> the context of the use "Redistributions of source code" > makes it clear that it means redistributions of the > material covered by the copyright,...which cannot possibly include the modifications made afterward.
We're experiencing a crunch. The old way of distributing movies and music is simply not going to survive much longer, so the people who depend on that way for their paychecks are panicking. They don't have to worry about their reputation ten years from now, so they're going to squeeze the consumer for every cent.
This process increases the pressure on the inchoative industry that will replace them. The more they squeeze, the more the consumer begs for an alternative, and the more that consumer will pay for the alternative when it arrives. (A common myth is that this will make the alternative arrive faster; what actually happens is that the alternative is released earlier when it is still incomplete and unreliable. The average consumer doesn't quite know the difference, but those of us who build these technologies do.)
Over time, the consumers end up paying roughly the same amount. Individual consumers may pay more, but not much more. If the industry didn't squeeze so hard, it would keep more customers and continue making money for a longer time - but less of it. Meanwhile, the alternative would still arrive, but consumers wouldn't flock to it and it wouldn't command as high a price.
In twenty years, the result - being more or less inevitable - will be roughly the same. All the media conglomerates are doing right now is driving themselves out of business faster, and arranging for the earliest alternative technology companies to get rich. The consumer will end up with the same end result, so I tend to view the transfer of wealth to the alternative technology companies as a net win overall.
It's sort of like the alternative O/S situation we had when Red Hat got massive. People who would otherwise have bought Microsoft products bought Red Hat instead. They still spent the same amount of money overall, but the Red Hat consumers got more for their investment. Companies that wouldn't have bought anything bought Red Hat. In the end, we got the scenario we have today: Linux has pretty much gotten where it's going to go, Microsoft is still the dominant force with no signs of failure in the near future, and the Mac is slowly carving a swath out of both. In the next couple years, this will stabilise, and we'll have that O/S market for the next twenty years. Even if there had been no Red Hat, things would have ended up very much the same way. Linux was a disruptive technology, but Red Hat was not in any way disruptive - just a momentary blip on the radar.
The media know that something disruptive is about to break. They don't know what. They don't know when. They just know it's all about to fall over and die, so they're grabbing all they can carry before they have to desert the sinking ship.
Slashdot is biased - heavily against large corporate structures which make scads of money, and heavily for small grassroots rebels which produce free products and services. They pick and choose the articles that best illustrate the worldview they think is important.
However, EVERY media source does this. If you go to MSNBC, you find pretty much the opposite; the small grassroots rebels are either ignored or painted as dangerous, and the large corporate structures are hailed as models of success and stability.
So what you need isn't one place that has no bias, but a collection of places that accurately balance out one another's bias. Slashdot is a great balancer for corporate-friendly media sources, but if you throw out the corporate-friendly sources you just end up unbalanced in the other direction.
I see at least one glaring flaw in the reasoning. The author states that redistribution of modified source code is a distribution of source code and hence it must be distributed under those restrictions.
But redistribution of unrelated source code is also a distribution of source code. Why stop at applying the license to source code written explicitly to extend the licensed code? You could extend it to source code written by anyone using the licensed code, whether their new code interacts with the licensed code or not. In fact, if you interpret the license literally, you could extend the license to any and all source code everywhere - even if the author never agreed to the license. It doesn't say "any distribution of THIS source code", it says "any distribution of source code". That could mean any source code by anyone, anywhere in the world! This license actually out-virals the GPL, by requiring everyone everywhere to release all of their code under the BSD license... even if they don't know it!
Of course, it would be patently absurd to suggest that the license applies in this way, yet this is precisely the sort of argument the author uses. The ambiguity of the phrase "any distribution of source code" is the focal point of his premise, but it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the license applies only to redistribution of the code that already contains it. The argument is nothing more than an exercise in mental masturbation.
I love Office 2007, and think it's one of the greatest interfaces I've seen in the last decade.
But since I work at Microsoft, I *would* think that, wouldn't I? So here's a concrete example. I think this rocks. You can make up your own mind.
I often build PowerPoint slide decks (I will refrain from making excuses for this; I have my reasons). I rough out a group of slides, then tweak them until they look good. In PowerPoint 2003, the way that worked was I would save the slides, then apply different styles until I found one I liked. On a large slide deck, each of these changes might take a minute or more.
In PowerPoint 2007, styles are visually applied when you hover. This is great, because it only applies to the slides you can see, which is a lot faster. So instead of applying two dozen different styles at a minute or more each, I hover over the style I'm considering and see whether it looks good. Once I see one I like, I click and apply it. The time drops massively from a 45 minute exercise to a 90 second experiment.
It doesn't take a lot of little things like this to start adding up. Office 2007 is full of them. Everything I do in Office is easier and faster and more intuitive. If you work with Office frequently, it's fantastic. If you use Office for an hour a month, and you don't really do much with it... well, you're probably not going to get anything really noticeable out of the upgrade.
I think Nintendo is more likely to envision a future where the hardcore gamer is locked up in the den with an XBox console, while the rest of the family are out in the front room playing the Wii. Sony and Microsoft are pandering more and more to an ever more freakish hardcore demographic, and that demographic is vastly outnumbered by the casual gamer. Nintendo has the only console profitable at launch, so any slow start they may experience will be more than made up in volume. I think they're okay with being the second console in the house, even if it's also the one that isn't the center of attention. Profit is profit, after all.
Besides, Sony and Microsoft are polishing a console model that is nearly finished, but Nintendo has a whole new thing that's still rough and untested. It may be uncertain, but DAMN is it exciting. What hardcore gamer isn't going to want the first motion-sensing controller that doesn't suck rocks?
