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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
That's business as usual, not a "dirty little secret".
years ago Piracy give windows and office a big boost to where they are now.
...pirating id's stuff.
Ditch perpetual copyrights. I say give corps 3-5 years to turn a profit and then it becomes public domain. For individuals a bit longer, but if you still can't make money, well, time to go back to plumber school I guess.
What's next? We keep paying doctors every few years for prior services rendered? Or how about the contractor that built your house you continue to live in?
No sig for you!!
ISPs are not much better with blatant advertising.
"Download movies at top speed!"
Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There's lots of things that they could do but [...]
The next question should have been:
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Really why should they be punished in any way?
I am not pro piracy at all but the simple answer is to bust the pirates or better yet offer the stuff on line for a reasonable price DRM free.
I for one think $.99 is a bit high for one track but I would pay that one TV show for sure.
Hack you could even leave in the ads if it was for free.
As far as software. I actually don't pirate video games. I know that is odd but that is just the way I am. Now I will download cracks for the games I buy just so I don't have to deal with the stupid DRM on them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Since when is it the hardware manufacturer's duty to prevent piracy? Who exactly? Is AMD supposed to stop pirated code from running? Is NVidia supposed to stop the graphics from rendering on a pirated game? My hard drive? My RAM?
fp
ID should start making decent games again, or fixing their engine they sell to other developers. Let's face it, the Wii and 360 are rife with pirate games, the PS3 isn't. All three consoles are selling titles very well. The PS3 hasn't been cracked, the other two have. So what do we see? Lots of games selling regardless of whether pirate games are an option.
Well think about the more bootleg you have the more harddrive space you need. IE the 50 gb of pirated TV show plus the 20Gbs of music equals a harddrive, and what the easy way to back that up via usb or firewire harddrive?
I always wondered why ASUS included those eye patches with their motherboards.
When was the last time your company released quality software?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today. if TH starts anti-piracy trolling, someone might have to remind him of his roots: episodic gaming is just the connect equivalent.
I suspect it would be something like a TPM chip, or better support for making sure you're talking to an optical drive (and not Daemontools)...
You know, the kind of thing that most people wouldn't notice, would cause serious headaches for some of us (and potentially lock Linux out -- again)...
And, of course, do absolutely nothing to stop piracy.
The PC isn't a console. That's the fucking point. If I wanted a console, I would have one already -- they're cheap. Probably will get one anyway -- but I'll still play PC games, and there's a reason for that.
But my guess is, that's where they'd love to see us going.
Also, this is coming from id? For shame... One of the reasons I buy id games is I can get relatively DRM-free versions for Linux. (If you stop them from phoning home, they'll still work.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Really? No kidding.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Every other content owner makes a similar attack on fair use. The content owners should never get a license to ban the legal trading. What this amounts to is an attempt to get out of the onus of proving the content is infringing in the first place, on a case by case basis. "We're not allowed to kill off fair use, so you must all be pirates"
I'm sorry mister producer, but the law says you have to prove infringement, and please, let's see you just caring about the infringemetn of your product, we'll deal with the other producer later. Cartels be damned.
OF course, at that point he'd have to admit the size of his potential market, and maybe he'd prefer a canadian-style tax on removable media.
If the claim in TFA were true, wouldn't we see lots of manufacturers pushing Linux? If they see pirated software as having a significant effect on demand for their product, they should see free software as having the same effect?
I suspect that they are just indifferent.
It is complete and utter nonsense that hardware makers should be somehow held accountable for the dissatisfaction of software makers.
Software was free to begin with. The idea that software is a product is the notion that doesn't quite work. Hardware makers follow industry standard specs for the most part and add benefits here and there and ultimately strive to lower costs. It's a classical capitalistic market. Supply and demand rules fit neatly here.
Software, on the other hand, does not. The supply is LIMITLESS and the demand is limited. Software-as-a-product people are attempting to create a market where none naturally exists. But this is generally the case of all products that have a limitless capacity for production.
One fact is known by all players -- lower costs bring more buyers. Software people know this too. Unfortunately, they believe their "product" is worth more than is actually is. The "demand" side of the equation demonstrates that demand levels at the prices they set does not always yield the sale numbers that suppliers would like to see.
In some extreme cases, software people seem to believe that the use of software should determine its value. Ultimately, software people are intending to leverage their software to get a piece of your labor pie. Just look at the cost of CAD or other design and engineering software. The prices are utterly ridiculous! Their expectation is that people who use this software will probably make a lot of money and as such, they want a lot of the users' money. Could you imagine what would happen to the price of other tools simply because they might be used to create some very expensive product or end result? My god, those would be some expensive hammers and nails! It is unrealistic for software makers to demand such exorbitant prices.
Meanwhile, real product makers will go on doing what they do -- give the consumer what they want for the lowest price they can so that consumers will buy more of it.
"Please give us a hardware-based lockdown solution for software authorization."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You're pretty ironic there buddy.
Put yourselves in the hardware manufacturers view, do they want to be spending money developing tech that their actual customers don't want. I don't see the main buyers of motherboards been ID software. ID you used to be cool! you supported Linux in 1994! what's happened? (apparently RAGE may not have a linux port)
After all, who has 500GB of legally acquired movies and music?
Apple and mp3 player manufacturers are guilty of this too. Even filling a 30gb iPod (~6000 songs) would cost $6000! (assuming $1 per song)
It's not the hardware manufacturers' job to police for pirated software. Most of them--Apple being the notable exception--couldn't care less about the software running their hardware. The drivers and whatnot are a means to an end, a necessary bother in order to actually make their hardware usable.
In some cases, they don't even have to do anything to get their hardware working in certain operating systems--the users do it for them!
To say that hardware manufacturers love piracy is a misstatement. Hollenshead's point is moot. Hardware folks just want to sell hardware, just like ISPs just want to sell bandwidth: they don't care what you do with it once you purchase it because they don't need to.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) (emphasis added)
Create games that run perfectly on 3 year old computers and people won't spend money on new hardware, and instead (maybe) spend it on software.
You don't want to sound like the trusted computing dicks who think it's their job to make computers which don't belong to their owners anymore.
When you have paid for the hardware needed to play those games, you don't have enough money left to pay for the games. You could try to buy low-end hardware so you could afford to pay for the games, but they would be barely playable on a shitty resolution (rather buy a Wii instead :) ). So you choose the lesser of the two evils : pay the high-end hardware and pirate the games.
That's how hardware manufacturers profits from piracy. The solution of this problem would be making games playable on low-end hardware. :D
What you say!? Oh noes! Hardware companies are reluctant to act against their own interests?! I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
The simpler explanation is that the hardware manufacturers don't want to increase the complexity and cost of their product in such a way that would decrease their product's usability and their customer's satisfaction with the product. Crippled hardware and unhappy customers would likely lead to lower market share, which would equal lower profits. And the hardware manufacturers are in business to make money, not to protect the failures of other company's business models.
ID CEO claims may carry some truths, but, for the least, it is as unbalanced as only enlightining the bright side of file sharing.
As a loyal ID Software customer, having baught every one of their games I play, all I can reply to them, is: Please dear brillant market aware ID CEO. Your wording hurt customers like me. Why do you spend time and money dealing with your non-customers, having such twisted juvenile words thrown as FUD in the wild?
