I wouldn't count on MS not being interested in the low end smartphone range. Just because they're only barely crawling into the market now doesn't mean they aren't aiming for a huge section of it. That's why they partnered with Nokia, who did everything from the low end $20 phone to the $20k phone with dual sim and special call centre, and everything in between. But it will take time for that to emerge as viable (or, more likely, not) from MS. Nokia at this point cannot afford to wait around.
Um... they do patch windows vulnerabilities. Not everyone installs them in a timely fashion though, and the more draconian windows becomes about forcing you to install updates the more people get upset and resist. Writing a completely new underlying structure to handle patching only works so well and only retains so much compatibility.
Even if you do install updates, there's a gap between vulnerabilities being discovered and when a patch can land on your computer.
Right. I could see us moving to a post *LAPTOP* era, but not post PC.
Besides, NewEgg sells electronics, including components, they can just start selling tablets, servers, software etc. It's not like it's a big stretch for them to add different products to their store.
Universities also can't fund large scale testing, and, generally, the university doesn't own the work, the author does (professor or grad student), as soon as something can make money you leave the university, or at least farm it out to a separate corporation.
MSc's and PhD's aren't really about writing a big full blown program though. They're about finding novel solutions to problems and demonstrating that with a program. So they're different goals. You may have a big enough team that you produce a full on program, but more often that not, even if you're working directly on a commercial product, your part of it is relatively small.
Of course the cost of a course is in developing what goes into the lecture, not delivering it. It's preferable to have the person who wrote the lecture deliver it, if nothing else because then they are there to answer questions.
Also, while lots of material doesn't change from year to year, subtle changes make for a lot of work. 2 or 3 years ago we didn't really touch mobile computing (tablets, mobile phones) in web development. Now you have to figure out how to squeeze that into a course that was already full of SQL and PHP (and maybe some design, depending).
If you're in STEM I'll give a great example. In 15 years of doing electronics pretty much nothing changed with analogue or digital circuits at the second or 3rd year level. It's not that the material was great, but if you're doing a theoretical discussion that leads into computer architecture (although most students were physics/electronics types so never got that far along). Sure, technology shrank things, a lot. But transistors were transistors, inductors were inductors and everyone was content plodding along. Some specialist courses had to deal with issues of VLSI and all of the sort of actual day to day modern engineering challenges. Then came along the memristor. Do you rewrite course material for this new technology, that might not every commercialize? If so how do you change the material? Do you even understand what the material is saying?
Traditional classrooms are a relatively small part of the overall education experience, but they're useful if nothing else than to connect you to the people trying to solve the same problems and so you can poke and prod people to find out *why* things got cut. You can go look up memristors on your own, but if you're a 2nd year student you have no f'n clue whether or not it should be in your 2nd year course or not. That's why there are people with experience who show up every day and do this, and hopefully in 2 or 3 more years you'll be able to know enough to know why it is, or isn't included too.
I have nothing against all of the plans for future solar technology. But I was looking today, the place where I work figured they could generate solar power on all of the building roofs for an average of 71 cents/kWh. Right now we pay 7 + about 3 for distribution.
new technology is new. It's hopefully more efficient, safer, cleaner blah blah blah. The same would be said of nuclear (imagine trying to compare 40 year old solare technology to fukushima). There's lots of solutions but no political will to solve the problems associated with.
As though that makes them something we can't use? Everything comes with risk. Building cities on coasts where people live has risks. Having people live near a fault line than can have a magnitude 9 earthquake isn't a great plan either, shall we evacuate all of the Japanese islands? All electrical generation causes problems, hydroelectric completely changes ecosystems, Wind Turbines kill piles of birds and, if you have enough of them, shoddy construction will lead to breakage and other damage, coal spews all sorts of toxic crap in the air, which kills people, mining for coal kills people. Solar uses a wonderful soup of toxic chemicals which will have to be disposed of, and need to be extracted. Natural gas is again, less than pleasant from extraction.