If a plumber screws up my plumbing, my pipes leak. I call him back out and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If an electrician screws up my wiring, my breakers trip. I call him back out and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If a mechanic screws up my car, it stops running. I have it towed back to him and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If a UNIX administrator screws up my server, it doesn't work right. I call him back and point at it. He tells me that he isn't liable for any damages and I have to pay an elevated hourly rate for emergency service with a four-hour minimum for coming out in the first place.
Yeah, I'd say that's pretty different.
Basically, the downside of a bad sysadmin is simply massive. I'm already not willing to take that risk when there's no real alternative. Why would I choose that risk over a smaller risk? Sure, the upside is great, but the upside of WHS is comparable to the upside of a homegrown solution - and it doesn't have a downside anywhere near as large.
Sometimes, the low-income person looks at the high-income person and says "there is no good reason why I can't do that just as well". If he's resourceful and assertive about it, he can put himself in the path of an oncoming opportunity and latch on. Then he moves up the ladder and may actually surpass his inspiration.
What a lot of people forget is that nothing causes people to be poor. Poverty is the default state. If you do absolutely nothing, you will be poor. This is not a problem, it's just the way things are.
And income equality is a stupid yardstick. Inflation and interest keep driving the highest incomes up, but the lowest income is still zero. It will always be zero. The top will always be twice as far away from that as the middle is.
Try this simple experiment: draw a line and place five people on it. Alice is homeless and makes nothing. Bob is poor, and makes $12,000 a year. Christine is middle-class and makes $65,000 a year. Doug is well-off, and makes $120,000 a year. Finally, Elizabeth is rich, and makes $500,000 a year.
Once you've placed these people on the line, proceed to draw another line which is 10% longer. Each person gets a 10% raise: Alice to 0 again, Bob to $13,200, Christine to $71,500, Doug to $132,000, and Elizabeth to $550,000. All of the incomes are still perfectly proportional. They represent the same percentile in the scale. But now that the scale is larger, they're all farther away from one another. The higher they were on the scale to begin with, the farther they've moved.
Each and every one of them is better off in real dollars (except Alice, who is still in the same place), and identical in relative position on the scale, but worse off in terms of inequality. In fact, when the inequality rises, it always means that certain people are better off. It has ZERO CORRELATION to anyone being worse off.
Somehow, I'm not convinced. Ubuntu is still Linux. You can never click a few buttons and be finished with Linux, or indeed with any UNIX derivative. After you spend enough time doing the recurring tweaks, you just stop noticing them, and think it's being finished.
I could be wrong, but I don't think it's likely enough to investigate.
Not rating at all. There's nothing wrong with unrated games, except that most retail outlets won't put them on the shelf. If you don't need to be on a shelf, you don't really need to have a rating, unless it's from someone parents trust. Because then, if they don't know whether they can trust YOU, they have a stamp of approval from someone else.
Self-certification is pointless. If parents trust you, they'll buy your game without it. If they don't, they can't trust your rating either. If the rating doesn't come from an external and believably impartial standards body, it may as well be dropped entirely.
I really like all the things WHS says it will do, because it means I can put my mind on other things. I'm just not really sure how good a job it does.
Many of the things in WHS are things I've been saying I was going to do for years. "I'm going to set up a SAN for all our documents and pictures," I keep saying, "and I'm going to schedule nightly rolling backups for all the PCs in the house." Well, I just don't have time. But if I could go out and pick up a $1500 PC, click a few buttons, and be finished... I'd do it.
My major concern is the same as yours: will it actually do what I want? If it does, great, but what if it doesn't? At least if I buy $1500 worth of commodity hardware and cobble up a home-grown solution, I can make it do SOMETHING. So the hardware+software option looks like it might be a bad deal; I think I'll do better if I buy my own components with an eye toward the manual solution, in the event that the software proves inadequate.
Hey, I may work at Microsoft, but I'm not stupid. Since when is v1.0 of anything trustworthy? Screw the party line, I want my shit to work. I'll give it a fair shake, but if it rolls over and plays dead, it can stay there.
> The only way to achieve these goals and increase > marketshare is to be innovative and look at the > market's unfulfilled potential.
Absolutely. But this is just so backwards of Sony and Microsoft; if you have other business for fallback, you have room to take much bigger and bolder risks. But they don't! They just incrementally improve to get a little more here and a little more there, while Nintendo is left to make the big leaps that change the way we think about games.
There are basically two ways to win any race: run like hell, or trip your opponents. Nintendo is a run-like-hell competitor and always has been. Sony is a trip-the-opponent competitor, although they were run-like-hell not so long ago. And while Microsoft has been a run-like-hell competitor in this game, it's been very much a trip-the-opponent competitor in the past, and I'm still not a hundred percent convinced those days are over. I'd like to see a lot more running out of Microsoft and Sony... and a lot less tripping out of Sony.
> unless there was some sort of lock-in > to worry about
But there *is* lock-in: I can't move songs from the Zune to the iPod or vice-versa. And once I buy the hardware, I'm stuck with that hardware - the people I know who bought iPods frequently had a problem within a couple months, and had to replace them. That's $200. I don't really think that's a lot of money, but I don't exactly wipe my ass with it either.
So when I was thinking about maybe getting an iPod, I waited a couple months to make sure it didn't end up with a problem. And then they announced a new model coming out in a couple months. So I'd wait till that came out, and think about it, and wait to make sure it was stable. And then they'd announce a new model. There was no long-term viability to the iPod, and I really disliked the lack of competition. I hate monopolies. (The irony here is not missed.)
