I've never understood this sentiment. I have no such delusions that "I'm better than everyone else" because by any standard, there are people who are more exceptional than me in every way and/or people who exist that I cannot compare to. How people can even have this "feeling" is a mystery to me. That's being honest, and I'm sure that it's not a special case in knowing it.
Alas. Unfortunately, most people are deluded. At least you can take comfort in the fact that you're far, far less deluded than everyone else is! You seem to be aware of this particular advantage you have, anyhow.
If the device drivers for your motherboard have a bug - which sounds more like the cause of your issue - then that isn't a Microsoft problem at all, since they didn't write the drivers. Contact Abit for support.
If we take this as true, it's an example of why for some people, paying a premium for a Macintosh is worth the cost and can make sense. You give up the freedom to do all sorts of things (like get a machine with specs perfectly suited to specialized needs for example), but you gain freedom from a lot of problems of this sort.
(Just trying to plant this in the heads of the countless people who argue there's literally no rational reason to buy a Mac, and only fanboys would even consider it. You won't see me argue that there's no such thing as an Apple fanboy, but I will argue that the fanboy phenomenon is not all there is to Apple's sales.)
...having a microSD in there is the only real different I see.
It's a big difference, if you consider the implications.
Let's say you want to get a Word or RTF document on to your reader. Maybe, I don't know, the Word97 version of "Dive Into Python" or something. What do you do?
As I understand it, with the Kindle, you do some trick to mail it to yourself, and it goes through Amazon's infrastructure and arrives on your device wirelessly. You're charged for this service, and if Amazon shuts the service down, you can't do this anymore. There may also be some way to use the web browser to do some of this, and that may get around the charge, but it also does require the currently-free-but-won't-stay-that-way-if-abused 3G wireless modem service in the thing. And I can't confirm that you can actually install content that way (though you could read a web version).
With the Nook, you load up a tool to convert RTF to either PDF or EPUB, and you put the microSD card in a computer, load the file on to it, move the microSD card to the Nook, and start reading. This works even if all the world's GSM networks are turned off and aliens in orbital invasion pods are jamming our 802.11 signals.
(That there is why removable media is a big deal to me, bigger than can be explained just by the ability to upgrade storage capacity. I take advantage of exactly the same thing on the Wii. I can pop an SD card into my laptop, load music and photo files on to it, pop it into my Wii, and use 'em.)
If the titles are bogged down with DRM, then I'm probably not buying the titles.
I might still buy the device, because it has direct native support for putting a microSD card in your computer, dumping PDF and EPUB documents that don't have any DRM on to that card, moving the card to the Nook, and then reading those files. So even if B&N went out of business, I know I could read DRM-free PDF and EPUB books on it. And that's tempting, if enough other stuff lines up correctly.
I find Microsoft's willingness to squeeze for storage interesting in two respects: One, it suggests a very high level of optimism about their position in the market. Two, it suggests that they don't much care about, or aren't making much money from, downloadable offerings for the Xbox(or that they view those offerings as being extremely compelling and likely to drive consumer behavior).
See, I think the exact opposite.
I think they see downloadable offerings as almost their entire future, and I think this activity is not centered around squeezing people for storage, but about maintaining control over storage options, to make sure every storage option has DRM support deep in their bones.
Microsoft does want everyone to have humungous hard drives. They just want to make sure that those hard drives are theirs, so they can build DRM into the storage at multiple levels, to prevent piracy of the downloaded content. Otherwise the level of piracy might approach that on the PC, and, well, better to go out of business than to tolerate that.
Actually, if you go ahead and tell your wife that, it may just be that one of your descendants would just be so abhorrent that the universe decided you should not be allowed to breed, and this is the method it's using to enforce that.
You are providing an example of one thing the author talks about:
people who are not consciously sexist themselves tend to be unable to see institutionalized sexism around them
Is it possible to have a sexist environment even when no individual in that environment is the least bit sexist? Yes, it is.
Let's imagine, let's pretend using a deliberately contrived and perhaps almost cartoonish example, that for the moment that there's some biologically-driven difference between men and women in the way they make arguments related to dominance or leadership. That, due to biology, due to evolution, men are more willing to be confrontational when jockeying for management or leadership positions than women are. Let's say that given a particular hostile confrontational result, a man is more likely to intensify competition, and a women is more likely to remove herself from the arena. Now let's say you've got some sort of communication medium that hides gender, and limits social feedback and social cues.
