I own a Samsung 26" LCD that burnt in on the left edge of the 4:3 picture after around a year of use. This means that when i now watch 16:9 content, particularly with a predominantly light picture, i get a gray line where the left edge of the 4:3 resolution would be.
the quote wasn't free or state regulated it was competitive or state regulated - it seems clear that there can be both competition and state regulation, there is a middle ground. There are degrees of competition (and actually most people would say there are degrees of freedom too).
Sounds like you're daring someone to come up with a DRM system for text content - oh good:(
Reminds me of some of the annoying PDF API documents i have to work with, where some bright spark has decided to protect there copyright by disabling copy and paste (yes, this can be done in Acrobat Reader). It's extremely annoying when you just want to copy and paste a long function prototype into your code.
You may be right, i've never thought of myspace in that way. Very few people i know use it (in fact 1 guy who has a band), but then i'm a little older than most myspace users (i think). In any case, it seems to me that myspace depends on its reputation and this kind of outing in a digital universe could at least be considered an opportunity by competitors (if there really are any). You're statement sounds a little like "there's no such thing as bad publicity" but on the other hand there is such a thing as "bad PR" (did i here that in a movie recently ??:).
If it is a PR nightmare then really, that's enough for it to be dealt with. Surely. (liability doesn't really come into it - this is an ephemeral market)
You should check my original post, and my subsequent posts. I never suggest that value is even related to price. You're own mind has made that mistake, and you're correct in pointing out that is a mistake. (BTW. there's more to USP than price/performance)
If you can explain why i'm still awake and checking this thread then i'd appreciate it:)
Spoilsport, but thankfully i'm not in the US so maybe tax laws are different here in The Netherlands. All i know is they're in dutch so i don't understand them.
After messing up my last 3 tax returns I now have a tax accountant and i got a rebate - think i'll ask him:)
Can i claim that i play games as a business then, thus write off my game purchases and broadband costs as expenses. Surely all i have to do is sell one character on eBay each year to show i'm making an effort - doesn't really matter that i'm making a loss, surely.
I didn't mean (or in fact say) that it would be a cartel, but that by inflating prices artificially you are allowing both Intel and AMD to take abnormal profits without providing additional value in a way that a cartel might try to do on its own.
As for leading an industry to a duopoly, i would say in this case that it already is and in fact we should be trying to encourage other entrants (whereas in fact other competitors seem to be falling away - at least in the desktop market).
This argument keeps coming up - that there is value in maintaining competition and a premium can thus be paid for it without regard to any competitive advantage.
One problem i have is that you have to trust the supplier to whom you're paying the premium to invest that in growing more competitive and not just taking it as profit. It seems a little like market manipulation to me - but some consumers are manipulating the market in favour of a supplier, which is odd if you disregard the influences of branding/marketing/advertising (which have been disregarded here).
The best consolation i can come up with (and i'm not sure how valid it is) is that such behaviour will offset against the section of the population that always goes for the market leader in the belief that they must be best in order to be market leader. However in reality I think that both groups are wrong and neither really aids competition (but perhaps they are a fact of life).
I never suggested that value = performance/price. Nor can value only be determined by being second in a market.
The original poster has since adjusted his position to state that if the other value factors got seriously out of sync then he would switch.
I'm happy to accept that supporting AMD and Intel for the purposes of maintaining competition does not seem as valuable to me as it does to you (BTW the argument seems to imply that you should buy Intel too - after all if it's rational to only buy AMD then Intel would disappear and that's not good for competition either).
Personally, i did not think there was much of a risk of AMD disappearing. I read the original article to find out why someone might think AMD could have been out of the race (this seemed preposterous to me).
You could argue, that if it were rational then everyone should do it. It is quite clear why this would not be good for the market.
Btw, i don't want anyone to confuse my point with an argument to not buy AMD - it is largely a hypothetical example of why blindly supporting the second player in a market without considering all aspects of value is not in the interests of competition. I definitely did not and would not state that value is only measured by price/performance.
I'm a little confused by your logic. It seems to me that always buying the products of the second largest supplier in a market does not really guarantee competition or at least not the benefits that should come from competition.
