No one will forget the Intel Itanic

Anyone investing in Intel needs to know that while they are manufacturing and marketing giants, they are design midgets. The x86 architecture is nothing to write home about in the first place. So they they try to fix it with Itanium and end up botching that completely, AND losing architectural authority over x86. World class business failure. Right up there with Digital Research losing the contract for IBM PC DOS in the 1980s.

BTW: EVERYBODY remembers the Titanic.

Ms Tigre

You are probably right - they won't forget. Remember the Edsel.

Regards and best wishes for 2006

Jim leNobel
Vancouver Canada

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

Interesting feature link today to the alternate "spaghetti monster" theory of creation.

I am considering developing the theory of Intoxicated Design. The universe was designed by an extremely intelligent being who was, however, either drunk or stoned off his ass.

Yeah, it needs some work.

Gabriel S.

My unbelievable experience with Dell

I felt like I was reading my own experience with Dell. Your article did great on the search engines. I got it in the top ten for just about all searches i did for dell's board of directors. i thought i might try writing to them at their independent places of business rather than getting my letter lost in the bureaucracy that is dell. little frustrated here, as you understand. maybe i'll submit my own article. or maybe one of dell's directors will take note of my letter and direct someone to adhere to the corporate vision and give this customer a superior experience. not betting the house on it.

M McCall

Hi Mike, this is about Nick's article "New Firefox loses features" (the web posting gave me a server error) :

The article is very misleading in fact Firefox features keep growing.

Tools>Extensions>Find Updates

I use 16 plus extensions with FF 1.5 like:

Adblock
BugMeNot
Click2TabExt2ABC
FlashGotHideTabBar
ImageZoomImage-Show-Hide
InFormEnterLaunchy
LinkyMenuEditor
NoScriptScrapBook
SessionSaverTranslate

All working fine.

If some extension doesn't have update for the latest Firefox, soon it will unless the project is dead.(In that case you probably find another extension with the same functionality)

Using the contextual menu of an extension in the extension manager you can go to the extension homepage and see how the things are progressing or manually download the add-on.

There is a good reason for the FF extension policy being the most important that a wrong extension can broke the browser(beside the security).

If you can't wait there is some little hack you can do:

-Open the 'extension'.xpi (is only a zip file)
-Open the install.rdf (is just a plain text file)
-Find the version compatibility, it look like this:

0.9
1.0.7

And change the upper version limit like this:

0.9
1.5

If the underlying functionality of the Firefox affected by the extension wasn't changed too much then the trick will work, but is obviously not guaranteed. I did it succesfully with Firefox 1.5 beta 2 waiting for the updated extensions to arrive.

I recommend to always backup the Mozilla Firefox and the profile folders so you can revert easily without reinstalling.

Any problem to find your profile:http://hail2u.net/archives/fxexts.html#open_profile_folder >"Install Open Profile Folder v1.1.3" (download with the right button)

Regards, SadClown

Software industry claims piracy costs millions of jobs

So if software piracy is somehow stopped, there will be millions of new jobs - in India, China, and everyplace else the software companies are outsourcing these days.

Does BSA have any bright ideas about what we could do to create some jobs here at home?

Jude Suszko

I love (and hate) the BSA. I love them, because they're so naive and innocent. I hate them, becuase they're so d*** stupid.

Do people pirate because of high software prices? Not exactly. Would cutting piracy increase software revenue? Not really.

The thing is, every program I have ever pirated was because it wasn't worth the money for me to buy it. True, I did use the program, and got some benefit from it. But, given the choice between paying for the program, and going without its benefits, I would choose to go without.

The solution to software piracy is to more reasonably match the price of the software with the value of it. A new video game for $60? Not when most of them will entertain me for at most two hours. $250 for Office XP? Even without OpenOffice.org, I can get by with notepad. It takes more work to do a spreadsheet than Excel does, but I would rather work the numbers by hand than pay out $250. $170 for Poser 6? Oh no, I can't make CG porn, I have to pay $170 so I can!

I mean honestly, piracy does not lesson software sales. Rather, it gets software into the hands of people who would otherwise not have that software. In fact, if the software is good enough, I might decide to go out and buy it after having dl'd a copy.

