If terms and conditions are understood and agreed in advance, then you can accomplish the same thing without DRM.
In an ideal world, but the realist cynic in me says that any company that trusts their customers to delete unprotected digital content after two days and not use it again, is going to find that trust broken over and over again.
But that's not exactly a revelation, since the movie rental market thrived for 3 decades without any seriously effective DRM.
To be fair, not having DVD Writers available to purchase in the shops helped for a good while, followed by the fact that it took some time before the DeCSS key was cracked. Even today there are still plenty of people who either don't own a DVD writer or do and simply have no idea that you can copy DVD's.
Having said all that, you're right though in the fact that the rental market is still doing okay as it relies on the trust (and ignorance) of customers to the fact that DVD's can be ripped. In my defence, I was more talking about digital content delivery where the knowledge required to duplicate content is as complicated as ctrl-c and ctrl-v.
DRM was never about the consumer. The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers.
At the risk of being burned at the stake, I can think of two scenarios where DRM would benefit the customer:
Try before you buy - This allows customers to get content for free for a limited period of time to determine whether or not they want to purchase it. Note that I'm talking about the DRM on the sample piece of content, not the final product. For example, try a ringtone on your phone for 2 days. If you like it, then you can buy the full (DRM free) version.
Rentals - The rental market is based on the basis that you borrow the content for a limited period of time at a significantly reduced rate on the understanding that it will expire.
In both cases, however, note that both parties get something out of the transaction and the terms and conditions are understood and agreed in advance. They get my money, I don't pay full price and they don't get me keeping the content.
Personally I wouldn't want to see rentals disappear. I'm happy with the fact that it's only mine for a couple of days on the basis that I pay only a quarter of the purchase price.
It even said in the FA that they were maps of the 3G coverage. As long as the maps are accurate, I can't see what they are complaining about. Nowhere is it implied that the normal service is limited to those same maps.
Unfortunately 3G was only mentioned after AT&T complained. Previously it just said "Out of touch" and implied that you would get absolutely no voice or data throughout vast amounts of America.
I think the editors really need to update the post - otherwise the comments are going to be filled with people making comments about the recently modified advert and not realising what was originally displayed.
I've seen a couple of people who say they don't get it and use the recently modified advert as proof. The first version of the map used the words "Out of touch", had no small print and wrongly implied that outside of the coloured area you weren't going to get any coverage at all.
AT&T's data coverage may be poor (I don't know, I don't live in the USA) but there aren't massive blackspots all over America as this map implied.
The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring.
There is actually no standard scale for signal bars on a mobile phone. As such, the mobile phone manufacturer implements a scale pretty much however they want. The upshot of this is that when the signal strength is the same, one model might show 4 bars but another only 2.
Years ago Nokia was notorious for showing a stronger signal than other phones did - meaning that when people sat around and compared the number of bars they had, the Nokias always looked the best - even though the actual strength was the same. I'm not sure if that is still the case.
Am I the only one that thinks that the pricing for the Mac Mini has gone a little insane? When they first came out they were for people who wanted to dip their toes into the Apple world but without spending a small fortune. Now the base unit is £500, hardly a drop in the ocean.
And yet again, nothing headless in the mid-range:( I can either go for the sexy (but hugely overpriced and underspecced) £649 Mac Mini or jump over £1200 to the £1,899 quad core beast. As the idea of paying to replace your monitor every time Apple make your old product obsolete sounds a little absurd to me - I'm not interested in the iMacs.
It's no wonder that some companies (*cough*psystar*cough*) and people are flirting with the idea of a Hackintosh. A £800 mid-range headless box from Apple would surely hit the sweet spot for quite a lot of people.
I just checked my addons and whilst I don't have the Microsoft addon, I do have an AVG one which is disabled. Clicking on the more information link (https://en-gb.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/blocklist/) presents me with a page that says:
en-gb.www.mozilla.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for *.mozilla.com.
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
Whilst it is nice to see they've done it, it's a shame that they didn't test the end to end user flow.
Slashdot is one of the worst for the mobile web. When I try to read slashdot on my blackberry (peal 8120) not only does it not render, it crashes first the browser and ultimately the phone itself. Just simply trying to load slashdot leaves me needing to pull the battery from my blackberry to execute a hard reboot.
I had this problem with Slashdot over 5 years ago and wrote AvantSlash which turns the pages into something which is readable on just about any mobile device. Please try it if you can.
It kind of saddens me that there are over 50 comments on this article about how poor Slashdot is and yet not one person has mentioned this project. Just goes to show the power of marketing I suppose.
OK, I know that anecdotal evidence really isn't acceptable, but based on the PSP owners I've talked to, I'm pretty sure I was the only person in North America who paid for PSP games. It was easily the most pirate friendly hand held console of it's generation.
Not really. The PSP needs to be reflashed with a custom firmware. This means either using some kind of flaw in a shipped game or needing a pandora battery and some software to create a magic memory stick. Oh and don't try this on a PSP-3000 or one with the TA088v3 boards because it won't work.
