While this article is relating to physical and for-profit piracy in poorer foreign countries, most of the points apply to internet-based piracy in First-world countries.
I, myself, pirated video games when I was younger. However, with the rise of digital distribution services, such as Steam, I don't need to. The amount disposable income hasn't changed much, but the value of legally purchasing games via dealing with the challenges of piracy has.
This has nothing to do with new DRM techniques, in fact, those harm my desire to purchase legally. If I purchase a game via Steam, I can install it any number of times as long as Valve is still in business (which is it's own issue). The Steam client provide other benefits for me, automatic patching (which is a great, but under appreciated, bonus), many useful community/friends support, and easy access to new and/or independent games.
What do I get if I buy a heavily DRM'ed game from $RETAILSTORE? A longer install process, annoying patch process or multiple background patching programs, obtrusive DRM (ubisoft, i'm looking at you), and no replacement if the physical media is damaged or lost.
Steam is far from perfect, but is far superior to the normal retail mess that is the mainstream game market. Hell, they even foster innovation in the independent game market, as they provide indie games exposure when they normally cannot get any reasonable physical distribution or marketing. I've spent far more money on games since the rise of Steam than the entire time before it, and I play far fewer games than before.
Why can't someone do this for Movies and TV shows? The few that do, such as Apple or Amazon, have high prices or annoying restrictions. When a game is released at retail stores, it's released at the same time on Steam. Why do I have to wait a week to see it on the Apple store? Why is one episode worth $2, when the entire season is $20 for 26 episodes?
If I can pirate the Movie or TV show, I bypass all of these annoyances for free. There aren't as many problems pirating video content as the chance of virus infection is greatly reduced, and any DRM methods can be easily bypassed by the 'Scene'. If anything, nasty consumer-level DRM (HDCP) is a foolish waste, as less intrusive DRM methods would prevent casual copying while not punishing those who legitimately attempt to purchase your items.
Fix the release delays, and one-download-only approach, and reduce the price discrepancies. Then you will have a healthy market again.
I think most people believe that the ability to contribute to a conversation means they are somehow encouraged to contribute, even if they don't have much to say. I don't believe this myself, If I have nothing of value to add to a conversation I will not do so.
Humans are social creatures, so the desire to communicate your thoughts is understandable. However, some form of self control should be valued. Look up to good contributions, and look down on valueless ones. Only a good community of people that understand those values can expect to keep a good signal ratio.
Of course, a good community will often be recognized as such, and eventually be dragged into a mire by the rest of the internet. Due to the open nature of the internet, and most communities, it is near impossible to prevent that form of decline. Look at sites such as Digg and Reddit, when they were new they had a smaller and news-focused community. Those communities grew because of their quality, to the point where that quality suffered. Looking at the front page of Reddit, very little resembles the original intent of the site: User-generated news. Now it harbors memes, jokes, videos, and discussion barely worthy of note. In it's hayday, it would have reasonable discussion, interesting articles, and varying viewpoints. Now it lacks most of that, emphasizing "social" over "news".
This shouldn't come as a suprise, look at Pandemic's release history. While there are a few good games here, most of them are quite average to mediocre. They seem to release little other than sequels and middle-of-the-genre titles. I doubt their sales records were spectacular. Thus, when EA started to hurt, they went to cut the least profitable studio.
I wonder what will happen to their next game, The Saboteur, which is due out in 3 weeks. It is worth noting that they have no other projects announced recently, perhaps this was long on the horizon.
This isn't your standard x86-compatible chip. There are many non-x86 chips out there, but they are usually segregated from "PC Computing". They are used in phones, PDAs, embedded devices, consoles (Nintendo DS and most other handhelds), servers, and much more. PowerPC was the last common "Personal Computer" processor that wasn't x86 compatible.
This is simply a case where a specialized processor designed for highly integrated and mobile uses is trying to break into the mainstream Personal Computing market. The primary limitation is that the instruction set on this processor does not support the Intel x86 standard, which is used by most mainstream Operating Systems (Windows, OSX). However, it is possble to port these OSs to ARM, as most open source operating systems (Linux, BSD) have been ported successfully.
