1. OEMs are in bed with antivirus manufacturers, too. This is why we have bundleware. My HP laptop came with a 60-day demo of Norton Internet Security, and HP got paid to put it there (and would probably get a commission if I bought a year subscription from the demo). Microsoft will have to fight at that level, which would piss off the OEMs as well as giving some lawyers a new courtroom circus. This would probably be even more evident in the EU where Microsoft is under even tighter regulation than in the US (Windows ships without Media Player in Europe for this reason).
2. Windows Live Onecare has sat on the shelves right next to Norton, McAffee, and Trend Micro for a few years now, includes even more features, but still has nowhere near the market share of the other companies. Odds are Symantec won't file for chapter 11 if MS starts bundling a minimalist antivirus. Roxio and Nero aren't going broke because Windows XP and Vista are able to burn CDs natively, either.
3. Internet Explorer was the first browser people had ever used in many cases (including my own). Netscape was a bit different than this case, because while Netscape was popular, in alot of cases the people that used IE at the exclusion of Netscape hadn't yet used a browser at all. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy then. I'd venture to say that most people have used an antivirus and know what one is, even if they don't update it or run regular scans, because they have been around for over two decades.
First off, I was going for humor, not insight. One day I will inadvertently get a post modded "funny", but apparently not today.
Second, I never said anything about Spore as a game. I have heard nothing but praise about the content of the game. My exact words were "Spore-like DRM"; Spore was used as an adjective describing the DRM. Wal-Mart got their DRM notoriety because they were a prime example of the inherent issue with DRM. Again, I had no intention of conveying Wal-Mart as a company nor anything outside of their noted DRM fiasco.
Third, DRM does suck.
Fourth, TFA didn't specify it one way or the other, so it's open to speculation.
I have purchased, played, and beat Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, and Timeshift in the past 6 months, so yes, I do play games. I'm not the one that sits around trying to reverse engineer the latest version of SecuROM.
1. It will probably go the way of Movie Maker, Windows Mail, and a few other apps that are now optional downloads.
2. It will be a basic virus scanner and will probably not replace NOD32 or another fully featured scanner.
3. Webroot seems to be doing just fine even though Windows Defender has been around for a few years now. Same for Spybot, Ad-Aware, and any number of other apps.
4. Compounded with #3, Microsoft Antivirus will be entering a well established field with plenty of household name competitors. Norton and McAffee are well known names that most consumers know and will probably opt for (quality of software notwithstanding).
5. Many smaller firms (Kaspersky comes to mind) have consumers as their small-fry and make their big bucks off volume licenses. It appears that Morro isn't competing here.
6. Whether accurate or not, perception or reality, many people consider Microsoft Security Solutions to be an oxymoron. So long as it can be uninstalled, people will be free to add their own antivirus software (see point #4).
I've never seen an issue of National Geographic that was less than 15 years old. If they use Spore-like DRM and Wal-Mart runs the activation servers, no one will ever get to play it.
In all honesty, I think that the fact that your neighbor has a free-for-all WAP helps your security as well. If you've got a WPA node and they've got a 'linksys' node, odds are that most hackers (bandwidth or information) will gravitate toward the lower hanging fruit.
-Software came on floppy disks. Being as CPU cycles, disk space and RAM were all much more limited resources, lean coding was a primary goal for any program being written. The fact that it would cost the company a whole lot less in materials and distribution for fewer disks being necessary helped.
-Windows patches were uncommon, and at that Microsoft would ship you a CD or floppy with the patch.
-E-mail normally involved Telnet.
-Flash didn't exist.
-Websites were written in plain HTML.
-Images were 256 colors and MUCH more compressed.
-No one had heard of MP3, and even if someone did, a Sound Blaster was optional and expensive.
-No one had heard of DivX/Xvid, and no computer could handle it even if they did.
-No one had CD-ROM ISO images because even if you did have a CD-ROM drive (quite an expense in itself), your hard drive would be too small to hold a full 650MByte image.
-No one uploaded photos to Flikr/Photobucket/Myspace/Facebook.
-If you had a modem, you had to know something about computers to use one, and odds are that you would only be talking to other people who also knew about computers. ISP's were taking a rather notable risk because the 1990 Internet is so drastically different from what it is today that most people who rely on the Web today wouldn't recognize it. ISP's couldn't rely on volume sales, the field had (and still has) an extremely high cost of entry, and for all they know this whole thing might not have gotten off the ground, leaving them shirtless in their datacenter.
