$40-60 would be somewhat excessive for an old game, and so long as Steam continues to exist you wouldn't have to re-buy, so it's not a rental in that sense.
Sure. Really, I was replying to the guy that implied rentals were acceptable because games often don't get replayed.
What Steam amounts to is an indefinite rental. Right now, if I don't specifically go offline (and apparently clear it with Steam's servers), then the game would still be unplayable if they turned the servers off tomorrow. I've got no real expectation that they'll let me know ahead of time that they're turning things off. And keeping a copy of the installed files is a bit different from keeping original installation media. Does the game run without correct registry entries? What all do I have to back up to get it to run again? The computer is a fairly volatile and hostile environment--it's much more likely that it will crash and take a backup with it than that it will crash and destroy a CD/DVD.
I've never been one to pirate games, and only on a few rare occasions have I installed a no-CD crack on a game I've purchased (and never for games I haven't purchased.) So I vote with my wallet, even though there are games I'd really enjoy owning. I choose not to rent them at the full retail price (even though it's really likely that I'll have them for a long time), so I don't play them.
Exactly. Saying that this isn't DRM is disingenuous.
What they're really getting at is that this makes things like SecuRom obsolete. Requiring that a person log in to play their offline game is about as good as you can get in the DRM world. You no longer have to deal with bugs related to copy protection that tries to disable functional software on the computer. No more registration limit nightmares. All you do is sell the game and tell the user to log in to the service.
It's convenient for users, too, but it's still DRM, no matter how you look at it.
Just for one data point, I regularly replay old games. The Ultima series never gets old for me, for example. Fallout, Civ2, all sorts of games that are older and no longer truly supported.
I've beaten them all more times than I can count, but I enjoy the experience, so they get replayed.
Under a real rental system, I'd have to repay each time I replay. That's more or less OK, except that the established going price for purchasing a copy of a game is between $40 and $60. If I'm going to just be renting, I damn well want it to be cheaper than that.
With opensource software, he could have hired someone to waste his time on it, even if the original developper wouldn't have been willing to do so.. Plus it could have been a nice contribution, so probably for a lower price, he could have had his software up&running, and made the software better..
More importantly, anyone could have fixed it or hired someone else to do so, and the either submitted the fix upstream or forked the project. There's more possibility for higher-quality code with F/OSS than with proprietary software because of this. There's not a single gatekeeper for the code.
That said...
If you don't want to look at code, however bad it is, it doesn't mean you should necessarily turn to proprietary software
This silly, too. Generally speaking, you should use the tool that's best for the job. If that tool happens to be F/OSS, great. But why would someone intentionally choose a piece of software on the basis that it's closed-source?
I guess we're talking about three on-screen sequences.
1) End of season 3. 2) Season 4, Episode 10 (when they find what they've been calling Earth all series.) 3) End of Season 4, (when they find what we call Earth.)
I was interesting in seeing if we'd seen continents on 2.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found: http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
Which of course means users can lock the Admin user out and then forget their password. The admin then just has to go through one of many security holes to change it back.
I don't get this. Lock the Admin out of what? Access to the file? The Administrator can always take ownership of the file.
There are a lot of reasons that Apple won't do A2DP (yet).
1) They'd want to make wireless headphones so that they could cash in on that accessory market. There's simply no way that they're going to enable A2DP before they have headphones on the shelves.
2) It's a fairly hefty drain on battery life, which doesn't make the product look good.
3) They may not want to differentiate their product lines in this way, which means that they'd have to add Bluetooth to their other devices. This would cost money in materials, and possibly in additional licensing costs.
I'm with you on a way to develop and test iPhone apps in another OS....I wish they'd provide this.
Yes, someone else pointed out that UAC requests a password if you aren't an administrator--which is, of course, correct. I fell into the same trap of assuming that users will be administrators, since that's how things tend to be in the real world (when not in a locked down environment, of course.) Of course, if you're not running as an administrator, the original complaint is moot. UAC is a compromise between making day-to-day users "Limited Accounts" and software which makes bad assumptions.
