I agree that on a worldwide scale there are bound to be more pirate CDs bought in areas where the legit ones aren't an option.
My post, though, was pointing out that even here, in the UK, where plenty of people have internet access (and, come to think of it, chart CDs in the local supermaket are only twice the price of what these pirate ones are), and we don't have anything like the poverty that the areas you are pointing out are big on piracy, people would rather have two illegal CDs for the price of one legit one. They really just don't care about the law or intellectual property, they just want CDs that cost two pints of beer rather than four.
Stopping the spread across the internet of a collection of 1s and 0s that happen to be someone else's song is (a) nigh-impossible and (b) even questionable as to if any real money is being lost. Someone paying ten quid to a pirate for two CDRs of chart music, rather than to a record shop for one legit copy is a pretty clear-cut loss.
Like I said in my nearby post, here in the UK the going rate at car boot sales for poorly duplicated CDs with inkjet covers is 5 quid. Amazon, Play.com and CDWow will all ship you anything popular for 9 quid, less than double that. Even the local supermarket will do most albums for around 10-11 quid.
And yet the pirate CDs still sell well. Why reduce prices to $10, where its near-impossible to make a profit, if people are still going to go for the pirate because its cheaper?
Arrgh. Thats what I get for not previewing. My pound signs (the numbers in my parent post were sterling) have disappeared, in case anyone thinks thats just a weird post.
I really just don't get the people who buy these pirate CDs. There's no getting away from the fact that they know they are buying illegal copies - the photocopied covers and blue backs are just too blatent on every dodgy market stall I've seen.
What I find shocking, though, is that people would rather fork over 5 to a pirate for a burnt CD than on the one hand download the album for free or on the other order a perfectly legit copy from Amazon (or Play, or CDWow etc) for 9.
Apparently, people trust random pirates at car boot sales and markets not to rip them off more than they do Amazon, simply because "you can't trust strangers on the Internet".
So yes, I think that they are right to go after these guys - they hurt the industry far more than the odd fileshare does.
Its certainly a valid point - after all, I despair at the fact that DScaler does such a stunning job at deinterlacing on the fly from my laserdisc player, but is effectively useless for any of my other components which output RGB thought Scart. This is for input, though.
But many (most?) HD displays will take your traditional 15-pin VGA connector without complaint, so component out isn't the biggie for me on output that input is.
As its basically just a fancy-form-factor PC, complete with AGP slot, both of your problems could be solved.
They were testing it with Windows XP, but there's nothing to stop you dropping in an appropriately featured AGP video card and running MythTV, Linux or anything else you fancied. Personally, I'm thinking that a MAME bootdisk coupled with decent USB joypad would be quite natty for it.
Do you seriously lack a single device that can play Worms, then? Its been onto everything from the Gameboy Color to the Dreamcast, along with DOS and Windows.
Apart from anything else, if you really do only have a Linux machine why not emulate the original in UAE? Its far better than most of the sequels and conversions.
"I imagine it's substantially easier to code a cross-platform server than it is to code a similar client"
Almost certainly, I'd say; most game clients are making DirectX calls these days (even when they can use OpenGL rather than Direct3D most games use the DirectX sound and control calls). Servers, by definition, aren't having to render any 3D, and so the main area of Windows dependence is removed.
"You'd have to have something wrong with you to spend that amount of money..."
To be fair, the sort of person having enough room to store the 12ft by 9ft model of the derelict spacecraft that the crew of the Nostromo found the alien onboard in their living room is possibly the sort that would have the $40 000 necessary to buy it...
Why? There actually is a good reason. The way they are pitching this suggests that its actually going to have an A/V out on it. There is much talk of sticking films on the new format, so I'm fully expecting this to actually be able to hook up to a TV and surround system and act as a DVD-style player.
"You are just purely on crack. I think you mean 160ms for gaming."
You need 160ms for running multiplayer client/server games, yes (though I tend to ignore anything over 100ms since I got ADSL).
