Telstra Big Pond Direct have on-sold my postal address to 3rd party advertisers - for I have received unsolicited advertising mail targetted at people who might be administering a company network, addressed to myself at the organisation name associated with my Big Pond Direct account. This organisation name is not used elsewhere.
I haven't yet confronted Telstra about it.
Certainly I never gave them my permission to pass on my personal details to third parties.
We tried - briefly - VSS in a project involving
approximately 15 developers in the same building.
It was slow and awful.
CVS may not integrate so prettily into VC++, but it does work! We found switching over to CVS to be relatively painless: the only problem was that sometimes a file would be edited using Notepad or something, that shouldn't have been, which introduced ^M characters that confused CVS.
Extrapolating from our experiences, the reason why VSS worked so poorly for your company might be more due to the quality of VSS rather than the degree of distribution of your developers.
Piracy typically involves hijacking, theft of valuables and often murder on the seas. Illegal software copying does none of these things - calling it pitacy is not doing anyone any favours.
Look at this story on the positive side. Despite the widespread availability of circumvention codes, nearly 50% of users were honest! That's a heartening ratio!
Shareware authors have to expect that there will be illegal copying or license breaking by the users of the software. If they're getting nearly 50% of users paying, that has to be a good thing.
Ideally, everyone would do the right thing, and either not use the software they don't wish to pay for, or pay appropriately. They should do so out of respect for the authors of the software. I don't feel it should be done out of respect for the law - copyright law as it stands is a travesty, typically (not always) favouring the larger companies and publishers at the expense of the people who actually do the creative work. Further, when one is obliged to use some software whose copyright owner is not deserving of respect, I would feel it morally justified not to abide by their licensing terms. The best thing to do though would be to work to encourage an environment where one was not so obliged.
That last bit of course doesn't apply to Ambrosia. If you like what they create, you ought to compensate them appropriately.
This observation, together with the more dubious recipes to be found in the collection, surprises me.
Many of my friends and acquaintances fall into the possibly geeky category. I say this because they are involved in or are interested in traditionally geeky things, like computing, mathematics, and academic arcana, and a good portion of them even having traditionally geeky hobbies like juggling or role-playing games, or SCA participation. Yet of all of them, I know of only one who doesn't give good food and cooking any real consideration. If I were to extrapolate from these people to geeky people generally, I would have thought that geeks typically took cooking and food quality very seriously!
I'm located in a city where there is a wide range of food available which is both cheap and of good quality --- this applies to both ingredients and to restaurants! It's possible that may explain some of the discrepancy.
Cooking though I think can appeal in many of the same ways that coding, or nutting out a new proof to a maths problem, or playing a musical instrument can. It's an opportunity to be both analytical and creative.
Given how quickly one can prepare a stir fry or pasta with fresh ingredients (25 minutes or less including washing up), there is not a lot of time to be gained by eating out save at the fastest of fast food places. Cooking for oneself can be practical in time and money savings, healthier than eating out, and intrinsically fun and interesting! If you the reader haven't before now, I'd recommend you give it a shot and do some experimentation!
Oooh, I've had SGI machines crash regularly and often. IRIX - at least some of the earlier versions - were not especially stable, and could be reliably borked by doing simple user tasks. Like running the default editor on NFS-mounted files.
SGI make nice kit. IRIX is an excellent operating system in some areas, especially scalability. But me, I'd mount a scratch monkey.
It is worth noting though that GCC version 3 is one of the most standards-conforming C++ compilers available.
It is significantly better than Intel's on weird template and STL stuff, and a vast improvement over Microsoft's Visual C++ (which even in its latest incarnation has failed to address partial specialisation bugs dating back to vanilla 6.0.)
Just because these template issues are weird, does not make them useless. On the contrary, they can allow code which is both more easily maintained and faster. For examples, consider Blitz (templated numerics library) and Boost (a very well thought out set of extensions to the standard C++ library.)
In a very significant way, the ability to sell copies of software on a profit-per-copy basis is very much a product of government fiat.
It's only through the artifical imposition of copyright that software producers can charge per copy. It's artificial, because having sold it to one party, that party would otherwise be able to give an identical product to a third party without depriving themselves of it.
Copyright is a comprimise, used to encourage the creation of intellectual property - it's perfectly legitimate to question where this comprimise ought to be taken, or whether or not it is in fact of net benefit to society.
