What is the actual outcome from this research? More knowledge about how to model the universe and the validity of our current understanding of it.
Yes, it's worthwhile for that reason, but we don't actually gain any new knowledge about the universe. Simulation is about testing theory, about processing the knowledge we now have, not adding to it. By analogy, simulating future environmental change doesn't add to our knowledge about such change in and of itself, just tests the theories we have about how it works and how it changes. The benefit is that we're able to test the predictive power of our current theory and see if that coresponds to the hard data we have about the universe. The outcome of such comparisons generates new knowledge, but the simulation itself just provides the basis for comparisons.
Maybe that's what you're getting at, so sorry if I'm niggling, but if you want to correct someone on the benefits of any kind of research--especially someone doubting the worth of that research--I think it's important to be as clear amd unambiguous as possible.
you've probably already flamed to death on this one, but i thought i'd weigh in soberly. what your take on this neatly leaves out is that what genesis mostly conflicts with is theories of how the earth itself (not to mention the life on it) has formed. the 6000 year inference is in direct conflict with the scientific (i.e. geological and archaelogical) evidence as to how long the earth has been around. granted there are lots of disagreements about how accurate our best scientific dating methods are, but the discrepancies are hardly enough to account for a several billion year overestimate.
don't mean to be rude, but i'll trust systematic observation of the actual earth and the geological processes shaping it over literal analysis of a book--history or not--anyday.
side note: genesis doesn't really start with the earth *already* created. it begins with the word, then light, etc. y_w_h did a fair amount of creatin' before the earth was actually "there." so saying that "god left out the creation of the universe" isn't terribly accurate anyway.
even assuming that the literality of the bible picks up at a fairly late chapter in human evolution--with Adam and Eve happening say, around the time of the emergence of language and sophisticated culture with H. Sapiens leaving Africa, that makes for a discrepancy in time-table in the ballpark of a hundred-thousand years, which is WAY beyond the error margins of our dating techniques.
i'm sorry, i just can't see any reasonable way to justify a literal reading of the bible as world history, except as a kind of mythologized history of one particular people in the middle east area. seen in that way, it makes a great deal of historical, cultural, etc sense and is pretty damn important to understanding humanity as it has developed in that part of the world.
i'm not trying to step on any religious toes here--you can get as literal as you want with the moral/cultural stuff in the bible if you want; if you want to read, say, leviticus as the literal law of a vengeful and nitpicky god, go for it, that's your business, but to equivocate and try to wiggle into a literal interpretation of the historical accuracy of it is--again, sorry if i offend--a little weak and kinda does an injustice to your faith.
...or is lars g. not coming off as the brightest light on the string here? his responses are so consistently several levels of sophistication below that offered by his fellow interviewees that it almost seems like he's dumbing them down, but that's giving him an awful lot of credit.
i give you many monopoly mod points for interesting, as i have none of the real kind. the child actor thing is absolutely the critical point that will make/break an ender's game movie. do you have a link or something for where Card actually said the harry potter actors were what convinced him? i'd be really interested to read that.
to be fair, hollywood has produced some major directors who are fairly decent storytellers recently. look at peter jacks--
ok. bad example.
on topic, this is a book that will only work if the script is killer. blockbuster sci-fi it is not, and done poorly, it'll just make fans of the series take up pitchforks and torches. if they want to hold off making the film until someone with sufficient talent decides to touch it, that's fine with me. still, regardless of whether it makes a good movie or not, i'd be interested to see how orson scott card would write his own screenplay.
wrong. the product Dell sells you is exactly what you get: bloated OS and all. the moment you purchase a "system" from them, you hand over the task of preinstalling, configuring, setting up the userspace, and generally clogging as many partner products as they can into the OS before you can get your grubby little mitts on it.
hate to say it, but the idea that what you pay for when buying "a computer" is just hardware is patently geek-naive, because its just not a distinction a large part of the market makes. others in this thread have said it, too--tell most computer buyers why they should ask for OEM OS reinstall discs, and the first question you get back is not "will that be necessary?" but "what's an OS?"
sadly, most parents have already failed. for some parents, the analogy of the police-state is just fine for them in terms of how they run their household. it's easy to say "get involved," but the fact is that getting involved is a damn sight harder than it sounds for a disturbingly large portion of parents.
in the face of an inability to actually communicate, what's left is oversight (which is true regardless of whether we're talking about the relationship of Big Brother to the People or of Mom and Dad to The Kids).
look at some mobile phone ads even now: the 'parental' motive for giving your kid a phone is that it allows you to keep in contact, or keep in touch. using the phone as a tracking device like this is just a logical extension of that impulse, and i can guarantee that there will be a ready and willing market for it.
reactionary it may be, but absurd it is not. Ritter's reaction to this whole 'cease and desist' business is exactly the effect they're looking to have with legalistic strong-arm moves: scaring small developers without the financial resources for a legal fight, preventing them from innovating in directions that will challenge the current--legally delineated--status quo as far as how music is published and distributed.