So unless you want to go back to a per-electrical area with infant mortality measured in the range of 70 or 80 percent, and huge portions of planet being unsafe to inhabit without fire etc. you're going to have to take risks. Fukushima is, at best, a 30 year old reactor, based on a 40 year old design. If people refuse to have new reactors built you're going to be stuck with old, more dangerous technology.
The earthquake and tsunami killed 16 000 people (with 4000 still missing). To put that in american terms thats more than 5x a sept 11th, and on a per capita basis more than 10x. Thus far the reactor has seriously burned 2, and the explosions etc have wounded 37.
Yes, there's a big area that is an exclusion zone, but there's a big area that's uninhabitable due to flooding too. On the scale of things that go wrong in the world Fukushima Daiichi is relatively boring, it's a useful learning experience for experts, and nuclear policy makers so they can, you know... do better. But that's about it.
I wouldn't want to give customers the option of without windows easily. 98% (actually slightly more than that) percent of your customers will be using windows. The fraction that don't want to pay for windows, but will just cost you more money if you give them an OS they've never seen, have no idea how to use, and have no friends who have any idea how to use far exceeds either parties desire to make something other than windows available. There are far more people who will think 'windows sucks I'll get a computer without windows, and save some money, awesome!' than there are people who want to run linux. Guess which group you don't want calling you with support problems 10 minutes after they get it out of the box at home?
The locked down bootloader is a good idea, as long as you can request the key. It doesn't do you any favours if, on a windows install it's always stored in c:\UEFIkey.txt. That's just asking for trouble. Keeping it away from casual messing with is a good idea.
Most users are either too smart or too stupid to use linux, and it's not worth handing the 98% of people who will never use that the keys to getting themselves rootkitted unless they're smart enough to ask for it. It will require the linux bootloader guys write some stuff that explains *why* it isn't working, but that's a small price to pay to chip away at the rootkit problems we're seeing.
And who built Fukushima? Oh right, GE. Doesn't seem to have hurt their reputation any.
I grant you, the public is stupid. But people with brains, call them 'european elites' if you want, or just the people who should actually be making decisions about these things realize a 40 year old set of reactors hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami is a very different problem than a reactor designed today.
Partly because in Europe you've traditionally bordered people who might try and invade you, and border patrol involves layers of fortresses, trenches, covering cannons and barracks. The actual letting of people in and out is a minor secondary subset of keeping the IRA, Heer or Grand Armee out. The US has not faced a manageable problem like that other than Al Qaeda, and that's not really up to the level of a full blown invasion.
They don't want it to be legal to use the military to suppress dissent or the like. Which is of course absurd, in the event that such a thing becomes sufficiently desirable the government will find a way around the rules, and everywhere else recognizes that the military are as useful domestically as internationally, it just depends on the enemy you face and what you intend to do about it. There are lots of problems the government needs to solve, and the ones where it's appropriate there's no particular reason why the people solving it should be in one agency or another.
US rules are stuck in the 18th centuries notions of warfare, and have, by blind adherence to the concept means you end up with a lot of redundant skills with the police and coast guard etc. and end up with extra layers of bureaucracy for the sake of it. On the other hand, if the job needs to be done (say border guards, which could include airports), there's no particular reason why that being done by the military, or a separate agency changes much, it's a big enough task to have people specifically allocated to it, and to need people specifically hired for it.
Where do they use private security that isn't at least overseen by a government agency? The EU is the only place where airports run their own security, but what security they provide is still mandated by the EU, national governments, and the rules for wherever the planes are flying to.
Not really no. The point of the TSA - a government agency that assumes accountability for security of air travel is good. The implementation as a long parade of security theatre which reacts as though past specific plans are guides to future threats is disastrously wasteful and ineffective, not to mention a drain on the economy when no one wants to travel for fear of being repeatedly groped, poked, and prodded by people in blue gloves who hate their jobs,
because if you did that professors would balk at working in academia. Industry pays more (a LOT) more for a PhD in engineering or comp sci than most universities do. Your grant helps you publish papers and train students (notably grad students who are future scientists) but enough people would give up on public academia for the more lucrative private field, even if that hampers the training of future scientists, for the difference in personal gain.
