Yeah, wait, you're talking about Sims 2, the *most widely bought* computer game ever? Yeah, lots of people pirated it. Lots more bought it, enough that they turned a handsome profit. I'd reckon atleast half of those people who bought it lost their discs in some way (dog chewed on it, it was forgotten at Uncle Bobs house, etc) and thus got another copy... On the internet.
We can take something even more recent, the Humble Indie Bundle released last week [1]. Now, six games cost a penny, so money isn't an issue here. But let's look at facts. About 25% of the downloads there are illegal. But the reasons for it are several;
1. Someone made a direct link to the download in a forum somewhere and people are too lazy to go back and fill in the form 2. No means of paying in your country and/or no access to a credit card 3. You already paid for it once and wants to download it again on your spare computer or monitor 4. You're a thievin' moneygrubbing pirate
Now, I'd consider 2 and 3 to be entirerly valid reasons, 1 a dumb excuse and 4 isn't very common. If this bundle had DRM and a set price, I'd add two more items on the list:
5. The DRM screwed the customer over so they said "fuck it" and found a torrent instead 6. The game cost too much for your average teenager to afford
So what does this tell us? That most people pirate because they:
a) Find the price too high b) The pirated product is superior to the bought product (pirated product lets me play my game, bought doesn't) c) The product is not available in your country (yet), and might never be d) The product requires you to pay for it with means that are not available to you
Solving these four points is the key to win over piracy. That is my firm belief.
You make a compelling argument, but how do you then explain several modern independent research papers providing evidence of two things:
1. The biggest pirates are also the biggest legal consumers 2. Most people pirating would gladly fork over a few bucks if the digital store was as easy as bittorrent + a payment option.
Because, let's face it; people are happy to pay for good games.
I wonder when all these gazillion different app stores realises that they're just repositories and as such, they should just fix one (branded?) client that uses repositories similar to how synaptic/apt works? It's bound to happen sometime.
1. Anything non-DirectX SUCKS on Windows (especially OpenGL, where driver support is very dissapointing compared to D3D), and 3D performance on Linux is still sub-par (It's starting to come around with Nouveau and other free drivers, but it's still around 5 years until something happens there).
2. The packaging problem on Linux. You have a gazillion different distros. Do you use package X or package Y? RPM or DEB? XFree or XOrg? PulseAudio or ALSA? KDE or Gnome? Etc etc etc etc... It's a freakin' mess.
Problem no. 1 will be solved in time; problem no. 2 won't unless one of two things happen;
1. Game developers open source their game engines, only selling their 3D models, graphics etc 2. A store specialized on gaming opens up and offers.deb/.rpm packages to your specific distro version.
First option won't happen ever; second is possible to do today but would require quite a bit of work and trust. So, us Linux gamers are basicly stuck between a rock and a hard place for a few years yet. Thank god for emulators!:)
That's how it should - buyer can choose the platform he prefers.
Amen to that brother, amen.
One can even take it further. I've often wondered what the difference between Steam, iTunes and The pirate bay is. Because the way I see it, there is no *significant* difference. The difference is about the same difference as Verizon, AT&T and T-mobile.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are differences between the three. The pirate bay, for instance, has no control over what floats through their trackers, which means quality often is hit-and-miss, and viruses are rampant. And now I'm only talking about the legal (e.g. filesharing CC-licensed content) aspect, not all the warez and pr0n. But for all intents and purposes, iTunes and TPB is essentially the same service.
So, what happens when lots of similar centralized services appear and we get a giant mess? Answer: Develop some open and decentralized protocols to clean it up! Thankfully, the open protocols are more or less already here (cue XMPP, HTTP and Bittorrent), now all someone needs to do is glue them together in a coherent way, make a nice packaging and release it under one brand. Here's how I'd like it to work:
Joe. A. User opens up his Digital Store(tm) client.
Joe selects one of many interesting stores in his "bookmarks" list. Think of it as a webbrowser.
Joe wants to check out that nifty game, Quake 2037 that he keeps hearing so much about. So Joe clicks on that title.
Joe gets directed to a page where he's asked to fill in his Credit Card details. Joe complies.
