Turbine is pretty good about expansions. They do monthly updates that add new content. These aren't always the best updates, but some of them were spectacular (AC1 anyway, I can't speak for AC2 but they promised the same things). When the expansion did come out for AC1 it added an entire landmass and while it wasn't necessarily worth the twenty bucks that it cost, you got another month of "free play" which meant the expansion really only cost $10 more than what you were already paying for monthly content.
The initial fee covers the first month of play plus the cost of distribution of the nice box, manual, cd, maps, posters, etc. It isn't going to go away any time soon. The monthly fee pays for access to the servers, access to updated content, and bandwidth. I've really enjoyed the effort that Turbine put into monthly events that made the fees worth it. AC1 was great and I played it for far too long. AC2 was beautiful, but I didn't really care for the game. This game should be interesting as it should be using the same engine as AC2. Besides, there are hundreds of thousands of people that won't think twice about paying both prices so they really aren't worried about losing one or two subscribers that won't pay the initial fee.
This still doesn't do anything to stop morons from sharing thier entire disk. That is the real problem. WINS gets rid of browse traffic assuming properly configured clients (easy with DHCP unlikely with staticly configured boxes).
Actually it could seriously help TI because they would much rather you buy DLP projecters at an average cost of 20% more than the LCD projectors. Of course the DLP projectors are still going to have to be replaced more often than most theatres are going to like, but that can probably be taken care of by reducing the cost of the dang things.
It's not a matter of who they are or why they are doing it. It is a personal preference. I don't give out my credit card for age verification. I only give out my credit card information when making a purchase.
That's a really horrible idea. The reason you block those ports even internally is to stop the wasted traffic from browse requests and Joe Sixpack opening up his entire computer to his neighbors becuase he doesn't have a clue how MS File sharing works. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to do support on a friends computer, or the family member of a friend and found they had the entire drive shared and connected to their ISP 24/7. If users were more cluefull or if this person wanted to do support for all 160 units then that would make sense. Otherwise the least amount of liability and hassle come from blocking those ports.
It's quite simple to setup squid to transparently cache the connections without user intervention. The same way that the cisco products work. I don't know if Ascend has a caching server at all, but even if they do you would want to look for it under the Lucent name as the last time I checked Lucent had not sold that particular property back off as part of thier current death spiral.
I was a little dubious about the first portion. Why do they need my address and phone number for a beta test? I figured that wasn't that big of a deal, they are verifying that I am who I say I am. Then I see the credit card portion and I closed the window. I'm sorry, but I'm not giving anyone my credit card unless they are charging me a predetermined fee that I agree to. I'm certainly not going to give a company my credit card number for a beta test.
I also use 1.4a and haven't seen a pop up ad in ages. You might want to check in your popup manager that you don't have the sites using popups in your allowed list.
One is bandwidth. The high quality versions require more bandwidth to download, and Apple may actually want to sacrifice you so that other users get a better experience. (Think ISP throttling back subscribers who use the most bandwidth.)
High quality versions would require more bandwidth to provide. They would also require more disk space, and probably be more expensive. However, the people that want that (like myself) would probably pay more for that (I would). For example, I'm already paying for a high speed unlimited bandwidth internet connection. I'm paying a small fortune for it each month, but based on that it could be expected that I would probably pay more for a higher quality service in other related areas as well. Besides, bandwidth is really the concern of the user and not Apple. They warn users right up front that you really need a higher speed internet connection to be able to download the music, previews, etc effectivly.
Two, the recording industry. What you see today is doubtlessly a compromise. The industry is leery of unprotected high quality tracks. Thus, Apple gives some protection, and lowers the quality somewhat. I expect that if Apple insisted on high quality, the industry would demand strong DRM, and if Apple insisted on zero DRM, the industry would only permit low quality downloads.
I think this is the real issue. The recording industry probably figures that if they released higher quality music online it would just end up being on one of the p2p networks. Even if it did have very restrictive DRM. In fact I think very restrictive DRM on the files would make it so that the files showed up more frequently on the p2p networks, but of course I don't have any evidence to support that claim so it's just my opinion. Apple isn't insisting on strong DRM, they are providing a system that is fairly flexible and fair the users as well as the record companies. However, I don't think the price is justified because of the lower quality. I think that maybe $.50 is a fair price for a limited quality song but not almost the full price of the song (based on cd prices).
The problem is I do actually want higher quality versions of just those tracks. If they made that available to me I would buy more tracks. As it is I am only buying tracks that I absolutly wouldn't buy otherwise.
