Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista... I figured that out too. Seems there are plenty of products on the market already that help with the problem. OS X, Ubuntu, Amiga, Solaris, Zeta,... hell, even XP.
The problem here is, game manufacturers are not making products for the same console for 20 years. Instead, they are forced to design and develop games for a new system every few years. I am not a game developer, but I believe optimizing for each platform is non-trivial. Combine that with changes in development environments and inflation, and you have your magical $10. But they are selling exponentially larger volume every generation, and profit margin scales significantly as such.
from http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ "What cost $40 in 1986 would cost $68.52 in 2005." Interesting site. So inflation fully covers the price increase of video games. That's really obnoxious.
1999 $50 2005 $57.03
But that still doesn't mean that games should cost $60. It means they should have cost $30 back in 1999, and $40 now. Ha! *grumble grumble*
As for all games cost the same, I don't believe that is the case. Even the relatively cheap Wii games have a range of $30 (for the lowly Rampage) to $50 for Zelda. According to Best Buy (and most game retail shops use the same price) there is one $30 game, two $40 games, and thirty-seven $50 games. 8% of games are not the highest price?
All that said, I just wait for games to become Greatest Hits, or Platinum, or whatever they call it and buy them for $20 or $30. And my friends and I pass games around pretty liberally. The only ones we each own our own of are networkable games.
Lower the cost of a front line game and and developer has to plan to sell more copies to be successfull. Which means taking fewer chances, which means worse games. Alternatively, he can develop the game for less money and plan to sell the ame number of copies; cut 2 programers and 3 artists out of the equation, you get a lower qulaity game. The only way this plan possibly works is if people buy more games because they are cheaper; They have a set $ budget for games ($300/year) instead of set # budget for games (6 games/year). And I bet psychologically there's more of teh latter than the former. Interesting. Yes if games were cheaper I would be buying more of them. And I think other people would too. But I think you're right that the majority lies in the people who purchase a set number of games rather than a set dollar amount. If the quality of the games stays the same, there's only so many games a person can fully enjoy no matter how cheap they are.
But I go back to, it doesn't matter to me how expensive the console / hardware is (within reason), it's the reoccurring cost of the games that needs to be kept low. I'd easily pay the $600 for a PS3, or more if the hardware was worth it (dual display!), but I'm not going to pay $600 just so I have the privilege of paying $60 per game once a month or whatever (and they need more games). The Wii games appear to be $50 each, the XBox360 and PS3 games appear to be $60 each. That alone makes me more interested in a Wii. Sega could leap back into the hardware market with an XBox-esque (PC in a small box) console and sell games for $40 and I'd sign up in a heart beat.
I wonder how they got that 150M number--if it's the number of Bots out there or the number of infected PCs? If it's the former, and I suspect it is, you can't equate that to the number of PCs. One PC can be a member of several botnets. From what I've seen (and most of you have probably too), a PC either seems to be clean or has 14 bots and 95 pieces of spyware on it depending on the user's habits and training. Not to mention, how do they know how many computers are behind a NAT? Does anyone besides me know how many computers are on at my house? Or my office? Or any of the other networks I administrate regularly?
Cell phone companies do not base the price of their service on how much it costs them to provide it (including the cost of the phone). Rather, they price their plans purely on how much people are willing to pay. In a product / service business where the supply is virtually unlimited the demand factor is fully taken advantage of. Look at video game costs. Each console generation drives the game cost up another magical $10. Nearly all games cost the same price when they hit the shelves. They don't cost the same to supply, so why do they cost the same to purchase? Because people will pay it.
I actually had that argument on a Gran Turismo forum a while back. Personally I don't pay more than $30 for a game, and if the majority of the rest of the gamers would stick up for themselves the price of games would come down. And I don't believe it would effect the quality of games because the developers would still be competing with each other to make the best game and get our money, no matter how much or little money there is to get.
In these kinds of markets, where the supply is endless, the growing population should drive the cost of products down, not up. The more copies they sell the more their profit margin goes up. Same as telephone service.
Apparently, the submitter and editor don't truly realize what "open source" is. Selling a PC without anything on it isn't open source; it's selling a computer with nothing on it. This isn't a move to support open source, it's a move to save money by not having to pay the MS tax. Actually they aren't without anything. They come with FreeDOS. And FreeDOS is open source.
Are you looking for a desktop on which you can run Linux® or other open-source operating systems? Look no further!
