At work we have purchased a dual processor system with a quad core CPU in each that runs Vista.
Would that be the minimum or recommended spec for Vista?
IANAVU so I'm wondering if, after all this hoo-ha about Vista being more secure, does it _still_ have Autorun enabled on drives by default? It's one thing to add a security feature of debatable effect (UAC) but quite another to leave a gaping hole that everyone's been complaining about for years.
Not sure why you copped so much flak for what you wrote, but I think - especially for your age - you have the right idea. Most people don't think about the rich/poor divide and ways in which society can be improved for everyone.
The implementation of these Mosquito things is evidence that people a lot older than us, and in much more responsible positions, can think only of short-term solutions, as a by-product of winning favour in their constituency.
We need inspiration and long-term solutions - something Democracy as we know it is not that well geared up to provide. Things will improve slowly, we hope, over time. It always feels like 1.5 steps forward, one step back.
Then why does Amazon try to patent the one-click checkout? If a site in Germany can just do the same thing regardless, where's the reason for them to patent? There must be some benefit surely?
In a time when companies are trying to patent a mouse click, I wonder at why MS never patented the Task Bar. That is, "an interactive strip, positioned on the desktop, displaying running programs and facilitating control over program windows" or something like that.
Sounds like something that could have been be patented, since (I assume) MS first came up with it, for Windows 95.
In my personal experience of meeting various interesting people, I feel that learned behaviours have a lot to do with how one's mental skills are shaped, and hence how the person is perceived by others.
One friend of mine had a very bad childhood. She learned to escape inwardly, by concentrating on books, study, escaping physically to a library any time she had the chance. Now, she is a doctor. She also has a photographic memory and can "re-read" pages she has scanned. People might perceive her as "high IQ". However she has trouble reading people, and cannot pick up more than the basics of computers, as she gets frustrated and bored easily. You could say she's a bad multitasker.
If an IQ test was based on mechanical cognition, she wouldn't rate very high. If it was memory-based, she would excel. If it was dependent on multi-tasking, she would also struggle.
Briefly, I'm the opposite. Multi-task all the time, rarely bored, but my visual memory sucks. I'm good at judging people's moods, but terrible with faces and names. I grew up slightly hypervigilant, and for some reason need to swap tasks to keep my brain ticking over, like those old watches you had to shake to wind up. I'm good at remembering practical and mechanical skills, of which I class programming as one. Which is funny, others I've spoken to class programming as technical, or mathematical. To me, it's mechanical, like a watch.
If I sat an IQ test which required visual memory, I'd fail. If it relied on drawing meaning from literature, or reading body language I'd do well. If it required multi-tasking (like the classic male-secretary-in-busy-office experiment) I'd breeze.
My point is, learned behaviours can sometimes be extreme, leading to some amazing skillsets while impairing other skillsets. So what does a measure of multi-tasking ability or IQ really mean, in terms of gauging "intelligence"? Nothing, in my opinion.
To me, intelligence, simply means we function well in our environment. As modern humans, we tend to pick our environments so that our learned skills are most applicable. That's "comfort zone". Sometimes dysfunctional, but always dependent on the skills you have learned therefore, ideally, the place where you are most "intelligent".
I could have continued playing official WoW after the 2-week free trial, but then I heard about "Funservers". They are free WoW servers set up in more or less the same way as the official game. Lots of quest content is incomplete or buggy, but the idea is simply to muck about, starting from scratch and levelling up a lot quicker than usual. More gold, more drops, more cool weapons & armour available. Level 70 in a couple of hours, and enough people around to chat to and do raids with.
Sure, cheating "ruined the game" for me, but I THANK them for ruining the game for me. They ruined any inclination I had to pay a monthly fee for a computer game designed to keep me sucked in for months. Thanks to funservers, I had fun for many hours, checked out the hi-level parts of the game and finally got tired of it. The way you're SUPPOSED to.
If I wanted to integrate a computer game into my lifestyle, it would need to provide at least the level of endorphins I get from cycling to the shops.
Playing official WoW would have been a waste of time and money. The bad, cheating funservers turned it back into a GAME. I salute them.
What they don't take into account are the complexities of systems. People hate thinking about complicated stuff. Hence the success of what we call "marketing" - a process of dumbing-down issues for popular consumption.
