Personally, I was mighty pissed in 1995 when I tried to install Might & Magic III and the program told me it needed access to the phone line to call Mr Z. who sold the game to verify that he actually did sell it and it wasn't resold, copied, etc. I mean the NERVE of those guys. They sell me a game but it turns out I need to have constant access to phone line and Mr. Z. needs to be in business and still selling it, because as soon as he quits picking up the damn phone the game says buy-buy and bricks itself. ? What a load.
If you are that angry about it, don't buy the game.
Unfortunately, even if all slashdotters stopped buying, the effect on video-game market would be almost zero. On the other hand, if we raise stink about it and manage to educate a significant portion of buyers managements will think twice before crippling their offerings. And that is exactly what we are doing here.
If most of their market is ok with this deal
Most of their market does not realize/give it a thought that their acquisition will kick the bucket as soon as it is not profitable to maintain those DRM servers, which could happen after a few years or as soon as tomorrow. And at that point they will need to go to the grey market looking for hacked version and punch themselves for shelling money for it in the first place. If the DRM locks the game to hardware, they are out of luck with the next hardware upgrade as well. Meanwhile those who have a hacked version can enjoy a DRM-free experience for years to come. This is called "defective by design". Look it up.
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
Children will grow up to become adults sooner than you think. And by that time they will not object being tagged with an RFID chip on a daily basis because YOU told them it is OK. There is a distinction between children and pets and the line should not be crossed.
Instead of spending time, money and effort on new DRM measures that get circumvented within a few days of release,
No blue-ray support on Apple Macs nor Linux. Maybe someone somewhere did circumvent it, but I can simply do without these disks. Does the Big Media hope that I will buy some Blue-Ray movies? And play them on what exactly?
Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market.
That's a big gamble for a system just coming out of the closet. I will parrot what everyone else said on this forum and repeat that should that happen there is still no upside for Nokia: 1. 5 years is three generations in mobile world. Nokia will not last that long. 2. Should MS-phone become a success numerous competitors will instantly jump in the boat and add a few product lines, alongside their multiple Android and dumb-phone offerings. This is a wet dream of MS, Elop will be presented with an island nation and a castle, but where does that leave Nokia? One of the many after N years of struggling to be profitable? There was a precedent with HTC (among others) where MS just distributed all designs created during MS-HTC patnership to HTC's competitors. This will happen again as MS has not invested a penny in Nokia and does not give a damn if it goes under.
What is happening is an absurd from the business perspective. Sorry for a hyperbole, but I see Elop as a mind-controlling parasite who managed to instill himself in the host's brain. Through Elop Microsoft gained complete control of a successful transnational company without investing a penny. This is even crazier than a 90% leveraged buyout. Under the circumstances MS is free to suck it dry and dump the carcass without a second thought.
This is also not the first time MS ex-execs in new positions of power steer the subordinates to be milked by MS -- I recall something about ex-MS exec government officials happily signing away our tax dollars for MS. There was recently a lawsuit initiated by Google to dispute this. Thus we establish that this "trick" is a long standing part of MS "business practice".
From logical and business points of view the effect of a "Trojan CEO" is simply not possible. Even if we were to assume that Elop is a super-loyal-fan of MS cannot justify stripping all the non-MS product lines from a giant such as Nokia (used to be). After all, CEO's are smart people and supposed to be capable of looking after their own pocketbooks and reputations. This brings me to the only logical conclusion - somehow, somewhere Elop is getting personal kickbacks from MS. Maybe he is promised a small island with a castle, ownership of a nation, or a banal anonymous Swiss bank account. Finnish authorities should take a close look at this strange business arrangement. And if that does not happen (and it will not), an angry mob of investors with torches and pitchforks is in order.
Anecdote: A few years back I had Windows with SP2 with Firewall behind a router with firewall. Had an antivirus running as well. At some point while browsing an innocent "funny video" website it opended an ad, which opened an ad which opened a cascading window with multiple attack sites, all blocked by Firefox as "this is a known attack site". Guess what, Firefox did not block all of them. Ended up with the magical Windows XP SP2 reinstall and painstaking recovery of my data.
Morale: 1. What you are saying is not true. 2. Firewall is not an "all the security you need" miracle. 3. I expect the same problems in Vista/7/8 because the thing keeps running in admin mode by default. I also suspect that there are multiple loopholes when running in non-admin mode as well.
