1. Linux is a choice for people whose work days don't involve the use of a Windows-only app. Try getting an architect to ditch his copy of Windows and Autocad for Linux.
2. If they repackaged Windows 3.1 and marketed it, it would either be insanely fast (The OS came on 4 or 5 floppies for crying out loud), or just not function because the new crop of 64-bit processors can't run 16-bit apps IIRC. Then you wouldn't have Vista sluggishness, you'd have this-won't-boot issues a mile long.
While I agree with your theory, i don't think that a negligible difference in piracy is going to help the situation.
It can be argued in one sense that "DRM hasn't altered the piracy rates, so why spend all kinds of cash to license a system that doesn't help us at all?" SecuROM's answer will be "Because there's alot more casual copying going on. People aren't going to The Pirate Bay to get a copy because they're just getting it from Phil, who got it from Jessie, who got it from Shanelle, who got it from Derek who got it in Chinatown on a street corner."
I agree that I have all intentions of purchasing the game - retail - full price - for the sake of principle. It is the single best way for me to show the companies that it is *more* profitable for them to ship DRM-free games (or at least client-side DRM, IMO UT2004 and UT3's preventing duplicate keys from logging in is an acceptable measure as it doesn't affect my machine at all).
I'll even take it a step further and recommend this game on amazon and give it a 5 star rating. This way, we can show that this works in reverse, too.
I've got plenty of respect for a company that is willing to take the first step in righting the wrong that is DRM. The way I've always seen it, both sides have a responsibility. It is my responsibility to keep my copy in my possession, not be handing out copies to everyone else, and not to steal it off a store shelf. It is there responsibility to take reasonable measures to ensure that I can use their product properly. Since they showed good faith in us and fulfilled their end of the bargain (well, at least took steps to not introduce technology which is known to cause issues), I feel that it is our turn to reciprocate and show them that if you don't assume that we're criminals, we won't act like them.
Except that although nobody exactly knows what a foton is, it is known not to be an electron. And these transistors happen to be designed for the latter...
It's a flat mattress that sits very low to the ground and are very popular in Japan. Everyone knows that!
There are only a handful of reasons why iphone users wouldn't buy an iphone app:
1. They don't know about the application. AirSharing took care of this one quick, fast, and in a hurry.
2. They don't need the function. You will never win these users unless their situation changes.
3. They would like the function, but the user does not want to pay your price. These people will simply do without your app until the price is lowered or...
4. The user has found a lower cost, freeware alternative. If you're selling an app for $10 that does the exact same thing as a free app, then you need to figure out what makes your app worth $10.
As has been said, this is the issue across every market segment, IP or tangible, goods or services.
I seriously don't know why these companies don't do time-bombing demos. SwirlyMMS has done it with great success. They charge $8 for an app that addresses one of the biggest gripes about the iphone, give you 14 days to make sure that you can configure it properly, and last I checked they did a pretty good job at it. If they can implement all of that - without the App Store - then why can't all these other developers who are writing apps?
because if you send a cease-and-decist letter threatening a lawsuit and don't follow through, then it's extortion. Not that they're not guilty of that to begin with, but if they were to threaten a lawsuit without filing one, not even their army of lawyers could prove them innocent.
is the fact that the means of aggregating the facts are different. In the mid 1980's my dad worked at an insurance company (a pretty big one, too) that had purchased one copy of Wordperfect 5.1 for an entire office floor; the number of copies in the building could be counted on one hand. Who's going to report that?