How much do I mean by a lot more money? 40-50k/year more if you go to one of the top tier research places (intel, amazon, MS). The average starting salary for a PhD in comp sci is around 100k. Which is really 70-80k for people who go into academia (I might note fresh grads can regularly make that with just an undergraduate degree, so much for the value of 6 more years of school), compared to 110-120 in industry.
Patents and book selling pad the revenue stream to make being a professor worthwhile compared to the private sector for a lot of good people. Obviously some profs are quite happy at their current pay grade and would happily plod along whatever the rules. But researchers (both profs and grad students) want to own their own work, because frankly we don't get paid enough to warrant this job if we don't.
We run thousands of cables that support electricity across the ocean including to the coast of japan now. They are lower energy, but the principle is the same. Sure, an earthquake could wreck a cable, but it's a lot cheaper (and faster) to replace a cable than a power generator. Build the generators in safe (by japanese standards) places, and put the risky stuff on wires that can be replaced and turned off.
Hence they may have chosen to not use it. The last ones I played with a few months ago were for munitions not aircraft, but they seemed pretty resilient. A peacetime drill isn't the time to be showing off the detailed function of your EW/ECW suite to an ambiguous theoretical future enemy.
I should expand on what I said. Steam *is* drm. It may offer other features, but it's sole purpose in life is to be DRM. Once you've bought something with them it's tied to your steam account, and whatever they decide can happen to the content of that steam account. You cannot resell it, you can install it as many times or as few times as they allow. To activate a product with steam you have to connect to the steam service, if steam is offline you cannot activate, and, in many cases you won't be able to start your game (depends what api features the developer uses, and if you support offline mode).
You can add a game to steam that you've bought independently, say world of warcraft (that isn't available on steam), in that case nothing happens if valve blows up and steam is out of business. If you've bought your game through steam on the other hand.... You can back up your game, but you can't reactivate it without the steam service.
Steam is also there to prevent cheating, which is a form of DRM, though one players tend to be in favour of obviously. Which is what i was getting at about it offering a service as well. By making it harder to pirate you tend to make it harder to cheat and the reverse.
That's not really how content is consumed. 1 user for 4 months is really 1 user for 2 or 3 weeks, and then they're done with it, or it's 1 user for a year, and then your product is dead anyway. 3 or 4 users come with all sorts of issues. First, they need patches of course, which costs money to supply, second on average there's a certain support cost per user depending on what goes wrong, 1 guy, who needs your help getting it to work on his computer once, now balloons to 3 or 4. Theoretically they are customers of a future version, assuming you stay in business that long, but usually not, usually they'll buy used again. If they waited on used game sales 3 months they wouldn't be much of a problem, it's when they sell a game for 60 dollars, then later that week resell for 55 used. If walmart did that with movies the studios would have a fit.
The last major hurdle is if you provide any sort of online account service to go with the game. Say registering a key on a forum or something, now you have multiple keys, which, depending on the service you're offering may mean you have to deactivate one account and activate another, or have both active or the like. In this day and age a lot of companies offer redownload service in some way, so really what you're buying is the CD key, of someone else shows up with the same CD key I'm stuck figuring out if it was legitimately transfered, or not, if it isn't... well after about 15 minutes of my time you've cost me more than the game was worth to me.
Cancelling isn't the same as getting banned, actually, I don't think you can cancel a steam account, since there's no recurring billing, once you've paid, you've paid, and you can't launch a steam bought game without steam (or at least aren't supposed to be able to). If you disagree with steam over billing they'll immediately ban your account and lock you out of all your steam games. It *is* a DRM platform, as are consoles. They wrap that up by providing services or simplicity, but they're still DRM.
