While I don't think it's out of the question that they'd make a tablet, I think people are right that we'll just end up with a next generation iPhone/iTouch.
The tablet market is competitive, but it's not huge. I think they'd have a good shot at the art crowd with a decent digitizer, but nothing they've shown so far (that I'm aware of) seems to be going in that direction. They seem much more focused on finger interaction and multitouch. On top of that, Apple isn't terribly desirable in business, which is the other major draw for tablets.
I don't see a big win for them other than sheer novelty. I will admit, though, that novelty seems to be one of their biggest strengths.
Good points, but that assumes that drivers are reasonable people. The very people this device is targeting are the ones that will do things like that. You're causing just as much trouble by putting the devices in as leaving them out.
True, your brakes are much better at changing your speed than your engine, but if a car is out of control, it's going to be slowing down. So by slowing down next to him, you're staying in a potentially dangerous place. In front of the car is the only guaranteed safe place because physics prohibits the vehicle from catching you.
As far as seeing and avoiding erratic drivers, that's not always possible. Suppose there's debris in the lane next to you and a car next to you. That driver has no option but to:
1. steer into you
2. steer into the ditch
3. drive straight into the debris
At speeds likely to be affected by this system, odds are he won't be able to stop in time. Not to mention stopping dead in a highway is a wee bit dangerous on its own. Assuming you see the debris at roughly the same time he does, you can accelerate while he brakes, getting you clear and giving him a place to go. That saves quite a bit of trouble for everybody.
I wish I had mod points for you. That is by far the best response I've seen so far regarding the danger of this technology.
I'm not necessarily opposed to some kind of action to deal with out-of-control speeders, but unexpected physical limits placed on the vehicle are not the way to do it. Any limits need to be clearly defined prior to a person operating a machine capable of that much destruction. If the parent poster's scenario occurs or the system reports an incorrect speed limit at just the wrong moment, I don't see any potential for GOOD things to happen.
It seems to me that the people who drive fast enough to be affected by these systems are also the ones most likely to find a way to get into trouble with it. They're also likely to simply disable it completely, which defeats the whole purpose. After realizing that, it does start to sound like nothing more than a way to track innocent people. Oh crap I've joined the tin foil crowd...
I swore by nvidia for a long time and, for most of that time, I upgraded every time new drivers came out. I never had a serious issue doing that. I've gotten over my ATI paranoia a bit now, but the ATI cards I've used have all caused me some kind of grief at one time or other, even when I wasn't monkeying with anything.
Granted, every company is going to have issues OCCASIONALLY, but you shouldn't be AFRAID to upgrade your drivers. That's just silly. Occasional bugs are fine, but you shouldn't expect showstoppers every time new drivers are released. When did that become okay?
Unfortunately, a lot of standard consumers today want a laptop because it's cute and portable. It doesn't matter that they'll never take it anywhere; that's not the point. The point is that they COULD take it somewhere. It's a waste, but it's really hard to fight that momentum, especially with the marketing reinforcing it.
Like a lot of slashdotters, I fix computers for friends and family on a fairly regularly basis. I'll agree that HPs generally do tend to run hotter than a comparable Dell, Toshiba, etc, regardless of the processor. I have no idea why. I'd guess it's because they just don't put enough thought into cooling their laptops.
I will say that my HP tx2500 (Turion) certainly runs hotter than I'd prefer when doing intensive things, but it's bearable. However, I think some of the HP laptops out there give you the best bang for your buck, as long as you can deal with the heat. And my tx2500 (and the newer model, whatever they call it now) are the only laptop/tablets I've come across with even passable graphics capabilities. It'd be a shame if HP took a dive here. I'd love to see them get their heat issues under control.
Yeah it's probably at least partly a money grab. If we really want to make some progress fixing the obesity issues, we need to start targeting the parents. They're the real problem.
My vote would be a high powered rifle. Or lasers. Definitely lasers. I'll settle for ANYTHING that motivates a little ACTUAL parenting, though.
Unfortunately, any method of trying to make bad parents work for their kids would probably be just as unpopular (if not more) as new taxes. Let's give a big welcome to the status quo. I believe you've met.
I think that was the part that was meant to be funny, but my 8800 has gotten a 5.9 on that test for over a year now. Isn't it time we moved past the 'Vista is slow' thing?
I don't think most people realize just how much information they're giving away. If you sat there and asked them explicitly, some of them might say no. At least, I'd like to think some of them would...
you should also be able to play the game without having to insert the media each time you want to play
I can and do. What's the issue?