All it takes now is some loose counting on the top 10-20 torrent sites and that's where the numbers come from. It's likely that piracy based on empirical numbers (i.e. literal number of pirated copies in use) has gone up based on the much higher number of people using them, but percentage wise (pirated copies over purchased copies) has probably gone down as a whole. While centralized sourcing has gone up (one purchase, 100 limewire downloads), disk swapping has likely gone down (100 purchases, each person giving the disk to two friends, who then each give copies to two friends equals 700 installs)
1. The RIAA has a guaranteed stream of income. I'm not terribly thrilled with what's being peddled on commercial radio right now, but at least there's a market sway on it. Sure it's a chicken-and-egg problem (Britney Spears' "Circus" is #1 on iTunes due to airplay or is Britney getting so much airplay because of its' iTunes popularity?), but the thing is that if Britney didn't sell more than a few hundred tracks or albums, the songs would be replaced on the air with something that does. Simple as that. This is about the only place where the free market still works in the current music industry. What sells is continued, what doesn't sell is not. If I pay the RIAA $X per year so that I can use *wire with their blessing, the ability to vote with my wallet as to what they produce and what the don't is gone.
2. If you want to argue point #1 by saying that they'll track what I download, that's an IT nightmare in itself. It's not just that the university is going to have to pay $Y/year/student, there's the added cost of the network infrastructure to provide the RIAA with the list of songs that have been downloaded. How do we do that? Do we scan for file names? Sure, because no file is ever misnamed on these networks and adding network harware/software to keep track of all the files that students download is both inexpensive and won't take an age to implement properly. Are we going to get the students to write these things down? Sure, send an e-mail around asking for a list of all downloaded tracks so that they can count it all up while they're supposed to be in class or just finishing sleeping off their hangover. The backend of it is going to add to the cost of this system, both in purchase costs and in maintenance costs. Call me nuts, but I'd rather my tuition dollars go to improving and securing my schools' network, not hiring an extra guy or two whose sole job is to enforce the RIAA's "new" business model.
3. I agree that it seems that no system short of free-music-for-all is good enough for slashdot. "The RIAA has an outdated business model", so everyone cries. Fine. I'm no RIAA sympathizer by any means, but I know that there are a few Business and Economics people here. Let's keep score, shall we?
Albums aren't okay, because of the one-good-song-per-album problem. Agreed. iTunes is forbidden because of DRM (remotely understandable), but I don't recall Napster or Amazon having to deal with the Slashdot effect the day that they went 100% DRM-Free MP3; the latter is at 256kbps encoding. Baking it into tuition or ISP dollars is heresy as well. Radiohead's pay-if-you-feel-like-it wasn't the rousing success that you'd think from reading all of the comments here about how honest everyone wants to be but isn't because of their pet reason. Bonus points to Radiohead since they got plenty of free publicity for their experiment (though admittedly it did to pretty well on CD). So, albums aren't okay, single tracks in a vertical ecosystem aren't okay, single tracks in an open ecosystem aren't okay, baking the cost into your ISP bill isn't okay, and the honor system doesn't really work. Anyone want to design a business model in which people still pay for music that would be acceptable to both the customer, the artist, and a handful of middlemen who for the sake of the model will remain reasonable and take their fair share without robbing either side?
Between the way it is now where I at least can vote with my purchases and give the RIAA a carrot to make music I want to listen to, and paying a set amount regardless of how much I do and don't download, and which titles I do and don't like, and remove the freedom of having to have a particular piece of software tracking what I'm downloading, option #1 seems to me to be the lesser of two evils.
this is a good point, and I'm all for versioning. The other way around this is to have an "Exit Without Saving" and/or "Exit while saving to new file" option in the file menu. Sure users are used to hitting the "red X in the corner", but let's hope that if they're thinking far enough ahead to say to themselves, "self! I wanna branch this file instead of saving over my last one", then they'll hopefully realize that their ticket out is through the file menu.
The solution to this would be a "do not save" button. Additionally, I could understand it being difficult to figure out which apps you *don't* want it on (notepad being a good example of could-go-either-way), but typically if it's made by Microsoft or Adobe or Autodesk or any other app that takes up a decent amount of hard disk space, requires activation, and whose users typically save stuff out of it, it's a good bet that having a save-during-creation system is a good idea. Finally, it could be added to the saving preferences dialog in the app itself, alongside the default formats and such.
