Is it so weird that a corporation with excess capital will enter an entertainment market tangentially related to their core technology market?
More curious than Microsoft's entrance into video games is perhaps Nintendo's. Apparently Nintendo just got tired of printing hanafuda decks and expanded into electronics and eventually entertainment electronics.
Ok but no one considers Microsoft's contribution significant by itself. If I cared to build my own kernel I'd likely not build that one module. I suspect that's true of almost anyone, but the distributions who want to provide long tail (Google "long tail" if you're lost) features. Microsoft is the largest corporation out there but its contribution is really fucking small to the much larger picture.
Yes, each part is less than the whole. What exactly are you suggesting? That Microsoft didn't contribute until they couldn't ignore the benefits any longer? Couldn't the same be argued about any corporate contributor?
Corporations owe their success with Linux to its development model's independence of any one participant. The smalltime players are just as much responsible as the bigtime. Of the whole list of corporations you listed, only 4 of them contributed more than 5% to Linux development. Only one of them managed over 10%. How do all these corporations manage by being in the 2 percentile or less? Development wise, Linux is all long tail.
On what metric are you basing contributions? Checkins? LoC?
Linux didn't get successful because it was it was born. Linux got successful because it was a Unix work-a-like. Work on it developed to a point where it was useful enough to be the no-cost alternative to $$$$$$ big iron implementations. The GPL also made it attractive because you could patch it up, share, and everyone else would continue to weave it in to continued improvements. It's a very Man Moment Machine event, and no part of its success can be torn away from.
Considering Linux was built right off the features supported on the 386, and the domination of the x86 architecture is, in part, thanks to Microsoft. Maybe they summoned evil to do it but, I mean, we're not all running primarily Amigas and Ataris, right? I would say both Intel and Microsoft had a huge say in it's success by carving out a dominant market enough to let the goodness spread.
So why is it that men are free, nay, celebrated, to exploit their bodies in a chosen profession (pro sports, dangerous jobs for which women don't bother to apply), yet women that exploit their bodies (modeling, sex work) reflects poorly on society? Both are objectification, both are exploitative, and both represent some natural attributes and potential that makes them desirable.
If you're born with the natural aptitude towards intelligence, choose to become educated (education is compulsory in the 1st world, but not all students actually let themselves soak it all in), and you choose to work for a living where your asset is your smarts, awesome. If you're born with the beautiful genes, choose to cultivate that and watch what you eat and how you exercise, and you choose to work for a living where your asset is your body, that too is awesome because you took what God / Parents / Evolution gave you and made it work for you.
The truth is that, if you give people freedom to decide their own destiny within the limits of what is biologically possible, what results may fall short of some artificial fantasy ideal. You can lament the society produced by this and say it's unethical, unfair, or wrong. But in my opinion, personal freedom, personal choice, and being master of your own destiny trumps enforcing the ideal.
Hacking your XBox 360 is clearly a crime worthy of being charged for, but taking the cover off a microchip and reading code that wasn't meant to be read is not a DMCA violation at all.
That's only because the right folks haven't been getting their campaign contributions to make that illegal, too.
I'd like to take a moment and thank all these people for working tirelessly in uncovering these secret bits of gaming history. I'm both envious of how smart these people are and grateful that they've spent their energy on something I just so happen to love.
Isn't this banned? Or is it only the ones that have military features?
I really don't see the need for the average citizen to use a semi automatic hacking tool. We should ban them and force hackers to reboot after every hack.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
This is an interesting scenario. Pure bad-movie-fantasy rubbish, of course.
It might be surprising to you, but the government is not infallible.
From no-knock guns-blazing warrants into the wrong house killing the occupants as casualties of the war on drugs, to innocent people getting sent to the chair, to arrested people "mysteriously" getting shot while handcuffed and in the back of a police car, the fantasy is thinking this can't happen to you. Hell, MK-ULTRA actually fucking happened.
If it does, low odds notwithstanding, I hope your cries for justice are met with a less hostile and condescending response.
Hold on. Did you read the memo ? It pretty much states that:
The citizen must be on foreign soil. They must be engaged with a enemy with which we are at war as declared by Congress . They must be determined to be engaged in planning or preparation for attacks against Americans that threaten American lives. There must be no feasible way to capture them.
How is this different from a cop who shoots an armed assailant before he has a chance to kill people ?
