You're misreading my post. I wasn't saying that having plug-ins for the video was better/worse than a flash plugin, I was saying that there is a better way to do that. The flash part was only there to show that having plug-ins for video formats is just as bad as flash.
Good for technical people, but some people don't know how or don't want to install those plug-ins. If I wanted to watch videos through the use of a plug-in, then flash works perfectly fine for that.
It's the statutory damages used to intimidate would-be pirates into not pirating. They make an example of someone who caused less that $16 dollars of damage to try to convince people to stop downloading. Not that that even directly nets any money, since many people (especially in a recession) pirate things because they're broke.
Also, keep in mind that the RIAA probably isn't even trying to get any money out of the defendant. What will happen is that the defendant will declare bankruptcy after getting a million dollar verdict or something slapped on them. If they RIAA actually wanted get money out of people, they would sue for reasonable amounts, or actually stop suing people and actually do something productive.
It was a while ago. My laptop's DVD drive was broken but I didnt have the money to replace it because the laptop had more important things that needed to be replaced. So I loaded up the ISO ob an external hard drive and installed it only to get a securom error. Googled it, and sure enough, securom explicitly prevents you from playing in VMware.
Also, if someone wants to replay a game 10 years from now, will Ubisoft still be running the server?
The Ubisoft execs who ordered up the draconian DRM will be retired in 10 year's and wouldn't care at all about people trying to play a 10 year old game. Besides, the day that they make DRM that takes 10 years to crack is the day I completely stop playing games.
Again, spore can still sell for one reason: the DRM doesn't affect the average person. IIRC, Spore had, among other things, a limit on the number of installations. Most people don't own multiple computers, so that doesn't affect them. One particular example of DRM that pissed me off was Mass Effect's Securom not letting me play it in VMware. This brings me to my next point: if someone actually cares, they'll likely just go find a crack and then forget all about it. Would you rather be sending angry letters to some CEO who won't read them anyway, or would you rather just download a crack and get on with playing your game?
This is different. It is approaching the point at which the average person might actually start caring. We may not be there quite yet, but when we get there, it should be pretty obvious. This about the history of DRM systems. Macrovision? Most people didn't need to copy tapes. DVD encryption? That's what DVD players are for. Requiring game CDs to be present? Most people don't care about the extra 30 seconds it takes to find and insert a CD.
I expect that in a year or two, DRM systems will be so draconian that a large portion of people will actually not be able to play the game. What I would expect to happen is that a DRM that checks for suspicious system devices gets false positives off certain devices because the devs were too lazy to test on a variety of hardware. Suddenly, everyone with a certain type of motherboard/graphics card/CD drive etc is unable to play.
Another possibly scenario is that games start requiring hardware DRM, but that would not be present on older systems, so anybody with an old system would not be able to play.
I know we debate this ad nauseum, but I'm not sure that particular graph would show anything. So few people care about DRM that it probably cancels out with the extra sales they'll get from the 10 people who decided not to pirate because of the DRM. I personally game from a desktop that's always connected to the internet, and I'm not willing to forsake a game I'm interested in for the potentially 1-2 hours a month that my internet connection might be malfunctioning. I don't like this concept, but I'm not willing to change my behavior for somebody else's crusade...
Why would you not just wait a short amount of time for the DRM to be cracked? Nobody 'decides not to pirate' because of DRM. Excessive DRM actually causes piracy because pirated copies will be cracked to bypass the DRM.
No, the Ubisoft execs will make a 'Level of DRM annoyingness' vs 'Number of copies pirated' graph. They will see that less people bought it and more people pirated it, and they will come to the conclusion that the games need even more DRM to stop people from pirating it. The next generation of games will such have more DRM, and the cycle will repeat.
People are still IN the trap. It's vendor lock-in at its finest. They start with MS from client to server, and everything is dependent on other MS products. Then they seal it when they have to start making MS-based web apps and such. And on top of that, they see no reason to get out. There aren't any 'consequences' for some people. So they just stay in the MS-hole.
I've been using linux on a mac for ages. EFI isn't something like a peripheral that requires driver support. It is only enhanced with drivers. If I do not install the right modules on Linux, it works fine, but I can't set the fan speed and such. Drivers are only really needed for fine control. It's like if you install windows but you don't install any drivers. It will work, just not as well. But you definitely won't cause any damage.
