Does Ubisoft care if I get Tomb Raider Underworld working on my copy of Windows ME? You can install Windows XP onto a machine with 32MB's of ram, MS won't try to stop you selling machines in that configuration.
Because MS doesn't sell machines themselves, while Apple does.
Apple is the only company I know that attempts to restrict where it's software will run. All other companies will just refuse to support a platform and they state plainly what platform the software has been tested on (and will be supported on) and what they believe are the minimum requirements.
Of course they do, again, Apple sells hardware+software bundles. Apple's business is selling hardware. Of course they want their software running on their own hardware. It is their business model.
Besides, there actually are companies who restrict what their software will run on. I'm pretty sure an Xbox game does not run on a PS3. I know they are totally incompatible on many levels, but if they were compatible, you'd have the same discussion.
Just because something is *technically* possible, does NOT mean it is legal, or should be.
If i decide to build some kind of highly specialised medical software, and decide to bundle it exclusively on x86-hardware i sell with my own label, just for performance assurance, does that mean somebody else can tear it apart and re-sell my software on their own systems?
Yes, there is such a thing. Every country can decide what channels are allowed to use. Not every frequency/channel is allowed for free use in every country in the world. Cisco accesspoints, for example, have a configuration parameter to specify the country it is used in, so it won't use channels it isn't allowed to use. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels.
Afwully strong statement for only 1 patent. Without any information about wether they are going to actually *use* it, and if so, in what product... Are you sure that every company behind every product you own in your house, only holds patents that you agree with? Patents that not neccessarily have anything to do with the stuff you actually have?
Let's also hope that they won't license it to others, so we'll never see this technology in action. Seriously, do they expect anyone to appreciate this technology? (Anyone that is not in the marketing business, of course)
I have a similar setup, with a Mac Mini somewhere on the attic, streaming its music to several Airport Expresses through the house. I use the Airport Expresses only for the music, and have them connected through ethernet, not wireless. I also wrote an XML app for my Cisco IP phones, and can select the music from every phone in the house. With the birth of our son, i expanded it further and figured out that by running iTunes under different user accounts on the same box, i can play different music on different Airport Expresses, so our son can fall asleep on children's music, while i enjoy other music elsewhere in the house.
...so ten years ago, i had the pleasure of visiting a startup (back then) called Microvision, developing what seems to me like exactly the same thing. Looking at their site now, they are still in business and working on the same stuff, which i think is cool.
I recall wearing a similar device, with a Windows 98 desktop being laser-projected directly on my eye, altough at 640x480. I recall the nervousness of what would happen if lightning would strike at that very moment. Just the idea of a Windows desktop etched on my retina...
Actually, EA has done that before. I recall seeing DLC for EA's Need For Speed, Madden NFL and Godfather games in the Xbox marketplace, offering extra cars, stadiums and weapons respectively. All cost good money, and all downloads were 180KB or so in size, far too small to be 'real' DLC, these had to be unlocking codes for content that was already on the discs in the first place.
Actually, if i read this and several other IT sites and their reader's reactions, it's the non-Apple-users who like to see iPhone-customers like that.
I know quite a few people with iPhones (and other Apple gear), and are quite happy with it, but not in your "look at how cool i am" way. It's the rest of the world that likes to apply that stereotype to them.
Funny that none of the points you mention are about the actual games. I mean, we are talking about games consoles, right? Why not choose the console that has the games you like most, instead of having a pissing contest about dvd playback quality and hard disk size?
There used to be a time were Dutch providers had a download limit, but one by one they changed this to a FUP.
I can understand them doing this from a commercial point of view (a competitor's FUP sounds more interesting to potential customers than their own hard limit), but if you ask me, all a FUP does is attract people you don't want on your network, for exactly this reason.
I have zero problems with the iPhone, I used to own one. What I have a problem with, are typical apple product users.
Quite agreed. Apple users can be a pain in fora like this. However, not as much as Apple bashers, being negative all the time about Apple, Jobs, the iPhone, basically everything white and shiny with an Apple on it, often not realizing their posts are far greater in numbers than those of Apple fans.
They can be recognized by topics such as "overpriced", "[insert name here] is better", "Apple logo", etc, much like yours.
Back ontopic: your first posting blames Apple for alot of things, while it is the 3rd party software maker (TomTom) deciding the price. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. However, if you think Apple is overpriced, then perhaps you're not their target market. Personally, i think Porsches are overpriced too, but i'm not ranting about it in every car magazine. Tell us something we don't know, please.
Oh, and for the record... TT's prices for this product seem on par with their Navigator for Windows Mobile software. Not sure their software is overpriced in this regard.
I know every country is different. I live in the Netherlands, where tv shows and movies are NOT dubbed, but subtitled instead. Every kid in school learns English.