1. I like to travel to foreign countries. Now all humanity has a target on their back, including those already part of the evil galactic empire. 2. Declarations of war cite a group, membership therein is subject to interpretation of much less stringency. 3. How do they know what I'm thinking? With due process, the burden is on the state to PROVE it. No due process, no proof required. 4. The watermark for "feasible" varies based on effort. They could spent a few millions of dollars trying to apprehend me, or just $100K on a drone strike.
The difference between this and the armed assailant is the interpretation of the word "imminent". It's hard to argue the bad guy is an imminent threat when he's half a hemisphere away and armed with a spoon for his muesli.
I'm not supporting Obama's policy but I don't think this is as evil as everyone is making it out to be. Our country is theoretically "at war" with Al Quada as an organization (whether that makes any sense is a whole other tangent). During World War II, plenty of German-American citizens living in the US flue back to Germany and fought against American forces. We didn't need due process to kill them on the battlefield. Whether you're an American citizen or not, if you're on foreign territory and pose a threat to our armed forces, there's not a large legal barrier to killing you.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
If the human race fails in it's rampage towards extinction for the next 500 years, we'll look back on this era as the second dark ages.
Probably not. If you build a business based upon the faults of someone else's products, do not be surprised when they decide to handle the problem themselves and put you out of business. If there is money to be made in repairs then you should not be surprised when the manufacturer gets into the repairs business. It's fine to make money on repairing and selling other people's products but if you are a middle man they WILL cut you out if they can.
The way a manufacturer ought to handle the problem themselves is to make their product more reliable so they need you less. Not build a parallel repair infrastructure and lock you out of what you need to repair their stuff.
I guess mob tactics are cheaper than better engineering, though.
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.
I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?
This is a different situation, they are making the parts, but just refuse to sell them to certain people. How the law should be written to distinguish between those two is beyond me, but I'm fairly sure we have a small army of law makers that can figure out how to word it.
Perhaps the scale is different, but it's really the same. He is making parts, but just refusing to sell them except in the form of a finished product.
Braun is doing something related with their shavers. I bought one a few years back, and on the shelf next to it were replacement blades, along with information in the packaging telling me to replace the blades every year. So I bought the blades annually as advised, and one year I start having a horribly uncomfortable shave. Upon further inspection, I discovered their replacement blades (advertised as being correct for my shaver) were no longer of the same geometry, and not sharpened the way previous blades were. So a product that should have lasted 15 years or more was binned after only six years because the replacement parts were substandard. This was a barely visible change, and I suspect a lot of people simply assumed their shavers were "worn out" and needed replacement (by a new $150 model).
To me, this was a completely unethical move. But now I'm trying to figure out how you would propose we deal with this kind of situation. Caveat emptor? Regulations on replacement part availability? Capitalism and competition?
It's more than just replacement parts, it's entire replacement units.
I had a shower pump from Simple Human break on me, the handle just came off in my hand. After contacting the manufacturer because it was under warranty, they sent out a whole new unit. I was kind of surprised they wouldn't just ask for it back and replace the arm.
When I got it, it was slightly different. The arm was much thicker and it made me happy they revised the design for the design weakness. But there was more different. The fit and finish, if that makes sense for what's essentially a wall mounted plastic pump, was a lot worse. There was curved metal trim that was more triangular than curved, like it was forced into space instead of bent. The metal backing plate was now all plastic, and the gap between both plastic sides seemed misaligned. Even the manufacturer logo on the front was not level or centered. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a knock-off.
If I had to guess, they have top-quality (except for the pump arm, but maybe that made it to retail) units in stores, and, as a way to trim down on warranty claim costs, they replace broken units with less-expensive lesser-quality units.
what does politics have to do with a company not willing to sell spares anyhow?
frankly I'd be surprised if they'd be able to source spare parts for their own warranty repair centres...
It's political because it advocates for changes in policy and law in consumer electronics, a defense similar to the auto indusry's "right to repair" laws.
My favorite part of Slashdot has to that each post, in alternative realities, are like this:
>by User (xxxxxx) on Monday February 04, @02:54PM (#42788301) Nikon is a multinational corporation which has offices in and employs citizens of the US.
>by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04, @02:54PM (#42788301) Nikon is a multinational corporation which has offices in and employs citizens of the US, jizzdrizzler.
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
Oh, I don't know. Somehow the FBI can figure out how to catch a terrorist who wants to bomb a building without letting them actually build a working bomb. Yet the ATF couldn't figure out how to catch an illegal buyer without actually letting them get a working weapon?
As long as we're whipping out anecdotes as evidence, I've played lots of gun games but I didn't actually get interested in the real life versions at all until I was invited to shoot trap.