IANAL, but lyrics are also copyrighted material, and someone needs to get permission from the owner of that copyright before doing anything with them. personally, i fail to see how reproducing the material with correct attribution (as in a searchable website or database with song lyrics) is problematic, but hey.
the *real* point here, as others have posted, is not that this litigation was spurious, but that the "record company lawyers" actually successfully managed to make a reasonable call as to whether a bit of software was worth persecuting based not on the legality of its use of copyrighted material, but rather on whether that use of said copyrighted material was damaging. this actually represents a step away from blind legalism toward a more considered stance on what actually constitutes harmful copyright infringement. if this turns out well for pearLyrics, it might actually encourage development of online resources for music-related info.
so kudos, thanks for not *totally* skewering a small developer.
...it's been two generations of card since it was released. i've got a 9600 and finding driver updates for it since the X series came out is like pulling teeth. yes, it's still a radeon chip, yes, it still works fine, but as far as ATI's concerned, the 9x00 series is legacy.
these driver updates are mainly just ironing out the bugs in bleeding edge cards before they stop being bleeding edge. i seem to remember the big hoopla over the 5.11 and 5.12 catalysts was mainly to do with crossfire bugs in the x_00 and x1_00 series. regardless of how ridiculous ignoring relatively recent cards like the 9x00 series is, grandparent's point is still valid: info on the status of older cards with these drivers is basically nill.
imho, the big reason for not paying attention to older radeons is the shift to PCIe--hardware nuts see AGP as a performance bottleneck, so hardware companies like ATI are concentrating on the new standard, working out the bugs and so on. [shrug] since they make most of their money on bleeding-edge enthusiasts, focusing on PCIe seems like a smart business move to me. those "stuck with AGP" will just have to deal until it's really obsolete.
seems to me that this is less an insight into the limitations of critical thinking in human children as it is a refutation of what we've commonly thought about chimps. i'm not up on current chimp cog-sci, but since critical and creative thinking is always thought to be a hallmark of h. sapiens (even with reference to other direct ancestors of ours like h. neanderthalensis), it's pretty common to think of chimps as lacking in the creative problem solving department.
hell, the whole idea of humans as the "toolmaking ape" was based on just this sort of idea of what separates us from our living relatives--even though we've seen chimps in the wild using sticks or rocks as tools, the common explanation for that isn't spontaneous critical thinking or innovation, but a skill learned from parents (specifically the mother). so if this experiment does indicate that chimps are capable of at least minimally creative problem solving, this kind of forces us to redefine our notion of what makes us, as a species unique.
that said, i have my doubts as to what this experiment actually demonstrates as to chimp cognitive abilities. seems to me that even if they simplified the task mimed for them, they were still essentially learning by imitation. show me chimps spontaneously picking up a pencil to jimmy the box open, and that's a whole different story.
this story would be fairly interesting if not for the shoddy "how can we get people interested?" approach. shame on you,/. for picking up on the damn tourism angle.
for example, from TFA: "It's going to be a scholarly database - it won't just be pretty pictures," he said.
well, i would damn well hope so. the aim here isn't tourism. this stuff isn't going to be used primarily for a 3D tour at visitmali.com. the digital imaging being done at these sites is rescue archaeological work, aimed at preserving these bits of history for future generations of students and scholars far into the future.
granted, some of the money now going to laser scanning and photogrammetry might be better used shoring up the preservation funding the article takes care to mention is lacking, letting these monuments disintegrate, but preserving them in replicable digital form will make them accessible to people who might want to study these works long after they've crumbled or been bombed into dust.
with something like a new console system, one that's planned to be a stable standard platform for a number of years to come, wouldn't it be commonsense to delay a launch in order to ensure that there's no incredible publicity buzzkill like these bugs and shortages? personally, i was eagerly awaiting drooling over one of these, but now i'm thinking four, five, even six times if it's worth it to drop 300 smacks on something that was rushed out of the launch gates. that kinda bad publicity has gotta at least drop demand around the fringes of the market, and will make a lot more people willing to comparison shop for the next-gen console.