As a side note, I ran Windows 2000 for a fairly long while as a regular user. Most things worked fine, but the ones that didn't were incredibly irritating. Tracking down what permissions were required to get things to run was a pain. As a side-side note, I eventually stopped using Antivirus because it never found any viruses--either I wasn't getting them (in which case, why bother?) or it wasn't finding the ones I had (in which case, why bother?)
Of course, the poster to whom I replied implied (with his subject line) that UAC was comparable to Unix permissions, which is really like comparing Apples(tm) to oranges. S/he seemed completely ignorant of the fact that Windows does have permissions (which I noted are actually ACLs--more granular than Unix default permissions.)
I'm a fan of the Unix permission model, but in some cases, it does leave something to be desired.
It's a fairly difficult process to give one other user access to my files. Sure, if I'm root, I can create a special group, add myself and that user to it, and then chgrp. That works on the small scale. Now what if I want two groups to be able to access the file? Create a new group, add the members of all of those groups, and chgrp again. Only now I'm maintaining that list of groups in two places--in the main group, and in the combined group.
If I'm not root? Forget it. It's a support request at best, and not going to happen at worst.
ACLs make it trivial to grant selective access to files, and you don't even have to be root to do it.
I forget whether or not regular users can modify ACLs on their own files in Windows, but I'm pretty sure that they can.
Windows permissions are quite fine-grained. They're much more flexible than POSIX permissions--comparable to ACLs, in fact, which fewer people use on Linux.
The problem isn't the permission scheme at all, but a combination of legacy, a ruthless dedication to backwards compatibility, and lazy software developers who don't understand the guidelines that Microsoft (now) sets forth regarding secure development from their platform. Maybe throw in a dash of OEMs setting people to administrator by default, but until the other stuff is fixed, that's the only way that they're going to sell any computers.
That said, UAC is a lot like requiring sudo without a password, except that in theory, a user process can't automatically click "ok" for you.
Similar (and safer) experiments have been performed using the ability to remotely shock a person and actors who would pretend to be shocked. On average, given permission to be sadistic, most people are.
The reports were that counting DVRs increased the reported viewership by 33%.
Also, I haven't noticed the eyecatches, but then, I don't watch it live. I'm one of the people who DVR it, and I'm not a part of a Nielson household, so there's no value to me in watching it live. I'm not voting for it that way, as it were.
Your average 30 minute show has 8 minutes of commercials. That's 27%. 60 minute shows get a bit more usually--maybe 30%? Dollhouse gets about 10 minutes of commercials, or 17%.
Really, the networks just care about getting money. To get money, they need advertisers. To get advertisers, they need to provide content that people want to watch. If a person doesn't watch the content (or intentionally avoids the advertisements while watching the content), then no one really counts that as a viewer. Everyone in the industry assumes that most people who use a DVR to timeshift a particular show are avoiding the ads, so those people aren't counted in the formula, the network doesn't get to report them as "viewers" to the ad agency, and the ad agency doesn't pay based on those people.
Sure, there are people who avoid commercials without using a DVR. And there probably always have been. Commercials were good for bathroom breaks, for getting a snack, etc. And the networks and advertisers knew that some people did this. But with a DVR, the assumption is now that most people do it, and that changes the perception of the economics of advertising to those customers.
So when Fox puts a show in a bad timeslot, they know that they're going to get low ratings. They know how the ratings are calculated, and they have no real reason to care. They take the same shotgun approach to TV that the music industry has been using for some time--sign a bunch of acts, hope for a huge hit that will become a cash cow, and let all of the rest of the acts die off. The truth is, they probably expected Dollhouse to tank, so they put it in a crappy slot. Maybe it would have tanked anywhere, maybe not. We'll never know. But they're certainly not helping.
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$40-60 would be somewhat excessive for an old game, and so long as Steam continues to exist you wouldn't have to re-buy, so it's not a rental in that sense.
Sure. Really, I was replying to the guy that implied rentals were acceptable because games often don't get replayed.