However, Sony were claiming that it would do silly things like farm out scene rendering duties to idle time on other devices. At which point you need to get the frame back within the frame. That means doing it in 1/60th of a second, which works out to ~16ms, the figure the guy came up with.
Using spare consoles connected to the internet as dedicated game servers is something we can do today; just choose the relevant option when you start an Xbox Live game of Wolfenstein, for instance.
The flaw with your argument with LOTR was that there has been a mass of Tolkein-geeks lapping up any old rubbish tied into the books for decades already, and it hasn't killed it yet (the text adventures on the 8-bit machines were stunningly horrible, for instance, and I didn't think much of Bakshi's animated version either).
The flaw here, similiarly, is that Eidos had already released four terrible sequels to Tomb Raider before the first film came out. I find it really difficult to believe its the fault of a fifth bad game sequel, rather than the dire first film that is at fault here.
But every Tomb Raider sequel has failed to come even close to capturing the atmosphere of the first one. Four onwards were monumentally terrible, in fact.
So if this suggestion has any basis in fact whatsoever, the first film should have bombed.
Since it didn't, I'd suggest that this failure had an awful lot more to do with how shockingly bad that first film was.
Actually, forget that. Before Nell McAndrew got the job as "some model dressed up as Lara at press gigs", it originally went to Rhona Mitra. I always just assumed she was merely a pretty face, but she handled acting perfectly well in "Sweet Home Alabama", so I say give her a chance.
And she's English too, and does the accent ok without looking like she's thinking too hard to maintain it.
Anyone who knows their Ghostbusters (which, incidentally, made a pretty neat RPG itself back in the day) knows that the idea of the Dead rising from their graves (Which the whole vampirism thing has at its heart) is an obvious sign of end times.
The End Of The World Is Nigh is the only logical place for the story to go, then.
I'm absolutely with you on the vampire-hating front, don't worry. PTerry had the right idea - cut their heads off and stuff garlic down the neck hole.
I must admit its just hilariously astute of Marilyn Manson to have switched allusions from vampirism to Weimar Republic-era Germany. The excusing of all manner of violent, offensive and generally distateful ideas behind a veneer of "but they look really stylish while they exploit people" is a neat parallel.
I know I should have dropped this long ago, but there you are.
Let me get this straight: You not only seriously expect Microsoft to introduce more security holes onto my box in a Windows Update patch than they close up, but for me to actually hammer the patch out on an internal network hard enough to figure that out before I connect my machine to the internet?
The idea that there is a greater chance of Microsoft introducing new, deadly security holes onto boxes out there automatically installing every new patch than there is of holes being left unpatched because the average Windows owner doesn't think they need it when they do is just silly. In fact I'd say that Linux users running a
On what, exactly? You sad, strange, silly little man.
This isn't enterprise level servers we're talking about, its fucking home computers used for email and the odd game. If it turns out that an automatic update broke my Half-Life I'll use System Restore (which works very well, thanks) to take it off again. Take your moronic attitude elsewhere.
Lovely idea, but anyone with auto-update turned on for Microsoft Update will have already had the patch which tells Windows the key is invalid for all products. Its too late now.
Its a fun piece of speculation, and I'm not flaming you in any way, but if I was going to help the RIAA by intentionally leaving a DirectMedia buffer overflow lying around I sure as hell would put it in something like MP3 or WMA, rather than general midi files.
How many people actually listen to those things on their home PC?
You don't turn it off, you just don't bother turning it on. Its not the default option. The default is to only be notified.
You may think that autoupdating sucks. You have the right to be paranoid if you want to, though exactly how you think that someone can insert an autoupdating nasty thing without being able to make the autonotifying thing sound like something you'd want to install I've no idea.
But to suggest that you don't like it so it shouldn't be an option is manifestly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that on a worldwide scale there are bound to be more pirate CDs bought in areas where the legit ones aren't an option.
My post, though, was pointing out that even here, in the UK, where plenty of people have internet access (and, come to think of it, chart CDs in the local supermaket are only twice the price of what these pirate ones are), and we don't have anything like the poverty that the areas you are pointing out are big on piracy, people would rather have two illegal CDs for the price of one legit one. They really just don't care about the law or intellectual property, they just want CDs that cost two pints of beer rather than four.
