Windows 7 is such a terrible OS because it's essentially what Vista should have been, and:
The UI improvements (read: "eye candy") are apparently stolen from other operating systems, although who started what is a huge debate. 7's UI feels flat and sluggish, and in my opinion OS X and Beryl/Compiz still did it better.
The "easy to configure" bit is a ridiculous assertion, although I keep seeing it repeated all over the 'net. The vast majority of users think Microsoft just moved things around for the sake of moving things around. IT professionals may find that the new configuration systems require them to click a few less times per day, but that came at the expense of confusing everyone who had ever used Windows before.
Vista/7's security is a joke, and was a laughingstock from the very first time it spawned a window asking "Cancel or Allow?"
The security improvements are only an improvement when you consider that XP users run as "root" (Administrator) by default, requiring antivirus software to be purchased (and increasing the TCO). The reason people run at elevated privilege levels is because the software they want to run required it, in most cases.
UAC was such a hugely annoying beast in Vista, the improvements made to it in 7 were a welcome relief. Both Linux and OS X have better security models in practice. For instance, UAC is essentially gksudo, without the security of requiring an admin password, and with the added annoyance that it doesn't remember that you just clicked that "continue" button. In other words, it's not actually secure, and it's annoying as hell to the user (who eventually becomes trained to just click "Yes" to any prompt whatsoever).
The apparent security you're seeing right this moment (with not catching any viruses) is only a lull while the malware developers figure out where the holes are in this new version of what has historically been the least secure operating system in the industry, even before the internet. MS-DOS was so full of holes, it came with its own virus scanner that used a whitelist of "system" files and their signatures to detect changes... not that it could inform you unless you ran it, and if your system was infected, well... Let's leave this one with "I believe it's safe to say that Microsoft has been failing at securing their operating system for as long as they've had an operating system".
Live OneCare has been shut down, we can only assume because it either wasn't doing its job, or wasn't profitable (perhaps there's a correlation, there).
Windows 7 and Vista are failing to displace Windows XP, with twice as many XP machines on the internet as Windows Vista and Windows 7 combined.
In short, I'm sure your opinion pleases Microsoft, but reality seems to disagree with you.
I just blew away a bunch of mod points to say this, so pay attention.
They perform extraordinarily well, for a failure. Their profits are still twice as big as Apple's, for instance. Perhaps the media and the stock market simply are delusional.
Microsoft's profits are only twice as large as Apple's? How interesting, since Windows is dominating the desktop market, with eight times Apple's market share. It does, indeed, sound as if they are failing. They have a lot of capital to work with before it really impacts their bottom line, but by the time they start feeling the crunch, it will be too late (See: Overshoot).
Microsoft is already being downgraded by stock brokers, and downplayed across the board. They may be an industry giant, but they've made a lot of poor decisions recently. Nearly all of their current products are flawed, with many of them seriously crippled or broken in comparison to competitors' products. They're bleeding market share out of every pore, and even their new OS is failing to pick up the slack, despite how easy it is to be "better than Vista".
In my opinion, Microsoft is going to die unless they do something differently; Unfortunately, they have shown no indication that they are even aware of the issue, much less attempting to do anything about it. "Business as usual" is going to do the same thing to Microsoft, Blizzard, and Sony that it has done to the RIAA and the MPAA; people will begin to treat them as if they are irrelevant, they will respond by increasing the litigation rate, and then there will come a turning point where they truly are irrelevant, and everyone is ignoring them (How many file-sharing suits have you read about recently? They seem to be tapering off a bit, perhaps in response to the Streisand Effect). Are torrents still going strong? How about those ISPs that cut off their customers in response to C&D letters, how are they doing? Didn't they lose customers in droves, overnight, and decide that was a bad idea?
Customers can only be pushed so far (at least, all in one shove), and patents are just one more issue where the more strongly they're enforced, the less people pay attention to them, and the more people deliberately act against them. Copyright litigation has actually already stoked this fire, and the pendulum is already very close to swinging the other direction.
Corporations are growing more powerful every day - I will not be surprised when they are hands-down more of a "governing body" than the governments (that day is coming, more quickly than most people realise; Google got away with spitting in China's eye, the biggest companies are becoming less concerned with obeying the law than with protecting profits... Governments need to chop the legs out from under these unaccountable organisations before it's too late; if it's not already. To be honest, many of the largest corporations have more money than many of the smaller countries, and we all know the Golden Rule (He who has the gold makes the rules).
-- If you feel there's a flaw in my reasoning, please respond instead of modding me down; put your own karma on the line and explain why you feel that way.
... and if you happen to be at a LAN party where the internet is spotty? Case in point: actual LAN party, at a KOA campground's reception hall, nearly 120 people... and the guy with the cablemodem didn't show up on time. No internet for several hours.
How about a hotel room with crappy wifi that only works 10% of the time, if at all?
Broadband internet is common in the urban setting, sure, but try smaller towns. There are places that don't have *phone service*, much less broadband, and I'm not talking about some third-world country... I'm talking about places in the US.
My "scenarios" are based on actual events, with actual people and actual places. I'm glad you have always-on internet no matter where you are, that's awesome - unfortunately, it's not the case for all of us.
Do you have kids? Can you not imagine a scenario where you hand your child a laptop and a Starcraft disk, plug them into the cigarette-lighter-adaptor power inverter, and enjoy a few miles of silence (thank god for headphones) on the way to grandma's house? With internet access required to install the game, this isn't an option.
The same goes for a long bus trip, or plane ride, or train ride (although trains are starting to provide free wifi).
My point is simply that the product is rendered unusable without piracy if internet access is not ubiquitously available.
He should not dragged the Apple Java issue in here. He should have directed that to Apple. With $50B+ in bank, it is not like Apple could not afford to keep a few Engineers working on the Mac JVM port and it's not as if Oracle must provide JVMs for all platforms - plenty other vendors provide JVMs for their platforms.