Purchase is now completed. Joe is granted access to download the game. The game can be on a server owned by the Digital Store(tm), on a server owned by the game developer, or perhaps on a bittorrent tracker. The "where" is not that important, only that Joe gets his game. Where it is is up to the content deliverer, whom does not have to be the same as the Digital Store(tm).
Joe has now downloaded his game and can start playing it. Happy playing!:D
Before anyone says "WTF, security holes! o_O;;" yes, there are a few in the above scenario, but they can be fixed. The important part here is that there's *one* program to get your music/movies/games/warez/whatever from, and that one connects to a lot of different stores. The stores in turn have deals with content producers, that is, the artists, game developers, writers etc. Since the standard is open, someone will make it dead easy to set up your own store, thus avoiding the big cartels. Voila, the distribution of the future is solved!
Oh Em Gee! A disease that so far has killed around 8 000 people WORLDWIDE is going to make the world go under! It might even kill as many as 20 000!... Like, seriously, what the hell. 20k is a drop in the ocean. With those statistics, you're more likely to die in a traffic accident (~100 000 deaths a year, in the US alone), cancer (~500 000 deaths - in the US alone) or heartattacks (~450 000 deaths in the US alone) than in the Swine flu.
Death sucks, being sick sucks as well. But let's face it - The swine flu, as far as health hazards go, is mostly overrated.
They basically have to "give away" the game for free since once you've released full source code for your game, there is pretty much no reason to buy it.
And what, exactly, is preventing one to sell the other parts of the game? A game is more than just it's engine and engine code. There's music, 3D-art, textures, maps and a whole slew of other *content* one could sell, while still giving away the engine for free. And any enhancements to the game engine can go back upstream, as well. It's a win/win.
I would laugh at your ignorance, were it not that that ignorance is the same thing that got us in this mess in the first place.
The internet is here. The internet cannot be controlled; only destroyed. If destroyed, the people will build a new one. Except it won't have the same flaws and will be even more resistant to control mechanisms. Accept it or GTFO.
A much better question is, why aren't they firing this obviously incompetent person from his job?
If you do not perform your job duties and surf porn instead of working, you deserve to get fired. And don't get me that "addiction is a disease" crap - if it is an addiction problem, put him in a twelve-step program, write him off as sick for 2 years, and put someone else in charge. Small lapses are tolerable, but in this case it's simply doing something he *really* shouldn't, by society's and the organizations standards, be doing. And that means it'll backfire.
As for 1 (and 2); The first batch is due early summer. Mass production due fall.
As for 3, once it has proven it isn't vaporware, I believe it'll gain lots of traction. But, it'll probably never reach more than 1M units. However, it will be the king of homebrews once it arrives.:3
Wait, so let me get this straight;
If Crimson Echoes got released, the devs would get hit with around $150 000 of fines?...
Can you say pledge drive? If 7 500 people paid $20 each, this would be a non-issue. I know I want to see this game that badly. Though, IANAL and more importantly, IANFA (I Am Not From America), so there might be something I'm overlooking.
Still, it seems like it'd be possible to get the fans to release this one regardless. SE sure as hell ain't.
As a parent, there will come a time when you have to "let go". Kids grow up. In a few years, she won't be that innocent girl anymore. She'll be a teenager, hormones raging everywhere, getting drunk, finding a guy and start having lots of "woohoo" - And, she will also probably discover the darker sides of the Internet with or without your help.
So, set a date. Could be on her twelfth birthday, or next christmas. Doesn't really matter. What matters is, that day is when you take your girl, and gradually let go. Let her discover things on her own. Tell her to be careful. And then, let her venture out alone. Be the kind of parent that your daughter feels can go and ask something, and get a clear answer. That way, once she does stumble across a "bad" webpage... You're there for her.
Anything else will probably result in your relations turning sour.
Many of Soviet's casualties could've been prevented, though, if every soldier had been given a rifle. More often than not Soviet forces sent out 100 men with half a rifle each (every other carried a rifle; the rest carried the ammo). So much of those losses are more due to commander incompetence and lack of weaponry than anything else.