Surely you should be buying the products that give you the best value, no matter which supplier that may be. If we assume for the puposes of discussion (and not claiming any facts) that the current Intel range offers the best value (which may well be independent of market position) then by refusing to switch from AMD to Intel, you are artificially inflating the value of AMD products. This should in effect result in the type of market that would be more akin to a monopoly or cartel, rather than real competition.
Basically you could be shooting yourself in the foot, and you're definitely acting irrationally from an economics stand point (although maybe not from a marketing point of view).
I think we may have to wait for the next round of elections to see if the majority really do differ - these restrictions have not been implemented after a referendum.
In that case, it seems to me that calling pluto a dwarf planet isn't very descriptive - perhaps potential planet would be better (after all it may get collected up by another object in the Kuiper belt before it has a chance to converge), we might even be able to measure the potential in terms of a probability distribution of when it will become an actual planet.
I agree with the comment about poor moderation - this is a valid comment in most respects.
Unfortunately I don't agree with the conclusions of said comment. In essence fallacious logic has been used to support the patent system. It cannot be concluded that without patents money would not be spent on drug development as there exist other forms of finance - not least public funding. If the logic were to be correct then we would not have street lighting, which is expensive to provide, where anyone is free to stand under a street light without paying a toll. Instead it is deemed beneficial to society as a whole and paid for out of taxation applied to society as a whole.
Back to the question of whether patents are bad (and to mix metaphors:), I agree, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water due to a few bad apples. However, it might be noted that just because patenting has appeared to provide a useful function in the past it does not mean that it will continue to do so or that abuses will not eventually become the norm rather than the exception (I think this is what many slashdotters believe and fear - myself included i'm afraid).
I like the idea of a free market in patents. If it could work then it should be easily enforceable by the patent office. ie. you can't have a patent unless your willing to accept market rates for licensing - thus allowing the market to value the patent and avoiding monopolies.
This, of course, isn't the first time i've thought about this and here's the problem I always hit. There is no scarcity in a market for licenses (unless it is invented through anticompetitive measures) - as a result allowing market forces to determine the correct price will result in a price of zero.
However, the difficulty alluded to with regard to assigning patents to individuals is not really a question of the wider economic problems associated with monopolies (fairness for the consumer). It is a question of fairness with regard to who benefits from providing invention (fairness for the supplier). In this respect I find myself torn between the desire to have the opportunity to create something and profit from it personally and the wider socialist view that invention should be for the benefit of society at large. From a socialist standpoint, invention (and the progress it affords) could be seen as the duty of each member of society, much like politeness, it is necessary and people will continue to do it for their own benefit and the benefit of their friends whether they profit financially from it or not. From this I tend to conclude that the market should not be in the ideas themselves (so called intellectual property - but i prefer to call it information property) but in understanding the ideas (ie. support and market driven future development) - in such a market it would seem likely that the originator (or originators) of a technology or idea will have the competive edge of reknown in the market place.
The same principles could be applied to copyright. An author could make revenue from after dinner speaking or a lecture tour. Or a distributor profiting from advertising revenue in its distribution channel could commission new work to keep itself known as the best place for finding new an interesting fiction.
The example may be over simplified but eventually, i believe, it will be necessary to accept that information has no intrinsic value in of itself (in that once it is available it cannot be effectively made scarce) and that the real value is in understanding and continued creativity (both might be termed intellectual potential).
So there you have it, IP - Information Property or Intellectual Potential, you decide:)
I keep telling my boss I should have my own office - but it aint gonna happen. For now I have some big ass headphones that isolate me pretty well when i'm focusing. Plus there is the added bonus of not being able to hear the phone:)
What is the point of mac people continually comparing this list to OSX. It seems to me this is a list of reasons to put Vista on your IBM compatible PC - You can't put OSX on an IBM compatible PC (legally anyway). I am certainly not going to bin my PC and purchase an overpriced MAC just because OSX could do this first, nor do i think the majority of computer owners (who use more reasonably priced and diverse (read - competitive market) IBM compatibles) will want to do that.
If Apple released OSX to run on other platforms then you would have a point but they won't.
We all know what OSX can do (eg. make you feel warm and fuzy inside) and what it can't do (eg. play most of the games I want to play). The article wasn't a comparison to other OSes it was a comparison to XP, as far as i can tell.