Yeah, like Microsoft... wait, they got sued for doing that (admittedly MSFT were playing hardball, and struck out).
Maybe I'll try to support the other end of your argument, and point out that Apple is only 10% of the market... wait, no, because they used to be more like 2%. Seems they're big enough now that Jobs figures he can pressure Sun(Oracle) into paying Apple, or at least providing their product for free, rather than paying Sun(Oracle) licensing fees for the privilege of writing up a port of Sun(Oracle)'s product.
If Oracle drops the ball, here, they may just be desperate enough to do it... on the other hand, with the JVM being deprecated on Macs, it's quite possible there will be a hardware shift to support software backends.
Are we to understand Sun only sold 6,000 of these storage appliances? 100PB = 100,000TB / 6,000 = 16.6TB per systems. Yeah, I guess they did. For small rackmount storage, that's not exactly burning up the marketplace.
Because kids can't afford a cell phone bill. Would you propose buying a phone and a plan for a single-digit-year-old child? Or are you of the opinion that any child old enough to be left alone deserves a phone on a parent's family plan?
At $10 a month added onto my family plan, sure, why not? If you can use the child as justification to add a $30/month land line to your house, I can easily justify $10/month for them to have a phone that will always be with them.
A 19" monitor doesn't work well for several people to sit around in the living room, and most people aren't geek enough to pull HDMI through the wall from the PC room to the living room. Appliances have a higher wife acceptance factor.
We have a 40" LCD TV in the living room, attached to a PC (along with a 5.1 surround sound speaker set I picked up on sale at wally world for around $45, if I recall correctly).
Besides, what do you do when you want to watch TV while your daughter is typing up her homework?
Well, since she's on her PC and I'm on the media center, I don't see a conflict.
CableCARD OCUR doesn't support any operating systems for general-purpose personal computers other than some editions of Windows
World of Warcraft doesn't have a Linux version, either... nor does Steam, Counterstrike, Call of Duty 4, the Sims 3... I suppose you're implying that software being written for the "wrong" operating system means it can't possibly run on a different OS? WineHQ appears to tell a different story...
Home Stereo - PC
True if you're listening in the PC room. But what about another member of the household listening to something else in the living room?
We each have our own PCs, headphones work just fine, so does the wifi. My living room has 5 PCs, not counting the 2 laptops; with only 3 people living in the house, there's no shortage of systems.
The stereo might run on the same computer as the navigation, but the engine runs on an independent computer systems [sic] for safety reasons. Therefore, a car counts as two devices, each with its own telemetry.
No, it doesn't. My friend replaced his factory radio without checking the vehicle's specs first, and it refused to start without it. Replacing the original factory radio resolved the issue. He ended up doing some major modifications to the car's dash in order to use the new head unit. Let's also completely ignore that a "gaming" PC would count as potentially 6+ "devices", if you insist on this point.
If I spend $60 on a game, I do not expect to be unable to play it, due to my internet being down, due to my 10-year-old boy downloading cheats, due to my machine having a virus, or for any other reason. I would expect, for $60 of my hard-earned cash, that it would "Just Work", and practically wouldn't even need installation - for that price, it should jump out of the box directly on to every computer in my house, as soon as I get it home.
If I spend $60 (which is the most I've ever seen a single game priced at, by the way) on a game, I expect it to get up in the morning and make me coffee, then spend 15 minutes begging me to get out of bed and get dressed so I'll go into the living room and play it.
I just spent a bunch of time unlocking achievements on Hard in single player, and if some jerkoff 14 year old kid goes and does the same thing, well then the cool little portraits I just worked to unlock just became uncool.
I didn't notice you saying anything about cheating in those statements... so how does it make it "uncool" if a teenager does the same thing you did?
On a side note, who the hell needs to cheat on SC2? I am not an RTS veteran by any stretch of the imagination, and I flew through the game on hard. My fiance, who only plays games like Zelda and Mario lost one mission on normal.
Get your story straight - either the achievements are difficult enough to achieve that they're worthwhile, or they're easy enough that they're not worth bothering with.
So basically, in SC2 (and get used to it in the future!), it is always multiplayer
... with no option to not connect to the internet when I play. Yeah, sounds like tons of fun. What do I do if I'm 30 miles from the nearest cell tower or phone line, nevermind internet connection? I've got my laptop, and a power inverter in the RV... why can't I play my game? Oh, right, because the corporation thinks we're all pirates.
Let me point something out to you, here: The pirates are playing the cracked version, online, right this moment, with no issues whatsoever, while I can't play my legitimately purchased game because of the DRM - my game won't start without phoning home, and I don't have internet access at <insert location here>. What part of this sounds like I'm not getting the short end of the stick for actually forking over my hard-earned cash?
Let me say it again, in case you missed it the first time: DRM only inconveniences legitimate customers; the pirates crack it and away they go.
It's enough to make me want to download the cracked version, and leave my purchased copy in the shrinkwrap on the shelf, as a lawsuit deterrent.
It's certainly enough for me to understand why people are reluctant to pay for the game in the first place... The legitimate product may decide not to function, due to circumstances outside your control... If nothing else, the pirated version "Just Works".
It doesn't sound like you've bought a blizzard game in the past couple of years - or used bnet.
Hmm... this battlenet? The one that people seem to hate? The one that used to be synonymous with "easy way to find games where everyone cheats" and "easy way to find games with 10-year-olds who have nothing better to do than type profanities"? The one that returned 448,000 entries in a 0.17 second google query for "battlenet issues"?
Yeah, I thought that was the one you were talking about. Why would I ever bother looking at that broken system again, after the experiences I had with it a decade ago? If it weren't for WoW requiring battle.net accounts, I'd have never even returned to the website, much less used the service. I very nearly quit WoW instead of bowing to their demand that I use what I consider to be a horrible service. I have since quit WoW because I'm tired of Blizzard's player-hating crap.