Ok, that's all well and good, but what would the cost of that CD be if it was in a low quality format with no liner notes like the songs in the iTunes store? Half price? Would people buy it at all?
While CD's at the store may still be more expensive you are getting a better product. You might be only getting 3 songs you want but you are getting them in a very high quality compared to the 128Kbps AAC files offered from the iTunes store. I've already bought several songs, but each time I pressed that buy now button I had to ask myself if it was really worth it to buy the lower quality track.
The only reason I decided it was is that I would never buy the full albums for just those tracks. The lower quality and slightly higher price is worth not having it on your concience that you just downloaded the high quality version from kazaa or other p2p service.
Even if the DRM doesn't affect him the lower quality does. AAC @ 128Kbps is not as good as MP3 @ 320Kbps. The reduction in quality is the primary reason that cds are still a better value. Also, as broadband becomes more wide spread it will get better than this or people will still just continue to share music rather than purchasing it.
On to the interesting stuff: actually buying songs. I select a song I've got a poor p2p copy of and click buy, and it asks me to sign in with my Apple ID, or create one if I don't have one. This is where I have my first problem. I have an Apple ID, but entering it puts up a message saying I've never used it with iTunes Music Store before (well, duh) and asks me to review the terms and conditions. Then it directs me to the account creation screen, with my info already filled in.
Of course, the account creation screen won't let you create a duplicate account, and asks me to log in. Can we say endless loop? How about bug that should be fixed?
I've signed up two accounts since the store opened and both went from the terms and conditions screen into the store once I had succesfully logged in with an existing apple id. I would say this is probably an isolated incidant. Or at least one of low occurance as it's the first place I've seen the error reported.
The selection is broad, but not yet very deep. Many albums I found are in partial status, with only one or two songs. Several artists I was looking for were not listed at all.
It's a new service and Apple admits freely that they are adding music as quickly as possible and are only adding what the music labels have agreed to provide.
Also, some albums are listed as "Explicit" or "Clean." Notice I said "albums": if one song in an album has a label they all seem to, though I didn't do an exhaustive search. Since this is structured as song-centric, I feel they should have labeled on a song-by-song basis.
This is most likely due to how the songs/albums are provided to Apple by the labels. When you go to a store and there are two copies of an album one is clean and the other is explicit it is because one or more songs on the album are considered to be that way. This very well may have to do with the voluntary labeling the record labels have been doing. This is hardly an issue, and for many parents letting their kids get music using iTunes is probably a good thing. So I don't see how this could possibly be an issue, nor do I see a reason for it to be changed.
First options: inside iTunes. iTunes can convert one format to another normally, trying it on a 'protected' AAC file returns an error. Also, trying to burn an MP3 CD with one on the playlist just skips burning the AAC files (or returns an error if they are the only files.) Fair enough, we didn't really expect the capability to circumvent all controls to be built in... (Though you can of course burn regular CDs.)
Of course you can't burn MP3 cds, of course you can't convert the song directly to mp3 in iTunes. That would blatently break the copy limitations and the record companies wouldn't have allowed Apple to go through with it. However, the easiest way to beat the copy protection is either convert the AAC file with another app that ignores the protection or burn a regular cd from iTunes and then rerip the song into the format of your choice. Of course you are burning and ripping a reduced quality song and then encoding it into yet another lossy format (probably) which is only going to reduce the quality more so there isn't really a great reason to do so.
This service isn't for everyone. It's for people that primarily listen to thier songs on thier computer, ipod, or maybe the car. Anyone with a nice stereo isn't going to want to go this route due to the reduced quality of the songs. My experience with the system has been good so far. I don't see myself buying a lot of music because of a couple of reasons. First, the price per song is not low enough to justify the low quality of the reproduction. If I go to the store and buy a cd I'm getting several songs for around $1.00 - $1.50 each depending on the artist, label, and number of tracks on the cd. These are in high quality format on the cd and I can rip the entire cd to whatever quality format I want. I also get a jewel case and liner notes etc. When I get a song from the
Without having a federally registered trademark the firebird sql people can only invoke common trademark law. This gives them extremely limited rights in thier geographic area of distribution. Having had this discussion with a lawyer in the past, not having a registerd trademark grants additional protections and allows national recognition. Unless the firebird sql people and mozilla are distributing into the same area and from the same area with a similar product that could be confusing there is no basis in law for a trademark violation. The AOL lawyers are probably very very aware of this and hence are not worried in the least about the firebird sql server or any potential trademark issues. Based on the advice that I recieved, I over simplified that matter. However, without a registered trademark they may as well not even bother protesting the issue.
