On the contrary. The fact that you resort to insulting your opponent speaks about you. You have some good points, but so does delinear. Rather than attacking him, why not actually respond to his point?
Not entirely related? Let's see...
Gaming is a billion dollar industry on both consoles and on PCs.
The business strategy surrounding PCs is based on media consumption, for which DRM has never been taken off the table.
In general, when large companies with entrenched interests in marketing their platforms to music and movie studios talk about security, it is safe to assume they are talking about the security in the context of preventing people from doing certain things with their computers. Blizzard has invested significant resources in this sort of security, to enforce the rules of their video game and ensure that people have paid the appropriate fees.
That's not entirely related, as I said. What happens on gaming consoles has some relevance to what happens on general-purpose PCs, but not total relevance. They are not the same market, and it doesn't follow that a trend in one will happen in the other.
Does this count?
Not in the least. Even if your link showed that there was an incredible concerted effort to cram DRM down the throats of unwilling consumers everywhere (which it doesn't, the existence of the consortium described there doesn't tell us about their actions), it doesn't provide evidence that PC manufacturers are going to disable the ability to change the secure boot parameter, which is the specific issue under discussion. I happen to agree that there is a strong push from media companies to create DRM as strong as possible, but that general trend is not evidence to suggest that this specific thing will happen. There are many other ways that such a trend could manifest itself, and this would be taking unnecessary steps (locking the OS down to Windows doesn't do any good unless you ensure that your media could only be played on Windows... but that step alone fulfills the requirements, because simply installing an alternative OS won't circumvent that restriction).
The fact that it is possible for something to occur is not a reason to believe that it will occur.
As a corollary, the fact that something vaguely similar has happened in a not-entirely-related arena is not a reason to believe that the event will occur. Nothing has ever stopped PC manufacturers from locking down their computers in ways that are unfriendly to the consumer. They have not done so. There's no evidence to suggest that they will start doing so now. In fact, there is reason to believe that it will not happen.
The whole thing is pure unsubstantiated FUD, unless someone can drag up a scrap of evidence that PC manufacturers are planning to restrict users from disabling the secure boot feature. And that's not even getting into the common claim that this is a conspiracy perpetrated by Microsoft, which, again, there has been not a scrap of evidence to support that I've seen.
Way to completely miss the point. I don't suggest that IT should refuse to look beyond how things are currently done, that's obviously unhelpful. But letting the users decide what is and isn't supported turns into a free-for-all. If permitted, it will mean that anyone at all can buy a device, that IT knows nothing about and might not even play nicely with the existing infrastructure, and demand that they fix anything that goes wrong with it. In other words, it means that IT's job expands from "providing support for the devices that the company chooses to buy" to "providing support for anything under the sun which is vaguely technology-related".
IT has to serve the users, that is what it does. I have no arguments with that idea. But that doesn't mean letting the users make you their bitch, either.
The fact that it is possible for something to occur is not a reason to believe that it will occur. It's possible that I'll take horrible offense to one of your posts, engage in some drawn-out process to hunt you down in real life, and murder you brutally. You'd be a fool to spend even a moment's thought worrying about it, however, because such an event is exceptionally unlikely.
Except, as another commenter pointed out already, there's practically no incentive for Microsoft to push such an agenda with PC makers (the market for Linux/other OS desktops is very small compared to Windows, and no threat at this time), while there is a strong disincentive (if caught, they would be slapped HARD). I fully appreciate the nature of slippery slopes, but that doesn't mean that one must assume that we will arrive at the bottom just because the potential is there.
There's never been any real reason to believe that locking down of this feature would happen, apart from FUD. This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, and it's frankly sad to see how many members of the community are willing to believe that "on by default" necessarily means "unable to turn off".
No. The job of IT is to keep things running smoothly. Letting people buy any random crap they think is neat, and then make IT support it, is almost 100% counterproductive to that goal.
Furthermore, unless you're the CEO or my boss in some other way, you don't get to add every single piece of technology under the sun to the list of things I'm required to support for you. IT (or those up the food chain from IT) decide what gets supported, not random people who think that iPads are cool, so they should purchase one and IT should be required to support it as if it were a product they researched and decided to use themselves.
I don't know about Notes (although if you're stuck supporting that POS, you have my most profound sympathies), but iOS does have ActiveSync support, so getting mail from your Exchange server is quite possible.
Certain information is public. Your birthday is not...
How is it not? Birth records are public. It might require a bit of poking about to find where to look, but if you can find the information in public records I would say that it fits the very definition of "public information".
There has never been a bit of evidence that game publishers have lost profits due to piracy.
I'm not saying that no pirated game represents a lost sale...
If they lost a sale (that is, if someone would have bought the game if not for being able to pirate it, which you seem to agree does happen with a non-zero frequency), they lost profits. You don't need to lose millions upon millions of dollars to lose profits.
Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
You overstate your case. If you don't know even one gamer who would buy a game that they pirate (if piracy weren't an option), you either know very few gamers or have an exceptional circle of acquaintances. I don't hold with the attitude that (insert copyright Nazi group here) espouses that every pirated copy is a lost sale. That's bullshit. But it's equally bullshit to claim that no pirated copies represent a lost sale.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. If we try to argue the opposite extreme as the (insert copyright Nazi group), then we're frankly no better than they are.
Hell, I'm from the US, and even I think that the US style is retarded on this point. Something should only be inside the quote marks if it is part of the quote.
What I found most striking about his post is that I am apparently a fucking genius, because I have never had any trouble at all using Amazon's web site.
I agree with the AC, although I wouldn't have been so rude. Once you solve a level in Portal, the magic is gone. You will come back to it, and never have the fun "aha" moment again, because you already know the solution. This goes double for co-op, because one of you may know the solution and the other not... making it either an exercise in keeping your mouth shut for the experienced partner, or the Portal equivalent of power-leveling for the inexperienced partner. Neither is the most fun.
Sure - I'm not saying the man was a nobody, that's obviously untrue. I just feel that he should be given credit for what he actually did (sell the shit out of products), rather than what others did (create said products).
It's true that history remembers those who use technology to accomplish things, and not those who created the technology. I would not agree with history that this is the important thing, however. I value the people who created the thing far more than the people who saw how to make others want it.
Well, I'd disagree that Apple is following all of those, not to mention that those speak to only aesthetic design... not functional, which I consider by far more important. Still, it hardly matters, because even if those rules are the only thing that is important and Apple follows them to a T... Steve Jobs didn't cause that. The designers and engineers that he oversaw caused that. To whatever extent Apple has made excellent products, those products are the achievements of the people who created them, and not Steve Jobs.
Flamebait, perhaps. But not factually wrong. Steve Jobs was a brilliant salesman, perhaps one of the best the world has ever seen. But he reaps a ton of credit for technology he didn't create. Some of it is technology even Apple didn't create. His true genius and achievements were marketing, not tech.
No evidence suggests that the MMORPG genre is "dying". In fact, it's going strong. TOR will carve out its own little niche and do well.
Besides which, even if TOR were fated to die 6 months after release, it's irrelevant. If I got 6 months of fun out of a game, I call that a success. I don't need a long term investment to enjoy a game, I play games to enjoy them now. If I also enjoy them years from now, that's simply gravy.
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On the contrary. The fact that you resort to insulting your opponent speaks about you. You have some good points, but so does delinear. Rather than attacking him, why not actually respond to his point?
Not entirely related? Let's see... Gaming is a billion dollar industry on both consoles and on PCs. The business strategy surrounding PCs is based on media consumption, for which DRM has never been taken off the table. In general, when large companies with entrenched interests in marketing their platforms to music and movie studios talk about security, it is safe to assume they are talking about the security in the context of preventing people from doing certain things with their computers. Blizzard has invested significant resources in this sort of security, to enforce the rules of their video game and ensure that people have paid the appropriate fees.
That's not entirely related, as I said. What happens on gaming consoles has some relevance to what happens on general-purpose PCs, but not total relevance. They are not the same market, and it doesn't follow that a trend in one will happen in the other.
Does this count?
Not in the least. Even if your link showed that there was an incredible concerted effort to cram DRM down the throats of unwilling consumers everywhere (which it doesn't, the existence of the consortium described there doesn't tell us about their actions), it doesn't provide evidence that PC manufacturers are going to disable the ability to change the secure boot parameter, which is the specific issue under discussion. I happen to agree that there is a strong push from media companies to create DRM as strong as possible, but that general trend is not evidence to suggest that this specific thing will happen. There are many other ways that such a trend could manifest itself, and this would be taking unnecessary steps (locking the OS down to Windows doesn't do any good unless you ensure that your media could only be played on Windows... but that step alone fulfills the requirements, because simply installing an alternative OS won't circumvent that restriction).
The fact that it is possible for something to occur is not a reason to believe that it will occur.
As a corollary, the fact that something vaguely similar has happened in a not-entirely-related arena is not a reason to believe that the event will occur. Nothing has ever stopped PC manufacturers from locking down their computers in ways that are unfriendly to the consumer. They have not done so. There's no evidence to suggest that they will start doing so now. In fact, there is reason to believe that it will not happen.
The whole thing is pure unsubstantiated FUD, unless someone can drag up a scrap of evidence that PC manufacturers are planning to restrict users from disabling the secure boot feature. And that's not even getting into the common claim that this is a conspiracy perpetrated by Microsoft, which, again, there has been not a scrap of evidence to support that I've seen.
Way to completely miss the point. I don't suggest that IT should refuse to look beyond how things are currently done, that's obviously unhelpful. But letting the users decide what is and isn't supported turns into a free-for-all. If permitted, it will mean that anyone at all can buy a device, that IT knows nothing about and might not even play nicely with the existing infrastructure, and demand that they fix anything that goes wrong with it. In other words, it means that IT's job expands from "providing support for the devices that the company chooses to buy" to "providing support for anything under the sun which is vaguely technology-related".