They build things into the EULA that you have to accept in order to play the game... things like "we reserve the right to stop you from using the product we sold you, despite the fact that we won't actually say the product actually does anything". Don't believe me? Read the warranty, where it says that the product is not actually warranted to do anything at all, or be fit for any particular purpose. The quick translation of that legalese is that they are selling you a product that may not actually do anything, and the EULA is demanding that you allow them the privilege of removing your ability to use it in the case that it actually does do something.
Screw you. You sold me a thing, then told me it may or may not do anything, and isn't fit for any particular purpose. I'm going to do whatever I damn well please with it, and just you try and stop me. I may not have the ability to do what I please on your servers, but if I'm not on your servers, who are you to judge my use of your product? After all, if it isn't suitable for any particular purpose, then how can you judge whether my use is invalid?
It's not a joke, you just missed my point. By a mile.
(my old SC license validated just fine recently on the new bnet)
Sure, sure... but if you have the physical disks, with the original case (for the cd-key), then you have an install method that doesn't require access to the internet. This is tons of fun when you're, for instance, in a hotel room where the wifi service works maybe 10% of the time, or out camping in the middle of nowhere and it starts raining.
If you have two disks, you and a friend can play together, with nothing more than a crossover cable between your 10-year-old laptops, or using wifi ad hoc on newer systems. No internet, no download, no activation, no bullshit.
Just so we all understand what's going on here: you're taking offence to my saying
Show me you have no qualms about removing my ability to use the product I actually paid for, and you push me one step closer to the pirates - after all, I *paid* for the product - it's mine. If I can't play the game I paid for, then I'm much more likely to steal the next one.
Seriously? So you think it's ok for them to steal from us, but not the other way around?
When we purchase a piece of software, we are purchasing a product, just as if we were to go the hardware store and purchase a hammer.
If my car's manufacturer came to my house and took my paid for car because I got a parking ticket, they'd better be sneaky and fast, or I'd shoot them dead in my driveway.
How is this any different from my software's manufacturer taking away my ability to use my paid for software, because they don't like how I'm using it? The warranty in the box says it's not fit for any particular use or purpose, who are they to judge my use of the product?
You can't plug HDMI into a standard-definition television. That's one of the advantages of consoles over PCs for cash-strapped gamers: you get SDTV output as a standard feature.
Have you seen any "standard-definition televisions" in BestBuy lately?
Have you seen any recent (in the last year or so) display device that didn't accept HDMI as an input?
And I'm still waiting for Google to grow a clue and let HTC and other manufacturers put the Google apps on a cheaper version without a cellular radio, so that I don't need to pay $1679.76 over the course of a 24-month service commitment. That's how much Sprint.com just quoted me for the cheapest service plan that works with the EVO 4G.
By "distinct", I meant in a sense that application can tell from which device a keypress, click, or movement event came. For example, in a shooting range game, did player 1 click her primary mouse button to fire her weapon, or did player 2 click his? DirectInput on Windows combines all connected keyboards' keypresses into one virtual keyboard device and all connected mice's movements and button presses into one virtual mouse device.
On linux, however, you can get distinct inputs from distinct input devices; else things like multi-head wouldn't work.
PC, cell phone, home phone, TV, DVD player or game console, cable box, home stereo, car stereo, car engine, refrigerator, microwave oven, coffee maker, home lighting, home climate control, home security, now how many gadgets am I up to?
PC - PC Cell Phone - Cell Phone Phone - Cell Phone TV - PC DVD Player - PC Game Console - PC Cable Box - PC Home Stereo - PC Car Stereo - Car Car Engine - Car Refrigerator - Refrigerator Microwave Oven - Microwave Oven Coffee Maker - Coffee Maker Home Lighting - SmartHome Climate Control - SmartHome Security - Smarthome
7.
General-purpose computing devices (PCs) are able to do most of those things, and with linux and free (beer or speech) software available, can and are doing so. If everyone in your house has a cell phone, why does your house need its own line?
As for the car... well, it already has a computer in it, and there are current production models that have mp3 players and cellphones built-in; not to mention the seat-back and ceiling-mounted DVD players... you can practically consider a car (or at least minivan) to be a mobile home, at this point.
None of my kitchen appliances are internet-connected at the moment, and to be honest, I don't care. If they're going to be on any network, I'd just as soon tie them into a PC running linux, thus creating an easy method of controlling them all from one location... Imagine having to tell your refrigerator that you bought milk, using a tiny keypad on the front of it... no thanks. The coffeemaker's tiny keypad is usable for setting the coffee to start brewing before I'm conscious enough to be able to fumble through the process, but I do that when I'm awake. Add a water source and a grounds hopper to the thing, maybe an ethernet port, and voila, you have... a fancy coffee maker. Might be faster, easier, or more economical, but what it all boils down to is that it makes coffee. I don't need to access it from outside the house 99% of the time, and if I'm already outside the house, there's plenty of other places to get a cup o' joe. The microwave already has a keypad, but it doesn't make sense to connect it to a network unless and until the refrigerator has a method of putting food from itself into the little box for making hot. At that point, we can just have the same robot push the buttons on the microwave, and it *still* doesn't need internet connectivity.
A "Smarthome" really boils down to having Cat5 jacks in every room, and having multiple electronic devices plugged into the network, controlled from a single location (or via remote). Again, I'm thinking PC server and smartphone as remote, here. These things already exist.
The point of the memo is that more and more of these devices will become Internet-connected.
Most of those devices already are. Yes, they may become more integrated, but you're going out on a limb and hacking at the trunk below you if you're trying to tell us that this is some kind of breaking news... or even important.
Unless you have more money than you know what to do with, I'm willing to bet it's going to be at least a decade before anything on that list other than the "entertainment" devices (which a includes the car and cell phone, of course) is internet connected in your home, or anyone else's.
Android and iPhone are counterparts to the DS/PSP/DSi/3DS, not a set-top multiplayer gaming device like 360/PS3/Wii that just needs extra gamepads.
Why not?
