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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."
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) (emphasis added)
ISPs DON'T want to sell bandwidth, they want people to buy their flat-rate service, then use as little bandwidth as possible. ISPs throttle or kick off the bandwidth hogs.
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.
The Amiga was pretty much dead before anyone heard about Doom. What killed the Amiga was simply not enough innovation in the hardware department. A 8Mhz 68000 was nice in 1985, but in 1990 it was underpowered. When in 1990 the A3000 was finally released, its price was far too high. Nobody could afford to pay that much for a hobby or gaming computer, so people were still stuck with a computer designed with 1985 hardware. Commodore had some reaction in 1992 with the Amiga 1200, but the the 14 Mhz 68020 was still not powerful enough, it should have been 68030, and anyway it was already too late as people already made the switch.
Also, piracy did help a lot in killing the Amiga. In 1990, the Amiga was to the IBM PC what the PC is now to consoles. It was a nice machine, but with no real money to be made because of piracy. After 1990, games for the Amiga were mostly PC ports. This means that there was no real incentive to have a not so shiny Amiga.
"People who can create should not be treated like someone who flips burgers. "
Wait, what? Anyone can create, some better than others. Burger flippers create 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?"
So no different than a burger flipper then.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Are you suggesting that people knowing that the copyright will expire sooner will cause them to wait 5 years until things are available legally for free?
Only if you form a "copyright police" to go around and rough up everyone who doesn't conform... At which point we start extending copyright again.
There's no obvious solution to the problem of copyright. Frankly, there must be a basic moral issue at question here someplace; perhaps it's over whether the creator of a work has a right to reassign ownership, or perhaps it's over whether it's right for a corporation (which has no "soul" whatever that means to you and can in theory live eternally) to receive that ownership. For some it's over whether there should be a right to make a profit from that idea at all. Some only disagree on how long you should be able to profit, with opinions ranging on up into infinity.
Copyright law is inherently intermingled with DRM; the two cannot be separated unless we bomb ourselves back to the stone age and are no longer using digital media too complicated to be interpreted without the aid of electronic computers, and that only because (I hope...) no one will be delivering plays or poems in cipher... Copyright is intended to be an agreement between the creator and the public. The public grants the creator the sole right to distribute their work for a limited time. In exchange, the public receives the right to use that work for any purpose once the work is no longer covered by its term of copyright. The creator is motivated to send their work in to the national archive through a copyright registration process which more or less surely establishes a date of copyright.
The existence of the legal entity known as the "corporation", which has the legal rights of a person but none of the responsibilities, brings the issue into the realm of trademark law as well. The canonical example is Disney's character Mickey Mouse, numerous pieces of media including whom would now be in the public domain if it were not for repeated extensions of copyright law.
Finally, legislation like the DMCA tie all these bodies of copyright law together (along with patents!) into the same big pool of pain. The patents are related because of their necessity for legally protecting DRM, which of course is impossible to protect technologically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...pirating id's stuff.
That's how Id got big, remember? Doom was pirated a lot, and that made it a big hit.
To some extent, sure. However, Doom had a demo, and as I recall, that's what made it popular. Quake had the first quarter of the game as a demo, and I know a lot of people who routinely copied things from friends who each bought themselves copies of Quake.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
None of what you say is true for OS X development. The whole "commissar" bit is great emotive writing, but flawed because it's simply untrue.
iPhone development definitely has some issues when it comes to developing apps that you want to sell at Apple's online store, but you just can't extend that to OS X development and go on a tirade with any honesty.
PDD stands for Pervasive Developmental Disorder which is a part of the autism spectrum.
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 !
The only thing right about apple's interface is the consistency. Can you point me to a way to use anything OTHER THAN ITUNES to get an mp3 playing on my iphone ?
I use Amarok on Ubuntu to manage my iPod. There are other solutions on Windows and I'm sure the Mac has other solutions too.
Despite what most people may think it's not some hacky way either. I just plug in my ipod, Amarok recognised it and let me put music on it. It just works.
Can I write gui's for mac os x with some language other than objective-c yet?
Yes, easily.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.