I could keep going, but I think I've made my point. Yes, it's alot cheaper now, but whether you believe the chicken came first or the egg did, either way we consume a whole lot more bandwidth than we did in 1990; keeping the price the same rate as back then would have severely halted subscriptions as sites became more sophisticated, or sites would still look like sites made in the early 1990's. *shudder*
Sounds like a good plan. The problem is that the government would simply raise everyone else's taxes to cover this. Retail stores do this all the time - every item you buy is sufficiently marked up so that the company still turns a profit even though people shoplift merchandise every day.
Mod Parent Up!
I'm not a Clinton fan, but I do have to give him credit for knowing not to do too much to upset the good economic times that were going on, bringing environmental issues to the table, and a few other things that were done well in the 1990's. It does bother me when people give others blame for the bad things in the absence of credit for good things that the person does - not just for political figures, but even in every day life, people get credit but not blame, or vice versa. I find it a shame that this is the case.
I jailbroke mine and have never looked back. an unjailbroken iphone is a hindered iphone. If you use PwnageTool/Winpwn/Quickpwn, it's also 100% reversible if you don't like it.
Joey
That a meter(oid)/asteroid that gets this kind of press coverage would get a name more creative than "2008 TC3". Geez, the Greeks and Romans had that down thousands of years ago. What happened?
Joey
and the belief that AIDS is God's punishment toward gay people are independent of each other.
I believe in Intelligent Design, but that doesn't mean that I believe that this is a means of God punishing people. God could use any number of means to accomplish this, so why would He use a disease that has infected straight people as well?
Joey
The reason why I think that the Spore backlash is working is because we have now told EA games *WHY* their sales aren't as high as they could be. From the author's perspective, if I don't buy a game, there are five basic reasons why. It may be because I never heard of it (solution: increase marketing spending), I don't have a system capable of running it (solution: make games easier on hardware), I dislike the game itself (solution: write games I like), the game is too expensive (solution: reduce cost), or that I heard of the game, have a computer that can run it, like the game, and have the money to purchase it, but don't because I pirated it ("solution": DRM).
Most reasons why someone doesn't purchase a particular game can be boiled down to one of the above. If I simply don't purchase a game, there's no guarantee which of the five basic reasons was the reason why I didn't purchase it. In the case of Bioshock, it was the DRM itself, but I haven't told 2K games why I haven't gotten it. From their perspective, it could be any of the above reasons, when in fact it is because of the DRM.
If I don't buy Bioshock, I have sent the same message to 2K games as has the guy with a five year old Dell POS with a Celeron and Intel Integrated graphics, the MMORPG-or-bust gamer, the broke college student paying for school by himself, the living-under-a-rock gamer whose last purchase was DOOM, and the "gamer" whose entire software collection comes from Limewire, when the reality is that my reasoning isn't any of those. The problem is that I've got their statisticians and marketing folks grabbing their magic 8-balls trying to figure out why my software shelf doesn't have a copy of Bioshock on it; odds are that I probably have been categorized in their pirate category.
In the case of Spore, EA games is being told that they've gone so far with the solution with reason #5 that DRM has become their reason #6, and it's a reason that they can very easily overcome. This backlash that TFA advises against is actually working because if every one of the 1-star comments on Amazon is a single lost sale, that's 2,578 lost sales as of this writing. That's something that EA's bean counters can't otherwise explain away. The fact that EA has changed a policy at all is a step in the right direction (they're not going to abolish DRM overnight - SecuROM is on the other side of the fence convincing them that DRM does indeed work).
Where exactly is that money going to come from? Tax dollars? MY tax dollars? YOUR tax dollars? So you expect the government to raise our taxes by $100 as a voting incentive then give it back to us? I don't care if you're a democrat, republican, whig, communist, or a sheep...that just doesn't happen.
On a more practical note, how do you think that that is actually going to work? what if someone only votes for president, but ignores the senators, congressmen, and local elections? where does this come from? and do you *really* want people voting only because they want $100? and then one must tie the ballot to the voter in order to accurately verify that they did indeed vote, and there goes our secret ballot.
Of course the opposite of this entire issue at hand is Saddam's means of voting. According to his interview with Dan Rather, he never had this problem - in 1996(?) he won with a 99.6% majority, in 2001(?) he won with a 100% majority.