I'm still waiting for someone to grow a clue and make the EVO 4G into a truly awe-inspiring presentation device/mini-computer. It has Bluetooth, WiFi, and an HDMI port. Why aren't we plugging it into a TV, using a wireless keyboard and mouse (or gamepads, for that matter), and using it as a full-blown computer that happens to fit in my pocket and make phone calls?
Didn't any of you other geeks out there play Shadowrun and Cyberpunk?
How should we as geeks try to convince the public that consoles' restrictions aren't worth the loss of an end user's right to do what he wants with what he owns?
Perhaps by mentioning the current Sony and Blizzard fiascos resulting from draconian DRM and ridiculous corporate policies?
Or maybe mentioning that one can still install and play StarCraft1 (with or without BroodWar) without any internet connection whatsoever, no activation required, LAN play is available... and if you cheat, you don't get banned from using your own ridiculously expensive purchased product.
Oh, and the same holds true for Diablo and Diablo II.
If I pay $60 for a game, I damn well better own it. If you want to rent it out to me, then I'm not paying more than $10. Blizzard has crossed the line, and has lost me (and my family, and my friends) as customers. This is poor behavior on their part, and I refuse to reward it by opening my wallet to them.
I respect your decision. Personally, I bought a PS3 because I wanted a next-gen gaming console and there aren't very many choices.
For the money they were asking for the PS3, I bought another gaming PC. Plenty of options for low-cost or no-cost gaming, and when I need to do "serious" things, I don't have to switch "appliances".
If you purchased a gaming console because it suited your needs, that's fine. If you purchased it because of the additional features (for instance, a friend of mine bought one because he considers it to be a BLuRay player with bonus features), then that is fine.
My argument is against giving Sony money (essentially subsidizing their dirty tactics), not against playing games on the console of your choice.
As in, how badly will Blizzard treat its customer base with this game? We've already watched them destroy the Starcraft franchise with their heavy-handed tactics... Will the Diablo franchise get a similar treatment?
I, for one, will be waiting to see if D3 has LAN play, and whether or not cheating in the single player game gets you banned from playing single-player, and whether the price will be anywhere near reasonable. To be honest, with all the crap they pulled with SC2, I'm not willing to put out more than about US$20 for any product with the Blizzard name on it at this point. I'm sure not going to spend $60 (multiple times, no less) to support these shenanigans.
To be honest, I didn't even read this "article", because merely seeing Blizzard's name in the title pissed me off.
I'd like to point out that my wife and I will still whip out D2, make new toons, and go off to kill Andariel... it's still a fun way to waste a couple hours, even more than a decade since its release.
I'd like to point out that I have several copies of Starcraft, that I keep expressly for the purpose of playing at LAN parties. Owning multiple copies makes it easy to (without even patching!) get my ass kicked by my buddies (I suck at multiplayer, and mostly play single-player (campaign) mode, where I can figure out how to outsmart the AI, and then min-max for greater glory).
I'd like to point out that I can still lay my hands on my original Diablo disks, and still dust them off occasionally to run around smashing goblins and demons in a 6-hour dungeon crawling spree on a random Saturday. I own the Hellfire expansion, as well.
In 10 years, will we still be able to play SC2 or D3, or will the product lines have been EOL'd, with the activation servers offline? When I buy a game, I expect to be able to play it indefinitely. Being shut down due to the activation server for an "obsolete" product being offline is not something I'm willing to drop $50-$60 on. Want to "rent" me a game? Charge something that feels more like a rental fee. $10 sounds about right. Want to charge me to "purchase" a game? Make sure it will work without internet access, without any interaction from the corporate overseers. Show me you have no qualms about removing my ability to use the product I actually paid for, and you push me one step closer to the pirates - after all, I *paid* for the product - it's mine. If I can't play the game I paid for, then I'm much more likely to steal the next one.
I can understand WoW being pay-to-play - the game is online, after all, and a lot of the fun involved is simply the idea of getting together with a couple dozen of your best friends, and smashing down a dungeon. On the other hand, I'd love to be able to play without having to be online... a lot of the content is single-player PvE stuff, and even after 4 years, I haven't seen anywhere near all the content. I'm not saying I want to solo the whole thing, but having the option would be a nice touch. Where will all our max-level toons be, when Blizzard gets tired of hosting 15 million players?
The Dead Kennedys released a cassette with the second side left intentionally empty... probably due to the fact that there were a dozen songs, but they were each only 2 minutes or so in length. Quote: "Home taping is killing the music industry. This side left blank so you can help!"
Interesting... I would have thought that the massive virus/rootkit/audio CD thing would have killed them by now. Or their yanking the plug on advertised features of their products. Or suing their users for using their products in innovative ways.
Whatever. Sony, you can pretty much do what you want. Anyone who is still a customer of yours evidently enjoys the pain.
It's not just that they are hostile, it's that they just plain don't get it.
Yep, the same way they just "don't get" that removing the ability to play on a LAN breaks the game for many buyers. The same way they "don't get" that they are killing the potential longevity of this game with their draconian control measures. The same way they "don't get" their entire user base.
I have purchased several copies of damn near every game Blizzard has made for the last 2 decades. I haven't been on battle.net since the days of Diablo I. I (and the other 3 members of my family) used to be huge WoW players. I don't see any Blizzard games on the current (or near future) market that grab enough interest (now that I see what they did to StarCraft) to entice me to spend more than about $20 on anything they've got. $60 is ridiculous, especially since they're requiring me to go online to activate single-player mode, I can't just drop in at a LAN party and play, I can get banned (and locked out of single-player mode) for cheating in single-player... The list goes on. Blizzard, you really dropped the ball with this one.
If the problem is that your developers (or whoever is actually steering your company) "just don't get it", you better find someone who does... fast.
The kicker is that these decision makers are probably right. They are probably driving a quarter or two of unprecedented growth for the company.
... followed by an amazing swan-dive that will drag the entire company into the gutter. Good job looking at the short term, fellas!