Dell's new open-source n Series desktop solution provides customers with a DimensionTM E520, E521 or C521 desktop without an installed or included Microsoft® operating system. With the n Series desktop, customers have the flexibility to install an alternative operating system (such as a version of Linux® ), and help reduce the price of this system. In addition, the n Series desktop comes with a non-formatted hard drive ready for your custom installation. Dell's n Series desktop ships with a copy of FreeDosTM , an open-source operating system that is ready to install.http://www.freedos.org/
Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working -- there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.' If you're looking for a fast booting and obscure operating system I'd recommend something more like Zeta (what has become of BeOS).
I really liked BeOS. In fact I've installed and used it in the past year. Though it was short lived;)
I'm sure these operating systems are excellent for older hardware that has already been downgraded to web browsing, emailing, and simple word processing. All they need to do is boot and run Firefox. Google takes care of the rest. Has anyone made an uber-lite Linux distro that just includes X and Firefox? Perhaps even launches straight to a Firefox full screen window with tabs. I guess maybe a Linux web kiosk... shit, I've got to look that up!
Re:Short memory
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses. Most of them at the time came from floppies because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive? I don't think that standard "x86" drives would automatically access a disk - the OS usually has to be told to do so, unless it is constantly probing. But I think that would cause the OS to constantly be hanging. I think Tandy also used automatic drives.
Or more accurately they will deliberately choose to disengage from their intended role since that's tedious. You'll end up with all the monsters from a given level grouping up together for a single assault, or camping and taking pot shots. Sounds like improvement to me, and exactly what they're looking for. They want the traditional AI characters to be more realistic, do things out of the ordinary.
The best AI I've played against (the list is short) were the levels in Half-Life where the Marines in the warehouses. They would alert each other and lock down the target, hailing the player with grenades and machine gun fire. If the same units were human controlled and locked into only playing that one particular room, or building, while main character players were streaming through there one after another, it could be lots of fun. The game for the marine players would be to see how many main characters you can kill off. It'd be like goal tending in soccer.
1) Positioned on poles, really, really high up - some as high as fifty feet. Or 2) low lying cameras are arranged in pairs so one includes the other in its field of vision.
So you either can't steal them because they are too high up, or if in snatch range you'd be filmed stealing them. And keep in mind some are monitored by humans, so as soon as you setup your stepladder The Police are on their way. Ski mask and quickness. It's really not all that difficult.
Yeah, this article smacks of "how can I dump on Jobs to get page views?" Whoa, hold on there. We all know that no self respecting slashdot reader will follow TFA link in the summary.
How soon before you start seeing this hardware on ebay? I don't know that Londoners (??) would be apt to steal such equipment, but I can absolutely see it happening in NYC.
Spamming != Phishing? Why not just hit him for fraud instead, other than to show off their new baby? Yes, what he did was far and away more than simply sending annoying emails. But if they can use "Spammer sent to slammer" in headlines maybe they'll scare the lightweights out of business.
Just because our planet has evolved the way it did doesn't mean that any other random planet that contains intelligent life evolved the same way. Assuming the vagueness of "ten billion years" is even remotely close to the available time for a species to evolve into a space traveling culture I would say there's actually a pretty good possibility that one of them is moving about the Universe at a rather quick pace. Hell, look at our own damn planet! We have cultures that are walking on the Moon, and cultures who don't even use the wheel. If you use that same comparison and place Earthlings at the wheel state then another planet far far away is zipping around at Warp, or spinning up their FTL, or jumping into worm holes, or constructing jump gates to enter hyperspace, or whatever Sci-Fi expression of extreme space travel you prefer. Or maybe there's one of each! Or maybe there is no other intelligent life anywhere in the entire universe, and never will be until we colonize it.
There's a lot out there that we don't know anything about.
Re:Hiding the iPhone
on
iPhone Roundup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Honestly, the best way that I can think of to protect iPhone owners from mugging is for the GSM carriers to get together and share ESNs of stolen phones, and then simply black list them (this would have to be a group effort as unlocking the phone would get around each network blacklisting phones stolen from their customers). Or take it a step further and use the phone to track the person who stole it / bought it hot and bust them.
Stop drinking the damn Kool-Aid. 1) Windows crashes even if you don't do anything but let it sit there. Install Linux (or Solaris, or BSD) and voila, it's rock-stable. I don't have your problems. Maybe it's you.
2) Apple (really it was Jobs) abandoned the clones because the clone makers were making better, faster, and cheaper hardware. Apple had realized that without people buying Apple's own hardware, they didn't make any money. Apple is a hardware, not a software company. Steve Jobs quoting Alan Kay, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
Steve Jobs says they make hardware to run the software that they make. So, are they a software or hardware company?