I think that positive light angle is probably overblown. I mean, it's not like the bad guys aren't also armed, or that the game will keep you from dying because you're holding a magic Colt branded M4, or the game prevents you from shooting unarmed civilians while equipping a Remington but will let you do it if you equip a Beretta.
What they don't want you doing is what any other brand wouldn't like you doing: trashing it. They wouldn't necessarily want a licensee pointing to the Bushmaster logo and saying it resembles a guy in a hoodie on fire (it does to me! It's sort of like that FedEx arrow, once you see it you can't not see it), or showing a bomber plane with the Winchester logo drop a nuke on DC.
I'm pretty sure if Square Enix was planning to disembowel Disney characters in Kingdom Hearts, they similarly would not have been allowed to license it. Calling such actions "propaganda" dilutes the power of the word.
Maybe it's not your case, but some people do care if the money they spend on a videogame ultimately goes to industries like the Arms Industry. It is perfectly valid, as a customer, to refuse to spend money on games that, due to copyright, end up supporting an industry they loathe (I may like playing a virtual FPS, but loathe an industry that makes money by putting guns in the hands of African children so they kill each other).
Yeah, but how far does that go? I don't want my money to go to a company that supports DRM, so that's easy. I also don't want my money going to Oracle. Does it make sense to not buy a game because the company that published it might have an ancillary backend database for something tangentially related? I don't want my money going to nuclear weapons, but the companies pay taxes to the government which, in part, helps fund the stockpile. I don't want my money going to child prostitutes but who knows what any given employee might do with his take home salary.
If it makes you feel better, I doubt game companies paying licensing fees to manufacturers are trickling down to illegal arms dealers in violation of UN treaties with discounts on kid-sized AKs.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it so weird that a corporation with excess capital will enter an entertainment market tangentially related to their core technology market?
More curious than Microsoft's entrance into video games is perhaps Nintendo's. Apparently Nintendo just got tired of printing hanafuda decks and expanded into electronics and eventually entertainment electronics.
Ok but no one considers Microsoft's contribution significant by itself. If I cared to build my own kernel I'd likely not build that one module. I suspect that's true of almost anyone, but the distributions who want to provide long tail (Google "long tail" if you're lost) features. Microsoft is the largest corporation out there but its contribution is really fucking small to the much larger picture.
Yes, each part is less than the whole. What exactly are you suggesting? That Microsoft didn't contribute until they couldn't ignore the benefits any longer? Couldn't the same be argued about any corporate contributor?
Corporations owe their success with Linux to its development model's independence of any one participant. The smalltime players are just as much responsible as the bigtime. Of the whole list of corporations you listed, only 4 of them contributed more than 5% to Linux development. Only one of them managed over 10%. How do all these corporations manage by being in the 2 percentile or less? Development wise, Linux is all long tail.
On what metric are you basing contributions? Checkins? LoC?
Linux didn't get successful because it was it was born. Linux got successful because it was a Unix work-a-like. Work on it developed to a point where it was useful enough to be the no-cost alternative to $$$$$$ big iron implementations. The GPL also made it attractive because you could patch it up, share, and everyone else would continue to weave it in to continued improvements. It's a very Man Moment Machine event, and no part of its success can be torn away from.
Considering Linux was built right off the features supported on the 386, and the domination of the x86 architecture is, in part, thanks to Microsoft. Maybe they summoned evil to do it but, I mean, we're not all running primarily Amigas and Ataris, right? I would say both Intel and Microsoft had a huge say in it's success by carving out a dominant market enough to let the goodness spread.
It's a little bit like Carl Sagan's apple pie.
So why is it that men are free, nay, celebrated, to exploit their bodies in a chosen profession (pro sports, dangerous jobs for which women don't bother to apply), yet women that exploit their bodies (modeling, sex work) reflects poorly on society? Both are objectification, both are exploitative, and both represent some natural attributes and potential that makes them desirable.
If you're born with the natural aptitude towards intelligence, choose to become educated (education is compulsory in the 1st world, but not all students actually let themselves soak it all in), and you choose to work for a living where your asset is your smarts, awesome. If you're born with the beautiful genes, choose to cultivate that and watch what you eat and how you exercise, and you choose to work for a living where your asset is your body, that too is awesome because you took what God / Parents / Evolution gave you and made it work for you.
The truth is that, if you give people freedom to decide their own destiny within the limits of what is biologically possible, what results may fall short of some artificial fantasy ideal. You can lament the society produced by this and say it's unethical, unfair, or wrong. But in my opinion, personal freedom, personal choice, and being master of your own destiny trumps enforcing the ideal.