Not that I claim that these are necessarily viable, but there do exist alternatives to the artificial imposition of copyright.
One is support through taxation in order to add to the capabilities and richness of society. I don't really expect this one to be popular on Slashdot:) But it does correspond to arts grants and the like. In fact, it is siginificantly better than a grant to support a performance or art installation: software's easy and nearly-free duplication ensure that it can benefit a very large number of people very easily.
This form of funding already exists for many people involved in the creative arts, and in a slightly different form, for those involved in research at public Universities and the like.
The second major alternative is to treat software creation like a service (which it is.) If a company or consortium feel they could benefit from the creation of software package, they could (and in fact can right now of course) go out and commision that package. So the software may be copied by third parties? I imagine in many circumstances this won't take away from the original benefit acrued by the commisioners of the software, and that in the remainder of cases it is could be protected in the same way that trade secrets already are.
Given that these two forms of IP creation are already extant in industry, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they could work for software as well.
This is only addressing one of your points, and then tangentially - but I feel it's important to keep in mind that copyright is very much an artificial construction, and as such, needs to be carefully weighed in terms of the benefits and hindrances it bestows upon society at large.
The reasons one might want to go this route rather than an iMac include
Price - for the small footprint, it's very inexpensive
x86 architecture
customizable to a greater degree
It's not perfect for every application, but it does suit some. I know I would have preferred 2 PCI slots, but there is a space restriction after all. Certainly with so much included with the motherboard, there is less need for PCI cards than usual: firewire can fulfill many of the SCSI applications; there is onboard networking; and there is onboard sound and video too, even if it's not great for gaming. For small server applications you could pop in that SCSI card; for a portable gaming box, you could find a decent PCI video card.
If I understand it correctly, what is holding iPod on Linux back is the lack of HFS+ support.
While HFS+ read support seems to be up and working (more or less), HFS+ write support is just not there. It's been on wishlists for years, but so far no luck.
Can anyone say what the stumbling block is? Is it lack of or misleading documentation? Is it a patent issue?
Is there code in Darwin that could be legally borrowed and turned into an HFS+ module?
I freely admit, when I was first introduced
to RPN on a calculator, it seemed odd.
Yet it's not some bizarre geek snobbery that
has me say that it's worthwhile - after
getting used to it (and it did not take long,
really) it really is much more efficient.
Quicker entry - no need for explicit entry
of matched parentheses.
Consistent entry - all operators act like postfix
operators. Algebraic and non-scientfic
calculators have a mixture of infix, prefix
and postfix operators.
Easy viewing of intermediate calculations - at
least on large-display RPN calculators. This
allows on-the-fly checking of the calculation
which can catch errors early.
Speaking of HP calculators in particular, they
do or did have a couple of very strong points that
tended to distinguish them from their peers:
Very robust! Renowned for withstanding accidents,
drops, etc.
Good tactile feedback on the keys (the latest
one excepted.) The HP-28*,48* had great keypads,
unrivalled on any other calculator I've used.
The later HP graphic calculators also supported
an algebraic entry mode for those who found it
easier or more intuitive than RPN.
I'm glad your TI worked well for you! But
there are good reasons why the HP calculators
are so widely recommended.
I'm probably still sad over HP's decision to
disband their calculator division. Still, in
comparison, the TI calculators don't look as
classy as (say) the HP-28C or its ilk - at least
to my eyes.
A USB connection does seem like a nice feature.
Not being a TI user, I can't speak for their
functionality. Do they have a RPN mode? What
are the keys like? Are they easy to code for?
Just think of it as an innumeracy tax on
venture capitalists.
The marklet requires checks
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The most telling quote is, I believe,
Monsanto's critics, Kaley says, do not understand capitalism.
The critics understand unchecked capitalism all too well. If monetary profit is all that matters, then the evidence clearly demonstrates that people suffer. This is yet another datum.
There is absoloutely no guarantee that an unregulated market will lead to an optimal outcome for actual people. On the contrary, some people will suffer greatly.
A significant problem with this sort of beta testing procedure is that other countries are likely to get shafted on the network play aspect.
If the only reasonable network play is going to be over the Battle.Net servers, and they are only testing the game with people who live on the same continent as the best connected servers, then clearly they won't be examining the game's performance under higher latency conditions.
Unless they pop well-connected Battle.Net servers all over the world - and they certainly did not for Diablo II - then they are effectively saying they just don't care about their foreign market.
really though, when it comes to optimized code, great game play, and solid support, you
know Blizzard will deliver, no need to even ask..