85-year-old grandfather watches TV on an Ubuntu HTPC (Zotac) and uses Ubuntu laptop . Stability and no annoying pop-ups from taskbar make him happy. It also wonderfully translated itself in Russian, would probably need a special purchase of Windows to achieve that.
The drawback: he relies on me for support. The "neighborhood nerd for hire" does not dig his system. I tried to convert several non-techie acquaintances to Linux and they ended up depending for on me for support, and obviously I visit them seldom, if at all -- many unhappy "customers" who switched back, and I just abandoned the practice of recommending it to non-techies.
After having wasted a few terabits over a year of experimenting, I came to a conclusion that flash is a necessary evil. An f1.7 lens helped significantly, but most images simply don't come out sharp. A diffused flash that bounces off ceiling is not that bad actually, I am currently working on how to reduce recycle time without having to drag a flash that's bigger than my camera.
The overwhelming majority of people responsible for carrying out the final act of ending another human life know it. Whether it's at the end if a knife, or the end of a thousand miles of cable, they know exactly what they just did, and feel it intensely. Those are not the people I am concerned with.
There is a chasm between hacking someone do death with a stone club and pressing a button knowing that somewhere in some remote country "mission is accomplished". There do exist a handful of conscious people who make the mental connection, but they are far from "overwhelming majority".
The Manning's video of indiscriminately executing civilians from a helicopter (after some crying for permission) brings the point across.
The scientific experiment behind it is theMilgram Experiment: "What made more of a difference was the proximity of the "learner" and the experimenter." Please note, that although most of the participants refused to administer lethal shock to a person they have been introduced to and who's screams they could hear, the variation of experiment where the "tracher" had no contact with the "victim" were much less optimistic.
600 MB CD-ROM then, 45 GB BluRay now (only two orders)
Not a fair comparison. CD-ROM was just breaking the ground back then. BlueRay is on the way out today. I am probably being a little subjective, but look at the highest high end consumer desktop. Do you see BlueRay? It was first shipped in mid-June 2006 and still has very limited adoption due to being laden with DRM so badly, even Apple refused to install them, and for Linux devices it is simply not an option. This is what marketing would call a "flopped" product.
Also, there is a rapidly decreasing need to purchase software/entertainment on a physical media, as online streaming is so much faster and cheaper. Just put a 32 Gb flash drive in your comparison and call it a day.
True, the millisecond-splitting has gone to the realm of insane. Electronic trading companies invest untold $$$ into trading infrastructure just to be able to shave off a few milliseconds and get unfair advantage on the market. On the other hand, you have real-time games like Starcraft, where all transactions are synchronized to a timer and if one of the players has a slower connection he is still guaranteed to be on the same playing field.
Just lock all transaction to 1-minute intervals, that gives plenty of time for all trading computers (and even humans), with all kinds of latencies to adjust to changing market conditions and send their responses (if any). There is no loss of liquidity; the opposite is true: having latency disadvantage out of the way traders in remote from exchange regions will be willing to participate.
I expect this system to be mandated by SEC in 50 years or whenever they grow up.
PS: Liquidity is very important in investment system. For example: you bought a car 6 years ago, that you no longer need. Being able to re-sell that car is called "liquidity". When there is little liquidity, you are either stuck with the useless heap of metal, or have to sell it for pennies. Of course, being able to process a trade in a few milliseconds impedes liquidity, rather than helps it. The reason is simple: traders in Miami will think twice before trading on NYSE for the simple reason of high latency disadvantage. Loss of potential trading volume (aka liquidity) right there.
Well, if they don't check the warrants, that means their constitution is meaningless, just like in the US of A. In Soviet Russia people were sentenced for life for telling a political joke. They could make a heavy use of Interpol back in those years, those labour camps don't work themselves, you know.
I was thinking the same thing, Interpol was supposed to be a respectable international organisation. I guess the staff located in the Middle East observe Sharia themselves...
MPAA/RIAA got these rights extended to some 50 or 70 years. Pharmaceuticals (with a lot more R&D) last for only 12 years. Why should society allow the MPAA/RIAA such obscene long monopolies at the cost of the citizen? Solves a lot of so called piracy too.