To explain using the game I mentioned above... When I click on my 'Civilization 4' icon, a script loads an.iso (properly made with the original disk) into a virtual drive, then launches the program. After the program launches, it unloads the image. True, this doesn't work with every game, but it's actually quite easy for a great many games. I much prefer the 5-10 minutes of work (once) to having to log into the company's server each time for a single player game.
No, it doesn't necessarily prevent it from happening, but it might make it difficult enough that your average non-tech person will give up and just buy it. Either way, I can see where they're coming from. Why should people get the exact same game I have without paying for it, regardless of whether they would have paid for it or not?
Well... I haven't had to insert a disk in years. That's without cracking anything. Part of that may just be the games I play, but a little ingenuity with cd images can go a long way.
Either way, I'd personally rather have a small shelf/rack/drawer with some CDs/DVDs on it than try to keep track of 12 different accounts. Not to mention, I can be sure I can always install and play the game if I own the media. I'm sure there are people that feel the opposite way about it, but that doesn't mean my option should go away.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess the blue stuff was just a pH buffer solution (used to calibrate pH meters) or similar. Maybe not the BEST thing to flush down the drain, but probably not overly dangerous.
Not that I completely disagree with you, but I don't think you can put all of the blame for Spore's poor sales on DRM. The game was just not that good. It might have been fun to play through a couple of times, but it was definitely lacking. Part of that is probably due to the hype machine, but it wasn't exactly a great game to begin with.
For the record, I don't pirate games anymore (and really only ever downloaded a couple that I played for any length of time). Now that I'm out of school and have a decent income, I buy all my games if/when I want them.
For me, it's not about the game being easy or difficult to get (either price or effort). I don't want to keep track of a dozen accounts with different game developers just to get their content. There's a limit to how much of that I'm willing to deal with. It's a matter of practicality.
Re:Play at your friend's house? Sell a game? Nope.
on
Why Bother With DRM?
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· Score: 1
As drinkypoo said, Steam is not a straight backup.
I haven't used Impulse's archive feature, so I'm not sure if the archives are completely separate from Impulse itself (I'll take your word for it), but my experience with Sins of a Solar Empire is that I can simply copy the game folder directly out of Program Files to another computer and run it without hassle.
Re:Saw It in Music! Coming Soon in Games, E-Books
on
Why Bother With DRM?
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· Score: 1
What's nice about Impulse, though, is that you don't have to run Impulse to play the game. The only time you even have to open it is for the initial install or if you choose to update the game. I've gone months without touching my Impulse install. I even copied SoaSE from my Windows desktop to my Ubuntu partition, then to my laptop without even touching Impulse.. No issues whatsoever.
Re:Sophistry To Kill First Sale Doctrine
on
Why Bother With DRM?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Really, if we distill the arguments for DRM down far enough, it becomes clear that the idea is to try to work around the First Sale Doctrine and kill the second-hand market.
Really, if we distill the arguments against DRM down far enough, it becomes clear that the ideas is to try to get shit for free.
Both of you are right. There's a group of people fighting for each of those extremes. The rest of us are getting drowned out in the chaos of the battle.
I can't speak for everyone, but I don't want to connect to a server if I don't have to. Most of my favorite games are primarily single player (ie. Civilization). A lot of them have a multiplayer component, but there are tons of people that never touch that.
For games that are primarily multiplayer, I agree that a small fee for the initial install along with a monthly fee is reasonable, but not for single player games. I think this is dangerous territory too. It could lead to separate single/multiplayer editions where they get to charge you extra for small additions to a game.
I've thought about this a bit and I don't necessarily have a problem with paying every month. Assuming I can only make use of a certain amount of digital content, my costs should remain relatively constant. Priced accordingly, I suppose I could live with that, but my problem then is that I don't feel that I should have to connect to a third party to authorize my use of a game EVERY TIME I PLAY. I live with it for some multiplayer games because it can improve the experience, but I generally don't feel it's necessary. While I don't have a problem with the model in itself; the day the whole industry goes that way is the day I give up computers.
It makes me nervous enough that I rely on Valve to play some of my games. If they were to go under (not so likely, but certainly not impossible), I only hope that they detach the games from their online component and that I have enough notice to back things up properly. If all games were like that (or worse, all software), I'd probably go crazy trying to keep track of it all. That's especially true since it's unlikely there'd ever be a single, unified place where you purchase/maintain all of it.
I agree that that is generally how people see things, but think about it. What is a book? It's simply a collection of words that tell a story. A movie, same thing with images and sounds. A game simply adds a measure of human interaction into the mix.
