The problem with a tablet is that it's large, adds one to the number of devices you have to carry, and doesn't fit in a pocket. What I want is to have a phone that syncs email and calender with the service of my choice (corporate Exchange/Lotus, Gmail/Google calander, whatever) ideally can do Google Maps+GPS, and can be used to check Wikipedia and IMDB to settle arguments in bars/after movies. I want it to do all this more or less wherever I am, check for new email every 10 minutes or so, be reasonably fas and responsive, have buttons, and still be a good phone. A good camera (1.3+ Megapixels, w/ lens) doesn't hurt, neither does music/video playback, and docs/spreadsheets, but those are all extras. I would pay 500$ for a phone like that if it worked with my carrier (Sprint), and I would get an unlimited data plan to go with my voice plan, but as far as I can tell, there isn't a damn thing in that category. Think of it as an always online PDA that happens to be a phone. The Moto-Q is the only thing I've looked at that hasn't obviously failed on any of these counts, but I can't find a working one to try out, and Sprint tells me that getting it before December will have a 225$ premium, because I'm not a new customer. So basically, I'm SOL.
In fairness, experts are usually more likely to quibble over fine details, because they care about precision. Everyone who wasn't an expert thought of Pluto as a planet. (Ok, I thought of Pluto as a Romanized Greek deity, but I'm special). The gist here is, only those people who are passionate about something, and know enough to spot the implications of fine details care about those details.
Why should they have to? They may be aware of the degree of customer piracy, they may not. But even if they don't ask a lot of questions, if their intent is to supply a legitimate market, and their business practices don't obviously contradict that intent (i.e. advertising a copy-protection bypass) then really, they're on a clean ground as a store that sells crowbars, bolt cutters, or any of the other tools used in, say, bike thefts.
The fact that most mod chips allow the playing of pirated games is a direct consequence of the fact that they allow the loading of software that doesn't use the copy/access restriction system. This is a necessary bypass to make to enable homebrew games, because homebrew developers can't make games that work with said access restriction system. Nobody here has been charged with any copyright violations. Nobody has stolen anything. If I make a shotgun, and you use it to rob liquor stores, that's not my fault. If I make you a dvd-burner, and mod it into your Dell, and you use it to pirate dvds, that's not my fault. If I make a racing chip for your car, and you use the added performance to evade cops in a police chase, it's still not my fault. What about all the people who hacked the original Xbox to make it an MCE pc, and never bought or stole a game? If modifying a privately owned hardware good without knowing how it will be used can be illegal, than homebuilt PCs should be illegal, because 99% of them contain some trace of pirated software, pirated media, or just software that infringes on patents. What about the people who bought PS3s, knowing that Sony was selling them at a loss, then ripped them apart for the blue lasers?
I have been enjoying Super Smash Brothers since it came out, and while I paid no attention to Brawl, I am looking forward to another chance to jump into the franchise.
Here's another: Daikatana. Time spent on development does not directly correlate with quality of finished product. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your game is, every month overdue hurts.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
Oh, that's almost certainly true. Although faced with the mounting cost of attorneys fees and settlements for those that fight, I suspect that their break even percentage is something like 85% settling, and the precedents are piling up in favor of those that fight.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unfortunately for them, that's not entirely accurate. The MafiAA style lawsuits are, at least for now, so full of legal and technical holes that each court loss causes several more people to fight, rather than settle. If just one person can get a countersuit to stick, odds are good that the landslide of lawsuits that will follow would have a crippling effect on the whole program. Remember what the tobacco world looked like in the 70s/80s? One loss opened the floodgates, and cigarette companies are now a pale shadow of their former glory.
So... if hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens started to uses sigs like "Obliterate the infidel" or "Assassinate the president"... what exactly would happen? I'm merely curious here, as to just how sophisticated these systems are.
And it's high time we remembered that. I for one would rather see, or even be killed in, another 9/11 than see us continue as we have. We Americans have become far too cowardly when it comes to defending our own freedoms lately, particularly against our own government.
Maybe, but think about the difference between a postal working reading your postcard, versus faxing a copy to the FBI, or just his buddies, without your knowledge. It's about to what extent the government is allowed to say "You don't expect it to be completely private, therefore it's going into our database". IIRC the Google street view van is facing similar issues abroad. Just because it isn't entirely private, that doesn't make it entirely public.
It's not a matter of tracking everything. Even if they only track "suspected dissidents," who will doubtless be selected by procedures as effective and precise as those that get people on to no fly lists, it's still a massive invasion of the privacy of the people who get tracked.
I do like the "Where the third party is not expected to access the e-mails in the normal course of business... the party (sending them) maintains a reasonable expectation of privacy." bit. We need more decisions like this, if we want to remain an even somewhat free society.
