse/Germanic mythology. And a pro baseball player who likes MMOs? Any idiot can see that the only thing he'll bring to the picture is a list of rich friends looking to invest money in the next Ion Storm Dallas.
They'll probably manage to sucker a lot of investors out of a lot of cash before they produce one or two crappy derivative titles and go bankrupt - which is probably important to McFarlane, who keeps blowing all his money on baseball memorabilia.
If all you need to do is dump 30 gigs of files to disc (that's only 8 discs!), you're going to spend more time finding and learning to use software than you would just by breaking the files up into disc-sized directories. I've managed backups on everything from individual workstations to massive datacenters, and for my home backups I still just dump stuff to DVDs and external hard discs manually - there just isn't any real need for software that does the job for small, irregular backup jobs.
Given how much energy can be saved by replacing these bulbs, and how little effort and money it takes for people to do so, I propose that the governments of the world apply a sin tax to all incandescent and halogen light bulbs intended for home or office use. Right now the biggest problem CFEs have is that they still cost several times what regular bulbs do up front; especially since some retailers still charge absurd premiums for CFE bulbs. The tax itself would actually save most people money in the long run by lowering electric bills, cutting replacement costs, and helping slow the rise in energy prices by lowering demand.
This is actually an idea I've had for a few years now, but I just don't know how to get it off the ground. Anyone have any suggestions?
"So what should they do? Just not make music for profit? Or, you accept that the artist "deserves" a cut proportional to listeners, but that the "record companies" take "too much". Do you know how difficult, and what a crapshoot it is, to promote an artist?"
Honestly, I just don't give a damn about artists getting screwed over by the major labels. Those labels have one business model - try to sell as many copies of an album as possible, and their contracted "artists" are usually just hoping to hit the jackpot, get rich, and move to California to live out their dreams of an easy life. How many recording artists from the last few decades have kept working hard, year-round, after they got rich? Not many. If those mainstream "artists" get screwed and have to go back to being regular people and earning a living because they got greedy and signed a deal with the devil to handle the heavy lifting while they only work a couple months out of the year, why should I care? Rock and pop artists are rarely great figures producing transcendent works that enhance my life. If 99.9% of the artists on those labels all go bankrupt and have to live the life of a normal person, never getting a gold-plated jacuzzi in Beverly Hills, civilization is in no way harmed.
Record companies are only able to screw people because people let themselves get screwed. I rarely hear classical musicians, jazz musicians, or blues musicians complaining about getting screwed by the major labels - because they spend their lives working and living like normal people instead of just trying to get rich and famous. If more pop and rock "artists" stopped chasing fame and riches and actually spent their lives working they could do just fine without the major labels.
"Guess they didn't learn from the Star Wars debacle."
Do you mean the Star Wars debacle that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales and sold tens of millions of videocassettes and DVDs? If they're going to learn anything from that, it's that pissing off whiny SciFi geeks is an easy way to get free publicity.
"But if their literacy rate is approaching zero, why not teach the kids english alongside their language?"
Because the instructors would have to know English. Africa is full of little farming villages where few people, if any, speak either of the big international languages (English and French). So in many cases, there simply isn't anyone to teach those languages.
ESR doesn't understand a really important part of the F/OSS movement that he really should - namely that F/OSS developers aren't usually in it because they adamantly want the whole world to embrace Open Source. Sure there may be some F/OSS leaders out there like that, but when it comes down to the grunt, the armies of programmers and end-users, most of them just use F/OSS because it works for them. Maybe they can't get the features they want in commercial software, maybe the commercial apps aren't secure or stable enough, or maybe they're just hobbyists who like to play with different operating systems. But overall, the F/OSS community isn't in it to win over the whole world to BSD/GNU/etc. philosophies. Even if some project leaders compromise, even if a lot of Linux/BSD distro managers license some codecs and algorithms and whatever else, it won't make much of a difference unless the software is being designed and tested by people who are designing and testing it with people who aren't F/OSS nerds in mind.
Years ago the Washington Post held a contest to find the best system for storing massive CD collections. There were dozens of traditional shelving systems, notebook systems, etc. The winner skipped all that crap, and instead threw out the cases and slid the discs and inserts into ziploc baggies and kept them alphabetized in plastic storage boxes that conveniently fit under the bed. I recently started using a similar system for my huge CD collection, except that I'm using shoeboxes in a closets.