People seem to have forgotten that the point isn't the medium. It's the story underneath. Words were simply the only way to convey a complex story back before radio, tv, etc. High art is an idea, expression in its purest form. It is not bound by the method in which it's communicated. It is only limited because people get locked into the traditional forms. Art has not been allowed to evolve as freely as it should.
Please note that I'm not about to get up in arms over the game thing. I think it's a bigger issue than just that. We (as a people) get hung up on things because "that's the way it's always been done." The problem is that when we stop changing, that's the beginning of the end for us. I don't believe a stagnation of art forms will cause that, but it's a trend that I find disturbing.
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly. People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
At its most basic definition, entertainment is just a diversion, something that holds a persons' attention in a way that they find enjoyable. The subject matter sometimes has little bearing on the level of enjoyment. True, those books often are assigned in schools for the sole purpose of learning about mankind, but that's not all they are.
Does anyone play an "adult" videogame to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenille self-indulgence.
No, maybe we can't explore humanity in games, but there are people who certainly would if there were suitable games out there. I think you probably agree with me on that based on what you said after, but I do have a problem with this:
Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
If you just mean unsavory stuff for the sake of unsavory stuff, then I suppose I won't disagree with you too strongly. We probably shouldn't parade it around just for the heck of it. However, there is nothing wrong with unsavory imagery and sounds in a game (or anything else) if there is a something more to it. Humanity, and nature in general, is brutal and unsavory. To deny it and cover it up because you don't like it is silly. Personally, I think most people that try do it because they don't like the idea that humanity was once (and mostly still is) a part of nature. They don't like to be reminded of it and so think everyone else should be the same. They're just pictures and sounds. They have no meaning other than what we assign to them.
Anyway, I believe (and I think you agree) that games are potentially a much more powerful medium than any other form, due to the level of interactivity. I'm reminded of Call of Duty 4. (Yes, call me juvenile if you want.) If I remember right, the game opens with the player stuck in first person mode of a man being dragged to his execution. The player is stuck like that right up until the man's end. I believe the whole scenario was fabricated (and so has little real-world significance), but I was very much affected by that scene. Imagine how powerful that and similar scenes could be with something that has real significance.
I don't know about Yahoo, but with Gmail and others, you can set up pop or imap in Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. I'm sure you could find widgets to work with this setup.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't think it's out of the question that they'd make a tablet, I think people are right that we'll just end up with a next generation iPhone/iTouch.
The tablet market is competitive, but it's not huge. I think they'd have a good shot at the art crowd with a decent digitizer, but nothing they've shown so far (that I'm aware of) seems to be going in that direction. They seem much more focused on finger interaction and multitouch. On top of that, Apple isn't terribly desirable in business, which is the other major draw for tablets.
I don't see a big win for them other than sheer novelty. I will admit, though, that novelty seems to be one of their biggest strengths.
Good points, but that assumes that drivers are reasonable people. The very people this device is targeting are the ones that will do things like that. You're causing just as much trouble by putting the devices in as leaving them out.
True, your brakes are much better at changing your speed than your engine, but if a car is out of control, it's going to be slowing down. So by slowing down next to him, you're staying in a potentially dangerous place. In front of the car is the only guaranteed safe place because physics prohibits the vehicle from catching you.
As far as seeing and avoiding erratic drivers, that's not always possible. Suppose there's debris in the lane next to you and a car next to you. That driver has no option but to:
1. steer into you
2. steer into the ditch
3. drive straight into the debris
At speeds likely to be affected by this system, odds are he won't be able to stop in time. Not to mention stopping dead in a highway is a wee bit dangerous on its own. Assuming you see the debris at roughly the same time he does, you can accelerate while he brakes, getting you clear and giving him a place to go. That saves quite a bit of trouble for everybody.
I wish I had mod points for you. That is by far the best response I've seen so far regarding the danger of this technology.
I'm not necessarily opposed to some kind of action to deal with out-of-control speeders, but unexpected physical limits placed on the vehicle are not the way to do it. Any limits need to be clearly defined prior to a person operating a machine capable of that much destruction. If the parent poster's scenario occurs or the system reports an incorrect speed limit at just the wrong moment, I don't see any potential for GOOD things to happen.
It seems to me that the people who drive fast enough to be affected by these systems are also the ones most likely to find a way to get into trouble with it. They're also likely to simply disable it completely, which defeats the whole purpose. After realizing that, it does start to sound like nothing more than a way to track innocent people. Oh crap I've joined the tin foil crowd...
