The problem with DRM is that it turns everything into a rental.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true, but even if we accept the premise, I don't see a problem with rental as long as everyone knows up-front what the deal is.
This is my big problem with buying stuff from online DRM services. They never tell me for how long I can use the content, it's just implied that it will be for as long as the service is active. I don't know what the deal is, so I can't decide whether that $5 super-sale is really worth $5. I'd rather pay $20 and know that I own it forever.
I have no trouble renting things, but I have to know for how long I can have it. If the time is arbitrary, well, on principle I find that just a sleazy way of doing business.
I'd like to agree with this, but I used to work in a small photography store. We also used software that often cost between $2,000 to $10,000 a pop, and was designed to run on NT4.
It shocked me... shocked... how little of that software ran on Win2K, including the apps that didn't require a hardware dongle attached to the parallel port. These apps didn't need special drivers or network support. They were things like compiling customer images into photo CD ISO, which you then had to burn yourself with an app like Nero. These were apps where if you tried to run them under Win2K, some of the GUI buttons would be missing, or they'd just freeze with 100% CPU utilization.
I've always been so used to upgrading Windows and having all my old stuff work fine (except for a few games). I tried to update as much of the store to Win2K as I could, but it was pretty hopeless. The majority of our software refused to work on anything but NT4, even after days of trying every compatibility hack I could find on the net and every ACT patch I could cook up.
I chock it up to shoddy programming and cutting corners, and possibly a side effect of so little competition in the market. For all I know, maybe these vendors locked their software to NT4 on purpose to force people to buy an upgrade if they bought new computers. It's bad enough that consumer Windows software thinks it owns your machine and should always run in admin mode. I can't imagine specialty software running on a few thousand machines total would be developed by the book and be properly tested.
Nintendo always had different release schedules than their competitors. It's easy to release a superior platform if it's launched with hardware a couple years newer.
You forgot about the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit. Everyone knows how much the CPU ISA changed so that it's not economically feasible to support 32-bit anymore.
It used to be you could buy a new computer, and use it. Now to do that, you have to find an operating system, figure out how to get it to work with the new (unsupported on older OSs) hardware.
You don't remember DOS very well, do you?
I remember telling people how my Amiga "just worked", despite my having to disable CPU caches, change the chipset emulation, do a 1.3 ROM Kick, and running Degrader with "NoFastRAM" to get my old software to work. The Macs at college were even worse, but that was only because there weren't any hacks you could run to get old crap working.
Nobody ever just bought a computer and used it. There was always a level of fumbling and prodding. Arguably, and ironically to your argument, smart phones are what changed all that, and it's why the public LOVES them so much.
I'm using Firefox on mac, and it is always sucking up CPU. It is NEVER idle... Why does it do this, I'm not really sure.
Memory garbage collection. The Mozilla community has been denying this problem exists for over 6 years, so don't expect it to get fixed anytime soon. Also, the garbage collector is apparently single threaded, because it will always freeze the browser when it does its job. I laugh when people call Firefox the OS of the future. Basic resource management is totally broken.
Don't ever argue with Firefox fans that the browser still has memory management issues. Your karma will spike between -1 and +5 like a metronome.
This is bullcrap and it's a terrible shame that so many people actually bought it. XP is still miles faster and better then 7 in myriad of ways.
I agree completely, but when I explain to people why I feel that way, they tell me I'm being picky and "ordinary people" don't need what I need, therefore my opinions are irrelevant. As if, you know, there's something wrong with liking old stuff, and all changes are always progress. As far as I'm concerned, if they just tacked on a few legacy design tweaks on to Win7, like they did with Vista, it'd be terrific and I'd pay full price to upgrade. So long as the taskbar, explorer windows, and file requesters remain dumbed-down, XP is still a more productive environment, despite its older code.
My way of looking at it is that Microsoft has spent billions making Windows, so tacking on support for the "old way" of doing things would be a drop in the bucket. The company interns could add decent legacy support in a few weeks. Sort of like how 95% of people who use Windows speak English, but the OS is still available in dozens of translations, anyway.
Marketing is at work here, not technological or practical limitations. The public needs to be trained in the ways of the new tablet/MS Store ecosystem, and that means burying the past -- by force if necessary. It's a shame that whole communities are falling for this BS and horrible long-term support is now the norm across all platforms. Fuck you, smartphones.