The Zune makes me nervous, too. I don't like to commit to hardware. I like to see something perform in the real world for a few months before I get it. I want to buy it, and have it in my house and working as advertised for five to ten years. So I'm not interested in putting money down on the Zune until next month at the earliest.
And now that the iPhone has changed the playing field, I won't be picking up a Zune unless I'm convinced the iPhone isn't a better deal. If I'm convinced the iPhone IS a better deal, I'll be picking one up around September. And I'm somewhat less fussy about phones, which I expect to have hanging around for two to three years, so the iPhone even has a lower bar to meet than the Zune does. Right now, I'm betting on the iPhone, but the fat lady hasn't sung yet.
> I'm still not sure why a conversation about > the marketing of the iPod took a turn towards > discussing the merits of the Zune.
You'd have to ask the person who complained that nobody was even talking about the Zune. It wasn't me.
> I'm not sure exactly where the line should > be drawn, but I think that matters concerning > your current employer are certainly still > behind it.
I think the judgment call is primarily around how much it affects your decision making. I don't work for Microsoft; I work for a contract agency. That contract agency is nationwide and works with pretty much every major player in the tech industry. They work with Microsoft. They work with Google. They work with Nintendo. They work with Apple. They work with RealNetworks. But these associations don't drive my decisions.
It's not reasonable to expect that I should disclose working for a contract agency that works with Nintendo when I say that Nintendo is probably going to outperform Sony in the console wars this round. I have never actually worked at Nintendo. I don't have any involvement with that part of my contract agency. And I don't think anyone would argue about that.
So when I work at a company like Microsoft, which is huge and does hundreds of different things, I don't really see the difference. Microsoft has a team that designed and produced the Zune, but I don't have anything to do with that team. I don't even know where that team is or who's on it. Working at Microsoft doesn't bias me toward the Zune, because it doesn't alter my understanding of the Zune in any practical sense.
Working on the Vista team instead of the Zune team, there's no realistic difference from working at RealNetworks on digital media instead of at WildTangent on casual games. Not only are the two not communicating, their jobs are so fundamentally dissimilar that the idea of disclosing "I work at a company in the same geographic region" is simply absurd. It's like saying you work across the street from a company, or that you live in the same neighborhood with someone who works at a company, or that you drive past that company on the way to your local grocery store. It's not even remotely sensible.
Microsoft is not a cult. It's a business. We do not have any set of overriding beliefs that drive our d
Pfft, I miss Crystal Pepsi *and* preferred new Coke to classic. The market failed me.
I think the PS3 faces a few problems. First, they have this bundled Blu-Ray thing which is by no means a must-buy for everyone, but which every PS3 owner... well, must buy. Second, largely because of the first factor, their price point is much higher. Third, the architecture is simply less convenient for developers; it's not similar enough to the PS2 that you get a leg-up from history, and it's not similar to anything else either.
But I think Sony is a smart company that will work like hell to resolve those problems. And I think they want to own the market. I think they'll get more and more desperate until they start taking back market share.
Nintendo, I think, is smarter than that. They've said "this is a huge market; we can get along just fine with a piece of it; and look, there's this massive market segment (family-friendly games) that almost nobody is serving". I don't think Nintendo is interested in fighting a war. I think they'd defend their territory against encroaching competitors, but I really don't see them trying to push into "hardcore" territory with more than a token effort.
So it's not that I think Nintendo isn't going to compete. I think they're going to compete just fine. But I think Microsoft and Nintendo will participate with one another in the space; both companies seem to respect each other, and are probably willing to cooperate in this endeavour. There's more than enough market for both, and a significant segment is going to play on both fields. The 360 is a great console, but it's not *exciting* like the Wii is.
If I were Sony, I'd be really worried about a Nintendo/Microsoft collaboration. I don't think either of them would feel threatened about that idea, and I think they might very well see a massive opportunity there.
I've been pretty impressed by what I hear about the Wii, but I wouldn't consider it a bigger threat than Sony. From where I sit, it looks like Nintendo are perfectly content to do lots of business without being the market leaders - but Sony seem very fixated on the "being number one" mentality. I'd be inclined to promote Nintendo's competition factor, but I wouldn't start counting them as a threat (they don't seem to feel any need to eliminate competitors), and I think it's a BIG mistake to count Sony out as a threat.
Of course, this could just be a bluff to drive Sony insane with the idea that they aren't even relevant to us anymore.
> I don't think that you expressed your > intended message very well
There's always a question there. Did I not write properly, or did the audience not read properly?
I thought I was pretty fair in my analysis, but the overwhelming response was that I was overlooking how great and popular and successful the iPod was. What's unfair, in my opinion, is to take something that's been out a couple of months and compare it to a mature product's sales figures and popularity. That's a comparison invited by people who don't like competition, and it's simply not rational.
> I don't think that he was dissin' the Zune
I don't either. Why do you mention this? Did you get the impression that I thought he was being derogatory?
> I think that it is not only relevant, but > actually interesting that you worked in > the mobile devices division.
When does it *stop* being relevant? I've worked at or with some thirty to fifty different companies in my career. Chances are, if it's in the IT world, I've got some sort of history with it. When someone brings up processor architectures, do I need to mention that I once worked for Intel back when the 486 was still cutting edge technology?
> The iPhone may or may not be any better > than the existing "smart" phones out there
It can't possibly be worse. I spent eight months working on them in the mobile devices division.