What Steam amounts to is an indefinite rental. Right now, if I don't specifically go offline (and apparently clear it with Steam's servers), then the game would still be unplayable if they turned the servers off tomorrow. I've got no real expectation that they'll let me know ahead of time that they're turning things off. And keeping a copy of the installed files is a bit different from keeping original installation media. Does the game run without correct registry entries? What all do I have to back up to get it to run again? The computer is a fairly volatile and hostile environment--it's much more likely that it will crash and take a backup with it than that it will crash and destroy a CD/DVD.
I've never been one to pirate games, and only on a few rare occasions have I installed a no-CD crack on a game I've purchased (and never for games I haven't purchased.) So I vote with my wallet, even though there are games I'd really enjoy owning. I choose not to rent them at the full retail price (even though it's really likely that I'll have them for a long time), so I don't play them.
I'm curious--are you actually advocating a full RDBMS for just about every data storage problem?
Exactly. Saying that this isn't DRM is disingenuous.
What they're really getting at is that this makes things like SecuRom obsolete. Requiring that a person log in to play their offline game is about as good as you can get in the DRM world. You no longer have to deal with bugs related to copy protection that tries to disable functional software on the computer. No more registration limit nightmares. All you do is sell the game and tell the user to log in to the service.
It's convenient for users, too, but it's still DRM, no matter how you look at it.
I know it's a longshot, but were you on Astaria? I remember a Rei on there in the late 90s....
Just for one data point, I regularly replay old games. The Ultima series never gets old for me, for example. Fallout, Civ2, all sorts of games that are older and no longer truly supported.
I've beaten them all more times than I can count, but I enjoy the experience, so they get replayed.
Under a real rental system, I'd have to repay each time I replay. That's more or less OK, except that the established going price for purchasing a copy of a game is between $40 and $60. If I'm going to just be renting, I damn well want it to be cheaper than that.
With opensource software, he could have hired someone to waste his time on it, even if the original developper wouldn't have been willing to do so.. Plus it could have been a nice contribution, so probably for a lower price, he could have had his software up&running, and made the software better..
More importantly, anyone could have fixed it or hired someone else to do so, and the either submitted the fix upstream or forked the project. There's more possibility for higher-quality code with F/OSS than with proprietary software because of this. There's not a single gatekeeper for the code.
That said...
If you don't want to look at code, however bad it is, it doesn't mean you should necessarily turn to proprietary software
This silly, too. Generally speaking, you should use the tool that's best for the job. If that tool happens to be F/OSS, great. But why would someone intentionally choose a piece of software on the basis that it's closed-source?
If it's implied that she took us there in the middle of season four, but she really didn't, then we were mislead (exactly as I said.)
I guess we're talking about three on-screen sequences.
1) End of season 3.
2) Season 4, Episode 10 (when they find what they've been calling Earth all series.)
3) End of Season 4, (when they find what we call Earth.)
I was interesting in seeing if we'd seen continents on 2.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html gives some insight. In specific, Cavil's skinjobs were supposed to be eradicated.
How do they justify free updates to Mac OS X?
No, I don't.
Which of course means users can lock the Admin user out and then forget their password. The admin then just has to go through one of many security holes to change it back.
I don't get this. Lock the Admin out of what? Access to the file? The Administrator can always take ownership of the file.
That's pretty spiffy, actually! I think it might even beat out gksudo, since ctrl-alt-del generates a non-maskable interrupt.
They removed DRM from the music, and appear to be doing just fine. The MPAA really ought to look closely at that and try following suit.
Weird. Mine survived at least one trip through the washing machine, and they sound just fine.
There are a lot of reasons that Apple won't do A2DP (yet).
1) They'd want to make wireless headphones so that they could cash in on that accessory market. There's simply no way that they're going to enable A2DP before they have headphones on the shelves.
2) It's a fairly hefty drain on battery life, which doesn't make the product look good.
3) They may not want to differentiate their product lines in this way, which means that they'd have to add Bluetooth to their other devices. This would cost money in materials, and possibly in additional licensing costs.
I'm with you on a way to develop and test iPhone apps in another OS....I wish they'd provide this.