Yet, every game on the shelves appears to be translated to Dutch nowadays. Thank God not the software itself, but the packaging and manuals are all Dutch everywhere. I asked around a bit amongst friends, but nobody understands why they exactly do this. For the small percentage of kids games who don't understand English, we can understand, but why translate the paperwork of Grand Theft Auto IV? The target audience has learned English in school, watches English on tv anyway, and the game itself is English as well. On the other side, the manual is written as a tourist guide to Liberty City, with sarcastic remarks between the lines about how crap the city is... But all these are lost in translation.
Why do they even bother? If nothing else is translated on our (tv) screens?
EA learned a hard lesson with the first Black & White game, one of the few games that got translated completely to Dutch. After a storm of complaints from just about everyone, they offered exchanging discs for a native English version, and later even offered separate voice pack downloads. It's not the the voices are bad (which they weren't, honestly) but nobody wanted a Dutch version in the fist place.
I remember that at one point in the original Deus Ex, you could turn in a quest at a NPC, giving you xp and an item in return. When your inventory was full at the moment of talking to him however, he would ask you to clean up your inventory and come back later. The quest would still be open... but you did get the xp. So I kept trying and trying and trying to turn in the quest with a full inventory, until my xp was maxed out (I believe this was about 60% into the game).
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
I had the same issue with an earlier update of Leopard.
Fortunately I had a second computer nearby to look up the issue before reinstalling the entire thing. Check out http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306998, appearantly it happens more often when updates aren't completely installed. The solution seemed so simple, yet it fixed my problem.
Still a nasty bug that shouldn't be there, and i'm sure there are more than a few people out there who went looking for their OS X installation discs while cursing themselves for making fun of Windows users...
One. A colleague (at an IT company) managed 2 redundant servers. Server A crashed, and server B took over as expected. He had to turn off server A to change a harddisk, and as usual with unresponsive hardware, the easiest way to do so is to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds, which he did. Unfortunately, the labels "Server A" and "Server B" were swapped during installation years before...
Two. Another colleague walked through our office, past a customer's server that was temporarily in our office. This chap is known and respected for his Novell knowledge ("no, you HAVE to check that checkbox during installation. Otherwise, he won't support it."), but has no Windows knowledge. Some joker installed the sysinternals BSOD-screensaver, displaying and repeating a blue screen of death, and a Windows server splashscreen, as if it was continuously rebooting. Being the helpful chap that he is, he thought the best thing to do was to shut down the server between these reboots, and notifying the administrator responsible for this server.
After said administrator calmed down, the Novell guy explained sarcastically: "Well, i thought we had a serious problem, and fortunately now we have. But next time, let's just stay professional with installing screensavers, shall we?"
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Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper? /duck
Does Ubisoft care if I get Tomb Raider Underworld working on my copy of Windows ME? You can install Windows XP onto a machine with 32MB's of ram, MS won't try to stop you selling machines in that configuration.
Because MS doesn't sell machines themselves, while Apple does.
Apple is the only company I know that attempts to restrict where it's software will run. All other companies will just refuse to support a platform and they state plainly what platform the software has been tested on (and will be supported on) and what they believe are the minimum requirements.
Of course they do, again, Apple sells hardware+software bundles. Apple's business is selling hardware. Of course they want their software running on their own hardware. It is their business model.
Besides, there actually are companies who restrict what their software will run on. I'm pretty sure an Xbox game does not run on a PS3. I know they are totally incompatible on many levels, but if they were compatible, you'd have the same discussion.
Just because something is *technically* possible, does NOT mean it is legal, or should be.
If i decide to build some kind of highly specialised medical software, and decide to bundle it exclusively on x86-hardware i sell with my own label, just for performance assurance, does that mean somebody else can tear it apart and re-sell my software on their own systems?
Yes, there is such a thing. Every country can decide what channels are allowed to use. Not every frequency/channel is allowed for free use in every country in the world. Cisco accesspoints, for example, have a configuration parameter to specify the country it is used in, so it won't use channels it isn't allowed to use. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels.
Afwully strong statement for only 1 patent. Without any information about wether they are going to actually *use* it, and if so, in what product... Are you sure that every company behind every product you own in your house, only holds patents that you agree with? Patents that not neccessarily have anything to do with the stuff you actually have?
Let's also hope that they won't license it to others, so we'll never see this technology in action. Seriously, do they expect anyone to appreciate this technology? (Anyone that is not in the marketing business, of course)
I have a similar setup, with a Mac Mini somewhere on the attic, streaming its music to several Airport Expresses through the house. I use the Airport Expresses only for the music, and have them connected through ethernet, not wireless. I also wrote an XML app for my Cisco IP phones, and can select the music from every phone in the house. With the birth of our son, i expanded it further and figured out that by running iTunes under different user accounts on the same box, i can play different music on different Airport Expresses, so our son can fall asleep on children's music, while i enjoy other music elsewhere in the house.
...so ten years ago, i had the pleasure of visiting a startup (back then) called Microvision, developing what seems to me like exactly the same thing. Looking at their site now, they are still in business and working on the same stuff, which i think is cool.
I recall wearing a similar device, with a Windows 98 desktop being laser-projected directly on my eye, altough at 640x480. I recall the nervousness of what would happen if lightning would strike at that very moment. Just the idea of a Windows desktop etched on my retina...