My reason for using XP for my main workstation is because I really hate a lot of the interface changes in newer versions. The file requesters are different for little good reason, and the root directory is no longer the desktop. Lots of new, useless rubbish pollutes the GUI and much of it can't be removed. Everything is dumbed down. I couldn't care less about the Start menu, but the actual taskbar and pinned icons drive me nuts. The composited video system for the new GUI works MUCH more slowly, so most of my windowed multimedia and video software runs slower on Win7. It constantly thrashes the hard drive just as hard as Win95 did. The toolbars aren't as configurable. Selecting default colors is a pain (I do sensitive color work, so I want my desktop and taskbar to be neutral grey).
Everybody tells me I'm nuts for not loving Win7, but that's because they don't know what I do. If I just surfed the web, Win7 would be fine. As it stands, I can only use Win7 on my laptop, and I need XP to get real work done. I put off upgrading from Win2K to XP because XP was slower and I didn't really "need" it. I'm avoiding Win7/8 because those OSes are actually a downgrade for my requirements.
Funny how an OS that's unsupported will still get new mal-ware.
I seem to recall that most mal-ware actually comes from insecure apps doing stupid things (Mozilla's background update process comes to mind). Will the choice in OS really help when the apps demand admin privileges and think and behave as if they own the computer?
Does this include all the receipts for everything you've ever bought online? If I have to save all the receipts and type them in one at a time, that's not going to work. Most people can't even remember where they put their CDs or registration codes.
Enforcement will likely be an issue, too, just like with the use tax.
Personally, I think it makes sense to just abolish the sales tax altogether. Several states don't have a sales tax, including New Hampshire, where most of my relatives live. Those states still get their taxes, but they just get them from other sources.
fostering creativity by limiting resources and force developers away from spending their time budgets on shallow eye candy.
Shallow eye candy sells better than creativity. It's nice to say that everything sucks and diamonds in the rough don't get the credit they deserve, but for the most part, the products actually on the market reflect what the market wants.
There's market demand for the old way of doing things, but it's still a small market. Much the same way that there's people who still want XP, unlocked $600 smartphones, and diesel-powered cars, but they are so few that they officially qualify as "nobody." I hate it when marketeers say that "nobody" wants a particular thing, when that market share might be, say, 5-10% of the population. I reel at the thought that 5% out of hundreds of millions is "nobody."
For chiptunes, I can hear a difference between 256 and 320, but just barely.
The biggest factor is how the high frequencies are filtered out before the audio is compressed, because the filtering appears to be the same regardless of the final bitrate. Even ultra-high bitrate audio will sound awful if the stock frequency cutoff is used, and I have to fiddle with the settings in LAME to make my songs sound good, even at 320.
You don't inherently have a right to prohibit people from copying it, distributing it, etc. So where's that leave us?
Usually on Slashdot, whining and bitching about their privacy, and how corporations are "stealing" our personal information and selling it to their affiliates.
Cue another heated debate one how your private shopping habits from Discrete Brown Packaging, Inc. are not the same as the 100 songs you just downloaded.
Right here on Slashdot, I've heard people argue that hardware acceleration is way faster on IE than other browsers. I still prefer compatibility over performance, but, devil's advocate, there appears to be a reason for IE doing what it's doing, rather than the usual case of lock-in.
If it's so easy to make your own service pack, why does MS release service packs so infrequently? There has to be a catch.
Then again, given how extensively XP is used, there really should have been a SP4, and it would really be nice if there would be an EOL Service Pack when support is finally dumped. I still maintain a few XP systems, and starting with SP3 (or even an nLite slipstream) can be a pain.
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Computers make us less smart because they are entertainment devices. As the old saying goes, "man uses his highest technology to amuse himself."
The problem with DRM is that it turns everything into a rental.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true, but even if we accept the premise, I don't see a problem with rental as long as everyone knows up-front what the deal is.
This is my big problem with buying stuff from online DRM services. They never tell me for how long I can use the content, it's just implied that it will be for as long as the service is active. I don't know what the deal is, so I can't decide whether that $5 super-sale is really worth $5. I'd rather pay $20 and know that I own it forever.