I refer to it as firebird sql for the sake of differentiation in the scope of this discussion. Under normal circumstances the two would probably not be mentioned in the same conversation and this would not be an issue. The issue of the use of the word firebird, and that action being lame is objective while the trademark issues are far less so.
This is nothing like a domain dispute. Nissan motors was trying to claim that they had rights to the domain because Nissan computers was attempting to capitalize on thier trademark and brand recognition. The court ruled that the domain didn't have to be handed over, but had to be converted to non commercial use. Incidentally the computer companies owners name is Nissan.
This isn't even close. This is a dispute over a name for two pieces of software competing in different areas of the software world. If there is any type of claim it would be a trademark claim. Interestingly enough, I don't find a claim at the USPTO for a firebird sql anything. I see lots of expired and cancelled trademarks for computer games, golf club bags, cars, electronic devices, etc. However there is no (in my searching) trace of a Firebird trademark for the Firebird SQL server. In which case they have absolutly no claim. You can't invoke trademark law if you don't have a trademark.
The biggest mistake the "editors" made here is that Michael obviously didn't read the article and just figured it was worth submitting based on the summary. However, we've seen this in the past and have to assume that without reading the article all of the information in the summary is suspect. It seems we all agree on that point. I just wish that people would put the majority of the blame where it lies. When a person submits a summary with the news submission and that is all there is with the post, a bad summary is the fault of the person submitting the article. You can blame Michael for not reading the article and posting an addition on the end, but I stated that in my original post.
I just get irritated because the majority of complaints about the summaries that accompany articles are directed at the "editors" when the submitter of the article is the one making errors. It's almost as if people can't distinguish between the submitters comments and the "editors."
editors is encapsulated in quotes as it is hard to call the slashdot article moderators editors in my opinion
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a link specifically to info on the player races.
AC2 already has multiple playable races with race specific paths, buildings, weapons, spells etc. This is being built by whom built AC2
Turbine is pretty good about expansions. They do monthly updates that add new content. These aren't always the best updates, but some of them were spectacular (AC1 anyway, I can't speak for AC2 but they promised the same things). When the expansion did come out for AC1 it added an entire landmass and while it wasn't necessarily worth the twenty bucks that it cost, you got another month of "free play" which meant the expansion really only cost $10 more than what you were already paying for monthly content.
The initial fee covers the first month of play plus the cost of distribution of the nice box, manual, cd, maps, posters, etc. It isn't going to go away any time soon. The monthly fee pays for access to the servers, access to updated content, and bandwidth. I've really enjoyed the effort that Turbine put into monthly events that made the fees worth it. AC1 was great and I played it for far too long. AC2 was beautiful, but I didn't really care for the game. This game should be interesting as it should be using the same engine as AC2. Besides, there are hundreds of thousands of people that won't think twice about paying both prices so they really aren't worried about losing one or two subscribers that won't pay the initial fee.
Don't worry, you've got until 2004 to save up for when you get fired for playing MEO all day.
I got the impression he meant something else by 3d. Maybe more like VR games rather than 3d rendered games as most of us play all the time.
This still doesn't do anything to stop morons from sharing thier entire disk. That is the real problem. WINS gets rid of browse traffic assuming properly configured clients (easy with DHCP unlikely with staticly configured boxes).
Actually it could seriously help TI because they would much rather you buy DLP projecters at an average cost of 20% more than the LCD projectors. Of course the DLP projectors are still going to have to be replaced more often than most theatres are going to like, but that can probably be taken care of by reducing the cost of the dang things.
It's not a matter of who they are or why they are doing it. It is a personal preference. I don't give out my credit card for age verification. I only give out my credit card information when making a purchase.
That's a really horrible idea. The reason you block those ports even internally is to stop the wasted traffic from browse requests and Joe Sixpack opening up his entire computer to his neighbors becuase he doesn't have a clue how MS File sharing works. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to do support on a friends computer, or the family member of a friend and found they had the entire drive shared and connected to their ISP 24/7. If users were more cluefull or if this person wanted to do support for all 160 units then that would make sense. Otherwise the least amount of liability and hassle come from blocking those ports.
It's quite simple to setup squid to transparently cache the connections without user intervention. The same way that the cisco products work. I don't know if Ascend has a caching server at all, but even if they do you would want to look for it under the Lucent name as the last time I checked Lucent had not sold that particular property back off as part of thier current death spiral.