and the 'box shortage isn't even the tightest publicity noose MS has hanged itself with: the crashes and hardware failures are. the behavior here in shooting for the deadline regardless of the backend logistics is the same as with game publishers rushing out a buggy "final" release, then patching the crap out of it (or not). except with the crucial difference that there's no possibility of an aftermarket patch for a piece of integrated, proprietary hardware; the very advantage of having a standard, compatibility ensured gaming environment is completely fscked if the platform can't stop from blowing up.
consumers deserve to be able to rely on a product like the xbox, and i think they'd bite the bullet and wait for a later deadline if they were reassured that the product would be bug free.
folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed. i guess the real news is that geologists and other hard scientists are starting to listen to folklorists and anthropologists, taking cross-cultural similarities traditions seriously as sources of insight about global climatic events in the pre-historical or semi-historical past rather than as amusing consequences or the result of some sort of freakishly convergent cultural evolution.
i figure as the amount of what we know about the earth's climatic and geological history increases, the more of these correlations with myth we'll find. i think the idea of being able to predict localized patterns of geological events like eruptions and earthquakes is what's really seductive, i don't know what kind of value this sort of new insight will have for predicting major natural disasters will have on a human timescale, though. saying an earthquake will happen in the next 200 to 1000 years is next to useless in terms of preparing for it in the short-term.
hell, the history channel loves to tell us that according to the mayan calendar, this age of the world will end in 2012. doesn't necessarily mean we'll have another great flood on our hands, but it certainly makes for good tv.
actually, HiPriestM$ didn't deem them clean. from TFA:
Microsoft considered acquiring Claria. The two went as far as holding meetings to discuss terms. However, Redmond employees who were aware of Claria's reputation demurred, setting off what the Times called an "internal battle" among Microsoft execs. Neither company will comment on the article.
the cited times article is archived, but you get the idea. i would have loved to have been on the wall for that "internal battle" at MS. kinda would tell you something telling about the environment there.
Research links high blood-content levels of the molecule NGF (nerve growth factor) to frequent delusions or hallucinations, impaired judgment, and a strange speech defect known only as "infantilation," characterized by--among other things--the inability to pronounce the consonants/l/ or/r/.
Researchers disagree on the exact effects of the dangerous compound, but have all stressed its perception altering characteristics, and have pushed strongly for stricter FDA standards concerning amounts found in consumer products. Hallmark, for example, would be required to either blow up its card factory or allow warning labels on every card.
out of curiosity, which species of lemur are you referring to, and when did they disappear?
cause the same thing happened to a bunch of megafauna in Australia 'round the time humans showed up, and that might've been overhunting or any number of other causes; was this giant lemur extinction a prehistoric event, or something more recent?
i think the mistake intel made has been sticking with the pentium brand for too many generations. considering how many core architectures have fallen under the "pentium" umbrella, and how many are half under it and half not, it does make compatibility determination deceptively hard. i think they put just way too much stock in brandname pull, and were afraid to launch a new name/logo/marketing strategy.
granted, in their position as de-facto market leader and average-joe default choice, brand consistency has probably been a smart move, since the average computer user doesn't give a CRAP about the specs as long as it works fast enough. however, they've made themselves incredibly unattractive to the DIY crowd. for SHAME, ignoring a relatively small portion of their target market. i mean REALLY.
but would that additional support include user support, or stuff like live updates, free upgrades, and so on? because not including an upgrade service or security patches would be a significant disadvantage for some kinds of software--and a major disincentive to buy it secondhand--but retail versions of large suites like Windows or Officious don't really come with discounts on major version upgrades anyway.
in order to make retail licenses significantly more appealing than secondhand, a developer'd have to up the services they provide with the original licenses, nerf the secondhand-license services, and on top of all that, somehow keep track of which is which....a bit prohibitive if you ask me.
but this is slashdot, so to hell with retail software anyway. VIVA LA OPEN SOURCE REVOLUCION!
Slashdot Mirror
What is the actual outcome from this research?
More knowledge about how to model the universe and the validity of our current understanding of it.