Hacking your XBox 360 is clearly a crime worthy of being charged for, but taking the cover off a microchip and reading code that wasn't meant to be read is not a DMCA violation at all.
That's only because the right folks haven't been getting their campaign contributions to make that illegal, too.
I'd like to take a moment and thank all these people for working tirelessly in uncovering these secret bits of gaming history. I'm both envious of how smart these people are and grateful that they've spent their energy on something I just so happen to love.
Isn't this banned? Or is it only the ones that have military features?
I really don't see the need for the average citizen to use a semi automatic hacking tool. We should ban them and force hackers to reboot after every hack.
?STACK OVERFLOW
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
This is an interesting scenario. Pure bad-movie-fantasy rubbish, of course.
It might be surprising to you, but the government is not infallible.
From no-knock guns-blazing warrants into the wrong house killing the occupants as casualties of the war on drugs, to innocent people getting sent to the chair, to arrested people "mysteriously" getting shot while handcuffed and in the back of a police car, the fantasy is thinking this can't happen to you. Hell, MK-ULTRA actually fucking happened.
If it does, low odds notwithstanding, I hope your cries for justice are met with a less hostile and condescending response.
Hold on. Did you read the memo ? It pretty much states that:
The citizen must be on foreign soil.
They must be engaged with a enemy with which we are at war as declared by Congress .
They must be determined to be engaged in planning or preparation for attacks against Americans that threaten American lives.
There must be no feasible way to capture them.
How is this different from a cop who shoots an armed assailant before he has a chance to kill people ?
1. I like to travel to foreign countries. Now all humanity has a target on their back, including those already part of the evil galactic empire.
2. Declarations of war cite a group, membership therein is subject to interpretation of much less stringency.
3. How do they know what I'm thinking? With due process, the burden is on the state to PROVE it. No due process, no proof required.
4. The watermark for "feasible" varies based on effort. They could spent a few millions of dollars trying to apprehend me, or just $100K on a drone strike.
The difference between this and the armed assailant is the interpretation of the word "imminent". It's hard to argue the bad guy is an imminent threat when he's half a hemisphere away and armed with a spoon for his muesli.
Bullshit. The 5th Amendment protects US citizens, PERIOD. You really have no fucking clue, do you?
It's just a piece of paper that people lie in their oaths about protecting.
I'm not supporting Obama's policy but I don't think this is as evil as everyone is making it out to be. Our country is theoretically "at war" with Al Quada as an organization (whether that makes any sense is a whole other tangent). During World War II, plenty of German-American citizens living in the US flue back to Germany and fought against American forces. We didn't need due process to kill them on the battlefield. Whether you're an American citizen or not, if you're on foreign territory and pose a threat to our armed forces, there's not a large legal barrier to killing you.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
If the human race fails in it's rampage towards extinction for the next 500 years, we'll look back on this era as the second dark ages.
Probably not. If you build a business based upon the faults of someone else's products, do not be surprised when they decide to handle the problem themselves and put you out of business. If there is money to be made in repairs then you should not be surprised when the manufacturer gets into the repairs business. It's fine to make money on repairing and selling other people's products but if you are a middle man they WILL cut you out if they can.
The way a manufacturer ought to handle the problem themselves is to make their product more reliable so they need you less. Not build a parallel repair infrastructure and lock you out of what you need to repair their stuff.
I guess mob tactics are cheaper than better engineering, though.
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.
I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?
This is a different situation, they are making the parts, but just refuse to sell them to certain people. How the law should be written to distinguish between those two is beyond me, but I'm fairly sure we have a small army of law makers that can figure out how to word it.
Perhaps the scale is different, but it's really the same. He is making parts, but just refusing to sell them except in the form of a finished product.
Braun is doing something related with their shavers. I bought one a few years back, and on the shelf next to it were replacement blades, along with information in the packaging telling me to replace the blades every year. So I bought the blades annually as advised, and one year I start having a horribly uncomfortable shave. Upon further inspection, I discovered their replacement blades (advertised as being correct for my shaver) were no longer of the same geometry, and not sharpened the way previous blades were. So a product that should have lasted 15 years or more was binned after only six years because the replacement parts were substandard. This was a barely visible change, and I suspect a lot of people simply assumed their shavers were "worn out" and needed replacement (by a new $150 model).
To me, this was a completely unethical move. But now I'm trying to figure out how you would propose we deal with this kind of situation. Caveat emptor? Regulations on replacement part availability? Capitalism and competition?