-- "We'll show those pirates what for! We'll alienate our customer base, and bankrupt ourselves! Let's see them steal our intellectual property after that!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the AC, but I'll bite.
Windows 7 is such a terrible OS because it's essentially what Vista should have been, and:
In short, I'm sure your opinion pleases Microsoft, but reality seems to disagree with you.
True, but don't forget that Apple, Android, and even WebOS have a several-year head start on Microsoft in the mobile space.
Pardon me? Do you have even the slightest clue what you're talking about?
Windows has been in the mobile market since at least 2000, and arguably earlier than that (if you consider WinCE, which was the original core of Windows Mobile).
The earliest Android can claim to be in the market was 5 years later.
Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 at Macworld 2007, making it a late-comer to the party by any standards.
WebOS is practically brand new, with its first public version (1.0.2) being released in June of last year, although it could be argued that its predecessor, PalmOS, has been around the mobile device space for quite a while longer than that; the Visor had an expansion port that could accept a cellphone module in 1999.
In short, your assertion is ridiculously inaccurate.
This is not to say that MSFT is a 'dead' or 'dying' company.
CNN and Wall Street disagree: "Microsoft is a dying consumer brand".
I just blew away a bunch of mod points to say this, so pay attention.
They perform extraordinarily well, for a failure. Their profits are still twice as big as Apple's, for instance. Perhaps the media and the stock market simply are delusional.
Microsoft's profits are only twice as large as Apple's? How interesting, since Windows is dominating the desktop market, with eight times Apple's market share. It does, indeed, sound as if they are failing. They have a lot of capital to work with before it really impacts their bottom line, but by the time they start feeling the crunch, it will be too late (See: Overshoot).
Microsoft is already being downgraded by stock brokers, and downplayed across the board. They may be an industry giant, but they've made a lot of poor decisions recently. Nearly all of their current products are flawed, with many of them seriously crippled or broken in comparison to competitors' products. They're bleeding market share out of every pore, and even their new OS is failing to pick up the slack, despite how easy it is to be "better than Vista".
In my opinion, Microsoft is going to die unless they do something differently; Unfortunately, they have shown no indication that they are even aware of the issue, much less attempting to do anything about it. "Business as usual" is going to do the same thing to Microsoft, Blizzard, and Sony that it has done to the RIAA and the MPAA; people will begin to treat them as if they are irrelevant, they will respond by increasing the litigation rate, and then there will come a turning point where they truly are irrelevant, and everyone is ignoring them (How many file-sharing suits have you read about recently? They seem to be tapering off a bit, perhaps in response to the Streisand Effect). Are torrents still going strong?
How about those ISPs that cut off their customers in response to C&D letters, how are they doing? Didn't they lose customers in droves, overnight, and decide that was a bad idea?
Customers can only be pushed so far (at least, all in one shove), and patents are just one more issue where the more strongly they're enforced, the less people pay attention to them, and the more people deliberately act against them. Copyright litigation has actually already stoked this fire, and the pendulum is already very close to swinging the other direction.
Corporations are growing more powerful every day - I will not be surprised when they are hands-down more of a "governing body" than the governments (that day is coming, more quickly than most people realise; Google got away with spitting in China's eye, the biggest companies are becoming less concerned with obeying the law than with protecting profits... Governments need to chop the legs out from under these unaccountable organisations before it's too late; if it's not already. To be honest, many of the largest corporations have more money than many of the smaller countries, and we all know the Golden Rule (He who has the gold makes the rules).
--
If you feel there's a flaw in my reasoning, please respond instead of modding me down; put your own karma on the line and explain why you feel that way.
... and if you happen to be at a LAN party where the internet is spotty?
Case in point: actual LAN party, at a KOA campground's reception hall, nearly 120 people... and the guy with the cablemodem didn't show up on time. No internet for several hours.
How about a hotel room with crappy wifi that only works 10% of the time, if at all?
Broadband internet is common in the urban setting, sure, but try smaller towns. There are places that don't have *phone service*, much less broadband, and I'm not talking about some third-world country... I'm talking about places in the US.
My "scenarios" are based on actual events, with actual people and actual places. I'm glad you have always-on internet no matter where you are, that's awesome - unfortunately, it's not the case for all of us.
Do you have kids? Can you not imagine a scenario where you hand your child a laptop and a Starcraft disk, plug them into the cigarette-lighter-adaptor power inverter, and enjoy a few miles of silence (thank god for headphones) on the way to grandma's house? With internet access required to install the game, this isn't an option.
The same goes for a long bus trip, or plane ride, or train ride (although trains are starting to provide free wifi).
My point is simply that the product is rendered unusable without piracy if internet access is not ubiquitously available.
He should not dragged the Apple Java issue in here. He should have directed that to Apple. With $50B+ in bank, it is not like Apple could not afford to keep a few Engineers working on the Mac JVM port and it's not as if Oracle must provide JVMs for all platforms - plenty other vendors provide JVMs for their platforms.
Yeah, like Microsoft... wait, they got sued for doing that (admittedly MSFT were playing hardball, and struck out).
Maybe I'll try to support the other end of your argument, and point out that Apple is only 10% of the market... wait, no, because they used to be more like 2%. Seems they're big enough now that Jobs figures he can pressure Sun(Oracle) into paying Apple, or at least providing their product for free, rather than paying Sun(Oracle) licensing fees for the privilege of writing up a port of Sun(Oracle)'s product.
If Oracle drops the ball, here, they may just be desperate enough to do it... on the other hand, with the JVM being deprecated on Macs, it's quite possible there will be a hardware shift to support software backends.
Are we to understand Sun only sold 6,000 of these storage appliances? 100PB = 100,000TB / 6,000 = 16.6TB per systems. Yeah, I guess they did. For small rackmount storage, that's not exactly burning up the marketplace.
Ah, yes, but how much is the per unit cost?
Because kids can't afford a cell phone bill. Would you propose buying a phone and a plan for a single-digit-year-old child? Or are you of the opinion that any child old enough to be left alone deserves a phone on a parent's family plan?