Stopping the spread across the internet of a collection of 1s and 0s that happen to be someone else's song is (a) nigh-impossible and (b) even questionable as to if any real money is being lost. Someone paying ten quid to a pirate for two CDRs of chart music, rather than to a record shop for one legit copy is a pretty clear-cut loss.
Like I said in my nearby post, here in the UK the going rate at car boot sales for poorly duplicated CDs with inkjet covers is 5 quid. Amazon, Play.com and CDWow will all ship you anything popular for 9 quid, less than double that. Even the local supermarket will do most albums for around 10-11 quid.
And yet the pirate CDs still sell well. Why reduce prices to $10, where its near-impossible to make a profit, if people are still going to go for the pirate because its cheaper?
Arrgh. Thats what I get for not previewing. My pound signs (the numbers in my parent post were sterling) have disappeared, in case anyone thinks thats just a weird post.
I really just don't get the people who buy these pirate CDs. There's no getting away from the fact that they know they are buying illegal copies - the photocopied covers and blue backs are just too blatent on every dodgy market stall I've seen.
What I find shocking, though, is that people would rather fork over 5 to a pirate for a burnt CD than on the one hand download the album for free or on the other order a perfectly legit copy from Amazon (or Play, or CDWow etc) for 9.
Apparently, people trust random pirates at car boot sales and markets not to rip them off more than they do Amazon, simply because "you can't trust strangers on the Internet".
So yes, I think that they are right to go after these guys - they hurt the industry far more than the odd fileshare does.
Its certainly a valid point - after all, I despair at the fact that DScaler does such a stunning job at deinterlacing on the fly from my laserdisc player, but is effectively useless for any of my other components which output RGB thought Scart. This is for input, though.
But many (most?) HD displays will take your traditional 15-pin VGA connector without complaint, so component out isn't the biggie for me on output that input is.
As its basically just a fancy-form-factor PC, complete with AGP slot, both of your problems could be solved.
They were testing it with Windows XP, but there's nothing to stop you dropping in an appropriately featured AGP video card and running MythTV, Linux or anything else you fancied. Personally, I'm thinking that a MAME bootdisk coupled with decent USB joypad would be quite natty for it.
Do you seriously lack a single device that can play Worms, then? Its been onto everything from the Gameboy Color to the Dreamcast, along with DOS and Windows.
Apart from anything else, if you really do only have a Linux machine why not emulate the original in UAE? Its far better than most of the sequels and conversions.
"I imagine it's substantially easier to code a cross-platform server than it is to code a similar client"
Almost certainly, I'd say; most game clients are making DirectX calls these days (even when they can use OpenGL rather than Direct3D most games use the DirectX sound and control calls). Servers, by definition, aren't having to render any 3D, and so the main area of Windows dependence is removed.
"You'd have to have something wrong with you to spend that amount of money..."
To be fair, the sort of person having enough room to store the 12ft by 9ft model of the derelict spacecraft that the crew of the Nostromo found the alien onboard in their living room is possibly the sort that would have the $40 000 necessary to buy it...
Well, I thought it was funny, anyway. I also saw Memento's ending before the opening credits had finished...
Why? There actually is a good reason. The way they are pitching this suggests that its actually going to have an A/V out on it. There is much talk of sticking films on the new format, so I'm fully expecting this to actually be able to hook up to a TV and surround system and act as a DVD-style player.
"You are just purely on crack. I think you mean 160ms for gaming."
You need 160ms for running multiplayer client/server games, yes (though I tend to ignore anything over 100ms since I got ADSL).
However, Sony were claiming that it would do silly things like farm out scene rendering duties to idle time on other devices. At which point you need to get the frame back within the frame. That means doing it in 1/60th of a second, which works out to ~16ms, the figure the guy came up with.
Using spare consoles connected to the internet as dedicated game servers is something we can do today; just choose the relevant option when you start an Xbox Live game of Wolfenstein, for instance.
