Really? So you discount the US Government Accountability Office's statement that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."?
Here's another beautiful GAO quote: "Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology."
If Ubisoft applies a similar but tweaked version of this DRM to another game, will it take hacker groups like Skid Row the same amount of time to develop a crack? If so, then Ubisoft will be quite happy to continue releasing games that sell for several weeks before their DRM is cracked.
On the other hand if this means Skid Row can now apply the same technique to all of Ubisoft's games, then the company has just wasted a lot of money and frustrated many of their customers all for the sake of one game.
That was actually the German army doing the surprise attacking in Africa. Rommel was suffering was a complete lack of military supply refreshment from Hitler, and had to make do with just a trivial number of forces. He truly was a military genius, however, and continued to present a massive headache to the Allies despite being totally outnumbered.
It's fascinating to see how different the telecom industry is with the device manufacturing industry. The wireless telecom market especially is dominated by the two behemoths of Verizon and AT&T. There's such a severe lack of competition that they can get away with setting similar prices and skimping on service.
AT&T tripled their annual profits from $4 billion to $12 billion from 2005-2008. This was coupled with a drastic drop in infrastructure investment in both their wireline and wireless networks.
And yet here they still are, making far more income in their latest earnings report than say Verizon, who is rushing to upgrade to LTE and is finishing up its FIOS deployments. People have little to no choice, especially with phones being locked to individual carriers.
Device manufacturers on the other hand live and die by the sword. Regardless of past success, if they don't produce they are gradually outpaced and find themselves facing a bleak future full of red ink.
Something really needs to be done about the telecom industry.
Basically you're an idiot who doesn't realize fascism is a RIGHT-WING CONCEPT. You don't have a clue how the internet industry actually works, and you blindly scream "GUB'MINT IS BAD!" over and over, believing that being screwed by corporations is far better than allowing a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED government help you. Brilliant.
I can't believe you're complaining about utilities. Why are there so many nutcases in America? If you hate having only one provider of electricity why don't you move to Somalia? No regulations there. I'm sure you'll have 10 corporations just begging you to run lines to your house.
Your government is elected by the people you twit. How is it a "monopoly" when every 2 or 4 years you get to CHOOSE who is running the government? I wish I could slap you for your idiocy.
Here's the thing. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the most prolific pirates are also the most voracious consumers, purchasing far more material than the average, casual gamer. These companies don't seem to understand that piracy does not correlate to a loss of sales. If anything, as a recent Arstechnica article mentioned, it may *increase* sales as people are able to legitimately sample the product and decide to buy either the current or future releases.
The real problem is that the executives and CEOs of these companies are performing their duties on behalf of the shareholders. The shareholders see people using their company's product for free, and like greedy little children who want to have their cake and eat it too, equate every torrent download with a lost sale. Even if it's not a true correlation, they can't stand the idea of someone using their stuff without adding to their pockets. If the shareholders don't recognize the value that targeted piracy, or even *demos* as the recent article about Crytek demonstrated, can have for a company, then nothing is going to improve, and the CEOs will keep shooting themselves in their foot trying to "stop piracy", all the while punishing their customers in the process.
What we need are more studies conducted by independent third parties to assess the true affects of piracy on sales. And I don't just mean a straight-up numbers analysis. I'm talking about determining the sociological implications of piracy, and its effects on buyers' habits over the long-term. Once these studies are performed we need to educate people about the *actual* conclusions, not some made-up garbage by the RIAA or other entrenched schemers.
I recall an article at Arstechnica about cell phone use while driving mentioning a study that found a minority of people are actually capable of multi-tasking while the rest are "bad at it". Oh yes, here we go:
Indeed, I am in favor of even higher levels of efficiency requirements, but Google makes very good points. As long as company isn't harming the environment, let them find the proper way to innovate. Utilize their greed to your advantage.
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
This is a good issue for government to investigate, as obviously interns can't exactly speak out publicly about their lack of pay without suffering a loss of employment.
Also salaried interns means more taxes for government... so there's always that incentive.
The interesting thing about LTE is that its entirely packet-switched. Voice will essentially be VOIP over the packet-switched network. Although operators will continue running their legacy circuit-switched networks for several more years (if only because they've already sunk billions into it), once voice transitions entirely over to digital transmission Verizon and co. will have to come up with another pricing scheme to extract higher ARPU from their customers.