At $10 a month added onto my family plan, sure, why not? If you can use the child as justification to add a $30/month land line to your house, I can easily justify $10/month for them to have a phone that will always be with them.
A 19" monitor doesn't work well for several people to sit around in the living room, and most people aren't geek enough to pull HDMI through the wall from the PC room to the living room. Appliances have a higher wife acceptance factor.
We have a 40" LCD TV in the living room, attached to a PC (along with a 5.1 surround sound speaker set I picked up on sale at wally world for around $45, if I recall correctly).
Besides, what do you do when you want to watch TV while your daughter is typing up her homework?
Well, since she's on her PC and I'm on the media center, I don't see a conflict.
CableCARD OCUR doesn't support any operating systems for general-purpose personal computers other than some editions of Windows
World of Warcraft doesn't have a Linux version, either... nor does Steam, Counterstrike, Call of Duty 4, the Sims 3... I suppose you're implying that software being written for the "wrong" operating system means it can't possibly run on a different OS? WineHQ appears to tell a different story...
Home Stereo - PC
True if you're listening in the PC room. But what about another member of the household listening to something else in the living room?
We each have our own PCs, headphones work just fine, so does the wifi. My living room has 5 PCs, not counting the 2 laptops; with only 3 people living in the house, there's no shortage of systems.
The stereo might run on the same computer as the navigation, but the engine runs on an independent computer systems [sic] for safety reasons.
Therefore, a car counts as two devices, each with its own telemetry.
No, it doesn't. My friend replaced his factory radio without checking the vehicle's specs first, and it refused to start without it. Replacing the original factory radio resolved the issue. He ended up doing some major modifications to the car's dash in order to use the new head unit.
Let's also completely ignore that a "gaming" PC would count as potentially 6+ "devices", if you insist on this point.
It's poor business and it smells a bit like someone else is pulling the strings.
Perhaps Steve Jobs is the puppeteer?
If I spend $60 on a game, I do not expect to be unable to play it, due to my internet being down, due to my 10-year-old boy downloading cheats, due to my machine having a virus, or for any other reason. I would expect, for $60 of my hard-earned cash, that it would "Just Work", and practically wouldn't even need installation - for that price, it should jump out of the box directly on to every computer in my house, as soon as I get it home.
If I spend $60 (which is the most I've ever seen a single game priced at, by the way) on a game, I expect it to get up in the morning and make me coffee, then spend 15 minutes begging me to get out of bed and get dressed so I'll go into the living room and play it.
I just spent a bunch of time unlocking achievements on Hard in single player, and if some jerkoff 14 year old kid goes and does the same thing, well then the cool little portraits I just worked to unlock just became uncool.
I didn't notice you saying anything about cheating in those statements... so how does it make it "uncool" if a teenager does the same thing you did?
On a side note, who the hell needs to cheat on SC2? I am not an RTS veteran by any stretch of the imagination, and I flew through the game on hard. My fiance, who only plays games like Zelda and Mario lost one mission on normal.
Get your story straight - either the achievements are difficult enough to achieve that they're worthwhile, or they're easy enough that they're not worth bothering with.
So basically, in SC2 (and get used to it in the future!), it is always multiplayer
... with no option to not connect to the internet when I play. Yeah, sounds like tons of fun. What do I do if I'm 30 miles from the nearest cell tower or phone line, nevermind internet connection? I've got my laptop, and a power inverter in the RV... why can't I play my game? Oh, right, because the corporation thinks we're all pirates.
Let me point something out to you, here:
The pirates are playing the cracked version, online, right this moment, with no issues whatsoever, while I can't play my legitimately purchased game because of the DRM - my game won't start without phoning home, and I don't have internet access at <insert location here>. What part of this sounds like I'm not getting the short end of the stick for actually forking over my hard-earned cash?
Let me say it again, in case you missed it the first time: DRM only inconveniences legitimate customers; the pirates crack it and away they go.
It's enough to make me want to download the cracked version, and leave my purchased copy in the shrinkwrap on the shelf, as a lawsuit deterrent.
It's certainly enough for me to understand why people are reluctant to pay for the game in the first place... The legitimate product may decide not to function, due to circumstances outside your control... If nothing else, the pirated version "Just Works".
It doesn't sound like you've bought a blizzard game in the past couple of years - or used bnet.
Hmm... this battlenet? The one that people seem to hate? The one that used to be synonymous with "easy way to find games where everyone cheats" and "easy way to find games with 10-year-olds who have nothing better to do than type profanities"? The one that returned 448,000 entries in a 0.17 second google query for "battlenet issues"?
Yeah, I thought that was the one you were talking about. Why would I ever bother looking at that broken system again, after the experiences I had with it a decade ago? If it weren't for WoW requiring battle.net accounts, I'd have never even returned to the website, much less used the service. I very nearly quit WoW instead of bowing to their demand that I use what I consider to be a horrible service. I have since quit WoW because I'm tired of Blizzard's player-hating crap.
They build things into the EULA that you have to accept in order to play the game... things like "we reserve the right to stop you from using the product we sold you, despite the fact that we won't actually say the product actually does anything". Don't believe me? Read the warranty, where it says that the product is not actually warranted to do anything at all, or be fit for any particular purpose. The quick translation of that legalese is that they are selling you a product that may not actually do anything, and the EULA is demanding that you allow them the privilege of removing your ability to use it in the case that it actually does do something.
Screw you. You sold me a thing, then told me it may or may not do anything, and isn't fit for any particular purpose. I'm going to do whatever I damn well please with it, and just you try and stop me. I may not have the ability to do what I please on your servers, but if I'm not on your servers, who are you to judge my use of your product? After all, if it isn't suitable for any particular purpose, then how can you judge whether my use is invalid?
It's not a joke, you just missed my point.
By a mile.