The question is whether or not Microsoft or Apple will port and take advantage of these new devices, or will Linux gain a lead in this emerging market?
This isn't Intel's first outlandish prediction. In 2000, they predicted they would make a 11Ghz processor by 2011. Instead, they ran into problems reaching beyond 4Ghz, and instead went towards multi-core processors.
I have a feeling the same people who made that prediction are behind this one. Whether or not they can accomplish this is to be seen, but it seems quite unlikely.
1. What? Sorry, wasn't paying attention. Not much I can say about this one.
2. This is actually a good thing, it may teach them to be critical of the world. There is plenty of bias, and tons of new age junk science out there.
3. Dead trees? That's what they are. While they still have value, online news sources have reader comments, better retractions, and the ability to research the topic immediately.
4. Science projects have already devolved into this. At least when I did mine, our class was not allowed to do fluff-projects like the classic volcano. As long as they do some form of scientific method, then it's for the best.
5. An excuse is an excuse, but computer issues really do cause a lot of legitimate delays. I'm constantly asked to fix stuff just a few hours before their assignment's due date, even in the middle of the night.
That is the point, no manufacturers want to sell computers with 4gb of RAM without 64bit for fear of complaints or lawsuits. For a while many computers were shipped with 3gb of RAM, so they could stay in 32bit. Now they feel it is safe enough to offer 64bit without hurting their customer base.
Of course, that does not mean everyone offers 64bit software, but 64bit is quickly gaining marketshare. There's also the fact that most Linux distros have offered fully 64bit versions for years now, that's the benefit of open source.
Well, there were issues reading/writing to NTFS for years. Remember the captive-NTFS method, wrapping Microsoft's own driver? Then there was the big NTFS reverse-engineering project that finally provided a stable enough driver for general linux use. Don't forget that OS X can only read NTFS volumes, there is no official write support.
It would have been much better if Microsoft had simply released specifications for NTFS like they had for FAT.
Microsoft is going to make a closed filesystem, so we might as well ask for whatever benefits we can get from it. Eventually they will have to abandon NTFS, then maybe they could make something useful. Possibly ZFS-style pool volumes, I would love to setup a RAID-1 on a computer without a complete reinstall.
Ah, sorry for the mistake. I wasn't sure about DMA at first, took a quick look at wikipedia and understand a bit more now.
As for the shared addressable space, I'm obviously no expert, but it seems to be an oversight during the design of 32bit x86 processors.
As the old saying goes, "Nobody will need more than 640k of RAM", they probably never saw as far ahead enough as to recognize this issue.
Of course, the x86_64 architecture should have become standard sooner. Microsoft is trying to force this now, with 64bit Vista (see Vista logo compatibility requirements). Although they should have at least pushed harder for XP64 support.
They are not directly mapped to RAM, this is simply a limitation of 32bit computing. All devices need addressable memory space, including video RAM, and the total 32bit limit (4GB) is split among these devices. When a driver accesses the device, it preforms a call to that devices memory address and the device responds. When the OS runs a process, it is copied into the system ram using the same kind of address.
Imagine a city with a limited road budget. The industrial areas (devices) have priority over residential areas (system RAM), so some residential areas are left without road access.
This is why there is an average usable limit of 3-3.5GB of RAM in most 32bit systems. You can have 4gb of RAM, but the system still needs to allocate space to the other devices so it can interact with them. This also has to do with DMA, direct memory access, that enables devices to directly access ram (bypassing the CPU) to make Input/Output operations faster.
Thus, 2gb, even 1gb, video cards are quite useless until 64bit is the norm. Any game that would require 1gb of video memory will most likely need more than 2gb of system ram, as history has shown relating video memory to system ram requirements in games.
If your numbers are correct, and they were to expand their customer base to 100% capacity, you would still be using almost half of their total! You were paying for a cheaper residential rate, yet using more than their business customers probably used.
If that company had expanded their customer base, they would reach full capacity far sooner than they should because of you. Being a mom&pop, they probably did not have the capital or clout to upgrade their network just because you felt like using half the capacity.
This is also why ISP's should include a bandwidth cap in their contract. There is no such thing as unlimited, anyone who sells their service as such can never live up to it.