Agreed. The problem with this test is that they already know what is a virus and what isn't. While it's crucial to the test, it's also problematic in that they already know exactly which files to look for. As such, being able to tune the sensitivity and recording the results is like going on a treasure hunt while already knowing exactly where the treasure is just to see the distance if you take different routes. To the average end user (and probably a decent chunk of slashdotters), discerning the positives from the false positives is a crapshoot.
Disclaimer: I do not work for NOD32, nor any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, blah blah blah
Isn't free, so Antivir wins there. NOD32's footprint used to be incredibly small (25MBytes installed), though as they're trying to go more mainstream they have beefed up a bit. The antivirus is somewhere in the ballpark of 45-55MBytes installed, and their kitchen sink "Smart Security" suite is a little over 100MBytes installed. In their defense, the newer interface (which likely accounts for the majority of size balloon) is much more user friendly. It more closely mimics the de facto standardized UI of Norton/McAffee/TrendMicro/Panda, making it alot more palatable for new users. Compared to the aforementioned security suites, it is still MUCH less taxing than most of the big-name suites.
As far as system resources, I've yet to have a friend, family member, or client who *hasn't* noticed a performance boost after ditching their old virus scanner in lieu of NOD32. Granted none of them were coming from Antivir, but I would still say that they are very good as far as detection rate and removal rate, in addition to having an impressively small system footprint (although again it is bigger than it used to be).
The solution to this would be to have the "save document" window come up before you could even type something, like Microsoft Access does. You first put a file name and save location, then you get to work. This way, Access can constantly save the data you're working on. It really isn't that bad of a model to work off of.
But those items are purchased differently than mice are. Few (if any) retail stores sell mice in packages of more than one. The smallest box of paper clips I can get at Staples is 100, and I can buy them in quantities of 1,000 as well. if I go to Costco, I can get a box of 10,000 paper clips. As such, it's not terribly difficult to imagine a paper clip manufacturing plant pumping out a billion paper clips in a relatively short amount of time. Screws, nails, and other quantity purchased items fit into this category.
1 billion Coca-Cola's is also an interesting metric that's not quite apples-to-apples. If I purchase a 12oz can of coke or a 3 liter bottle, does that number change? If I buy a 12 pack of cans, is that 1 unit or 12 sold? Is it based on SKUs sold or liters consumed? If I go to McDonalds and get a medium coke and refill it three times, how does that factor into their counting methodology? Yes, one can say that Coca Cola deals with such massive volumes of product manufactured and sold daily that my refilled fountain drink does not significantly impact their units sold, but it does add a variable to their sales that Logitech doesn't have. A mouse is sold. whether you get a larger mouse or a smaller mouse, it is still a single unit and the larger one is different from the smaller. A 12oz can of coke contains the exact same product as the 2 and 3 liter bottles; a consumer chooses the quantity of the product they wish to buy, not between two different products.
IMO I think that the list in TFA is a reasonable step in the right direction. Try taking too much, and the house of cards will come down. bypassing hardware lock-in for OSX will come across as exactly what it is - a full-scale attack against Apple's business model. While I'm all for that, the DMCA is already hard enough to append because of the *AA. Adding apple to the mix gets the *AA and Apple on the same side again, in which case the odds of any of the other exemptions getting approved are slim.
The Zune Marketplace, IIRC, is all MP3 now, so it really *does* play for sure. Not exactly something that I would consider a "lock in".
You state that Apple is trying to get rid of DRM. Let's go with that theory for a moment. My question is, do you believe that Apple is going to swap out their customers' protected files with DRM ones? Alternatively, do you think that they'll release an Apple-approved version of JHymn that will remove the DRM from the files that they currently have? DRM has been an advantage to Apple with keeping iPod users future iPod users, which leads me to believe that Steve Jobs' "open letter" was nothing but PR for Slashdot. Few people are going to buy-burn-rip their iTMS libraries to use another player without a reason to do so, and while DRM is a big no-no here on Slashdot, I do have to give Apple credit for making it largely invisible to the general populus (at least at first and under the majority of circumstances).