It is sad I will have these awkward words in mind , the next time I plan on buying one of your upcomming games.
Léa Gris
1) I would LOVE to see where he's getting that "99% of peer-to-peer is piracy" number. Sounds like something he came up with off the top of his head that we're just supposed to accept as common knowledge.
2) Even if that were true (and I doubt it... I'll give him that most peer-to-peer is probably illegal, but 99%...? Really?), is it still fair to punish the 1% of us that use Bittorrent for Linux ISO's, free software, or the odd WoW patch?
3) Even if ISPs did do away with / block bittorrent or other P2P traffic, you really think the geek thinktank that is the Internet wouldn't come up with something else? Hell, you really want to stop piracy, we oughtta do away with this "Interweb" thingy!
Give it up, gang. No matter what you do, somebody's gonna find a way to steal your crap. Deal with it, and move on. Quit punishing the rest of us for it.
It is like saying that car manufacturers should try to prevent cars from being used in bank robberies.
Ah, so people don't have to use Steam. But, if they do, then the only thing stopping it from being the salvation of the PC platform in the long-term is whether piracy is possible with it.
Here's a clue. The reason the PC platform is questionable in the long-term is because the PC as a platform is fickle. All platforms are, mind you. It used to be that there were tons of computers to market towards. Then DOS tended to dominate the PC gaming scene (with Amiga and Macs on the side). Then Windows even further dominated the PC gaming scene with one platform. The future, though, indicates that fracturing of the PC market is likely to happen.
Fracturing means more large percentages of people using multiple platforms. And since most game developers aren't willing to write for multiple platforms (hence the reason why the heavy Windows monopoly has been so good for PC gaming companies), the future is rather bleak that there will ever be the same sort of unity of PC gaming as there was in the past.
Now, one could use dosbox or flash or some new cross-platform VM to get around that in theory. But, VMs eat into gaming performance. Sure, people might be content on buying old games for nostalga sake. And people might even be willing to buy smaller arcade-ish games (certainly that's working well for MS and Nintendo). But, they can't surplant the main reason for buying PC games over other consoles games*: PCs can be more bleeding edge because they don't have to rely on a reference platform that stays the same, processing power wise, for 3+ years. Ie, the very reason that PC gamers exist would be squashed heavily by having VM overhead.
Even if MS maintains its Windows monopoly, I still see the PC gaming industry as mostly doomed. Consoles keep getting closer and closer to the power of PCs while remaining a lot cheaper than cutting-edge PCs. Consoles are moving further into the PC games turf (MS's push with the XBox and DirectX might have a lot to do with that). And consoles avoid having to fuck around with setup; regardless of the claims of how foolproof Steam is, I really won't buy that until a lot of old games that are still being sold are packaged under Steam. Enough bad experiences with supposedly compatible games is enough to turn a lot of people off from even bothering with PC games. As much as Microsoft tries to work its magic with compatbility modes, it's still not enough to maintain 100% compatibility.
*Admittedly other main reasons would be superior network play (although on the console front, that gap has significantly shrank) and better controls (that might save FPSs but that's about it).
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
In canada, we got stuck with a tariff that we pay on blank cds that assumes their use as a pirated music medium.
... but you'll never get in trouble for doing so (in canada).
... Since we pay that tariff, it has made it impossible to take someone to court over personal use stuff - "But... You already thought I was a pirate when you sold the blank CD to me!"
Ah yes, my point: Filling an ipod with music might not be legal
Here's all I have to say about that idea: http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf
And again, why should they care? Piracy is not their problem, and it's not worth their R&D time to bolt 'trusted computing' modules onto their products. Suggesting that they have an obligation to act is like suggesting that firearm manufacturers have an obligation to prevent gun-related crimes.
HW manufacturers don't understand why they should cripple their products and lose a buck so Mr. Hollenshead can make a buck.
If he really believes what he says then he should simply stop releasing PC games and go console only. Of course there's a another whole set of problems when you go that route. Sounds to me more like a big case of WOW envy.
DRM in the hands for the consumer will always be cracked. It is pointless to try and chase it.
Because everyone knows regular consumers need a 1TB+ HDD in order to surf Myspace and download a couple of songs on iTunes, am I right? :)
10 print "And I'm saying that Yes, it is limitless. Once it has been created." 20 print yourcomment$ 30 goto 10
If God didn't want me to he'd not have made this computer for me to do so. Since God has, I will not disappoint. I am only doing my Christian duty, fellow soldiers.
I disagree. Years ago, when PCs cost a hell of a lot more, you actually got full versions of MS Office on your computer, along with a licensed copy of Windows. People building their own systems have pretty much always been in the minority (except a loooong time ago), and pre-built systems from any major manufacturer have always had licensed copies of Windows.
Office stays popular among consumers today probably due to piracy. How many people do you think actually paid $500 for Office Pro? Heck how many paid $150 for Student and Teacher edition? Disks get shared around, borrowed from work or school volume licenses, etc. I would say businesses, in general, pay for most of thier copies of Office, and always have.
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Its not "helping pirates", its "not being a complete idiot and bankrupting your business"
If for example a motherboard manufacturer would implement a anti piracy/drm chip or such to one or all of their boards people would just buy another product or from another vendor.
Why would anyone in their right mind let a software manufacturer to cripple their computer physically when they deem that your copy is not legit when we know how how accurately and well drm has worked before.
"No internet connection to authenticate? Well we'll just shut down your computer then."
I wouldn't mind seeing a real console PC out there, one with hardware DRM and hardware tilt sensors and all that, so long as I don't have to buy one and pay for all that extra hardware to make my computer less reliable and more likely to break if I install the wrong RAM or what have you. I'm concerned that they'll do that, and then make it so every PC has that stuff in it.
There appear to be a lot of slashdot people that either don't have a speck of creativity or value what creativity they have at about the level of flipping burgers at McDonald's. It seems they can't (gimme gimme gimme) wait to enjoy the fruits of (someone else's) creativity, but that the creative person should be treated like someone who flips burgers.
Creating something is not like flipping burgers.
People who can create should not be treated like someone who flips burgers. When a creative person makes something new, (or better) it provides jobs for CEO's and marketing and sales and manufacturing and shipping and so on. After providing the fuel and justification for all of this employment and commerce, why shouldn't the creative person be entitled to remuneration, for as long as all of these other people are benefiting monetarily off of the creative persons efforts and gift?
If you treat creative people like burger flippers (don't kill the goose) they may lose interest in creating anything new (laying golden eggs) for you. Of course, that might suite some people just fine, then they wouldn't have to be consumed with envy.
I downloaded Quake 2 with BitTorrent recently because my original disk, bought on launch day, is too scratched to work.
BitTorrent is less messy than toothpaste or Brasso :)
Wrong assumption Windows became popular due to piracy sorry, but it is like that. The office os used to be DOS, Windows then was not bundled it came into the offices over the home piracy when people started to demand Windows... There were other better alternatives there at that time OS/2, Gem, but Windows was the most pirated UI...
U.S. law is based on the fact that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one goe to jail for a crime that he didn't commit. Clearly, the government loves murderers!