Safe search is far form effective. It will filter out common search terms, yes, but it's not hard to find one it doesn't filter. Ironically, the auto-completer will show what is filtered, so you don't even have to check, so it's easier to find porn. For example, start typing something obvious like "creampie" into Google with safesearch on full, and it won't try to autocomplete it for you. Then, type "rule 34" into Google and look at all the suggestions it has for you. Searching for "rule 34" itself yields basically no pornographic results, no matter what the safesearch state is. However, pick something more specific from the list of choices the auto-completer has so nicely given you, and you get porn, even with safesearch on. All it does is filter it from people that don't actually know how to get around that kind of thing.
Until google or someone figures out an algorithm to detect all boobs, genitals, etc in images, including cartoons and hand-drawn things, no automatic filtering will be truly effective.
Not to mention outsourcing support to India. Had a phone call from hell once. Person in India had *no way at all* of telling me if a particular office was opened or closed, and could not connect me to anyone within the company that would know.
Off topic as this may be, the US does need to stop relying so heavily on other countries, and stop basing decisions based on other countries' actions.
You're implying that they somehow block every single search term related to porn. Guess what? Not only are there tons of slang terms for various things they haven't heard of, but even whole genres of porn that they can't block because they've never heard of. Sure, they can block most mainstream porn, but a lot of genre-specific porn would also apply to mainstream.
Didn't Google do the same thing with China? Censor themselves or be completely blocked? Possibly, if Google was blocked, it would piss enough people off to lower the people's opinion of the government and possibly effect change. I don't know though, I don't live in India, so I don't know if a few million people being pissed about something like this would effect any changes from the government.
I'm not sure if this applies to Germany, but many non-US countries put less emphasis on individual short-term rights (gun ownership, free speech) and more on rights as a society (not being shot in a dark alley, protecting children.) Many people in the US view short-term rights as being better, but that is probably just cultural values.
Mine handles a HTTP/IRC/SMTP/IMAP/DNS server with medium use AND heavy torrenting. I have gotten over 30mbps with it, bottlenecked only by 802.11g and by my cable line. If you are getting bad torrenting throughput, dropped connections, reduce the connection limit in your torrent client so it will use less connections to transfer the same amount of data. Your router is likely trying to manage a huge NAT table for no good reason.
I have noticed a speed increase after installing OpenWRT though. I'm not sure what it is, but you can also get faster noticable speeds with QoS and firewalling.
Just get a cheap router like a WRT54GL and run OpenWRT on it. I have a couple of them in a WDS network. They're very manageable, and you can set up DMZs and such, and you can do basically anything you would do on a normal Linux system.
...is that it turns it into a cat-and-mouse game. Just like the Apple vs Palm USB issue. Apple will find a way to prevent OS X from running on this, and people will have a system where any software update could brick their computer. Then the Psystar team will find a way around that. Rinse, repeat. So I can either ignore upgrades, use a different OS, or actually buy a Mac. Sounds like some great choices.
I think it ends up being like NCQ. The drive's processor can be much more specialized and can do the processing much more efficiently. Not to mention, it might require standards to be changed, since some busses (like USB, IIRC) don't provide commands to zero-out a sector on a low level. On an SSD, just writing a sector with zeros doesn't work the same as blanking the memory. It just makes the drive use a still-blank sector for the next write to that sector. The problem only comes when you run out of blank sectors.
It's not just that they are doing that, but that they do so without warning. Of course they are free to put that in their software, and you have every right to disable it, but (from my understanding) they are doing this without telling the user. So how would you know to disable it if you didn't know it existed?
You're correct in that you can compile it, do whatever with it. The SDK is free, and has an iPhone emulator for testing apps, but jailbreaking is illegal (according to Apple, and a US court would probably agree.) Which makes precompiled binaries hard to distribute in a way that makes them useful. If everyone jailbroke their phones, and Apple stopped plugging the holes that allowed for it, the GPL issue would be moot here.
Not everyone is going to jailbreak their phones and void their warranties just to keep their GPL rights. Most people haven't even heard of the GPL. But those that do care about it get left out in the cold. Basically everyone does this in some way, but Apple makes it hard for FOSS users more than the FOSS developers. Which fits with their business plan of doing whatever gets them more money.
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You're misreading my post. I wasn't saying that having plug-ins for the video was better/worse than a flash plugin, I was saying that there is a better way to do that. The flash part was only there to show that having plug-ins for video formats is just as bad as flash.