I have no trouble renting things, but I have to know for how long I can have it. If the time is arbitrary, well, on principle I find that just a sleazy way of doing business.
Some people are into messed-up shit. It's best not to ask.
I'd like to agree with this, but I used to work in a small photography store. We also used software that often cost between $2,000 to $10,000 a pop, and was designed to run on NT4.
It shocked me... shocked... how little of that software ran on Win2K, including the apps that didn't require a hardware dongle attached to the parallel port. These apps didn't need special drivers or network support. They were things like compiling customer images into photo CD ISO, which you then had to burn yourself with an app like Nero. These were apps where if you tried to run them under Win2K, some of the GUI buttons would be missing, or they'd just freeze with 100% CPU utilization.
I've always been so used to upgrading Windows and having all my old stuff work fine (except for a few games). I tried to update as much of the store to Win2K as I could, but it was pretty hopeless. The majority of our software refused to work on anything but NT4, even after days of trying every compatibility hack I could find on the net and every ACT patch I could cook up.
I chock it up to shoddy programming and cutting corners, and possibly a side effect of so little competition in the market. For all I know, maybe these vendors locked their software to NT4 on purpose to force people to buy an upgrade if they bought new computers. It's bad enough that consumer Windows software thinks it owns your machine and should always run in admin mode. I can't imagine specialty software running on a few thousand machines total would be developed by the book and be properly tested.
Give the makers time to soak up some feedback on Ouya's weak points and the next version will probably be beefed up a bit.
Which may not be long. Didn't they claim they wanted to release new hardware every year?
Nintendo always had different release schedules than their competitors. It's easy to release a superior platform if it's launched with hardware a couple years newer.
You forgot about the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit. Everyone knows how much the CPU ISA changed so that it's not economically feasible to support 32-bit anymore.
It used to be you could buy a new computer, and use it. Now to do that, you have to find an operating system, figure out how to get it to work with the new (unsupported on older OSs) hardware.
You don't remember DOS very well, do you?
I remember telling people how my Amiga "just worked", despite my having to disable CPU caches, change the chipset emulation, do a 1.3 ROM Kick, and running Degrader with "NoFastRAM" to get my old software to work. The Macs at college were even worse, but that was only because there weren't any hacks you could run to get old crap working.
Nobody ever just bought a computer and used it. There was always a level of fumbling and prodding. Arguably, and ironically to your argument, smart phones are what changed all that, and it's why the public LOVES them so much.
I'm using Firefox on mac, and it is always sucking up CPU. It is NEVER idle ... Why does it do this, I'm not really sure.
Memory garbage collection. The Mozilla community has been denying this problem exists for over 6 years, so don't expect it to get fixed anytime soon. Also, the garbage collector is apparently single threaded, because it will always freeze the browser when it does its job. I laugh when people call Firefox the OS of the future. Basic resource management is totally broken.
Don't ever argue with Firefox fans that the browser still has memory management issues. Your karma will spike between -1 and +5 like a metronome.
Microsoft loves you as a customer.
Because he won't be buying anything from the MS Store or watching the ads?
There's a reason everyone is warning modern corps about short-term business plans.
This is bullcrap and it's a terrible shame that so many people actually bought it. XP is still miles faster and better then 7 in myriad of ways.
I agree completely, but when I explain to people why I feel that way, they tell me I'm being picky and "ordinary people" don't need what I need, therefore my opinions are irrelevant. As if, you know, there's something wrong with liking old stuff, and all changes are always progress. As far as I'm concerned, if they just tacked on a few legacy design tweaks on to Win7, like they did with Vista, it'd be terrific and I'd pay full price to upgrade. So long as the taskbar, explorer windows, and file requesters remain dumbed-down, XP is still a more productive environment, despite its older code.
My way of looking at it is that Microsoft has spent billions making Windows, so tacking on support for the "old way" of doing things would be a drop in the bucket. The company interns could add decent legacy support in a few weeks. Sort of like how 95% of people who use Windows speak English, but the OS is still available in dozens of translations, anyway.
Marketing is at work here, not technological or practical limitations. The public needs to be trained in the ways of the new tablet/MS Store ecosystem, and that means burying the past -- by force if necessary. It's a shame that whole communities are falling for this BS and horrible long-term support is now the norm across all platforms. Fuck you, smartphones.