Apple is leaving themselves some room for improvement so that next year's MacWorld, when they announce a hugely-refined version, they can market the device for those who aren't quite satisfied with the current version. That's exactly what Apple does. Look at their product history. The first version announces some really radical concept, but it generally sucks. Some people must have said technology and essentially pay for Apple's development costs. Then the next year they have a version that doesn't suck.
It's because of this simplicity of Apple products that I am surprised that Jobs didn't just come out and say: "This is our phone. You know. The one everyone's been calling the iPhone." And then market it as Apple Phone (Like Apple TV). I'm sure it's been said a lot already, but I bet they move to a less "i" focused naming scheme and a more "[Apple logo]" naming scheme.
Heh - you're right. What's sad, though, is that Apple does a disservice to it's shareholders by not opening up. Examples:
1) Let OS/X be usable on any Intel platform. Sell it on the shelf. Sell it via OEM on new Intel-based PCs. Increase your user base. Increase profitability immediately. Imageine - OS/X being able to go head-to-head vs Windows. But Alas, Apple is too retarded to see this. Not so fast there. One of Microsoft's biggest battles is dealing with a bad reputation for Windows when in fact it's the hardware that is at fault. Apple experienced this with the various Mac clones that were licensed about a decade ago. Where they would have a larger user base, the consistency of quality that Apple produces would be tarnished by people running OS X on sub quality hardware and blaming OS X for their troubles. The practically universal idea that OS X "just works" would quickly fade, and it would become comparable to Windows OSes (in that regard), but Windows has a larger software base and would then become more popular again.
2) Open up iTMS to other players. Selling more music is a good thing, right? Again, Apple passing up easy money by locking it in to iPods. I personally, nor will I let anyone in my family, buy a POS iPod just for this reason alone. iPods have a better track record than any other portable music device that I know of. The same as above for this hardware market.
3) Their whole thing with the iPhone. The price is stupid (and their quoted prices are AFTER rebate if memory serves). Also, had they just made it an open-network phone, letting people buy them from all the major carriers, imagine how much better it'd sell. I don't know of very many people who will change providers just to have an iPhone. Keep in mind that they're not trying to sell everyone an Apple phone. They're just trying to get to the people who use 'smart phones' already. That group of people probably don't care what it costs, nor who's providing the service. They just want it to be rock solid because they don't like dealing with broken things or the people who fix broken things. Yes the Apple phone is expensive, but it replaces four devices, each about half its price, which makes it quite a bargain.
I like to bitch about Apple's business choices just as much as the next guy, but you're not thinking this shit through.
But! Apple's products are simple and easy to use. They do what they're designed for. And they are elegant. In a lot of cases a Mac is the right tool for the job. It does, however, frighten me how quickly the 'geek community' has gotten onboard with Apple. Steve Jobs is the best salesman in the world. He sold the smartest community (geeks, by definition) on their biggest enemy (closed everything), and made them love what he's doing. Rather appalling if you ask me.
Not 60% of the time, but 60% more than expected if it were chance alone. So more likely 1.6 * (30*.5) = 24/30, not 18/30.
But of course the actual number isn't in the article. Exactly. I love it when stats aren't displayed as stats. Pretty much invalidates the entire study in my book.
You know, 37.4% of all statistics are made up, anyway.
When I'm at "the other end of my cycle" aka, my period, I'm bleeding and bloated and cramping and my face is breaking out, and looking pretty is not exactly high on my list. When I'm not, looking pretty is much less of a hassle. So, not exactly rocket science here. But all the rocket scientists have real jobs so the scientists that were left over ended up working on this project;)
Once non-Slashdot people start seeing the likes of Paris Hilton and Shaq using the iPhone, it will gain traction. Isn't that how it always is? Remember, nobody was going to spend $300 on an MP3 player named the iPod...
This is a new take on an old market. Give it time. I bet come October we'll all be singing a different tune... I think the iPod was actually $500 originally, and not many people bought them. But it had a restricted marked due to the computers it could be used with. Now that iTunes is on Windows and the devices use USB the availability of connecting both iPods and the iPhone to [insert person here]'s computer is pretty damn likely.
Apple also corrected the quality of the device and the price fairly quickly. Once they had a better product and greater available user base it started to take off.
The iPhone is coming into the market with the iPod's successful attributes already in place. I figure within a year or two the price will start dropping, the storage will go up, and the hardware will get better. Not to mention software upgrades and addons constantly.
