What's unethical about it? Was the game without this "DLC" poor? If this content hadn't been on the disc, would that make it okay?
If the game was shitty, then fine - but your dislike of the game has nothing to do with their decision to make DLC for it.
If the game was fine, and you're just angry that something that shipped on the disc wasn't part of the original release; so what? That's a pretty arbitrary distinction to make, and completely irrelevant.
Either the game was good as-released, and this additional content is a good addition worth $5; or alternatively, it's not a worthwhile addition and you keep your $5. If the game wasn't good as-released, then it just wasn't a very good game. The DLC doesn't come into it.
So a company is going to invest millions of dollars into R&D and risk losing it all if it doesn't product anything worthwhile so that, in the best case, it can... get back to the same level of wealth that it started with? And you think that's going to promote progress in science and the useful arts?
Research is a high-risk investment: most research doesn't lead to anything commercially viable. In order to make a high-risk investment appealing, you need to have a high-reward component. That's exactly what the patent system does and provides for: a high reward if your research yields something useful, which means it's worthwhile to run research projects even if most of them don't pay off.
Nobody is going to invest money into something where they risk losing it, and the very best they can hope for, is to be no better off for having invested it.
Yes, one of the costs of this is that some progress will become stalled when it gets mired in patents. But if you start nullifying any patents that are holding up further development, you greatly decrease the potential reward for research, thus making it less appealing.
My thinking here is that the people who put forward proposals would also be responsible for putting together a concise summary of why their view is the best (it would need to be concise, since voters won't read a wall of text). Their opposition would then vet their summary for accuracy, so any claims made would need to be backed by evidence. A few weeks of debate would probably be more than enough for most issues to make it to the final stage where they can be put to the vote. A voter who spent a few minutes reading all the summaries would then be sufficiently informed to make a decent decision. Those who don't care can abstain from the vote, and those who are really interested can always do their own research and check out the citations for evidence presented in the summaries, and so on.
With this system, parties won't be so important. You'd probably want to require a certain amount of support within the House before a proposal could actually be put forth to vote (so if only one or two representatives backed it, it wouldn't make it through to the voters); in this case, you'd probably have groups forming to back particular issues, disintegrating after the matter was settled. There should probably be a "none of the above" option in every vote, too, so even if you do get a silly situation where there's only two proposals and they're both terrible, the voters can refuse to back either. (I think there's a significant difference between "voting no" and "not voting at all".)
I think such a scheme could effectively be implemented using the internet to vote so it's not a huge burden on the populace, and such voting could occur very frequently, even weekly. That way there would only be a small number of issues each time, making it viable for the populace to read the summaries for issues they're interested in and have their say. Also, the summaries would make it easy for the mainstream news media to present the issues in an unbiased manner.
...which will get even fewer votes than the Greens.
I think the next step for democracies is to scrap the party system and have voting based on particular policies, not on some nebulous notion of a "party platform". The common system of voting in a bunch of drongos every few years and writing to representatives and hope they'll support your views is far from ideal, and modern technology makes it quite feasible to enable voters to have a much more direct say on particular issues.
But I'm not sure any of the major political parties would ever support such a scheme; certainly not while they're in power.
This, to me, is the strangest thing about these filtering/censorship proposals. On the one hand, it's claimed that only really, really illegal stuff will be blocked by it -- the worst of the worst that pretty much guarantees a prison sentence merely for possessing, and that the lists will be accurate and won't block legitimate content. On the other, people who are detected trying to access this stuff won't be charged or even investigated?
It seems very strange. Obviously there's simple explanations for this lack of coherency, but the self-contradictory nature of the proposals is so much more transparent than usual in politics.
Relatively new? Dead Space was over a year old - that's bargain bin territory for most games. Bioshock was two years old when you bought it on special, with a sequel on the way - hardly walking off the shelves on its own now, was it? Arkham Asylum was still fairly current at only 3 months old, but it was still well outside of the initial sales period. A lot of companies release games right in time for the Christmas holiday, so it's not surprising companies would have a game that came too early for the Christmas sales period on sale at a discount.
Understand that by "obsolete" I mean in terms of primary sales, not in terms of the game itself. There's plenty of very old games that are still excellent to play today, however there's very little money in them because very few people buy old games. There's a lot of not-so-old games that are pretty hard to buy new these days, especially from bricks-and-mortar stores, due to limited shelf space and so on.
Digital distribution solves that issue, and also makes it easier to give a discount, as I mentioned before. Not having to worry about distribution logistics makes it a lot easier. It seems pretty tough for even major manufacturers to do promotions on their goods across many different retailers, so for a video game publisher to do that on their margins would almost certainly be a money-losing exercise. I think stores that have low prices for games are simply trimming their profit margins in an effort to clear stale inventory that's no longer selling. But if it's just a matter of getting Valve to discount the price and put up a nice banner, it's an easy to eek a few extra sales out of a product that's no longer on the radar. Plus like all sales, it's likely to stir some interest that will result in additional purchases after the sales period is over.
