Well, as the links in the article pointed out, "World of Goo" made the Top 10 Sales list in spite of (or perhaps because of) the 90% piracy rate. They got emails from people who bought the game after trying it pirated, and I'm sure there were others who did the same but didn't bother to fess up to the pirating.
World of Goo being DRM free was an experiment, and it turned into one of their best sellers, even if it was also heavily copied. It may seem a bitter trade, but pirates are also publicity. I got World of Goo with the last bundle. Would I have purchased it separately? No, probably not. It was fun, but not terribly compelling.
Brighter Minds might have gone bankrupt (due to their other business ventures) in spite of the success of World of Goo, not because of the piracy.
Yeah, I found the "twinview" issue on a lot of Linux games - indie or not.
Does anyone know of a way to lie to the games as to what the desktop dimensions are? I've used google before without much luck on the matter, but hopefully this crowd can point us in the right direction.
You joke, but once, long ago (late 80's), I was working as a gofer in a computer department. One of my tasks was to do the initial set up and check of computers that were brought in for repair. I set up one and fiddled with a few things and it seemed to work perfectly. I called my boss over and asked what the repair ticket listed as the problem. "Bright horizontal lines on the display." It took a few moments, but suddenly it hit me. I reached over turned the brightness all the way up, revealing the beam retrace lines. "THOSE horizontal lines?" Yeah, those people got charged the standard bench fee. They were constantly bringing in the computer over dumb things like that...
Excellent question and good point. I guess I'm not really protecting against a true man-in-the-middle attack who has dedicated time and resources. It'll stop eavesdroppers, though. For now, and as long as my website isn't a money-maker and self-certified sites cause browsers to throw up frightening warnings, that will have to be good enough. I'll still suggest people don't use the same password on two sites.
Three generation better than ones "currently in use today." The ones they commonly use today are a couple generations old. Southwest Flight 812, which recently lost a bit of skin, was built in 1996. 737's in general started being built in 1968 and the technology hasn't changed that much.
I agree that the shows would have to be static, but I am skeptical that it is a big problem for the vast majority of shows. Most shows you watch them when they are current and never again. Especially shows like "Survivor" which are high on the watch-once list. In the model I'm suggesting, reselling the ad space becomes much more of a moot point. Broadcast stations could air local ads, the torrents would focus on large, national brands. There are plenty of companies that have out-lasted even the best sit-coms.
I don't like the idea of a dedicated client, though. Too often Linux gets ignored. Yeah, it's a marginal market, but I'm in it and I'm thrilled that many sites (ESPN) will stream to it quite happily. That's interesting having a dedicated decoder... Do you mean that you would get an encrypted file, and watching the commercial would decrypt it forever? I'm not sure that's better than just having commercials in a DRM-free file...
Some people would skip commercials, sure, but most people don't bother. The people who would rather skip the commercials and get annoyed by being forced to watch them are, I suspect, a poor market anyway.
I run a Really Small website that I'm trying to start up (and I'm not going to plug it, I'm weird like that). I don't really want to pay for an SSL cert since none of the data on the site is useful to hackers or criminals. The one exception is: passwords. The fact that people reuse passwords all over the place gives every website operator a great responsibility to protect passwords. Salts, modern hashes in the database, complexity requirements, all of it is moot if a MITM can just look at the raw login form data.
I WILL plug http://www.jcryption.org/ as a very nice way to do encryption for login forms. PHP generates the public key, sends it with the javascript in the form, all the form data is encrypted by the browser itself before sending it to the host.
I do that too, and I hope the people who produce TV shows figure out where they are going wrong.
To the TV viewer, the marginal cost of a TV show is $0. People pay for cable/internet service, but other than pay-per-view, they expect to be able to watch any channel at no additional cost. Sure, it costs money to make a show, but the consumer is conditioned for it to be free. It's time for show producers to figure out how to deliver their content for free...
How? Well, advertising. I download the versions of the show with the ads cut out, but only because (legal or not) those are the only ones available to download free. The show distributors could easily create the show with commercials already in it and release their own torrents and track the downloads to give advertisers a way to know about how many viewers there were. I would download a torrent from the actual producer WITH ads instead of the pirated copies with various local station logos and varying quality that you can find these days. (I've gotten torrents with local storm warnings etc in them.)
Another option is to look back to the Golden Age of Television and have the actors promote products themselves. If you want to cut out commercials, go with product placement. The quality of "DWTS" or "Survivor" would be unaffected by hawking a few products. Or, go with the soccer model and have ads on screen during the action.