Steam was never junk, and never a favourite. People irrationally hated a service that used 35 MB of memory (when gaming computers had 2GB standard), and it's still a glorified DRM platform that will ban you from playing all of your games if they dislike you for some reason. Oh, and they want a 30% cut of anything (which is normal) but then you have to build your DLC to support their system (separate from your own system or any other provider) since they won't sell your game if they don't get a cut of the DLC, and you're locking into them for expansions and so on. They've gone evil light.
As a developer, I like online services. They mean I get more money, and waste a lot less on buying thousands of boxed copies that sit in a warehouse somewhere. As opposed to getting ~20% of the retail value of the product, I'll get 50-70% when it's through Steam/Impulse/Gamersgate. Steam has good patching now, but are a bugger to deal with on the back end. Gamersgate are easy to deal with all around but the service doesn't have any wow factor to it. Etc.
I can see where EA is coming from, they'd get more money from their own service, they don't have to deal with steams bullshit about Dragon Age 2, Cyrsis 2 etc (and the DLC), and they have enough clout with big titles (especially TOR) that it's worth running their own platform financially, and of course, once you have your own platform there's no reason to not sell anyone else's games. They're also getting to the point where the relationship with GameStop and Walmart is more destructive than constructive. Used games don't put money in my pocket, nor do they put money in EA's pocket, so they were and are trying to monetize DLC, which steam makes difficult. See where this is going? Selling a game to GameStop (as EA) that they can turn around and resell 2 or 3 times adds 2 or 3x to my support costs, if not more, since those games may have online features/codes that have already been redeemed, more patching etc. Walmart cares so little about your product but demands huge orders, so you print 40k copies of your game, which they sell 400 copies off, ya... not good. Online you can sell 400 a day, because hardcore gamers don't tend to think 'hey, this awesome new RPG I want, I'm gonna go to walmart for it 3 days after release!' Or they will fuck something up and start selling your game early, when you don't have your services turned on/active yet, and that just makes everyone angry.
Whatever one may think of the quality of the origin client, I'm hardpressed to argue that there isn't a lot of value in it for EA, and as a gamer, loathe as I am to say it of EA, if I want good games companies like EA need to get paid for the work they do. If I'm spending 60 bucks on a game, I'd rather see 100% of that go to people who actually participated in making the product, than see 50% of it be wasted on the retail chain.
There are GPS counter-counter jammers as well. I don't believe they're very expensive, but they might simply not have had one on this plane, or preferred to not use it.
Don't neglect the strategic and economic situation. Solar is at least 2-3x more expensive than fossil fuels. When fossil fuels become more expensive, or the cost of solar goes down, people will, without objection, start building solar.
Take the Iranian situation. If they tomorrow said, well, I want some windmills. They'd put someone with a suitcase full of money in a plane, fly them to the denmark or the netherlands, fly back with a plane full of windmills. No questions asked, no problems. No complaints. But if they want nuclear they're going to need years to train people, years to fight with the IAEA, the americans, the israelis, the indians, the saudis etc. over actually building even one little reactor. So they have to start early, and plod for a long time.
When the time comes the solar power business will probably boom, but it's too expensive now (or other sources of power are too cheap, depending on your perspective).
ya, I mean if the TSA agent is doing their job, as per government instructions, then you're into a whole ugly problem here. I don't even enter the US anymore, and I know the TSA are reviled, but being reviled isn't the same as one agent engaging in illegal activity. It probably is defamation to accuse a government agent, doing their job properly, of rape. If the government, in doing it's legally authorized job is violating peoples rights (which it probably is) that still belongs in the courts but it shouldn't be up to an individual agent to defend the policy.
For personal use, having both WP7 and Android would give the best app coverage i'd want without giving apple another cent. As a developer, being able to test multiple OS's on 1 device would be really nice.