This would probably scale pretty well - use steel shelving systems from any hardware store, cardboard dividers to create sections for each client, a bunch of plastic boxes, and just affix labels to the top of each bag, and put the archive date right onto the label so that old discs can be quickly purged. You can get ziploc bags in bulk at Costco.
So it does raster graphics, vector graphics and has some innovative features that Illustrator doesn't? As a designer, I might be really interested if this ran on OS X using a Carbon UI - hell, if it's stable (I tried to use inkscape, the bugger crashed every time I tried to load it) I'd even fire up X to run it.
But alas, it's on Linux, and, well, that's just soooo 2001.
"...to undergo some sort of therapy to deal with his anti-social mores as sending out emails saying "you will die in seven days" is pretty sick."
You must not run into teenagers very often - "you will die in seven days" might have been nasty in the Leave-it-to-Beaver" days, but as far as internet nastiness goes, it's quite tame.
Now I actually have a reason to buy a 360! Being able to loaf on my couch and play great boardgames online without messing with my computer could easily be worth buying a $400 game console and paying monthly connection costs plus the costs of the games.
"Do you people actually have 10hrs of spare time you can just sit down and play straight through? Don't you people have to work? Eat? Poo? Spend "quality time" with the wifey?"
If you have a GOOD wife, she'll bring you liquid meals (eliminating the need to poo) and change your catheter bag throughout the match. And she'll do it barefoot.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is quite right - Sony execs have been too full of themselves for too long, and it's hurt them again and again. My favorite arrogant Sony moment was a rather infamous interview that Sony did in boot magazine about how Vaio systems were about to conquer the desktop market, because Sony had realized that Moore's law needed to "be thrown out the window" and consumers really just needed high-margin, overdesigned PCs that did what big manufacturing companies like Sony wanted them too. The new Vaio desktops were then launched, immediately bombed, and within a month of the magazine hitting the stands Sony had publicly announced that it was going to be scaling back its desktop line and being just another PC manufacturer, instead of conquering the world with the Vaio concept.
Earlier this year a report about Google in the Economist claimed that some analysts felt that the high share price of Google was justified simply because they expected Google to end up with a minimum of 1% of the market for all internet distribution of video content. That was before YouTube caught on. Given that YouTube is now in a good position to grab onto a very large chunk of online video sales, and because many of YouTube's customers are young people who can easily be developed into a long-term loyal customer base, I think that 1.5 billion is a steal.
"Thanks for showing your bias submitter. The story stood up on its own without you injecting partisan hackery into the summary."
Thank's for posting a brain-dead response to my submission. My statement about the reversal of usual political roles regarding this issue is in no way biased! It was simply me pointing out that the situation in Maryland is interestingly different from the national situation regarding electronic voting.
"I think what's really going on is that people can see the obvious: the price structure (digital vs. physical medium) is currently way out of whack. You don't save anything by buying the digital version!"
I agree that the pricing is screwed up, but not because it's more than retail. I find that I often would save by purchasing albums on iTunes, as most of the albums I want are $9.99 - but $9.99 is too much to pay for 128kb AAC files. Too many of the albums I purchased with iTunes sound like crap - so I'm done with iTunes until Apple upgrades to losses audio.
How exactly does one Australian newspaper with a circulation of 365,000 (Wikipedia) count as the mainstream media?
Quick, somebody wget the entire site to redistribute as a torrent when they start charging!
This writers seem to be focused on Leave it to Beaver and Dick and Jane concepts of childhood. In the minds of the writers, a childhood that only existed for children in some of Western Europe, the USA and Canada for a portion of the twentieth century is what we should be striving for. This is the childhood of a strange era where the psyches of civilization were ripped apart by two world wars, one of which involved the largest genocide in human history. Following those wars, the children were raised in the shadow of communism, in which the two most murderous states to ever exist (murderous in terms of the number of citizens killed by their governments) were attempting to expand their totalitarian ideals across the globe, creating a cold war that spawned two massive arsenals of nuclear weapons that on at least one occasion were nearly, and quite publicly, pushed the world to the edge of Armageddon.