(caveat: in theory; in practice District Attorneys, and other prosecutors, are more than happy to convict people of crimes they know damn well the defendant didn't commit to further their own agenda(s). In theory, theory always works. In practice it often doesn't.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I downloaded Quake 2 with BitTorrent recently. My original disc, bought on launch day, is too scratched to work. BitTorrent was less messy than Brasso or toothpaste :)
PC Hardware manufacturers love piracy. Well, duh.
Of course people would buy a computer, rather than a gaming console, because you can still get most of the games for free without having to muck around with those pesky modchips.
That's now news, that's common sense.
However, what can hardware manufacturers actually do about piracy, and more importantly, why should they care? Why should hardware makers concern themselves with software piracy? How is it their problem?
These guys make the hardware on a large scale. TPM and all that hardware DRM is a design issue. If it is to be implemented at all, it needs (and I use the word loosely) to be done at a higher level. Otherwise, every vendor will have its own DRM solution, and the only thing worse than hardware DRM is ten different kinds of incompatible hardware DRM.
Your first paragraph is 100% wrong. I don't know what time period you're talking about, but it's clearly NOT when Microsoft gained their dominance back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Windows 3.1 and WFW 3.11 came on something like 11-13 floppy disks and there was NO copy protection of any kind. NONE. People were used to DOS but could now have this fancy GUI-driven "operating system" for the cost of a box of 3.5" floppies. NO ONE that I knew in the PC world ever had to buy a copy of Windows 3.1 because they always had either a friend or someone at work who had the floppies.
The availability of Windows 3.1 through piracy "sneakernet" made it the de facto standard on all PCs once it was clear that the world was leaving DOS and going to Windows. That laid down almost the entire user base for Windows 95, who then moved to 98, etc.
The dominance of most of the major software out there ESPECIALLY Windows is due to piracy, and the software companies know it.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
??? who is in favor of murder and mayhem on the High Seas?
Copying might well be unauthorized, but that doesn't make it necessarily illegal let alone murder, mayhem and theft!
I'm tired of the propagandistic exaggeration.
His claims that all they care about is the 1% (I'm not going to comment on his percentage being incredibly wrong) because in the USA we don't take away legitimate tools because they can be used to commit crimes. He makes the argument we should make owning crowbars illegal because they can be used for crime. This is exactly the reason the supreme court has refused laws that make items illegal where there is a legitimate and legal use. This is why owning crowbars and bolt cutters isn't illegal even though they are the primary tools of burglary.
So get working on the software side Toddy!
Back when PCs came preloaded, there wasn't Lotus Symphony, Paint.NET, GIMP, Thunderbird etc. There was Lotus 1-2-3, Photoship, WinFax and Eudora - all pay-to-use, and later on crippled versions for "free". If you couldn't pay, the only alternative was piracy.
Open Source gives the freedom NOT to use pirated material.
...to download ISOs for my consoles. 60 bucks for a game that can't even be patched or modded? They have to be dreaming. Especially when you can get great PC games for less than $25 (ex., through Steam), and play them on a good monitor, with a real mouse and keyboard, etc..
PC's are by and large, open platform general purpose machines. They were not even initially designed to play games. id can just release their titles on the console but they probably would not be able to run thier latest stuff and id would have to share the profits with Sony/MS/and Nintendo since those are closed platforms.
Kind of stupid to bitch about the very traits of a platform that makes your content viable. Hardware vendors should not be the software police.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Game companies create new games all the time that demand new hardware and the hardware industry then promotes them. Even if those games could run on older hardware and look almost if not just as nice. So Quake was never given away with new graphic hardware? And how about that "the way it's meant to be played"?
This is the 21st Century equivalent of killing the messenger.
That is a load of crap. Some people choose to break laws and some choose not to, their choice of gaming platform has nothing to do with it. Are automakers to blame for selling cars to people who end up killing others while driving drunk? Are they encouraging drunk driving because it's easier to kill someone driving a car than riding in a taxi?
For the most part, these "pirates" are either students who can't afford the games, or people who are fundamentally opposed to the current state of intellectual property law. Neither group is going to pay for games regardless of what controls are in place to restrict piracy. If publishers really want to prevent piracy, their products shouldn't be targeted a demographic that disproportionately believes piracy is acceptable.
subject sums it up.
I think ID should just start suing all of the pirates aka "customers" so that they'll earn the disdain of everyone that owns a PC. That way, when they sell games, nobody will buy them and that will eliminate piracy altogether.
It's an excellent business plan. It's worked wonders for Microsoft/BSA and don't forget the RIAA/MPAA/Sony. Here's another good one. Next, don't release any Linux clients, but be sure to focus on Linux servers, cause you know- only people with servers play your game. But wait, just in case nobody wants to give you money anymore, you can bundle your games with the Xbox just like Duke Nukem3D! Wouldn't that be awesome. Then people will be sure to buy your games and never pirate them. All in all, I think Todd has the right idea. Best of luck with it Todd.
He has no numbers to back up what he suggesting and neither do I, but I don't know of anyone that is a PC gamer that prefers the PC platform over consoles for ease of piracy. Unless he is hanging out with impoverished college students most people I know prefer to buy games. You know what else is a dirty secret? Most id games are rated mature, but they make a ton of money off selling the game to underage kids. Sure I don't have any proof, but in I saw a a 14 year old at EB Games buy a copy. id should be a ashamed of themselves. They need to implement some sort of age verification system.
I may be imagining this, but why is it that every post on Slashdot concering piracy prevention is always followed by numerous comments by people who seem to think that they have some automatic right to download music and software illegally, and that any preventative measure is the work of the devil?
I realise that plenty of piracy prevention measure are irritating (or even downright harmful to users), but how many of you here would honestly celebrate a non-intrusive method of killing the large piracy networks like Bittorrent?
They're evaluating the facts on the ground and adapting their business to profit from it. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do.
Look, piracy is here to stay. It's not going away, period. Adapt or die. Target people who want to give you money, and ignore those that don't.
In other news, analysts suspect that Barnes & Noble may have a vague idea that sales of their manuals for Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD et al may have something to do with piracy...
rj
For what's it worth, Win95 came on floppies as an option, too. The first version I had, I've got that way.
Having mod points must reduce you ability to think. Post like the parent simply don't need moderation. Not up, not down. Use your points on something useful, or just don't use them.
The hardware companies are greedy companies who are perfectly content to screw anyone or look the other way so long as it will improve profits...
Software companies are just the same...
The difference is that hardware companies have more competitors, and much smaller margins, while copyright infringement is much easier than duplicating hardware.
Do you really think that if it was possible to download hardware for free, the software companies wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing trying to get more sales?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
This is dense, how do these guys with tyrannical perspectives get to be CEO's or is control freakery a requisite? Why stop at PCs, if we can show 90% of the Internet and the network infrastructure is used to transmit 'illegal' content then lets close that down. That makes sense. Another despot out to reduce and configure the world to his interests and profit. And why should anyone else care?