What's going to happen? Who's going to end up in charge? Is the result sexist? Does the answer change even if we know that none of the participating individuals have any sexist thoughts? If the result is sexist, can anything be done about it? (No, saying "well, women just need to man up and deal" will not get you bonus points.)
Now, just imagine that the difference isn't nearly as clear-cut, and isn't even close to universal, and imagine that we do not know if the behavioral difference that allows this to perpetuate comes from biology or is taught by society in some way.
Indeed it says a great deal in that the myth that "Microsoft is the number one target because Microsoft is number one" is now shattered with this reported fact/statistic.
This is misleading.
XB360 is not the top console, no. Wii is. But how many of those Wii players network their machines? And how many of those also attach payment information to their machines?
In terms of network accounts with cash flow attached to them (ie. paid subscribers to a network service), Microsoft is number one. There are more paid XBox Live accounts worldwide than there are active "World of Warcraft" accounts! When looked at this way, Nintendo and Sony aren't even close. And so, the priority for hackers makes a great deal of sense.
I'm a computer programmer married to an artist/librarian. When we got married (okay, eloped) about 14 years ago, what we did is, we looked around us and identified people who we considered to have successful marriages. And then we went to them and asked them how they did it.
Were there certain common themes? Sure there were. I'm not going to post them here, because what you really need to do is go identify people you know that you folks consider to be successful at this, and go talk to them.
But is it legal to release any iPhone application under the GPL?
GPLv2, I have no doubt that the answer is "yes". This has a lot in common with TiVo's use of Linux, where they use it and distribute their sources, and still make it difficult to replace the version that's installed on the hardware you own. Some folks consider this a loophole that needs to be closed.
If you use a version of the GPL with the so-called "anti TiVoization clause", well, that supposedly closes that loophole. But the existence of jailbroken iphones makes me unsure. It might be that you can say to the GPL license owner that your "target market" is the jailbroken iphone community, and an additional app-store link is just an extra paid way to distribute binaries for folks who prefer that method.
I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner -- the XCom series would be perfect for a reboot.
The turn-based tactical aspect with action points... you know, that had a lot in common with the original Fallout game mechanics... maybe a Fallout 3 style "VATS" system would be a way to bring it up to date. Who has the rights to this today, and how do we get those rights into the hands of Bethesda?
I'd pay for a "reboot" of the SSI "Gold Box" games. Likewise for "Eye of the Beholder".
I would pay big money for a port of the original Deus Ex to a modern console. Likewise for an updating of the System Shock series.
Fallout 3 has been successful on consoles; I'd pay for Fallout 1 and 2 somewhat updated and ported to a console.
With the whole renewed interest in crazy DaVinci Code type stuff, a reboot of the whole "Gabriel Knight" series might actually do decently, if handled right.
It shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted.
I'll take this further: it cannot be abolished, because in this field in particular, tools to combat outright plagiarism are pretty important. But it should be dramatically altered in ways that promote the free flow of ideas. It should be converted almost entirely into an anti-plagiarism tool, within this domain. Some sort of mandatory "go ahead and use this as long as you give full attribution" license ought to do the trick I think.
Great. Yes, that covers the most simplistic, most trivial way Apple could do this. So if Apple does this in a brainless manner, and doesn't study anything anyone else has done, Palm has an easy ride ahead.
Now let me ask you, what do you know about XBox 360 hard drives?
You can't stick any old hard drive in there without hacking the device firmware. The "legit" hard drives all have a particular image file stored on them. The system won't recognize it as a drive without that file. And that file is copyrighted. So to put your own hard drive into an XB360, you have to either mod the firmware to recognize a drive without that image, or violate copyright and copy that image.
This has been sufficient to block widespread/mainstream installing of custom hard drives into XB360. Their technology detects the modded systems, and bans them from the network. Yeah, it's legal to go ahead and mod a system so it doesn't require that image, but the result is one that violates your XBLA agreements, and gets banned from the network. And as for installing the image on a non-approved hard drive, so you can use it with a non-modified XB360, the legal system seems to be sufficient to stop that.