The flaw with your argument with LOTR was that there has been a mass of Tolkein-geeks lapping up any old rubbish tied into the books for decades already, and it hasn't killed it yet (the text adventures on the 8-bit machines were stunningly horrible, for instance, and I didn't think much of Bakshi's animated version either).
The flaw here, similiarly, is that Eidos had already released four terrible sequels to Tomb Raider before the first film came out. I find it really difficult to believe its the fault of a fifth bad game sequel, rather than the dire first film that is at fault here.
But every Tomb Raider sequel has failed to come even close to capturing the atmosphere of the first one. Four onwards were monumentally terrible, in fact.
So if this suggestion has any basis in fact whatsoever, the first film should have bombed.
Since it didn't, I'd suggest that this failure had an awful lot more to do with how shockingly bad that first film was.
Actually, forget that. Before Nell McAndrew got the job as "some model dressed up as Lara at press gigs", it originally went to Rhona Mitra. I always just assumed she was merely a pretty face, but she handled acting perfectly well in "Sweet Home Alabama", so I say give her a chance.
And she's English too, and does the accent ok without looking like she's thinking too hard to maintain it.
And you thought that the "short the dying guy" strategy on Hollywood Stock Exchange was a slightly sick game to play.
So this is what they mean when they talk about a "peace dividend". I never realised it was quite so literal.
Anyone who knows their Ghostbusters (which, incidentally, made a pretty neat RPG itself back in the day) knows that the idea of the Dead rising from their graves (Which the whole vampirism thing has at its heart) is an obvious sign of end times.
The End Of The World Is Nigh is the only logical place for the story to go, then.
I'm absolutely with you on the vampire-hating front, don't worry. PTerry had the right idea - cut their heads off and stuff garlic down the neck hole.
I must admit its just hilariously astute of Marilyn Manson to have switched allusions from vampirism to Weimar Republic-era Germany. The excusing of all manner of violent, offensive and generally distateful ideas behind a veneer of "but they look really stylish while they exploit people" is a neat parallel.
err, what was the subject again?
"no matter what your characters do, they are all going to DIE"
Aaah, I see you've played Paranoia before then.
I know I should have dropped this long ago, but there you are.
Let me get this straight: You not only seriously expect Microsoft to introduce more security holes onto my box in a Windows Update patch than they close up, but for me to actually hammer the patch out on an internal network hard enough to figure that out before I connect my machine to the internet?
The idea that there is a greater chance of Microsoft introducing new, deadly security holes onto boxes out there automatically installing every new patch than there is of holes being left unpatched because the average Windows owner doesn't think they need it when they do is just silly. In fact I'd say that Linux users running a
You really are odder than I thought.
"you TEST TEST TEST"
On what, exactly? You sad, strange, silly little man.
This isn't enterprise level servers we're talking about, its fucking home computers used for email and the odd game. If it turns out that an automatic update broke my Half-Life I'll use System Restore (which works very well, thanks) to take it off again. Take your moronic attitude elsewhere.
Lovely idea, but anyone with auto-update turned on for Microsoft Update will have already had the patch which tells Windows the key is invalid for all products. Its too late now.
Its a fun piece of speculation, and I'm not flaming you in any way, but if I was going to help the RIAA by intentionally leaving a DirectMedia buffer overflow lying around I sure as hell would put it in something like MP3 or WMA, rather than general midi files.
How many people actually listen to those things on their home PC?
"The updates are signed. Fake that ;)"
Creating a trojan that appears to be signed code: difficult.
Creating a signed trojan and then hosting it on windowsupdate.microsoft.com without them noticing: damn near impossible, surely?
Lets try this again.
You don't turn it off, you just don't bother turning it on. Its not the default option. The default is to only be notified.
You may think that autoupdating sucks. You have the right to be paranoid if you want to, though exactly how you think that someone can insert an autoupdating nasty thing without being able to make the autonotifying thing sound like something you'd want to install I've no idea.
But to suggest that you don't like it so it shouldn't be an option is manifestly stupid.