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I wouldn't count on MS not being interested in the low end smartphone range. Just because they're only barely crawling into the market now doesn't mean they aren't aiming for a huge section of it. That's why they partnered with Nokia, who did everything from the low end $20 phone to the $20k phone with dual sim and special call centre, and everything in between. But it will take time for that to emerge as viable (or, more likely, not) from MS. Nokia at this point cannot afford to wait around.
Um... they do patch windows vulnerabilities. Not everyone installs them in a timely fashion though, and the more draconian windows becomes about forcing you to install updates the more people get upset and resist. Writing a completely new underlying structure to handle patching only works so well and only retains so much compatibility.
Even if you do install updates, there's a gap between vulnerabilities being discovered and when a patch can land on your computer.
Right. I could see us moving to a post *LAPTOP* era, but not post PC.
Besides, NewEgg sells electronics, including components, they can just start selling tablets, servers, software etc. It's not like it's a big stretch for them to add different products to their store.
Universities also can't fund large scale testing, and, generally, the university doesn't own the work, the author does (professor or grad student), as soon as something can make money you leave the university, or at least farm it out to a separate corporation.
MSc's and PhD's aren't really about writing a big full blown program though. They're about finding novel solutions to problems and demonstrating that with a program. So they're different goals. You may have a big enough team that you produce a full on program, but more often that not, even if you're working directly on a commercial product, your part of it is relatively small.
Of course the cost of a course is in developing what goes into the lecture, not delivering it. It's preferable to have the person who wrote the lecture deliver it, if nothing else because then they are there to answer questions.
Also, while lots of material doesn't change from year to year, subtle changes make for a lot of work. 2 or 3 years ago we didn't really touch mobile computing (tablets, mobile phones) in web development. Now you have to figure out how to squeeze that into a course that was already full of SQL and PHP (and maybe some design, depending).
If you're in STEM I'll give a great example. In 15 years of doing electronics pretty much nothing changed with analogue or digital circuits at the second or 3rd year level. It's not that the material was great, but if you're doing a theoretical discussion that leads into computer architecture (although most students were physics/electronics types so never got that far along). Sure, technology shrank things, a lot. But transistors were transistors, inductors were inductors and everyone was content plodding along. Some specialist courses had to deal with issues of VLSI and all of the sort of actual day to day modern engineering challenges. Then came along the memristor. Do you rewrite course material for this new technology, that might not every commercialize? If so how do you change the material? Do you even understand what the material is saying?
Traditional classrooms are a relatively small part of the overall education experience, but they're useful if nothing else than to connect you to the people trying to solve the same problems and so you can poke and prod people to find out *why* things got cut. You can go look up memristors on your own, but if you're a 2nd year student you have no f'n clue whether or not it should be in your 2nd year course or not. That's why there are people with experience who show up every day and do this, and hopefully in 2 or 3 more years you'll be able to know enough to know why it is, or isn't included too.
I have nothing against all of the plans for future solar technology. But I was looking today, the place where I work figured they could generate solar power on all of the building roofs for an average of 71 cents /kWh. Right now we pay 7 + about 3 for distribution.
new technology is new. It's hopefully more efficient, safer, cleaner blah blah blah. The same would be said of nuclear (imagine trying to compare 40 year old solare technology to fukushima). There's lots of solutions but no political will to solve the problems associated with.
As though that makes them something we can't use? Everything comes with risk. Building cities on coasts where people live has risks. Having people live near a fault line than can have a magnitude 9 earthquake isn't a great plan either, shall we evacuate all of the Japanese islands? All electrical generation causes problems, hydroelectric completely changes ecosystems, Wind Turbines kill piles of birds and, if you have enough of them, shoddy construction will lead to breakage and other damage, coal spews all sorts of toxic crap in the air, which kills people, mining for coal kills people. Solar uses a wonderful soup of toxic chemicals which will have to be disposed of, and need to be extracted. Natural gas is again, less than pleasant from extraction.