Why is something along these lines not sufficient for this purpose? Just put a firmware update on every iPod that has it create a particular copyrighted data file in a particular location if that file is missing, and have iTunes look for that file. For Palm to overcome this, they have to either mod iTunes not to look for that file, or violate copyright by copying that file.
But I'm not sure it'll be necessary. Palm is violating their own agreements with the USB standards body by doing what their doing. I'm not sure how long this will last.
It's all stupid anyway. All they have to do is what everyone else is doing (RIM, doubleTwist, et cetera) and they would have syncing without getting into any pissing matches.
Theres only so much though that Apple can do short of killing compatibility with older iPods.
False, I believe.
Every real iPod can receive a firmware update from iTunes. That's how AAC and DRM support were added to the iPods that were sold before the iTunes music store existed! If things got really crazy... I wouldn't put it past Apple to make the installation of a firmware upgrade a part of the sync process. And if Palm tried to spoof that, I think they'd end up in more legal trouble than they bargained for.
RIM is doing this the right way, as are any number of other vendors. Palm is just... they're either being very stupid or very smart, and at this time I do not have a reason to bet on "very smart".
Essentially the same feature was built into the mail client of the MagicCap operating system, if I'm understanding what's being claimed.
I have a Sony PIC-1000, a Sony PIC-2000A, and a General Magic DataRover 840, and they all have this feature. Basically, when you're composing email (or in fact any other message -- email is not all that's supported), you can open a "stamp drawer" and drop "stamps" on the message to indicate any number of things. This could be done for purely cosmetic reasons, but it was also how you added metadata to the message. Particular stamps had code attached to them and could actually do things. And I think this goes all the way back to 1994.
Listening to music has been my number one hobby for over thirty years now and the reason why you and others cannot "decompose" music is that you're in a younger generation who is too caught up in running around after flashy gadgets and having very low attention spans.
It's possible that you're making invalid assumptions here.
I'm in my 40s. I spent large parts of the 70s and 80s in basements listening to AOR with friends. I have an extensive vinyl collection. (I actually have an 8-track collection too.) I have probably spent thousands of hours in laying down in a room with the lights off, with an LP on the turntable doing nothing but listening to it. (I've spent other times listening to the music while pouring over such stuff as the full fold-out "newspaper" version of "Thick As A Brick".)
Now, if you were already assuming all of that and your statements stand, fine, go ahead and get on with the hate. But if you were instead making assumptions that aren't true, well, might want to re-evaluate.
Pressing buttons while holding your hands in a similar position as when playing a guitar gives you zero indication of musical ability or any positive benefit for your playing. It only shows you can move your fingers in time with a beat, but thats where the similarity ends.
As a non-musician, let me tell you about one other thing these games have done for me.
I never used to do any decomposition of music before. I listened to the whole piece as if it were one monolithic, inseparable thing.
Playing these games has taught me to decompose music in various ways. For one thing, the game forces me to separate out what the guitar is doing from what the drums are doing from what the bass is doing, and now that has become a part of my normal listening habits. For another thing, I'm more aware of the linear structure of a song, the chorus, the bridging pieces, the solos, et cetera.
It may not be much, but for me at least, there's been some musical benefit.
Compare the test result accuracy to the accuracy of typical spam filters.
People get spam, and understand the problem with false positives and false negatives.
If you say "if your spam filter was as accurate as this test, you'd have an XX% chance to lose mail from your bank or your spouse, and a YY% chance to get Z pieces of spam anyway", I think that would make the numbers considerably more meaningful for a lot more people.
I don't agree with your argument that people will be less likely to buy a game due to the fact that they can't resell it. I think resell value is far down on the priority list when buyers make decisions on purchasing games.
Some people will be less likely, and some people won't.
Myself, I won't buy an expensive game unless either I can try it out before buying it or I have the expectation that I can resell it. These days, in most cases that translates to "I won't buy any game unless I've rented it through GameFly first", but this is one of the reasons I sunk so much money on Oblivion for the XBox (which I did later re-sell).
This is a reason I have a price cap for downloaded games with DRM (eg. XBLA titles). The Penny Arcade game may have been a fantastic game, and if it were on a disk I might have been willing to pay what they asked for it, but as a download that I can't re-sell, or easily take to a buddy's house, or easily lend to a co-worker? No, sorry, no. Developers, if you're going to limit what I can do with it, then you're going to have to bring that price down.