One problem that pops to mind - let's say a brand of GM corn can reproduce, and it's more successful in the wild than natural corn. Let's say in a couple of years (assuming the GM company doesn't sue into the ground anyone found with "their" corn in their field without a contract) natural corn is overrun by the GM corn.
Great, who cares, it grows better, we're making more corn than ever before. Suddenly a "bug in the code" appears. The GM corn isn't immune to a newly imported insect which quickly devastates entire corn fields. We can't stop it. All our crops for the year are decimated. No problem, there are stockpiles for now.
But - there is on ONE species of corn in production now. Just one, because of the "perceived benefits". And now it all has the same problem. That's one big problem.
It helps to think these things through before just saying, "GM is good because it will be.. uh.. better at stuff."
Given the history of unethical business practices, which have led to much inequity and suffering, your sensitive blogging hippy generation are the voice of protest against corporate greed. You can't discount concerned citizenry by ignoring the nasty things we all see happening when corporate greed makes decisions about technology.
Or, would you rather de-regulate everything and let market forces alone control our health, food and education? It's not doing that great controlling the economy of the world at the moment, is it? The sub-prime mortgage crisis is a case in point of greed governing sense.
How comfortable would you feel if the same commercial collapse was happening right now to food production? What people are afraid of is purely commercial interests taking control of the technology, not the technology per se.
People have had to fight corporate greed over simple things like "saving seed", the right to drink rainwater, the loss of groundwater in villages just because Coke needs it in their local factories. Monsanto and the "terminator seed". Don't you see, it's that kind of insanity we need to worry about?
So it's not about GM as a technology - it's about what is going to be done with it, and what industry will turn it into. Nobody trusts corporations anymore, and rightly so.
People *are* worried about natural foods making them sick, as they are about GM foods. You seem to imply that since nature comes up with diseases, we shouldn't be "irrationally fearful" about science accidentally doing the same.
That makes not the slightest bit of sense.
In addition, the starving and malnourished peoples of the world do not have to be so. The problem is inequity of food distribution, not our capacity to make it. How do you think the world's population got to 6.6 billion, by starving to death? We can feed ourselves, but the ravishes of war and unethical behaviour cause most of our health and food problems.
See, this is why the public are so mistrustful of science. First they say the universe is an amazing, beautiful place, then they proceed to explain why it's going to destroy life as we know it.
It strikes me as incredibly strange that Vista (and Office 07?) have backward compatibility problems. Isn't this the first rule writing software, that changes don't disturb existing functionality? Or, more specifically, that version updates don't piss users off by making it harder to do their work than the previous version?
As a programmer myself, the Vista mess feels rather surreal! I mean, this is 2008, we've all learned from our mistakes now, surely? How could a company like MS make such simple business blunders?
The only possibility I see is that this was a traditional MS "upgrade strategy" gone terribly wrong. If so, it was the worst idea, considering all the competition emerging now. Such is the result of "old thinking" I guess.
They should have made it a "no brainer" for gods sake. All product updates should be no-brainers.
It's interesting times, when hacking technology is a game for kids too young to really know what consequences and social responsibility is about. Not their fault, it's just brain development.
When I was 12, a mate and I were fires in laneways behind houses and running away. This is in Australia, you'd think we'd be more fire-conscious. But it wasn't because we wanted to hurt anyone or burn anything down. We knew it was "naughty" (hence running away afterwards) but that doesn't translate into "wrong". Naughty = thrill FTW. Luckily nothing happened.
Never committed an actual crime in my life, highest respect for property and people. Kids are just kids, but the tech makes em more dangerous buggers nowadays. Lighting fires in laneways less deadly than derailing a train.
According to this article, Paramount received $150M to go with HDDVD:
"Paramount and DreamWorks Animation together will receive about $150 million in financial incentives for their commitment to HD DVD, according to two Viacom executives with knowledge of the deal but who asked not to be identified."
And try to keep up with the times,/. Don't you know: "Zango Advisory: As of this posting, the Zango security team has observed that the Secret Crush widget on Facebook is now called the "My Admirer" widget."
If we're talking about publicly-ranked search results, the results may expose more than we're comfortable with.
Wikipedia content is either right or wrong. It's not meant to be subjective, hence it can be patrolled and corrected. Now they want to apply it to subjective content; I don't see that making sense, albeit at first glance. User A is a technocrat who loves Monty Python. Hardly an isolated case. Use B is a 15yr old who likes whatever he/she likes this week. There's no "patrolling" this, except to address systematic abuse.
