All of this is, of course, due to piracy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the best the major labels have to offer is angsty teen pop and rap-rock. Everybody likes that shit, after all.
What it REALLY comes down to is "He's OUR dick, so lets leave him alone". Just as the Democrats never had any problems with a certain Pres lying under oath to a Grand jury.
I can't stand either major political party, but I have a real hard time drawing a parallel between lying about getting a blowjob and sending 2000+ of your fellow citizens off to die because it fit your agenda.
Many of the older, oldschool programmers I know just got tired of doing it and went and did something else. Programming may not pay you enough to retire early, but if you're halfway intelligent about it you can save enough to take enough time off (or just cut way down on your hours) to get whatever education you need to start doing what you love, then subsidize the income from that if need be.
I know several older programmers who have gone into teaching, public service, or just started small businesses that are completely unrelated to programming. I know one who builds sand castles for a living now.
Programming for the man rapidly eats away at your soul. It's only fitting that it should be a path to doing something you can be proud of.
Oh no! Downloads are down less than 1% since the third quarter!
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out. Nobody's going nuts buying music because they're spending all their money on presents and other holiday shit. Apple says they're selling a crapload of gift cards, and I believe them, given that everything iPod seems to fly off the shelves, virtual or otherwise. Regardless, since you no longer have to buy the physical media songs come on, there's no reason to buy them when you're doing your normal Christmas shopping, so sales very well *should* be down.
iPod sales are nuts, as usual, but that doesn't mean that music has to be selling, either. How many people you know, out of those who have bought iPods recently, are buying their first one? I'm sure a large portion of whatever iPods they're selling are peoples' second or third such devices. They're not going to be re-buying songs just because they got a new player, at least for now...
All this amounts to is another chance for the music services that lost (and it was pretty much over before they even got started) to bash Apple in a futile attempt to gain some traction. It's pointless, though. There's no buzz about Napster or Rhapsody, it's all iPod, iPod, iPod, for better or worse.
I haven't RTFA (I really should be asleep...), but my experience with my parents backs up the headline. They recently bought one of the new Dell 50" Plasmas and had HD service installed. Their cable system places SD channels in their "normal" slots, and gives them HD versions of the same channels in the 600 range. My parents, being creatures of habit, and not traditionally technology-savvy pretty much can't tell the difference and seem to watch the SD versions of these channels 99% of the time.
It almost makes me want to cry, but I'm still glad they have it, if only for the week or two a year I visit them:). HD sporting events and Discovery HD Theater are so nice as to be almost completely different experiences from regular television.
This happens everywhere, and is normal in IT. It's two extra weeks of paid vacation from somewhere you obviously didn't want to work anyway. What's the fucking problem?
Because companies would have to spend a whole lot more money to get those people. They're not going to do that unless the consumer demands it. The consumer isn't going to demand it unless the certification/standard/seal of approval becomes well known. And that isn't going to happen unless someone spends a large amount of money creating and marketing it.
Basically, the industry would have to foot the bill for something that would end up costing them a lot of money in the long run with nothing to gain except stable software. Of course, software companies nowadays make tons of cash off selling what amounts to bugfixes for their previous products, so there's more money down the tubes. I guess it could be done in a grassroots fashion, but you have to remember that what you're suggesting would essentially call most of the people working in the industry "unqualified". Doubt they're going to go for it.
In short, this isn't going to happen. Not anytime soon, at least. Definitely not until consumers learn to stop taking it up the keister and stop buying software that doesn't work just because they don't know any better.
It is a brand new product in the eyes of the retailers (who deal in SKUs, not specs or trends). Give it some time. I'm sure they'll fall back to where they were.
Though, honestly, as the owner of two of these little giants, they're only slightly less of a bargain at $70. I wouldn't hesitate to buy more at that price if I had any use for them whatsoever.
At present, Novell's Evolution, a groupware client for Linux, provides email, calendaring, tasks and contact management functionality and can connect to Microsoft Exchange, but there are few alternatives.
I thought one of the major complaints about desktop Linux was its inability to back a single pony, so to speak. That there were so many alternatives and competing products that the whole landscape suffered. That used to be the line, at least.