If this means that some sorts of games are just not economical to produce... I am completely fine with that. My world would not have been worse if the Penny Arcade game had never come out, and might in fact have been better (maybe those resources could have been spent on something I would enjoy).
The only way the clueless masses will use it is if it's the only choice on a cool-looking netbook or laptop and they're hooked on the color of it.
I'm not sure. If there's a netbook that, on identical hardware, is $250 if you use Chrome and $400 if you use Windows, due to the differences in OS licensing cost, I could see some consumers opting for the cheaper one. The cheaper the machine gets, the greater the percentage of total cost is due to software cost.
My bad, I started reacting to the editor's summary before I finished reading the article.
The article is about an old, old argument that I remember from my tabletop gaming days. Basically, which is better, a system like 1st edition D&D before the "Wilderness Survival Guide" and "Dungeoneer's Survival Guide" came out (those are the books that added non-weapon proficiencies to the game), or a system like GURPS or the original "Call of Cthulhu" or StoryTeller (ie. White Wolf)?
In the one case your "power" is to a large extent based off a single scalar value that grows as you progress (ie. when comparing a 5th level magic-user to a 12th-level magic-user in original D&D, everything is improved -- hit points, saving throws, combat rolls, spell damage, everything), while at the other extreme, you've got a bunch of completely distinct abilities that progress separately.
The level-based system can result in absurdities. Why is a 12th level mage more likely to survive a fall down a flight of stairs than a 3rd level acrobat? Why is that 17th level warrior extremely resistant to a disease he's never been exposed to, while a 0th level peasant indigenous to the area has almost no resistance?
However, the skill-based system can have emergent complexities that the designers can't forsee. One example: what happens when the designers intend for characters to pick a mix of abilities that make them more potent and that make them more durable, but some players ignore durability at the expense of pure potency? You have these glass canons that obliterate everything they come across before it has a chance to interact with them, and thus their low durability becomes irrelevant, potentially resulting in a degenerate, unbalanced situation that just isn't a fun game.
When the skill-based systems do work, there's no question in my mind that they provide a richer and more fun experience. But there's also no question in my mind that a level-based system is far easier to balance around, and also far easier to communicate about -- you don't have to measure "e-peen", the system will display its value for you right there!
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I've never understood this sentiment. I have no such delusions that "I'm better than everyone else" because by any standard, there are people who are more exceptional than me in every way and/or people who exist that I cannot compare to. How people can even have this "feeling" is a mystery to me. That's being honest, and I'm sure that it's not a special case in knowing it.
Alas. Unfortunately, most people are deluded. At least you can take comfort in the fact that you're far, far less deluded than everyone else is! You seem to be aware of this particular advantage you have, anyhow.
If the device drivers for your motherboard have a bug - which sounds more like the cause of your issue - then that isn't a Microsoft problem at all, since they didn't write the drivers. Contact Abit for support.
If we take this as true, it's an example of why for some people, paying a premium for a Macintosh is worth the cost and can make sense. You give up the freedom to do all sorts of things (like get a machine with specs perfectly suited to specialized needs for example), but you gain freedom from a lot of problems of this sort.
(Just trying to plant this in the heads of the countless people who argue there's literally no rational reason to buy a Mac, and only fanboys would even consider it. You won't see me argue that there's no such thing as an Apple fanboy, but I will argue that the fanboy phenomenon is not all there is to Apple's sales.)
...having a microSD in there is the only real different I see.
It's a big difference, if you consider the implications.
Let's say you want to get a Word or RTF document on to your reader. Maybe, I don't know, the Word97 version of "Dive Into Python" or something. What do you do?
As I understand it, with the Kindle, you do some trick to mail it to yourself, and it goes through Amazon's infrastructure and arrives on your device wirelessly. You're charged for this service, and if Amazon shuts the service down, you can't do this anymore. There may also be some way to use the web browser to do some of this, and that may get around the charge, but it also does require the currently-free-but-won't-stay-that-way-if-abused 3G wireless modem service in the thing. And I can't confirm that you can actually install content that way (though you could read a web version).
With the Nook, you load up a tool to convert RTF to either PDF or EPUB, and you put the microSD card in a computer, load the file on to it, move the microSD card to the Nook, and start reading. This works even if all the world's GSM networks are turned off and aliens in orbital invasion pods are jamming our 802.11 signals.