Distribution by torrent is cheap, and if you run the tracker, you can keep reasonable distribution counts and charge advertisers accordingly.
It was Epsilon's systems that were compromised and their whole purpose is to send out subscriber emails. Epsilon was never given any information except what was used to generate those emails: mostly names and email addresses. One exception was the number of "member rewards" points for a company who presumably sends out automated emails with "Hi [your name]! You have [N] rewards points to spend!"
I don't trust that the sensitive information is secure due to extra security around it at Epsilon, but I do trust it is secure due to the force of laziness. Why a company construct the tables or spend the bandwidth to send all that sensitive information to a bulk mailing company? It's risky, costly, unnecessary, and more work.
Some people will doubtless fall victim to targeted phishing, but that's the only way the breach will result in loss of more sensitive information.
Ok, see, it's like this... The phone could be part of the backup plan in case the card is lost! You wouldn't have to use one of your other, lower rewards cards. Of course, the phone KNOWS where it is and where you are making the purchase, so you could configure it so that if you are at a gas station it uses one card, a grocery store would default to another card. You could even program in custom overrides based on GPS location! There's an endless amount of fiddling, twiddling, and customizing you could do! Why should you take out your wallet when everyone already has their phone out? Save wear and tear on the wallet leather! Mine only last a decade or so under normal conditions and phones are SO much more durable than that.
There could still be troubles though. I can envision a business person saying "oh shoot, I paid for that with the wrong phone..."
As for driver's license, there are densely populated areas (eg DC, NYC) where most of the people do not drive most of the time.
This has been my sarcastic way of agreeing with you:) At least one of my cards has that "blink" thing which I forget about and end up swiping the card anyway for all the difference it makes.
Funny, most of the time I use a credit card there is an informational display with a UI that asks "is this amount correct" and gets a signature. Even gas pumps print out receipts. I'm not a Luddite at all and love tech, but this does seem like a complex solution in search of a problem.
I might appreciate the walled garden a little more... if I didn't have an iPhone 3G on my desk. It is only JUST out of its two-year service agreement with AT&T. I'm sure there are other people who bought new 3G phones who are still under contract but out of support.
What phone am I going to get next? Well, I crossed iPhone 4 off the list already, so I'll probably get an Android device and reconsider Apple when the iPhone 5 or 6 comes out.
Now I get the reference to "creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic..." But those CSI writers are laughing all the way to the "ATM machine!"
A lot of the other terrible movies were using fantasy computer nonsense. Like Hackers, it's terrible sure, but it's so unrealistic in general that it doesn't really register as bad or misleading about computers. In Independence Day, aliens invade earth and a computer is poorly used as a plot device but that only strains credulity because we don't ask why an alien invading fleet spread out around the planet has to use our satellites to bounce their signals around.
As my brother always asks when I nit-pick, "is this where the movie stopped being believable to you?"
The CSI takes the cake for TRYING to be realistic and bombing miserably. I hope the writers were having a contest to see who could get the dumbest line broadcast.
My wife noted this and said "You just love to screw up your computer and fix it, don't you?" The answer: Yeah, basically I do.
Uninteresting story: a screwed up computer was how I knew to leave law school. I worked as a software engineer for more than a decade before I decided to investigate one of my life's other interests: law. I really enjoyed studying it, but there were certain aspects I didn't like so much, like writing papers. One day, in the middle of a paper, my desktop hard drive died. I had backups, of course, and I had a laptop with a version of the paper that was less than an hour old. I was faced with a decision: continue working on the paper on the laptop or drive to a shop to get a new hard drive and restore my desktop to its former glory. The paper was late and I withdrew from law school right before the end of my first semester and went back to software. It was really wonderful to KNOW that I was doing what was best for me.
Before that, I overheard a woman in the lounge lamenting that her computer died (someone spilled water in her keyboard). I offered to help and she accepted, though she was worried. Right there in the lounge I whipped out a couple tools from my bag and removed her hard drive. Apparently, law students are impressed by that kind of thing. (What, you DON'T carry screwdrivers to class?!) I recovered all her data and she didn't miss a beat in class.
Off topic? Isn't this reminiscing about old school? I guess my point is that I'm with you on the love of fixing what's not right. As Red Green says "if it ain't broke, you're not tryin'!"
Don't feel bad... I GET the reference and it left me wondering what his problem was. It distracted from his message and the reference doesn't actually make sense in the context of the article.
It made me want to exclaim "there's no crying in RIM development!" (An equally out of place A League of Their Own reference.)
If "retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode" is not considered "dumping" X, well, then alright, maybe it's a semantic difference...