But since I don't work there anymore, disclosure isn't necessary, right? Or do I still have to disclose it just because it impacts my opinion? Can I not say anything, because I have a *negative* opinion of the smartphone? Or do I just have to say "hey, I work at Microsoft" before everything I ever post about anything that Microsoft sells or used to sell or might decide to sell?
> You pipe in singing the Zunes praises...
Yeah, I sure did:
"...every single detractor I have heard about it is a software problem. Lot of problems, to be sure..."
Wow! What massive praise! Especially the conclusion: "Overall, I think Zune made the best choices of where to fail."
Yeah, I'm pimpin' that shit all over the place, boyeeee.
> it would be a stretch to say that your > post was even on-topic.
I was responding to the parent's statement that "you're further reinforcing the idea that "everyone" owns an iPod and nobody owns a Zune". The whole post was about how everyone always talks about how many iPods Apple sells, and that's all you ever hear.
So I said something different, and everyone jumped up my butt. Wow, I guess this is why nobody talks about anything except how many iPods Apple sells. It's simply not socially acceptable.
> The guy says that he was getting > harassed at MS for having an iPod
I get harassed for having a Motorola RAZR instead of a Windows SmartPhone. I also get harassed for wearing a tie instead of some witty t-shirt from an edgy online vendor. I even get harassed for coming in at five instead of showing up at ten. I survive; I explain why I do these things, and most people leave me alone. It's a weak person who can't defend his own choices.
Besides, I'm "the guy with the tie". Everybody knows me. Everybody can find me.
> I think that you would be better off > disclosing that you work for MS when > pimping their products.
I do, when I'm pimping their products. I'm ripping Alex St. John a new one over his letter on Gamasutra about Vista security. Well, I work on Vista. It's sort of important that people know that before I say anything else.
But I wasn't pimping the Zune. I simply said I was eyeing one. I explained why. I never at any time said YOU or ANYONE ELSE should buy one. I never said it was a superior product. In fact, I outright said that *both* the Zune and the iPod were less than ideal, but that the Zune's failures were more acceptable TO ME than the iPod's. And since I have zero involvement with the Zune's development, testing, and support... it really shouldn't have been important whether I worked at Microsoft or not.
And besides, with the iPhone on the way out, screw the Zune. I'd rather carry one device than two any day.
> Other developers do have legitimate needs, > but will now need to do some extra work to > get their applications to work on Vista in > the first place.
I'm going to tell a story about that.
Several years ago, the MFC libraries were updated with a minor change: developers were no longer permitted to combine window styles and control bar styles in the same bit vector. Suddenly, upon installation of this update, many applications lost their toolbars; the control bar constructor was failing, so no control bar was created.
At the time, I worked for a company which produced three products that needed to be fixed as a result. We had all these requests. We tracked down the problem. We found that it was the MFC update causing it. And the response of my development team was that Microsoft had screwed up the MFC update, so we would have to wait for them to patch it.
Meanwhile, I went and looked at MSDN, where I found this little blurb in the documentation for the control bar styles: don't combine them with window styles. Curious, and something of a pack rat, I started going through my back catalog of MSDN CDs. It turns out that this rule had been in the documentation ever since the introduction of the control bar in the first place. For years, our applications had been breaking the rules and getting away with it.
And as soon as the rules changed, we blamed Microsoft. But when I dug into the MFC header files, I discovered something: in this release, for the first time, there was a bit flag that had meaning as both a control bar style and a window style. Previously, the styles had been assigned from opposite ends of the spectrum, delaying the intersection as long as possible - but we had, at last, intersected. The rules had changed because they needed to change. There was no choice.
The fix was easy; literally two lines. Where we used to have "int style = [cbrs flags] | [ws flags]", I simply edited it to "int style = [ws flags]" and added the later line "style = [cbrs flags]" between window and control bar initialisation. Since it was an internal library function, all three of our applications were fixed. We shipped an update.
But meanwhile, rather than track down the real issue, my developers had been telling customers that Microsoft was the problem and only they could fix it. It's very convenient and easy to blame Microsoft. A lot of people would rather do that than their work. I've watched people blame Microsoft to avoid work for fifteen years. I'm rather used to it.
But this? This isn't a developer trying to avoid debugging. This is the CEO and founder of a company trying to avoid running his business. I'm simply stunned.
> People need to get a grip. Piracy isn't going away. > Malware isn't going away. [...] You can only go so > far in countering them before your solutions are > worse than the original problem.
I completely agree with this. The problems of malware and piracy and spam and pr0n and whatever else you want to throw in, these aren't technical problems. These are sociocultural problems. There is no technical solution. At best, we can provide a set of tools that allow you to construct your own solution to suit your own needs, and a set of defaults that will support most people's desired solutions most of the time.
The biggest problem we face is that you can't educate someone who doesn't want to be educated. This is a problem facing both Linux and Windows, and I'd really like to see the two communities around them join forces to solve it.
Slashdot Mirror
Formatting got funky on that post. Should have used "preview". Clarifying the problem portion:
...which cannot possibly include the modifications made afterward. [stuff I added]
> material covered by the copyright, [stuff you said]
> the context of the use "Redistributions of source code" ...which cannot possibly include the modifications made afterward.
> makes it clear that it means redistributions of the
> material covered by the copyright,
The argument is stupid.
> squeeze every last cent out of customers
This is called "capitalism".
It's a good thing.