Essentially, most consumers are pretty fickle and the majority of a game's sales come early in its life. This is particularly true of the really commercialised mass-market offerings; more in-depth, hard-core or niche products probably have a smoother sales curve as word-of-mouth slowly spreads. But for the big titles, it's the initial release period where it's in all the magazines and so on where the real money is.
You keep saying that and I'd really like to see where you get this information from, i.e. [citation needed].
Buying video games is clearly discretionary (purely entertainment), which means people are going to make such purchases from discretionary income. Selling things second-hand gives people more discretionary spending ability. It seems highly unlikely that at least some portion of this wouldn't go back into buying new games. After all, if they have games to sell, they must have bought them new at some point, right?
Gabe Newell seems to think that pricing isn't all that important. This is in regards to piracy, but it seems reasonable it would hold true for new games, as well: he's certainly not going to be discussing the second-hand market here. Video here (statement at 5:25).
Also, there seems to be an element of circular logic here: games have to be sold at high retail price because many people aren't willing to pay that and instead buy it second-hand (at a lower price). Presumably this leads to publishers increasing the retail price to make up for the "losses" from the second-hand market, leading even more people to resort to the second-hand market. Nice self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't think the cheap Steam sales demonstrate any kind of willingness on the part of publishers to lower their prices, given how new-release titles are still just as expensive on Steam (which, to the best of my knowledge, effectively prohibits re-sale). This only seems to happen for products that are effectively obsolete, and as a way to increase exposure for new products (e.g. Bioshock as you mentioned: what better way to get people interested in Bioshock 2 than to have them play Bioshock 1 just before its release?). This is more about the cost structure of digital distribution vs. retail distribution than anything else, i.e. it's actually feasible to sell a game for $5 and make money on it on Steam, whereas packaging and shipping a product and putting it on retail shelves for $5 just isn't going to happen. Retailers who have a large stock paid way more than $5 for it already and won't want to take a loss, and the margins on selling product at that price point would be too small for most publishers to want to bother with.
Either way, my point was that you seemed to be comparing "safety conscious pilots/air passengers" to "general road users" which seemed an odd comparison. As you say, the low hanging fruit is easily achievable and reasonable, but I would argue that a large reason for the current road toll is the apathy of many road users. i.e. people think twice before getting into an airplane because it seems scary and dangerous, but many of those same people don't think twice about using the phone or even texting while driving along with the radio blaring and a million things on their mind (besides the road).
While there certainly are stupid and/or ignorant pilots, I think aviation in general is more self-selective due to the higher costs and (arguably) lower reward for becoming a pilot in the first place.
So anyway, this sums up what I'm talking about perfectly:
By flying well maintained equipment, which is hardly an undesired objective, are statistically safer than your typical vehicle on the road
i.e. Is flying well maintained equipment statistically safer than an equally well-maintained vehicle on the road? If you, as a road user, limit yourself to well-maintained vehicles and drivers who aren't idiots, are you still statistically safer in a well-maintained aircraft with a non-idiot pilot?
That was all I was getting at. I don't really care about the answer (and I'm not sure if such an answer could reasonably be arrived at via available statistics) but it just seemed like somewhat faulty reasoning and it bugged me. I'll go take my medication and leave you alone now.:)
Realistically, as long as you are a conservative pilot, and especially if you own your own plane (assuming that means its well maintained), you're far safer flying in a plane than riding on the roads.
Are you actually comparing the safety of a conservative pilot with their own well-maintained aircraft to the statistics for all motorcyclists, or was it just badly phrased?
If you are, then is there any evidence that a conservative pilot in a well-maintained aircraft is "far safer" than a conservative rider on a well-maintained motorcycle? You've excluded a lot of "low hanging fruit" to boost the safety statistics for aircraft, but don't appear to have applied the same comb to statistics for motorcycle safety.
The thing is, it doesn't matter if it's up 99.99999999999% of the time. Because most of the time you're not trying to play a game that requires the internet connection. It only matters if it happens to be down when you want to play the game.
The only way to achieve that is to have a connection that is either ALWAYS up 24x7 with 100% reliability; or otherwise is only down when you don't want to play the game. Neither is a particularly realistic proposition.
Sure, it's not the end of the world if you can't play the game at some point. But that's just weasel-words to get around the real issue: Ubisoft have added a dependency on a component which is otherwise completely unrelated to the game. If you're playing a single-player game, your internet connection shouldn't matter. In fact, a single-player game is exactly the kind of thing you might decide to do if your internet connection does go down in order to pass the time while you wait for it to be fixed.
And of course, it's not just your own internet connection that matters here: your ability to play the game is dependent on the reliability of things which are entirely outside of your control. Just because your connection to Verizon is up doesn't mean their connection to some other arbitrary network is working reliably.
I don't know that doing anything client-side will work, for the same reason that DRM doesn't work. I guess it might deter the casual cheater, but then there's also the possibility that raising the bar will entice people to break the anti-cheating code just for the challenge.