It's funny, I once ran a simple test of iTunes on Windows vs Winamp.
Step 1: Import my 18 gigs of music, stored on a network share. Winamp took about a minute. iTunes crashed after 15, and took another 5 to finish the job after restart.
Step 2: Find all the songs whose titles contain the word 'the'. Both took less than 30 seconds.
Step 3: Generate a playlist, reorder that playlist, play the first song. Both took less than 30 seconds.
Step 4: Profit. Both were unsuccessful at profiting.
What I was left with is a strong suspicion that Apple just wasn't trying that hard. After all, if the first thing that a new user tries to do takes forever or crashes, that user is likely never going to get to the part where they appreciate the good parts. What's more, the interface to iTunes took up most of the screen real-estate in full mode, without displaying any more info than Winamp, and in mini-mode was the size of Winamp in full mode. The whole thing made my wonder why they hadn't gone for something more like Audion. I mean, in fairness, one could argue that since iTunes is theoretically a bundled app, it's really competing against that travesty of interface design that is post 6.0 Windows Media player, but iTunes isn't bundled on PCs, so that really doesn't go that far.
Ahh, I have it. What they want is to have their iPods stolen at gunpoint. Then, since the new owner will have all the music, and they won't anymore, thousands of dollars worth of piracy will have been averted by a mere hundred dollars of stolen real property. It all makes sense now. In order to get that hundreds of billions down, we need to start stealing more physical media. So remember, instead of downloading, just steal an iPod. You'll even get to discover bands that way.
Remember, multi-thousand-dollar/seat software is commonly torrented by high school & college students for, essentially, the hell of it. I had a friend who used pirated copies of Photoshop, Maya, 3dStudio, Visual Studio, Office Enterprise, and Oracle, all running on pirate W2k. He would download new versions as they became available. Now since, as we all know, 1 download == 1 sale, his piracy was costing probably in excess of 1 Million dollars over the course of his 4 years at school. A few thousand like him, with combined assets of maybe a million dollars between them, are never the less costing several billion dollars in lost sales. In la-la land, anyway.
Yeah, if you post in a discussion you've moderated in, you remove your moderations from the discussion. I choked on an ice cube and accidentally modded you down, so I figured I would just get rid of it.
Hang on, are you saying that Iraqis are the "murderous, rage infected and hyper-religious chimps"? Because I went all the way through that post before it occurred to me that that you weren't talking about Americans
(I am an American, and I am proud of my country, but only up to about 1969. After the moon landing, it's been a pretty steady downhill)
"This life [mine] may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and accounts and descriptions may not be disseminated without the express written consent of [me]"
Now to go after those pesky credit score companies. Keeping unauthorized accounts and reports of my life, and cutting into my potential profits.
There's also the problem of barrier to entry. All the asynchronous information, irrational consumer decisions, and even government meddling could work for competitors just as easily. competition is what pushes prices, and hence profits, down towards costs. A high barrier to entry means that when profits are high, it takes longer and costs more for competitors to get into the market, which means that an imbalance, leading to high profits, lasts longer. The online auction market requires a critical mass of users, just like the online dating market, making entry an extremely expensive, time consuming process. The lack of competition is what allows eBay to charge whatever they feel will maximize profits, confident that they would have ample warning if another agency was attempting to enter into the market and build up a user network. The only real checks on a company in such a position is the effect of per-unit pricing on volume (50k units at 10$ea makes more gross than 20k units at 20$ea) and the danger that, if they are too visibly profitable, the investment of time and money will begin to look attractive to other agencies with deep pockets,particularly if they already have access to other user networks.
The freedom to choose your ISP is a really annoying talking point that the anti-neutrality folks keep bringing up. (Personally, I am for a neutral "internet", and I am also for separate networks to meet custom needs (we'll call them 'Phone Lines' and 'Cable networks', for example). But ISP choice is damn near complete fiction. Everywhere I have lived on my own, there have two options: the local cable company (which has a monopoly on local cable service) and the phone company (through which you DSL must pass, and which was always Verizon). Now I would shop around a bit, and tended to favor Speakeasy DSL, as the only affordable ISP I could find that allowed servers and static IPs, but Verizon always did their level best to encourage me to use their lines, by taking their sweet time (up to two months in one place) to get the phone line ready for DSL, and we always had outage issues, which they would take days to fix. Among the ISPs who actually owned their own last mile cable, there were never ore than two choices, and they almost always had nearly identical service packages. The problem comes from the last mile cable. Whoever owns that dictates the choices in your town as to what ISP you get, and most places, your lucky to have two options.