Clearly you haven't been playing much Diablo II.
Diablo II has been plagued with graphics slow downs - including obvious redundant overdraws! - that meant that it ran unsteadily even on top of the line hardware at release date.
Despite marketting it as an online game with secure servers, the servers in question were regularly overloaded and unstable. They were - and still are - not close net-wise to a large number of players, yet the gameplay is very intolerant of high latency connections to servers.
Play over a local network is plagued with inexplicable latency spikes.
It was (and with the expansion still is) a hugely popular game, yet promised continued support in the way of new runewords, cube recipies and the like have never materialised.
They changed gameplay rather than address underlying flaws in the graphics code of the game.
By all accounts, Starcraft is a well designed, well coded, and well supported game. Their more recent project - Diablo II - is good fun, but in spite of rather than because of the game's support and performance.
I am wary of Warcraft III. If it fulfills its promise it will be grand. I'll wait and see.
Are you in Australia? (I'm presuming so!)
Can you tell us which ISP you're using?
Last time I looked, Telstra's BigPond Direct service over ADSL was prohibitively expensive.
A local provider offers a similar service at $100/month (but with download charges over 500MB/month and a $20/month surcharge for a maximum of 5 static IPs.) I'd miss my/27
network, so I've been putting off using them:)
Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
Would you consider the average Western individual with dial-up access 'on the Internet'?
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.
Re:justification for region-locking
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 2
I want to dismiss the last point first, because it looks awfully like a strawman: most region-specific games are pretty much identical across the regions, with only names changed and language translated. Occasionally there is some censoring. If a local region version of the game satisfies local safety laws, the foreign one will too. At the end of the day, they are the same game!
There are exceptions of course, but most of the localization changes that are not direct translations, are done for marketting purposes only.
Gwonga-Longa "Eye suprise!" teddy bears are completely irrelevant.
The other front - local distributors - has more weight. For starters, in Australia at least, there are already companies that do business by importing games from other regions. Their success of course is constrained by their limited market. One must ask though, in these heady days of globalization, why do local distributors have a right to make an artificial profit at the expense of their customers? Who is this helping ultimately, other than one or two distribution companies?
Look at Australia again as an example - because I live here:). Here, Dreamcast consoles and software were distributed by a company called Ozisoft, which I believe has now been acquired by Infogrames (is this true?). The local release saw: inflated local prices; roving release-dates, sometimes out by over 12 months!; an artificially imposed monopoly on net access with a single expensive ISP; a critically small number of titles; poor availability of hardware; and games that were available for less than 6 weeks before being discontinued. Some of this is sure to be a result of poor support from Sega, but a lot of the blame has to rest at Ozisoft's feet.
How did one company manage to so completely and utterly drop the bundle with the Dreamcast? Through the artificial imposition of region-locking. No one benefitted from this with the possible exception of Ozisoft, who if they did, profitted through incompetence.
Remeber that there isn't a fundamental right for companies to make a profit; elsewise I could go out there with any hare-brained scheme and watch the dollars roll in. Artificial market protection can make sense when there are industries whose loss would have a severe impact on a country's economic sustainability. Outside of this domain - and game distribution is well removed - it just rewards inefficiency and effectively forces the consuming public to pay higher prices for goods unnecessarily.
There is room to support localized versions, as game buyers will typically prefer to have a game that supports their local video standard and comes in a language they can easily understand. This is independent of region locking though! They'd still prefer it even if it were easy to play a foreign version. Region locking is there only to protect markets. Those instances where a foreign version may violate local morality laws are already covered by those laws which prevent the importation of restricted material.
Re:Ease of copying killed the Dreamcast...
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the info!
It's been a while since I looked at it - when I last looked, everyone seemed to be keeping it pretty secret. Clearly no longer the case:)
But still, while straightforward, I'd claim it's not trivial!
Also, while of course it is easy to copy a CD-R that someone else has already produced, not that many people really do have access to the low-cost high-bandwidth connections required to download images off the net. I still suspect that illegal copying of Dreamcast software had only a minor impact when compared to the size of the market.
Re:Ease of copying killed the Dreamcast...
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 2
Where's -1 Wrong when you need it?