The long-term solution I think is to design the game in such a way that the server can verify clients are playing by the rules. If wallhacks are a problem, the server could send fake data to the client telling it there's an enemy hidden behind a wall (when it's really not). Legitimate players won't be aware of this, but it would alter the behaviour of cheaters and thus they could be found out. Aimbots could perhaps be detected by supplying an invisible model that a legitimate player wouldn't be shooting at. Essentially, give the client bogus data that won't affect the experience of legit players, but will out cheaters.
Maybe it's easier to keep changing the client-side checks fast enough that it's not worth the time to work around, but I don't know if that kind of strategy is working in practice. Who will pay for the constant development?
I think it's safe to say they didn't happen to have cameras there filming the bottom of the door the moment the note was slipped under. There's also no indication that the note shown in the show bears any resemblance to the actual note (if there really was a note).
Given that the hosts didn't make any comments on what they thought of the issue (other than devoting more airtime to proponents of an R18+ rating for video games), I would suggest this was the show's way of expressing its own opinion on the matter, i.e. by taking the piss out of the allegation. Hardly unexpected given the nature of the show...
Similar experience on a small plane (50-seater, two seats on each side of the aisle) which was really underbooked - maybe 15 to 20 passengers total, and most people were seated around the middle of the plane next to other passengers, leaving other rows completely empty. Before take-off, someone asked if they could move to one of the empty rows, and were told they could once the plane was airborne but would need to move back before landing, due to the weight distribution.
The key management server will only activate the hosts that are reporting to once there's a certain number. Something like 20 clients, or 5 servers, is needed before any will activate when using the KMS key. I don't know if this is implemented locally on the server (i.e. a hacked version could activate them), or if there's some kind of back-and-forth between your KMS server and Microsoft. But if you use the regular software, it's not really viable for an ordinary user who only has a few PCs at most.
The new products like Vista and 7 also have Multiple Activation Keys (MAK) in addition to the KMS keys, which work in the normal manner (activation by speaking to Microsoft's servers), for those that don't want to set up a KMS host. Likely your campus also has MAK keys so if you could get hold of one of them you'd be able to use that to activate your copy of the OS, but they might keep them extra hidden. If you're using KMS there's no need to even keep a record of your MAK key(s).
I didn't realise Iranians previously had no choice but to use Gmail for their email. How silly of me. Maybe they should simply dismantle those laws so people can choose their email provider like in other countries, rather than changing it from "you must use Gmail" to "you must not use Gmail".
The goal isn't a bad one, however banning the competition seems contrary to the desire to "boost local development of internet technology". Outlawing your competitors is an effective way to gain market share, but it's not an effective way of encouraging innovation.
Really, they should just set up their service and try to out-compete Google. By blocking access to it just means their own service is more likely to be inferior to what people were previously using (Gmail) - but what incentive is there to make it better?
Well it's not about need. If you really need constant availability with absolutely no interruptions, you'll have engineered something to provide that. But most people would like to have constant availability, but the reality is you can't afford to provide that, so do what they can given their resources. That often means a high-availability failover cluster, with a short disruption to services whenever the failover occurs.
An inexpensive service to allow you to avoid failovers for some classes of scheduled maintenance just gives you another tool you can use to get closer to constant availability at a price that's affordable.
Combine this with something like VMware's fault tolerance and you could get a pretty robust solution. Now you just need to be able to patch the programs providing your service in-memory and you're gold!
Most clustered applications aren't active/active and fully stateful, as that raises the complexity by "quite a lot". I've got pending patches for one of the MS SQL servers that our website runs off, but failing over to the other cluster node will result in an interruption to the site while the services are stopped, the IP address etc. migrated, and everything restarts on the other server. Plus, the web application doesn't handle the temporary unavailability of the database very well, and it takes a couple of failed requests before it retries and starts working again.
The proxies sit between the web servers and the big bad internet are clustered as well (Linux-HA), but again there's a few seconds while the IP address is transitioned. This isn't so bad since in this case only on IP address needs to be relocated and no services restarted, but it does still cause a slight blip.
For many applications, having true seamless failover is very difficult. And if a few bucks a month can save you from having those 30 seconds of downtime, it could well be worth it for a lot of people.
Normally 1.0 implies that all features they expect/want to have in the "final version" of the product are present.
The question is, which features do you decide are going to be in "version 1.0" and what goes in "version 2.0"? I think a lot of OSS developers have a vision of what their project will eventually become, and those features all need to work and be stable before it'll be "1.0".
More commercially-focused developers may have a list of things they want in a "final" product, but then cull it down to a manageable subset and have that be the "1.0" release. And others might just develop until they run out of money, and then call whatever they've got "1.0".
I don't think it's anything to do with spinelessness; simply that if a program doesn't include all the expected features, then it's not "1.0". And the developers are the ones that decide which features are "expected"; it may still be a plenty useful program without them, but it's still "not finished".
