If this were true, it is more damning than you think. The whole climate change initiative hinges on the elimination of one gas--carbon dioxide. If it were conclusively found that CO2 is *not* responsible for the warming trend, it effectively pops the Climate Change Syndicate's hot air balloon.
Ever read Starship Troopers? No, not watched, but read the book. One of the themes of the book is similar to what you say. The author explains using a dog metaphor.
"Did you housebreak him?"
"Err . . . yes, sir. Eventually." It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.
"Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?"
"What? Why, he didn't know any better; he was just a puppy.
"What did you do?"
"Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him."
"Surely he could not understand your words?"
"No, but he could tell I was sore at him!"
"But you just said that you were not angry."
Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up. "No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn't he?"
"Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn't know that he was doing wrong. Yet you indicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?"
I didn't then know what a sadist was â" but I knew pups. "Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he's in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won't do it again â" and you have to do it right away! It doesn't do a bit of good to punish him later; you'll just confuse him. Even so, he won't learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it's a waste of breath just to scold him." Then I added, "I guess you've never raised pups."
"Many. I'm raising a dachshund now â" by your methods. Let's get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class . . . and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret â" in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage....
They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning â" a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished â" and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation â" 'paroled' in the jargon of the times.
"This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called 'juvenile delinquent' becomes an adult criminal â" and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You â" "
He had singled me out again. "Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken â" whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead....
Maybe not, but it really shows an unfulfilled need. Wouldn't it be cool if there were an app that did the same for a legal service such as Netflix? Maybe we should stop trying to demonize the way people use technology and adopt similar uses for legal activity. It just shows that consumers have and want greater control of their media. Content providers can adopt and change, or suffer at the hands of consumer ingenuity.
Not only that, but why are we trying to resuscitate the dying corpse of print media? If you got 10-20 min. This is a really great article on this subject. Elevator speech of the article: We don't need newspapers, we need journalism. There are opportunities to be had by these businesses, but they are unwilling to adapt and embrace them. **AA easily fit this same situation.
This is mostly because throughout my schooling I have been taught that that one book, The Book, is all I need to pass.
I think the reason is bit more than that. Wikipedia makes information readily accessible. It's primary search engine (not itself) is the most used search--Google. Access to it is free and not encumbered by an interface that obfuscates information more than it reveals.
If nothing else, so called 'reputable' and 'accurate' sources could increase their utility by simply making the information available in an easy way.
The collective information and knowledge of humanity is incredible--it's just not readily accessible-- and that is why people use Wikipedia as a primary source.
If you build it, they will come. I share the same frustration with computers too. I get what I'm thinking is a great computer (hardware wise) and then the OS comes so overbloated to render it equally as fast my 486SX computer running Windows 95. Thanks. For once can we evolve to makes things faster, not use all available resources that make inevitably slower.
Care to justify your position? Market segmentation is an essential part of a free market. It isn't just firms that create this segmentation--it's something intrinsic to human order. We naturally group ourselves according to our demographics. Then, products are created and segmented to either satisfy or create demand for those demographics. Products are priced according to what those segments will bear. What you propose, on the other hand, is outright socialism where everyone has equal access and price whether the product is ever consumed or not--not a very effective, efficient, nor sustainable means of using resources.
And I get mad that I can drive two hours to the Mexican border and pay less for a pineapple. Isn't that so unfair?
Products are priced according to what the market will bear--that's what this whole thread is about. If you find that you are paying 1 euro for a 1 dollar game, perhaps you should (as you claim) vote with your euro and not purchase the game and stop complaining.
In which case, Steam gets mad sales like these, both Steam and consumer walk away happy. I've been using Steam to purchase games for quite a while now and am a very happy customer. Most of the time I wait until a game hits the 'bargain bin'. For the price I pay, I can't understand what there is to gripe about...
See, this is where the fanboys fall down frothing at the mouth. For starters, I have to be able to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Now, I have to use those because all my peers throughout the industry are going to be using those same exact tools. When a firm hires me to do work for them, they expect me to be able to use the defacto tools for the trade.
Next up, games. I can run a TF2 dedicated server on Linux, but to actually play requires a Windows machine.
Development. Sorry, no substitute for XCode on Linux. If I'm writing apps for OS X or the iPhone, guess what?, you need OS X and an iPhone simulator. If I'm developing a.Net app, you're SOL too as MonoDevelop is just not up to par with VS.
You substitute cranks are all the same. You see some one complain about Linux not having the par software, and hold up a supposed equivalent which (most of the time) not only pales in comparison, but is outright inferior to the defacto standard tool.