GDROM games are not easy to copy; very few people have the hardware and software to do it, and they are keeping pretty quiet about the details. I'm presuming the easiest option is to write something for the Dreamcast which reads a GDROM and spits the data out the serial port. Having gotten this information though, it then needs to be cut down from 1GB or so to something that will fit on a notmal CDROM. It's not trivial.
The Dreamcast as a platform died due to some combination of Sega's financial troubles and the depressing effect of Sony's PS2 marketing machine. I don't know the relative weights of these contributions, though certainly Sony's efforts were the most visible.
I still can't see any justification for region-locking of console software, other than to artifically maintain otherwise unsupportable price differentials. People will still tend to buy the localized version of a game if it's available, just because it's much easier to read documentation and in-game text that's in your own language.
On the Dreamcast at least, it's pretty clear that most people who have a mod-chip installed are doing so for the ability to play imported games, given than the pirated CDROM cuts are typically self-booting.
... to make gene therapy cheap and safe, then let's not worry too much!
History has already shown that a significant proportion of athletes are willing to risk their health in order to gain a competitive advantage. Gene therapy will be another risky medical technique that they will adopt.
Given that it is going to happen anyway, think of the benefits! With widespread use and money invested in development, it will encourage the development of gene therapies that are safer, cheaper and of potential benefit to a large proportion of the population. Why shouldn't we be fitter (or smarter, or healthier) than what our random genetic heritage dictates?
The best defense against a world of genetic haves and have nots is to encourage an environment where gene therapy is widely accepted and above all, cheap! The alternative has the technology develop more slowly, and be available only to an elite, rich few.
On another front, on the topic of fairness in sport, it's already moot on the genetic front. While the very best athletes of course dedicate their lives to their activities and are admirable examples of determination and hard work, they are also in all likelihood blessed with an advantageous genetic makeup when compared with the population at large. (This is sure to be more the case in some sports than others, of course!) Much as we would like it to be otherwise, we are not all born equal when it comes to genetic potential. One could make the case that genetic tinkering has the potential to make competition more fair rather than less.
I really like the idea of lean and mean front end, and sophisticated rendering backend. I mean, I really like it. So why am I not using Galeon yet?
The main reason is that one has to have up to date mozilla source handy to build it, and the mozilla source code is huge. Downloading the latest mozilla source tar.gz over a modem takes about 2 hours, and for me (and most other Australians on a permanent link) would cost nearly $7 in bandwidth charges alone. It's just enormous.
Now that Galeon has hit 1.0, is it feasible for the gecko component of mozilla to be extracted and packaged as a library perhaps, to be downloaded seperately for use with galeon? I know that it would certainly encourage at least one more person to try Galeon out.
Slashdot Mirror
Telstra Big Pond Direct have on-sold my postal address to 3rd party advertisers - for I have received unsolicited advertising mail targetted at people who might be administering a company network, addressed to myself at the organisation name associated with my Big Pond Direct account. This organisation name is not used elsewhere.
I haven't yet confronted Telstra about it. Certainly I never gave them my permission to pass on my personal details to third parties.
We tried - briefly - VSS in a project involving approximately 15 developers in the same building. It was slow and awful.
CVS may not integrate so prettily into VC++, but it does work! We found switching over to CVS to be relatively painless: the only problem was that sometimes a file would be edited using Notepad or something, that shouldn't have been, which introduced ^M characters that confused CVS.
Extrapolating from our experiences, the reason why VSS worked so poorly for your company might be more due to the quality of VSS rather than the degree of distribution of your developers.
Piracy typically involves hijacking, theft of valuables and often murder on the seas. Illegal software copying does none of these things - calling it pitacy is not doing anyone any favours.
Look at this story on the positive side. Despite the widespread availability of circumvention codes, nearly 50% of users were honest! That's a heartening ratio!
Shareware authors have to expect that there will be illegal copying or license breaking by the users of the software. If they're getting nearly 50% of users paying, that has to be a good thing.
Ideally, everyone would do the right thing, and either not use the software they don't wish to pay for, or pay appropriately. They should do so out of respect for the authors of the software. I don't feel it should be done out of respect for the law - copyright law as it stands is a travesty, typically (not always) favouring the larger companies and publishers at the expense of the people who actually do the creative work. Further, when one is obliged to use some software whose copyright owner is not deserving of respect, I would feel it morally justified not to abide by their licensing terms. The best thing to do though would be to work to encourage an environment where one was not so obliged.
That last bit of course doesn't apply to Ambrosia. If you like what they create, you ought to compensate them appropriately.