You can use the same logic to say that having laws against murder and rape is equally futile, because you can't physically prevent people from doing whatever they want to do without massively encroaching on their basic rights. In fact, the final conclusion of such logic is that every single law that exists is pointless because it contravenes the laws of nature, and therefore is unenforceable. Of course every law is about stopping people from doing things they're physically capable of doing. That's kind of the whole point. Why would you make legislation mandating the laws of nature / laws of physics be obeyed?
This kind of "information is different and therefore laws to control it are stupid" thinking is therefore not in itself a compelling argument for why laws should be changed/scrapped and the idea of "intellectual property" should be completely rethought.
You're welcome to define the term however you want, but Wikipedia's definition is how most people see it. The term DRM is pretty recent, and post-dates other forms of copy protection such as bad sectors on disks that made them hard to copy, or having you look in the manual to find the Nth word in the Mth paragraph and page X.
Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. [...] The term is used to describe any technology which inhibits uses (legitimate or otherwise) of digital content that were not desired or foreseen by the content provider. The term generally doesn't refer to other forms of copy protection which can be circumvented without modifying the file or device, such as serial numbers or keyfiles.
Again, you're free to extend the term to include whatever you want it to include, but the general usage is fairly well-defined (even if the dividing line seems arbitrary) and that is likely what the person quoted in the article was talking about: "traditional" copy protection methods as opposed to newer, typically more invasive, DRM.
Might have a serial number or something similar you need to enter, with a checksum to verify it's valid. Lots of shareware titles do this. The demo is actually the full game, with just a simple check to see whether or not you're allowed to access all content, or play for longer than 30 minutes at a time, or level up your character past level 10, etc. Not every form of copy-protection is DRM, but if you don't have a legitimate copy you'd still need to bypass it in order to play the full game.
Even bypassing something as simple as a dialog that prompts you to "Type the magic word" to continue, with "the magic word" being what you have to type would qualify as a "crack".
The text you quoted says "Windows Vista continues to support the ability to use older XPDM drivers for upgrades and corporate editions" (emphasis mine). So if you bought a retail (non-upgrade) copy of Vista or 7 and did a clean install, you wouldn't be able to use the XP drivers?
Firstly, the statistics are useless because you're comparing very different things. People drive because they have to, or because the alternatives are too inconvenient. Pilots self-select to a much higher degree. Additionally, driving is perceived differently. Pilots are doing something that is considered difficult/challenging by the majority of the population; drivers are doing something mundane and trivial. Therefore, people will be much less willing to admit to themselves (let alone others) that they're bad at driving than at flying. Most people won't even try flying an aircraft in the first place! That goes to self-selection: the barrier to entry for being a pilot in control of your own aircraft is much higher than that of being a driver in control of your own car.
So, the mere fact that you're flying your own small aircraft in the first place means you're not "average", and neither are any of the other pilots. Driving is something that you pretty much just naturally end up doing, just like you end up getting a job and a bank account... it's just the natural path society sets up for us. Becoming a pilot requires a conscious decision and maintained effort.
Further, I bet that when you're "maneuvering in 3 dimensions while avoiding 5 or more other targets in close airspace while traveling well in advance of 100 MPH while engaging in a conversation with those 5 other targets" you're pretty damned alert and aware of what's going on. You really think the average driver in their daily commute is paying anywhere near as much attention to what's going on around them as you are when flying?
I agree that decreasing cell phone use in particular isn't going to change much, just as decreasing speeding won't. The root problem is complacency, and other unsafe behaviour is merely a symptom of that. But I don't know how to change that, and I suspect that any measures which would reduce complacency would be election-losers, so could never happen. At least, not while cars are still needed.
It usually comes down to whether or not I am driving in a familiar area where I know my way around in my sleep.
The majority of accidents occur in fairly close proximity to one's home - i.e. in places that are familiar to the driver.
Also, just because you sometimes choose to end a call because you've realised it's distracting you too much, doesn't mean you always end calls when you're too distracted to drive safely. Just because you're not aware you're not paying attention when driving doesn't mean you're always paying attention when driving.
I don't think that would be an improvement. Spammers would just use botnets or compromised hosts or ISPs/datacentres that don't care to send and host their spam emails, just like they currently use them to send mail. So nothing would change there. Spam filtering would be harder, since you can't analyse the content of the message to determine if it's spam or ham. And if you retrieve every message automatically so you can filter it, then you've not really achieved anything at all; the only possible gain from having spammers have to host their spam messages is that they might be taken offline by the time you come to read your email. If you don't automatically retrieve messages, then now sender's will always know exactly when you read their message, instead of the opt-in receipt currently in use.
Also, what if the sender's server is down when I go to read an email? What if it's just on a slow or congested link? What if I'm on a congested link? At least with regular "push" email, once it arrives it's local and fast to access and I can read my emails without an active internet connection. So pretty much everyone is simply going to configure their server or client to download every message automatically as soon as the notification is received, so it's just added an extra back-connection for no particular reason. (Kind of like FTP...)