The concept is fine for slashdot, or any "closed" system, where the users generally share a common set of expectations. At/., I find all +5 content to be generally insightful, interesting, funny, etc. At least it seems so to me. Either I'm new here, or we've all seen Life of Brian. Whether that's utopia or not is another question altogether.
Expand this out to the general internet user, and the result will, of course, reflect the general focus of human society. That will be interesting, to say the least, though I'll bet $5 that anything entertainment- and religion-based will always be at the top of the results. Is that what people want? Ipso facto perhaps, but sure as hell not I.
Let's keep in mind that (no offence to anyone specific) ~80% of Americans believe in God, less than 50% subscribe to Darwin, ~30% believe in "UFOs, witches and astrology" (if you can believe this poll that is). Of course, smart people believe weird things too.
Add to this, that 81% of those who have seen two or more "Police Academy" movies believe that O.J. is innocent, and you have a recipe for disaster.
It has been theorised that how people treat animals is indicative of how they might treat other people. A young person who tortures a cat, for instance, is seen to have something wrong with him.
It would be interesting to see how long before these ideas begin to apply to computer simulations - as "games" are becoming more and more like simulations, especially in the war/FPS genre.
Call me over-sensitive, but I personally feel a wee bit disturbed playing a game like Crysis where human faces are so realistic. The more photo-quality the faces are, the less likely I am to play the game. It just feels icky.
Crysis is especially problematic, as I didn't like the whole "gook" mentality. I'm causasian btw. I found it embarassing and wondered two things: a) how Asians in general would react to it, and b) if it was politically inspired (with regards to North Korea specifically). It was a bit over the top.
Surely it would take less money, time and effort to equip long haul aircraft with twin pilot seats and a place to sleep. One flies, the other sleeps. Truckers do this already.
I'm sure they have other applications in mind, for which there'd be more sensible solutions as well.
Any IT person with half an ounce of paranoia has suspected this for years.
I usually just try to browse the URL (URL-search off of course). If the domain isn't found, I try to register it. I haven't used whois to search for a new domain for a decade.
This is my take.. The introduction of iPods and the idea that music is a kind of go-anywhere ultra-convenient entertainment item, is very different to how it used to be.
Pre-MP3, music you loved was a collectable item; mostly dominated by a handful of bands that were standard-bearers of your particular taste and culture. So of course you'd buy the latest U2 EP or Best of Sade, whatever. Remixes died in the 90's, but before that you'd also buy an EP full of remixes on ONE SONG. That would be insane now. But then it was at least something new and different.
So the culture has changed, and it's the music industry's own fault for homogenising music. There's little now that's new and different, so why buy an album that sounds just like 20 other albums from other artists? You really just want one track because the other suck, and you've no particular loyalty to the artist anyway.
However, if they came out with a Digitally Somehow Special version of Human League's "Dare", I'd buy that in a shot. But why, since I already have the vinyl and the CD? Because it's special! Hence the high sales of the Eagles' album as well.
The industry has failed to keep music special, by saturating it with similarly insipid, production-line pop songs and Idol winners. At the same time, iPods and MP3's introduced the power of the playlist over the album. (While that's a bit sad for albums, it was inevitable in the digital age.)
Combine all this and you get a de-valuing of music in the public's mind. There are still many bands out there of the calibre of REM in the pop world, but as the industry has tried to expand and push crap on us, they induced ambivalence in the market. Non-pop genres are probably still doing ok.
So to me it's no surprise people are reluctant to fork out a still-overpriced $30 for an album any more. Even in the previous decades it still took some time to gain reputation as a good artist, now they expect a new band to hit the top in 6 months because there's no much hype and marketing behind the release, instead of letting the music find its own level.
So IMO it's their fault there's an excess of pirating instead of it being a more fringe activity and looked down upon by people who support artists and good music. i.e. The culture is the important thing, not the product.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be the minimum or recommended spec for Vista?
IANAVU so I'm wondering if, after all this hoo-ha about Vista being more secure, does it _still_ have Autorun enabled on drives by default? It's one thing to add a security feature of debatable effect (UAC) but quite another to leave a gaping hole that everyone's been complaining about for years.