I don't think they need to. For me (and I'm sure that a lot of consumers would agree), it all comes down to price/value. <flamebait>I personally don't see a lot of value in a Linux desktop, when the software *I* need/want to run won't ever appear on Linux--not any time soon at least.</flamebait> But that aside, the reason that I didn't downgrade to Vista was for the same reason. Sure the apps would install and run, but I found performance wanting, so I discarded my free Vista license. Now, here we are with Windows 7. I don't know if I'll be able to score a free (legit) copy of Windows 7, but I will find the price tag for a copy to be a tougher pill to swallow if the same performance problems with certain applications persist.
Maybe I'll be sticking with my Windows XP box and my new Mac Mini for the next few years. We'll see what the future holds for value.
Am I naive in thinking that this insanity has to stop at some point? I don't think the **AA can stem the tide of people discovering and using file sharing, so when will they decide to give up, or better yet, focus its efforts on promoting a new business model? It seems like the spend an awful amount of effort trying to subvert the subversives with little or no net gain. I'm not sure that anything they have done thus far as been remotely effective in combating piracy, so assuming we live in a logical world, wouldn't it behoove them to stop pestering people and try something different???
Why don't they try something different like product bundling. Why not pair it with something everyone enjoys like water. Make some deals to include iTunes codes for a 49 cent download of choice when you buy a bottle of Dasani? Or get an album for free when you buy a 24 pack of Pepsi. The subsidy you get from these other product bundlings would surely generate more revenue than some kid downloading it off the net. There are many ways you can give your stuff away for 'free' and still make some hard cash...
Well, that's where I differ. My interactions with Sears had been few, but that's what makes customer service so important. As a firm, you have to get customer service right every time because you don't know when you're going to get the irregular shopper whose opinions are being formed on very few ( even just one) visits. So if I get a rotten apple on the rare occasion that I do patronize a firm, what incentive do I have to continue to go there?
Interesting anecdote. The wife and I were at a mall and she decided that she wanted to stop by Sears to see about some new bedding. She rifled through the various sheets that they had going, picked out one she liked, and we proceeded to check out. I handed the lady at the checkout stand my credit card which she tried several times to swipe. After those unsuccessful attempts she gave up and handed my card back. I thought it odd that it wasn't reading correctly considering we had just made some purchases with it a few minutes previous, so I asked her if she could manually punch the card number in.
She looked at me as if I were accosting her to do such a thing! She quite reluctantly did so and the purchase went through. It astounded me how poor the whole payment experience was. This experience left an indelible impression that I would not be returning to Sears anymore. If they were going to put up a stink over punching in a credit card number, I would not want to know what they would do if I had a real problem.
Long story, I know, but with all these companies racing to the bottom of 'low price guaranteed!', the biggest differentiator is going to be service. This is why companies like Newegg will always get my business and peer recommendation. I've had some really big problems with them, but in the end they were able to sort things out and make them right. Now if I could only purchase bedding from them...
And therein lies the rub for English speakers. The whole concept of intonation is outright foreign. It was told to me in me in my first Chinese class, "If you aren't going to learn tones, don't bother trying to learn Chinese." As English speakers, we are very lazy listeners because most of our words are phonetically distinct, whereas in Chinese, there are many subtleties in tone that have profound meaning.
If by 'us' you mean/.ers, no I'm not worried, but it's the teaming, mindless masses that accept as default whatever is placed before them. That's what Opera's (and now Mozilla's) hissyfit in the EU is all about with IE. Because people are not *presented* a choice they stick with the Big Blue E.
On the flip side, I do congratulate Microsoft (heresy!) on the post-installation launch of IE 7 where it *asks* you if you want Live Search to be the default or choose from an extensive list of providers.
You bring up an interesting point. It seems that we're approaching territory where the marginal increase in speed really isn't that significant. At this point the need for the greater marginal increase in accuracy would be much more appreciated than speed.
That's why I have a hard time taking *any* of these software companies seriously when the only thing they can brag about is how incremental their speed increases are.
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 1
It comes from an understanding that nothing is forever, that there are some things that are completely out of our direct control, and more importantly, that the life of the game is not expected to last longer than Steam. In ten years we'll all be playing something else--it's OK.
A lot of these deals will pop up on your Steam client when you first start it up. Also, they typically show up with much fanfare on the 'Store' page. I picked up L4D for 50% off on President's Day weekend.
Slashdot Mirror
With this extension you can relive OMG!!! Ponies!!! every day. Just go into the options and change the default style to OMG!!! Ponies!!!
In other news, 94% of Slashdot comments are spam or spam-equivalent.
Oh wait.
If this were true, it is more damning than you think. The whole climate change initiative hinges on the elimination of one gas--carbon dioxide. If it were conclusively found that CO2 is *not* responsible for the warming trend, it effectively pops the Climate Change Syndicate's hot air balloon.