Now the childhood of that era was not bad - it was certainly an improvement over the child labor that was prevalent in Europe throughout the middle ages and in Europe and the US during the industrial revolution. It was better than the lives of most children in the developing world (the majority of the world's children) are now, or are likely to be any time in the near future. However, it was still an exceptional time in history and should by no means be accepted as a period that should set the norms for childhood.
And also, on what basis do these writers state that children are losing their imaginations? Are they unaware of the adult artists and designers who have re-imagined the video games of their youth into the new books, artwork, clothing, and video games of today? What is it about the imaginings of the video game generation that makes them any less valid than the imaginings of creators like Mister Pullman? I get the impression that these authors are just jerking their proverbial knees and protesting against what they see as a threat to their livelihoods, and hoping to sell a lot of books to British libraries in the process.
"I would like to see wikipedia challenge china to come up with a workable sensorship mechanism for a volunteer online encyclopedia."
I'm pretty sure that it would involve Cisco blocking entire Wikipedia pages based on keywords.
(disclaimer - I am singling out the Microsoft/Google approach to China, it is in no way intended to represent the overall efforts of American businesses in China, especially the loathsome actions of Cisco and Yahoo.)
The problem here is that Wikipedia's approach accomplishes nothing - although neither does it compromise the organization's stated principles. Microsoft and Google's approach of censoring on request has still created a raging torrent of information within, into, and out of China, one that the Chinese government can only barely police. Wikipedia's outdated reactionary protest model will not coax China to change anything, after all, China has the resources to churn out competing products with ease. Microsoft and Google are showing China the rest of the world, and giving Chinese dissidents great, albeit limited, tools for proactively attacking totalitarianism.
If you want to impress the MBA crowd with ideas, the ideas need to either earn more money (by increasing productivity for example) or save money (by preventing repetitive motion injuries.). The reason user experiences have gotten so bad is that purchasing decisions are often based on cost - which is why offices are full of uncomfortable chairs, cheap CRT monitors, bland cubicles, and bad software. Whatever you do, find a way to frame it around money. That's all MBA's really worry about.
"Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers."
Just think about it this way - posting garbage like this keeps Zonk off the streets, where he's sit around all day leeching power to code useless PPC linux F/OSS apps on a used toilet-seat iBook in-between bottles of Mad Dog 20/20. Be sure to respond to stories like this, or he might go the way of John Katz, and end up out in the real world inflicting himself upon the rest of us.
I wouldn't expect anything original from any of these guys - aside from realizing that there was a market for high-end action figures, Todd McFarlane hasn't been involved in anything interested since the early to mid 1990's when Spawn was still new and different. RA Salvatore is just a guy who writes the same book over and over, changing the location - his work is so formulaic that he could be replaced by a shell script that added a lot of simple words and fight scenes to anything involving Norse/Germanic mythology. And a pro baseball player who likes MMOs? Any idiot can see that the only thing he'll bring to the picture is a list of rich friends looking to invest money in the next Ion Storm Dallas.
They'll probably manage to sucker a lot of investors out of a lot of cash before they produce one or two crappy derivative titles and go bankrupt - which is probably important to McFarlane, who keeps blowing all his money on baseball memorabilia.
If all you need to do is dump 30 gigs of files to disc (that's only 8 discs!), you're going to spend more time finding and learning to use software than you would just by breaking the files up into disc-sized directories. I've managed backups on everything from individual workstations to massive datacenters, and for my home backups I still just dump stuff to DVDs and external hard discs manually - there just isn't any real need for software that does the job for small, irregular backup jobs.
Given how much energy can be saved by replacing these bulbs, and how little effort and money it takes for people to do so, I propose that the governments of the world apply a sin tax to all incandescent and halogen light bulbs intended for home or office use. Right now the biggest problem CFEs have is that they still cost several times what regular bulbs do up front; especially since some retailers still charge absurd premiums for CFE bulbs. The tax itself would actually save most people money in the long run by lowering electric bills, cutting replacement costs, and helping slow the rise in energy prices by lowering demand.
This is actually an idea I've had for a few years now, but I just don't know how to get it off the ground. Anyone have any suggestions?
"So what should they do? Just not make music for profit? Or, you accept that the artist "deserves" a cut proportional to listeners, but that the "record companies" take "too much". Do you know how difficult, and what a crapshoot it is, to promote an artist?"