Basically I've been wanting an iPhone for... since the iPod came out. Portable music players and PDAs have never interested me, neither have camera phones, GPS units, or portable hard drives. But once they're all in one device that fits in my shirt pocket I'm ON BOARD. Not really jazzed about the nearly $100/month service fees, but that comes with the territory of such devices.
iPhone 2.0: Higher MP camera, greater storage capacity, higher density display, more apps, same price... ? Aaahhhh, gettin' there;)
Slashdot Mirror
No one ever said we have to upgrade to Vista.
"What cost $40 in 1986 would cost $68.52 in 2005." Interesting site. So inflation fully covers the price increase of video games. That's really obnoxious.
1999 $50
2005 $57.03
But that still doesn't mean that games should cost $60. It means they should have cost $30 back in 1999, and $40 now. Ha! *grumble grumble* As for all games cost the same, I don't believe that is the case. Even the relatively cheap Wii games have a range of $30 (for the lowly Rampage) to $50 for Zelda. According to Best Buy (and most game retail shops use the same price) there is one $30 game, two $40 games, and thirty-seven $50 games. 8% of games are not the highest price?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat
All that said, I just wait for games to become Greatest Hits, or Platinum, or whatever they call it and buy them for $20 or $30. And my friends and I pass games around pretty liberally. The only ones we each own our own of are networkable games.
Fight the man! Games shouldn't cost $60.
But I go back to, it doesn't matter to me how expensive the console / hardware is (within reason), it's the reoccurring cost of the games that needs to be kept low. I'd easily pay the $600 for a PS3, or more if the hardware was worth it (dual display!), but I'm not going to pay $600 just so I have the privilege of paying $60 per game once a month or whatever (and they need more games). The Wii games appear to be $50 each, the XBox360 and PS3 games appear to be $60 each. That alone makes me more interested in a Wii. Sega could leap back into the hardware market with an XBox-esque (PC in a small box) console and sell games for $40 and I'd sign up in a heart beat.
I actually had that argument on a Gran Turismo forum a while back. Personally I don't pay more than $30 for a game, and if the majority of the rest of the gamers would stick up for themselves the price of games would come down. And I don't believe it would effect the quality of games because the developers would still be competing with each other to make the best game and get our money, no matter how much or little money there is to get.
In these kinds of markets, where the supply is endless, the growing population should drive the cost of products down, not up. The more copies they sell the more their profit margin goes up. Same as telephone service.
Dell's new open-source n Series desktop solution provides customers with a DimensionTM E520, E521 or C521 desktop without an installed or included Microsoft® operating system. With the n Series desktop, customers have the flexibility to install an alternative operating system (such as a version of Linux® ), and help reduce the price of this system. In addition, the n Series desktop comes with a non-formatted hard drive ready for your custom installation. Dell's n Series desktop ships with a copy of FreeDosTM , an open-source operating system that is ready to install. http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.zeta-os.com/
I really liked BeOS. In fact I've installed and used it in the past year. Though it was short lived
I'm sure these operating systems are excellent for older hardware that has already been downgraded to web browsing, emailing, and simple word processing. All they need to do is boot and run Firefox. Google takes care of the rest. Has anyone made an uber-lite Linux distro that just includes X and Firefox? Perhaps even launches straight to a Firefox full screen window with tabs. I guess maybe a Linux web kiosk
The best AI I've played against (the list is short) were the levels in Half-Life where the Marines in the warehouses. They would alert each other and lock down the target, hailing the player with grenades and machine gun fire. If the same units were human controlled and locked into only playing that one particular room, or building, while main character players were streaming through there one after another, it could be lots of fun. The game for the marine players would be to see how many main characters you can kill off. It'd be like goal tending in soccer.
So you either can't steal them because they are too high up, or if in snatch range you'd be filmed stealing them. And keep in mind some are monitored by humans, so as soon as you setup your stepladder The Police are on their way. Ski mask and quickness. It's really not all that difficult.
How soon before you start seeing this hardware on ebay? I don't know that Londoners (??) would be apt to steal such equipment, but I can absolutely see it happening in NYC.
Just because our planet has evolved the way it did doesn't mean that any other random planet that contains intelligent life evolved the same way. Assuming the vagueness of "ten billion years" is even remotely close to the available time for a species to evolve into a space traveling culture I would say there's actually a pretty good possibility that one of them is moving about the Universe at a rather quick pace. Hell, look at our own damn planet! We have cultures that are walking on the Moon, and cultures who don't even use the wheel. If you use that same comparison and place Earthlings at the wheel state then another planet far far away is zipping around at Warp, or spinning up their FTL, or jumping into worm holes, or constructing jump gates to enter hyperspace, or whatever Sci-Fi expression of extreme space travel you prefer. Or maybe there's one of each! Or maybe there is no other intelligent life anywhere in the entire universe, and never will be until we colonize it.