But you're right that everyone contributed to a victory.:)
Except it spawned tens of thousands of horrible hacks that may or may not work, depending on the day, time and your network admin's mood. Oh, and don't forget the rings of saturn, they also play a big part in this. The fact that NAT has been around for *atleast two decades* and there *still* isn't a foolproof way to establish a decent P2P connection between two NAT networks proves just how much of an ugly hack NAT is.
Describing NAT as working and being just fine is like saying walking corpses are healthy, living humans and nothing is wrong with them.
"Be that as it may the business case for NAT long predates address space limitations (and RFC1918). Businesses require private and non-routable addresses for their internal networks."
Bullshit. You can achieve the exact same thing with a firewall and a few decent rules. In fact, you only need these three to achieve the same layer of security as NAT:ed firewalls (excuse my SQL-ish syntax, been messing around with databases too much recently):
ALLOW EVERYTHING FROM $internal TO $external WHERE SOURCE PORT IS HIGH AND DESTINATION PORT IS LOW; DENY EVERYTHING FROM $external TO $internal WHERE SOURCE PORT IS HIGH AND DESTINATION PORT IS LOW; DENY EVERYTHING EXCEPT SSH FROM $internal TO $local;
That last is only there if you want to be able to remote-admin the firewall. NAT is entirerly superfluous from a business and security perspective, and until you can give actual real-world cases where it isn't... Then please, stop talking about things you have no clue about.
This has already happened. The problem lies in the fact that few sites support logging in with OpenID. This must change almost overnight or it will be the IPv6 of the Web.
I thought about this when I first heard about OpenID. Ultimately, it's not true, because;
1. You can have multiple OpenIDs. 2. There's nothing preventing the site in question to ask you to provide a different username and display that. So john.smith@aol.com could be "StJohn" on one site and "Tom Bombadil" on another. How are you supposed to datamine something you don't have access to? (In fact, this should be reccommended practice among RPs)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, wait, you're talking about Sims 2, the *most widely bought* computer game ever? Yeah, lots of people pirated it. Lots more bought it, enough that they turned a handsome profit. I'd reckon atleast half of those people who bought it lost their discs in some way (dog chewed on it, it was forgotten at Uncle Bobs house, etc) and thus got another copy... On the internet.
We can take something even more recent, the Humble Indie Bundle released last week [1]. Now, six games cost a penny, so money isn't an issue here. But let's look at facts. About 25% of the downloads there are illegal. But the reasons for it are several;
1. Someone made a direct link to the download in a forum somewhere and people are too lazy to go back and fill in the form
2. No means of paying in your country and/or no access to a credit card
3. You already paid for it once and wants to download it again on your spare computer or monitor
4. You're a thievin' moneygrubbing pirate
Now, I'd consider 2 and 3 to be entirerly valid reasons, 1 a dumb excuse and 4 isn't very common. If this bundle had DRM and a set price, I'd add two more items on the list:
5. The DRM screwed the customer over so they said "fuck it" and found a torrent instead
6. The game cost too much for your average teenager to afford
So what does this tell us? That most people pirate because they:
a) Find the price too high
b) The pirated product is superior to the bought product (pirated product lets me play my game, bought doesn't)
c) The product is not available in your country (yet), and might never be
d) The product requires you to pay for it with means that are not available to you
Solving these four points is the key to win over piracy. That is my firm belief.
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-when-even-a-penny-is-too-much-100510/
You make a compelling argument, but how do you then explain several modern independent research papers providing evidence of two things:
1. The biggest pirates are also the biggest legal consumers
2. Most people pirating would gladly fork over a few bucks if the digital store was as easy as bittorrent + a payment option.
Because, let's face it; people are happy to pay for good games.
I predict they'll run into trouble much sooner than that. Q, more specifically.
I wonder when all these gazillion different app stores realises that they're just repositories and as such, they should just fix one (branded?) client that uses repositories similar to how synaptic/apt works? It's bound to happen sometime.