Re:When are they going to patch
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Informative
well, and i'm really not making this up, i came home from work about a week ago and opened the laptop on my coffee table (that had been on for about a week, probably, with an instance of firefox running constantly) and i found that it had stopped responding almost entirely. I checked task manager (took a while to open) and I was running at 1.2GB of memory/page file usage (this is a laptop with 512MB of RAM). Checked Firefox process and that was well over 300MB. I killed the firefox process (this took about 10 mins to finish cleaning up) and memory usage dropped to around 300MB total - meaning i had recovered around 900MB from the firefox process. I'm not sure why there was a discrepancy between the reported memory usage and the memory recovered but there you go. The memory leak didn't seem to happen gradually either, as it was fine the evening before. Unfortunately I have no idea what the cause was so i haven't submitted a bug report (maybe i'll try and reproduce it sometime - probably not though) but i'd say there's still at least one big memory issue floating around.
It has been suggested that silent cars might result in more accidents involving pedestrians as they don't hear them coming and could potentially step into roads in front of them - seems a little over the top, but i'm guessing you're a conscientious type and wouldn't like that to happen.
Totally off topic, but my '74 Alfa GTV is a 4 cylinder and the exhaust note is music to my ears (when it's actually running - which it isn't at the moment, grrr)
hmm, i had a similar thought about wind turbines potentially messing with weather patterns and wave/tidal energy technology messing with sea currents. But to be honest i thought i might be getting slightly paranoid - particularly when i started thinking that nuclear reactions might be messing with the finely balanced fabric of space/time and accelerating the collapse of the universe.
Some of the comments here seem a little uninformed (with regard to the current state of steam)
For instance it is possible to use steam while not connected to the internet, it has an offline mode so you can still play single player games. Probably multiplayer too on a LAN (haven't tried it though)
Also, they recently added a back up option so that you can backup your games (plus all the patches, maps, etc you've downloaded). Admittedly, I just checked and for me this is 10GB of stuff to back up. But I do use this as i'm always reinstalling my game machine when i think performance has dropped off a tad. Redownloading use to take a very long time - pretty much a whole day.
Personally I like steam - i've nevered bothered selling a game on when i've finished with it - and it saves me having to go to the shop.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a Samsung 26" LCD that burnt in on the left edge of the 4:3 picture after around a year of use. This means that when i now watch 16:9 content, particularly with a predominantly light picture, i get a gray line where the left edge of the 4:3 resolution would be.
the quote wasn't free or state regulated it was competitive or state regulated - it seems clear that there can be both competition and state regulation, there is a middle ground. There are degrees of competition (and actually most people would say there are degrees of freedom too).
Sounds like you're daring someone to come up with a DRM system for text content - oh good :(
Reminds me of some of the annoying PDF API documents i have to work with, where some bright spark has decided to protect there copyright by disabling copy and paste (yes, this can be done in Acrobat Reader). It's extremely annoying when you just want to copy and paste a long function prototype into your code.
You may be right, i've never thought of myspace in that way. Very few people i know use it (in fact 1 guy who has a band), but then i'm a little older than most myspace users (i think). In any case, it seems to me that myspace depends on its reputation and this kind of outing in a digital universe could at least be considered an opportunity by competitors (if there really are any). :).
You're statement sounds a little like "there's no such thing as bad publicity" but on the other hand there is such a thing as "bad PR" (did i here that in a movie recently ??
If it is a PR nightmare then really, that's enough for it to be dealt with. Surely. (liability doesn't really come into it - this is an ephemeral market)
kinda like? sounds to me like a CSI story line. Did this happen to you? Jeez... It could happen, but ffs.
You should check my original post, and my subsequent posts. I never suggest that value is even related to price. You're own mind has made that mistake, and you're correct in pointing out that is a mistake. (BTW. there's more to USP than price/performance)
If you can explain why i'm still awake and checking this thread then i'd appreciate it :)
Spoilsport, but thankfully i'm not in the US so maybe tax laws are different here in The Netherlands. All i know is they're in dutch so i don't understand them.
After messing up my last 3 tax returns I now have a tax accountant and i got a rebate - think i'll ask him :)
Can i claim that i play games as a business then, thus write off my game purchases and broadband costs as expenses. Surely all i have to do is sell one character on eBay each year to show i'm making an effort - doesn't really matter that i'm making a loss, surely.