Ever read Starship Troopers? No, not watched, but read the book. One of the themes of the book is similar to what you say. The author explains using a dog metaphor.
"Did you housebreak him?"
"Err . . . yes, sir. Eventually." It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.
"Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?"
"What? Why, he didn't know any better; he was just a puppy.
"What did you do?"
"Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him."
"Surely he could not understand your words?"
"No, but he could tell I was sore at him!"
"But you just said that you were not angry."
Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up. "No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn't he?"
"Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn't know that he was doing wrong. Yet you indicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?"
I didn't then know what a sadist was â" but I knew pups. "Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he's in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won't do it again â" and you have to do it right away! It doesn't do a bit of good to punish him later; you'll just confuse him. Even so, he won't learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it's a waste of breath just to scold him." Then I added, "I guess you've never raised pups."
"Many. I'm raising a dachshund now â" by your methods. Let's get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class . . . and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret â" in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage. ...
They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning â" a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished â" and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation â" 'paroled' in the jargon of the times.
"This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called 'juvenile delinquent' becomes an adult criminal â" and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You â" "
He had singled me out again. "Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken â" whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. ...
Mr. Dubois then turned to me. "I told you tha
Maybe not, but it really shows an unfulfilled need. Wouldn't it be cool if there were an app that did the same for a legal service such as Netflix? Maybe we should stop trying to demonize the way people use technology and adopt similar uses for legal activity. It just shows that consumers have and want greater control of their media. Content providers can adopt and change, or suffer at the hands of consumer ingenuity.
Not only that, but why are we trying to resuscitate the dying corpse of print media? If you got 10-20 min. This is a really great article on this subject. Elevator speech of the article: We don't need newspapers, we need journalism. There are opportunities to be had by these businesses, but they are unwilling to adapt and embrace them. **AA easily fit this same situation.
This is mostly because throughout my schooling I have been taught that that one book, The Book, is all I need to pass.
I think the reason is bit more than that. Wikipedia makes information readily accessible. It's primary search engine (not itself) is the most used search--Google. Access to it is free and not encumbered by an interface that obfuscates information more than it reveals.
If nothing else, so called 'reputable' and 'accurate' sources could increase their utility by simply making the information available in an easy way.
The collective information and knowledge of humanity is incredible--it's just not readily accessible-- and that is why people use Wikipedia as a primary source.
If you build it, they will come. I share the same frustration with computers too. I get what I'm thinking is a great computer (hardware wise) and then the OS comes so overbloated to render it equally as fast my 486SX computer running Windows 95. Thanks. For once can we evolve to makes things faster, not use all available resources that make inevitably slower.
Care to justify your position? Market segmentation is an essential part of a free market. It isn't just firms that create this segmentation--it's something intrinsic to human order. We naturally group ourselves according to our demographics. Then, products are created and segmented to either satisfy or create demand for those demographics. Products are priced according to what those segments will bear. What you propose, on the other hand, is outright socialism where everyone has equal access and price whether the product is ever consumed or not--not a very effective, efficient, nor sustainable means of using resources.
And I get mad that I can drive two hours to the Mexican border and pay less for a pineapple. Isn't that so unfair?
Products are priced according to what the market will bear--that's what this whole thread is about. If you find that you are paying 1 euro for a 1 dollar game, perhaps you should (as you claim) vote with your euro and not purchase the game and stop complaining.
In which case, Steam gets mad sales like these, both Steam and consumer walk away happy. I've been using Steam to purchase games for quite a while now and am a very happy customer. Most of the time I wait until a game hits the 'bargain bin'. For the price I pay, I can't understand what there is to gripe about...
This would be fine if your BIOS chip were a field replaceable part, but mine is soldered to the motherboard itself!
See, this is where the fanboys fall down frothing at the mouth. For starters, I have to be able to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Now, I have to use those because all my peers throughout the industry are going to be using those same exact tools. When a firm hires me to do work for them, they expect me to be able to use the defacto tools for the trade.
Next up, games. I can run a TF2 dedicated server on Linux, but to actually play requires a Windows machine.
Development. Sorry, no substitute for XCode on Linux. If I'm writing apps for OS X or the iPhone, guess what?, you need OS X and an iPhone simulator. If I'm developing a .Net app, you're SOL too as MonoDevelop is just not up to par with VS.
You substitute cranks are all the same. You see some one complain about Linux not having the par software, and hold up a supposed equivalent which (most of the time) not only pales in comparison, but is outright inferior to the defacto standard tool.
<bendsOverForModerationJackOver />
Can Microsoft make an OS cheaper than Linux?