The Internet and PCs play a bigger role in the world and people's lives than proprietary entertainment content, which has value but just one of the things we do for leisure and its the content owner's job to manage their content, not ours, PC maker's or the network. We cannot reduce the world to their limited narrow interest areas. Hardware makers are in the business of making hardware for profit, not protecting the business model of content makers. I don't give a fig leaf for their content when it comes to messing about with PCs or the net and they can take their content off it. If they don't have the capability then that's not my fault. Really, its not my problem. I don't make profits from their content, they do. Let them figure out a business model that fits in the evolving business environment. Tomorrow some technology hmmn.. let's say 'brain memory experience sharing' can make the whole idea of proprietary content irrelevant, then what do we do, ban progress? Content owners have to find a way to fit into the new reality, or become irrelevant to those who can.
What he is saying is essential as silly as asking for roads to be controlled or shut down because of crooks stealing cars. No road, no getaway with stolen car, problem solved. But the world is not about the car maker or the thief, let them sort out their problems without interfering with us or the road.
But.. when you can buy a PC for the same price as a console AND get all your games for free - why buy a console?
Because you don't have the money for four PCs. I can buy a $400 console, a $600 32 inch monitor, and three $50 controllers, and that works for me and the three friends I have over. Or I could pay twice as much for four $400 PCs and four $200 monitors because most games for Microsoft Windows don't support running four players off one PC + monitor. (Lego Star Wars and Serious Sam are exceptions.)
So, basically, this guy advocates the proliferation of hardware-based DRM.
Oh, id... how far you have fallen.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
If i paid for every song i listen to, i wouldn't have a car, computer, cd player, hell, i wouldn't have a house. I cant afford to buy games like BioShock, which i beat in 3 days. 50$ for 3 days? not a chance. And really, how many people even record home movies? why own a dvd burner? free movies. duh.
You left out the lack of any alternative to windows for the same platform.
Piracy leads to an economy that is more efficient.
Resources that were going to be used towards fulfillment of a legal contract are freed to be used on new technology, raw goods and education. The fact that piracy is a significant problem for people whom primarily distribute media means the economy hasn't run as efficiently as is could have in the past. Piracy isn't a problem; it's a correction.
Apparently you've never heard of OS/2 (what ARE you doing on Slashdot, then?), which was a phenomenal operating system and blew Windows away technologically.
OS/2 was most definitely a viable, alternative to Windows; however, it died because of bad decisions by Lou Gerstner who decided to keep OS/2 as a business platform and totally kicked the home user in the teeth.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
When Doom 2, and Quake was released John Carmach was happy that everyone was pirating the game. He felt joy in the fact that EVERYONE wanted to play HIS game. Not to mention the mad cash that they made after the fact. A lot of people would pay after trying it out. Not to mention some chip manufactures might have tried to include some form of DRM. I think that utimatly if that happened every one would just simply move to something else.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The only real difference between a software product and a hardware product like a car is that the "manufacturing plant" for software product usually costs about $1000 operable by a single person, whereas the one for car costs $1,000,000,000 and must be operated by a team of people.
I'm always amused by the level of altruism of people in the software field -- to the point of idiotic -- no professionals in other fields are so eager to eliminate their competitive barriers.
Apparently you've never heard of OS/2 (what ARE you doing on Slashdot, then?), which was a phenomenal operating system and blew Windows away technologically.
OS/2 was most definitely a viable, alternative to Windows; however, it died because of bad decisions by Lou Gerstner who decided to keep OS/2 as a business platform and totally kicked the home user in the teeth.
I was a kid back when OS/2 was around, and not really very skilled with anything but DOS at the time, but I got excited and bought OS/2 to install it on the four computers in my house (1 copy, four computers, yay "piracy"). I couldn't get it to install on any of them. I seem to recall the installer dying partway through installation. We have pretty robust systems, but I recognize that I was probably in the minority. Still, I've never seen another operating system resist installation like that.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm sure more than a few /.ers remember the old PC role playing games, with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
These methods are ultimately better than a CD check or similar, as they actually engage the player and give them a reason to keep the game packaging around. Unfortunately these days, game packaging is disgustingly minimal - the days of the latest Square RPG coming with giant fold-out maps and equally large fold-outs of bestiary stats and item lists (anyone remember the original Final Fantasy NES packaging? That bigass poster Dragon Warrior came with?) are long gone... ultimately leaving the gamer with "less hassle" as the only reason to buy the game or software instead of downloading it.
I'm not into multiplayer online gaming or mods, custom models, etceteras (probably due to my roots as a console gamer) - I don't want forty multiplayer modes as the "value added" bit for a few hours of single player - I want a keychain fob or a tchotchkey for my tower or something I can hang on my wall. In the box, not available from the company's online store for even more money, thank you.
As long as bits have to be read, piracy will always be an issue. I say stop whinging about it and put in a little extra effort to reward the people that want to give you their money!
Id has been spewing a lot of this crap the last few years. It's pretty obvious that they're simply trying to justify their move away from the PC. They'd rather make simpler games with no real advancement on consoles. I mean, if Halo can wow that audience, anything Id shits out can. It's sad too, because I recall a time when Id Software meant something in the gaming world.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
From Wikipedia -
Steam UP $70million USD (2007)
Blizzard UP $1.1 Billion
ID Software? Who Knows??
I would say ID is making a loss at the moment and not a profit. The remarks seem to implicitly imply that.
They also seem to lame to figure out a way for people to WANT to pay for there software.
How many people that have pirated games in the past now pay for Steam and Blizzard e-crack.
I would say ID is Jealous, and angry with themselves for being so incompetent and backward. Is this the only way they can drum up some marketing??
Because they are mostly kids who have never created anything of value.
The main problem comes from the fact that while, as you report, creating something of value is the most difficult part, currently what is charged by the economic model is the propagation of said creations, something that the average kid can do for free as easily as a finger snap.
And that's why the current model used by the media industry is as obsolete as the horse/buggy metaphor. It's not that they have been replaced by something better, it's just that they have become irrelevant.
The media market needs to come up with a new solution to compensate the artist, because the current one is attached to a step of the distribution chain that - although it made a lot of sense in the beginning (getting copies of music reach the consumer's home used to be as difficult as the production it self, but was a much more convenient point where to ask for money) - has become trivial now a day.
Producing music still costs money, but the point where the paying was done isn't a blocker that people can't get around anymore.
The current situation requires honor and honesty from people, so that they continue giving money even if technology would permit them to get it for free. (Pay to get a copy on CD so musician receive some fraction of it, even if getting a copy can be done effortlessly for free)
The current business model doesn't work anymore. But instead of trying to come up with a new one which works better in the modern world, industries are wasting resource on flawed system that try to prolong the current model - unsuccessfully (like DRM), introducing legal mean to make it mandatory (DMCA) and suing the hell out of average Janes and Joes.
And the problem is that finding a new working model is a complex task, difficult to achieve if not enough resources are thrown at it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nope. Apple won't poof. Microsoft's day in the sun was due to the cheapness of their products. Now that everyone has a computer they would like to get a GOOD one. Thats where Apple's Mac OS X comes in. Its been gaining in marketshare over both Windows AND Linux. Thats not an anomaly.