Now, apparently, it's the fact that there aren't enough choices. Well, guess what? That's wrong too. You've got the big names, the Outlook killers: Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail; and the smaller, more specialized ones: Sylpheed Claws or one of the eleventy billion other clients on Freshmeat; and if you need Real Ultimate Email Power more than anything, there's still nothing around that even comes close to the flexibility of Procmail+Mutt+Vim or Gnus.
Truth is, though, that none of this matters. Huge companies are willing to give email away for free, make it highly available, and give you more storage capacity than you'd get if you were willing to pay (my Exchange account at work is limited to ~100MB, Gmail gives me >2GB). You get collaborative spam filtering, virus scanning, keyboard shortcuts for nerds like me who want to blow through mail, some of the best search algorithms in the world with near-instant speed, universal access from anywhere, and now hot new drag and drop UIs.
In fact, probably the first thing AJAX will kill (and I'm not even *that* big on AJAX) is traditional email. Email has long been a pain in the ass, and offloading it to companies who can deal with its site-by-site issues in bulk (blacklisting, storage, availability) is a huge win for people without the resources of a Fortune 500 company. The day Gmail lets you point your own domain's MX record at their servers and deliver mail for your own domain to your Gmail account (making this a cheap, but for-pay feature would be a fabulous way to make money on the service) is the day I take my SMTP server down for good.
Email client? Hah. I'm looking for ways to get email software and traditional email infrastructure as far away from my computers as possible.
That would be hilarious. Could you get CBS to run a story about me selling baby meat to restaurants? Hell, I'll even play along in public if you provide me with a t-shirt that says "I sold baby meat to restaurants and all I got is this lousy t-shirt".
Meh. Any small, independent, high-speed ISPs that are still around are not long for this world anyway. The Comcasts and SBCs of the world in collaboration with the FCC have assured us of that. Dial-up should already be dead, since we should have had cheap broadband available most places years ago, so no tears for those guys.
Killing them off a little quicker in order to ensure that everyone has access to cost-effective broadband is more than worth it to me. The big telcos and cable companies aren't any more competitive in any market than a government monopoly, anyway.
I'm a fan of competition, but in the broadband space it's not going to happen. I'd just assume a government monopoly take my money as opposed to an ostensibly private monopoly who just bends the government to their will anyway. Yeah, it'll be slow, overloaded, and the customer service will suck. Called any major utility lately?
Except designer clothes have a reputation for either being cooler looking or higher quality. People buy them for those reputations, knowing the other people who are in the know will see the label and think better of them. The only thing the minibar has a reputation for is ripping you off, and not having nearly enough liquor in it to get you and your associates drunk (which is the universal language of real business).
People who are rich and have style get the hotel to send up bottles of quality booze (often at 5x or more what they go for retail, mind you). People who aren't rich and have style keep some good alcohol on hand to save face.
The minibar is, without question, only good for two things: Post-coital snacks, and laughing at the price list.
Get out of the MMORPG business. You can't handle it.
The problem with making an MMORPG is that most people only play one. Companies that are incapable of making an outstanding game -- like SOE -- can rest easy making regular PC or console titles, since truly awesome games are rare and they just have to compete with other mediocre companies on a marketing basis in an attempt to get a place in a larger shopping cart.
With MMORPGs things are different. One good one can come out and completely ruin the market for five years by locking up your potential audience. If these people have time for another MMORPG, they just play more of the one they already have.
Thus, if you really want to be successful in the MMORPG space, you need to make amazing, genre-defining games that are either so much better than the competition that people are willing to give up weeks/months/years building characters to switch, or that bring in players to the MMORPG space who wouldn't have played otherwise.
SOE, your best days in this market are behind you. You had the lead, with EQ, and you blew it. EQ2 is awful, SWG was (and probably still is, I'm reserving judgement to be fair) awful, Planetside didn't really make anything of itself, and you've got nothing better coming down the pipe. Get out, let Blizzard play the 800lb gorilla (which is what they are now, not you), and let smaller companies with better reputations and the ability to innovate try to topple them.
You guys... just get jobs you're actually good at.
Every culture... ever... has been anti-science. Every time a society starts to open up in the other direction, it's (usually violently) smacked back the other way by the religious nuts. This is nothing new. Thanks for pointing it out.
BugMeNot is great, but I've recently found just not visiting sites that require registration to be much more satisfying. Let's face it, I don't give a fuck what Forbes has to say about something they know nothing about, so why go through the motions?