Not sure why you copped so much flak for what you wrote, but I think - especially for your age - you have the right idea. Most people don't think about the rich/poor divide and ways in which society can be improved for everyone. The implementation of these Mosquito things is evidence that people a lot older than us, and in much more responsible positions, can think only of short-term solutions, as a by-product of winning favour in their constituency. We need inspiration and long-term solutions - something Democracy as we know it is not that well geared up to provide. Things will improve slowly, we hope, over time. It always feels like 1.5 steps forward, one step back.
Then why does Amazon try to patent the one-click checkout? If a site in Germany can just do the same thing regardless, where's the reason for them to patent? There must be some benefit surely?
In a time when companies are trying to patent a mouse click, I wonder at why MS never patented the Task Bar. That is, "an interactive strip, positioned on the desktop, displaying running programs and facilitating control over program windows" or something like that.
Sounds like something that could have been be patented, since (I assume) MS first came up with it, for Windows 95.
In my personal experience of meeting various interesting people, I feel that learned behaviours have a lot to do with how one's mental skills are shaped, and hence how the person is perceived by others.
One friend of mine had a very bad childhood. She learned to escape inwardly, by concentrating on books, study, escaping physically to a library any time she had the chance. Now, she is a doctor. She also has a photographic memory and can "re-read" pages she has scanned. People might perceive her as "high IQ". However she has trouble reading people, and cannot pick up more than the basics of computers, as she gets frustrated and bored easily. You could say she's a bad multitasker.
If an IQ test was based on mechanical cognition, she wouldn't rate very high. If it was memory-based, she would excel. If it was dependent on multi-tasking, she would also struggle.
Briefly, I'm the opposite. Multi-task all the time, rarely bored, but my visual memory sucks. I'm good at judging people's moods, but terrible with faces and names. I grew up slightly hypervigilant, and for some reason need to swap tasks to keep my brain ticking over, like those old watches you had to shake to wind up. I'm good at remembering practical and mechanical skills, of which I class programming as one. Which is funny, others I've spoken to class programming as technical, or mathematical. To me, it's mechanical, like a watch.
If I sat an IQ test which required visual memory, I'd fail. If it relied on drawing meaning from literature, or reading body language I'd do well. If it required multi-tasking (like the classic male-secretary-in-busy-office experiment) I'd breeze.
My point is, learned behaviours can sometimes be extreme, leading to some amazing skillsets while impairing other skillsets. So what does a measure of multi-tasking ability or IQ really mean, in terms of gauging "intelligence"? Nothing, in my opinion.
To me, intelligence, simply means we function well in our environment. As modern humans, we tend to pick our environments so that our learned skills are most applicable. That's "comfort zone". Sometimes dysfunctional, but always dependent on the skills you have learned therefore, ideally, the place where you are most "intelligent".
On one hand, scientists say the world is overpopulated, and on the other they do this.
Whatever brings in the grant money I guess.
I could have continued playing official WoW after the 2-week free trial, but then I heard about "Funservers". They are free WoW servers set up in more or less the same way as the official game. Lots of quest content is incomplete or buggy, but the idea is simply to muck about, starting from scratch and levelling up a lot quicker than usual. More gold, more drops, more cool weapons & armour available. Level 70 in a couple of hours, and enough people around to chat to and do raids with.
Sure, cheating "ruined the game" for me, but I THANK them for ruining the game for me. They ruined any inclination I had to pay a monthly fee for a computer game designed to keep me sucked in for months. Thanks to funservers, I had fun for many hours, checked out the hi-level parts of the game and finally got tired of it. The way you're SUPPOSED to.
If I wanted to integrate a computer game into my lifestyle, it would need to provide at least the level of endorphins I get from cycling to the shops.
Playing official WoW would have been a waste of time and money. The bad, cheating funservers turned it back into a GAME. I salute them.
I often wonder how designing AI to reason like a human will make the world a better place.
A cow, cloned from an adult cow, doesn't arrive as a fully grown adult cow.
Just FYI.
These are the simple opinions of many people.
What they don't take into account are the complexities of systems. People hate thinking about complicated stuff. Hence the success of what we call "marketing" - a process of dumbing-down issues for popular consumption.
One problem that pops to mind - let's say a brand of GM corn can reproduce, and it's more successful in the wild than natural corn. Let's say in a couple of years (assuming the GM company doesn't sue into the ground anyone found with "their" corn in their field without a contract) natural corn is overrun by the GM corn.