Throw out your desk. Duh.
Compelling reason my ass. Stop being cheapskates.
My reason for using XP for my main workstation is because I really hate a lot of the interface changes in newer versions. The file requesters are different for little good reason, and the root directory is no longer the desktop. Lots of new, useless rubbish pollutes the GUI and much of it can't be removed. Everything is dumbed down. I couldn't care less about the Start menu, but the actual taskbar and pinned icons drive me nuts. The composited video system for the new GUI works MUCH more slowly, so most of my windowed multimedia and video software runs slower on Win7. It constantly thrashes the hard drive just as hard as Win95 did. The toolbars aren't as configurable. Selecting default colors is a pain (I do sensitive color work, so I want my desktop and taskbar to be neutral grey).
Everybody tells me I'm nuts for not loving Win7, but that's because they don't know what I do. If I just surfed the web, Win7 would be fine. As it stands, I can only use Win7 on my laptop, and I need XP to get real work done. I put off upgrading from Win2K to XP because XP was slower and I didn't really "need" it. I'm avoiding Win7/8 because those OSes are actually a downgrade for my requirements.
Funny how an OS that's unsupported will still get new mal-ware.
I seem to recall that most mal-ware actually comes from insecure apps doing stupid things (Mozilla's background update process comes to mind). Will the choice in OS really help when the apps demand admin privileges and think and behave as if they own the computer?
I'd imagine wiping 200 hard drives individually would take a while. A full format of a 3TB drive takes several hours, and that's just a single pass.
put in my financial info
Does this include all the receipts for everything you've ever bought online? If I have to save all the receipts and type them in one at a time, that's not going to work. Most people can't even remember where they put their CDs or registration codes.
Enforcement will likely be an issue, too, just like with the use tax.
Personally, I think it makes sense to just abolish the sales tax altogether. Several states don't have a sales tax, including New Hampshire, where most of my relatives live. Those states still get their taxes, but they just get them from other sources.
fostering creativity by limiting resources and force developers away from spending their time budgets on shallow eye candy.
Shallow eye candy sells better than creativity. It's nice to say that everything sucks and diamonds in the rough don't get the credit they deserve, but for the most part, the products actually on the market reflect what the market wants.
There's market demand for the old way of doing things, but it's still a small market. Much the same way that there's people who still want XP, unlocked $600 smartphones, and diesel-powered cars, but they are so few that they officially qualify as "nobody." I hate it when marketeers say that "nobody" wants a particular thing, when that market share might be, say, 5-10% of the population. I reel at the thought that 5% out of hundreds of millions is "nobody."
Does Apple own the factories that manufacture their products?
It's easy to say that the operations you own are largely using renewable energy sources, if you're outsourcing your factory work.
For chiptunes, I can hear a difference between 256 and 320, but just barely.
The biggest factor is how the high frequencies are filtered out before the audio is compressed, because the filtering appears to be the same regardless of the final bitrate. Even ultra-high bitrate audio will sound awful if the stock frequency cutoff is used, and I have to fiddle with the settings in LAME to make my songs sound good, even at 320.
You don't inherently have a right to prohibit people from copying it, distributing it, etc. So where's that leave us?
Usually on Slashdot, whining and bitching about their privacy, and how corporations are "stealing" our personal information and selling it to their affiliates.
Cue another heated debate one how your private shopping habits from Discrete Brown Packaging, Inc. are not the same as the 100 songs you just downloaded.
Artists across all professions have always been dead. It's the performers (who actually deliver what the artists created) that still fare pretty well.
Right here on Slashdot, I've heard people argue that hardware acceleration is way faster on IE than other browsers. I still prefer compatibility over performance, but, devil's advocate, there appears to be a reason for IE doing what it's doing, rather than the usual case of lock-in.
You're using your bank account as a credit card?
If it's so easy to make your own service pack, why does MS release service packs so infrequently? There has to be a catch.
Then again, given how extensively XP is used, there really should have been a SP4, and it would really be nice if there would be an EOL Service Pack when support is finally dumped. I still maintain a few XP systems, and starting with SP3 (or even an nLite slipstream) can be a pain.