All that other stuff you listed is SO irrelevant to the non-engineer/geek customer. No one but such folks cares that Apple requires people to go through the "commisar" to develop for the iPhone. And no developing for the iPhone and OS X is not expensive in the least unless you're a seriously broke person who can't afford a used Intel Mac. Paternalistic and pushy? What are you a Montana mountain militia man? This is software we're talking about. Don't let the philosophies of free software and open source trick you into thinking that such things are actually important to non-geeks.
Your long screed about computing history's past also fails to note the current times. We all know there's more programs available for Windows. Whats really news is ever since Apple switched to Intel processors allowing virtualization of Windows and more importantly the video games that run on it Apple's Mac market share has been taking off like gangbusters.
As for developers being at the end of Apple's barrel... thats ridiculous. Drama queen/free software fanatic developers don't like Apple's iPhone SDK policies but other, more mature, developers are getting along just fine. So fine that they're already making money from the iPhone AppStore. There's a friggin stampede towards iPhone app development. When someone can make $2,000 a day people sit up and take notice. http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2008/08/part-time-iphone-developer-makes-2000-a-day/
LOTS of developers are making good money on the iPhone right now even though only a few million have the device. Can the same be said for Windows Mobile developers? Palm OS developers? Symbian, Blackberry or Linux mobile developers? Apple's gearing up to manufacture 45 million more iPhones in 2009. If developers are earning $2,000 a day now thats going to explode in the years to come. So the iPhone is doing just fine on the developer front, and seeing as how Apple gives out free programming tools for Mac OS X and you need an Intel Mac to develop for the iPhone and how the two programming environments are so similar its also raising Mac OS X development too.
You are suffering from what I like to call P.D.D. Perspective Deficit Disorder. You are looking at the technology industry from the viewpoint of a geek and are assuming everyone else on the planet does as well. Thats simply not true. If it were then GUIs would never had been developed. Regular people value good products that work well. They don't care about the GPL, they don't care about open standards, they don't care about copyleft or 'sharing with your neighbor'. As for Windows Mobile Apple couldn't be LESS worried about that platform. RIM's Blackberry in the US and Nokia's Symbian worldwide are the big titans. Windows Mobile has been on the market for over 7 years already and in ALL that time has failed to take the #1 or #2 spot. Its a non-event.
Rest easy though. For the small percentage of people on the planet who value 'independence' over practicality there will always be companies that cater to you. Looks like Google's Android will be picking up that mantle.
Have fun with it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Yes, I believe this is what drives hard disk business to grow so fast. Hell look at all the huge files hosted in pirate bay, how much terabytes of total pirated content do you think is there? Plus that each torrent has average of few dozens peers, is that total up to how many petabytes/exabytes? Without these pirated torrents there is really no point to get a 1TB hard disk and 10Mbps Internet connection for average users.
To keep it short, in the sense of economics, there is really no lost of profit. Pirated content is just transfering the profit from content provider to the hardware industry.
no M$ killed it may say to OEMs if you use OS2 we well take away your deal on windows and make you pay more.
I've been a fan of iD from day one. But this just REEKS Of idiocy.
Computer hardware has been becoming cheaper exponentially since the dawn of the silicon age. When you can get a new super computer for the equivalent of 20% of the previous price, how do expect the consumer to pay almost twice as much for the latest software? Especially when the software is bloated, slower, more complicated, and there is an Open Source version that is superior?
iD is no exception. The last EXCELLENT iD game I played was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Besides the fact that all their sequels are less fun than the previous one, the gameplay has stayed almost exactly the same for a decade.
You want me to pay for software? Good luck, especially when your software is repetitive, boring, over-priced, and a rehash of a previous game that was better.
But thank you for Open Sourcing the original quake engines, honestly, you could over-charge for tons of more boring rehashes, and you would still be saints in my eyes. Just STFU about piracy already. The corporations have already lost that battle, and let's be real, here, software is never going to be paid for in the end. It is inevitable reality of the new world we live in. You just look stupid fighting that fact.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The Doom 3 engine, which is what everything since then has been based on, really fails to impress me. Several problems:
1) It doesn't look as good as it should for the hardware requirements. I remember when Doom 3 came out, my PC struggled with it despite being decent. Had to run it at 800x600. No big deal... Except that it really didn't back that up with beauty. For example if you got close to a surface, you started to see pixelization of textures, even with it set on ultra detail. The game just used pretty low rez textures, and had nothing like the detail textures that the Unreal Engine uses to deal with close up viewing.
2) It was too concerned about being "realistic" not enough about looking good. The lighting model is a great example. They wanted 100% dynamic lighting, meaning there was no magic global lights, all lights had a source. Great... Except their lights didn't reflect or refract. Light would hit a surface and bounce only once. If it went to the camera, ok you saw it. Anywhere else, it went away. This lead to the hard shadows and the extremely dark corners. You could have a corner with two bright lights right by it, but if neither shined directly back in there, the corner would be pitch black because there isn't any reflected light. While that may be more "correct" than models used by some games, I don't care, it doesn't look as good and that's what matters.
3) The games had little replay value. Doom 3 in particular was all about shock value. I've gotta say, it was a scary game to play the first time through. However, it lost all that after the first run. When you know the imp is standing behind the door to ambush you, it's not so scary anymore. With the scare factor gone, it was really a fairly mediocre shooter in my opinion.
4) Poor backward scaling. While the Doom 3 engine now runs on what is quite old hardware, when it came out it was very much a Crysis. It needed first flight hardware to run. It wasn't just that you had to have it to look good, you needed it to run at all. DX8 or better hardware was mandatory. All the peopel with DX7 hardware were SOL. Well, many other games scaled much better. They had to give up shiny features on older hardware, but they still ran.
Over all I think iD has really dropped the ball recently and I think it shows in engine sales. Unreal Engine has been vastly outselling the iD Tech engine. Their problems with sales don't come from piracy, but from lack of quality. Their games, as you said, are not great. I gave Quake 4 a pass, and same for Enemy Territory. Decided to get Unreal Tournament 3 instead. Their engine is also getting almost no licenses. People are buying the Unreal Engine instead. No surprise there either. UE 3 looks fantastic, and scales quite well. It may not be as technologically "correct" as Id's engine in terms of lighting and such, but who care? Ultimately it looks awesome and that is what you are paying for.
I get tired of companies that release poor quality products blaming poor sales on piracy. This is especially true for companies that release shit that requires the highest end, most badass computer. Crytek was whining about that with Crysis. "Oh we only sold a million copies, those evil pirates are killing us!" Hmmm, you think maybe instead the reason you only sold a million copies is because you need, as Yahtzee put it, a hypothetical future computer from space to play it well? I gave Crysis a miss because looking at benchmarks, it wouldn't have run well on my system. When I came out, I had an 8800 GTS, not the top of the line, but damn near it in terms of video cards. Reason I had it is I have a large LCD. I want games to run nice and fast on that large LCD. They do to. However the Crysis benchmarks showed it didn't. Maybe if I had 2 8800 GTXes it would have, but my lowly GTS (a $400 card I might add) wasn't enough. Ok, well I didn't need that, so I passed on it.