Yes, it's worthwhile for that reason, but we don't actually gain any new knowledge about the universe. Simulation is about testing theory, about processing the knowledge we now have, not adding to it. By analogy, simulating future environmental change doesn't add to our knowledge about such change in and of itself, just tests the theories we have about how it works and how it changes. The benefit is that we're able to test the predictive power of our current theory and see if that coresponds to the hard data we have about the universe. The outcome of such comparisons generates new knowledge, but the simulation itself just provides the basis for comparisons.
Maybe that's what you're getting at, so sorry if I'm niggling, but if you want to correct someone on the benefits of any kind of research--especially someone doubting the worth of that research--I think it's important to be as clear amd unambiguous as possible.
aww, c'mon mods. -1 redundant on a first post? bad form.
-1 stating the obvious, maybe.
you've probably already flamed to death on this one, but i thought i'd weigh in soberly. what your take on this neatly leaves out is that what genesis mostly conflicts with is theories of how the earth itself (not to mention the life on it) has formed. the 6000 year inference is in direct conflict with the scientific (i.e. geological and archaelogical) evidence as to how long the earth has been around. granted there are lots of disagreements about how accurate our best scientific dating methods are, but the discrepancies are hardly enough to account for a several billion year overestimate.
don't mean to be rude, but i'll trust systematic observation of the actual earth and the geological processes shaping it over literal analysis of a book--history or not--anyday.
side note: genesis doesn't really start with the earth *already* created. it begins with the word, then light, etc. y_w_h did a fair amount of creatin' before the earth was actually "there." so saying that "god left out the creation of the universe" isn't terribly accurate anyway.
even assuming that the literality of the bible picks up at a fairly late chapter in human evolution--with Adam and Eve happening say, around the time of the emergence of language and sophisticated culture with H. Sapiens leaving Africa, that makes for a discrepancy in time-table in the ballpark of a hundred-thousand years, which is WAY beyond the error margins of our dating techniques.
i'm sorry, i just can't see any reasonable way to justify a literal reading of the bible as world history, except as a kind of mythologized history of one particular people in the middle east area. seen in that way, it makes a great deal of historical, cultural, etc sense and is pretty damn important to understanding humanity as it has developed in that part of the world.
i'm not trying to step on any religious toes here--you can get as literal as you want with the moral/cultural stuff in the bible if you want; if you want to read, say, leviticus as the literal law of a vengeful and nitpicky god, go for it, that's your business, but to equivocate and try to wiggle into a literal interpretation of the historical accuracy of it is--again, sorry if i offend--a little weak and kinda does an injustice to your faith.
...or is lars g. not coming off as the brightest light on the string here? his responses are so consistently several levels of sophistication below that offered by his fellow interviewees that it almost seems like he's dumbing them down, but that's giving him an awful lot of credit.
i give you many monopoly mod points for interesting, as i have none of the real kind. the child actor thing is absolutely the critical point that will make/break an ender's game movie. do you have a link or something for where Card actually said the harry potter actors were what convinced him? i'd be really interested to read that.
to be fair, hollywood has produced some major directors who are fairly decent storytellers recently. look at peter jacks--
ok. bad example.
on topic, this is a book that will only work if the script is killer. blockbuster sci-fi it is not, and done poorly, it'll just make fans of the series take up pitchforks and torches. if they want to hold off making the film until someone with sufficient talent decides to touch it, that's fine with me. still, regardless of whether it makes a good movie or not, i'd be interested to see how orson scott card would write his own screenplay.
wrong. the product Dell sells you is exactly what you get: bloated OS and all. the moment you purchase a "system" from them, you hand over the task of preinstalling, configuring, setting up the userspace, and generally clogging as many partner products as they can into the OS before you can get your grubby little mitts on it.
hate to say it, but the idea that what you pay for when buying "a computer" is just hardware is patently geek-naive, because its just not a distinction a large part of the market makes. others in this thread have said it, too--tell most computer buyers why they should ask for OEM OS reinstall discs, and the first question you get back is not "will that be necessary?" but "what's an OS?"
sadly, most parents have already failed. for some parents, the analogy of the police-state is just fine for them in terms of how they run their household. it's easy to say "get involved," but the fact is that getting involved is a damn sight harder than it sounds for a disturbingly large portion of parents.
in the face of an inability to actually communicate, what's left is oversight (which is true regardless of whether we're talking about the relationship of Big Brother to the People or of Mom and Dad to The Kids).
look at some mobile phone ads even now: the 'parental' motive for giving your kid a phone is that it allows you to keep in contact, or keep in touch. using the phone as a tracking device like this is just a logical extension of that impulse, and i can guarantee that there will be a ready and willing market for it.
reactionary it may be, but absurd it is not. Ritter's reaction to this whole 'cease and desist' business is exactly the effect they're looking to have with legalistic strong-arm moves: scaring small developers without the financial resources for a legal fight, preventing them from innovating in directions that will challenge the current--legally delineated--status quo as far as how music is published and distributed.