This observation, together with the more dubious recipes to be found in the collection, surprises me.
Many of my friends and acquaintances fall into the possibly geeky category. I say this because they are involved in or are interested in traditionally geeky things, like computing, mathematics, and academic arcana, and a good portion of them even having traditionally geeky hobbies like juggling or role-playing games, or SCA participation. Yet of all of them, I know of only one who doesn't give good food and cooking any real consideration. If I were to extrapolate from these people to geeky people generally, I would have thought that geeks typically took cooking and food quality very seriously!
I'm located in a city where there is a wide range of food available which is both cheap and of good quality --- this applies to both ingredients and to restaurants! It's possible that may explain some of the discrepancy.
Cooking though I think can appeal in many of the same ways that coding, or nutting out a new proof to a maths problem, or playing a musical instrument can. It's an opportunity to be both analytical and creative.
Given how quickly one can prepare a stir fry or pasta with fresh ingredients (25 minutes or less including washing up), there is not a lot of time to be gained by eating out save at the fastest of fast food places. Cooking for oneself can be practical in time and money savings, healthier than eating out, and intrinsically fun and interesting! If you the reader haven't before now, I'd recommend you give it a shot and do some experimentation!
Oooh, I've had SGI machines crash regularly and often. IRIX - at least some of the earlier versions - were not especially stable, and could be reliably borked by doing simple user tasks. Like running the default editor on NFS-mounted files.
SGI make nice kit. IRIX is an excellent operating system in some areas, especially scalability. But me, I'd mount a scratch monkey.
It is worth noting though that GCC version 3 is one of the most standards-conforming C++ compilers available.
It is significantly better than Intel's on weird template and STL stuff, and a vast improvement over Microsoft's Visual C++ (which even in its latest incarnation has failed to address partial specialisation bugs dating back to vanilla 6.0.) Just because these template issues are weird, does not make them useless. On the contrary, they can allow code which is both more easily maintained and faster. For examples, consider Blitz (templated numerics library) and Boost (a very well thought out set of extensions to the standard C++ library.)
In a very significant way, the ability to sell copies of software on a profit-per-copy basis is very much a product of government fiat.
It's only through the artifical imposition of copyright that software producers can charge per copy. It's artificial, because having sold it to one party, that party would otherwise be able to give an identical product to a third party without depriving themselves of it.
Copyright is a comprimise, used to encourage the creation of intellectual property - it's perfectly legitimate to question where this comprimise ought to be taken, or whether or not it is in fact of net benefit to society.
Not that I claim that these are necessarily viable, but there do exist alternatives to the artificial imposition of copyright.
One is support through taxation in order to add to the capabilities and richness of society. I don't really expect this one to be popular on Slashdot :) But it does correspond to arts grants and the like. In fact, it is siginificantly better than a grant to support a performance or art installation: software's easy and nearly-free duplication ensure that it can benefit a very large number of people very easily.
This form of funding already exists for many people involved in the creative arts, and in a slightly different form, for those involved in research at public Universities and the like.
The second major alternative is to treat software creation like a service (which it is.) If a company or consortium feel they could benefit from the creation of software package, they could (and in fact can right now of course) go out and commision that package. So the software may be copied by third parties? I imagine in many circumstances this won't take away from the original benefit acrued by the commisioners of the software, and that in the remainder of cases it is could be protected in the same way that trade secrets already are.
Given that these two forms of IP creation are already extant in industry, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they could work for software as well.
This is only addressing one of your points, and then tangentially - but I feel it's important to keep in mind that copyright is very much an artificial construction, and as such, needs to be carefully weighed in terms of the benefits and hindrances it bestows upon society at large.
The reasons one might want to go this route rather than an iMac include
It's not perfect for every application, but it does suit some. I know I would have preferred 2 PCI slots, but there is a space restriction after all. Certainly with so much included with the motherboard, there is less need for PCI cards than usual: firewire can fulfill many of the SCSI applications; there is onboard networking; and there is onboard sound and video too, even if it's not great for gaming. For small server applications you could pop in that SCSI card; for a portable gaming box, you could find a decent PCI video card.
If I understand it correctly, what is holding iPod on Linux back is the lack of HFS+ support.
While HFS+ read support seems to be up and working (more or less), HFS+ write support is just not there. It's been on wishlists for years, but so far no luck.
Can anyone say what the stumbling block is? Is it lack of or misleading documentation? Is it a patent issue?