They are opening it to everybody by producing a Windows version of iTunes that will be out eventually.
I was a little dubious about the first portion. Why do they need my address and phone number for a beta test? I figured that wasn't that big of a deal, they are verifying that I am who I say I am. Then I see the credit card portion and I closed the window. I'm sorry, but I'm not giving anyone my credit card unless they are charging me a predetermined fee that I agree to. I'm certainly not going to give a company my credit card number for a beta test.
I also use 1.4a and haven't seen a pop up ad in ages. You might want to check in your popup manager that you don't have the sites using popups in your allowed list.
Whoops, I thought I fixed that closing italics tag. Oh well.
One is bandwidth. The high quality versions require more bandwidth to download, and Apple may actually want to sacrifice you so that other users get a better experience. (Think ISP throttling back subscribers who use the most bandwidth.)
High quality versions would require more bandwidth to provide. They would also require more disk space, and probably be more expensive. However, the people that want that (like myself) would probably pay more for that (I would). For example, I'm already paying for a high speed unlimited bandwidth internet connection. I'm paying a small fortune for it each month, but based on that it could be expected that I would probably pay more for a higher quality service in other related areas as well. Besides, bandwidth is really the concern of the user and not Apple. They warn users right up front that you really need a higher speed internet connection to be able to download the music, previews, etc effectivly.
Two, the recording industry. What you see today is doubtlessly a compromise. The industry is leery of unprotected high quality tracks. Thus, Apple gives some protection, and lowers the quality somewhat. I expect that if Apple insisted on high quality, the industry would demand strong DRM, and if Apple insisted on zero DRM, the industry would only permit low quality downloads.
I think this is the real issue. The recording industry probably figures that if they released higher quality music online it would just end up being on one of the p2p networks. Even if it did have very restrictive DRM. In fact I think very restrictive DRM on the files would make it so that the files showed up more frequently on the p2p networks, but of course I don't have any evidence to support that claim so it's just my opinion. Apple isn't insisting on strong DRM, they are providing a system that is fairly flexible and fair the users as well as the record companies. However, I don't think the price is justified because of the lower quality. I think that maybe $.50 is a fair price for a limited quality song but not almost the full price of the song (based on cd prices).
Mozilla already allows you to turn off all of those things.
The problem is I do actually want higher quality versions of just those tracks. If they made that available to me I would buy more tracks. As it is I am only buying tracks that I absolutly wouldn't buy otherwise.
Ok, that's all well and good, but what would the cost of that CD be if it was in a low quality format with no liner notes like the songs in the iTunes store? Half price? Would people buy it at all?
While CD's at the store may still be more expensive you are getting a better product. You might be only getting 3 songs you want but you are getting them in a very high quality compared to the 128Kbps AAC files offered from the iTunes store. I've already bought several songs, but each time I pressed that buy now button I had to ask myself if it was really worth it to buy the lower quality track.
The only reason I decided it was is that I would never buy the full albums for just those tracks. The lower quality and slightly higher price is worth not having it on your concience that you just downloaded the high quality version from kazaa or other p2p service.
It says right when you sign up that the transactions use standard encryption methods (SSL I presume).
Even if the DRM doesn't affect him the lower quality does. AAC @ 128Kbps is not as good as MP3 @ 320Kbps. The reduction in quality is the primary reason that cds are still a better value. Also, as broadband becomes more wide spread it will get better than this or people will still just continue to share music rather than purchasing it.
On to the interesting stuff: actually buying songs. I select a song I've got a poor p2p copy of and click buy, and it asks me to sign in with my Apple ID, or create one if I don't have one. This is where I have my first problem. I have an Apple ID, but entering it puts up a message saying I've never used it with iTunes Music Store before (well, duh) and asks me to review the terms and conditions. Then it directs me to the account creation screen, with my info already filled in.
Of course, the account creation screen won't let you create a duplicate account, and asks me to log in. Can we say endless loop? How about bug that should be fixed?
I've signed up two accounts since the store opened and both went from the terms and conditions screen into the store once I had succesfully logged in with an existing apple id. I would say this is probably an isolated incidant. Or at least one of low occurance as it's the first place I've seen the error reported.
The selection is broad, but not yet very deep. Many albums I found are in partial status, with only one or two songs. Several artists I was looking for were not listed at all.
It's a new service and Apple admits freely that they are adding music as quickly as possible and are only adding what the music labels have agreed to provide.