I don't think they need to. For me (and I'm sure that a lot of consumers would agree), it all comes down to price/value. <flamebait>I personally don't see a lot of value in a Linux desktop, when the software *I* need/want to run won't ever appear on Linux--not any time soon at least.</flamebait> But that aside, the reason that I didn't downgrade to Vista was for the same reason. Sure the apps would install and run, but I found performance wanting, so I discarded my free Vista license. Now, here we are with Windows 7. I don't know if I'll be able to score a free (legit) copy of Windows 7, but I will find the price tag for a copy to be a tougher pill to swallow if the same performance problems with certain applications persist.
Maybe I'll be sticking with my Windows XP box and my new Mac Mini for the next few years. We'll see what the future holds for value.
Am I naive in thinking that this insanity has to stop at some point? I don't think the **AA can stem the tide of people discovering and using file sharing, so when will they decide to give up, or better yet, focus its efforts on promoting a new business model? It seems like the spend an awful amount of effort trying to subvert the subversives with little or no net gain. I'm not sure that anything they have done thus far as been remotely effective in combating piracy, so assuming we live in a logical world, wouldn't it behoove them to stop pestering people and try something different???
Why don't they try something different like product bundling. Why not pair it with something everyone enjoys like water. Make some deals to include iTunes codes for a 49 cent download of choice when you buy a bottle of Dasani? Or get an album for free when you buy a 24 pack of Pepsi. The subsidy you get from these other product bundlings would surely generate more revenue than some kid downloading it off the net. There are many ways you can give your stuff away for 'free' and still make some hard cash...
I wouldn't blame Sears as a whole.
Well, that's where I differ. My interactions with Sears had been few, but that's what makes customer service so important. As a firm, you have to get customer service right every time because you don't know when you're going to get the irregular shopper whose opinions are being formed on very few ( even just one) visits. So if I get a rotten apple on the rare occasion that I do patronize a firm, what incentive do I have to continue to go there?
Interesting anecdote. The wife and I were at a mall and she decided that she wanted to stop by Sears to see about some new bedding. She rifled through the various sheets that they had going, picked out one she liked, and we proceeded to check out. I handed the lady at the checkout stand my credit card which she tried several times to swipe. After those unsuccessful attempts she gave up and handed my card back. I thought it odd that it wasn't reading correctly considering we had just made some purchases with it a few minutes previous, so I asked her if she could manually punch the card number in.
She looked at me as if I were accosting her to do such a thing! She quite reluctantly did so and the purchase went through. It astounded me how poor the whole payment experience was. This experience left an indelible impression that I would not be returning to Sears anymore. If they were going to put up a stink over punching in a credit card number, I would not want to know what they would do if I had a real problem.
Long story, I know, but with all these companies racing to the bottom of 'low price guaranteed!', the biggest differentiator is going to be service. This is why companies like Newegg will always get my business and peer recommendation. I've had some really big problems with them, but in the end they were able to sort things out and make them right. Now if I could only purchase bedding from them...
I can't wait till we see the review for #006666 nail polish!
And therein lies the rub for English speakers. The whole concept of intonation is outright foreign. It was told to me in me in my first Chinese class, "If you aren't going to learn tones, don't bother trying to learn Chinese." As English speakers, we are very lazy listeners because most of our words are phonetically distinct, whereas in Chinese, there are many subtleties in tone that have profound meaning.
Assuming she isn't lying about the blank check to begin with, what makes you so sure that she's telling the truth about that?
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
If by 'us' you mean /.ers, no I'm not worried, but it's the teaming, mindless masses that accept as default whatever is placed before them. That's what Opera's (and now Mozilla's) hissyfit in the EU is all about with IE. Because people are not *presented* a choice they stick with the Big Blue E.
On the flip side, I do congratulate Microsoft (heresy!) on the post-installation launch of IE 7 where it *asks* you if you want Live Search to be the default or choose from an extensive list of providers.
One player Baker won't identify 'offered a blank check to replace Google,' she says.
Looking at the ocean of limping or necro-corps, there seemeth to be only one company that has the pocket to stomach carte blanche...
Could you imagine Live! Search being the default search engine of Firefox? Hiss! The thought near gives me the willies.
You bring up an interesting point. It seems that we're approaching territory where the marginal increase in speed really isn't that significant. At this point the need for the greater marginal increase in accuracy would be much more appreciated than speed.
That's why I have a hard time taking *any* of these software companies seriously when the only thing they can brag about is how incremental their speed increases are.
It comes from an understanding that nothing is forever, that there are some things that are completely out of our direct control, and more importantly, that the life of the game is not expected to last longer than Steam. In ten years we'll all be playing something else--it's OK.
A lot of these deals will pop up on your Steam client when you first start it up. Also, they typically show up with much fanfare on the 'Store' page. I picked up L4D for 50% off on President's Day weekend.
There was an interesting article on Valve's sales strategies of late.