Is there code in Darwin that could be legally borrowed and turned into an HFS+ module?
I freely admit, when I was first introduced to RPN on a calculator, it seemed odd. Yet it's not some bizarre geek snobbery that has me say that it's worthwhile - after getting used to it (and it did not take long, really) it really is much more efficient.
Speaking of HP calculators in particular, they do or did have a couple of very strong points that tended to distinguish them from their peers:
The later HP graphic calculators also supported an algebraic entry mode for those who found it easier or more intuitive than RPN.
I'm glad your TI worked well for you! But there are good reasons why the HP calculators are so widely recommended.
It does look a bit odd, you have to admit.
I'm probably still sad over HP's decision to disband their calculator division. Still, in comparison, the TI calculators don't look as classy as (say) the HP-28C or its ilk - at least to my eyes.
A USB connection does seem like a nice feature.
Not being a TI user, I can't speak for their functionality. Do they have a RPN mode? What are the keys like? Are they easy to code for?
They're looking for investment money?
Just think of it as an innumeracy tax on
venture capitalists.
The most telling quote is, I believe,
The critics understand unchecked capitalism all too well. If monetary profit is all that matters, then the evidence clearly demonstrates that people suffer. This is yet another datum.
There is absoloutely no guarantee that an unregulated market will lead to an optimal outcome for actual people. On the contrary, some people will suffer greatly.
Frankly, we can't trust an invisible hand.
A significant problem with this sort of beta testing procedure is that other countries are likely to get shafted on the network play aspect.
If the only reasonable network play is going to be over the Battle.Net servers, and they are only testing the game with people who live on the same continent as the best connected servers, then clearly they won't be examining the game's performance under higher latency conditions.
Unless they pop well-connected Battle.Net servers all over the world - and they certainly did not for Diablo II - then they are effectively saying they just don't care about their foreign market.
Which is probably true, just not very pleasant.
Diablo II has been plagued with graphics slow downs - including obvious redundant overdraws! - that meant that it ran unsteadily even on top of the line hardware at release date.
Despite marketting it as an online game with secure servers, the servers in question were regularly overloaded and unstable. They were - and still are - not close net-wise to a large number of players, yet the gameplay is very intolerant of high latency connections to servers.
Play over a local network is plagued with inexplicable latency spikes.
It was (and with the expansion still is) a hugely popular game, yet promised continued support in the way of new runewords, cube recipies and the like have never materialised.
They changed gameplay rather than address underlying flaws in the graphics code of the game.
By all accounts, Starcraft is a well designed, well coded, and well supported game. Their more recent project - Diablo II - is good fun, but in spite of rather than because of the game's support and performance.
I am wary of Warcraft III. If it fulfills its promise it will be grand. I'll wait and see.
Of course in Australia, thanks to the effective monopoly, we pay $95/GB (US dollars.) In fact, most ISPs pay the Big Three $95/GB for their data.
It never was a reasonable data charge rate, but now it's clearly ludicrous.
Are you in Australia? (I'm presuming so!)
/27
:)
Can you tell us which ISP you're using?
Last time I looked, Telstra's BigPond Direct service over ADSL was prohibitively expensive.
A local provider offers a similar service at $100/month (but with download charges over 500MB/month and a $20/month surcharge for a maximum of 5 static IPs.) I'd miss my
network, so I've been putting off using them
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.
I want to dismiss the last point first, because it looks awfully like a strawman: most region-specific games are pretty much identical across the regions, with only names changed and language translated. Occasionally there is some censoring. If a local region version of the game satisfies local safety laws, the foreign one will too. At the end of the day, they are the same game!
There are exceptions of course, but most of the localization changes that are not direct translations, are done for marketting purposes only. Gwonga-Longa "Eye suprise!" teddy bears are completely irrelevant.
The other front - local distributors - has more weight. For starters, in Australia at least, there are already companies that do business by importing games from other regions. Their success of course is constrained by their limited market. One must ask though, in these heady days of globalization, why do local distributors have a right to make an artificial profit at the expense of their customers? Who is this helping ultimately, other than one or two distribution companies?
Look at Australia again as an example - because I live here :). Here, Dreamcast consoles and software were distributed by a company called Ozisoft, which I believe has now been acquired by Infogrames (is this true?). The local release saw: inflated local prices; roving release-dates, sometimes out by over 12 months!; an artificially imposed monopoly on net access with a single expensive ISP; a critically small number of titles; poor availability of hardware; and games that were available for less than 6 weeks before being discontinued. Some of this is sure to be a result of poor support from Sega, but a lot of the blame has to rest at Ozisoft's feet.