Once you have it flashed, you need to keep updating the CFW (custom firmware) to ensure that you can play the latest games. FIFA 10, Grand Tourismo and others all need 6.x of which there isn't a CFW out there for it, so you're SOL unless you go back to official firmware or use some kind of hack.
In contrast, buy a Nintendo DS, buy a flashcard (there are plenty around, M3 is one common one), buy a microSD card, stick some game files on there, plug it in and away you go.
Sony memory card pricing hurts them in many ways. It's one of the many reasons I won't buy a Sony camera (no, it's not that I can't pirate pictures or whatever).
Indeed, I avoid Sony cameras like the plague for this very reason.
However when I got a PSP, I picked myself a MicroSDHC to Memory Stick Pro Duo converter (something like this although lots of other places do them).
The converter plus an 8GB card already starts to save you money and you don't get stuck with memory in the future that you cannot use elsewhere.
(Anorexia as a role model is the problem) not Photoshop. As long as fashion models have to be under normal weight to be accepted for the top fashion shows and magazines, young girls will follow this role model and that is the real problem, not photoshopping bad skin.
I'm giving up my moderator points here but whilst I agree with you and have my own concerns over why young girls are so easily led down this unnatural path, it's not a case of simply "photoshopping bad skin" any more.
This film by Dove shows the kind of manipulations done on models these days and the difference between the before and after is really quite significant. At the 40 second mark is where it starts to get really ridiculous with the changes.
Since Google allows anybody to use the Safe Browsing API, why doesn't Internet Explorer use it as well, in conjunction with their own blacklist, so that a site will be blocked by IE if it's present on either list?
Surely a slightly better solution would be for the Smartscreen server to import Google's data rather than everyone's version of IE? That way they could insert the results directly into their own database and so there would only be one hit to Google's API (rather than several million), they could vet and filter the data prior to importing (assuming they were mad enough to want to do it) and - best of all - it wouldn't need an update to IE.
Whilst it's a nice idea, I don't think Microsoft will do it. If it was someone else apart from Google (like Yahoo) then there would be a chance - but with Google, I seriously doubt it.
I'd really love to have a PSP*, but locking me into an awful, overpriced memory standard is a deal breaker. Well, not quite, it has "SONY" written on it, THAT'S the deal breaker.
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words.
What you consider to be bloat, many other people consider to be essential functionality.
Unfortunately my Google Fu is failing but I distinctly remember a long time ago the music industry suing manufacturers of CD writers claiming that they facilitated copyright infringement.
Sony, as both a content provider and hardware manufacturer, managed to end being in both camps.
I think Thunderbird is a good example of this. There are plenty of places where the UI is unpolished and poorly presented (the default button layout, the displaying of the message details when editing an email and when managing your contacts are three good examples).
I'm hoping that some of the Firefox UI team eventually get around to Thunderbird as it could do with some TLC.
Many many many years ago I installed Mandrake on a desktop PC with two CD drives (one was a reader and one was a reader/writer). I was installing it from the reader because it was a lot faster.
During the install process, it asked for the second CD. Helpfully it also ejected the CD drive, except that it ejected the reader/writer - the one I wasn't using. So I put CD 2 in there, closed it and it reported that there was a problem with my CD and it couldn't install the operating system and applications.
So I go back to Windows, re-download CD 2, re-burn it and try again. Same problem.
So I re-download from a different mirror, burn and try once more. Same problem.
I'm about to assume that my CD's are all duff when I suddenly have a brainwave. I close the opened CD drive, open my original one and replace the CD. Lo and behold, it worked.
From that day, I could never get over the fact that when asking for the second CD, the installer ejected the tray on the wrong CD-ROM. Not only that, but when it saw that the CD hadn't changed, it reported an error rather than pointing this out and giving me the option to try again.
It took a while before I could look back and laugh.
The machine the end user gets will have a browser. Likely more than one. Probably the blue E and the firefox will be on the desktop. The user can click on either one.
Unless the Mozilla Foundation (or Opera) will pay Dell/HP/etc to bundled their browser then I'd expect to see IE installed instead.
After all, if the OEM isn't going to get any more money out of bundling a different browser, they might as well save costs on people phoning their helpdesk because they can't get "onto the internet" by including IE.
In short, unless we see some serious money being coughed up - nothing is going to change from what it is now.
I'm hoping for better PIM tools. I'm currently using an iPhone at work (I can pick any device so I change regularly) and having spent a lot of time with Windows Mobile I'm missing a lot of its basic functionality. For example with the iPhone I cannot:
Sync notes even though there is a notes application
Sync tasks, as there is no tasks application (why? it's pretty basic!)
Label a calendar appointment as private. Everything is visible to people who have read access to my calendar until I set it on the PC.
Set the location of a meeting as free, out of the office or tentative. Everything is busy.
Differentiate between tentative meetings and ones that have been confirmed.
Snooze a reminder. It either nags you or gets dismissed when you unlock the phone and never comes back.