Yeah, the buttons on the side "Unity" interface is not ready yet. I stuck with 10.04 LTS because of that. They have made great strides with 11.04, but I suspect it'll be 12.04 LTS before I'm really happy with the changes.
servers != web servers. Lots of companies, particularly small ones, have an in-house Windows server and pay to have their website hosted elsewhere. I don't know the stats, but when I was looking for a Windows web hosting company for an ASP site that needed to relocate, it was easier and much cheaper to find a LAMP host. So much so that I converted the site to PHP. (It was a small, simple site that mostly used ASP to include header and footer files - an easy thing to rewrite.) It is possible to be serving up the most web pages, or even have the most web servers, without having a majority of the "servers."
As for what else you say, I agree. You can tell from my first line that I'm a CS nerd, but I'd really like to have an alternative to Windows for family members. My desktop is Ubuntu 10.04 and I have been struggling to get the alpha of 11.04 working well enough to be truly useful. It is an alpha, and I like that they are moving from Xorg to Wayland, but things do not "just work" on it. Yet. It has a lot of potential, but I'm holding my breath to see how things turn out in April.
It's late, so pardon me taking you TOO seriously, but the phone, in any orientation, knows which way "down" is. See, there's this force called "gravity" which acts exactly like accelerating away from the center of the earth. It's how phones know which way you have 'em oriented. If the measured acceleration sharply lessens then increases then you are dipping into a pothole. If the acceleration is the other way around, you've run over a... speed bump.
If the app's voice recognition software catches you saying "oh shit, do you think anyone saw that" they know to send the police.
From the article: "Kristin Ann Stahlbush was investigated by the Ohio Bar Association and suspended for two years." Comical follow-up: "She states that she completed her two year suspension in just under 8 months."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as the links in the article pointed out, "World of Goo" made the Top 10 Sales list in spite of (or perhaps because of) the 90% piracy rate. They got emails from people who bought the game after trying it pirated, and I'm sure there were others who did the same but didn't bother to fess up to the pirating.
World of Goo being DRM free was an experiment, and it turned into one of their best sellers, even if it was also heavily copied. It may seem a bitter trade, but pirates are also publicity. I got World of Goo with the last bundle. Would I have purchased it separately? No, probably not. It was fun, but not terribly compelling.
Brighter Minds might have gone bankrupt (due to their other business ventures) in spite of the success of World of Goo, not because of the piracy.
Yeah, I found the "twinview" issue on a lot of Linux games - indie or not.
Does anyone know of a way to lie to the games as to what the desktop dimensions are? I've used google before without much luck on the matter, but hopefully this crowd can point us in the right direction.
You joke, but once, long ago (late 80's), I was working as a gofer in a computer department. One of my tasks was to do the initial set up and check of computers that were brought in for repair. I set up one and fiddled with a few things and it seemed to work perfectly. I called my boss over and asked what the repair ticket listed as the problem. "Bright horizontal lines on the display." It took a few moments, but suddenly it hit me. I reached over turned the brightness all the way up, revealing the beam retrace lines. "THOSE horizontal lines?" Yeah, those people got charged the standard bench fee. They were constantly bringing in the computer over dumb things like that...
Excellent question and good point. I guess I'm not really protecting against a true man-in-the-middle attack who has dedicated time and resources. It'll stop eavesdroppers, though. For now, and as long as my website isn't a money-maker and self-certified sites cause browsers to throw up frightening warnings, that will have to be good enough. I'll still suggest people don't use the same password on two sites.
Three generation better than ones "currently in use today." The ones they commonly use today are a couple generations old. Southwest Flight 812, which recently lost a bit of skin, was built in 1996. 737's in general started being built in 1968 and the technology hasn't changed that much.
I agree that the shows would have to be static, but I am skeptical that it is a big problem for the vast majority of shows. Most shows you watch them when they are current and never again. Especially shows like "Survivor" which are high on the watch-once list. In the model I'm suggesting, reselling the ad space becomes much more of a moot point. Broadcast stations could air local ads, the torrents would focus on large, national brands. There are plenty of companies that have out-lasted even the best sit-coms.
I don't like the idea of a dedicated client, though. Too often Linux gets ignored. Yeah, it's a marginal market, but I'm in it and I'm thrilled that many sites (ESPN) will stream to it quite happily. That's interesting having a dedicated decoder... Do you mean that you would get an encrypted file, and watching the commercial would decrypt it forever? I'm not sure that's better than just having commercials in a DRM-free file...
Some people would skip commercials, sure, but most people don't bother. The people who would rather skip the commercials and get annoyed by being forced to watch them are, I suspect, a poor market anyway.