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The problem with a tablet is that it's large, adds one to the number of devices you have to carry, and doesn't fit in a pocket. What I want is to have a phone that syncs email and calender with the service of my choice (corporate Exchange/Lotus, Gmail/Google calander, whatever) ideally can do Google Maps+GPS, and can be used to check Wikipedia and IMDB to settle arguments in bars/after movies. I want it to do all this more or less wherever I am, check for new email every 10 minutes or so, be reasonably fas and responsive, have buttons, and still be a good phone. A good camera (1.3+ Megapixels, w/ lens) doesn't hurt, neither does music/video playback, and docs/spreadsheets, but those are all extras. I would pay 500$ for a phone like that if it worked with my carrier (Sprint), and I would get an unlimited data plan to go with my voice plan, but as far as I can tell, there isn't a damn thing in that category. Think of it as an always online PDA that happens to be a phone. The Moto-Q is the only thing I've looked at that hasn't obviously failed on any of these counts, but I can't find a working one to try out, and Sprint tells me that getting it before December will have a 225$ premium, because I'm not a new customer. So basically, I'm SOL.
In fairness, experts are usually more likely to quibble over fine details, because they care about precision. Everyone who wasn't an expert thought of Pluto as a planet. (Ok, I thought of Pluto as a Romanized Greek deity, but I'm special). The gist here is, only those people who are passionate about something, and know enough to spot the implications of fine details care about those details.
Why should they have to? They may be aware of the degree of customer piracy, they may not. But even if they don't ask a lot of questions, if their intent is to supply a legitimate market, and their business practices don't obviously contradict that intent (i.e. advertising a copy-protection bypass) then really, they're on a clean ground as a store that sells crowbars, bolt cutters, or any of the other tools used in, say, bike thefts.
The fact that most mod chips allow the playing of pirated games is a direct consequence of the fact that they allow the loading of software that doesn't use the copy/access restriction system. This is a necessary bypass to make to enable homebrew games, because homebrew developers can't make games that work with said access restriction system. Nobody here has been charged with any copyright violations. Nobody has stolen anything. If I make a shotgun, and you use it to rob liquor stores, that's not my fault. If I make you a dvd-burner, and mod it into your Dell, and you use it to pirate dvds, that's not my fault. If I make a racing chip for your car, and you use the added performance to evade cops in a police chase, it's still not my fault. What about all the people who hacked the original Xbox to make it an MCE pc, and never bought or stole a game? If modifying a privately owned hardware good without knowing how it will be used can be illegal, than homebuilt PCs should be illegal, because 99% of them contain some trace of pirated software, pirated media, or just software that infringes on patents. What about the people who bought PS3s, knowing that Sony was selling them at a loss, then ripped them apart for the blue lasers?
I have been enjoying Super Smash Brothers since it came out, and while I paid no attention to Brawl, I am looking forward to another chance to jump into the franchise.
Here's another: Daikatana. Time spent on development does not directly correlate with quality of finished product. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your game is, every month overdue hurts.
Oh, that's almost certainly true. Although faced with the mounting cost of attorneys fees and settlements for those that fight, I suspect that their break even percentage is something like 85% settling, and the precedents are piling up in favor of those that fight.
Unfortunately for them, that's not entirely accurate. The MafiAA style lawsuits are, at least for now, so full of legal and technical holes that each court loss causes several more people to fight, rather than settle. If just one person can get a countersuit to stick, odds are good that the landslide of lawsuits that will follow would have a crippling effect on the whole program. Remember what the tobacco world looked like in the 70s/80s? One loss opened the floodgates, and cigarette companies are now a pale shadow of their former glory.
I hope so.
So... if hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens started to uses sigs like "Obliterate the infidel" or "Assassinate the president"... what exactly would happen? I'm merely curious here, as to just how sophisticated these systems are.
And it's high time we remembered that. I for one would rather see, or even be killed in, another 9/11 than see us continue as we have. We Americans have become far too cowardly when it comes to defending our own freedoms lately, particularly against our own government.
Maybe, but think about the difference between a postal working reading your postcard, versus faxing a copy to the FBI, or just his buddies, without your knowledge. It's about to what extent the government is allowed to say "You don't expect it to be completely private, therefore it's going into our database". IIRC the Google street view van is facing similar issues abroad. Just because it isn't entirely private, that doesn't make it entirely public.
It's not a matter of tracking everything. Even if they only track "suspected dissidents," who will doubtless be selected by procedures as effective and precise as those that get people on to no fly lists, it's still a massive invasion of the privacy of the people who get tracked.
I do like the "Where the third party is not expected to access the e-mails in the normal course of business ... the party (sending them) maintains a reasonable expectation of privacy." bit. We need more decisions like this, if we want to remain an even somewhat free society.