Great, who cares, it grows better, we're making more corn than ever before. Suddenly a "bug in the code" appears. The GM corn isn't immune to a newly imported insect which quickly devastates entire corn fields. We can't stop it. All our crops for the year are decimated. No problem, there are stockpiles for now.
But - there is on ONE species of corn in production now. Just one, because of the "perceived benefits". And now it all has the same problem. That's one big problem.
It helps to think these things through before just saying, "GM is good because it will be.. uh.. better at stuff."
I would add a caveat to that last statement.
Given the history of unethical business practices, which have led to much inequity and suffering, your sensitive blogging hippy generation are the voice of protest against corporate greed. You can't discount concerned citizenry by ignoring the nasty things we all see happening when corporate greed makes decisions about technology.
Or, would you rather de-regulate everything and let market forces alone control our health, food and education? It's not doing that great controlling the economy of the world at the moment, is it? The sub-prime mortgage crisis is a case in point of greed governing sense.
How comfortable would you feel if the same commercial collapse was happening right now to food production? What people are afraid of is purely commercial interests taking control of the technology, not the technology per se.
People have had to fight corporate greed over simple things like "saving seed", the right to drink rainwater, the loss of groundwater in villages just because Coke needs it in their local factories. Monsanto and the "terminator seed". Don't you see, it's that kind of insanity we need to worry about?
So it's not about GM as a technology - it's about what is going to be done with it, and what industry will turn it into. Nobody trusts corporations anymore, and rightly so.
Your argument itself is completely irrational.
People *are* worried about natural foods making them sick, as they are about GM foods. You seem to imply that since nature comes up with diseases, we shouldn't be "irrationally fearful" about science accidentally doing the same.
That makes not the slightest bit of sense.
In addition, the starving and malnourished peoples of the world do not have to be so. The problem is inequity of food distribution, not our capacity to make it. How do you think the world's population got to 6.6 billion, by starving to death? We can feed ourselves, but the ravishes of war and unethical behaviour cause most of our health and food problems.
See, this is why the public are so mistrustful of science. First they say the universe is an amazing, beautiful place, then they proceed to explain why it's going to destroy life as we know it.
It strikes me as incredibly strange that Vista (and Office 07?) have backward compatibility problems. Isn't this the first rule writing software, that changes don't disturb existing functionality? Or, more specifically, that version updates don't piss users off by making it harder to do their work than the previous version?
As a programmer myself, the Vista mess feels rather surreal! I mean, this is 2008, we've all learned from our mistakes now, surely? How could a company like MS make such simple business blunders?
The only possibility I see is that this was a traditional MS "upgrade strategy" gone terribly wrong. If so, it was the worst idea, considering all the competition emerging now. Such is the result of "old thinking" I guess.
They should have made it a "no brainer" for gods sake. All product updates should be no-brainers.
One bowl of polenta each morning powers my bicycle all the way to work.
It's interesting times, when hacking technology is a game for kids too young to really know what consequences and social responsibility is about. Not their fault, it's just brain development.
When I was 12, a mate and I were fires in laneways behind houses and running away. This is in Australia, you'd think we'd be more fire-conscious. But it wasn't because we wanted to hurt anyone or burn anything down. We knew it was "naughty" (hence running away afterwards) but that doesn't translate into "wrong". Naughty = thrill FTW. Luckily nothing happened.
Never committed an actual crime in my life, highest respect for property and people. Kids are just kids, but the tech makes em more dangerous buggers nowadays. Lighting fires in laneways less deadly than derailing a train.
According to this article, Paramount received $150M to go with HDDVD:
"Paramount and DreamWorks Animation together will receive about $150 million in financial incentives for their commitment to HD DVD, according to two Viacom executives with knowledge of the deal but who asked not to be identified."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/technology/21disney.html
So sounds like it was simply a contract and bound to end eventually. No big news then?
I'm afraid this is all rumour and innuendo according to Zango:
/. Don't you know: "Zango Advisory: As of this posting, the Zango security team has observed that the Secret Crush widget on Facebook is now called the "My Admirer" widget."
http://blog.zango.com/PermaLink,guid,94c0e12c-c69e-484f-81b8-b8b58953d71b.aspx
(summary: users are clearly told they are downloading something, so what's the problem?)