I swore by nvidia for a long time and, for most of that time, I upgraded every time new drivers came out. I never had a serious issue doing that. I've gotten over my ATI paranoia a bit now, but the ATI cards I've used have all caused me some kind of grief at one time or other, even when I wasn't monkeying with anything.
Granted, every company is going to have issues OCCASIONALLY, but you shouldn't be AFRAID to upgrade your drivers. That's just silly. Occasional bugs are fine, but you shouldn't expect showstoppers every time new drivers are released. When did that become okay?
Unfortunately, a lot of standard consumers today want a laptop because it's cute and portable. It doesn't matter that they'll never take it anywhere; that's not the point. The point is that they COULD take it somewhere. It's a waste, but it's really hard to fight that momentum, especially with the marketing reinforcing it.
Like a lot of slashdotters, I fix computers for friends and family on a fairly regularly basis. I'll agree that HPs generally do tend to run hotter than a comparable Dell, Toshiba, etc, regardless of the processor. I have no idea why. I'd guess it's because they just don't put enough thought into cooling their laptops.
I will say that my HP tx2500 (Turion) certainly runs hotter than I'd prefer when doing intensive things, but it's bearable. However, I think some of the HP laptops out there give you the best bang for your buck, as long as you can deal with the heat. And my tx2500 (and the newer model, whatever they call it now) are the only laptop/tablets I've come across with even passable graphics capabilities. It'd be a shame if HP took a dive here. I'd love to see them get their heat issues under control.
Yeah it's probably at least partly a money grab. If we really want to make some progress fixing the obesity issues, we need to start targeting the parents. They're the real problem.
My vote would be a high powered rifle. Or lasers. Definitely lasers. I'll settle for ANYTHING that motivates a little ACTUAL parenting, though.
Unfortunately, any method of trying to make bad parents work for their kids would probably be just as unpopular (if not more) as new taxes. Let's give a big welcome to the status quo. I believe you've met.
I think that was the part that was meant to be funny, but my 8800 has gotten a 5.9 on that test for over a year now. Isn't it time we moved past the 'Vista is slow' thing?
I don't think most people realize just how much information they're giving away. If you sat there and asked them explicitly, some of them might say no. At least, I'd like to think some of them would...
you should also be able to play the game without having to insert the media each time you want to play
I can and do. What's the issue?
To explain using the game I mentioned above... When I click on my 'Civilization 4' icon, a script loads an .iso (properly made with the original disk) into a virtual drive, then launches the program. After the program launches, it unloads the image. True, this doesn't work with every game, but it's actually quite easy for a great many games. I much prefer the 5-10 minutes of work (once) to having to log into the company's server each time for a single player game.
No, it doesn't necessarily prevent it from happening, but it might make it difficult enough that your average non-tech person will give up and just buy it. Either way, I can see where they're coming from. Why should people get the exact same game I have without paying for it, regardless of whether they would have paid for it or not?
Well... I haven't had to insert a disk in years. That's without cracking anything. Part of that may just be the games I play, but a little ingenuity with cd images can go a long way.
Either way, I'd personally rather have a small shelf/rack/drawer with some CDs/DVDs on it than try to keep track of 12 different accounts. Not to mention, I can be sure I can always install and play the game if I own the media. I'm sure there are people that feel the opposite way about it, but that doesn't mean my option should go away.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess the blue stuff was just a pH buffer solution (used to calibrate pH meters) or similar. Maybe not the BEST thing to flush down the drain, but probably not overly dangerous.
Not that I completely disagree with you, but I don't think you can put all of the blame for Spore's poor sales on DRM. The game was just not that good. It might have been fun to play through a couple of times, but it was definitely lacking. Part of that is probably due to the hype machine, but it wasn't exactly a great game to begin with.
+1
That's what I did for a long time. I don't do it now, but I also have much less time to play games.
For the record, I don't pirate games anymore (and really only ever downloaded a couple that I played for any length of time). Now that I'm out of school and have a decent income, I buy all my games if/when I want them.
For me, it's not about the game being easy or difficult to get (either price or effort). I don't want to keep track of a dozen accounts with different game developers just to get their content. There's a limit to how much of that I'm willing to deal with. It's a matter of practicality.
As drinkypoo said, Steam is not a straight backup.
I haven't used Impulse's archive feature, so I'm not sure if the archives are completely separate from Impulse itself (I'll take your word for it), but my experience with Sins of a Solar Empire is that I can simply copy the game folder directly out of Program Files to another computer and run it without hassle.