Well same shit with Doom 3. I did actually pick that one up but it really ran pathetic. I wasn't rocking top of the line graphics hardware, but
#1 - There is no Piracy of IP - because IP doesn't exist. It cannot exist. Thought is not a tangible object. You can copyright specific code, or patent a specific object. You cannot call thought an object, it's an action. Ideas are your own, only if you never share them with anyone else. Once an idea is shared, it belongs as well to the person you've shared that idea with. You may have been the original thinker who came up with it, but it's no longer your thought alone.
#2 - DRM is a sham. It was never intended to stop piracy. It's the next generation of faulty media to be sold by the MPAA/RIAA in an attempt to continue to sell products that will fail / fall apart, degrade - so that you have to buy it again. Just like vinyl, tapes, compact discs and DVDs - DRM is designed to be broken. The MAFIAAS complain, and release the next version they had up their sleeves, ready for it to be broken as well. They want it to break, so that they can release something new, and force the consumer to buy another copy in the latest and greatest, unbreakable encryption version - which of course is broken within hours of release.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
When someone is making a new type of thing which obsoletes software, get back to me, and then you can use the buggy whip analogy.
But software makers don't charge for "making the thing"; they charge for distribution (handing out copies of software that they've already written), and their distribution model is obsolete. That's where the analogy to buggy whips works. I don't need a buggy whip because I have a car, and I don't need a box with a disc in it because I have internet access. (Or: I don't need a paid download server because I have a torrent client.)
What I still need is the act of writing that software in the first place, but that doesn't seem to be for sale. They expect me to buy a disc in a box instead, even though I don't need it.
Yes, and that is because the work in those [other] areas is the reproduction of the product. The work in IP is actually creating the thing you wish to sell, reproduction is and always has been effortless.
Then maybe they should stop charging for reproduction, and charge instead for the work they do that isn't effortless.
Their skill and talent as developers can't be reproduced. If they just come out and say "I'm not writing any more software until there's money in my hand", what could the pirates possibly do? Kidnap them and force them to write software for free? Of course not.
Someone will put money in that hand, because people still need new software to be written, and then the developer gets paid for writing software, and everyone's happy.
Good God, why is is that no one on /. who opposes IP even understands the issue at hand?
Apparently no one who supports IP understands the issue either. The issue is that developers are doing the hard work for free and then charging money for something that's trivial and effortless. It's no surprise that people would rather do the trivial stuff themselves for free; the trouble is that developers aren't willing to charge directly for their hard work.
(And no, I'm not some kid who's never created anything of value. I've been a professional developer for about a decade, and as a hobbyist I've written tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lines of OSS and freeware.)
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I am a software developer, and I grew up in Mesquite, TX (Home of id Software). The company would not exist today had it not been for the efforts of file sharing. Hundreds if not thousands of disks copied among friends to share this amazing game. BBS's spanning the Big-D list all had file sections devoted to Wolfenstien, and later Doom. Granted the program was handed out as shareware, but it's not the distribution of files that leads to piracy, it's the crack of the key mechanism. Developers understood this then,
Hollenshead , from the article: "what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem."
Does he seriously think that hardware vendors shoulder the responsibility of stopping software from working? Hardware vendors have added so many new security features to PC's in recent years, but in the end it is MY COMPUTER. I choose what to run, what to download, and how to use that PC. DRM-like technologies have a history of being used to content providers to limit legal use of a product. As such any hardware-level solutions will not be received warmly, therefore decrease sales.
DRM, as is with speeding, will always be a cat and mouse game of technology. Lasers and scanners will continue to 1-up each other, but don't expect the car maker to slow the car down.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
1.5 is nothing. I filled that in just 2 days of Olympics in HD.
Your post is total B.S. I hope you are not a software developer, because I would not touch anything you write with a 20 ft pole....
I happen to disagree with all the choices you made.
"Mac OS is impractical, paternalistic in the extreme, and pushy as hell"
Nonsense. Impractical, right. Paternalistic? What's more paternalistic than Windoze? Mac OS X is UNIX, tweakable in the extreme.
"And then microsoft came along. And gave developers visual basic.....Therefore there's MANY more apps for windows."
Correction: There are MANY more CRAPPY applications for windoze.
"matlab vs mathematica. ....Yet nearly everyone jumps in the matlab pit."
I don't. I chose Mathematica and never regretted it. Many others agree with me.
"The exact same situation you have with iphone versus windows smartphones. Why do you only have skype on windows smartphones ? Why do you only have good calculators on windows smartphones ? "
But try browsing the web in the iPhone vs. a Windoze smartphone...I don't want Skype, whose protocol is proprietary. Good calculators? Please, just wait and see.
Your analogies with capitalism/socialism are totally out of place. So Apple is socialism?!???
"Apple is currently a blip". A blip that has been around for 30 years during which M$ continuously copied them (badly)?
I bet you consider McDonald gourmet food.
I'm talking about the late 90's, That's when PCs transformed from a novelty item only some had, to a mainstream item that almost every home had.
Windows was more established in the early 90's via the methods you mentioned, true, but the primary reason that Windows became mainstream is because major PC manufacturers pre-installed it during the late 90's when everyone started picking up a PC(this was true in the later days of 3.1/3.11 as well).
Also, like you mentioned, there were many other alternatives at the time, some of which were even free. But people *gasp* wanted Windows for some reason or another. If Windows has sucked, no one would have started using it in the first place. That's what you're trying to say here isn't it? The only reason people use Windows is because they got it for free?
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
If you think we're promoting piracy, you're free to write software that runs without hardware. Drop us a little note to let us know how that works out, why don't you?
Sincerely,
The Hardware Manufactures
P.S. You frigging parasites
It came on 40 floppies or something like that. :)
I remember it asking me to insert "disk containing file x"
when you wanted to install something. And it never told
you which disk it was so you had to test all until you hit
the right one
By Todd's same logic, our government loves criminals because we assume that people are innocent of crimes even if they possess tools that are commonly used in crimes.
Would Todd outlaw anything that has been used illicitly? Apparently so. I prefer to keep all things legal and prosecute when possible based on the acts. If you shoot someone with a gun, you are a criminal. Owning one is not. If you drive drunk, it is a crime, drinking is not. Trading copyrighted materials over a peer to peer network is a crime, using a peer to peer network is not.
If anything hardware companies come out on the side of freedom, something Todd obviously doesn't understand.
He is still angry that computer manufacturers refused to bundle in Duct Tape and a Flashlight so Doom 3 would actually be playable.
Sure they know about it. I have an HP machine I bought about 1999. "Download music off the web" is one of the ones in 1 inch high letters on the front. There was no iTunes or anything back then. For the record, I use Linux, and use p2p to get distributions when they come out (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu), and also large data sets (the world terrain data for FlightGear is a 4 dvd set). Of course, all of this software is GPL. There isn't anything illegal about downloading it (you aren't even allowed to grump about me downloading it, not a bit!). I have contributed to solving Linux kernel bugs with the assistance of Intel senior systems engineers. They like free (freely available) software.
alternatives were there from the start OS/2 and Gem being the most popular...
You can make the same argument that PC game developers love Windows piracy, because it provides so many more targets for their products.