We're experiencing a crunch. The old way of distributing movies and music is simply not going to survive much longer, so the people who depend on that way for their paychecks are panicking. They don't have to worry about their reputation ten years from now, so they're going to squeeze the consumer for every cent.
This process increases the pressure on the inchoative industry that will replace them. The more they squeeze, the more the consumer begs for an alternative, and the more that consumer will pay for the alternative when it arrives. (A common myth is that this will make the alternative arrive faster; what actually happens is that the alternative is released earlier when it is still incomplete and unreliable. The average consumer doesn't quite know the difference, but those of us who build these technologies do.)
Over time, the consumers end up paying roughly the same amount. Individual consumers may pay more, but not much more. If the industry didn't squeeze so hard, it would keep more customers and continue making money for a longer time - but less of it. Meanwhile, the alternative would still arrive, but consumers wouldn't flock to it and it wouldn't command as high a price.
In twenty years, the result - being more or less inevitable - will be roughly the same. All the media conglomerates are doing right now is driving themselves out of business faster, and arranging for the earliest alternative technology companies to get rich. The consumer will end up with the same end result, so I tend to view the transfer of wealth to the alternative technology companies as a net win overall.
It's sort of like the alternative O/S situation we had when Red Hat got massive. People who would otherwise have bought Microsoft products bought Red Hat instead. They still spent the same amount of money overall, but the Red Hat consumers got more for their investment. Companies that wouldn't have bought anything bought Red Hat. In the end, we got the scenario we have today: Linux has pretty much gotten where it's going to go, Microsoft is still the dominant force with no signs of failure in the near future, and the Mac is slowly carving a swath out of both. In the next couple years, this will stabilise, and we'll have that O/S market for the next twenty years. Even if there had been no Red Hat, things would have ended up very much the same way. Linux was a disruptive technology, but Red Hat was not in any way disruptive - just a momentary blip on the radar.
The media know that something disruptive is about to break. They don't know what. They don't know when. They just know it's all about to fall over and die, so they're grabbing all they can carry before they have to desert the sinking ship.
> I'm talking about the articles
Slashdot is biased - heavily against large corporate structures which make scads of money, and heavily for small grassroots rebels which produce free products and services. They pick and choose the articles that best illustrate the worldview they think is important.
However, EVERY media source does this. If you go to MSNBC, you find pretty much the opposite; the small grassroots rebels are either ignored or painted as dangerous, and the large corporate structures are hailed as models of success and stability.
So what you need isn't one place that has no bias, but a collection of places that accurately balance out one another's bias. Slashdot is a great balancer for corporate-friendly media sources, but if you throw out the corporate-friendly sources you just end up unbalanced in the other direction.
I see at least one glaring flaw in the reasoning. The author states that redistribution of modified source code is a distribution of source code and hence it must be distributed under those restrictions.
But redistribution of unrelated source code is also a distribution of source code. Why stop at applying the license to source code written explicitly to extend the licensed code? You could extend it to source code written by anyone using the licensed code, whether their new code interacts with the licensed code or not. In fact, if you interpret the license literally, you could extend the license to any and all source code everywhere - even if the author never agreed to the license. It doesn't say "any distribution of THIS source code", it says "any distribution of source code". That could mean any source code by anyone, anywhere in the world! This license actually out-virals the GPL, by requiring everyone everywhere to release all of their code under the BSD license... even if they don't know it!
Of course, it would be patently absurd to suggest that the license applies in this way, yet this is precisely the sort of argument the author uses. The ambiguity of the phrase "any distribution of source code" is the focal point of his premise, but it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the license applies only to redistribution of the code that already contains it. The argument is nothing more than an exercise in mental masturbation.
I love Office 2007, and think it's one of the greatest interfaces I've seen in the last decade.
But since I work at Microsoft, I *would* think that, wouldn't I? So here's a concrete example. I think this rocks. You can make up your own mind.
I often build PowerPoint slide decks (I will refrain from making excuses for this; I have my reasons). I rough out a group of slides, then tweak them until they look good. In PowerPoint 2003, the way that worked was I would save the slides, then apply different styles until I found one I liked. On a large slide deck, each of these changes might take a minute or more.
In PowerPoint 2007, styles are visually applied when you hover. This is great, because it only applies to the slides you can see, which is a lot faster. So instead of applying two dozen different styles at a minute or more each, I hover over the style I'm considering and see whether it looks good. Once I see one I like, I click and apply it. The time drops massively from a 45 minute exercise to a 90 second experiment.
It doesn't take a lot of little things like this to start adding up. Office 2007 is full of them. Everything I do in Office is easier and faster and more intuitive. If you work with Office frequently, it's fantastic. If you use Office for an hour a month, and you don't really do much with it... well, you're probably not going to get anything really noticeable out of the upgrade.
There is a big difference between what you would prefer and what you can actually expect to happen in the Real World.
I think Nintendo is more likely to envision a future where the hardcore gamer is locked up in the den with an XBox console, while the rest of the family are out in the front room playing the Wii. Sony and Microsoft are pandering more and more to an ever more freakish hardcore demographic, and that demographic is vastly outnumbered by the casual gamer. Nintendo has the only console profitable at launch, so any slow start they may experience will be more than made up in volume. I think they're okay with being the second console in the house, even if it's also the one that isn't the center of attention. Profit is profit, after all.
Besides, Sony and Microsoft are polishing a console model that is nearly finished, but Nintendo has a whole new thing that's still rough and untested. It may be uncertain, but DAMN is it exciting. What hardcore gamer isn't going to want the first motion-sensing controller that doesn't suck rocks?
> How is this different?
