Like what though? There isn't one thats possible to legally have. Over the course of many years there isn't a single business practice that hasn't had prior art thats useful.
1. Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.
2. Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it, for the first time in many years, to get a popular brand of computers (Dell) preinstalled with something other than OS X or Windows
3. BitTorrent, Limewire, (the original) Napster and other P2P technologies, took out the last hurdle in independent content distribution, bandwidth.
4. Skype and other VOIP technologies, let people abandon phone companies for the first time while letting them talk to landlines and cell phones alike
5. AIM, MSN, IRC and other IM services took e-mail and made it much better
Ok, if so few people pirate stuff then why does the RIAA think it necessary to sue people to "send a message". Then, if most people only download few things and the network is slightly slower because of the heavy P2P user they won't feel it because they will just assume their computer is a bit slower due to anti-virus, etc.
The average customer isn't going to care if their internet is slightly slower because of a P2P user so if everything is as you say it is there is no need to cap.
Well, currently there isn't any economy that is free enough, you only need to look at the internet as a whole to see where little to no taxes, minimal government regulation, and close to universal participation gets you, and that is a ton of content made cheaply that anyone can access. Take away the government regulation (with content), abolish all internet taxes and with increased broadband adoption the internet will continue to grow and flourish. Its only with government regulation that any stagnation occurs.
Getting tiered pricing requires everyone to do it at the same time, and last I looked, the internet only ISP isn't gone yet... and won't be gone for some time.
But most people really only have access to either Comcast, Time Warner or AT&T other then the occasional local ISP (which usually has slow connection speeds because of the lack of infrastructure) or dial up (unusable to download anything really) there are many people who can't switch even if they wanted to.
Why not mandate that if Time Warner uses any public property for their lines that they must be high capacity and they must not throttle/charge based on bandwidth. While I despise regulation of any free market the fact remains that a lot of Time Warner's lines run through public property so they should answer to the people.
Or it could come from survival instinct. Even just a generation or two ago people horded things that might be needed, food could be rationed, money could become worthless, stocks could crash and banks could fail. If I horded a large amount of gold in my house I would be relatively immune if the dollar suddenly became worthless rather then the person who had their life savings purely in cash. Today we have more insurances against that sort of stuff but it could still happen.
Then why not release things with only one or two native languages in the poorer areas and release them with all sorts of languages in the wealthier areas. For example, I don't speak Japanese, I'm not going to go out of my way to buy a Japanese copy of a game that I can get in English thats more available. However, I do own several Japanese games but they aren't (or weren't for a long time in the case of Fire Emblem: Dragon of Darkness and Sword of Light) in English anywhere I'm however a fan of the series and so bought the game to play. Just because I can get Halo 3 in Mandarin and its cheaper doesn't mean I'm going to buy it because I prefer my games to be in English where possible. Plus most languages are in similar economic zones most places that speak English are relatively wealthy, etc. About the only ones that are different are French ranges from wealthy (France) to poor (in some poorer areas of Africa), and Spanish that ranges from wealthy (Spain) to poor (Cuba)
Yes is the answer. You can't assume that if there are 100,000 pirate copies that the publisher has lost that many sales. There are lots of lamers who wouldn't pay for anything. But even if 1/5 of those copies could have been legitimate then that is still a very substantial loss of revenue.
But similarly there are many cases that people have pirated games, loved them then bought newer games when they came out that were part of the series that they wouldn't have ever bought if they hadn't been exposed to it via piracy. Yes, there will be people who will never pay for anything, but there will be far more people who will use it as a demo service. Not every game system will be pirateable within a reasonable amount of time (such as the Wii which took ages to crack), and if someone became hooked on a series they would buy the other games in the series for the un-pirateble system. Its the same way with music too.
The R4 ships out of the box to play.ds files. I doubt very many people are buying it to run moonshell.