70? Don't you mean 120 years after artist's death? It must be allowed for Mikey Mouse to belong to Disney perpetually. You don't want Mickey to fall into wrong hands, do you? Expect another extension in 20 years, not that anyone cares anymore.
we have technology accessible to us NOW that can reduce emissions and is not nearly as expensive (environmentally or economically) as nuclear will be.
Which one is it? Sun? Wind? My assumption so far is that a "hamster treadmill" is not practical or cheap, or we would see it used more in places other than Germany, where the "phobia of things people don't understand" took over.
I am also a little worried about the global climate change that will bring famine and war some 50-100 years from now, because the most power-hungry nation was burning coal for energy in the 21st century. Paint me paranoid.
Or maybe they knew about oppressive regimes more than you do. After all, they wrote a very successful constitution, with all the safeguards built in against the slow roll to a Nazi state we experience today. The history repeats itself.
Most Americans have not experienced being ruled by iron fist, nor did their parents or even grandparents to tell the story. Go live in Myanmar or Belarus, and come back when you start to appreciate the slowly melting paradise built for you by the first generations of refugees.
at this point, even a lunatic would get my vote if he's a true outsider. insiders are all messed up and voting for the same-old is not working.
That's what everyone expected from Obama. Instead he failed his agenda and enhanced all the evil policies started by Bush (short of starting new wars). There supposed to be some radical difference between R and D, or at least that's how they peddle it. Bait and switch.
Ordinance: All private automobiles over 3 meters in length or 2 meters in width or weighing more than 750kg (excluding passengers) are excluded from the downtown business district.
Have fun getting your little folding coffin squished by this. Oh, and as far as "private" goes, no worries - it will be registered to ShompolTech, Inc. This will not be the first time Hummer owners pawn the legislation, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I was mighty pissed in 1995 when I tried to install Might & Magic III and the program told me it needed access to the phone line to call Mr Z. who sold the game to verify that he actually did sell it and it wasn't resold, copied, etc. I mean the NERVE of those guys. They sell me a game but it turns out I need to have constant access to phone line and Mr. Z. needs to be in business and still selling it, because as soon as he quits picking up the damn phone the game says buy-buy and bricks itself. ? What a load.
If you are that angry about it, don't buy the game.
Unfortunately, even if all slashdotters stopped buying, the effect on video-game market would be almost zero. On the other hand, if we raise stink about it and manage to educate a significant portion of buyers managements will think twice before crippling their offerings. And that is exactly what we are doing here.
If most of their market is ok with this deal
Most of their market does not realize/give it a thought that their acquisition will kick the bucket as soon as it is not profitable to maintain those DRM servers, which could happen after a few years or as soon as tomorrow. And at that point they will need to go to the grey market looking for hacked version and punch themselves for shelling money for it in the first place. If the DRM locks the game to hardware, they are out of luck with the next hardware upgrade as well. Meanwhile those who have a hacked version can enjoy a DRM-free experience for years to come. This is called "defective by design". Look it up.
Slashdot TV is what happens when more than one person tears off calendar pages in the office.
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
Children will grow up to become adults sooner than you think. And by that time they will not object being tagged with an RFID chip on a daily basis because YOU told them it is OK. There is a distinction between children and pets and the line should not be crossed.
Instead of spending time, money and effort on new DRM measures that get circumvented within a few days of release,
No blue-ray support on Apple Macs nor Linux. Maybe someone somewhere did circumvent it, but I can simply do without these disks. Does the Big Media hope that I will buy some Blue-Ray movies? And play them on what exactly?
Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market.
That's a big gamble for a system just coming out of the closet. I will parrot what everyone else said on this forum and repeat that should that happen there is still no upside for Nokia: 1. 5 years is three generations in mobile world. Nokia will not last that long. 2. Should MS-phone become a success numerous competitors will instantly jump in the boat and add a few product lines, alongside their multiple Android and dumb-phone offerings. This is a wet dream of MS, Elop will be presented with an island nation and a castle, but where does that leave Nokia? One of the many after N years of struggling to be profitable? There was a precedent with HTC (among others) where MS just distributed all designs created during MS-HTC patnership to HTC's competitors. This will happen again as MS has not invested a penny in Nokia and does not give a damn if it goes under.