(my old SC license validated just fine recently on the new bnet)
Sure, sure... but if you have the physical disks, with the original case (for the cd-key), then you have an install method that doesn't require access to the internet. This is tons of fun when you're, for instance, in a hotel room where the wifi service works maybe 10% of the time, or out camping in the middle of nowhere and it starts raining.
If you have two disks, you and a friend can play together, with nothing more than a crossover cable between your 10-year-old laptops, or using wifi ad hoc on newer systems. No internet, no download, no activation, no bullshit.
Just so we all understand what's going on here: you're taking offence to my saying
Show me you have no qualms about removing my ability to use the product I actually paid for, and you push me one step closer to the pirates - after all, I *paid* for the product - it's mine. If I can't play the game I paid for, then I'm much more likely to steal the next one.
Seriously? So you think it's ok for them to steal from us, but not the other way around?
When we purchase a piece of software, we are purchasing a product, just as if we were to go the hardware store and purchase a hammer.
If my car's manufacturer came to my house and took my paid for car because I got a parking ticket, they'd better be sneaky and fast, or I'd shoot them dead in my driveway.
How is this any different from my software's manufacturer taking away my ability to use my paid for software, because they don't like how I'm using it? The warranty in the box says it's not fit for any particular use or purpose, who are they to judge my use of the product?
You can't plug HDMI into a standard-definition television. That's one of the advantages of consoles over PCs for cash-strapped gamers: you get SDTV output as a standard feature.
Have you seen any "standard-definition televisions" in BestBuy lately?
Have you seen any recent (in the last year or so) display device that didn't accept HDMI as an input?
Just checking...
And I'm still waiting for Google to grow a clue and let HTC and other manufacturers put the Google apps on a cheaper version without a cellular radio, so that I don't need to pay $1679.76 over the course of a 24-month service commitment. That's how much Sprint.com just quoted me for the cheapest service plan that works with the EVO 4G.
Have you considered buying the phone outright, with no contract? It looks like you can do that for less than a third of the price you quoted.
There are many options for getting service on it once you've purchased it, including no service at all... Perhaps skype over wifi?
By "distinct", I meant in a sense that application can tell from which device a keypress, click, or movement event came. For example, in a shooting range game, did player 1 click her primary mouse button to fire her weapon, or did player 2 click his? DirectInput on Windows combines all connected keyboards' keypresses into one virtual keyboard device and all connected mice's movements and button presses into one virtual mouse device.
On linux, however, you can get distinct inputs from distinct input devices; else things like multi-head wouldn't work.
Apple just deprecated Java. Sucks to be them.
PC, cell phone, home phone, TV, DVD player or game console, cable box, home stereo, car stereo, car engine, refrigerator, microwave oven, coffee maker, home lighting, home climate control, home security, now how many gadgets am I up to?
PC - PC
Cell Phone - Cell Phone
Phone - Cell Phone
TV - PC
DVD Player - PC
Game Console - PC
Cable Box - PC
Home Stereo - PC
Car Stereo - Car
Car Engine - Car
Refrigerator - Refrigerator
Microwave Oven - Microwave Oven
Coffee Maker - Coffee Maker
Home Lighting - SmartHome
Climate Control - SmartHome
Security - Smarthome
7.
General-purpose computing devices (PCs) are able to do most of those things, and with linux and free (beer or speech) software available, can and are doing so.
If everyone in your house has a cell phone, why does your house need its own line?
As for the car... well, it already has a computer in it, and there are current production models that have mp3 players and cellphones built-in; not to mention the seat-back and ceiling-mounted DVD players... you can practically consider a car (or at least minivan) to be a mobile home, at this point.
None of my kitchen appliances are internet-connected at the moment, and to be honest, I don't care.
If they're going to be on any network, I'd just as soon tie them into a PC running linux, thus creating an easy method of controlling them all from one location...
Imagine having to tell your refrigerator that you bought milk, using a tiny keypad on the front of it... no thanks.
The coffeemaker's tiny keypad is usable for setting the coffee to start brewing before I'm conscious enough to be able to fumble through the process, but I do that when I'm awake. Add a water source and a grounds hopper to the thing, maybe an ethernet port, and voila, you have... a fancy coffee maker. Might be faster, easier, or more economical, but what it all boils down to is that it makes coffee. I don't need to access it from outside the house 99% of the time, and if I'm already outside the house, there's plenty of other places to get a cup o' joe.
The microwave already has a keypad, but it doesn't make sense to connect it to a network unless and until the refrigerator has a method of putting food from itself into the little box for making hot. At that point, we can just have the same robot push the buttons on the microwave, and it *still* doesn't need internet connectivity.
A "Smarthome" really boils down to having Cat5 jacks in every room, and having multiple electronic devices plugged into the network, controlled from a single location (or via remote). Again, I'm thinking PC server and smartphone as remote, here. These things already exist.
The point of the memo is that more and more of these devices will become Internet-connected.
Most of those devices already are. Yes, they may become more integrated, but you're going out on a limb and hacking at the trunk below you if you're trying to tell us that this is some kind of breaking news... or even important.
Unless you have more money than you know what to do with, I'm willing to bet it's going to be at least a decade before anything on that list other than the "entertainment" devices (which a includes the car and cell phone, of course) is internet connected in your home, or anyone else's.
Android and iPhone are counterparts to the DS/PSP/DSi/3DS, not a set-top multiplayer gaming device like 360/PS3/Wii that just needs extra gamepads.
Why not?
I'm still waiting for someone to grow a clue and make the EVO 4G into a truly awe-inspiring presentation device/mini-computer. It has Bluetooth, WiFi, and an HDMI port. Why aren't we plugging it into a TV, using a wireless keyboard and mouse (or gamepads, for that matter), and using it as a full-blown computer that happens to fit in my pocket and make phone calls?
Didn't any of you other geeks out there play Shadowrun and Cyberpunk?
Hello Cyberdecks!
How should we as geeks try to convince the public that consoles' restrictions aren't worth the loss of an end user's right to do what he wants with what he owns?
Perhaps by mentioning the current Sony and Blizzard fiascos resulting from draconian DRM and ridiculous corporate policies?