I run a Really Small website that I'm trying to start up (and I'm not going to plug it, I'm weird like that). I don't really want to pay for an SSL cert since none of the data on the site is useful to hackers or criminals. The one exception is: passwords. The fact that people reuse passwords all over the place gives every website operator a great responsibility to protect passwords. Salts, modern hashes in the database, complexity requirements, all of it is moot if a MITM can just look at the raw login form data.
I WILL plug http://www.jcryption.org/ as a very nice way to do encryption for login forms. PHP generates the public key, sends it with the javascript in the form, all the form data is encrypted by the browser itself before sending it to the host.
I do that too, and I hope the people who produce TV shows figure out where they are going wrong.
To the TV viewer, the marginal cost of a TV show is $0. People pay for cable/internet service, but other than pay-per-view, they expect to be able to watch any channel at no additional cost. Sure, it costs money to make a show, but the consumer is conditioned for it to be free. It's time for show producers to figure out how to deliver their content for free...
How? Well, advertising. I download the versions of the show with the ads cut out, but only because (legal or not) those are the only ones available to download free. The show distributors could easily create the show with commercials already in it and release their own torrents and track the downloads to give advertisers a way to know about how many viewers there were. I would download a torrent from the actual producer WITH ads instead of the pirated copies with various local station logos and varying quality that you can find these days. (I've gotten torrents with local storm warnings etc in them.)
Another option is to look back to the Golden Age of Television and have the actors promote products themselves. If you want to cut out commercials, go with product placement. The quality of "DWTS" or "Survivor" would be unaffected by hawking a few products. Or, go with the soccer model and have ads on screen during the action.
Distribution by torrent is cheap, and if you run the tracker, you can keep reasonable distribution counts and charge advertisers accordingly.
Isn't the book's title a pretty good "executive summary" of the book itself? How do you fluff that out to 104 pages?
It was Epsilon's systems that were compromised and their whole purpose is to send out subscriber emails. Epsilon was never given any information except what was used to generate those emails: mostly names and email addresses. One exception was the number of "member rewards" points for a company who presumably sends out automated emails with "Hi [your name]! You have [N] rewards points to spend!"
I don't trust that the sensitive information is secure due to extra security around it at Epsilon, but I do trust it is secure due to the force of laziness. Why a company construct the tables or spend the bandwidth to send all that sensitive information to a bulk mailing company? It's risky, costly, unnecessary, and more work.
Some people will doubtless fall victim to targeted phishing, but that's the only way the breach will result in loss of more sensitive information.
Ok, see, it's like this... The phone could be part of the backup plan in case the card is lost! You wouldn't have to use one of your other, lower rewards cards.
Of course, the phone KNOWS where it is and where you are making the purchase, so you could configure it so that if you are at a gas station it uses one card, a grocery store would default to another card. You could even program in custom overrides based on GPS location! There's an endless amount of fiddling, twiddling, and customizing you could do!
Why should you take out your wallet when everyone already has their phone out? Save wear and tear on the wallet leather! Mine only last a decade or so under normal conditions and phones are SO much more durable than that.
There could still be troubles though. I can envision a business person saying "oh shoot, I paid for that with the wrong phone..."
As for driver's license, there are densely populated areas (eg DC, NYC) where most of the people do not drive most of the time.
This has been my sarcastic way of agreeing with you :) At least one of my cards has that "blink" thing which I forget about and end up swiping the card anyway for all the difference it makes.
Funny, most of the time I use a credit card there is an informational display with a UI that asks "is this amount correct" and gets a signature. Even gas pumps print out receipts.
I'm not a Luddite at all and love tech, but this does seem like a complex solution in search of a problem.
I might appreciate the walled garden a little more... if I didn't have an iPhone 3G on my desk. It is only JUST out of its two-year service agreement with AT&T. I'm sure there are other people who bought new 3G phones who are still under contract but out of support.
What phone am I going to get next? Well, I crossed iPhone 4 off the list already, so I'll probably get an Android device and reconsider Apple when the iPhone 5 or 6 comes out.
Now I get the reference to "creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic..."
But those CSI writers are laughing all the way to the "ATM machine!"
A lot of the other terrible movies were using fantasy computer nonsense. Like Hackers, it's terrible sure, but it's so unrealistic in general that it doesn't really register as bad or misleading about computers. In Independence Day, aliens invade earth and a computer is poorly used as a plot device but that only strains credulity because we don't ask why an alien invading fleet spread out around the planet has to use our satellites to bounce their signals around.