What's nice about Impulse, though, is that you don't have to run Impulse to play the game. The only time you even have to open it is for the initial install or if you choose to update the game. I've gone months without touching my Impulse install. I even copied SoaSE from my Windows desktop to my Ubuntu partition, then to my laptop without even touching Impulse.. No issues whatsoever.
Really, if we distill the arguments for DRM down far enough, it becomes clear that the idea is to try to work around the First Sale Doctrine and kill the second-hand market.
Really, if we distill the arguments against DRM down far enough, it becomes clear that the ideas is to try to get shit for free.
Both of you are right. There's a group of people fighting for each of those extremes. The rest of us are getting drowned out in the chaos of the battle.
I can't speak for everyone, but I don't want to connect to a server if I don't have to. Most of my favorite games are primarily single player (ie. Civilization). A lot of them have a multiplayer component, but there are tons of people that never touch that.
For games that are primarily multiplayer, I agree that a small fee for the initial install along with a monthly fee is reasonable, but not for single player games. I think this is dangerous territory too. It could lead to separate single/multiplayer editions where they get to charge you extra for small additions to a game.
I've thought about this a bit and I don't necessarily have a problem with paying every month. Assuming I can only make use of a certain amount of digital content, my costs should remain relatively constant. Priced accordingly, I suppose I could live with that, but my problem then is that I don't feel that I should have to connect to a third party to authorize my use of a game EVERY TIME I PLAY. I live with it for some multiplayer games because it can improve the experience, but I generally don't feel it's necessary. While I don't have a problem with the model in itself; the day the whole industry goes that way is the day I give up computers.
It makes me nervous enough that I rely on Valve to play some of my games. If they were to go under (not so likely, but certainly not impossible), I only hope that they detach the games from their online component and that I have enough notice to back things up properly. If all games were like that (or worse, all software), I'd probably go crazy trying to keep track of it all. That's especially true since it's unlikely there'd ever be a single, unified place where you purchase/maintain all of it.
I agree that that is generally how people see things, but think about it. What is a book? It's simply a collection of words that tell a story. A movie, same thing with images and sounds. A game simply adds a measure of human interaction into the mix.
People seem to have forgotten that the point isn't the medium. It's the story underneath. Words were simply the only way to convey a complex story back before radio, tv, etc. High art is an idea, expression in its purest form. It is not bound by the method in which it's communicated. It is only limited because people get locked into the traditional forms. Art has not been allowed to evolve as freely as it should.
Please note that I'm not about to get up in arms over the game thing. I think it's a bigger issue than just that. We (as a people) get hung up on things because "that's the way it's always been done." The problem is that when we stop changing, that's the beginning of the end for us. I don't believe a stagnation of art forms will cause that, but it's a trend that I find disturbing.
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly. People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
At its most basic definition, entertainment is just a diversion, something that holds a persons' attention in a way that they find enjoyable. The subject matter sometimes has little bearing on the level of enjoyment. True, those books often are assigned in schools for the sole purpose of learning about mankind, but that's not all they are.
Does anyone play an "adult" videogame to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenille self-indulgence.
No, maybe we can't explore humanity in games, but there are people who certainly would if there were suitable games out there. I think you probably agree with me on that based on what you said after, but I do have a problem with this:
Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
If you just mean unsavory stuff for the sake of unsavory stuff, then I suppose I won't disagree with you too strongly. We probably shouldn't parade it around just for the heck of it. However, there is nothing wrong with unsavory imagery and sounds in a game (or anything else) if there is a something more to it. Humanity, and nature in general, is brutal and unsavory. To deny it and cover it up because you don't like it is silly. Personally, I think most people that try do it because they don't like the idea that humanity was once (and mostly still is) a part of nature. They don't like to be reminded of it and so think everyone else should be the same. They're just pictures and sounds. They have no meaning other than what we assign to them.
Anyway, I believe (and I think you agree) that games are potentially a much more powerful medium than any other form, due to the level of interactivity. I'm reminded of Call of Duty 4. (Yes, call me juvenile if you want.) If I remember right, the game opens with the player stuck in first person mode of a man being dragged to his execution. The player is stuck like that right up until the man's end. I believe the whole scenario was fabricated (and so has little real-world significance), but I was very much affected by that scene. Imagine how powerful that and similar scenes could be with something that has real significance.
I don't know about Yahoo, but with Gmail and others, you can set up pop or imap in Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. I'm sure you could find widgets to work with this setup.