If a plumber screws up my plumbing, my pipes leak. I call him back out and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If an electrician screws up my wiring, my breakers trip. I call him back out and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If a mechanic screws up my car, it stops running. I have it towed back to him and point at it. He fixes it and his insurance pays for any damage.
If a UNIX administrator screws up my server, it doesn't work right. I call him back and point at it. He tells me that he isn't liable for any damages and I have to pay an elevated hourly rate for emergency service with a four-hour minimum for coming out in the first place.
Yeah, I'd say that's pretty different.
Basically, the downside of a bad sysadmin is simply massive. I'm already not willing to take that risk when there's no real alternative. Why would I choose that risk over a smaller risk? Sure, the upside is great, but the upside of WHS is comparable to the upside of a homegrown solution - and it doesn't have a downside anywhere near as large.
The income gap also inspires.
Sometimes, the low-income person looks at the high-income person and says "there is no good reason why I can't do that just as well". If he's resourceful and assertive about it, he can put himself in the path of an oncoming opportunity and latch on. Then he moves up the ladder and may actually surpass his inspiration.
What a lot of people forget is that nothing causes people to be poor. Poverty is the default state. If you do absolutely nothing, you will be poor. This is not a problem, it's just the way things are.
And income equality is a stupid yardstick. Inflation and interest keep driving the highest incomes up, but the lowest income is still zero. It will always be zero. The top will always be twice as far away from that as the middle is.
Try this simple experiment: draw a line and place five people on it. Alice is homeless and makes nothing. Bob is poor, and makes $12,000 a year. Christine is middle-class and makes $65,000 a year. Doug is well-off, and makes $120,000 a year. Finally, Elizabeth is rich, and makes $500,000 a year.
Once you've placed these people on the line, proceed to draw another line which is 10% longer. Each person gets a 10% raise: Alice to 0 again, Bob to $13,200, Christine to $71,500, Doug to $132,000, and Elizabeth to $550,000. All of the incomes are still perfectly proportional. They represent the same percentile in the scale. But now that the scale is larger, they're all farther away from one another. The higher they were on the scale to begin with, the farther they've moved.
Each and every one of them is better off in real dollars (except Alice, who is still in the same place), and identical in relative position on the scale, but worse off in terms of inequality. In fact, when the inequality rises, it always means that certain people are better off. It has ZERO CORRELATION to anyone being worse off.
> I do need somewhere for age 13-17s to start from
> when discussing game demos with their parents.
How about "I'm old enough not to be under parental controls"?
I'll bet you don't even need to market that one.
> Your average *nix admin is going to fix
> things so they never have to bother doing
> so again.
The day I need to be or hire a UNIX admin to run my home network, I will kill myself.
Somehow, I'm not convinced. Ubuntu is still Linux. You can never click a few buttons and be finished with Linux, or indeed with any UNIX derivative. After you spend enough time doing the recurring tweaks, you just stop noticing them, and think it's being finished.
I could be wrong, but I don't think it's likely enough to investigate.
Not rating at all. There's nothing wrong with unrated games, except that most retail outlets won't put them on the shelf. If you don't need to be on a shelf, you don't really need to have a rating, unless it's from someone parents trust. Because then, if they don't know whether they can trust YOU, they have a stamp of approval from someone else.
Self-certification is pointless. If parents trust you, they'll buy your game without it. If they don't, they can't trust your rating either. If the rating doesn't come from an external and believably impartial standards body, it may as well be dropped entirely.
I really like all the things WHS says it will do, because it means I can put my mind on other things. I'm just not really sure how good a job it does.
Many of the things in WHS are things I've been saying I was going to do for years. "I'm going to set up a SAN for all our documents and pictures," I keep saying, "and I'm going to schedule nightly rolling backups for all the PCs in the house." Well, I just don't have time. But if I could go out and pick up a $1500 PC, click a few buttons, and be finished... I'd do it.
My major concern is the same as yours: will it actually do what I want? If it does, great, but what if it doesn't? At least if I buy $1500 worth of commodity hardware and cobble up a home-grown solution, I can make it do SOMETHING. So the hardware+software option looks like it might be a bad deal; I think I'll do better if I buy my own components with an eye toward the manual solution, in the event that the software proves inadequate.
Hey, I may work at Microsoft, but I'm not stupid. Since when is v1.0 of anything trustworthy? Screw the party line, I want my shit to work. I'll give it a fair shake, but if it rolls over and plays dead, it can stay there.
Holy crap, it's PICS all over again! Maybe it will work this time!
Oh, wait, we still live on the same planet.
> The only way to achieve these goals and increase
> marketshare is to be innovative and look at the
> market's unfulfilled potential.
Absolutely. But this is just so backwards of Sony and Microsoft; if you have other business for fallback, you have room to take much bigger and bolder risks. But they don't! They just incrementally improve to get a little more here and a little more there, while Nintendo is left to make the big leaps that change the way we think about games.
There are basically two ways to win any race: run like hell, or trip your opponents. Nintendo is a run-like-hell competitor and always has been. Sony is a trip-the-opponent competitor, although they were run-like-hell not so long ago. And while Microsoft has been a run-like-hell competitor in this game, it's been very much a trip-the-opponent competitor in the past, and I'm still not a hundred percent convinced those days are over. I'd like to see a lot more running out of Microsoft and Sony... and a lot less tripping out of Sony.