I found that quite a few games offer a "free" or "light" demo version of the game, posted in the AppStore as a separate app.
Actually, EA has done that before. I recall seeing DLC for EA's Need For Speed, Madden NFL and Godfather games in the Xbox marketplace, offering extra cars, stadiums and weapons respectively. All cost good money, and all downloads were 180KB or so in size, far too small to be 'real' DLC, these had to be unlocking codes for content that was already on the discs in the first place.
Actually, if i read this and several other IT sites and their reader's reactions, it's the non-Apple-users who like to see iPhone-customers like that.
I know quite a few people with iPhones (and other Apple gear), and are quite happy with it, but not in your "look at how cool i am" way. It's the rest of the world that likes to apply that stereotype to them.
Funny that none of the points you mention are about the actual games. I mean, we are talking about games consoles, right? Why not choose the console that has the games you like most, instead of having a pissing contest about dvd playback quality and hard disk size?
There used to be a time were Dutch providers had a download limit, but one by one they changed this to a FUP.
I can understand them doing this from a commercial point of view (a competitor's FUP sounds more interesting to potential customers than their own hard limit), but if you ask me, all a FUP does is attract people you don't want on your network, for exactly this reason.
I have zero problems with the iPhone, I used to own one. What I have a problem with, are typical apple product users.
Quite agreed. Apple users can be a pain in fora like this. However, not as much as Apple bashers, being negative all the time about Apple, Jobs, the iPhone, basically everything white and shiny with an Apple on it, often not realizing their posts are far greater in numbers than those of Apple fans.
They can be recognized by topics such as "overpriced", "[insert name here] is better", "Apple logo", etc, much like yours.
Back ontopic: your first posting blames Apple for alot of things, while it is the 3rd party software maker (TomTom) deciding the price. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. However, if you think Apple is overpriced, then perhaps you're not their target market. Personally, i think Porsches are overpriced too, but i'm not ranting about it in every car magazine. Tell us something we don't know, please.
Oh, and for the record... TT's prices for this product seem on par with their Navigator for Windows Mobile software. Not sure their software is overpriced in this regard.
I know every country is different. I live in the Netherlands, where tv shows and movies are NOT dubbed, but subtitled instead. Every kid in school learns English.
Yet, every game on the shelves appears to be translated to Dutch nowadays. Thank God not the software itself, but the packaging and manuals are all Dutch everywhere. I asked around a bit amongst friends, but nobody understands why they exactly do this. For the small percentage of kids games who don't understand English, we can understand, but why translate the paperwork of Grand Theft Auto IV? The target audience has learned English in school, watches English on tv anyway, and the game itself is English as well. On the other side, the manual is written as a tourist guide to Liberty City, with sarcastic remarks between the lines about how crap the city is... But all these are lost in translation.
Why do they even bother? If nothing else is translated on our (tv) screens?
EA learned a hard lesson with the first Black & White game, one of the few games that got translated completely to Dutch. After a storm of complaints from just about everyone, they offered exchanging discs for a native English version, and later even offered separate voice pack downloads. It's not the the voices are bad (which they weren't, honestly) but nobody wanted a Dutch version in the fist place.
I remember that at one point in the original Deus Ex, you could turn in a quest at a NPC, giving you xp and an item in return. When your inventory was full at the moment of talking to him however, he would ask you to clean up your inventory and come back later. The quest would still be open... but you did get the xp. So I kept trying and trying and trying to turn in the quest with a full inventory, until my xp was maxed out (I believe this was about 60% into the game).
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
I had the same issue with an earlier update of Leopard.
Fortunately I had a second computer nearby to look up the issue before reinstalling the entire thing. Check out http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306998, appearantly it happens more often when updates aren't completely installed. The solution seemed so simple, yet it fixed my problem.
Still a nasty bug that shouldn't be there, and i'm sure there are more than a few people out there who went looking for their OS X installation discs while cursing themselves for making fun of Windows users...
One. A colleague (at an IT company) managed 2 redundant servers. Server A crashed, and server B took over as expected. He had to turn off server A to change a harddisk, and as usual with unresponsive hardware, the easiest way to do so is to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds, which he did. Unfortunately, the labels "Server A" and "Server B" were swapped during installation years before... Two. Another colleague walked through our office, past a customer's server that was temporarily in our office. This chap is known and respected for his Novell knowledge ("no, you HAVE to check that checkbox during installation. Otherwise, he won't support it."), but has no Windows knowledge. Some joker installed the sysinternals BSOD-screensaver, displaying and repeating a blue screen of death, and a Windows server splashscreen, as if it was continuously rebooting. Being the helpful chap that he is, he thought the best thing to do was to shut down the server between these reboots, and notifying the administrator responsible for this server. After said administrator calmed down, the Novell guy explained sarcastically: "Well, i thought we had a serious problem, and fortunately now we have. But next time, let's just stay professional with installing screensavers, shall we?"