And try to keep up with the times,
Well said.
If we're talking about publicly-ranked search results, the results may expose more than we're comfortable with.
/., I find all +5 content to be generally insightful, interesting, funny, etc. At least it seems so to me. Either I'm new here, or we've all seen Life of Brian. Whether that's utopia or not is another question altogether.
Wikipedia content is either right or wrong. It's not meant to be subjective, hence it can be patrolled and corrected. Now they want to apply it to subjective content; I don't see that making sense, albeit at first glance. User A is a technocrat who loves Monty Python. Hardly an isolated case. Use B is a 15yr old who likes whatever he/she likes this week. There's no "patrolling" this, except to address systematic abuse.
The concept is fine for slashdot, or any "closed" system, where the users generally share a common set of expectations. At
Expand this out to the general internet user, and the result will, of course, reflect the general focus of human society. That will be interesting, to say the least, though I'll bet $5 that anything entertainment- and religion-based will always be at the top of the results. Is that what people want? Ipso facto perhaps, but sure as hell not I.
Let's keep in mind that (no offence to anyone specific) ~80% of Americans believe in God, less than 50% subscribe to Darwin, ~30% believe in "UFOs, witches and astrology" (if you can believe this poll that is). Of course, smart people believe weird things too.
Add to this, that 81% of those who have seen two or more "Police Academy" movies believe that O.J. is innocent, and you have a recipe for disaster.
It has been theorised that how people treat animals is indicative of how they might treat other people. A young person who tortures a cat, for instance, is seen to have something wrong with him.
It would be interesting to see how long before these ideas begin to apply to computer simulations - as "games" are becoming more and more like simulations, especially in the war/FPS genre.
Call me over-sensitive, but I personally feel a wee bit disturbed playing a game like Crysis where human faces are so realistic. The more photo-quality the faces are, the less likely I am to play the game. It just feels icky.
Crysis is especially problematic, as I didn't like the whole "gook" mentality. I'm causasian btw. I found it embarassing and wondered two things: a) how Asians in general would react to it, and b) if it was politically inspired (with regards to North Korea specifically). It was a bit over the top.
Surely it would take less money, time and effort to equip long haul aircraft with twin pilot seats and a place to sleep. One flies, the other sleeps. Truckers do this already.
I'm sure they have other applications in mind, for which there'd be more sensible solutions as well.
Any IT person with half an ounce of paranoia has suspected this for years.
I usually just try to browse the URL (URL-search off of course). If the domain isn't found, I try to register it. I haven't used whois to search for a new domain for a decade.
This is my take.. The introduction of iPods and the idea that music is a kind of go-anywhere ultra-convenient entertainment item, is very different to how it used to be.
Pre-MP3, music you loved was a collectable item; mostly dominated by a handful of bands that were standard-bearers of your particular taste and culture. So of course you'd buy the latest U2 EP or Best of Sade, whatever. Remixes died in the 90's, but before that you'd also buy an EP full of remixes on ONE SONG. That would be insane now. But then it was at least something new and different.
So the culture has changed, and it's the music industry's own fault for homogenising music. There's little now that's new and different, so why buy an album that sounds just like 20 other albums from other artists? You really just want one track because the other suck, and you've no particular loyalty to the artist anyway.
However, if they came out with a Digitally Somehow Special version of Human League's "Dare", I'd buy that in a shot. But why, since I already have the vinyl and the CD? Because it's special! Hence the high sales of the Eagles' album as well.
The industry has failed to keep music special, by saturating it with similarly insipid, production-line pop songs and Idol winners. At the same time, iPods and MP3's introduced the power of the playlist over the album. (While that's a bit sad for albums, it was inevitable in the digital age.)
Combine all this and you get a de-valuing of music in the public's mind. There are still many bands out there of the calibre of REM in the pop world, but as the industry has tried to expand and push crap on us, they induced ambivalence in the market. Non-pop genres are probably still doing ok.
So to me it's no surprise people are reluctant to fork out a still-overpriced $30 for an album any more. Even in the previous decades it still took some time to gain reputation as a good artist, now they expect a new band to hit the top in 6 months because there's no much hype and marketing behind the release, instead of letting the music find its own level.
So IMO it's their fault there's an excess of pirating instead of it being a more fringe activity and looked down upon by people who support artists and good music. i.e. The culture is the important thing, not the product.