So unless you want to go back to a per-electrical area with infant mortality measured in the range of 70 or 80 percent, and huge portions of planet being unsafe to inhabit without fire etc. you're going to have to take risks. Fukushima is, at best, a 30 year old reactor, based on a 40 year old design. If people refuse to have new reactors built you're going to be stuck with old, more dangerous technology.
The earthquake and tsunami killed 16 000 people (with 4000 still missing). To put that in american terms thats more than 5x a sept 11th, and on a per capita basis more than 10x. Thus far the reactor has seriously burned 2, and the explosions etc have wounded 37.
Yes, there's a big area that is an exclusion zone, but there's a big area that's uninhabitable due to flooding too. On the scale of things that go wrong in the world Fukushima Daiichi is relatively boring, it's a useful learning experience for experts, and nuclear policy makers so they can, you know... do better. But that's about it.
I wouldn't want to give customers the option of without windows easily. 98% (actually slightly more than that) percent of your customers will be using windows. The fraction that don't want to pay for windows, but will just cost you more money if you give them an OS they've never seen, have no idea how to use, and have no friends who have any idea how to use far exceeds either parties desire to make something other than windows available. There are far more people who will think 'windows sucks I'll get a computer without windows, and save some money, awesome!' than there are people who want to run linux. Guess which group you don't want calling you with support problems 10 minutes after they get it out of the box at home?
The locked down bootloader is a good idea, as long as you can request the key. It doesn't do you any favours if, on a windows install it's always stored in c:\UEFIkey.txt. That's just asking for trouble. Keeping it away from casual messing with is a good idea.
Most users are either too smart or too stupid to use linux, and it's not worth handing the 98% of people who will never use that the keys to getting themselves rootkitted unless they're smart enough to ask for it. It will require the linux bootloader guys write some stuff that explains *why* it isn't working, but that's a small price to pay to chip away at the rootkit problems we're seeing.
And who built Fukushima? Oh right, GE. Doesn't seem to have hurt their reputation any.
I grant you, the public is stupid. But people with brains, call them 'european elites' if you want, or just the people who should actually be making decisions about these things realize a 40 year old set of reactors hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami is a very different problem than a reactor designed today.
Partly because in Europe you've traditionally bordered people who might try and invade you, and border patrol involves layers of fortresses, trenches, covering cannons and barracks. The actual letting of people in and out is a minor secondary subset of keeping the IRA, Heer or Grand Armee out. The US has not faced a manageable problem like that other than Al Qaeda, and that's not really up to the level of a full blown invasion.
They don't want it to be legal to use the military to suppress dissent or the like. Which is of course absurd, in the event that such a thing becomes sufficiently desirable the government will find a way around the rules, and everywhere else recognizes that the military are as useful domestically as internationally, it just depends on the enemy you face and what you intend to do about it. There are lots of problems the government needs to solve, and the ones where it's appropriate there's no particular reason why the people solving it should be in one agency or another.
US rules are stuck in the 18th centuries notions of warfare, and have, by blind adherence to the concept means you end up with a lot of redundant skills with the police and coast guard etc. and end up with extra layers of bureaucracy for the sake of it. On the other hand, if the job needs to be done (say border guards, which could include airports), there's no particular reason why that being done by the military, or a separate agency changes much, it's a big enough task to have people specifically allocated to it, and to need people specifically hired for it.
Where do they use private security that isn't at least overseen by a government agency? The EU is the only place where airports run their own security, but what security they provide is still mandated by the EU, national governments, and the rules for wherever the planes are flying to.
Not really no. The point of the TSA - a government agency that assumes accountability for security of air travel is good. The implementation as a long parade of security theatre which reacts as though past specific plans are guides to future threats is disastrously wasteful and ineffective, not to mention a drain on the economy when no one wants to travel for fear of being repeatedly groped, poked, and prodded by people in blue gloves who hate their jobs,
because if you did that professors would balk at working in academia. Industry pays more (a LOT) more for a PhD in engineering or comp sci than most universities do. Your grant helps you publish papers and train students (notably grad students who are future scientists) but enough people would give up on public academia for the more lucrative private field, even if that hampers the training of future scientists, for the difference in personal gain.