Sweet ;)
I didn't mean (or in fact say) that it would be a cartel, but that by inflating prices artificially you are allowing both Intel and AMD to take abnormal profits without providing additional value in a way that a cartel might try to do on its own.
As for leading an industry to a duopoly, i would say in this case that it already is and in fact we should be trying to encourage other entrants (whereas in fact other competitors seem to be falling away - at least in the desktop market).
This argument keeps coming up - that there is value in maintaining competition and a premium can thus be paid for it without regard to any competitive advantage.
One problem i have is that you have to trust the supplier to whom you're paying the premium to invest that in growing more competitive and not just taking it as profit. It seems a little like market manipulation to me - but some consumers are manipulating the market in favour of a supplier, which is odd if you disregard the influences of branding/marketing/advertising (which have been disregarded here).
The best consolation i can come up with (and i'm not sure how valid it is) is that such behaviour will offset against the section of the population that always goes for the market leader in the belief that they must be best in order to be market leader. However in reality I think that both groups are wrong and neither really aids competition (but perhaps they are a fact of life).
I never suggested that value = performance/price. Nor can value only be determined by being second in a market.
The original poster has since adjusted his position to state that if the other value factors got seriously out of sync then he would switch.
I'm happy to accept that supporting AMD and Intel for the purposes of maintaining competition does not seem as valuable to me as it does to you (BTW the argument seems to imply that you should buy Intel too - after all if it's rational to only buy AMD then Intel would disappear and that's not good for competition either).
Personally, i did not think there was much of a risk of AMD disappearing. I read the original article to find out why someone might think AMD could have been out of the race (this seemed preposterous to me).
You could argue, that if it were rational then everyone should do it. It is quite clear why this would not be good for the market. Btw, i don't want anyone to confuse my point with an argument to not buy AMD - it is largely a hypothetical example of why blindly supporting the second player in a market without considering all aspects of value is not in the interests of competition. I definitely did not and would not state that value is only measured by price/performance.
I'm a little confused by your logic. It seems to me that always buying the products of the second largest supplier in a market does not really guarantee competition or at least not the benefits that should come from competition.
Surely you should be buying the products that give you the best value, no matter which supplier that may be. If we assume for the puposes of discussion (and not claiming any facts) that the current Intel range offers the best value (which may well be independent of market position) then by refusing to switch from AMD to Intel, you are artificially inflating the value of AMD products. This should in effect result in the type of market that would be more akin to a monopoly or cartel, rather than real competition.
Basically you could be shooting yourself in the foot, and you're definitely acting irrationally from an economics stand point (although maybe not from a marketing point of view).
I think we may have to wait for the next round of elections to see if the majority really do differ - these restrictions have not been implemented after a referendum.
In that case, it seems to me that calling pluto a dwarf planet isn't very descriptive - perhaps potential planet would be better (after all it may get collected up by another object in the Kuiper belt before it has a chance to converge), we might even be able to measure the potential in terms of a probability distribution of when it will become an actual planet.
I agree with the comment about poor moderation - this is a valid comment in most respects.
Unfortunately I don't agree with the conclusions of said comment. In essence fallacious logic has been used to support the patent system. It cannot be concluded that without patents money would not be spent on drug development as there exist other forms of finance - not least public funding. If the logic were to be correct then we would not have street lighting, which is expensive to provide, where anyone is free to stand under a street light without paying a toll. Instead it is deemed beneficial to society as a whole and paid for out of taxation applied to society as a whole.
Back to the question of whether patents are bad (and to mix metaphors :), I agree, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water due to a few bad apples. However, it might be noted that just because patenting has appeared to provide a useful function in the past it does not mean that it will continue to do so or that abuses will not eventually become the norm rather than the exception (I think this is what many slashdotters believe and fear - myself included i'm afraid).
I like the idea of a free market in patents. If it could work then it should be easily enforceable by the patent office. ie. you can't have a patent unless your willing to accept market rates for licensing - thus allowing the market to value the patent and avoiding monopolies.
This, of course, isn't the first time i've thought about this and here's the problem I always hit. There is no scarcity in a market for licenses (unless it is invented through anticompetitive measures) - as a result allowing market forces to determine the correct price will result in a price of zero.