The problem is'nt that he is not right, he is right actually. The problem is that he does'nt come with any trace of solution to that situation after making such a statement. Making such charge against the hardware manifacturers without any more substance to back up his claims is just irrevelant. This kind of speech will just vanish into the wild cause it does'nt bring up anything, while it actually hold truth, which is sad. I actually am, like many others, pirating and spending my money on hardware. But if I did'nt have the hardware, I would'nt be able to run his or other compagnies games decently. So when you think about it, is his statment bringing anything new to the situation, or chaning anything? no. I would'nt buy a game i could'nt run decently. I will tell you mister Id CEO, I pretty much like Id Software, John Carmack in particular, but you have to push the matter much more far then this if you want to make any kind of impact. The broadband ISPs have a much bigger responsability in the piracy case than the hardware manifacturers have. The hardware manifacturers actually benifits from the piracy situation, but without being really aware of it. If they are guilty of something, it is to not denounce it, and not to encourage it. Check out the ISPs first. The internet is a great information and communication tool right, but what is the point in having a high bandwith connection if it's not to pirate content, there is no other point. You see, there should be some kind of piracy taxe, and everyone with some kind of brain knows it. The situation with hardware manifacturers is totally different, there should be a coallission between software and hardware manifacturers to back each others up, and there is already one that have been created around last year, including the big players in the industry like Microsoft, AMD-ATI and Intel. So well...what's really the point behind that accusation of yours?
Once you say an obvious fact like that, you must be suggesting something to prevent it. Blame of hardware manufacturers to support piracy means they aren't doing enough to prevent it. How can a hardware manufacturer prevent it? Think about it.
I am also sick of piracy especially for making that junk desktop (Windows) some sort of de-facto standard. Everyone knows all of those some hundred thousand games can be easily pirated so they choose Windows at first hand along with that no name gaming PC.
Most of you are missing the biggest point! It is NOT up to hardware manufacturers to try to stop software piracy. Their task is to build the hardware that the customer wants, and make sure it works and has proper drivers.
Crippling hardware with DRM is just gonna lose sales for them. Just think about this for a second...if hardware manufacturers build DRM into their products, they are as good as acusing every customer of Piracy!
Stoping software piracy is up to the software companies. First of all they have to accept that a certain small percentage of users are not going to pay for anything that they can get for free. Just accept it and get over it. Second, they need to realize that the rest of us are tired of overpriced software. I mean really! $50.00 or more for a game that I will have completed and gotten tired of in two to 3 weeks?! And while some companies put out quality software, many software products are not as good or well written as trhey could (or should) be.
DRM and copy protection are NOT the answer...they only punish legitimate paying customers. They don't stop the biggest pirates , the ones who sell hundreds or thousands of illegal copies.
So ID software, get it together! Don't ecpect others to solve your problems for you!
Are you seriously equating tools bundled with OS == easy to write software?
Apple includes these tools because of lack of developers, compared to windows. they *need* to make it really easy to obtain tools.
windows is a desktop OS. 90% of the users (ok i pulled that out of nothing, but you get the idea) aren't developers. it makes no sense to add that crap onto the install disk.
besides.. microsoft couldnt care any less if the tools are on the disk or not. people are still writing _TONS_ of windows apps. looks like they know how to find the tools they need.
Actually there was a speech by Bill Gates where he said that piracy was part of the business plan to hook users to their software. It was exactly around that time. Microsoft obviously knew what was going on and they were happy about it because they knew once they have established themselves in the corporate offices (Have in mind, many people were using PC Dos back than, Lotus 123 was the spreadsheet of choice, dbase the workstation database and Wordperfect the word processor of choice) they could slowly but surely tighten the screws to milk the cow. Their most important aspect was to gain domination in the business software sector, and they used unfair tactics on all fronts. Lotus 123 and Wordperfect were kicked out of their positions by witholding vital API information or delivering the API information at the time of the Windows release, while Excel already was in place. Windows gained domination over GEM and OS/2 by simply the stupidity of IBM, having Microsoft accepting that everyone was copying Windows, and GEMs deathknell was the lost case against Apple regarding the movable Windows. No matter what "historians" write today, accepting piracy as door into corporations and unfair practices against the competition helped Microsoft to dominate the PC UI market!
Actually the cornerstone was laid in the early 90s when everyone including the uncle of everyone was copying windows and Microsoft had a business plan to allow that exactly to gain foothold into the doors. The late 90s didnt change that anymore Windows already was the defacto standard. OS/2 was dead on the consumer front. Gem died also in the early 90s there simply were no alternatives due to the fact that the Linux UIs were not as sophisticated as they are today and OSX was in its infancy back then! (Or did not even exist) Nextstep came a few years to late on the PC it came when Windows already was established as a defacto standard!
Seriously, there is plenty of good reasons against DRMrs. And by the way: Why should hardware manufacturers do the job? And should they do it for free?
And, by the way, it is not necessary to secure DRM to full extent. It just has to be hard enough to crack it. But why would I buy DRMed music anyways? What's in it for the customer? Nothing, there is no benefit for us, so good luck implementing it...
The content that is available will not go away. They should have thought about it when I told you 10 years ago. Good luck with forcing it on us anyways.
I recall the CEO of Seagate saying that his company help people store a bunch of crap like smut. Obviously, a lot of that smut, movies, anime, games, etc come from P2P for "free".
No, pre-installation did. And that cause others to want it for free.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They should include DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Basically the hammer smashes your digits if you don't have the necessary rights to use the hammer for a particular task.
I'm a developer, who actually analyses & writes code for a living. Code that actually has to work (actually I'm a consultant, currently developing for a bank, the current instance of the database that my code has to work against was, I'm not kidding, started before I was born. And it's still running. How do you query it ? You take a terminal change "a part of the 80x25 screen" (I'm not kidding), then write "+SAM" and it executes everything above the current cursor and changes the text into the response. Now imagine doing that from C++ code. That's what "it needs to work" means. Oh btw, this method of working is, I kid you not, called "EASY". And apparently, compared to it's predecessor, it is easy).
Let's say I want to start apple programming, let's evaluate what I need :
-> an apple desktop or laptop. The bottom end or second-hand simply won't run os X (or won't run it acceptably or for very long), we're talking at least $1300 to $1800. I can only buy this directly from apple, no competition or alternatives exist here
-> a membership of apple's "development club" : $99 (a month I believe)
-> I need to get my software into the apple stores and into shop.apple.com, because there is no other channel. And if it doesn't follow apple's interpretation of the "user interface guidelines" (which quicktime violates rougly in the manner a fat pakistani violates a goat) it's just not going to happen
-> I need to learn & develop my software in objective C. Again, there is no (useable) alternative with support from apple. To add insult to injury, nobody else uses objC (well I believe there is a linux desktop environment in the language).
On windows ... buy myself a $499 laptop (which will more than do, and come with windows). I pick whatever company I want (one that's close for example) to sell it to me. I get a beer the next time I see the guy selling it to me in a cafe. I download visual studio express (which knocks the socks of xcode, but I will fully admit xcode is useable), which let's me develop, fully supported (and even free) in C#, C++, Basic, F#, Python (after a few downloads from microsoft reasearch). I download another dev environment, eclipse (by ibm) or one by sun, and I develop in java. I download another and develop in pascal. Support is available, even from microsoft, for all of these languages, and they're open and widely used, including used by microsoft.