How much do I mean by a lot more money? 40-50k/year more if you go to one of the top tier research places (intel, amazon, MS). The average starting salary for a PhD in comp sci is around 100k. Which is really 70-80k for people who go into academia (I might note fresh grads can regularly make that with just an undergraduate degree, so much for the value of 6 more years of school), compared to 110-120 in industry.
Patents and book selling pad the revenue stream to make being a professor worthwhile compared to the private sector for a lot of good people. Obviously some profs are quite happy at their current pay grade and would happily plod along whatever the rules. But researchers (both profs and grad students) want to own their own work, because frankly we don't get paid enough to warrant this job if we don't.
We run thousands of cables that support electricity across the ocean including to the coast of japan now. They are lower energy, but the principle is the same. Sure, an earthquake could wreck a cable, but it's a lot cheaper (and faster) to replace a cable than a power generator. Build the generators in safe (by japanese standards) places, and put the risky stuff on wires that can be replaced and turned off.
Hence they may have chosen to not use it. The last ones I played with a few months ago were for munitions not aircraft, but they seemed pretty resilient. A peacetime drill isn't the time to be showing off the detailed function of your EW/ECW suite to an ambiguous theoretical future enemy.
I should expand on what I said. Steam *is* drm. It may offer other features, but it's sole purpose in life is to be DRM. Once you've bought something with them it's tied to your steam account, and whatever they decide can happen to the content of that steam account. You cannot resell it, you can install it as many times or as few times as they allow. To activate a product with steam you have to connect to the steam service, if steam is offline you cannot activate, and, in many cases you won't be able to start your game (depends what api features the developer uses, and if you support offline mode).
You can add a game to steam that you've bought independently, say world of warcraft (that isn't available on steam), in that case nothing happens if valve blows up and steam is out of business. If you've bought your game through steam on the other hand.... You can back up your game, but you can't reactivate it without the steam service.
Steam is also there to prevent cheating, which is a form of DRM, though one players tend to be in favour of obviously. Which is what i was getting at about it offering a service as well. By making it harder to pirate you tend to make it harder to cheat and the reverse.
That's not really how content is consumed. 1 user for 4 months is really 1 user for 2 or 3 weeks, and then they're done with it, or it's 1 user for a year, and then your product is dead anyway. 3 or 4 users come with all sorts of issues. First, they need patches of course, which costs money to supply, second on average there's a certain support cost per user depending on what goes wrong, 1 guy, who needs your help getting it to work on his computer once, now balloons to 3 or 4. Theoretically they are customers of a future version, assuming you stay in business that long, but usually not, usually they'll buy used again. If they waited on used game sales 3 months they wouldn't be much of a problem, it's when they sell a game for 60 dollars, then later that week resell for 55 used. If walmart did that with movies the studios would have a fit.
The last major hurdle is if you provide any sort of online account service to go with the game. Say registering a key on a forum or something, now you have multiple keys, which, depending on the service you're offering may mean you have to deactivate one account and activate another, or have both active or the like. In this day and age a lot of companies offer redownload service in some way, so really what you're buying is the CD key, of someone else shows up with the same CD key I'm stuck figuring out if it was legitimately transfered, or not, if it isn't... well after about 15 minutes of my time you've cost me more than the game was worth to me.
Cancelling isn't the same as getting banned, actually, I don't think you can cancel a steam account, since there's no recurring billing, once you've paid, you've paid, and you can't launch a steam bought game without steam (or at least aren't supposed to be able to). If you disagree with steam over billing they'll immediately ban your account and lock you out of all your steam games. It *is* a DRM platform, as are consoles. They wrap that up by providing services or simplicity, but they're still DRM.
sadly. I also missed a comma after good games*,*.