IANAL, but lyrics are also copyrighted material, and someone needs to get permission from the owner of that copyright before doing anything with them. personally, i fail to see how reproducing the material with correct attribution (as in a searchable website or database with song lyrics) is problematic, but hey.
the *real* point here, as others have posted, is not that this litigation was spurious, but that the "record company lawyers" actually successfully managed to make a reasonable call as to whether a bit of software was worth persecuting based not on the legality of its use of copyrighted material, but rather on whether that use of said copyrighted material was damaging. this actually represents a step away from blind legalism toward a more considered stance on what actually constitutes harmful copyright infringement. if this turns out well for pearLyrics, it might actually encourage development of online resources for music-related info.
so kudos, thanks for not *totally* skewering a small developer.
Google Bomb.
...it's been two generations of card since it was released. i've got a 9600 and finding driver updates for it since the X series came out is like pulling teeth. yes, it's still a radeon chip, yes, it still works fine, but as far as ATI's concerned, the 9x00 series is legacy.
these driver updates are mainly just ironing out the bugs in bleeding edge cards before they stop being bleeding edge. i seem to remember the big hoopla over the 5.11 and 5.12 catalysts was mainly to do with crossfire bugs in the x_00 and x1_00 series. regardless of how ridiculous ignoring relatively recent cards like the 9x00 series is, grandparent's point is still valid: info on the status of older cards with these drivers is basically nill.
imho, the big reason for not paying attention to older radeons is the shift to PCIe--hardware nuts see AGP as a performance bottleneck, so hardware companies like ATI are concentrating on the new standard, working out the bugs and so on. [shrug] since they make most of their money on bleeding-edge enthusiasts, focusing on PCIe seems like a smart business move to me. those "stuck with AGP" will just have to deal until it's really obsolete.
seems to me that this is less an insight into the limitations of critical thinking in human children as it is a refutation of what we've commonly thought about chimps. i'm not up on current chimp cog-sci, but since critical and creative thinking is always thought to be a hallmark of h. sapiens (even with reference to other direct ancestors of ours like h. neanderthalensis), it's pretty common to think of chimps as lacking in the creative problem solving department.
hell, the whole idea of humans as the "toolmaking ape" was based on just this sort of idea of what separates us from our living relatives--even though we've seen chimps in the wild using sticks or rocks as tools, the common explanation for that isn't spontaneous critical thinking or innovation, but a skill learned from parents (specifically the mother). so if this experiment does indicate that chimps are capable of at least minimally creative problem solving, this kind of forces us to redefine our notion of what makes us, as a species unique.
that said, i have my doubts as to what this experiment actually demonstrates as to chimp cognitive abilities. seems to me that even if they simplified the task mimed for them, they were still essentially learning by imitation. show me chimps spontaneously picking up a pencil to jimmy the box open, and that's a whole different story.
this story would be fairly interesting if not for the shoddy "how can we get people interested?" approach. shame on you, /. for picking up on the damn tourism angle.
for example, from TFA:
"It's going to be a scholarly database - it won't just be pretty pictures," he said.
well, i would damn well hope so. the aim here isn't tourism. this stuff isn't going to be used primarily for a 3D tour at visitmali.com. the digital imaging being done at these sites is rescue archaeological work, aimed at preserving these bits of history for future generations of students and scholars far into the future.
granted, some of the money now going to laser scanning and photogrammetry might be better used shoring up the preservation funding the article takes care to mention is lacking, letting these monuments disintegrate, but preserving them in replicable digital form will make them accessible to people who might want to study these works long after they've crumbled or been bombed into dust.
with something like a new console system, one that's planned to be a stable standard platform for a number of years to come, wouldn't it be commonsense to delay a launch in order to ensure that there's no incredible publicity buzzkill like these bugs and shortages? personally, i was eagerly awaiting drooling over one of these, but now i'm thinking four, five, even six times if it's worth it to drop 300 smacks on something that was rushed out of the launch gates. that kinda bad publicity has gotta at least drop demand around the fringes of the market, and will make a lot more people willing to comparison shop for the next-gen console.