While I appreciate your optimism in Apple, one of my college professors said it best: Apple is the new Microsoft. Microsoft is the new IBM. We're back in 1983 all over again.
What makes you think that they won't? All they have to do is make the activation server revoke your key and voila! you're at the point where you either don't play the game anymore or you have to buy a second copy (or hit up your favorite torrent site). The whole issue with DRM is that post-sale control is introduced; they have it and you don't.
Vista sucked beyond imagination, Windows 7 is Vista with a different name and Apple is playing again ad again the bad guy card, both software and hardware wise. What else does Linux need to get some serious consideration among average users?
Linux needs some serious marketing. People have either never heard of Linux, think that "Linux is just too complicated" or "Really Nerdy", or is being used by said nerds to whom "sudo apt-get" actually means something. Give it some marketing, iron out the software installation process (Repositories are great, but downloading an RPM or DEB package is still messy), and say "to hell with 101 permutations of the GPL" because 99% of the people will never look at the source code and only care if software is free-as-in-beer. Add a celeb spokesperson and get official Linux support from software houses like Adobe and Linux may start to find its way onto the desktop if Windows and MacOS take an even greater nose dive.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Linux is a choice for people whose work days don't involve the use of a Windows-only app. Try getting an architect to ditch his copy of Windows and Autocad for Linux.
2. If they repackaged Windows 3.1 and marketed it, it would either be insanely fast (The OS came on 4 or 5 floppies for crying out loud), or just not function because the new crop of 64-bit processors can't run 16-bit apps IIRC. Then you wouldn't have Vista sluggishness, you'd have this-won't-boot issues a mile long.
Joey
While I agree with your theory, i don't think that a negligible difference in piracy is going to help the situation.
It can be argued in one sense that "DRM hasn't altered the piracy rates, so why spend all kinds of cash to license a system that doesn't help us at all?" SecuROM's answer will be "Because there's alot more casual copying going on. People aren't going to The Pirate Bay to get a copy because they're just getting it from Phil, who got it from Jessie, who got it from Shanelle, who got it from Derek who got it in Chinatown on a street corner."
I agree that I have all intentions of purchasing the game - retail - full price - for the sake of principle. It is the single best way for me to show the companies that it is *more* profitable for them to ship DRM-free games (or at least client-side DRM, IMO UT2004 and UT3's preventing duplicate keys from logging in is an acceptable measure as it doesn't affect my machine at all).
I'll even take it a step further and recommend this game on amazon and give it a 5 star rating. This way, we can show that this works in reverse, too.
I've got plenty of respect for a company that is willing to take the first step in righting the wrong that is DRM. The way I've always seen it, both sides have a responsibility. It is my responsibility to keep my copy in my possession, not be handing out copies to everyone else, and not to steal it off a store shelf. It is there responsibility to take reasonable measures to ensure that I can use their product properly. Since they showed good faith in us and fulfilled their end of the bargain (well, at least took steps to not introduce technology which is known to cause issues), I feel that it is our turn to reciprocate and show them that if you don't assume that we're criminals, we won't act like them.
Joey
Funny, I rarely hear about problems with Nvidia cards or sound in Slackware anymore, and I'm in the irc channel all the time.
Forget Slackware...there's another person using IRC?
Except that although nobody exactly knows what a foton is, it is known not to be an electron. And these transistors happen to be designed for the latter...
It's a flat mattress that sits very low to the ground and are very popular in Japan. Everyone knows that!
Running 26 GHz is nice, but... Does it run Vista ?
There. Fixed that for ya.
There are only a handful of reasons why iphone users wouldn't buy an iphone app:
1. They don't know about the application. AirSharing took care of this one quick, fast, and in a hurry.
2. They don't need the function. You will never win these users unless their situation changes.
3. They would like the function, but the user does not want to pay your price. These people will simply do without your app until the price is lowered or...
4. The user has found a lower cost, freeware alternative. If you're selling an app for $10 that does the exact same thing as a free app, then you need to figure out what makes your app worth $10.