Also, some albums are listed as "Explicit" or "Clean." Notice I said "albums": if one song in an album has a label they all seem to, though I didn't do an exhaustive search. Since this is structured as song-centric, I feel they should have labeled on a song-by-song basis.
This is most likely due to how the songs/albums are provided to Apple by the labels. When you go to a store and there are two copies of an album one is clean and the other is explicit it is because one or more songs on the album are considered to be that way. This very well may have to do with the voluntary labeling the record labels have been doing. This is hardly an issue, and for many parents letting their kids get music using iTunes is probably a good thing. So I don't see how this could possibly be an issue, nor do I see a reason for it to be changed.
First options: inside iTunes. iTunes can convert one format to another normally, trying it on a 'protected' AAC file returns an error. Also, trying to burn an MP3 CD with one on the playlist just skips burning the AAC files (or returns an error if they are the only files.) Fair enough, we didn't really expect the capability to circumvent all controls to be built in... (Though you can of course burn regular CDs.)
Of course you can't burn MP3 cds, of course you can't convert the song directly to mp3 in iTunes. That would blatently break the copy limitations and the record companies wouldn't have allowed Apple to go through with it. However, the easiest way to beat the copy protection is either convert the AAC file with another app that ignores the protection or burn a regular cd from iTunes and then rerip the song into the format of your choice. Of course you are burning and ripping a reduced quality song and then encoding it into yet another lossy format (probably) which is only going to reduce the quality more so there isn't really a great reason to do so.
This service isn't for everyone. It's for people that primarily listen to thier songs on thier computer, ipod, or maybe the car. Anyone with a nice stereo isn't going to want to go this route due to the reduced quality of the songs. My experience with the system has been good so far. I don't see myself buying a lot of music because of a couple of reasons. First, the price per song is not low enough to justify the low quality of the reproduction. If I go to the store and buy a cd I'm getting several songs for around $1.00 - $1.50 each depending on the artist, label, and number of tracks on the cd. These are in high quality format on the cd and I can rip the entire cd to whatever quality format I want. I also get a jewel case and liner notes etc. When I get a song from the
Without having a federally registered trademark the firebird sql people can only invoke common trademark law. This gives them extremely limited rights in thier geographic area of distribution. Having had this discussion with a lawyer in the past, not having a registerd trademark grants additional protections and allows national recognition. Unless the firebird sql people and mozilla are distributing into the same area and from the same area with a similar product that could be confusing there is no basis in law for a trademark violation. The AOL lawyers are probably very very aware of this and hence are not worried in the least about the firebird sql server or any potential trademark issues. Based on the advice that I recieved, I over simplified that matter. However, without a registered trademark they may as well not even bother protesting the issue.
I refer to it as firebird sql for the sake of differentiation in the scope of this discussion. Under normal circumstances the two would probably not be mentioned in the same conversation and this would not be an issue. The issue of the use of the word firebird, and that action being lame is objective while the trademark issues are far less so.
This is nothing like a domain dispute. Nissan motors was trying to claim that they had rights to the domain because Nissan computers was attempting to capitalize on thier trademark and brand recognition. The court ruled that the domain didn't have to be handed over, but had to be converted to non commercial use. Incidentally the computer companies owners name is Nissan.
This isn't even close. This is a dispute over a name for two pieces of software competing in different areas of the software world. If there is any type of claim it would be a trademark claim. Interestingly enough, I don't find a claim at the USPTO for a firebird sql anything. I see lots of expired and cancelled trademarks for computer games, golf club bags, cars, electronic devices, etc. However there is no (in my searching) trace of a Firebird trademark for the Firebird SQL server. In which case they have absolutly no claim. You can't invoke trademark law if you don't have a trademark.
The biggest mistake the "editors" made here is that Michael obviously didn't read the article and just figured it was worth submitting based on the summary. However, we've seen this in the past and have to assume that without reading the article all of the information in the summary is suspect. It seems we all agree on that point. I just wish that people would put the majority of the blame where it lies. When a person submits a summary with the news submission and that is all there is with the post, a bad summary is the fault of the person submitting the article. You can blame Michael for not reading the article and posting an addition on the end, but I stated that in my original post.
I just get irritated because the majority of complaints about the summaries that accompany articles are directed at the "editors" when the submitter of the article is the one making errors. It's almost as if people can't distinguish between the submitters comments and the "editors."
editors is encapsulated in quotes as it is hard to call the slashdot article moderators editors in my opinion