Small, rural ISPs operate on one major idea: Their customers demand high speeds, but low throughput. They just want to browse the web fast, not download torrents. Albeit, youtube would consume 30gb relatively quickly. Often, the only backbone they can get is a T1, which is horribly expensive for the bandwidth provided.
It's a tough situation, but these small companies would be in a tough spot. A larger company would have enough customers to subsidize your high-bandwidth use, but probably would still cancel your service.
Is NTFS support still that complicated for any desktop distros? I've been using the newest Knoppix to backup NTFS drives at work, it's so easy I managed to get my co-workers to do it. Knoppix has ntfs-3g built in, and will automount with it. Thanks to dbus, KDE (and gnome, last I checked) should auto-recognize the drive and be able to mount it for you.
I haven't used ubuntu in a while, but I'm pretty sure they have at least some NTFS support without modifying anything. As for installing packages, thats why they have the "Add/Remove Programs" option on the application bar.
Ubuntu isn't that hard, please don't make it sound that way.
It is hard to find high capacity SD cards that work in most devices. First, most devices have restrictions like filesystems and older SD specifications for the card reader. Only revised SD specs support 4GB cards. Even worse, there are new SDHC (Secure digital high capacity) cards, special cards that use a completely different filesystem and make it even harder to find the right card for your device.
For example, while looking for a card for my palm tx, palm's website stated a max of 2gb for SD cards. It turned out, since the TX has support for fat32, you can use non-SDHC 4gb cards without issues (possibly goes for trio phones too). Some devices don't support fat32 at all, so they must use 2gb cards with fat16. Even worse, older devices use early SD specifications, which do not support 2gb at all.
Its quite a mess, but overall I still like SD cards over the other types of memory I have tried. I just wish more MP3 players supported full size SD, the sansa players I have seen only support miniSD.
Slashdot Mirror
While this article is relating to physical and for-profit piracy in poorer foreign countries, most of the points apply to internet-based piracy in First-world countries.
I, myself, pirated video games when I was younger. However, with the rise of digital distribution services, such as Steam, I don't need to. The amount disposable income hasn't changed much, but the value of legally purchasing games via dealing with the challenges of piracy has.
This has nothing to do with new DRM techniques, in fact, those harm my desire to purchase legally. If I purchase a game via Steam, I can install it any number of times as long as Valve is still in business (which is it's own issue). The Steam client provide other benefits for me, automatic patching (which is a great, but under appreciated, bonus), many useful community/friends support, and easy access to new and/or independent games.
What do I get if I buy a heavily DRM'ed game from $RETAILSTORE? A longer install process, annoying patch process or multiple background patching programs, obtrusive DRM (ubisoft, i'm looking at you), and no replacement if the physical media is damaged or lost.
Steam is far from perfect, but is far superior to the normal retail mess that is the mainstream game market. Hell, they even foster innovation in the independent game market, as they provide indie games exposure when they normally cannot get any reasonable physical distribution or marketing. I've spent far more money on games since the rise of Steam than the entire time before it, and I play far fewer games than before.
Why can't someone do this for Movies and TV shows? The few that do, such as Apple or Amazon, have high prices or annoying restrictions. When a game is released at retail stores, it's released at the same time on Steam. Why do I have to wait a week to see it on the Apple store? Why is one episode worth $2, when the entire season is $20 for 26 episodes?
If I can pirate the Movie or TV show, I bypass all of these annoyances for free. There aren't as many problems pirating video content as the chance of virus infection is greatly reduced, and any DRM methods can be easily bypassed by the 'Scene'. If anything, nasty consumer-level DRM (HDCP) is a foolish waste, as less intrusive DRM methods would prevent casual copying while not punishing those who legitimately attempt to purchase your items.
Fix the release delays, and one-download-only approach, and reduce the price discrepancies. Then you will have a healthy market again.
I think most people believe that the ability to contribute to a conversation means they are somehow encouraged to contribute, even if they don't have much to say. I don't believe this myself, If I have nothing of value to add to a conversation I will not do so.
Humans are social creatures, so the desire to communicate your thoughts is understandable. However, some form of self control should be valued. Look up to good contributions, and look down on valueless ones. Only a good community of people that understand those values can expect to keep a good signal ratio.