I go to the nearest company, and they have 10 programs they're willing to pay me to develop. I go to the nearest shop, even did this with a supermarket once, and they're willing to sell boxed versions of software I wrote. There are thousands of places like that within a kilometer of where I live.
And you're seriously wondering why microsoft wins ?
You are suffering from PDD, in that you're a user, and you're blaming me for not going to 10x more trouble to develop for mac os x for half the price, because "it looks better".
But we all know the real deal : you want me to jump through 10 times more hoops to sell applications to you, and I will ask you 10 times the price of a windows application.
Of course, you consider this unfair.
To that, I will respond with a fully meant, eloquently put and most satisfying "fuck you". Then you do not buy, I cut my losses and go back to windows. Cya !
This assumes your friends don't have PCs of their own.
They don't, and they probably won't until college. Even then, it's a heck of a lot more pain to pack a PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers than to grab a controller.
I'd still much rather play on my console, and have them on their console -- no screen peeping
What advantage would screen peeping give in a game like Bomberman or Super Smash Bros. that shows the whole arena on one screen anyway?
and they don't even have to physically be here.
But they are here, and the family PC is at home. The model of one PC per player is tough on people who have to stay with a sitter (such as myself) because their parents aren't home or on children of families who travel 500 miles to a periodic family reunion. And it also means that people who live in the same house can't play against each other.
If your one console cost twice as much altogether as one PC, I think the PC is the win
Let's look at it from a different stance. Assume that a family already owns a television and a PC. Adding a game console would cost $550: $400 for the console and $150 for extra controllers. Adding three more PCs would easily cost that much each, plus you often have to buy the game discs separately for each PC.
id software seems to have forgotten that it exists due to "piracy", or at least peer to peer sharing of the original "Doom" shareware game and voluntary contributions that started the whole thing. Of course almost everything else they make is crap, so it's pretty normal to blame the lack of success on everyone else.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Content will only survive if they adopt a subscription model.
They're using their grammar skills there.
some kids played his games without paying. Awww. Now that is a real crime, letting some multimillionaire suffer while some lower or middle class kids played a game for free.
There is another perspective. Copyright is corrupt, there's no real competition or a free market and therefore, software prices are artificially high. In fact, if software was priced reasonably, there would be far, far less so-called "piracy".
It's a shame that management spends it's time attempting to control its customers rather than focusing on building better products at better prices.
Hardware manufacturers make money selling hardware. So it's hardly surprising they don't care to solve someone else's problem, right?
However... there IS a thing which was created to help deter software theft- it's call Digital Rights Management (DRM). And not only is it not all that popular, but it's not even a selling point for hardware (quite the opposite, in fact).
So really, the only thing I learned on this issue is that Captain Obvious works at id.
if you don't see the brave new industry you're blind!
p2p, mp3 players, internet usage, and pc sales have been soaring for quite some time.
This brave new industry has been expanding into other areas as well, such as centralized media servers.
This "brave new industry" is called the convergence, which was promised in the mid 90's, until the incumbent firms realized it would be the end of piece-meal sales. This, of course, is why entirely new players are forcing their hands.
Of course, convergence also means greater interactivity between devices, and in fact depends on the capacity to copy freely.
So far as gaming is concerned, the smart developers have shifted to subscription based online games. You can't pirate webhosting, and if you continue adding value to the game with new content "free server" providers won't be able to keep up (see wowscape vs official wow servers for a good example)
Others have focused solely on consoles! people feel more comfortable gaming on them anyway because they know they'll get better stability, fewer cheaters, and won't be forced on an upgrade treadmill with every new title, and it shows as consoles have been gaining ground on pc games.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
you're talking about 3d modelling with metallurgy and various other physics engines built in for the utmost accuracy and to avoid those nasty "engineering disasters", among other useful features.
Is this not exactly the same kind of thing game developers strive for?
It seems pretty obvious to me that a single engine could be used to power a cad tool on the one hand, and produce the "rag doll physics" on a game engine on the other.
Game's are hardly niche.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...made up on the spot, id belongs to the 99% of the video game industry that relish in promoting violence and gratuitous sexually laden content (largely consisting of scantily-clad voluptous females).
But when challenged by the concerned public, they pull out the 1% of the industry that make wholesome games.
See? Two can play that game, mr. "Doom".
They have apparently overturned it
They can claim a difference all they want, but scotus has overturned betamax. There is no clarity anymore, and it has noticeably chilled technical innovation since then.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience.
yeah, just like drm provides "value added" to music and movies right?
I think your idea of value is rather perverted.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
yep... that's the truth!
and that's why people don't like to buy expensive PCs or MACS because they ALL have that family member, co-worker, dude down the street or little kid that has what they WANT and NEED!.
admit it!
every PC i fix and they don't have the original cd they ALWAYS try to bribe me into giving it to them for free....hell no...i'm not going to jail for you.
besides the manufactures know its going to break On the software side and the enduser being ignorant will give up, give the so-called broken PC away and buy a new one at some place with a cool flashy advertising price cut cost!.
enough with the tunnel vision linear bias talk.....its the liars
that ALWAYS try to cover there ass.
and stop trying to force feed your ISM on someone!
the law is the law!
those that break it will get theres
Ok if your a pc gamer and haven't been living under a rock, you know they sponsor a well known event called Quakecon every year. For the last 5 years I have been attending they have had a dc++ hub where there have been terabytes of stuff for download. Everyone says "game patches and mods" but you know what it really is being downloaded, Movies, tv shows, music, games, and other software. Yes id software supports one of the largest piracy events in North America. Then Todd H. has the balls to blame hardware companies? What the hell has he been smoking?
Some errors in your post.
You don't need to join apple's development connection to sell apps for mac. (Iphone is a different story). There used to be 3rd party compilers for mac (metroworks), but since its gcc now. Xcode development platform is free.
Eclipse development works on mac as well.
Full visual studio is not free, and is quite pricy.
I do manly linux development but there is a good article on ars about mac development worth checking out:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars
I have noticed a trend away from open systems (mac/linux/pc) to closed ones (Nintendo , Xbox, iphone etc... ) which require "blessing" of a company to sell software for the device. This is probably a reaction to piracy.
Yes, piracy got 3.1 some dominance. But it was still open season until personal computer ownership went from a minority to a majority. This is the late 90s. Linux wasn't anywhere close to being ready for the consumer desktop like it is today, so the options were pretty much Windows or Mac OS...yes, it was alive and well then, and had a much larger marketshare than it does today. But Mac OS was only available on Apple hardware, and they weren't producing anything special back then. So other manufacturers, bundling Windows, won out. That's pretty much it. Not some grand theory about piracy (it might have *helped* make Windows one of those two, but it was far from one of the most important factors), just the fact that only two OS's were ready for the mainstream when everyone was buying computers left and right.
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what very well may be his livelihood
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
He speaks the truth.
Windows 3.1 and WFW 3.11 came on something like 11-13 floppy disks and there was NO copy protection of any kind. NONE.
Oh, those were they days!
I still have Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse on floppy disk (8 disks), the copy protection on that was the classic:
open page x and type the nth word of the nth paragraph