I think I've finally reached my breaking point on providing my details to organizations who don't need to know. By that I mean, I've gotten so annoyed with it that I can't even be bothered to make something up.
It's taken a lot of years for that to happen. I'd like to congratulate corporate america on its persistence.
I realize this may not be an option in your situation, but if it's at all practical consider going back to college. At Georgia Tech (the only institution I'm fit to speak about from experience) they don't even teach you a language the first semester, because -- at least this is what I was told when I attended a brief talk about the differences between available intro courses -- they want people to learn the principles of programming, not a certain implementation.
I wasn't particularly concerned about this, having already had quite a bit of experience with procedural, OO, and functional languages, and took the "experimental" Scheme version of the class instead so I could have the benefits of an interpreter to check my work. But if that's the type of thing you're looking for, it seems like a great option, if a little expensive.
Personally, after toying around with an old Tandy that booted into a BASIC interpreter for a few months, I started scripting in the extension languages of a couple applications I was interested in. These weren't fully-featured, which helped me I think because I could grasp common programming concepts with a tiny language that might have been more difficult with the complexities of something like C++ (or even one of the P* languages). From there it was natural to move into actual programming, and I don't think I'd have wanted to learn the other way. I'm a bit odd, though, so I acknowledge it might be easier for someone else to learn differently:).
Because the only thing standing in the way of the Wal-Mart "associate" with 2 kids working for minimum wage 31 hours per week or the 16 year old kid flipping burgers at McDonald's buying a US$21,000 Prius is the lack of corporate incentives. Sure both companies have their share of white collar work force, but let's keep in mind who the vast majority of the foot soldiers are.
Unless those corporate incentives amounted to about US$20,990 I don't think so. Half these people would kill for any reliable transportation, much less some slick hybrid. Give it ten years for plenty of them to leak into the used market, then we'll talk.
Slashdot Mirror
All of this is, of course, due to piracy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the best the major labels have to offer is angsty teen pop and rap-rock. Everybody likes that shit, after all.
What it REALLY comes down to is "He's OUR dick, so lets leave him alone". Just as the Democrats never had any problems with a certain Pres lying under oath to a Grand jury.
I can't stand either major political party, but I have a real hard time drawing a parallel between lying about getting a blowjob and sending 2000+ of your fellow citizens off to die because it fit your agenda.
Maybe you can shed some light on that for me.
Many of the older, oldschool programmers I know just got tired of doing it and went and did something else. Programming may not pay you enough to retire early, but if you're halfway intelligent about it you can save enough to take enough time off (or just cut way down on your hours) to get whatever education you need to start doing what you love, then subsidize the income from that if need be.
I know several older programmers who have gone into teaching, public service, or just started small businesses that are completely unrelated to programming. I know one who builds sand castles for a living now.
Programming for the man rapidly eats away at your soul. It's only fitting that it should be a path to doing something you can be proud of.
Oh no! Downloads are down less than 1% since the third quarter!
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out. Nobody's going nuts buying music because they're spending all their money on presents and other holiday shit. Apple says they're selling a crapload of gift cards, and I believe them, given that everything iPod seems to fly off the shelves, virtual or otherwise. Regardless, since you no longer have to buy the physical media songs come on, there's no reason to buy them when you're doing your normal Christmas shopping, so sales very well *should* be down.
iPod sales are nuts, as usual, but that doesn't mean that music has to be selling, either. How many people you know, out of those who have bought iPods recently, are buying their first one? I'm sure a large portion of whatever iPods they're selling are peoples' second or third such devices. They're not going to be re-buying songs just because they got a new player, at least for now...
All this amounts to is another chance for the music services that lost (and it was pretty much over before they even got started) to bash Apple in a futile attempt to gain some traction. It's pointless, though. There's no buzz about Napster or Rhapsody, it's all iPod, iPod, iPod, for better or worse.
I haven't RTFA (I really should be asleep...), but my experience with my parents backs up the headline. They recently bought one of the new Dell 50" Plasmas and had HD service installed. Their cable system places SD channels in their "normal" slots, and gives them HD versions of the same channels in the 600 range. My parents, being creatures of habit, and not traditionally technology-savvy pretty much can't tell the difference and seem to watch the SD versions of these channels 99% of the time.