Yes, someone else pointed out that UAC requests a password if you aren't an administrator--which is, of course, correct. I fell into the same trap of assuming that users will be administrators, since that's how things tend to be in the real world (when not in a locked down environment, of course.) Of course, if you're not running as an administrator, the original complaint is moot. UAC is a compromise between making day-to-day users "Limited Accounts" and software which makes bad assumptions.
As a side note, I ran Windows 2000 for a fairly long while as a regular user. Most things worked fine, but the ones that didn't were incredibly irritating. Tracking down what permissions were required to get things to run was a pain. As a side-side note, I eventually stopped using Antivirus because it never found any viruses--either I wasn't getting them (in which case, why bother?) or it wasn't finding the ones I had (in which case, why bother?)
Of course, the poster to whom I replied implied (with his subject line) that UAC was comparable to Unix permissions, which is really like comparing Apples(tm) to oranges. S/he seemed completely ignorant of the fact that Windows does have permissions (which I noted are actually ACLs--more granular than Unix default permissions.)
I'm a fan of the Unix permission model, but in some cases, it does leave something to be desired.
It's a fairly difficult process to give one other user access to my files. Sure, if I'm root, I can create a special group, add myself and that user to it, and then chgrp. That works on the small scale. Now what if I want two groups to be able to access the file? Create a new group, add the members of all of those groups, and chgrp again. Only now I'm maintaining that list of groups in two places--in the main group, and in the combined group.
If I'm not root? Forget it. It's a support request at best, and not going to happen at worst.
ACLs make it trivial to grant selective access to files, and you don't even have to be root to do it.
I forget whether or not regular users can modify ACLs on their own files in Windows, but I'm pretty sure that they can.
Windows permissions are quite fine-grained. They're much more flexible than POSIX permissions--comparable to ACLs, in fact, which fewer people use on Linux.
The problem isn't the permission scheme at all, but a combination of legacy, a ruthless dedication to backwards compatibility, and lazy software developers who don't understand the guidelines that Microsoft (now) sets forth regarding secure development from their platform. Maybe throw in a dash of OEMs setting people to administrator by default, but until the other stuff is fixed, that's the only way that they're going to sell any computers.
That said, UAC is a lot like requiring sudo without a password, except that in theory, a user process can't automatically click "ok" for you.
Is this footage online?
If I've misrepresented it, I apologize. I was merely going off of how it was presented in one of my classes.
Similar (and safer) experiments have been performed using the ability to remotely shock a person and actors who would pretend to be shocked. On average, given permission to be sadistic, most people are.
The reports were that counting DVRs increased the reported viewership by 33%.
Also, I haven't noticed the eyecatches, but then, I don't watch it live. I'm one of the people who DVR it, and I'm not a part of a Nielson household, so there's no value to me in watching it live. I'm not voting for it that way, as it were.
Approaching 40%?
Your average 30 minute show has 8 minutes of commercials. That's 27%. 60 minute shows get a bit more usually--maybe 30%? Dollhouse gets about 10 minutes of commercials, or 17%.
I guess.
Really, the networks just care about getting money.
To get money, they need advertisers.
To get advertisers, they need to provide content that people want to watch.
If a person doesn't watch the content (or intentionally avoids the advertisements while watching the content), then no one really counts that as a viewer. Everyone in the industry assumes that most people who use a DVR to timeshift a particular show are avoiding the ads, so those people aren't counted in the formula, the network doesn't get to report them as "viewers" to the ad agency, and the ad agency doesn't pay based on those people.
Sure, there are people who avoid commercials without using a DVR. And there probably always have been. Commercials were good for bathroom breaks, for getting a snack, etc. And the networks and advertisers knew that some people did this. But with a DVR, the assumption is now that most people do it, and that changes the perception of the economics of advertising to those customers.
So when Fox puts a show in a bad timeslot, they know that they're going to get low ratings. They know how the ratings are calculated, and they have no real reason to care. They take the same shotgun approach to TV that the music industry has been using for some time--sign a bunch of acts, hope for a huge hit that will become a cash cow, and let all of the rest of the acts die off. The truth is, they probably expected Dollhouse to tank, so they put it in a crappy slot. Maybe it would have tanked anywhere, maybe not. We'll never know. But they're certainly not helping.