(That there is why removable media is a big deal to me, bigger than can be explained just by the ability to upgrade storage capacity. I take advantage of exactly the same thing on the Wii. I can pop an SD card into my laptop, load music and photo files on to it, pop it into my Wii, and use 'em.)
If the titles are bogged down with DRM, then I'm probably not buying the titles.
I might still buy the device, because it has direct native support for putting a microSD card in your computer, dumping PDF and EPUB documents that don't have any DRM on to that card, moving the card to the Nook, and then reading those files. So even if B&N went out of business, I know I could read DRM-free PDF and EPUB books on it. And that's tempting, if enough other stuff lines up correctly.
See, I think the exact opposite.
I think they see downloadable offerings as almost their entire future, and I think this activity is not centered around squeezing people for storage, but about maintaining control over storage options, to make sure every storage option has DRM support deep in their bones.
Microsoft does want everyone to have humungous hard drives. They just want to make sure that those hard drives are theirs, so they can build DRM into the storage at multiple levels, to prevent piracy of the downloaded content. Otherwise the level of piracy might approach that on the PC, and, well, better to go out of business than to tolerate that.
Actually, if you go ahead and tell your wife that, it may just be that one of your descendants would just be so abhorrent that the universe decided you should not be allowed to breed, and this is the method it's using to enforce that.
You are providing an example of one thing the author talks about:
people who are not consciously sexist themselves tend to be unable to see institutionalized sexism around them
Is it possible to have a sexist environment even when no individual in that environment is the least bit sexist? Yes, it is.
Let's imagine, let's pretend using a deliberately contrived and perhaps almost cartoonish example, that for the moment that there's some biologically-driven difference between men and women in the way they make arguments related to dominance or leadership. That, due to biology, due to evolution, men are more willing to be confrontational when jockeying for management or leadership positions than women are. Let's say that given a particular hostile confrontational result, a man is more likely to intensify competition, and a women is more likely to remove herself from the arena. Now let's say you've got some sort of communication medium that hides gender, and limits social feedback and social cues.
What's going to happen? Who's going to end up in charge? Is the result sexist? Does the answer change even if we know that none of the participating individuals have any sexist thoughts? If the result is sexist, can anything be done about it? (No, saying "well, women just need to man up and deal" will not get you bonus points.)
Now, just imagine that the difference isn't nearly as clear-cut, and isn't even close to universal, and imagine that we do not know if the behavioral difference that allows this to perpetuate comes from biology or is taught by society in some way.
This is misleading.
XB360 is not the top console, no. Wii is. But how many of those Wii players network their machines? And how many of those also attach payment information to their machines?
In terms of network accounts with cash flow attached to them (ie. paid subscribers to a network service), Microsoft is number one. There are more paid XBox Live accounts worldwide than there are active "World of Warcraft" accounts! When looked at this way, Nintendo and Sony aren't even close. And so, the priority for hackers makes a great deal of sense.
It wasn't blinking, was it? Because if it was blinking, termination is certainly justified.
Hey! Did you secure the permission of the copyright owner to post that information?
I'm a computer programmer married to an artist/librarian. When we got married (okay, eloped) about 14 years ago, what we did is, we looked around us and identified people who we considered to have successful marriages. And then we went to them and asked them how they did it.
Were there certain common themes? Sure there were. I'm not going to post them here, because what you really need to do is go identify people you know that you folks consider to be successful at this, and go talk to them.
But is it legal to release any iPhone application under the GPL?
GPLv2, I have no doubt that the answer is "yes". This has a lot in common with TiVo's use of Linux, where they use it and distribute their sources, and still make it difficult to replace the version that's installed on the hardware you own. Some folks consider this a loophole that needs to be closed.
If you use a version of the GPL with the so-called "anti TiVoization clause", well, that supposedly closes that loophole. But the existence of jailbroken iphones makes me unsure. It might be that you can say to the GPL license owner that your "target market" is the jailbroken iphone community, and an additional app-store link is just an extra paid way to distribute binaries for folks who prefer that method.
I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner -- the XCom series would be perfect for a reboot.
The turn-based tactical aspect with action points... you know, that had a lot in common with the original Fallout game mechanics... maybe a Fallout 3 style "VATS" system would be a way to bring it up to date. Who has the rights to this today, and how do we get those rights into the hands of Bethesda?