There's a lot out there that we don't know anything about.
Leisure Suite Larry? It's been two over two years!
I guess that explains why my old monitors turned that ugly yellow... thanks.
Quite likely. But I bet most monitors (not saying yours here) are discolored by smokers.
1) Windows crashes even if you don't do anything but let it sit there. Install Linux (or Solaris, or BSD) and voila, it's rock-stable. I don't have your problems. Maybe it's you. 2) Apple (really it was Jobs) abandoned the clones because the clone makers were making better, faster, and cheaper hardware. Apple had realized that without people buying Apple's own hardware, they didn't make any money. Apple is a hardware, not a software company. Steve Jobs quoting Alan Kay, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
Steve Jobs says they make hardware to run the software that they make. So, are they a software or hardware company?
Hardware:
ApplePhone
ApplePod
AppleMac
AppleBook
AppleTV
Software:
AppleTunes
AppleSync
AppleWork
AppleDVD
More to type, but probably would have a cooler image and they wouldn't have to worry about name competition.
1) Let OS/X be usable on any Intel platform. Sell it on the shelf. Sell it via OEM on new Intel-based PCs. Increase your user base. Increase profitability immediately. Imageine - OS/X being able to go head-to-head vs Windows. But Alas, Apple is too retarded to see this. Not so fast there. One of Microsoft's biggest battles is dealing with a bad reputation for Windows when in fact it's the hardware that is at fault. Apple experienced this with the various Mac clones that were licensed about a decade ago. Where they would have a larger user base, the consistency of quality that Apple produces would be tarnished by people running OS X on sub quality hardware and blaming OS X for their troubles. The practically universal idea that OS X "just works" would quickly fade, and it would become comparable to Windows OSes (in that regard), but Windows has a larger software base and would then become more popular again. 2) Open up iTMS to other players. Selling more music is a good thing, right? Again, Apple passing up easy money by locking it in to iPods. I personally, nor will I let anyone in my family, buy a POS iPod just for this reason alone. iPods have a better track record than any other portable music device that I know of. The same as above for this hardware market. 3) Their whole thing with the iPhone. The price is stupid (and their quoted prices are AFTER rebate if memory serves). Also, had they just made it an open-network phone, letting people buy them from all the major carriers, imagine how much better it'd sell. I don't know of very many people who will change providers just to have an iPhone. Keep in mind that they're not trying to sell everyone an Apple phone. They're just trying to get to the people who use 'smart phones' already. That group of people probably don't care what it costs, nor who's providing the service. They just want it to be rock solid because they don't like dealing with broken things or the people who fix broken things. Yes the Apple phone is expensive, but it replaces four devices, each about half its price, which makes it quite a bargain.
I like to bitch about Apple's business choices just as much as the next guy, but you're not thinking this shit through.
Yep. Yep yep. Yep. Yep yep yep.
You are correct.
But! Apple's products are simple and easy to use. They do what they're designed for. And they are elegant. In a lot of cases a Mac is the right tool for the job. It does, however, frighten me how quickly the 'geek community' has gotten onboard with Apple. Steve Jobs is the best salesman in the world. He sold the smartest community (geeks, by definition) on their biggest enemy (closed everything), and made them love what he's doing. Rather appalling if you ask me.
But of course the actual number isn't in the article. Exactly. I love it when stats aren't displayed as stats. Pretty much invalidates the entire study in my book.
You know, 37.4% of all statistics are made up, anyway.
This is a new take on an old market. Give it time. I bet come October we'll all be singing a different tune... I think the iPod was actually $500 originally, and not many people bought them. But it had a restricted marked due to the computers it could be used with. Now that iTunes is on Windows and the devices use USB the availability of connecting both iPods and the iPhone to [insert person here]'s computer is pretty damn likely.
Apple also corrected the quality of the device and the price fairly quickly. Once they had a better product and greater available user base it started to take off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IpodSales.svg
The iPhone is coming into the market with the iPod's successful attributes already in place. I figure within a year or two the price will start dropping, the storage will go up, and the hardware will get better. Not to mention software upgrades and addons constantly.
Basically I've been wanting an iPhone for
iPhone 2.0: Higher MP camera, greater storage capacity, higher density display, more apps, same price