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What's unethical about it? Was the game without this "DLC" poor? If this content hadn't been on the disc, would that make it okay?
If the game was shitty, then fine - but your dislike of the game has nothing to do with their decision to make DLC for it.
If the game was fine, and you're just angry that something that shipped on the disc wasn't part of the original release; so what? That's a pretty arbitrary distinction to make, and completely irrelevant.
Either the game was good as-released, and this additional content is a good addition worth $5; or alternatively, it's not a worthwhile addition and you keep your $5. If the game wasn't good as-released, then it just wasn't a very good game. The DLC doesn't come into it.
So a company is going to invest millions of dollars into R&D and risk losing it all if it doesn't product anything worthwhile so that, in the best case, it can... get back to the same level of wealth that it started with? And you think that's going to promote progress in science and the useful arts?
Research is a high-risk investment: most research doesn't lead to anything commercially viable. In order to make a high-risk investment appealing, you need to have a high-reward component. That's exactly what the patent system does and provides for: a high reward if your research yields something useful, which means it's worthwhile to run research projects even if most of them don't pay off.
Nobody is going to invest money into something where they risk losing it, and the very best they can hope for, is to be no better off for having invested it.
Yes, one of the costs of this is that some progress will become stalled when it gets mired in patents. But if you start nullifying any patents that are holding up further development, you greatly decrease the potential reward for research, thus making it less appealing.
My thinking here is that the people who put forward proposals would also be responsible for putting together a concise summary of why their view is the best (it would need to be concise, since voters won't read a wall of text). Their opposition would then vet their summary for accuracy, so any claims made would need to be backed by evidence. A few weeks of debate would probably be more than enough for most issues to make it to the final stage where they can be put to the vote. A voter who spent a few minutes reading all the summaries would then be sufficiently informed to make a decent decision. Those who don't care can abstain from the vote, and those who are really interested can always do their own research and check out the citations for evidence presented in the summaries, and so on.
With this system, parties won't be so important. You'd probably want to require a certain amount of support within the House before a proposal could actually be put forth to vote (so if only one or two representatives backed it, it wouldn't make it through to the voters); in this case, you'd probably have groups forming to back particular issues, disintegrating after the matter was settled. There should probably be a "none of the above" option in every vote, too, so even if you do get a silly situation where there's only two proposals and they're both terrible, the voters can refuse to back either. (I think there's a significant difference between "voting no" and "not voting at all".)
I think such a scheme could effectively be implemented using the internet to vote so it's not a huge burden on the populace, and such voting could occur very frequently, even weekly. That way there would only be a small number of issues each time, making it viable for the populace to read the summaries for issues they're interested in and have their say. Also, the summaries would make it easy for the mainstream news media to present the issues in an unbiased manner.
...which will get even fewer votes than the Greens.
I think the next step for democracies is to scrap the party system and have voting based on particular policies, not on some nebulous notion of a "party platform". The common system of voting in a bunch of drongos every few years and writing to representatives and hope they'll support your views is far from ideal, and modern technology makes it quite feasible to enable voters to have a much more direct say on particular issues.
But I'm not sure any of the major political parties would ever support such a scheme; certainly not while they're in power.
This, to me, is the strangest thing about these filtering/censorship proposals. On the one hand, it's claimed that only really, really illegal stuff will be blocked by it -- the worst of the worst that pretty much guarantees a prison sentence merely for possessing, and that the lists will be accurate and won't block legitimate content. On the other, people who are detected trying to access this stuff won't be charged or even investigated?
It seems very strange. Obviously there's simple explanations for this lack of coherency, but the self-contradictory nature of the proposals is so much more transparent than usual in politics.
Relatively new? Dead Space was over a year old - that's bargain bin territory for most games. Bioshock was two years old when you bought it on special, with a sequel on the way - hardly walking off the shelves on its own now, was it? Arkham Asylum was still fairly current at only 3 months old, but it was still well outside of the initial sales period. A lot of companies release games right in time for the Christmas holiday, so it's not surprising companies would have a game that came too early for the Christmas sales period on sale at a discount.
Understand that by "obsolete" I mean in terms of primary sales, not in terms of the game itself. There's plenty of very old games that are still excellent to play today, however there's very little money in them because very few people buy old games. There's a lot of not-so-old games that are pretty hard to buy new these days, especially from bricks-and-mortar stores, due to limited shelf space and so on.
Digital distribution solves that issue, and also makes it easier to give a discount, as I mentioned before. Not having to worry about distribution logistics makes it a lot easier. It seems pretty tough for even major manufacturers to do promotions on their goods across many different retailers, so for a video game publisher to do that on their margins would almost certainly be a money-losing exercise. I think stores that have low prices for games are simply trimming their profit margins in an effort to clear stale inventory that's no longer selling. But if it's just a matter of getting Valve to discount the price and put up a nice banner, it's an easy to eek a few extra sales out of a product that's no longer on the radar. Plus like all sales, it's likely to stir some interest that will result in additional purchases after the sales period is over.