Or maybe mentioning that one can still install and play StarCraft1 (with or without BroodWar) without any internet connection whatsoever, no activation required, LAN play is available... and if you cheat, you don't get banned from using your own ridiculously expensive purchased product.
Oh, and the same holds true for Diablo and Diablo II.
If I pay $60 for a game, I damn well better own it. If you want to rent it out to me, then I'm not paying more than $10. Blizzard has crossed the line, and has lost me (and my family, and my friends) as customers. This is poor behavior on their part, and I refuse to reward it by opening my wallet to them.
I respect your decision. Personally, I bought a PS3 because I wanted a next-gen gaming console and there aren't very many choices.
For the money they were asking for the PS3, I bought another gaming PC. Plenty of options for low-cost or no-cost gaming, and when I need to do "serious" things, I don't have to switch "appliances".
If you purchased a gaming console because it suited your needs, that's fine. If you purchased it because of the additional features (for instance, a friend of mine bought one because he considers it to be a BLuRay player with bonus features), then that is fine.
My argument is against giving Sony money (essentially subsidizing their dirty tactics), not against playing games on the console of your choice.
As in, how badly will Blizzard treat its customer base with this game? We've already watched them destroy the Starcraft franchise with their heavy-handed tactics... Will the Diablo franchise get a similar treatment?
I, for one, will be waiting to see if D3 has LAN play, and whether or not cheating in the single player game gets you banned from playing single-player, and whether the price will be anywhere near reasonable. To be honest, with all the crap they pulled with SC2, I'm not willing to put out more than about US$20 for any product with the Blizzard name on it at this point. I'm sure not going to spend $60 (multiple times, no less) to support these shenanigans.
To be honest, I didn't even read this "article", because merely seeing Blizzard's name in the title pissed me off.
I'd like to point out that my wife and I will still whip out D2, make new toons, and go off to kill Andariel... it's still a fun way to waste a couple hours, even more than a decade since its release.
I'd like to point out that I have several copies of Starcraft, that I keep expressly for the purpose of playing at LAN parties. Owning multiple copies makes it easy to (without even patching!) get my ass kicked by my buddies (I suck at multiplayer, and mostly play single-player (campaign) mode, where I can figure out how to outsmart the AI, and then min-max for greater glory).
I'd like to point out that I can still lay my hands on my original Diablo disks, and still dust them off occasionally to run around smashing goblins and demons in a 6-hour dungeon crawling spree on a random Saturday. I own the Hellfire expansion, as well.
In 10 years, will we still be able to play SC2 or D3, or will the product lines have been EOL'd, with the activation servers offline? When I buy a game, I expect to be able to play it indefinitely. Being shut down due to the activation server for an "obsolete" product being offline is not something I'm willing to drop $50-$60 on. Want to "rent" me a game? Charge something that feels more like a rental fee. $10 sounds about right. Want to charge me to "purchase" a game? Make sure it will work without internet access, without any interaction from the corporate overseers. Show me you have no qualms about removing my ability to use the product I actually paid for, and you push me one step closer to the pirates - after all, I *paid* for the product - it's mine. If I can't play the game I paid for, then I'm much more likely to steal the next one.
I can understand WoW being pay-to-play - the game is online, after all, and a lot of the fun involved is simply the idea of getting together with a couple dozen of your best friends, and smashing down a dungeon. On the other hand, I'd love to be able to play without having to be online... a lot of the content is single-player PvE stuff, and even after 4 years, I haven't seen anywhere near all the content. I'm not saying I want to solo the whole thing, but having the option would be a nice touch. Where will all our max-level toons be, when Blizzard gets tired of hosting 15 million players?
The Dead Kennedys released a cassette with the second side left intentionally empty... probably due to the fact that there were a dozen songs, but they were each only 2 minutes or so in length.
Quote: "Home taping is killing the music industry. This side left blank so you can help!"
But my Super VHS? Still use it. It creates perfect DVD-quality copies from my DTV converter box, which I can store indefinitely on my bookshelves.
until the iron filings on the plastic tape inside become damaged due to magnetic and/or electrical fields...
or the tape stretches, or melts...
Admittedly, "burned" CDs can become unreadable after a few years, too, due to the ink fading...
It seems no storage medium is perfect; I prefer a storage medium that won't be degraded simply by reading the data stored on it.
Interesting... I would have thought that the massive virus/rootkit/audio CD thing would have killed them by now. Or their yanking the plug on advertised features of their products. Or suing their users for using their products in innovative ways.
Whatever. Sony, you can pretty much do what you want. Anyone who is still a customer of yours evidently enjoys the pain.
It's not just that they are hostile, it's that they just plain don't get it.
Yep, the same way they just "don't get" that removing the ability to play on a LAN breaks the game for many buyers.
The same way they "don't get" that they are killing the potential longevity of this game with their draconian control measures.
The same way they "don't get" their entire user base.
I have purchased several copies of damn near every game Blizzard has made for the last 2 decades. I haven't been on battle.net since the days of Diablo I.
I (and the other 3 members of my family) used to be huge WoW players.
I don't see any Blizzard games on the current (or near future) market that grab enough interest (now that I see what they did to StarCraft) to entice me to spend more than about $20 on anything they've got. $60 is ridiculous, especially since they're requiring me to go online to activate single-player mode, I can't just drop in at a LAN party and play, I can get banned (and locked out of single-player mode) for cheating in single-player... The list goes on. Blizzard, you really dropped the ball with this one.
If the problem is that your developers (or whoever is actually steering your company) "just don't get it", you better find someone who does... fast.
The kicker is that these decision makers are probably right. They are probably driving a quarter or two of unprecedented growth for the company.
... followed by an amazing swan-dive that will drag the entire company into the gutter. Good job looking at the short term, fellas!
--
"We'll show those pirates what for! We'll alienate our customer base, and bankrupt ourselves! Let's see them steal our intellectual property after that!"