It's funny, I once ran a simple test of iTunes on Windows vs Winamp. Step 1: Import my 18 gigs of music, stored on a network share. Winamp took about a minute. iTunes crashed after 15, and took another 5 to finish the job after restart. Step 2: Find all the songs whose titles contain the word 'the'. Both took less than 30 seconds. Step 3: Generate a playlist, reorder that playlist, play the first song. Both took less than 30 seconds. Step 4: Profit. Both were unsuccessful at profiting. What I was left with is a strong suspicion that Apple just wasn't trying that hard. After all, if the first thing that a new user tries to do takes forever or crashes, that user is likely never going to get to the part where they appreciate the good parts. What's more, the interface to iTunes took up most of the screen real-estate in full mode, without displaying any more info than Winamp, and in mini-mode was the size of Winamp in full mode. The whole thing made my wonder why they hadn't gone for something more like Audion. I mean, in fairness, one could argue that since iTunes is theoretically a bundled app, it's really competing against that travesty of interface design that is post 6.0 Windows Media player, but iTunes isn't bundled on PCs, so that really doesn't go that far.
Ahh, I have it. What they want is to have their iPods stolen at gunpoint. Then, since the new owner will have all the music, and they won't anymore, thousands of dollars worth of piracy will have been averted by a mere hundred dollars of stolen real property. It all makes sense now. In order to get that hundreds of billions down, we need to start stealing more physical media. So remember, instead of downloading, just steal an iPod. You'll even get to discover bands that way.
Remember, multi-thousand-dollar/seat software is commonly torrented by high school & college students for, essentially, the hell of it. I had a friend who used pirated copies of Photoshop, Maya, 3dStudio, Visual Studio, Office Enterprise, and Oracle, all running on pirate W2k. He would download new versions as they became available. Now since, as we all know, 1 download == 1 sale, his piracy was costing probably in excess of 1 Million dollars over the course of his 4 years at school. A few thousand like him, with combined assets of maybe a million dollars between them, are never the less costing several billion dollars in lost sales. In la-la land, anyway.
Yeah, if you post in a discussion you've moderated in, you remove your moderations from the discussion. I choked on an ice cube and accidentally modded you down, so I figured I would just get rid of it.
Posting to remove erroneous mod.
Hang on, are you saying that Iraqis are the "murderous, rage infected and hyper-religious chimps"? Because I went all the way through that post before it occurred to me that that you weren't talking about Americans (I am an American, and I am proud of my country, but only up to about 1969. After the moon landing, it's been a pretty steady downhill)
"This life [mine] may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and accounts and descriptions may not be disseminated without the express written consent of [me]" Now to go after those pesky credit score companies. Keeping unauthorized accounts and reports of my life, and cutting into my potential profits.
"...the PS4 version of 'Driving to work'...." GTA IV?
There's also the problem of barrier to entry. All the asynchronous information, irrational consumer decisions, and even government meddling could work for competitors just as easily. competition is what pushes prices, and hence profits, down towards costs. A high barrier to entry means that when profits are high, it takes longer and costs more for competitors to get into the market, which means that an imbalance, leading to high profits, lasts longer. The online auction market requires a critical mass of users, just like the online dating market, making entry an extremely expensive, time consuming process. The lack of competition is what allows eBay to charge whatever they feel will maximize profits, confident that they would have ample warning if another agency was attempting to enter into the market and build up a user network. The only real checks on a company in such a position is the effect of per-unit pricing on volume (50k units at 10$ea makes more gross than 20k units at 20$ea) and the danger that, if they are too visibly profitable, the investment of time and money will begin to look attractive to other agencies with deep pockets,particularly if they already have access to other user networks.
The freedom to choose your ISP is a really annoying talking point that the anti-neutrality folks keep bringing up. (Personally, I am for a neutral "internet", and I am also for separate networks to meet custom needs (we'll call them 'Phone Lines' and 'Cable networks', for example). But ISP choice is damn near complete fiction. Everywhere I have lived on my own, there have two options: the local cable company (which has a monopoly on local cable service) and the phone company (through which you DSL must pass, and which was always Verizon). Now I would shop around a bit, and tended to favor Speakeasy DSL, as the only affordable ISP I could find that allowed servers and static IPs, but Verizon always did their level best to encourage me to use their lines, by taking their sweet time (up to two months in one place) to get the phone line ready for DSL, and we always had outage issues, which they would take days to fix. Among the ISPs who actually owned their own last mile cable, there were never ore than two choices, and they almost always had nearly identical service packages. The problem comes from the last mile cable. Whoever owns that dictates the choices in your town as to what ISP you get, and most places, your lucky to have two options.
Sorry to hear you wasted a lot of cash on all those blue-ray discs, but maybe when Jack Valenti decides they shouldn't work, I'll lend you my dvds.