Someone is confused with the DS homebrew scene;) Basically it started with PassME, it was this circuit board that you put your DS card on top of and the DS booted using the authentication from the DS card and then had instructions to load whatever was in the Slot-2 which could be a flash cart. Then came Wi-FiMe which could send homebrew via Wi-Fi but still required the Pass-Me. After that they cracked the encryption on commercial games in order to make a no-pass device that was just a DS card that required no commercial game. Then after that came Flash Me, some libraries to make homebrew, etc. Then after that came the piracy stage, but it wasn't the original developers of PassME, Flash Me, Wi-FiMe, etc. But rather an entire different scene, the warez scene. Then basically the warez scene used all the prior work to make nice slot one devices such as the R4.
On the DS there actually *are* flash carts that don't have enough included RAM to play commercial games however they can't play some homebrew titles.
But common sense dictates that the vast majority use it for piracy.
But are the developers actually losing money from piracy? Often the people who use and develop custom firmware are some of the people who buy the most games for the system. Then there is the need for legitimate backups of your UMDs. UMDs while protected still are optical disks and as such are quite prone to scratches, etc. If the UMD filesystem isn't cracked then whenever the last UMD drive fails then the entire library of UMD games gets wiped out forever. If you can save them you ensure the survival of them for future generations or for yourself whenever your PSP breaks.
If genuine homebrewers are shocked by this accusation, there is a simple solution. Disable iso record / playback functionality in custom firmware
I haven't really been much in the PSP homebrew scene but I know that for the DS/Wii most of the time the real developers who develop the technologies do disable it, however because its an open platform any coder can code and run something that helps piracy.
Exactly, I really don't understand why consoles/movies are made with region lockout. Its totally stupid in a global economy, if I want to play a game in Japanese rather than English and buy a Japanese game, how do they lose money? They actually *gain* money, heck, most of the people who import games are the same people who spend tons of money buying and playing games.
If we had the same stupid restrictions on books as we do on movies and games, manga wouldn't have become popular and as a result anime wouldn't have either and there are both huge industries in the western world.
It loses sales because the majority of people running custom firmware do so to play pirated games. Same goes for the R4 device on the DS.
[Citation Needed]
Sure, custom firmware can be used to play pirated PSP games much as how a candle can be used to burn down a house, yet that isn't necessarily mean thats the reason for having a candle burning in a house. There are many applications such as Nintendo emulators, etc. that will never be released on the PSP with an official release yet you can get them via custom firmware.
Same thing with the DS, as someone who owns a flash cart (purchased oddly enough at Wal-Mart) there are many, many, many quality applications that are DS homebrew. Some things such as emulators will never be released for it legitimately and there are also many homebrew games that will never be officially released for it.
In most homebrew circles piracy is frowned heavily upon.
Ok, think of it this way, if in ~1998 when Apple was killing itself and Linux hadn't caught on, if MS decided "Hey, we're moving to the ARM platform" and developed chips for it that worked, etc. We would probably be using ARM right now. Same thing for Apple, if everyone started using exclusively Macs, Windows dwindled to where it was in last place, Linux made no huge leaps forward, then if Apple only developed for the Cell platform and made good Cell chips, I would think we would move to Cell CPUs similarly how we all moved to x86 CPUs because of DOS and Windows.
The build quality of hardware is improving though. In the past ~2 years the only thing that I can think of thats gone wrong on my EEE, new-ish laptop, 5 year old desktop and 7 year old desktop is that on the 5 year old one because I moved it so much the SATA cable came a bit loose and I needed to reconnect it to the HD before it would boot, but that can happen with even Apple branded hardware. And all these systems are cheap, running various OSes, etc.
Really if Apple had a range of computers that ranged from top of the line, to a cheap desktop (under $350), to cheap laptop (under $500), a cheap netbook (no more than $400) then the market for Mac clones would go away. But I can't go out and buy a really cheap desktop with OS X on it, nor can I buy a netbook with OS X preinstalled.
But if Apple dominated the OS market they could control the hardware market too. If Apple got every PC user hooked to OS X as much as every Mac fanboy, Apple could switch architectures and take the hardware market with it....