Yes, the Evangelical Christians will lean toward a candidate who shares their moral system. Two questions arise:
1. Are these issues not important?
2. Doesn't everyone have an issue that can turn the tide?
Perhaps the rights of the unborn are a minor issue to you, but to the person 35 miles away from a central office and thus still on dial-up, net neutrality and DRM legislation aren't major issues to them, either. Here on Slashdot, NN and DRM are a much bigger deal.
Bonus points: if they're as easy to get as you make 'em out to be, then there's no law saying that the democratic candidate (not just Obama) can't be pro-life and against legalizing federally-recognized gay marriages. They don't. Because they don't, they give up Evangelical Christian votes in order to gain the votes of the NOW, ACLU, and members of other organizations that hold those beliefs.
Joey
Verizon blocks incoming connections on port 80 on my Internet access. It isn't just TOS, they flat-out disable my ability to have incoming connections to access an HTTP server on a standard port. My desktop is presently an FTP server, a VNC server, and an e-mail server. I have hosted games of Unreal Tournament and have downloaded, uhm, Linux ISO's via bittorrent in which incoming TCP connections have been made. If they can block incoming TCP connections for HTTP, they can block them for e-mail and FTP, neither of which they have done.
Joey
Slashdot Mirror
cout >> "I have no patience to program anything useful and I hate having to write code";
2. Windows Live Onecare has sat on the shelves right next to Norton, McAffee, and Trend Micro for a few years now, includes even more features, but still has nowhere near the market share of the other companies. Odds are Symantec won't file for chapter 11 if MS starts bundling a minimalist antivirus. Roxio and Nero aren't going broke because Windows XP and Vista are able to burn CDs natively, either.
3. Internet Explorer was the first browser people had ever used in many cases (including my own). Netscape was a bit different than this case, because while Netscape was popular, in alot of cases the people that used IE at the exclusion of Netscape hadn't yet used a browser at all. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy then. I'd venture to say that most people have used an antivirus and know what one is, even if they don't update it or run regular scans, because they have been around for over two decades.
Joey
Second, I never said anything about Spore as a game. I have heard nothing but praise about the content of the game. My exact words were "Spore-like DRM"; Spore was used as an adjective describing the DRM. Wal-Mart got their DRM notoriety because they were a prime example of the inherent issue with DRM. Again, I had no intention of conveying Wal-Mart as a company nor anything outside of their noted DRM fiasco.
Third, DRM does suck.
Fourth, TFA didn't specify it one way or the other, so it's open to speculation.
I have purchased, played, and beat Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, and Timeshift in the past 6 months, so yes, I do play games. I'm not the one that sits around trying to reverse engineer the latest version of SecuROM.
2. It will be a basic virus scanner and will probably not replace NOD32 or another fully featured scanner.
3. Webroot seems to be doing just fine even though Windows Defender has been around for a few years now. Same for Spybot, Ad-Aware, and any number of other apps.
4. Compounded with #3, Microsoft Antivirus will be entering a well established field with plenty of household name competitors. Norton and McAffee are well known names that most consumers know and will probably opt for (quality of software notwithstanding).
5. Many smaller firms (Kaspersky comes to mind) have consumers as their small-fry and make their big bucks off volume licenses. It appears that Morro isn't competing here.
6. Whether accurate or not, perception or reality, many people consider Microsoft Security Solutions to be an oxymoron. So long as it can be uninstalled, people will be free to add their own antivirus software (see point #4).
Joey
Joey
An official Red Ryder two hundred shot carbine action Range Model air rifle with a compass and a thing which tells time built right into the stock.
Joey
-Software came on floppy disks. Being as CPU cycles, disk space and RAM were all much more limited resources, lean coding was a primary goal for any program being written. The fact that it would cost the company a whole lot less in materials and distribution for fewer disks being necessary helped.
-Windows patches were uncommon, and at that Microsoft would ship you a CD or floppy with the patch.
-E-mail normally involved Telnet.
-Flash didn't exist.
-Websites were written in plain HTML.
-Images were 256 colors and MUCH more compressed.
-No one had heard of MP3, and even if someone did, a Sound Blaster was optional and expensive.
-No one had heard of DivX/Xvid, and no computer could handle it even if they did.
-No one had CD-ROM ISO images because even if you did have a CD-ROM drive (quite an expense in itself), your hard drive would be too small to hold a full 650MByte image.
-No one uploaded photos to Flikr/Photobucket/Myspace/Facebook.