Of course, a good community will often be recognized as such, and eventually be dragged into a mire by the rest of the internet. Due to the open nature of the internet, and most communities, it is near impossible to prevent that form of decline. Look at sites such as Digg and Reddit, when they were new they had a smaller and news-focused community. Those communities grew because of their quality, to the point where that quality suffered. Looking at the front page of Reddit, very little resembles the original intent of the site: User-generated news. Now it harbors memes, jokes, videos, and discussion barely worthy of note. In it's hayday, it would have reasonable discussion, interesting articles, and varying viewpoints. Now it lacks most of that, emphasizing "social" over "news".
This shouldn't come as a suprise, look at Pandemic's release history. While there are a few good games here, most of them are quite average to mediocre. They seem to release little other than sequels and middle-of-the-genre titles. I doubt their sales records were spectacular. Thus, when EA started to hurt, they went to cut the least profitable studio.
I wonder what will happen to their next game, The Saboteur, which is due out in 3 weeks. It is worth noting that they have no other projects announced recently, perhaps this was long on the horizon.
This isn't your standard x86-compatible chip. There are many non-x86 chips out there, but they are usually segregated from "PC Computing". They are used in phones, PDAs, embedded devices, consoles (Nintendo DS and most other handhelds), servers, and much more. PowerPC was the last common "Personal Computer" processor that wasn't x86 compatible.
This is simply a case where a specialized processor designed for highly integrated and mobile uses is trying to break into the mainstream Personal Computing market. The primary limitation is that the instruction set on this processor does not support the Intel x86 standard, which is used by most mainstream Operating Systems (Windows, OSX). However, it is possble to port these OSs to ARM, as most open source operating systems (Linux, BSD) have been ported successfully.
The question is whether or not Microsoft or Apple will port and take advantage of these new devices, or will Linux gain a lead in this emerging market?
This isn't Intel's first outlandish prediction. In 2000, they predicted they would make a 11Ghz processor by 2011. Instead, they ran into problems reaching beyond 4Ghz, and instead went towards multi-core processors. I have a feeling the same people who made that prediction are behind this one. Whether or not they can accomplish this is to be seen, but it seems quite unlikely.
1. What? Sorry, wasn't paying attention. Not much I can say about this one.
2. This is actually a good thing, it may teach them to be critical of the world. There is plenty of bias, and tons of new age junk science out there.
3. Dead trees? That's what they are. While they still have value, online news sources have reader comments, better retractions, and the ability to research the topic immediately.
4. Science projects have already devolved into this. At least when I did mine, our class was not allowed to do fluff-projects like the classic volcano. As long as they do some form of scientific method, then it's for the best.
5. An excuse is an excuse, but computer issues really do cause a lot of legitimate delays. I'm constantly asked to fix stuff just a few hours before their assignment's due date, even in the middle of the night.
That is the point, no manufacturers want to sell computers with 4gb of RAM without 64bit for fear of complaints or lawsuits. For a while many computers were shipped with 3gb of RAM, so they could stay in 32bit. Now they feel it is safe enough to offer 64bit without hurting their customer base.
They are actually working towards 64bit. Many new computers with 4+ gb of RAM have Vista 64bit by default.
.doc by google)
Microsoft made 64bit compatibility a requirement of the "Certified for Vista" logo. (Vista cert requirements, converted from
Of course, that does not mean everyone offers 64bit software, but 64bit is quickly gaining marketshare. There's also the fact that most Linux distros have offered fully 64bit versions for years now, that's the benefit of open source.
Well, there were issues reading/writing to NTFS for years. Remember the captive-NTFS method, wrapping Microsoft's own driver? Then there was the big NTFS reverse-engineering project that finally provided a stable enough driver for general linux use. Don't forget that OS X can only read NTFS volumes, there is no official write support.
It would have been much better if Microsoft had simply released specifications for NTFS like they had for FAT.
Microsoft is going to make a closed filesystem, so we might as well ask for whatever benefits we can get from it. Eventually they will have to abandon NTFS, then maybe they could make something useful. Possibly ZFS-style pool volumes, I would love to setup a RAID-1 on a computer without a complete reinstall.