:). HD sporting events and Discovery HD Theater are so nice as to be almost completely different experiences from regular television.
It almost makes me want to cry, but I'm still glad they have it, if only for the week or two a year I visit them
I have sufficient information on Atlanta's public transportation system: it's shite.
Stating the obvious, but... DING DING DING!
This happens everywhere, and is normal in IT. It's two extra weeks of paid vacation from somewhere you obviously didn't want to work anyway. What's the fucking problem?
Because companies would have to spend a whole lot more money to get those people. They're not going to do that unless the consumer demands it. The consumer isn't going to demand it unless the certification/standard/seal of approval becomes well known. And that isn't going to happen unless someone spends a large amount of money creating and marketing it.
Basically, the industry would have to foot the bill for something that would end up costing them a lot of money in the long run with nothing to gain except stable software. Of course, software companies nowadays make tons of cash off selling what amounts to bugfixes for their previous products, so there's more money down the tubes. I guess it could be done in a grassroots fashion, but you have to remember that what you're suggesting would essentially call most of the people working in the industry "unqualified". Doubt they're going to go for it.
In short, this isn't going to happen. Not anytime soon, at least. Definitely not until consumers learn to stop taking it up the keister and stop buying software that doesn't work just because they don't know any better.
Not that I'm jaded...
Who the fuck am I trolling? All the giant, faceless corporation sympathizers out there?
Totally worth it.
There, I said it.
It is a brand new product in the eyes of the retailers (who deal in SKUs, not specs or trends). Give it some time. I'm sure they'll fall back to where they were.
Though, honestly, as the owner of two of these little giants, they're only slightly less of a bargain at $70. I wouldn't hesitate to buy more at that price if I had any use for them whatsoever.
I thought one of the major complaints about desktop Linux was its inability to back a single pony, so to speak. That there were so many alternatives and competing products that the whole landscape suffered. That used to be the line, at least.
Now, apparently, it's the fact that there aren't enough choices. Well, guess what? That's wrong too. You've got the big names, the Outlook killers: Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail; and the smaller, more specialized ones: Sylpheed Claws or one of the eleventy billion other clients on Freshmeat; and if you need Real Ultimate Email Power more than anything, there's still nothing around that even comes close to the flexibility of Procmail+Mutt+Vim or Gnus.
Truth is, though, that none of this matters. Huge companies are willing to give email away for free, make it highly available, and give you more storage capacity than you'd get if you were willing to pay (my Exchange account at work is limited to ~100MB, Gmail gives me >2GB). You get collaborative spam filtering, virus scanning, keyboard shortcuts for nerds like me who want to blow through mail, some of the best search algorithms in the world with near-instant speed, universal access from anywhere, and now hot new drag and drop UIs.
In fact, probably the first thing AJAX will kill (and I'm not even *that* big on AJAX) is traditional email. Email has long been a pain in the ass, and offloading it to companies who can deal with its site-by-site issues in bulk (blacklisting, storage, availability) is a huge win for people without the resources of a Fortune 500 company. The day Gmail lets you point your own domain's MX record at their servers and deliver mail for your own domain to your Gmail account (making this a cheap, but for-pay feature would be a fabulous way to make money on the service) is the day I take my SMTP server down for good.
Email client? Hah. I'm looking for ways to get email software and traditional email infrastructure as far away from my computers as possible.
That would be hilarious. Could you get CBS to run a story about me selling baby meat to restaurants? Hell, I'll even play along in public if you provide me with a t-shirt that says "I sold baby meat to restaurants and all I got is this lousy t-shirt".
Capital!
Way to Hemos it up! *high five*
Meh. Any small, independent, high-speed ISPs that are still around are not long for this world anyway. The Comcasts and SBCs of the world in collaboration with the FCC have assured us of that. Dial-up should already be dead, since we should have had cheap broadband available most places years ago, so no tears for those guys.
Killing them off a little quicker in order to ensure that everyone has access to cost-effective broadband is more than worth it to me. The big telcos and cable companies aren't any more competitive in any market than a government monopoly, anyway.
I'm a fan of competition, but in the broadband space it's not going to happen. I'd just assume a government monopoly take my money as opposed to an ostensibly private monopoly who just bends the government to their will anyway. Yeah, it'll be slow, overloaded, and the customer service will suck. Called any major utility lately?