IT has to serve the users, that is what it does. I have no arguments with that idea. But that doesn't mean letting the users make you their bitch, either.
The fact that it is possible for something to occur is not a reason to believe that it will occur. It's possible that I'll take horrible offense to one of your posts, engage in some drawn-out process to hunt you down in real life, and murder you brutally. You'd be a fool to spend even a moment's thought worrying about it, however, because such an event is exceptionally unlikely.
Except, as another commenter pointed out already, there's practically no incentive for Microsoft to push such an agenda with PC makers (the market for Linux/other OS desktops is very small compared to Windows, and no threat at this time), while there is a strong disincentive (if caught, they would be slapped HARD). I fully appreciate the nature of slippery slopes, but that doesn't mean that one must assume that we will arrive at the bottom just because the potential is there.
There's never been any real reason to believe that locking down of this feature would happen, apart from FUD. This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, and it's frankly sad to see how many members of the community are willing to believe that "on by default" necessarily means "unable to turn off".
No. The job of IT is to keep things running smoothly. Letting people buy any random crap they think is neat, and then make IT support it, is almost 100% counterproductive to that goal.
Furthermore, unless you're the CEO or my boss in some other way, you don't get to add every single piece of technology under the sun to the list of things I'm required to support for you. IT (or those up the food chain from IT) decide what gets supported, not random people who think that iPads are cool, so they should purchase one and IT should be required to support it as if it were a product they researched and decided to use themselves.
I don't know about Notes (although if you're stuck supporting that POS, you have my most profound sympathies), but iOS does have ActiveSync support, so getting mail from your Exchange server is quite possible.
It's his time to waste. It's no business of the CIO's how he chooses to use his free time (assuming that it is free time, which seems reasonable).
Certain information is public. Your birthday is not...
How is it not? Birth records are public. It might require a bit of poking about to find where to look, but if you can find the information in public records I would say that it fits the very definition of "public information".
I'm not outraged because I don't care about this data. They can collect it all they want.
There has never been a bit of evidence that game publishers have lost profits due to piracy.
I'm not saying that no pirated game represents a lost sale...
If they lost a sale (that is, if someone would have bought the game if not for being able to pirate it, which you seem to agree does happen with a non-zero frequency), they lost profits. You don't need to lose millions upon millions of dollars to lose profits.
Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
You overstate your case. If you don't know even one gamer who would buy a game that they pirate (if piracy weren't an option), you either know very few gamers or have an exceptional circle of acquaintances. I don't hold with the attitude that (insert copyright Nazi group here) espouses that every pirated copy is a lost sale. That's bullshit. But it's equally bullshit to claim that no pirated copies represent a lost sale.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. If we try to argue the opposite extreme as the (insert copyright Nazi group), then we're frankly no better than they are.
Hell, I'm from the US, and even I think that the US style is retarded on this point. Something should only be inside the quote marks if it is part of the quote.
What I found most striking about his post is that I am apparently a fucking genius, because I have never had any trouble at all using Amazon's web site.
I agree with the AC, although I wouldn't have been so rude. Once you solve a level in Portal, the magic is gone. You will come back to it, and never have the fun "aha" moment again, because you already know the solution. This goes double for co-op, because one of you may know the solution and the other not... making it either an exercise in keeping your mouth shut for the experienced partner, or the Portal equivalent of power-leveling for the inexperienced partner. Neither is the most fun.
Sure - I'm not saying the man was a nobody, that's obviously untrue. I just feel that he should be given credit for what he actually did (sell the shit out of products), rather than what others did (create said products).
That's the exact opposite of innovation. Innovation is creating something new, not repackaging existing ideas.
It's true that history remembers those who use technology to accomplish things, and not those who created the technology. I would not agree with history that this is the important thing, however. I value the people who created the thing far more than the people who saw how to make others want it.
Well, I'd disagree that Apple is following all of those, not to mention that those speak to only aesthetic design... not functional, which I consider by far more important. Still, it hardly matters, because even if those rules are the only thing that is important and Apple follows them to a T... Steve Jobs didn't cause that. The designers and engineers that he oversaw caused that. To whatever extent Apple has made excellent products, those products are the achievements of the people who created them, and not Steve Jobs.
Flamebait, perhaps. But not factually wrong. Steve Jobs was a brilliant salesman, perhaps one of the best the world has ever seen. But he reaps a ton of credit for technology he didn't create. Some of it is technology even Apple didn't create. His true genius and achievements were marketing, not tech.
No evidence suggests that the MMORPG genre is "dying". In fact, it's going strong. TOR will carve out its own little niche and do well.
Besides which, even if TOR were fated to die 6 months after release, it's irrelevant. If I got 6 months of fun out of a game, I call that a success. I don't need a long term investment to enjoy a game, I play games to enjoy them now. If I also enjoy them years from now, that's simply gravy.
Just because you don't like MMORPGs doesn't mean nobody else does. Rather presumptuous of you.
There is an ongoing beta, and there are testing weekends. So, in answer to your "why only 3 days?" question, the answer is that it's not only 3 days.