Good for technical people, but some people don't know how or don't want to install those plug-ins. If I wanted to watch videos through the use of a plug-in, then flash works perfectly fine for that.
It's the statutory damages used to intimidate would-be pirates into not pirating. They make an example of someone who caused less that $16 dollars of damage to try to convince people to stop downloading. Not that that even directly nets any money, since many people (especially in a recession) pirate things because they're broke.
Also, keep in mind that the RIAA probably isn't even trying to get any money out of the defendant. What will happen is that the defendant will declare bankruptcy after getting a million dollar verdict or something slapped on them. If they RIAA actually wanted get money out of people, they would sue for reasonable amounts, or actually stop suing people and actually do something productive.
It was a while ago. My laptop's DVD drive was broken but I didnt have the money to replace it because the laptop had more important things that needed to be replaced. So I loaded up the ISO ob an external hard drive and installed it only to get a securom error. Googled it, and sure enough, securom explicitly prevents you from playing in VMware.
You do realize ethernet originally ran over coax, right? Google '10BASE2'
Also, if someone wants to replay a game 10 years from now, will Ubisoft still be running the server?
The Ubisoft execs who ordered up the draconian DRM will be retired in 10 year's and wouldn't care at all about people trying to play a 10 year old game. Besides, the day that they make DRM that takes 10 years to crack is the day I completely stop playing games.
Again, spore can still sell for one reason: the DRM doesn't affect the average person. IIRC, Spore had, among other things, a limit on the number of installations. Most people don't own multiple computers, so that doesn't affect them. One particular example of DRM that pissed me off was Mass Effect's Securom not letting me play it in VMware. This brings me to my next point: if someone actually cares, they'll likely just go find a crack and then forget all about it. Would you rather be sending angry letters to some CEO who won't read them anyway, or would you rather just download a crack and get on with playing your game?
This is different. It is approaching the point at which the average person might actually start caring. We may not be there quite yet, but when we get there, it should be pretty obvious. This about the history of DRM systems. Macrovision? Most people didn't need to copy tapes. DVD encryption? That's what DVD players are for. Requiring game CDs to be present? Most people don't care about the extra 30 seconds it takes to find and insert a CD.
I expect that in a year or two, DRM systems will be so draconian that a large portion of people will actually not be able to play the game. What I would expect to happen is that a DRM that checks for suspicious system devices gets false positives off certain devices because the devs were too lazy to test on a variety of hardware. Suddenly, everyone with a certain type of motherboard/graphics card/CD drive etc is unable to play.
Another possibly scenario is that games start requiring hardware DRM, but that would not be present on older systems, so anybody with an old system would not be able to play.
I know we debate this ad nauseum, but I'm not sure that particular graph would show anything. So few people care about DRM that it probably cancels out with the extra sales they'll get from the 10 people who decided not to pirate because of the DRM. I personally game from a desktop that's always connected to the internet, and I'm not willing to forsake a game I'm interested in for the potentially 1-2 hours a month that my internet connection might be malfunctioning. I don't like this concept, but I'm not willing to change my behavior for somebody else's crusade...
Why would you not just wait a short amount of time for the DRM to be cracked? Nobody 'decides not to pirate' because of DRM. Excessive DRM actually causes piracy because pirated copies will be cracked to bypass the DRM.
No, the Ubisoft execs will make a 'Level of DRM annoyingness' vs 'Number of copies pirated' graph. They will see that less people bought it and more people pirated it, and they will come to the conclusion that the games need even more DRM to stop people from pirating it. The next generation of games will such have more DRM, and the cycle will repeat.
getting themselves out of that trap
People are still IN the trap. It's vendor lock-in at its finest. They start with MS from client to server, and everything is dependent on other MS products. Then they seal it when they have to start making MS-based web apps and such. And on top of that, they see no reason to get out. There aren't any 'consequences' for some people. So they just stay in the MS-hole.
I've been using linux on a mac for ages. EFI isn't something like a peripheral that requires driver support. It is only enhanced with drivers. If I do not install the right modules on Linux, it works fine, but I can't set the fan speed and such. Drivers are only really needed for fine control. It's like if you install windows but you don't install any drivers. It will work, just not as well. But you definitely won't cause any damage.