Essentially, most consumers are pretty fickle and the majority of a game's sales come early in its life. This is particularly true of the really commercialised mass-market offerings; more in-depth, hard-core or niche products probably have a smoother sales curve as word-of-mouth slowly spreads. But for the big titles, it's the initial release period where it's in all the magazines and so on where the real money is.
You keep saying that and I'd really like to see where you get this information from, i.e. [citation needed].
Buying video games is clearly discretionary (purely entertainment), which means people are going to make such purchases from discretionary income. Selling things second-hand gives people more discretionary spending ability. It seems highly unlikely that at least some portion of this wouldn't go back into buying new games. After all, if they have games to sell, they must have bought them new at some point, right?
Gabe Newell seems to think that pricing isn't all that important. This is in regards to piracy, but it seems reasonable it would hold true for new games, as well: he's certainly not going to be discussing the second-hand market here. Video here (statement at 5:25).
Also, there seems to be an element of circular logic here: games have to be sold at high retail price because many people aren't willing to pay that and instead buy it second-hand (at a lower price). Presumably this leads to publishers increasing the retail price to make up for the "losses" from the second-hand market, leading even more people to resort to the second-hand market. Nice self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't think the cheap Steam sales demonstrate any kind of willingness on the part of publishers to lower their prices, given how new-release titles are still just as expensive on Steam (which, to the best of my knowledge, effectively prohibits re-sale). This only seems to happen for products that are effectively obsolete, and as a way to increase exposure for new products (e.g. Bioshock as you mentioned: what better way to get people interested in Bioshock 2 than to have them play Bioshock 1 just before its release?). This is more about the cost structure of digital distribution vs. retail distribution than anything else, i.e. it's actually feasible to sell a game for $5 and make money on it on Steam, whereas packaging and shipping a product and putting it on retail shelves for $5 just isn't going to happen. Retailers who have a large stock paid way more than $5 for it already and won't want to take a loss, and the margins on selling product at that price point would be too small for most publishers to want to bother with.
Either way, my point was that you seemed to be comparing "safety conscious pilots/air passengers" to "general road users" which seemed an odd comparison. As you say, the low hanging fruit is easily achievable and reasonable, but I would argue that a large reason for the current road toll is the apathy of many road users. i.e. people think twice before getting into an airplane because it seems scary and dangerous, but many of those same people don't think twice about using the phone or even texting while driving along with the radio blaring and a million things on their mind (besides the road).
While there certainly are stupid and/or ignorant pilots, I think aviation in general is more self-selective due to the higher costs and (arguably) lower reward for becoming a pilot in the first place.
So anyway, this sums up what I'm talking about perfectly:
By flying well maintained equipment, which is hardly an undesired objective, are statistically safer than your typical vehicle on the road
i.e. Is flying well maintained equipment statistically safer than an equally well-maintained vehicle on the road? If you, as a road user, limit yourself to well-maintained vehicles and drivers who aren't idiots, are you still statistically safer in a well-maintained aircraft with a non-idiot pilot?
That was all I was getting at. I don't really care about the answer (and I'm not sure if such an answer could reasonably be arrived at via available statistics) but it just seemed like somewhat faulty reasoning and it bugged me. I'll go take my medication and leave you alone now. :)
Realistically, as long as you are a conservative pilot, and especially if you own your own plane (assuming that means its well maintained), you're far safer flying in a plane than riding on the roads.
Are you actually comparing the safety of a conservative pilot with their own well-maintained aircraft to the statistics for all motorcyclists, or was it just badly phrased?
If you are, then is there any evidence that a conservative pilot in a well-maintained aircraft is "far safer" than a conservative rider on a well-maintained motorcycle? You've excluded a lot of "low hanging fruit" to boost the safety statistics for aircraft, but don't appear to have applied the same comb to statistics for motorcycle safety.
The thing is, it doesn't matter if it's up 99.99999999999% of the time. Because most of the time you're not trying to play a game that requires the internet connection. It only matters if it happens to be down when you want to play the game.
The only way to achieve that is to have a connection that is either ALWAYS up 24x7 with 100% reliability; or otherwise is only down when you don't want to play the game. Neither is a particularly realistic proposition.
Sure, it's not the end of the world if you can't play the game at some point. But that's just weasel-words to get around the real issue: Ubisoft have added a dependency on a component which is otherwise completely unrelated to the game. If you're playing a single-player game, your internet connection shouldn't matter. In fact, a single-player game is exactly the kind of thing you might decide to do if your internet connection does go down in order to pass the time while you wait for it to be fixed.
And of course, it's not just your own internet connection that matters here: your ability to play the game is dependent on the reliability of things which are entirely outside of your control. Just because your connection to Verizon is up doesn't mean their connection to some other arbitrary network is working reliably.
I don't know that doing anything client-side will work, for the same reason that DRM doesn't work. I guess it might deter the casual cheater, but then there's also the possibility that raising the bar will entice people to break the anti-cheating code just for the challenge.