I'd pay for a "reboot" of the SSI "Gold Box" games. Likewise for "Eye of the Beholder".
I would pay big money for a port of the original Deus Ex to a modern console. Likewise for an updating of the System Shock series.
Fallout 3 has been successful on consoles; I'd pay for Fallout 1 and 2 somewhat updated and ported to a console.
With the whole renewed interest in crazy DaVinci Code type stuff, a reboot of the whole "Gabriel Knight" series might actually do decently, if handled right.
It shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted.
I'll take this further: it cannot be abolished, because in this field in particular, tools to combat outright plagiarism are pretty important. But it should be dramatically altered in ways that promote the free flow of ideas. It should be converted almost entirely into an anti-plagiarism tool, within this domain. Some sort of mandatory "go ahead and use this as long as you give full attribution" license ought to do the trick I think.
Great. Yes, that covers the most simplistic, most trivial way Apple could do this. So if Apple does this in a brainless manner, and doesn't study anything anyone else has done, Palm has an easy ride ahead.
Now let me ask you, what do you know about XBox 360 hard drives?
You can't stick any old hard drive in there without hacking the device firmware. The "legit" hard drives all have a particular image file stored on them. The system won't recognize it as a drive without that file. And that file is copyrighted. So to put your own hard drive into an XB360, you have to either mod the firmware to recognize a drive without that image, or violate copyright and copy that image.
This has been sufficient to block widespread/mainstream installing of custom hard drives into XB360. Their technology detects the modded systems, and bans them from the network. Yeah, it's legal to go ahead and mod a system so it doesn't require that image, but the result is one that violates your XBLA agreements, and gets banned from the network. And as for installing the image on a non-approved hard drive, so you can use it with a non-modified XB360, the legal system seems to be sufficient to stop that.
Why is something along these lines not sufficient for this purpose? Just put a firmware update on every iPod that has it create a particular copyrighted data file in a particular location if that file is missing, and have iTunes look for that file. For Palm to overcome this, they have to either mod iTunes not to look for that file, or violate copyright by copying that file.
But I'm not sure it'll be necessary. Palm is violating their own agreements with the USB standards body by doing what their doing. I'm not sure how long this will last.
It's all stupid anyway. All they have to do is what everyone else is doing (RIM, doubleTwist, et cetera) and they would have syncing without getting into any pissing matches.
Theres only so much though that Apple can do short of killing compatibility with older iPods.
False, I believe.
Every real iPod can receive a firmware update from iTunes. That's how AAC and DRM support were added to the iPods that were sold before the iTunes music store existed! If things got really crazy... I wouldn't put it past Apple to make the installation of a firmware upgrade a part of the sync process. And if Palm tried to spoof that, I think they'd end up in more legal trouble than they bargained for.
RIM is doing this the right way, as are any number of other vendors. Palm is just... they're either being very stupid or very smart, and at this time I do not have a reason to bet on "very smart".
Essentially the same feature was built into the mail client of the MagicCap operating system, if I'm understanding what's being claimed.
I have a Sony PIC-1000, a Sony PIC-2000A, and a General Magic DataRover 840, and they all have this feature. Basically, when you're composing email (or in fact any other message -- email is not all that's supported), you can open a "stamp drawer" and drop "stamps" on the message to indicate any number of things. This could be done for purely cosmetic reasons, but it was also how you added metadata to the message. Particular stamps had code attached to them and could actually do things. And I think this goes all the way back to 1994.
Listening to music has been my number one hobby for over thirty years now and the reason why you and others cannot "decompose" music is that you're in a younger generation who is too caught up in running around after flashy gadgets and having very low attention spans.
It's possible that you're making invalid assumptions here.
I'm in my 40s. I spent large parts of the 70s and 80s in basements listening to AOR with friends. I have an extensive vinyl collection. (I actually have an 8-track collection too.) I have probably spent thousands of hours in laying down in a room with the lights off, with an LP on the turntable doing nothing but listening to it. (I've spent other times listening to the music while pouring over such stuff as the full fold-out "newspaper" version of "Thick As A Brick".)
Now, if you were already assuming all of that and your statements stand, fine, go ahead and get on with the hate. But if you were instead making assumptions that aren't true, well, might want to re-evaluate.