> unless there was some sort of lock-in
> to worry about
But there *is* lock-in: I can't move songs from the Zune to the iPod or vice-versa. And once I buy the hardware, I'm stuck with that hardware - the people I know who bought iPods frequently had a problem within a couple months, and had to replace them. That's $200. I don't really think that's a lot of money, but I don't exactly wipe my ass with it either.
So when I was thinking about maybe getting an iPod, I waited a couple months to make sure it didn't end up with a problem. And then they announced a new model coming out in a couple months. So I'd wait till that came out, and think about it, and wait to make sure it was stable. And then they'd announce a new model. There was no long-term viability to the iPod, and I really disliked the lack of competition. I hate monopolies. (The irony here is not missed.)
The Zune makes me nervous, too. I don't like to commit to hardware. I like to see something perform in the real world for a few months before I get it. I want to buy it, and have it in my house and working as advertised for five to ten years. So I'm not interested in putting money down on the Zune until next month at the earliest.
And now that the iPhone has changed the playing field, I won't be picking up a Zune unless I'm convinced the iPhone isn't a better deal. If I'm convinced the iPhone IS a better deal, I'll be picking one up around September. And I'm somewhat less fussy about phones, which I expect to have hanging around for two to three years, so the iPhone even has a lower bar to meet than the Zune does. Right now, I'm betting on the iPhone, but the fat lady hasn't sung yet.
> I'm still not sure why a conversation about
> the marketing of the iPod took a turn towards
> discussing the merits of the Zune.
You'd have to ask the person who complained that nobody was even talking about the Zune. It wasn't me.
> I'm not sure exactly where the line should
> be drawn, but I think that matters concerning
> your current employer are certainly still
> behind it.
I think the judgment call is primarily around how much it affects your decision making. I don't work for Microsoft; I work for a contract agency. That contract agency is nationwide and works with pretty much every major player in the tech industry. They work with Microsoft. They work with Google. They work with Nintendo. They work with Apple. They work with RealNetworks. But these associations don't drive my decisions.
It's not reasonable to expect that I should disclose working for a contract agency that works with Nintendo when I say that Nintendo is probably going to outperform Sony in the console wars this round. I have never actually worked at Nintendo. I don't have any involvement with that part of my contract agency. And I don't think anyone would argue about that.
So when I work at a company like Microsoft, which is huge and does hundreds of different things, I don't really see the difference. Microsoft has a team that designed and produced the Zune, but I don't have anything to do with that team. I don't even know where that team is or who's on it. Working at Microsoft doesn't bias me toward the Zune, because it doesn't alter my understanding of the Zune in any practical sense.
Working on the Vista team instead of the Zune team, there's no realistic difference from working at RealNetworks on digital media instead of at WildTangent on casual games. Not only are the two not communicating, their jobs are so fundamentally dissimilar that the idea of disclosing "I work at a company in the same geographic region" is simply absurd. It's like saying you work across the street from a company, or that you live in the same neighborhood with someone who works at a company, or that you drive past that company on the way to your local grocery store. It's not even remotely sensible.
Microsoft is not a cult. It's a business. We do not have any set of overriding beliefs that drive our d
> OK, maybe you're not old enough
Pfft, I miss Crystal Pepsi *and* preferred new Coke to classic. The market failed me.
I think the PS3 faces a few problems. First, they have this bundled Blu-Ray thing which is by no means a must-buy for everyone, but which every PS3 owner... well, must buy. Second, largely because of the first factor, their price point is much higher. Third, the architecture is simply less convenient for developers; it's not similar enough to the PS2 that you get a leg-up from history, and it's not similar to anything else either.
But I think Sony is a smart company that will work like hell to resolve those problems. And I think they want to own the market. I think they'll get more and more desperate until they start taking back market share.
Nintendo, I think, is smarter than that. They've said "this is a huge market; we can get along just fine with a piece of it; and look, there's this massive market segment (family-friendly games) that almost nobody is serving". I don't think Nintendo is interested in fighting a war. I think they'd defend their territory against encroaching competitors, but I really don't see them trying to push into "hardcore" territory with more than a token effort.
So it's not that I think Nintendo isn't going to compete. I think they're going to compete just fine. But I think Microsoft and Nintendo will participate with one another in the space; both companies seem to respect each other, and are probably willing to cooperate in this endeavour. There's more than enough market for both, and a significant segment is going to play on both fields. The 360 is a great console, but it's not *exciting* like the Wii is.
If I were Sony, I'd be really worried about a Nintendo/Microsoft collaboration. I don't think either of them would feel threatened about that idea, and I think they might very well see a massive opportunity there.
I've been pretty impressed by what I hear about the Wii, but I wouldn't consider it a bigger threat than Sony. From where I sit, it looks like Nintendo are perfectly content to do lots of business without being the market leaders - but Sony seem very fixated on the "being number one" mentality. I'd be inclined to promote Nintendo's competition factor, but I wouldn't start counting them as a threat (they don't seem to feel any need to eliminate competitors), and I think it's a BIG mistake to count Sony out as a threat.
Of course, this could just be a bluff to drive Sony insane with the idea that they aren't even relevant to us anymore.
> I don't think that you expressed your
> intended message very well
There's always a question there. Did I not write properly, or did the audience not read properly?
I thought I was pretty fair in my analysis, but the overwhelming response was that I was overlooking how great and popular and successful the iPod was. What's unfair, in my opinion, is to take something that's been out a couple of months and compare it to a mature product's sales figures and popularity. That's a comparison invited by people who don't like competition, and it's simply not rational.
> I don't think that he was dissin' the Zune
I don't either. Why do you mention this? Did you get the impression that I thought he was being derogatory?