The long-term solution I think is to design the game in such a way that the server can verify clients are playing by the rules. If wallhacks are a problem, the server could send fake data to the client telling it there's an enemy hidden behind a wall (when it's really not). Legitimate players won't be aware of this, but it would alter the behaviour of cheaters and thus they could be found out. Aimbots could perhaps be detected by supplying an invisible model that a legitimate player wouldn't be shooting at. Essentially, give the client bogus data that won't affect the experience of legit players, but will out cheaters.
Maybe it's easier to keep changing the client-side checks fast enough that it's not worth the time to work around, but I don't know if that kind of strategy is working in practice. Who will pay for the constant development?
I think it's safe to say they didn't happen to have cameras there filming the bottom of the door the moment the note was slipped under. There's also no indication that the note shown in the show bears any resemblance to the actual note (if there really was a note).
Given that the hosts didn't make any comments on what they thought of the issue (other than devoting more airtime to proponents of an R18+ rating for video games), I would suggest this was the show's way of expressing its own opinion on the matter, i.e. by taking the piss out of the allegation. Hardly unexpected given the nature of the show...
Similar experience on a small plane (50-seater, two seats on each side of the aisle) which was really underbooked - maybe 15 to 20 passengers total, and most people were seated around the middle of the plane next to other passengers, leaving other rows completely empty. Before take-off, someone asked if they could move to one of the empty rows, and were told they could once the plane was airborne but would need to move back before landing, due to the weight distribution.
The key management server will only activate the hosts that are reporting to once there's a certain number. Something like 20 clients, or 5 servers, is needed before any will activate when using the KMS key. I don't know if this is implemented locally on the server (i.e. a hacked version could activate them), or if there's some kind of back-and-forth between your KMS server and Microsoft. But if you use the regular software, it's not really viable for an ordinary user who only has a few PCs at most.
The new products like Vista and 7 also have Multiple Activation Keys (MAK) in addition to the KMS keys, which work in the normal manner (activation by speaking to Microsoft's servers), for those that don't want to set up a KMS host. Likely your campus also has MAK keys so if you could get hold of one of them you'd be able to use that to activate your copy of the OS, but they might keep them extra hidden. If you're using KMS there's no need to even keep a record of your MAK key(s).
I didn't realise Iranians previously had no choice but to use Gmail for their email. How silly of me. Maybe they should simply dismantle those laws so people can choose their email provider like in other countries, rather than changing it from "you must use Gmail" to "you must not use Gmail".
The goal isn't a bad one, however banning the competition seems contrary to the desire to "boost local development of internet technology". Outlawing your competitors is an effective way to gain market share, but it's not an effective way of encouraging innovation.
Really, they should just set up their service and try to out-compete Google. By blocking access to it just means their own service is more likely to be inferior to what people were previously using (Gmail) - but what incentive is there to make it better?
Well it's not about need. If you really need constant availability with absolutely no interruptions, you'll have engineered something to provide that. But most people would like to have constant availability, but the reality is you can't afford to provide that, so do what they can given their resources. That often means a high-availability failover cluster, with a short disruption to services whenever the failover occurs.
An inexpensive service to allow you to avoid failovers for some classes of scheduled maintenance just gives you another tool you can use to get closer to constant availability at a price that's affordable.
Combine this with something like VMware's fault tolerance and you could get a pretty robust solution. Now you just need to be able to patch the programs providing your service in-memory and you're gold!
Most clustered applications aren't active/active and fully stateful, as that raises the complexity by "quite a lot". I've got pending patches for one of the MS SQL servers that our website runs off, but failing over to the other cluster node will result in an interruption to the site while the services are stopped, the IP address etc. migrated, and everything restarts on the other server. Plus, the web application doesn't handle the temporary unavailability of the database very well, and it takes a couple of failed requests before it retries and starts working again.
The proxies sit between the web servers and the big bad internet are clustered as well (Linux-HA), but again there's a few seconds while the IP address is transitioned. This isn't so bad since in this case only on IP address needs to be relocated and no services restarted, but it does still cause a slight blip.
For many applications, having true seamless failover is very difficult. And if a few bucks a month can save you from having those 30 seconds of downtime, it could well be worth it for a lot of people.
Normally 1.0 implies that all features they expect/want to have in the "final version" of the product are present.
The question is, which features do you decide are going to be in "version 1.0" and what goes in "version 2.0"? I think a lot of OSS developers have a vision of what their project will eventually become, and those features all need to work and be stable before it'll be "1.0".
More commercially-focused developers may have a list of things they want in a "final" product, but then cull it down to a manageable subset and have that be the "1.0" release. And others might just develop until they run out of money, and then call whatever they've got "1.0".
I don't think it's anything to do with spinelessness; simply that if a program doesn't include all the expected features, then it's not "1.0". And the developers are the ones that decide which features are "expected"; it may still be a plenty useful program without them, but it's still "not finished".