Honestly, I just don't give a damn about artists getting screwed over by the major labels. Those labels have one business model - try to sell as many copies of an album as possible, and their contracted "artists" are usually just hoping to hit the jackpot, get rich, and move to California to live out their dreams of an easy life. How many recording artists from the last few decades have kept working hard, year-round, after they got rich? Not many. If those mainstream "artists" get screwed and have to go back to being regular people and earning a living because they got greedy and signed a deal with the devil to handle the heavy lifting while they only work a couple months out of the year, why should I care? Rock and pop artists are rarely great figures producing transcendent works that enhance my life. If 99.9% of the artists on those labels all go bankrupt and have to live the life of a normal person, never getting a gold-plated jacuzzi in Beverly Hills, civilization is in no way harmed.
Record companies are only able to screw people because people let themselves get screwed. I rarely hear classical musicians, jazz musicians, or blues musicians complaining about getting screwed by the major labels - because they spend their lives working and living like normal people instead of just trying to get rich and famous. If more pop and rock "artists" stopped chasing fame and riches and actually spent their lives working they could do just fine without the major labels.
"Guess they didn't learn from the Star Wars debacle."
Do you mean the Star Wars debacle that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales and sold tens of millions of videocassettes and DVDs? If they're going to learn anything from that, it's that pissing off whiny SciFi geeks is an easy way to get free publicity.
"But if their literacy rate is approaching zero, why not teach the kids english alongside their language?"
Because the instructors would have to know English. Africa is full of little farming villages where few people, if any, speak either of the big international languages (English and French). So in many cases, there simply isn't anyone to teach those languages.
porn.
ESR doesn't understand a really important part of the F/OSS movement that he really should - namely that F/OSS developers aren't usually in it because they adamantly want the whole world to embrace Open Source. Sure there may be some F/OSS leaders out there like that, but when it comes down to the grunt, the armies of programmers and end-users, most of them just use F/OSS because it works for them. Maybe they can't get the features they want in commercial software, maybe the commercial apps aren't secure or stable enough, or maybe they're just hobbyists who like to play with different operating systems. But overall, the F/OSS community isn't in it to win over the whole world to BSD/GNU/etc. philosophies. Even if some project leaders compromise, even if a lot of Linux/BSD distro managers license some codecs and algorithms and whatever else, it won't make much of a difference unless the software is being designed and tested by people who are designing and testing it with people who aren't F/OSS nerds in mind.
"Wow, and just one more year and it will certainly break into mainstream desktop usage"
Only if entertainment centers count as desks, and then DVRs can count as Linux desktops.
Years ago the Washington Post held a contest to find the best system for storing massive CD collections. There were dozens of traditional shelving systems, notebook systems, etc. The winner skipped all that crap, and instead threw out the cases and slid the discs and inserts into ziploc baggies and kept them alphabetized in plastic storage boxes that conveniently fit under the bed. I recently started using a similar system for my huge CD collection, except that I'm using shoeboxes in a closets.
This would probably scale pretty well - use steel shelving systems from any hardware store, cardboard dividers to create sections for each client, a bunch of plastic boxes, and just affix labels to the top of each bag, and put the archive date right onto the label so that old discs can be quickly purged. You can get ziploc bags in bulk at Costco.
So it does raster graphics, vector graphics and has some innovative features that Illustrator doesn't? As a designer, I might be really interested if this ran on OS X using a Carbon UI - hell, if it's stable (I tried to use inkscape, the bugger crashed every time I tried to load it) I'd even fire up X to run it.
But alas, it's on Linux, and, well, that's just soooo 2001.
"...to undergo some sort of therapy to deal with his anti-social mores as sending out emails saying "you will die in seven days" is pretty sick."
You must not run into teenagers very often - "you will die in seven days" might have been nasty in the Leave-it-to-Beaver" days, but as far as internet nastiness goes, it's quite tame.
Now I actually have a reason to buy a 360! Being able to loaf on my couch and play great boardgames online without messing with my computer could easily be worth buying a $400 game console and paying monthly connection costs plus the costs of the games.
The sad part is, I'm being completely serious.
"Do you people actually have 10hrs of spare time you can just sit down and play straight through? Don't you people have to work? Eat? Poo? Spend "quality time" with the wifey?"
If you have a GOOD wife, she'll bring you liquid meals (eliminating the need to poo) and change your catheter bag throughout the match. And she'll do it barefoot.