As has been said, this is the issue across every market segment, IP or tangible, goods or services.
I seriously don't know why these companies don't do time-bombing demos. SwirlyMMS has done it with great success. They charge $8 for an app that addresses one of the biggest gripes about the iphone, give you 14 days to make sure that you can configure it properly, and last I checked they did a pretty good job at it. If they can implement all of that - without the App Store - then why can't all these other developers who are writing apps?
Joey
All drains lead to the ocean!
Joey
is the fact that the means of aggregating the facts are different. In the mid 1980's my dad worked at an insurance company (a pretty big one, too) that had purchased one copy of Wordperfect 5.1 for an entire office floor; the number of copies in the building could be counted on one hand. Who's going to report that?
All it takes now is some loose counting on the top 10-20 torrent sites and that's where the numbers come from. It's likely that piracy based on empirical numbers (i.e. literal number of pirated copies in use) has gone up based on the much higher number of people using them, but percentage wise (pirated copies over purchased copies) has probably gone down as a whole. While centralized sourcing has gone up (one purchase, 100 limewire downloads), disk swapping has likely gone down (100 purchases, each person giving the disk to two friends, who then each give copies to two friends equals 700 installs)
Joey
1. The RIAA has a guaranteed stream of income. I'm not terribly thrilled with what's being peddled on commercial radio right now, but at least there's a market sway on it. Sure it's a chicken-and-egg problem (Britney Spears' "Circus" is #1 on iTunes due to airplay or is Britney getting so much airplay because of its' iTunes popularity?), but the thing is that if Britney didn't sell more than a few hundred tracks or albums, the songs would be replaced on the air with something that does. Simple as that. This is about the only place where the free market still works in the current music industry. What sells is continued, what doesn't sell is not. If I pay the RIAA $X per year so that I can use *wire with their blessing, the ability to vote with my wallet as to what they produce and what the don't is gone.
2. If you want to argue point #1 by saying that they'll track what I download, that's an IT nightmare in itself. It's not just that the university is going to have to pay $Y/year/student, there's the added cost of the network infrastructure to provide the RIAA with the list of songs that have been downloaded. How do we do that? Do we scan for file names? Sure, because no file is ever misnamed on these networks and adding network harware/software to keep track of all the files that students download is both inexpensive and won't take an age to implement properly. Are we going to get the students to write these things down? Sure, send an e-mail around asking for a list of all downloaded tracks so that they can count it all up while they're supposed to be in class or just finishing sleeping off their hangover. The backend of it is going to add to the cost of this system, both in purchase costs and in maintenance costs. Call me nuts, but I'd rather my tuition dollars go to improving and securing my schools' network, not hiring an extra guy or two whose sole job is to enforce the RIAA's "new" business model.
3. I agree that it seems that no system short of free-music-for-all is good enough for slashdot. "The RIAA has an outdated business model", so everyone cries. Fine. I'm no RIAA sympathizer by any means, but I know that there are a few Business and Economics people here. Let's keep score, shall we?
Albums aren't okay, because of the one-good-song-per-album problem. Agreed. iTunes is forbidden because of DRM (remotely understandable), but I don't recall Napster or Amazon having to deal with the Slashdot effect the day that they went 100% DRM-Free MP3; the latter is at 256kbps encoding. Baking it into tuition or ISP dollars is heresy as well. Radiohead's pay-if-you-feel-like-it wasn't the rousing success that you'd think from reading all of the comments here about how honest everyone wants to be but isn't because of their pet reason. Bonus points to Radiohead since they got plenty of free publicity for their experiment (though admittedly it did to pretty well on CD). So, albums aren't okay, single tracks in a vertical ecosystem aren't okay, single tracks in an open ecosystem aren't okay, baking the cost into your ISP bill isn't okay, and the honor system doesn't really work. Anyone want to design a business model in which people still pay for music that would be acceptable to both the customer, the artist, and a handful of middlemen who for the sake of the model will remain reasonable and take their fair share without robbing either side?