What is happening is an absurd from the business perspective. Sorry for a hyperbole, but I see Elop as a mind-controlling parasite who managed to instill himself in the host's brain. Through Elop Microsoft gained complete control of a successful transnational company without investing a penny. This is even crazier than a 90% leveraged buyout. Under the circumstances MS is free to suck it dry and dump the carcass without a second thought.
This is also not the first time MS ex-execs in new positions of power steer the subordinates to be milked by MS -- I recall something about ex-MS exec government officials happily signing away our tax dollars for MS. There was recently a lawsuit initiated by Google to dispute this. Thus we establish that this "trick" is a long standing part of MS "business practice".
From logical and business points of view the effect of a "Trojan CEO" is simply not possible. Even if we were to assume that Elop is a super-loyal-fan of MS cannot justify stripping all the non-MS product lines from a giant such as Nokia (used to be). After all, CEO's are smart people and supposed to be capable of looking after their own pocketbooks and reputations. This brings me to the only logical conclusion - somehow, somewhere Elop is getting personal kickbacks from MS. Maybe he is promised a small island with a castle, ownership of a nation, or a banal anonymous Swiss bank account. Finnish authorities should take a close look at this strange business arrangement. And if that does not happen (and it will not), an angry mob of investors with torches and pitchforks is in order.
Anecdote: A few years back I had Windows with SP2 with Firewall behind a router with firewall. Had an antivirus running as well. At some point while browsing an innocent "funny video" website it opended an ad, which opened an ad which opened a cascading window with multiple attack sites, all blocked by Firefox as "this is a known attack site". Guess what, Firefox did not block all of them. Ended up with the magical Windows XP SP2 reinstall and painstaking recovery of my data.
Morale: 1. What you are saying is not true. 2. Firewall is not an "all the security you need" miracle. 3. I expect the same problems in Vista/7/8 because the thing keeps running in admin mode by default. I also suspect that there are multiple loopholes when running in non-admin mode as well.
85-year-old grandfather watches TV on an Ubuntu HTPC (Zotac) and uses Ubuntu laptop . Stability and no annoying pop-ups from taskbar make him happy. It also wonderfully translated itself in Russian, would probably need a special purchase of Windows to achieve that.
The drawback: he relies on me for support. The "neighborhood nerd for hire" does not dig his system. I tried to convert several non-techie acquaintances to Linux and they ended up depending for on me for support, and obviously I visit them seldom, if at all -- many unhappy "customers" who switched back, and I just abandoned the practice of recommending it to non-techies.
After having wasted a few terabits over a year of experimenting, I came to a conclusion that flash is a necessary evil. An f1.7 lens helped significantly, but most images simply don't come out sharp. A diffused flash that bounces off ceiling is not that bad actually, I am currently working on how to reduce recycle time without having to drag a flash that's bigger than my camera.
The overwhelming majority of people responsible for carrying out the final act of ending another human life know it. Whether it's at the end if a knife, or the end of a thousand miles of cable, they know exactly what they just did, and feel it intensely. Those are not the people I am concerned with.
There is a chasm between hacking someone do death with a stone club and pressing a button knowing that somewhere in some remote country "mission is accomplished". There do exist a handful of conscious people who make the mental connection, but they are far from "overwhelming majority".
The Manning's video of indiscriminately executing civilians from a helicopter (after some crying for permission) brings the point across.
The scientific experiment behind it is theMilgram Experiment: "What made more of a difference was the proximity of the "learner" and the experimenter." Please note, that although most of the participants refused to administer lethal shock to a person they have been introduced to and who's screams they could hear, the variation of experiment where the "tracher" had no contact with the "victim" were much less optimistic.
600 MB CD-ROM then, 45 GB BluRay now (only two orders)
Not a fair comparison. CD-ROM was just breaking the ground back then. BlueRay is on the way out today. I am probably being a little subjective, but look at the highest high end consumer desktop. Do you see BlueRay? It was first shipped in mid-June 2006 and still has very limited adoption due to being laden with DRM so badly, even Apple refused to install them, and for Linux devices it is simply not an option. This is what marketing would call a "flopped" product.
Also, there is a rapidly decreasing need to purchase software/entertainment on a physical media, as online streaming is so much faster and cheaper. Just put a 32 Gb flash drive in your comparison and call it a day.