Pressing buttons while holding your hands in a similar position as when playing a guitar gives you zero indication of musical ability or any positive benefit for your playing. It only shows you can move your fingers in time with a beat, but thats where the similarity ends.
As a non-musician, let me tell you about one other thing these games have done for me.
I never used to do any decomposition of music before. I listened to the whole piece as if it were one monolithic, inseparable thing.
Playing these games has taught me to decompose music in various ways. For one thing, the game forces me to separate out what the guitar is doing from what the drums are doing from what the bass is doing, and now that has become a part of my normal listening habits. For another thing, I'm more aware of the linear structure of a song, the chorus, the bridging pieces, the solos, et cetera.
It may not be much, but for me at least, there's been some musical benefit.
Compare the test result accuracy to the accuracy of typical spam filters.
People get spam, and understand the problem with false positives and false negatives.
If you say "if your spam filter was as accurate as this test, you'd have an XX% chance to lose mail from your bank or your spouse, and a YY% chance to get Z pieces of spam anyway", I think that would make the numbers considerably more meaningful for a lot more people.
I don't agree with your argument that people will be less likely to buy a game due to the fact that they can't resell it. I think resell value is far down on the priority list when buyers make decisions on purchasing games.
Some people will be less likely, and some people won't.
Myself, I won't buy an expensive game unless either I can try it out before buying it or I have the expectation that I can resell it. These days, in most cases that translates to "I won't buy any game unless I've rented it through GameFly first", but this is one of the reasons I sunk so much money on Oblivion for the XBox (which I did later re-sell).
This is a reason I have a price cap for downloaded games with DRM (eg. XBLA titles). The Penny Arcade game may have been a fantastic game, and if it were on a disk I might have been willing to pay what they asked for it, but as a download that I can't re-sell, or easily take to a buddy's house, or easily lend to a co-worker? No, sorry, no. Developers, if you're going to limit what I can do with it, then you're going to have to bring that price down.
If this means that some sorts of games are just not economical to produce... I am completely fine with that. My world would not have been worse if the Penny Arcade game had never come out, and might in fact have been better (maybe those resources could have been spent on something I would enjoy).
What Apple is trying to do is not let a non-Apple device sync with iTunes, isn't it?
Nope! There are any number of ways to get the same job done that Apple supports. They're just trying to prevent it from happening this particular way.
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
The only way the clueless masses will use it is if it's the only choice on a cool-looking netbook or laptop and they're hooked on the color of it.
I'm not sure. If there's a netbook that, on identical hardware, is $250 if you use Chrome and $400 if you use Windows, due to the differences in OS licensing cost, I could see some consumers opting for the cheaper one. The cheaper the machine gets, the greater the percentage of total cost is due to software cost.
My bad, I started reacting to the editor's summary before I finished reading the article.
The article is about an old, old argument that I remember from my tabletop gaming days. Basically, which is better, a system like 1st edition D&D before the "Wilderness Survival Guide" and "Dungeoneer's Survival Guide" came out (those are the books that added non-weapon proficiencies to the game), or a system like GURPS or the original "Call of Cthulhu" or StoryTeller (ie. White Wolf)?
In the one case your "power" is to a large extent based off a single scalar value that grows as you progress (ie. when comparing a 5th level magic-user to a 12th-level magic-user in original D&D, everything is improved -- hit points, saving throws, combat rolls, spell damage, everything), while at the other extreme, you've got a bunch of completely distinct abilities that progress separately.
The level-based system can result in absurdities. Why is a 12th level mage more likely to survive a fall down a flight of stairs than a 3rd level acrobat? Why is that 17th level warrior extremely resistant to a disease he's never been exposed to, while a 0th level peasant indigenous to the area has almost no resistance?
However, the skill-based system can have emergent complexities that the designers can't forsee. One example: what happens when the designers intend for characters to pick a mix of abilities that make them more potent and that make them more durable, but some players ignore durability at the expense of pure potency? You have these glass canons that obliterate everything they come across before it has a chance to interact with them, and thus their low durability becomes irrelevant, potentially resulting in a degenerate, unbalanced situation that just isn't a fun game.
When the skill-based systems do work, there's no question in my mind that they provide a richer and more fun experience. But there's also no question in my mind that a level-based system is far easier to balance around, and also far easier to communicate about -- you don't have to measure "e-peen", the system will display its value for you right there!