Um, in case Apple has confused you, a Mac is made of commodity hardware. Other then perhaps EFI, nothing about the computer is a Mac, a Mac is simply a configuration of a PC installed with OS X by default.
Sure, OS X was designed with only one or two configurations for a Mac but with third party drivers its possible to extend it to almost any modern configuration in existence. There is nothing special about a Mac.
The thing is though, OS X already runs on lower hardware. Officially Leopard can be run on a 2001 G4. To put that in perspective thats about an early P4 in terms of age. Assuming that Apple's hardware is of amazing quality thats still way slower then the typical computer. Apple has things that few people really need such as DDR3 RAM. Sure, its faster but its also way more expensive.
If Apple officially supports running Leopard on hardware made in 2001, I would think they couldn't lose any customers by having them unofficially install it on hardware many times more powerful than that.
No, no there isn't too many of us. If it wasn't for corrupt government + bureaucracy no one would need to be starving in the world. The earth has plenty of room to grow plus birth rates are declining and birth control is cheaper and more effective than ever.
It is not a large speedup because Vista isn't all that slow compared to XP.
Yes, yes it is. Lets see, I had a Intel Cellron M at 1.5 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM laptop with XP pre installed on it. I also had a Pentium Dual Core 1.6 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM with Vista basic pre installed on that laptop. Which one had the higher specs? The Vista laptop had faster RAM, a faster CPU, better integrated graphics, and should have ran Vista perfectly. However it failed miserably, lockups every few seconds, even checking e-mail or browsing the internet seemed to take forever, on the other hand the XP laptop ran quickly with no slowdowns with more programs running in the background (such as IMs, etc.) while the Vista laptop had only the base Windows system with all OEM bloatware stripped out running only IE and Windows Mail. Yes, theres a huge difference between XP and Vista speedwise.
About the only thing that AOL really has that are of any worth are AIM and a few blogs such as Engdaget. Other then that they have ruined their reputation too much to be profitable in any other thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Like what though? There isn't one thats possible to legally have. Over the course of many years there isn't a single business practice that hasn't had prior art thats useful.
But similarly we are free to choose our own employer or become self employed.
1. Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.
2. Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it, for the first time in many years, to get a popular brand of computers (Dell) preinstalled with something other than OS X or Windows
3. BitTorrent, Limewire, (the original) Napster and other P2P technologies, took out the last hurdle in independent content distribution, bandwidth.
4. Skype and other VOIP technologies, let people abandon phone companies for the first time while letting them talk to landlines and cell phones alike
5. AIM, MSN, IRC and other IM services took e-mail and made it much better
Ok, if so few people pirate stuff then why does the RIAA think it necessary to sue people to "send a message". Then, if most people only download few things and the network is slightly slower because of the heavy P2P user they won't feel it because they will just assume their computer is a bit slower due to anti-virus, etc.
The average customer isn't going to care if their internet is slightly slower because of a P2P user so if everything is as you say it is there is no need to cap.
Well, currently there isn't any economy that is free enough, you only need to look at the internet as a whole to see where little to no taxes, minimal government regulation, and close to universal participation gets you, and that is a ton of content made cheaply that anyone can access. Take away the government regulation (with content), abolish all internet taxes and with increased broadband adoption the internet will continue to grow and flourish. Its only with government regulation that any stagnation occurs.
Getting tiered pricing requires everyone to do it at the same time, and last I looked, the internet only ISP isn't gone yet... and won't be gone for some time.
But most people really only have access to either Comcast, Time Warner or AT&T other then the occasional local ISP (which usually has slow connection speeds because of the lack of infrastructure) or dial up (unusable to download anything really) there are many people who can't switch even if they wanted to.
Why not mandate that if Time Warner uses any public property for their lines that they must be high capacity and they must not throttle/charge based on bandwidth. While I despise regulation of any free market the fact remains that a lot of Time Warner's lines run through public property so they should answer to the people.