The problem on gaming on Linux is two-fold:
1. Anything non-DirectX SUCKS on Windows (especially OpenGL, where driver support is very dissapointing compared to D3D), and 3D performance on Linux is still sub-par (It's starting to come around with Nouveau and other free drivers, but it's still around 5 years until something happens there).
2. The packaging problem on Linux. You have a gazillion different distros. Do you use package X or package Y? RPM or DEB? XFree or XOrg? PulseAudio or ALSA? KDE or Gnome? Etc etc etc etc... It's a freakin' mess.
Problem no. 1 will be solved in time; problem no. 2 won't unless one of two things happen;
1. Game developers open source their game engines, only selling their 3D models, graphics etc .deb/.rpm packages to your specific distro version.
2. A store specialized on gaming opens up and offers
First option won't happen ever; second is possible to do today but would require quite a bit of work and trust. So, us Linux gamers are basicly stuck between a rock and a hard place for a few years yet. Thank god for emulators! :)
C-x M-c M-butterfly yet?
That's how it should - buyer can choose the platform he prefers.
Amen to that brother, amen.
One can even take it further. I've often wondered what the difference between Steam, iTunes and The pirate bay is. Because the way I see it, there is no *significant* difference. The difference is about the same difference as Verizon, AT&T and T-mobile.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are differences between the three. The pirate bay, for instance, has no control over what floats through their trackers, which means quality often is hit-and-miss, and viruses are rampant. And now I'm only talking about the legal (e.g. filesharing CC-licensed content) aspect, not all the warez and pr0n. But for all intents and purposes, iTunes and TPB is essentially the same service.
So, what happens when lots of similar centralized services appear and we get a giant mess? Answer: Develop some open and decentralized protocols to clean it up! Thankfully, the open protocols are more or less already here (cue XMPP, HTTP and Bittorrent), now all someone needs to do is glue them together in a coherent way, make a nice packaging and release it under one brand. Here's how I'd like it to work:
Before anyone says "WTF, security holes! o_O;;" yes, there are a few in the above scenario, but they can be fixed. The important part here is that there's *one* program to get your music/movies/games/warez/whatever from, and that one connects to a lot of different stores. The stores in turn have deals with content producers, that is, the artists, game developers, writers etc. Since the standard is open, someone will make it dead easy to set up your own store, thus avoiding the big cartels. Voila, the distribution of the future is solved!
It's too bad MAFIAA won't ever let it happen... :(
Oh Em Gee! A disease that so far has killed around 8 000 people WORLDWIDE is going to make the world go under! It might even kill as many as 20 000! ... Like, seriously, what the hell. 20k is a drop in the ocean. With those statistics, you're more likely to die in a traffic accident (~100 000 deaths a year, in the US alone), cancer (~500 000 deaths - in the US alone) or heartattacks (~450 000 deaths in the US alone) than in the Swine flu.
Death sucks, being sick sucks as well. But let's face it - The swine flu, as far as health hazards go, is mostly overrated.
Just imagine, playing Go in GoEngine. Written in Go. Yeah. That's sweet. :D
And what, exactly, is preventing one to sell the other parts of the game? A game is more than just it's engine and engine code. There's music, 3D-art, textures, maps and a whole slew of other *content* one could sell, while still giving away the engine for free. And any enhancements to the game engine can go back upstream, as well. It's a win/win.
I would laugh at your ignorance, were it not that that ignorance is the same thing that got us in this mess in the first place.
The internet is here. The internet cannot be controlled; only destroyed. If destroyed, the people will build a new one. Except it won't have the same flaws and will be even more resistant to control mechanisms. Accept it or GTFO.
> Paul "Jack/Ardour" Davis summary is probably the best one I've read about why OSS is not sufficient
Link please? I'd like to read his arguments for myself and get my own opinion on things. :)
Why aren't they running a product like Websense?
A much better question is, why aren't they firing this obviously incompetent person from his job?
If you do not perform your job duties and surf porn instead of working, you deserve to get fired. And don't get me that "addiction is a disease" crap - if it is an addiction problem, put him in a twelve-step program, write him off as sick for 2 years, and put someone else in charge. Small lapses are tolerable, but in this case it's simply doing something he *really* shouldn't, by society's and the organizations standards, be doing. And that means it'll backfire.