Man, I've been a GNOME user for years, but KDE is getting pretty fucking cool. Rock on, KDE :).
A man who takes his laser pointer purchases seriously. I can respect that.
Except designer clothes have a reputation for either being cooler looking or higher quality. People buy them for those reputations, knowing the other people who are in the know will see the label and think better of them. The only thing the minibar has a reputation for is ripping you off, and not having nearly enough liquor in it to get you and your associates drunk (which is the universal language of real business).
People who are rich and have style get the hotel to send up bottles of quality booze (often at 5x or more what they go for retail, mind you). People who aren't rich and have style keep some good alcohol on hand to save face.
The minibar is, without question, only good for two things: Post-coital snacks, and laughing at the price list.
Oh, the minibar was never in danger of running low on soda...
Get out of the MMORPG business. You can't handle it.
The problem with making an MMORPG is that most people only play one. Companies that are incapable of making an outstanding game -- like SOE -- can rest easy making regular PC or console titles, since truly awesome games are rare and they just have to compete with other mediocre companies on a marketing basis in an attempt to get a place in a larger shopping cart.
With MMORPGs things are different. One good one can come out and completely ruin the market for five years by locking up your potential audience. If these people have time for another MMORPG, they just play more of the one they already have.
Thus, if you really want to be successful in the MMORPG space, you need to make amazing, genre-defining games that are either so much better than the competition that people are willing to give up weeks/months/years building characters to switch, or that bring in players to the MMORPG space who wouldn't have played otherwise.
SOE, your best days in this market are behind you. You had the lead, with EQ, and you blew it. EQ2 is awful, SWG was (and probably still is, I'm reserving judgement to be fair) awful, Planetside didn't really make anything of itself, and you've got nothing better coming down the pipe. Get out, let Blizzard play the 800lb gorilla (which is what they are now, not you), and let smaller companies with better reputations and the ability to innovate try to topple them.
You guys... just get jobs you're actually good at.
Love,
A concerned citizen
Pretty much. Next question?
Every culture... ever... has been anti-science. Every time a society starts to open up in the other direction, it's (usually violently) smacked back the other way by the religious nuts. This is nothing new. Thanks for pointing it out.
BugMeNot is great, but I've recently found just not visiting sites that require registration to be much more satisfying. Let's face it, I don't give a fuck what Forbes has to say about something they know nothing about, so why go through the motions?
I think I've finally reached my breaking point on providing my details to organizations who don't need to know. By that I mean, I've gotten so annoyed with it that I can't even be bothered to make something up.
It's taken a lot of years for that to happen. I'd like to congratulate corporate america on its persistence.
Yeah, this is off topic. No, I don't care.
I realize this may not be an option in your situation, but if it's at all practical consider going back to college. At Georgia Tech (the only institution I'm fit to speak about from experience) they don't even teach you a language the first semester, because -- at least this is what I was told when I attended a brief talk about the differences between available intro courses -- they want people to learn the principles of programming, not a certain implementation.
:).
I wasn't particularly concerned about this, having already had quite a bit of experience with procedural, OO, and functional languages, and took the "experimental" Scheme version of the class instead so I could have the benefits of an interpreter to check my work. But if that's the type of thing you're looking for, it seems like a great option, if a little expensive.
Personally, after toying around with an old Tandy that booted into a BASIC interpreter for a few months, I started scripting in the extension languages of a couple applications I was interested in. These weren't fully-featured, which helped me I think because I could grasp common programming concepts with a tiny language that might have been more difficult with the complexities of something like C++ (or even one of the P* languages). From there it was natural to move into actual programming, and I don't think I'd have wanted to learn the other way. I'm a bit odd, though, so I acknowledge it might be easier for someone else to learn differently
Because the only thing standing in the way of the Wal-Mart "associate" with 2 kids working for minimum wage 31 hours per week or the 16 year old kid flipping burgers at McDonald's buying a US$21,000 Prius is the lack of corporate incentives. Sure both companies have their share of white collar work force, but let's keep in mind who the vast majority of the foot soldiers are.
Unless those corporate incentives amounted to about US$20,990 I don't think so. Half these people would kill for any reliable transportation, much less some slick hybrid. Give it ten years for plenty of them to leak into the used market, then we'll talk.