How did one company manage to so completely and utterly drop the bundle with the Dreamcast? Through the artificial imposition of region-locking. No one benefitted from this with the possible exception of Ozisoft, who if they did, profitted through incompetence.
Remeber that there isn't a fundamental right for companies to make a profit; elsewise I could go out there with any hare-brained scheme and watch the dollars roll in. Artificial market protection can make sense when there are industries whose loss would have a severe impact on a country's economic sustainability. Outside of this domain - and game distribution is well removed - it just rewards inefficiency and effectively forces the consuming public to pay higher prices for goods unnecessarily.
There is room to support localized versions, as game buyers will typically prefer to have a game that supports their local video standard and comes in a language they can easily understand. This is independent of region locking though! They'd still prefer it even if it were easy to play a foreign version. Region locking is there only to protect markets. Those instances where a foreign version may violate local morality laws are already covered by those laws which prevent the importation of restricted material.
Thanks for the info!
:)
It's been a while since I looked at it - when I last looked, everyone seemed to be keeping it pretty secret. Clearly no longer the case
But still, while straightforward, I'd claim it's not trivial!
Also, while of course it is easy to copy a CD-R that someone else has already produced, not that many people really do have access to the low-cost high-bandwidth connections required to download images off the net. I still suspect that illegal copying of Dreamcast software had only a minor impact when compared to the size of the market.
Where's -1 Wrong when you need it?
GDROM games are not easy to copy; very few people have the hardware and software to do it, and they are keeping pretty quiet about the details. I'm presuming the easiest option is to write something for the Dreamcast which reads a GDROM and spits the data out the serial port. Having gotten this information though, it then needs to be cut down from 1GB or so to something that will fit on a notmal CDROM. It's not trivial.
The Dreamcast as a platform died due to some combination of Sega's financial troubles and the depressing effect of Sony's PS2 marketing machine. I don't know the relative weights of these contributions, though certainly Sony's efforts were the most visible.
I still can't see any justification for region-locking of console software, other than to artifically maintain otherwise unsupportable price differentials. People will still tend to buy the localized version of a game if it's available, just because it's much easier to read documentation and in-game text that's in your own language.
On the Dreamcast at least, it's pretty clear that most people who have a mod-chip installed are doing so for the ability to play imported games, given than the pirated CDROM cuts are typically self-booting.
... to make gene therapy cheap and safe, then let's not worry too much!
History has already shown that a significant proportion of athletes are willing to risk their health in order to gain a competitive advantage. Gene therapy will be another risky medical technique that they will adopt.
Given that it is going to happen anyway, think of the benefits! With widespread use and money invested in development, it will encourage the development of gene therapies that are safer, cheaper and of potential benefit to a large proportion of the population. Why shouldn't we be fitter (or smarter, or healthier) than what our random genetic heritage dictates?
The best defense against a world of genetic haves and have nots is to encourage an environment where gene therapy is widely accepted and above all, cheap! The alternative has the technology develop more slowly, and be available only to an elite, rich few.
On another front, on the topic of fairness in sport, it's already moot on the genetic front. While the very best athletes of course dedicate their lives to their activities and are admirable examples of determination and hard work, they are also in all likelihood blessed with an advantageous genetic makeup when compared with the population at large. (This is sure to be more the case in some sports than others, of course!) Much as we would like it to be otherwise, we are not all born equal when it comes to genetic potential. One could make the case that genetic tinkering has the potential to make competition more fair rather than less.
It's not piracy, it's illegal copying.
Both are illegal, sure, but that's about all they have in common.
I really like the idea of lean and mean front end, and sophisticated rendering backend. I mean, I really like it. So why am I not using Galeon yet?
The main reason is that one has to have up to date mozilla source handy to build it, and the mozilla source code is huge. Downloading the latest mozilla source tar.gz over a modem takes about 2 hours, and for me (and most other Australians on a permanent link) would cost nearly $7 in bandwidth charges alone. It's just enormous.
Now that Galeon has hit 1.0, is it feasible for the gecko component of mozilla to be extracted and packaged as a library perhaps, to be downloaded seperately for use with galeon? I know that it would certainly encourage at least one more person to try Galeon out.