I fully agree, x86_64 is merely a stop-gap effort to avoid the memory-size bottleneck. What we really need is a better architecture.
Unfortunately, there are huge difficulties faced in completely changing architecture on the consumer level.
I'm afraid I'm a bit out of my league here, so I will leave the discussion to the experts.
Ah, sorry for the mistake. I wasn't sure about DMA at first, took a quick look at wikipedia and understand a bit more now. As for the shared addressable space, I'm obviously no expert, but it seems to be an oversight during the design of 32bit x86 processors.
As the old saying goes, "Nobody will need more than 640k of RAM", they probably never saw as far ahead enough as to recognize this issue.
Of course, the x86_64 architecture should have become standard sooner. Microsoft is trying to force this now, with 64bit Vista (see Vista logo compatibility requirements). Although they should have at least pushed harder for XP64 support.
They are not directly mapped to RAM, this is simply a limitation of 32bit computing. All devices need addressable memory space, including video RAM, and the total 32bit limit (4GB) is split among these devices. When a driver accesses the device, it preforms a call to that devices memory address and the device responds. When the OS runs a process, it is copied into the system ram using the same kind of address.
Imagine a city with a limited road budget. The industrial areas (devices) have priority over residential areas (system RAM), so some residential areas are left without road access.
This is why there is an average usable limit of 3-3.5GB of RAM in most 32bit systems. You can have 4gb of RAM, but the system still needs to allocate space to the other devices so it can interact with them. This also has to do with DMA, direct memory access, that enables devices to directly access ram (bypassing the CPU) to make Input/Output operations faster.
Thus, 2gb, even 1gb, video cards are quite useless until 64bit is the norm. Any game that would require 1gb of video memory will most likely need more than 2gb of system ram, as history has shown relating video memory to system ram requirements in games.
No offense, but you were also at fault here.
If your numbers are correct, and they were to expand their customer base to 100% capacity, you would still be using almost half of their total! You were paying for a cheaper residential rate, yet using more than their business customers probably used.
If that company had expanded their customer base, they would reach full capacity far sooner than they should because of you. Being a mom&pop, they probably did not have the capital or clout to upgrade their network just because you felt like using half the capacity.
This is also why ISP's should include a bandwidth cap in their contract. There is no such thing as unlimited, anyone who sells their service as such can never live up to it.
Small, rural ISPs operate on one major idea: Their customers demand high speeds, but low throughput. They just want to browse the web fast, not download torrents. Albeit, youtube would consume 30gb relatively quickly. Often, the only backbone they can get is a T1, which is horribly expensive for the bandwidth provided.
It's a tough situation, but these small companies would be in a tough spot. A larger company would have enough customers to subsidize your high-bandwidth use, but probably would still cancel your service.
Is NTFS support still that complicated for any desktop distros? I've been using the newest Knoppix to backup NTFS drives at work, it's so easy I managed to get my co-workers to do it. Knoppix has ntfs-3g built in, and will automount with it. Thanks to dbus, KDE (and gnome, last I checked) should auto-recognize the drive and be able to mount it for you.
I haven't used ubuntu in a while, but I'm pretty sure they have at least some NTFS support without modifying anything. As for installing packages, thats why they have the "Add/Remove Programs" option on the application bar.
Ubuntu isn't that hard, please don't make it sound that way.
It is hard to find high capacity SD cards that work in most devices. First, most devices have restrictions like filesystems and older SD specifications for the card reader. Only revised SD specs support 4GB cards. Even worse, there are new SDHC (Secure digital high capacity) cards, special cards that use a completely different filesystem and make it even harder to find the right card for your device. For example, while looking for a card for my palm tx, palm's website stated a max of 2gb for SD cards. It turned out, since the TX has support for fat32, you can use non-SDHC 4gb cards without issues (possibly goes for trio phones too). Some devices don't support fat32 at all, so they must use 2gb cards with fat16. Even worse, older devices use early SD specifications, which do not support 2gb at all. Its quite a mess, but overall I still like SD cards over the other types of memory I have tried. I just wish more MP3 players supported full size SD, the sansa players I have seen only support miniSD.