> I think that it is not only relevant, but
> actually interesting that you worked in
> the mobile devices division.
When does it *stop* being relevant? I've worked at or with some thirty to fifty different companies in my career. Chances are, if it's in the IT world, I've got some sort of history with it. When someone brings up processor architectures, do I need to mention that I once worked for Intel back when the 486 was still cutting edge technology?
> The iPhone may or may not be any better
> than the existing "smart" phones out there
It can't possibly be worse. I spent eight months working on them in the mobile devices division.
But since I don't work there anymore, disclosure isn't necessary, right? Or do I still have to disclose it just because it impacts my opinion? Can I not say anything, because I have a *negative* opinion of the smartphone? Or do I just have to say "hey, I work at Microsoft" before everything I ever post about anything that Microsoft sells or used to sell or might decide to sell?
> You pipe in singing the Zunes praises...
Yeah, I sure did:
"...every single detractor I have heard about it is a software problem. Lot of problems, to be sure..."
Wow! What massive praise! Especially the conclusion: "Overall, I think Zune made the best choices of where to fail."
Yeah, I'm pimpin' that shit all over the place, boyeeee.
> it would be a stretch to say that your
> post was even on-topic.
I was responding to the parent's statement that "you're further reinforcing the idea that "everyone" owns an iPod and nobody owns a Zune". The whole post was about how everyone always talks about how many iPods Apple sells, and that's all you ever hear.
So I said something different, and everyone jumped up my butt. Wow, I guess this is why nobody talks about anything except how many iPods Apple sells. It's simply not socially acceptable.
> The guy says that he was getting
> harassed at MS for having an iPod
I get harassed for having a Motorola RAZR instead of a Windows SmartPhone. I also get harassed for wearing a tie instead of some witty t-shirt from an edgy online vendor. I even get harassed for coming in at five instead of showing up at ten. I survive; I explain why I do these things, and most people leave me alone. It's a weak person who can't defend his own choices.
Besides, I'm "the guy with the tie". Everybody knows me. Everybody can find me.
> I think that you would be better off
> disclosing that you work for MS when
> pimping their products.
I do, when I'm pimping their products. I'm ripping Alex St. John a new one over his letter on Gamasutra about Vista security. Well, I work on Vista. It's sort of important that people know that before I say anything else.
But I wasn't pimping the Zune. I simply said I was eyeing one. I explained why. I never at any time said YOU or ANYONE ELSE should buy one. I never said it was a superior product. In fact, I outright said that *both* the Zune and the iPod were less than ideal, but that the Zune's failures were more acceptable TO ME than the iPod's. And since I have zero involvement with the Zune's development, testing, and support... it really shouldn't have been important whether I worked at Microsoft or not.
And besides, with the iPhone on the way out, screw the Zune. I'd rather carry one device than two any day.
So fuck your accusations of bias, asshole.
> Other developers do have legitimate needs,
> but will now need to do some extra work to
> get their applications to work on Vista in
> the first place.
I'm going to tell a story about that.
Several years ago, the MFC libraries were updated with a minor change: developers were no longer permitted to combine window styles and control bar styles in the same bit vector. Suddenly, upon installation of this update, many applications lost their toolbars; the control bar constructor was failing, so no control bar was created.
At the time, I worked for a company which produced three products that needed to be fixed as a result. We had all these requests. We tracked down the problem. We found that it was the MFC update causing it. And the response of my development team was that Microsoft had screwed up the MFC update, so we would have to wait for them to patch it.
Meanwhile, I went and looked at MSDN, where I found this little blurb in the documentation for the control bar styles: don't combine them with window styles. Curious, and something of a pack rat, I started going through my back catalog of MSDN CDs. It turns out that this rule had been in the documentation ever since the introduction of the control bar in the first place. For years, our applications had been breaking the rules and getting away with it.
And as soon as the rules changed, we blamed Microsoft. But when I dug into the MFC header files, I discovered something: in this release, for the first time, there was a bit flag that had meaning as both a control bar style and a window style. Previously, the styles had been assigned from opposite ends of the spectrum, delaying the intersection as long as possible - but we had, at last, intersected. The rules had changed because they needed to change. There was no choice.
The fix was easy; literally two lines. Where we used to have "int style = [cbrs flags] | [ws flags]", I simply edited it to "int style = [ws flags]" and added the later line "style = [cbrs flags]" between window and control bar initialisation. Since it was an internal library function, all three of our applications were fixed. We shipped an update.
But meanwhile, rather than track down the real issue, my developers had been telling customers that Microsoft was the problem and only they could fix it. It's very convenient and easy to blame Microsoft. A lot of people would rather do that than their work. I've watched people blame Microsoft to avoid work for fifteen years. I'm rather used to it.
But this? This isn't a developer trying to avoid debugging. This is the CEO and founder of a company trying to avoid running his business. I'm simply stunned.
> People need to get a grip. Piracy isn't going away.
;)
> Malware isn't going away. [...] You can only go so
> far in countering them before your solutions are
> worse than the original problem.
I completely agree with this. The problems of malware and piracy and spam and pr0n and whatever else you want to throw in, these aren't technical problems. These are sociocultural problems. There is no technical solution. At best, we can provide a set of tools that allow you to construct your own solution to suit your own needs, and a set of defaults that will support most people's desired solutions most of the time.
The biggest problem we face is that you can't educate someone who doesn't want to be educated. This is a problem facing both Linux and Windows, and I'd really like to see the two communities around them join forces to solve it.
And as long as we're dreaming, I'd like a pony.