Safe search is far form effective. It will filter out common search terms, yes, but it's not hard to find one it doesn't filter. Ironically, the auto-completer will show what is filtered, so you don't even have to check, so it's easier to find porn. For example, start typing something obvious like "creampie" into Google with safesearch on full, and it won't try to autocomplete it for you. Then, type "rule 34" into Google and look at all the suggestions it has for you. Searching for "rule 34" itself yields basically no pornographic results, no matter what the safesearch state is. However, pick something more specific from the list of choices the auto-completer has so nicely given you, and you get porn, even with safesearch on. All it does is filter it from people that don't actually know how to get around that kind of thing.
Until google or someone figures out an algorithm to detect all boobs, genitals, etc in images, including cartoons and hand-drawn things, no automatic filtering will be truly effective.
Not to mention outsourcing support to India. Had a phone call from hell once. Person in India had *no way at all* of telling me if a particular office was opened or closed, and could not connect me to anyone within the company that would know. Off topic as this may be, the US does need to stop relying so heavily on other countries, and stop basing decisions based on other countries' actions.
You're implying that they somehow block every single search term related to porn. Guess what? Not only are there tons of slang terms for various things they haven't heard of, but even whole genres of porn that they can't block because they've never heard of. Sure, they can block most mainstream porn, but a lot of genre-specific porn would also apply to mainstream.
Didn't Google do the same thing with China? Censor themselves or be completely blocked? Possibly, if Google was blocked, it would piss enough people off to lower the people's opinion of the government and possibly effect change. I don't know though, I don't live in India, so I don't know if a few million people being pissed about something like this would effect any changes from the government.
Won't this just cause Bing and Yahoo to lose marketshare in India? I haven't RTFA'd very carefully, so correct me if I'm completely off the mark.
I'm not sure if this applies to Germany, but many non-US countries put less emphasis on individual short-term rights (gun ownership, free speech) and more on rights as a society (not being shot in a dark alley, protecting children.) Many people in the US view short-term rights as being better, but that is probably just cultural values.
Except the WRT54GL can't handle torrents
Mine handles a HTTP/IRC/SMTP/IMAP/DNS server with medium use AND heavy torrenting. I have gotten over 30mbps with it, bottlenecked only by 802.11g and by my cable line. If you are getting bad torrenting throughput, dropped connections, reduce the connection limit in your torrent client so it will use less connections to transfer the same amount of data. Your router is likely trying to manage a huge NAT table for no good reason.
I have noticed a speed increase after installing OpenWRT though. I'm not sure what it is, but you can also get faster noticable speeds with QoS and firewalling.
Just get a cheap router like a WRT54GL and run OpenWRT on it. I have a couple of them in a WDS network. They're very manageable, and you can set up DMZs and such, and you can do basically anything you would do on a normal Linux system.
...is that it turns it into a cat-and-mouse game. Just like the Apple vs Palm USB issue. Apple will find a way to prevent OS X from running on this, and people will have a system where any software update could brick their computer. Then the Psystar team will find a way around that. Rinse, repeat. So I can either ignore upgrades, use a different OS, or actually buy a Mac. Sounds like some great choices.
I think it ends up being like NCQ. The drive's processor can be much more specialized and can do the processing much more efficiently. Not to mention, it might require standards to be changed, since some busses (like USB, IIRC) don't provide commands to zero-out a sector on a low level. On an SSD, just writing a sector with zeros doesn't work the same as blanking the memory. It just makes the drive use a still-blank sector for the next write to that sector. The problem only comes when you run out of blank sectors.
It's not just that they are doing that, but that they do so without warning. Of course they are free to put that in their software, and you have every right to disable it, but (from my understanding) they are doing this without telling the user. So how would you know to disable it if you didn't know it existed?
You're correct in that you can compile it, do whatever with it. The SDK is free, and has an iPhone emulator for testing apps, but jailbreaking is illegal (according to Apple, and a US court would probably agree.) Which makes precompiled binaries hard to distribute in a way that makes them useful. If everyone jailbroke their phones, and Apple stopped plugging the holes that allowed for it, the GPL issue would be moot here.
Not everyone is going to jailbreak their phones and void their warranties just to keep their GPL rights. Most people haven't even heard of the GPL. But those that do care about it get left out in the cold. Basically everyone does this in some way, but Apple makes it hard for FOSS users more than the FOSS developers. Which fits with their business plan of doing whatever gets them more money.