You can use the same logic to say that having laws against murder and rape is equally futile, because you can't physically prevent people from doing whatever they want to do without massively encroaching on their basic rights. In fact, the final conclusion of such logic is that every single law that exists is pointless because it contravenes the laws of nature, and therefore is unenforceable. Of course every law is about stopping people from doing things they're physically capable of doing. That's kind of the whole point. Why would you make legislation mandating the laws of nature / laws of physics be obeyed?
This kind of "information is different and therefore laws to control it are stupid" thinking is therefore not in itself a compelling argument for why laws should be changed/scrapped and the idea of "intellectual property" should be completely rethought.
You're welcome to define the term however you want, but Wikipedia's definition is how most people see it. The term DRM is pretty recent, and post-dates other forms of copy protection such as bad sectors on disks that made them hard to copy, or having you look in the manual to find the Nth word in the Mth paragraph and page X.
From wikipedia:
Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. [...] The term is used to describe any technology which inhibits uses (legitimate or otherwise) of digital content that were not desired or foreseen by the content provider. The term generally doesn't refer to other forms of copy protection which can be circumvented without modifying the file or device, such as serial numbers or keyfiles.
Again, you're free to extend the term to include whatever you want it to include, but the general usage is fairly well-defined (even if the dividing line seems arbitrary) and that is likely what the person quoted in the article was talking about: "traditional" copy protection methods as opposed to newer, typically more invasive, DRM.
Might have a serial number or something similar you need to enter, with a checksum to verify it's valid. Lots of shareware titles do this. The demo is actually the full game, with just a simple check to see whether or not you're allowed to access all content, or play for longer than 30 minutes at a time, or level up your character past level 10, etc. Not every form of copy-protection is DRM, but if you don't have a legitimate copy you'd still need to bypass it in order to play the full game.
Even bypassing something as simple as a dialog that prompts you to "Type the magic word" to continue, with "the magic word" being what you have to type would qualify as a "crack".
The text you quoted says "Windows Vista continues to support the ability to use older XPDM drivers for upgrades and corporate editions" (emphasis mine). So if you bought a retail (non-upgrade) copy of Vista or 7 and did a clean install, you wouldn't be able to use the XP drivers?
Firstly, the statistics are useless because you're comparing very different things. People drive because they have to, or because the alternatives are too inconvenient. Pilots self-select to a much higher degree. Additionally, driving is perceived differently. Pilots are doing something that is considered difficult/challenging by the majority of the population; drivers are doing something mundane and trivial. Therefore, people will be much less willing to admit to themselves (let alone others) that they're bad at driving than at flying. Most people won't even try flying an aircraft in the first place! That goes to self-selection: the barrier to entry for being a pilot in control of your own aircraft is much higher than that of being a driver in control of your own car.
So, the mere fact that you're flying your own small aircraft in the first place means you're not "average", and neither are any of the other pilots. Driving is something that you pretty much just naturally end up doing, just like you end up getting a job and a bank account... it's just the natural path society sets up for us. Becoming a pilot requires a conscious decision and maintained effort.
Further, I bet that when you're "maneuvering in 3 dimensions while avoiding 5 or more other targets in close airspace while traveling well in advance of 100 MPH while engaging in a conversation with those 5 other targets" you're pretty damned alert and aware of what's going on. You really think the average driver in their daily commute is paying anywhere near as much attention to what's going on around them as you are when flying?
I agree that decreasing cell phone use in particular isn't going to change much, just as decreasing speeding won't. The root problem is complacency, and other unsafe behaviour is merely a symptom of that. But I don't know how to change that, and I suspect that any measures which would reduce complacency would be election-losers, so could never happen. At least, not while cars are still needed.
It usually comes down to whether or not I am driving in a familiar area where I know my way around in my sleep.
The majority of accidents occur in fairly close proximity to one's home - i.e. in places that are familiar to the driver.
Also, just because you sometimes choose to end a call because you've realised it's distracting you too much, doesn't mean you always end calls when you're too distracted to drive safely. Just because you're not aware you're not paying attention when driving doesn't mean you're always paying attention when driving.
I don't think that would be an improvement. Spammers would just use botnets or compromised hosts or ISPs/datacentres that don't care to send and host their spam emails, just like they currently use them to send mail. So nothing would change there. Spam filtering would be harder, since you can't analyse the content of the message to determine if it's spam or ham. And if you retrieve every message automatically so you can filter it, then you've not really achieved anything at all; the only possible gain from having spammers have to host their spam messages is that they might be taken offline by the time you come to read your email. If you don't automatically retrieve messages, then now sender's will always know exactly when you read their message, instead of the opt-in receipt currently in use.
Also, what if the sender's server is down when I go to read an email? What if it's just on a slow or congested link? What if I'm on a congested link? At least with regular "push" email, once it arrives it's local and fast to access and I can read my emails without an active internet connection. So pretty much everyone is simply going to configure their server or client to download every message automatically as soon as the notification is received, so it's just added an extra back-connection for no particular reason. (Kind of like FTP...)