Or it could come from survival instinct. Even just a generation or two ago people horded things that might be needed, food could be rationed, money could become worthless, stocks could crash and banks could fail. If I horded a large amount of gold in my house I would be relatively immune if the dollar suddenly became worthless rather then the person who had their life savings purely in cash. Today we have more insurances against that sort of stuff but it could still happen.
Put a customized Linux distro on each one with people's names as login names, etc.
...And for those who don't know Trident is used a lot in help files so it is kinda necessary
Then why not release things with only one or two native languages in the poorer areas and release them with all sorts of languages in the wealthier areas. For example, I don't speak Japanese, I'm not going to go out of my way to buy a Japanese copy of a game that I can get in English thats more available. However, I do own several Japanese games but they aren't (or weren't for a long time in the case of Fire Emblem: Dragon of Darkness and Sword of Light) in English anywhere I'm however a fan of the series and so bought the game to play. Just because I can get Halo 3 in Mandarin and its cheaper doesn't mean I'm going to buy it because I prefer my games to be in English where possible. Plus most languages are in similar economic zones most places that speak English are relatively wealthy, etc. About the only ones that are different are French ranges from wealthy (France) to poor (in some poorer areas of Africa), and Spanish that ranges from wealthy (Spain) to poor (Cuba)
Yes is the answer. You can't assume that if there are 100,000 pirate copies that the publisher has lost that many sales. There are lots of lamers who wouldn't pay for anything. But even if 1/5 of those copies could have been legitimate then that is still a very substantial loss of revenue.
But similarly there are many cases that people have pirated games, loved them then bought newer games when they came out that were part of the series that they wouldn't have ever bought if they hadn't been exposed to it via piracy. Yes, there will be people who will never pay for anything, but there will be far more people who will use it as a demo service. Not every game system will be pirateable within a reasonable amount of time (such as the Wii which took ages to crack), and if someone became hooked on a series they would buy the other games in the series for the un-pirateble system. Its the same way with music too.
The R4 ships out of the box to play .ds files. I doubt very many people are buying it to run moonshell.
Someone is confused with the DS homebrew scene ;) Basically it started with PassME, it was this circuit board that you put your DS card on top of and the DS booted using the authentication from the DS card and then had instructions to load whatever was in the Slot-2 which could be a flash cart. Then came Wi-FiMe which could send homebrew via Wi-Fi but still required the Pass-Me. After that they cracked the encryption on commercial games in order to make a no-pass device that was just a DS card that required no commercial game. Then after that came Flash Me, some libraries to make homebrew, etc. Then after that came the piracy stage, but it wasn't the original developers of PassME, Flash Me, Wi-FiMe, etc. But rather an entire different scene, the warez scene. Then basically the warez scene used all the prior work to make nice slot one devices such as the R4.
But common sense dictates that the vast majority use it for piracy.
But are the developers actually losing money from piracy? Often the people who use and develop custom firmware are some of the people who buy the most games for the system. Then there is the need for legitimate backups of your UMDs. UMDs while protected still are optical disks and as such are quite prone to scratches, etc. If the UMD filesystem isn't cracked then whenever the last UMD drive fails then the entire library of UMD games gets wiped out forever. If you can save them you ensure the survival of them for future generations or for yourself whenever your PSP breaks.
If genuine homebrewers are shocked by this accusation, there is a simple solution. Disable iso record / playback functionality in custom firmware
I haven't really been much in the PSP homebrew scene but I know that for the DS/Wii most of the time the real developers who develop the technologies do disable it, however because its an open platform any coder can code and run something that helps piracy.
Exactly, I really don't understand why consoles/movies are made with region lockout. Its totally stupid in a global economy, if I want to play a game in Japanese rather than English and buy a Japanese game, how do they lose money? They actually *gain* money, heck, most of the people who import games are the same people who spend tons of money buying and playing games.
If we had the same stupid restrictions on books as we do on movies and games, manga wouldn't have become popular and as a result anime wouldn't have either and there are both huge industries in the western world.
It loses sales because the majority of people running custom firmware do so to play pirated games. Same goes for the R4 device on the DS.