Name supplied

hi yall,

first time im sending an email to you. i like reading your site. anyway this is concerning your article:

re:Software industry claims piracy

all these issues about piracy that piracy is causing losses in the music industry and the software industry,etc . and now a reduction in piracy will create jobs - lol thats funny.

and the music industry is suing people because they shared music.

i have never seen any of the articles on your site or any other site bring up the one important fact: that the people who copied stuff had no money to begin with, which is why they resorted to copying instead of buying.

this also makes the assumption that reduction in piracy will create jobs - thats totally absurd.

i mean dont most people run their entire lives in debt anyway? how in the world are they going to have more money in order to buy stuff while they are in debt? get in more debt?

and then there are the lawsuits that the music industry is filing on poor college students copying music that have no jobs. how on earth will they pay that off? you see this is just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer all like usual. their claim that copying music is causing losses is as ridiculous as the software industries claims about reduction in piracy.

of course im not saying that lack of money makes a crime all right - its still wrong and should be punished, but the monetary lawsuits on poor people is just more oppression. they will all get what they deserve in the end.

Name supplied

Interesting article on software piracy. While I agree that software piracy is wrong, I don't agree with any of the other arguments the BSA makes.

The software that is generally pirated is mechanically mass-produced or electronically delivered. It does not take more people to make more of the same software. Ending or reducing piracy will add no more jobs.

Nor will it add anything to the economy. If people and organisations spend more on software, they will have less to spend on other things. Ending or reducing piracy will not add anything to the economy. It will just shift money from other things (like salaries) to software license purchases.

If anything, reducing software piracy will detract from the western economies, since commercial software is increasingly made in India. Money that is spent purchasing local goods and services will be spent on software licenses, part of which will go to India.

Anyway, thanks for the article. Makes me think more instead of taking all this stuff for granted...

Name supplied

IDC can side with the pigopolists if it wants, my own reports tell me that a 20% drop in prices will do wonders to thwart piracy.

I've already said this to a lot of people, but I'll try again : a game at €15 is a no-brainer, many people I know will be willing to buy just to try. A game at €45 is a liability, and people are ready to get a friend to "loan" them a copy before buying it - if they ever do.

Now let me see, a jewel case must cost 20 euro cents (counting large) with the decoration, a blank DVD must cost 10 euro cents when you buy them by the thousands, and that means that selling a game at €45 a pop brings in €44. Subtract distribution costs, marketing costs and fabrication costs, and you have to sell one or two hundred thousand to break even.

Except that, for 200,000 copies to sell, you have to really make a good game, which (by today's standards) mean an expensive game (not necessarily an original one).

At €45 a game, you have ten people look at it, six who pick it up and read the back, four who are sorely tempted but will wait for a friend, and one who actually buys it (and loans it to the four others). Not good.

At €15 a game, you have thirty who look at it, twenty who pick it up and read the back, and fifteen who say "what the heck, I'll try it out" and buy it. You might have one loser who'll wait for a friend, but he never buys anything anyway, so that is not a lost sale. Plus, patches and online play ensure that the losers don't enjoy their copies for long.

Anyway, when you do the math, you get either

1 x 45 = €45 or 15 x 15 = €225

Now I challenge IDC to make a study that says that I'm wrong and that, at €15 a game, more people won't be buying more games.

Pascal

I am not sure how exactly they figured out this amounts, except of course the classical way of taking a random number and dividing it by shoe size. Or perhaps they hired the same guys who came with the weapons of mass destruction "theory".

What these BSA morons don't understand: in some parts of the world, piracy is high because some people cannot afford expensive software. Hello, there are people earning as less as €50/month!!

Supposing that one can magically enforce a 10% reduction of piracy, it doesn't necessarily mean that all the "coverted pirates" (if any) will line up buying overpriced M$ programs. I'd expect them to simply switch to free alternatives.

Have a nice day,

Dragos

Jute, Jam and Journalism

Yeah, but I prefer your brand of journalism - at elast it is challenging to the status quo. The journalists in our normal press seem to be lap dogs of the powerful.

David

Misinformed readers!

Could someone, PLEASE! correct the mistakes these misinformed email authors have made - lest we beget more misinformed masses.

In particular, the numbering scheme used by AMD has absolutely nothing, zilch, nada, with Intel! It's based on the performance of the (AMD) K7, example - an Athlon 64 3800+ is roughly equivalent to a K7 running at 3.8 GHz.

Also, what does clock speed have to do with Moore's law? Moore's law relates to the number of transistors, has nothing to do with clock speed.

Thanks,
Mashman