If the Pandora sold 1M units it'd be a runaway success. Market share isn't everything you know... :)
As for 1 (and 2); The first batch is due early summer. Mass production due fall. As for 3, once it has proven it isn't vaporware, I believe it'll gain lots of traction. But, it'll probably never reach more than 1M units. However, it will be the king of homebrews once it arrives. :3
Wait, so let me get this straight; If Crimson Echoes got released, the devs would get hit with around $150 000 of fines? ...
Can you say pledge drive? If 7 500 people paid $20 each, this would be a non-issue. I know I want to see this game that badly. Though, IANAL and more importantly, IANFA (I Am Not From America), so there might be something I'm overlooking.
Still, it seems like it'd be possible to get the fans to release this one regardless. SE sure as hell ain't.
Sorry to say this, but...
As a parent, there will come a time when you have to "let go". Kids grow up. In a few years, she won't be that innocent girl anymore. She'll be a teenager, hormones raging everywhere, getting drunk, finding a guy and start having lots of "woohoo" - And, she will also probably discover the darker sides of the Internet with or without your help.
So, set a date. Could be on her twelfth birthday, or next christmas. Doesn't really matter. What matters is, that day is when you take your girl, and gradually let go. Let her discover things on her own. Tell her to be careful. And then, let her venture out alone. Be the kind of parent that your daughter feels can go and ask something, and get a clear answer. That way, once she does stumble across a "bad" webpage... You're there for her.
Anything else will probably result in your relations turning sour.
Many of Soviet's casualties could've been prevented, though, if every soldier had been given a rifle. More often than not Soviet forces sent out 100 men with half a rifle each (every other carried a rifle; the rest carried the ammo). So much of those losses are more due to commander incompetence and lack of weaponry than anything else. But you're right that everyone contributed to a victory. :)
>If you were a game studio looking to make money, which would you choose?
I'd choose the one with the biggest installed base. And then bitch and moan about their restrictive policies.
Ah yes, NAT is indeed fine.
Except it spawned tens of thousands of horrible hacks that may or may not work, depending on the day, time and your network admin's mood. Oh, and don't forget the rings of saturn, they also play a big part in this. The fact that NAT has been around for *atleast two decades* and there *still* isn't a foolproof way to establish a decent P2P connection between two NAT networks proves just how much of an ugly hack NAT is.
Describing NAT as working and being just fine is like saying walking corpses are healthy, living humans and nothing is wrong with them.
"Be that as it may the business case for NAT long predates address space limitations (and RFC1918). Businesses require private and non-routable addresses for their internal networks."
Bullshit. You can achieve the exact same thing with a firewall and a few decent rules. In fact, you only need these three to achieve the same layer of security as NAT:ed firewalls (excuse my SQL-ish syntax, been messing around with databases too much recently):
ALLOW EVERYTHING FROM $internal TO $external WHERE SOURCE PORT IS HIGH AND DESTINATION PORT IS LOW;
DENY EVERYTHING FROM $external TO $internal WHERE SOURCE PORT IS HIGH AND DESTINATION PORT IS LOW;
DENY EVERYTHING EXCEPT SSH FROM $internal TO $local;
That last is only there if you want to be able to remote-admin the firewall. NAT is entirerly superfluous from a business and security perspective, and until you can give actual real-world cases where it isn't... Then please, stop talking about things you have no clue about.
This has already happened. The problem lies in the fact that few sites support logging in with OpenID. This must change almost overnight or it will be the IPv6 of the Web.
Write a Regex for them! :D
I thought about this when I first heard about OpenID. Ultimately, it's not true, because;
1. You can have multiple OpenIDs.
2. There's nothing preventing the site in question to ask you to provide a different username and display that. So john.smith@aol.com could be "StJohn" on one site and "Tom Bombadil" on another. How are you supposed to datamine something you don't have access to? (In fact, this should be reccommended practice among RPs)
Therefore, I feel quite safe with OpenID.
Hmm, and I really should be using smileys more, as well... I mean it. Thanks for teaching me to remain humble. :D