It's more than just replacement parts, it's entire replacement units.
I had a shower pump from Simple Human break on me, the handle just came off in my hand. After contacting the manufacturer because it was under warranty, they sent out a whole new unit. I was kind of surprised they wouldn't just ask for it back and replace the arm.
When I got it, it was slightly different. The arm was much thicker and it made me happy they revised the design for the design weakness. But there was more different. The fit and finish, if that makes sense for what's essentially a wall mounted plastic pump, was a lot worse. There was curved metal trim that was more triangular than curved, like it was forced into space instead of bent. The metal backing plate was now all plastic, and the gap between both plastic sides seemed misaligned. Even the manufacturer logo on the front was not level or centered. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a knock-off.
If I had to guess, they have top-quality (except for the pump arm, but maybe that made it to retail) units in stores, and, as a way to trim down on warranty claim costs, they replace broken units with less-expensive lesser-quality units.
what does politics have to do with a company not willing to sell spares anyhow?
frankly I'd be surprised if they'd be able to source spare parts for their own warranty repair centres...
It's political because it advocates for changes in policy and law in consumer electronics, a defense similar to the auto indusry's "right to repair" laws.
My favorite part of Slashdot has to that each post, in alternative realities, are like this:
>by User (xxxxxx) on Monday February 04, @02:54PM (#42788301)
Nikon is a multinational corporation which has offices in and employs citizens of the US.
>by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04, @02:54PM (#42788301)
Nikon is a multinational corporation which has offices in and employs citizens of the US, jizzdrizzler.
Exactly.
Although, I will add Nikon to my boycott list right now, along with Sony and Microsoft. I will never forget.
If I boycotted every company that has wronged, I'd probably be living in a cave dressed in animal skins right now.
WTF is this even supposed to mean?
You want a well trained, licensed, armed body guard? What exactly is stopping you from getting one?
So your answer then is security only for those who can afford it.
to have a Sears catolog again.I could call and just place an order to a live operator..sigh.
How long did you have to wait to talk to an operator? What if a bunch of modems automatically dialed their sales number and flooded their systems?
they didn't lose that much and people decided their spatula purchase could wait a few hours
Amazon? Spatulas? Everyone knows to get your spatulas at Spatula City.
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
Oh, I don't know. Somehow the FBI can figure out how to catch a terrorist who wants to bomb a building without letting them actually build a working bomb. Yet the ATF couldn't figure out how to catch an illegal buyer without actually letting them get a working weapon?
As long as we're whipping out anecdotes as evidence, I've played lots of gun games but I didn't actually get interested in the real life versions at all until I was invited to shoot trap.
I think that positive light angle is probably overblown. I mean, it's not like the bad guys aren't also armed, or that the game will keep you from dying because you're holding a magic Colt branded M4, or the game prevents you from shooting unarmed civilians while equipping a Remington but will let you do it if you equip a Beretta.
What they don't want you doing is what any other brand wouldn't like you doing: trashing it. They wouldn't necessarily want a licensee pointing to the Bushmaster logo and saying it resembles a guy in a hoodie on fire (it does to me! It's sort of like that FedEx arrow, once you see it you can't not see it), or showing a bomber plane with the Winchester logo drop a nuke on DC.
I'm pretty sure if Square Enix was planning to disembowel Disney characters in Kingdom Hearts, they similarly would not have been allowed to license it. Calling such actions "propaganda" dilutes the power of the word.
Maybe it's not your case, but some people do care if the money they spend on a videogame ultimately goes to industries like the Arms Industry. It is perfectly valid, as a customer, to refuse to spend money on games that, due to copyright, end up supporting an industry they loathe (I may like playing a virtual FPS, but loathe an industry that makes money by putting guns in the hands of African children so they kill each other).
Yeah, but how far does that go? I don't want my money to go to a company that supports DRM, so that's easy. I also don't want my money going to Oracle. Does it make sense to not buy a game because the company that published it might have an ancillary backend database for something tangentially related? I don't want my money going to nuclear weapons, but the companies pay taxes to the government which, in part, helps fund the stockpile. I don't want my money going to child prostitutes but who knows what any given employee might do with his take home salary.
If it makes you feel better, I doubt game companies paying licensing fees to manufacturers are trickling down to illegal arms dealers in violation of UN treaties with discounts on kid-sized AKs.
Screw that, I'd just change the name.
That's not an AK, that's a BK. There's also a 1/10 chance it fires a hamburger.
It doesn't crit so it's balanced.