-If you had a modem, you had to know something about computers to use one, and odds are that you would only be talking to other people who also knew about computers. ISP's were taking a rather notable risk because the 1990 Internet is so drastically different from what it is today that most people who rely on the Web today wouldn't recognize it. ISP's couldn't rely on volume sales, the field had (and still has) an extremely high cost of entry, and for all they know this whole thing might not have gotten off the ground, leaving them shirtless in their datacenter.
I could keep going, but I think I've made my point. Yes, it's alot cheaper now, but whether you believe the chicken came first or the egg did, either way we consume a whole lot more bandwidth than we did in 1990; keeping the price the same rate as back then would have severely halted subscriptions as sites became more sophisticated, or sites would still look like sites made in the early 1990's. *shudder*
Joey
Joey
Joey
Are you saying that Android isn't coded to follow Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?
That's how you know that you've got a *REAL* recession on your hands.
Joey
That's why there's Winpwn/Pwnagetool. Joey
I jailbroke mine and have never looked back. an unjailbroken iphone is a hindered iphone. If you use PwnageTool/Winpwn/Quickpwn, it's also 100% reversible if you don't like it. Joey
That a meter(oid)/asteroid that gets this kind of press coverage would get a name more creative than "2008 TC3". Geez, the Greeks and Romans had that down thousands of years ago. What happened? Joey
Joey
and the belief that AIDS is God's punishment toward gay people are independent of each other. I believe in Intelligent Design, but that doesn't mean that I believe that this is a means of God punishing people. God could use any number of means to accomplish this, so why would He use a disease that has infected straight people as well? Joey
Most reasons why someone doesn't purchase a particular game can be boiled down to one of the above. If I simply don't purchase a game, there's no guarantee which of the five basic reasons was the reason why I didn't purchase it. In the case of Bioshock, it was the DRM itself, but I haven't told 2K games why I haven't gotten it. From their perspective, it could be any of the above reasons, when in fact it is because of the DRM.
If I don't buy Bioshock, I have sent the same message to 2K games as has the guy with a five year old Dell POS with a Celeron and Intel Integrated graphics, the MMORPG-or-bust gamer, the broke college student paying for school by himself, the living-under-a-rock gamer whose last purchase was DOOM, and the "gamer" whose entire software collection comes from Limewire, when the reality is that my reasoning isn't any of those. The problem is that I've got their statisticians and marketing folks grabbing their magic 8-balls trying to figure out why my software shelf doesn't have a copy of Bioshock on it; odds are that I probably have been categorized in their pirate category.
In the case of Spore, EA games is being told that they've gone so far with the solution with reason #5 that DRM has become their reason #6, and it's a reason that they can very easily overcome. This backlash that TFA advises against is actually working because if every one of the 1-star comments on Amazon is a single lost sale, that's 2,578 lost sales as of this writing. That's something that EA's bean counters can't otherwise explain away. The fact that EA has changed a policy at all is a step in the right direction (they're not going to abolish DRM overnight - SecuROM is on the other side of the fence convincing them that DRM does indeed work).
On a more practical note, how do you think that that is actually going to work? what if someone only votes for president, but ignores the senators, congressmen, and local elections? where does this come from? and do you *really* want people voting only because they want $100? and then one must tie the ballot to the voter in order to accurately verify that they did indeed vote, and there goes our secret ballot.
Of course the opposite of this entire issue at hand is Saddam's means of voting. According to his interview with Dan Rather, he never had this problem - in 1996(?) he won with a 99.6% majority, in 2001(?) he won with a 100% majority.
Joey
1. Are these issues not important? 2. Doesn't everyone have an issue that can turn the tide?
Perhaps the rights of the unborn are a minor issue to you, but to the person 35 miles away from a central office and thus still on dial-up, net neutrality and DRM legislation aren't major issues to them, either. Here on Slashdot, NN and DRM are a much bigger deal.
Bonus points: if they're as easy to get as you make 'em out to be, then there's no law saying that the democratic candidate (not just Obama) can't be pro-life and against legalizing federally-recognized gay marriages. They don't. Because they don't, they give up Evangelical Christian votes in order to gain the votes of the NOW, ACLU, and members of other organizations that hold those beliefs. Joey
Verizon blocks incoming connections on port 80 on my Internet access. It isn't just TOS, they flat-out disable my ability to have incoming connections to access an HTTP server on a standard port. My desktop is presently an FTP server, a VNC server, and an e-mail server. I have hosted games of Unreal Tournament and have downloaded, uhm, Linux ISO's via bittorrent in which incoming TCP connections have been made. If they can block incoming TCP connections for HTTP, they can block them for e-mail and FTP, neither of which they have done. Joey