The national news media has gone utterly insane over this tablet. I know it's a flashy, "cool" product that will sell well, but it's just not worth the crazy amount of attention it's getting.
I think the best example of the lunacy was illustrated on the Colbert Report. The iPad was given a full front-cover picture (free advertisement), while Amazon paid for a full back-cover advertisement of their Kindle on the same magazine.
From a comment in the engadget article: It's actually already out in the U.S. I was at a Kmart the other day and in the electronics dept. they had these sitting there but the kid had no idea if they were $149 or $99. I checked it out and it was terrible. The mouse buttons are insane, it has a 400Mhz Samsung CPU, and is pretty much worthless in build quality. They had 3 of them though on the shelf in the case.
So I should have qualified my statement with "legitimate, quality $99 netbook".
The problem with pricing books at $9.99 is the stickiness of the price tag. What is meant by this is consumer' perception of value. Although you can achieve large sales volume at price "below $10", if you ever try to raise the price by even a tiny amount, say $1, consumers *feel* like the markup was much higher than it really is, and sales subsequently drop off heavily.
The same phenomenon could be observed with iTunes'.99 cents pricing. Attempts to raise the price higher (especially without unilateral price raises across the board of offerings and publishers) resulted in significant sales drops.
It is also one reason we may never see a $99 netbook. That sub-factor of 10 number is quite magical for sales numbers, but kills any hope of raising prices in the future to combat inflation, increased salaries, admittedly raising profits, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why the possibility of quantum film replacing cmos sensors is so exciting. There was a slashdot article on this recently: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/22/2232222/Quantum-Film-Might-Replace-CMOS-Sensors?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Slashdot/slashdot+(Slashdot)
The possibilities for improving point and shoots will not end with the megapixel race.
Really? So you discount the US Government Accountability Office's statement that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars
Here's another beautiful GAO quote: "Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology."
Even the MPAA admitted its numbers were bogus: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/oops-mpaa-admits-college-piracy-numbers-grossly-inflated.ars
So why don't you calm down, take a deep breath, and let out some of the hot air stuck in your noggin?
Um...what? iTunes doesn't DRM its music files anymore.
Nor has any scientific evidence ever been provided that piracy negatively affects sales. Maybe you're the one who should stop complaining?
If Ubisoft applies a similar but tweaked version of this DRM to another game, will it take hacker groups like Skid Row the same amount of time to develop a crack? If so, then Ubisoft will be quite happy to continue releasing games that sell for several weeks before their DRM is cracked.
On the other hand if this means Skid Row can now apply the same technique to all of Ubisoft's games, then the company has just wasted a lot of money and frustrated many of their customers all for the sake of one game.
Wait, really? Why? What does throwing it in a bag of rice accomplish exactly?
That was actually the German army doing the surprise attacking in Africa. Rommel was suffering was a complete lack of military supply refreshment from Hitler, and had to make do with just a trivial number of forces. He truly was a military genius, however, and continued to present a massive headache to the Allies despite being totally outnumbered.
It's fascinating to see how different the telecom industry is with the device manufacturing industry. The wireless telecom market especially is dominated by the two behemoths of Verizon and AT&T. There's such a severe lack of competition that they can get away with setting similar prices and skimping on service.
AT&T tripled their annual profits from $4 billion to $12 billion from 2005-2008. This was coupled with a drastic drop in infrastructure investment in both their wireline and wireless networks.
And yet here they still are, making far more income in their latest earnings report than say Verizon, who is rushing to upgrade to LTE and is finishing up its FIOS deployments. People have little to no choice, especially with phones being locked to individual carriers.
Device manufacturers on the other hand live and die by the sword. Regardless of past success, if they don't produce they are gradually outpaced and find themselves facing a bleak future full of red ink.
Something really needs to be done about the telecom industry.
Slashdot has been ruined in recent times by trolling libertarian and right-wing mods. It saddens me.
And for all your effort you'll get a grand total of... $100. Yay! That'll show 'em!
Basically you're an idiot who doesn't realize fascism is a RIGHT-WING CONCEPT. You don't have a clue how the internet industry actually works, and you blindly scream "GUB'MINT IS BAD!" over and over, believing that being screwed by corporations is far better than allowing a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED government help you. Brilliant.