As my brother always asks when I nit-pick, "is this where the movie stopped being believable to you?"
The CSI takes the cake for TRYING to be realistic and bombing miserably. I hope the writers were having a contest to see who could get the dumbest line broadcast.
1. Microsoft stops patching IE6.
2. Find remote code execution exploit.
3. Deploy Trojan Updater to remove IE6 and install new browser.
A browser that automatically updates itself without asking would be a good choice for any stragglers at this point.
Pot, meet kettle....
Aw, does belittling others help you feel better about your choice of OS? You must be a Mac user
Exactly! See, I have TWO Macs! The minis make great TVPCs. I primarily run Ubuntu or XP, however. I love and hate them all...
My wife noted this and said "You just love to screw up your computer and fix it, don't you?" The answer: Yeah, basically I do.
Uninteresting story: a screwed up computer was how I knew to leave law school. I worked as a software engineer for more than a decade before I decided to investigate one of my life's other interests: law. I really enjoyed studying it, but there were certain aspects I didn't like so much, like writing papers. One day, in the middle of a paper, my desktop hard drive died. I had backups, of course, and I had a laptop with a version of the paper that was less than an hour old. I was faced with a decision: continue working on the paper on the laptop or drive to a shop to get a new hard drive and restore my desktop to its former glory.
The paper was late and I withdrew from law school right before the end of my first semester and went back to software. It was really wonderful to KNOW that I was doing what was best for me.
Before that, I overheard a woman in the lounge lamenting that her computer died (someone spilled water in her keyboard). I offered to help and she accepted, though she was worried. Right there in the lounge I whipped out a couple tools from my bag and removed her hard drive. Apparently, law students are impressed by that kind of thing. (What, you DON'T carry screwdrivers to class?!) I recovered all her data and she didn't miss a beat in class.
Off topic? Isn't this reminiscing about old school? I guess my point is that I'm with you on the love of fixing what's not right. As Red Green says "if it ain't broke, you're not tryin'!"
When I see Linux, I think fat 30 year old lonely virgins who still live at home with mummy.
Aw, does belittling others help you feel better about your choice of OS? You must be a Mac user...
You can't spell "Mac" without "AC!"
Don't feel bad... I GET the reference and it left me wondering what his problem was. It distracted from his message and the reference doesn't actually make sense in the context of the article.
It made me want to exclaim "there's no crying in RIM development!" (An equally out of place A League of Their Own reference.)
Unless I misunderstand, Ubuntu would like very much to replace X with Wayland.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
If "retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode" is not considered "dumping" X, well, then alright, maybe it's a semantic difference...
Yeah, the buttons on the side "Unity" interface is not ready yet. I stuck with 10.04 LTS because of that. They have made great strides with 11.04, but I suspect it'll be 12.04 LTS before I'm really happy with the changes.
servers != web servers.
Lots of companies, particularly small ones, have an in-house Windows server and pay to have their website hosted elsewhere. I don't know the stats, but when I was looking for a Windows web hosting company for an ASP site that needed to relocate, it was easier and much cheaper to find a LAMP host. So much so that I converted the site to PHP. (It was a small, simple site that mostly used ASP to include header and footer files - an easy thing to rewrite.) It is possible to be serving up the most web pages, or even have the most web servers, without having a majority of the "servers."
As for what else you say, I agree. You can tell from my first line that I'm a CS nerd, but I'd really like to have an alternative to Windows for family members. My desktop is Ubuntu 10.04 and I have been struggling to get the alpha of 11.04 working well enough to be truly useful. It is an alpha, and I like that they are moving from Xorg to Wayland, but things do not "just work" on it. Yet. It has a lot of potential, but I'm holding my breath to see how things turn out in April.
It's late, so pardon me taking you TOO seriously, but the phone, in any orientation, knows which way "down" is. See, there's this force called "gravity" which acts exactly like accelerating away from the center of the earth. It's how phones know which way you have 'em oriented. If the measured acceleration sharply lessens then increases then you are dipping into a pothole. If the acceleration is the other way around, you've run over a... speed bump.
If the app's voice recognition software catches you saying "oh shit, do you think anyone saw that" they know to send the police.
From the article:
"Kristin Ann Stahlbush was investigated by the Ohio Bar Association and suspended for two years."
Comical follow-up:
"She states that she completed her two year suspension in just under 8 months."
Wait a minute, lawyers are upset about systematic over-billing?
I'd say this is a "the pot calling the kettle black" moment, but it's more like "tar calling granite black."
I have no doubt that the lawyers will bill AT&T for every minute of those 10 days they "monitored" that iPhone...