True, the millisecond-splitting has gone to the realm of insane. Electronic trading companies invest untold $$$ into trading infrastructure just to be able to shave off a few milliseconds and get unfair advantage on the market. On the other hand, you have real-time games like Starcraft, where all transactions are synchronized to a timer and if one of the players has a slower connection he is still guaranteed to be on the same playing field.
Just lock all transaction to 1-minute intervals, that gives plenty of time for all trading computers (and even humans), with all kinds of latencies to adjust to changing market conditions and send their responses (if any). There is no loss of liquidity; the opposite is true: having latency disadvantage out of the way traders in remote from exchange regions will be willing to participate.
I expect this system to be mandated by SEC in 50 years or whenever they grow up.
PS: Liquidity is very important in investment system. For example: you bought a car 6 years ago, that you no longer need. Being able to re-sell that car is called "liquidity". When there is little liquidity, you are either stuck with the useless heap of metal, or have to sell it for pennies. Of course, being able to process a trade in a few milliseconds impedes liquidity, rather than helps it. The reason is simple: traders in Miami will think twice before trading on NYSE for the simple reason of high latency disadvantage. Loss of potential trading volume (aka liquidity) right there.
No amount of mod points can let me rate it +6, Funny :(
Well, if they don't check the warrants, that means their constitution is meaningless, just like in the US of A. In Soviet Russia people were sentenced for life for telling a political joke. They could make a heavy use of Interpol back in those years, those labour camps don't work themselves, you know.
I was thinking the same thing, Interpol was supposed to be a respectable international organisation. I guess the staff located in the Middle East observe Sharia themselves...
MPAA/RIAA got these rights extended to some 50 or 70 years. Pharmaceuticals (with a lot more R&D) last for only 12 years. Why should society allow the MPAA/RIAA such obscene long monopolies at the cost of the citizen? Solves a lot of so called piracy too.
70? Don't you mean 120 years after artist's death? It must be allowed for Mikey Mouse to belong to Disney perpetually. You don't want Mickey to fall into wrong hands, do you? Expect another extension in 20 years, not that anyone cares anymore.
we have technology accessible to us NOW that can reduce emissions and is not nearly as expensive (environmentally or economically) as nuclear will be.
Which one is it? Sun? Wind? My assumption so far is that a "hamster treadmill" is not practical or cheap, or we would see it used more in places other than Germany, where the "phobia of things people don't understand" took over.
I am also a little worried about the global climate change that will bring famine and war some 50-100 years from now, because the most power-hungry nation was burning coal for energy in the 21st century. Paint me paranoid.
This is why I pay real money for a temporary permission to squat on somebody's property instead of buying fake money with real money.
Or maybe they knew about oppressive regimes more than you do. After all, they wrote a very successful constitution, with all the safeguards built in against the slow roll to a Nazi state we experience today. The history repeats itself.
Most Americans have not experienced being ruled by iron fist, nor did their parents or even grandparents to tell the story. Go live in Myanmar or Belarus, and come back when you start to appreciate the slowly melting paradise built for you by the first generations of refugees.
at this point, even a lunatic would get my vote if he's a true outsider. insiders are all messed up and voting for the same-old is not working.
That's what everyone expected from Obama. Instead he failed his agenda and enhanced all the evil policies started by Bush (short of starting new wars). There supposed to be some radical difference between R and D, or at least that's how they peddle it. Bait and switch.
You realize that the Hummer is out of production? Not even the Chinese wanted to buy the company.
Finally, some beneficial side effect from high gas cost.
What does that mean "pawn" the legislation? They left it at a second hand shop as collateral on a short-term loan?
See definition #3, in common use among multiplayer gamers.
Bicycle is good, using it for commute to stay in shape.
Each year, from 2006 through 2009, drivers of newer SUVs suffered an average of 28 deaths per million vehicles, according to the Institute. That's about half the average driver death rate for cars, which was 56.
Ordinance: All private automobiles over 3 meters in length or 2 meters in width or weighing more than 750kg (excluding passengers) are excluded from the downtown business district.
Have fun getting your little folding coffin squished by this. Oh, and as far as "private" goes, no worries - it will be registered to ShompolTech, Inc. This will not be the first time Hummer owners pawn the legislation, either.