and the 'box shortage isn't even the tightest publicity noose MS has hanged itself with: the crashes and hardware failures are. the behavior here in shooting for the deadline regardless of the backend logistics is the same as with game publishers rushing out a buggy "final" release, then patching the crap out of it (or not). except with the crucial difference that there's no possibility of an aftermarket patch for a piece of integrated, proprietary hardware; the very advantage of having a standard, compatibility ensured gaming environment is completely fscked if the platform can't stop from blowing up.
consumers deserve to be able to rely on a product like the xbox, and i think they'd bite the bullet and wait for a later deadline if they were reassured that the product would be bug free.
...the better to bathe that joke in the glory it deserves.
folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed. i guess the real news is that geologists and other hard scientists are starting to listen to folklorists and anthropologists, taking cross-cultural similarities traditions seriously as sources of insight about global climatic events in the pre-historical or semi-historical past rather than as amusing consequences or the result of some sort of freakishly convergent cultural evolution.
i figure as the amount of what we know about the earth's climatic and geological history increases, the more of these correlations with myth we'll find. i think the idea of being able to predict localized patterns of geological events like eruptions and earthquakes is what's really seductive, i don't know what kind of value this sort of new insight will have for predicting major natural disasters will have on a human timescale, though. saying an earthquake will happen in the next 200 to 1000 years is next to useless in terms of preparing for it in the short-term.
hell, the history channel loves to tell us that according to the mayan calendar, this age of the world will end in 2012. doesn't necessarily mean we'll have another great flood on our hands, but it certainly makes for good tv.
actually, HiPriestM$ didn't deem them clean. from TFA:
Microsoft considered acquiring Claria. The two went as far as holding meetings to discuss terms. However, Redmond employees who were aware of Claria's reputation demurred, setting off what the Times called an "internal battle" among Microsoft execs. Neither company will comment on the article.
the cited times article is archived, but you get the idea. i would have loved to have been on the wall for that "internal battle" at MS. kinda would tell you something telling about the environment there.
for science! and possibly a crappy niche-market pr0n site.
Research links high blood-content levels of the molecule NGF (nerve growth factor) to frequent delusions or hallucinations, impaired judgment, and a strange speech defect known only as "infantilation," characterized by--among other things--the inability to pronounce the consonants /l/ or /r/.
Researchers disagree on the exact effects of the dangerous compound, but have all stressed its perception altering characteristics, and have pushed strongly for stricter FDA standards concerning amounts found in consumer products. Hallmark, for example, would be required to either blow up its card factory or allow warning labels on every card.
out of curiosity, which species of lemur are you referring to, and when did they disappear?
cause the same thing happened to a bunch of megafauna in Australia 'round the time humans showed up, and that might've been overhunting or any number of other causes; was this giant lemur extinction a prehistoric event, or something more recent?
it comes in pints?
[hides]
capbusters.
CTRL-Z!!!!CTRL-Z!!!!!ohgod, i swear i didn't mean it!
i think the mistake intel made has been sticking with the pentium brand for too many generations. considering how many core architectures have fallen under the "pentium" umbrella, and how many are half under it and half not, it does make compatibility determination deceptively hard. i think they put just way too much stock in brandname pull, and were afraid to launch a new name/logo/marketing strategy.
granted, in their position as de-facto market leader and average-joe default choice, brand consistency has probably been a smart move, since the average computer user doesn't give a CRAP about the specs as long as it works fast enough. however, they've made themselves incredibly unattractive to the DIY crowd. for SHAME, ignoring a relatively small portion of their target market. i mean REALLY.
apparently malaysia is taking a page from this pamphlet.
but would that additional support include user support, or stuff like live updates, free upgrades, and so on? because not including an upgrade service or security patches would be a significant disadvantage for some kinds of software--and a major disincentive to buy it secondhand--but retail versions of large suites like Windows or Officious don't really come with discounts on major version upgrades anyway.
...a bit prohibitive if you ask me.
in order to make retail licenses significantly more appealing than secondhand, a developer'd have to up the services they provide with the original licenses, nerf the secondhand-license services, and on top of all that, somehow keep track of which is which.
but this is slashdot, so to hell with retail software anyway. VIVA LA OPEN SOURCE REVOLUCION!