I can't believe you're complaining about utilities. Why are there so many nutcases in America? If you hate having only one provider of electricity why don't you move to Somalia? No regulations there. I'm sure you'll have 10 corporations just begging you to run lines to your house.
Your government is elected by the people you twit. How is it a "monopoly" when every 2 or 4 years you get to CHOOSE who is running the government? I wish I could slap you for your idiocy.
Here's the thing. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the most prolific pirates are also the most voracious consumers, purchasing far more material than the average, casual gamer. These companies don't seem to understand that piracy does not correlate to a loss of sales. If anything, as a recent Arstechnica article mentioned, it may *increase* sales as people are able to legitimately sample the product and decide to buy either the current or future releases.
The real problem is that the executives and CEOs of these companies are performing their duties on behalf of the shareholders. The shareholders see people using their company's product for free, and like greedy little children who want to have their cake and eat it too, equate every torrent download with a lost sale. Even if it's not a true correlation, they can't stand the idea of someone using their stuff without adding to their pockets. If the shareholders don't recognize the value that targeted piracy, or even *demos* as the recent article about Crytek demonstrated, can have for a company, then nothing is going to improve, and the CEOs will keep shooting themselves in their foot trying to "stop piracy", all the while punishing their customers in the process.
What we need are more studies conducted by independent third parties to assess the true affects of piracy on sales. And I don't just mean a straight-up numbers analysis. I'm talking about determining the sociological implications of piracy, and its effects on buyers' habits over the long-term. Once these studies are performed we need to educate people about the *actual* conclusions, not some made-up garbage by the RIAA or other entrenched schemers.
I recall an article at Arstechnica about cell phone use while driving mentioning a study that found a minority of people are actually capable of multi-tasking while the rest are "bad at it". Oh yes, here we go:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/rare-supertaskers-balance-driving-and-cellphone-use.ars
Indeed, I am in favor of even higher levels of efficiency requirements, but Google makes very good points. As long as company isn't harming the environment, let them find the proper way to innovate. Utilize their greed to your advantage.
This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
In other words, "Our browser is so slow it needs hardware acceleration to look good."
PS: Yes I realize it's not that simple.
This is a good issue for government to investigate, as obviously interns can't exactly speak out publicly about their lack of pay without suffering a loss of employment.
Also salaried interns means more taxes for government... so there's always that incentive.
I was a psychology major, and was impressed by how insightful the science often was.
Torrents would really only be an issue in dense urban areas. Especially in the boondocks, spectrum scarcity shouldn't be an issue.
The interesting thing about LTE is that its entirely packet-switched. Voice will essentially be VOIP over the packet-switched network. Although operators will continue running their legacy circuit-switched networks for several more years (if only because they've already sunk billions into it), once voice transitions entirely over to digital transmission Verizon and co. will have to come up with another pricing scheme to extract higher ARPU from their customers.
The national news media has gone utterly insane over this tablet. I know it's a flashy, "cool" product that will sell well, but it's just not worth the crazy amount of attention it's getting.
I think the best example of the lunacy was illustrated on the Colbert Report. The iPad was given a full front-cover picture (free advertisement), while Amazon paid for a full back-cover advertisement of their Kindle on the same magazine.
From a comment in the engadget article: It's actually already out in the U.S. I was at a Kmart the other day and in the electronics dept. they had these sitting there but the kid had no idea if they were $149 or $99. I checked it out and it was terrible. The mouse buttons are insane, it has a 400Mhz Samsung CPU, and is pretty much worthless in build quality. They had 3 of them though on the shelf in the case.
So I should have qualified my statement with "legitimate, quality $99 netbook".
The same phenomenon could be observed with iTunes' .99 cents pricing. Attempts to raise the price higher (especially without unilateral price raises across the board of offerings and publishers) resulted in significant sales drops.
It is also one reason we may never see a $99 netbook. That sub-factor of 10 number is quite magical for sales numbers, but kills any hope of raising prices in the future to combat inflation, increased salaries, admittedly raising profits, etc.
This has such incredible promise for the low-cost development of modern day games. Animation still presents a problem of course.