Between the way it is now where I at least can vote with my purchases and give the RIAA a carrot to make music I want to listen to, and paying a set amount regardless of how much I do and don't download, and which titles I do and don't like, and remove the freedom of having to have a particular piece of software tracking what I'm downloading, option #1 seems to me to be the lesser of two evils.
Joey
Joey
Joey
Joey
Isn't free, so Antivir wins there. NOD32's footprint used to be incredibly small (25MBytes installed), though as they're trying to go more mainstream they have beefed up a bit. The antivirus is somewhere in the ballpark of 45-55MBytes installed, and their kitchen sink "Smart Security" suite is a little over 100MBytes installed. In their defense, the newer interface (which likely accounts for the majority of size balloon) is much more user friendly. It more closely mimics the de facto standardized UI of Norton/McAffee/TrendMicro/Panda, making it alot more palatable for new users. Compared to the aforementioned security suites, it is still MUCH less taxing than most of the big-name suites.
As far as system resources, I've yet to have a friend, family member, or client who *hasn't* noticed a performance boost after ditching their old virus scanner in lieu of NOD32. Granted none of them were coming from Antivir, but I would still say that they are very good as far as detection rate and removal rate, in addition to having an impressively small system footprint (although again it is bigger than it used to be).
Joey
Joey
Thank you Lewis Black.
1 billion Coca-Cola's is also an interesting metric that's not quite apples-to-apples. If I purchase a 12oz can of coke or a 3 liter bottle, does that number change? If I buy a 12 pack of cans, is that 1 unit or 12 sold? Is it based on SKUs sold or liters consumed? If I go to McDonalds and get a medium coke and refill it three times, how does that factor into their counting methodology? Yes, one can say that Coca Cola deals with such massive volumes of product manufactured and sold daily that my refilled fountain drink does not significantly impact their units sold, but it does add a variable to their sales that Logitech doesn't have. A mouse is sold. whether you get a larger mouse or a smaller mouse, it is still a single unit and the larger one is different from the smaller. A 12oz can of coke contains the exact same product as the 2 and 3 liter bottles; a consumer chooses the quantity of the product they wish to buy, not between two different products.
Joey
Joey
Joey
You state that Apple is trying to get rid of DRM. Let's go with that theory for a moment. My question is, do you believe that Apple is going to swap out their customers' protected files with DRM ones? Alternatively, do you think that they'll release an Apple-approved version of JHymn that will remove the DRM from the files that they currently have? DRM has been an advantage to Apple with keeping iPod users future iPod users, which leads me to believe that Steve Jobs' "open letter" was nothing but PR for Slashdot. Few people are going to buy-burn-rip their iTMS libraries to use another player without a reason to do so, and while DRM is a big no-no here on Slashdot, I do have to give Apple credit for making it largely invisible to the general populus (at least at first and under the majority of circumstances).
While I appreciate your optimism in Apple, one of my college professors said it best: Apple is the new Microsoft. Microsoft is the new IBM. We're back in 1983 all over again.
Joey
Joey
...if an asteroid is big enough to end life as we know it on earth, are 1.4 gigapixels really necessary?
Vista sucked beyond imagination, Windows 7 is Vista with a different name and Apple is playing again ad again the bad guy card, both software and hardware wise. What else does Linux need to get some serious consideration among average users?
Linux needs some serious marketing. People have either never heard of Linux, think that "Linux is just too complicated" or "Really Nerdy", or is being used by said nerds to whom "sudo apt-get" actually means something. Give it some marketing, iron out the software installation process (Repositories are great, but downloading an RPM or DEB package is still messy), and say "to hell with 101 permutations of the GPL" because 99% of the people will never look at the source code and only care if software is free-as-in-beer. Add a celeb spokesperson and get official Linux support from software houses like Adobe and Linux may start to find its way onto the desktop if Windows and MacOS take an even greater nose dive.
Joey
because their pr0n still loads...for now.
Joey