[Citation Needed]
Sure, custom firmware can be used to play pirated PSP games much as how a candle can be used to burn down a house, yet that isn't necessarily mean thats the reason for having a candle burning in a house. There are many applications such as Nintendo emulators, etc. that will never be released on the PSP with an official release yet you can get them via custom firmware.
Same thing with the DS, as someone who owns a flash cart (purchased oddly enough at Wal-Mart) there are many, many, many quality applications that are DS homebrew. Some things such as emulators will never be released for it legitimately and there are also many homebrew games that will never be officially released for it.
In most homebrew circles piracy is frowned heavily upon.
Seriously Google how hard can it be? Just use GTK, its light, useful and even a weekend coder can use it.
Ok, think of it this way, if in ~1998 when Apple was killing itself and Linux hadn't caught on, if MS decided "Hey, we're moving to the ARM platform" and developed chips for it that worked, etc. We would probably be using ARM right now. Same thing for Apple, if everyone started using exclusively Macs, Windows dwindled to where it was in last place, Linux made no huge leaps forward, then if Apple only developed for the Cell platform and made good Cell chips, I would think we would move to Cell CPUs similarly how we all moved to x86 CPUs because of DOS and Windows.
The build quality of hardware is improving though. In the past ~2 years the only thing that I can think of thats gone wrong on my EEE, new-ish laptop, 5 year old desktop and 7 year old desktop is that on the 5 year old one because I moved it so much the SATA cable came a bit loose and I needed to reconnect it to the HD before it would boot, but that can happen with even Apple branded hardware. And all these systems are cheap, running various OSes, etc.
Really if Apple had a range of computers that ranged from top of the line, to a cheap desktop (under $350), to cheap laptop (under $500), a cheap netbook (no more than $400) then the market for Mac clones would go away. But I can't go out and buy a really cheap desktop with OS X on it, nor can I buy a netbook with OS X preinstalled.
But if Apple dominated the OS market they could control the hardware market too. If Apple got every PC user hooked to OS X as much as every Mac fanboy, Apple could switch architectures and take the hardware market with it....
Um, in case Apple has confused you, a Mac is made of commodity hardware. Other then perhaps EFI, nothing about the computer is a Mac, a Mac is simply a configuration of a PC installed with OS X by default.
Sure, OS X was designed with only one or two configurations for a Mac but with third party drivers its possible to extend it to almost any modern configuration in existence. There is nothing special about a Mac.
The thing is though, OS X already runs on lower hardware. Officially Leopard can be run on a 2001 G4. To put that in perspective thats about an early P4 in terms of age. Assuming that Apple's hardware is of amazing quality thats still way slower then the typical computer. Apple has things that few people really need such as DDR3 RAM. Sure, its faster but its also way more expensive.
If Apple officially supports running Leopard on hardware made in 2001, I would think they couldn't lose any customers by having them unofficially install it on hardware many times more powerful than that.
No, no there isn't too many of us. If it wasn't for corrupt government + bureaucracy no one would need to be starving in the world. The earth has plenty of room to grow plus birth rates are declining and birth control is cheaper and more effective than ever.
It is not a large speedup because Vista isn't all that slow compared to XP.
Yes, yes it is. Lets see, I had a Intel Cellron M at 1.5 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM laptop with XP pre installed on it. I also had a Pentium Dual Core 1.6 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM with Vista basic pre installed on that laptop. Which one had the higher specs? The Vista laptop had faster RAM, a faster CPU, better integrated graphics, and should have ran Vista perfectly. However it failed miserably, lockups every few seconds, even checking e-mail or browsing the internet seemed to take forever, on the other hand the XP laptop ran quickly with no slowdowns with more programs running in the background (such as IMs, etc.) while the Vista laptop had only the base Windows system with all OEM bloatware stripped out running only IE and Windows Mail. Yes, theres a huge difference between XP and Vista speedwise.
...And how many of the participants were bots or spammers?
About the only thing that AOL really has that are of any worth are AIM and a few blogs such as Engdaget. Other then that they have ruined their reputation too much to be profitable in any other thing.