However, the difficulty alluded to with regard to assigning patents to individuals is not really a question of the wider economic problems associated with monopolies (fairness for the consumer). It is a question of fairness with regard to who benefits from providing invention (fairness for the supplier). In this respect I find myself torn between the desire to have the opportunity to create something and profit from it personally and the wider socialist view that invention should be for the benefit of society at large. From a socialist standpoint, invention (and the progress it affords) could be seen as the duty of each member of society, much like politeness, it is necessary and people will continue to do it for their own benefit and the benefit of their friends whether they profit financially from it or not. From this I tend to conclude that the market should not be in the ideas themselves (so called intellectual property - but i prefer to call it information property) but in understanding the ideas (ie. support and market driven future development) - in such a market it would seem likely that the originator (or originators) of a technology or idea will have the competive edge of reknown in the market place.
The same principles could be applied to copyright. An author could make revenue from after dinner speaking or a lecture tour. Or a distributor profiting from advertising revenue in its distribution channel could commission new work to keep itself known as the best place for finding new an interesting fiction.
The example may be over simplified but eventually, i believe, it will be necessary to accept that information has no intrinsic value in of itself (in that once it is available it cannot be effectively made scarce) and that the real value is in understanding and continued creativity (both might be termed intellectual potential).
So there you have it, IP - Information Property or Intellectual Potential, you decide :)
I keep telling my boss I should have my own office - but it aint gonna happen. For now I have some big ass headphones that isolate me pretty well when i'm focusing. Plus there is the added bonus of not being able to hear the phone :)
What is the point of mac people continually comparing this list to OSX. It seems to me this is a list of reasons to put Vista on your IBM compatible PC - You can't put OSX on an IBM compatible PC (legally anyway). I am certainly not going to bin my PC and purchase an overpriced MAC just because OSX could do this first, nor do i think the majority of computer owners (who use more reasonably priced and diverse (read - competitive market) IBM compatibles) will want to do that.
If Apple released OSX to run on other platforms then you would have a point but they won't.
We all know what OSX can do (eg. make you feel warm and fuzy inside) and what it can't do (eg. play most of the games I want to play). The article wasn't a comparison to other OSes it was a comparison to XP, as far as i can tell.
well, and i'm really not making this up, i came home from work about a week ago and opened the laptop on my coffee table (that had been on for about a week, probably, with an instance of firefox running constantly) and i found that it had stopped responding almost entirely. I checked task manager (took a while to open) and I was running at 1.2GB of memory/page file usage (this is a laptop with 512MB of RAM). Checked Firefox process and that was well over 300MB. I killed the firefox process (this took about 10 mins to finish cleaning up) and memory usage dropped to around 300MB total - meaning i had recovered around 900MB from the firefox process. I'm not sure why there was a discrepancy between the reported memory usage and the memory recovered but there you go. The memory leak didn't seem to happen gradually either, as it was fine the evening before. Unfortunately I have no idea what the cause was so i haven't submitted a bug report (maybe i'll try and reproduce it sometime - probably not though) but i'd say there's still at least one big memory issue floating around.
It has been suggested that silent cars might result in more accidents involving pedestrians as they don't hear them coming and could potentially step into roads in front of them - seems a little over the top, but i'm guessing you're a conscientious type and wouldn't like that to happen.
Totally off topic, but my '74 Alfa GTV is a 4 cylinder and the exhaust note is music to my ears (when it's actually running - which it isn't at the moment, grrr)
hmm, i had a similar thought about wind turbines potentially messing with weather patterns and wave/tidal energy technology messing with sea currents. But to be honest i thought i might be getting slightly paranoid - particularly when i started thinking that nuclear reactions might be messing with the finely balanced fabric of space/time and accelerating the collapse of the universe.
Some of the comments here seem a little uninformed (with regard to the current state of steam)
For instance it is possible to use steam while not connected to the internet, it has an offline mode so you can still play single player games. Probably multiplayer too on a LAN (haven't tried it though)
Also, they recently added a back up option so that you can backup your games (plus all the patches, maps, etc you've downloaded). Admittedly, I just checked and for me this is 10GB of stuff to back up. But I do use this as i'm always reinstalling my game machine when i think performance has dropped off a tad. Redownloading use to take a very long time - pretty much a whole day.
Personally I like steam - i've nevered bothered selling a game on when i've finished with it - and it saves me having to go to the shop.