Still, Crysis, Dead space, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Battlefield 3, Need For speed, The Old Republic, is a pretty impressive array of stuff.
Steam was never junk, and never a favourite. People irrationally hated a service that used 35 MB of memory (when gaming computers had 2GB standard), and it's still a glorified DRM platform that will ban you from playing all of your games if they dislike you for some reason. Oh, and they want a 30% cut of anything (which is normal) but then you have to build your DLC to support their system (separate from your own system or any other provider) since they won't sell your game if they don't get a cut of the DLC, and you're locking into them for expansions and so on. They've gone evil light.
As a developer, I like online services. They mean I get more money, and waste a lot less on buying thousands of boxed copies that sit in a warehouse somewhere. As opposed to getting ~20% of the retail value of the product, I'll get 50-70% when it's through Steam/Impulse/Gamersgate. Steam has good patching now, but are a bugger to deal with on the back end. Gamersgate are easy to deal with all around but the service doesn't have any wow factor to it. Etc.
I can see where EA is coming from, they'd get more money from their own service, they don't have to deal with steams bullshit about Dragon Age 2, Cyrsis 2 etc (and the DLC), and they have enough clout with big titles (especially TOR) that it's worth running their own platform financially, and of course, once you have your own platform there's no reason to not sell anyone else's games. They're also getting to the point where the relationship with GameStop and Walmart is more destructive than constructive. Used games don't put money in my pocket, nor do they put money in EA's pocket, so they were and are trying to monetize DLC, which steam makes difficult. See where this is going? Selling a game to GameStop (as EA) that they can turn around and resell 2 or 3 times adds 2 or 3x to my support costs, if not more, since those games may have online features/codes that have already been redeemed, more patching etc. Walmart cares so little about your product but demands huge orders, so you print 40k copies of your game, which they sell 400 copies off, ya... not good. Online you can sell 400 a day, because hardcore gamers don't tend to think 'hey, this awesome new RPG I want, I'm gonna go to walmart for it 3 days after release!' Or they will fuck something up and start selling your game early, when you don't have your services turned on/active yet, and that just makes everyone angry.
Whatever one may think of the quality of the origin client, I'm hardpressed to argue that there isn't a lot of value in it for EA, and as a gamer, loathe as I am to say it of EA, if I want good games companies like EA need to get paid for the work they do. If I'm spending 60 bucks on a game, I'd rather see 100% of that go to people who actually participated in making the product, than see 50% of it be wasted on the retail chain.
There are GPS counter-counter jammers as well. I don't believe they're very expensive, but they might simply not have had one on this plane, or preferred to not use it.
Don't neglect the strategic and economic situation. Solar is at least 2-3x more expensive than fossil fuels. When fossil fuels become more expensive, or the cost of solar goes down, people will, without objection, start building solar.
Take the Iranian situation. If they tomorrow said, well, I want some windmills. They'd put someone with a suitcase full of money in a plane, fly them to the denmark or the netherlands, fly back with a plane full of windmills. No questions asked, no problems. No complaints. But if they want nuclear they're going to need years to train people, years to fight with the IAEA, the americans, the israelis, the indians, the saudis etc. over actually building even one little reactor. So they have to start early, and plod for a long time.
When the time comes the solar power business will probably boom, but it's too expensive now (or other sources of power are too cheap, depending on your perspective).
ya, I mean if the TSA agent is doing their job, as per government instructions, then you're into a whole ugly problem here. I don't even enter the US anymore, and I know the TSA are reviled, but being reviled isn't the same as one agent engaging in illegal activity. It probably is defamation to accuse a government agent, doing their job properly, of rape. If the government, in doing it's legally authorized job is violating peoples rights (which it probably is) that still belongs in the courts but it shouldn't be up to an individual agent to defend the policy.
For personal use, having both WP7 and Android would give the best app coverage i'd want without giving apple another cent. As a developer, being able to test multiple OS's on 1 device would be really nice.