Get the right mouse button to work on an appointment in Outlook that has been created in the iPhone (not sure if that is my work setup as it's very odd)
Use something which is lighter than iTunes to manage my contacts and calendar syncing - iTunes is a heavy beast for something which should be running in the background. I never thought I'd wish for ActiveSync.
Search the whole device for something. There is a wedding coming up in the next couple of months. Only way to find it? Hunt for it manually.
Now to be fair, I'm probably limited by the fact I use Outlook on the desktop and have no desire to use MS Push (who wants work emails arriving on a weekend?) or send all my data to Google's services - but some of this is pretty basic that even Palm had in when they were king of the world and pushing out black and white V series products.
If they put all that in, then I'd never need to go back to Windows Mobile. Fingers crossed.
It's not like bundling Firefox with their PC is going to increase their sales or profit. If Opera were going to pay them to bundle their browser, they would have done it by now (as someone has already pointed out, Microsoft doesn't prevent this).
In short, I really cannot see any OEM's bothering to do this - and so nothing will change.
Slashdot Mirror
In an ideal world, but the realist cynic in me says that any company that trusts their customers to delete unprotected digital content after two days and not use it again, is going to find that trust broken over and over again.
To be fair, not having DVD Writers available to purchase in the shops helped for a good while, followed by the fact that it took some time before the DeCSS key was cracked. Even today there are still plenty of people who either don't own a DVD writer or do and simply have no idea that you can copy DVD's.
Having said all that, you're right though in the fact that the rental market is still doing okay as it relies on the trust (and ignorance) of customers to the fact that DVD's can be ripped. In my defence, I was more talking about digital content delivery where the knowledge required to duplicate content is as complicated as ctrl-c and ctrl-v.
At the risk of being burned at the stake, I can think of two scenarios where DRM would benefit the customer:
In both cases, however, note that both parties get something out of the transaction and the terms and conditions are understood and agreed in advance. They get my money, I don't pay full price and they don't get me keeping the content.
Personally I wouldn't want to see rentals disappear. I'm happy with the fact that it's only mine for a couple of days on the basis that I pay only a quarter of the purchase price.
I won't shed a tear for the other forms of DRM.
Unfortunately 3G was only mentioned after AT&T complained. Previously it just said "Out of touch" and implied that you would get absolutely no voice or data throughout vast amounts of America.
I think the editors really need to update the post - otherwise the comments are going to be filled with people making comments about the recently modified advert and not realising what was originally displayed.
I've seen a couple of people who say they don't get it and use the recently modified advert as proof. The first version of the map used the words "Out of touch", had no small print and wrongly implied that outside of the coloured area you weren't going to get any coverage at all.
AT&T's data coverage may be poor (I don't know, I don't live in the USA) but there aren't massive blackspots all over America as this map implied.
See Engadget for more information.
There is actually no standard scale for signal bars on a mobile phone. As such, the mobile phone manufacturer implements a scale pretty much however they want. The upshot of this is that when the signal strength is the same, one model might show 4 bars but another only 2.
Years ago Nokia was notorious for showing a stronger signal than other phones did - meaning that when people sat around and compared the number of bars they had, the Nokias always looked the best - even though the actual strength was the same. I'm not sure if that is still the case.
Because, oh I don't know, you do if you want the next available headless box?
Because it's not headless?
Yeah, okay.
Oops, well spotted and thanks :)
Am I the only one that thinks that the pricing for the Mac Mini has gone a little insane? When they first came out they were for people who wanted to dip their toes into the Apple world but without spending a small fortune. Now the base unit is £500, hardly a drop in the ocean.
And yet again, nothing headless in the mid-range :( I can either go for the sexy (but hugely overpriced and underspecced) £649 Mac Mini or jump over £1200 to the £1,899 quad core beast. As the idea of paying to replace your monitor every time Apple make your old product obsolete sounds a little absurd to me - I'm not interested in the iMacs.
It's no wonder that some companies (*cough*psystar*cough*) and people are flirting with the idea of a Hackintosh. A £800 mid-range headless box from Apple would surely hit the sweet spot for quite a lot of people.
I just checked my addons and whilst I don't have the Microsoft addon, I do have an AVG one which is disabled. Clicking on the more information link (https://en-gb.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/blocklist/) presents me with a page that says:
Whilst it is nice to see they've done it, it's a shame that they didn't test the end to end user flow.
I had this problem with Slashdot over 5 years ago and wrote AvantSlash which turns the pages into something which is readable on just about any mobile device. Please try it if you can.
It kind of saddens me that there are over 50 comments on this article about how poor Slashdot is and yet not one person has mentioned this project. Just goes to show the power of marketing I suppose.
Not if you own a PSP made in the last two years it isn't.
I'm more than happy to be proven wrong but so far no-one has managed to get CFW loaded onto a TA088v3 board or the PSP3000.
Not really. The PSP needs to be reflashed with a custom firmware. This means either using some kind of flaw in a shipped game or needing a pandora battery and some software to create a magic memory stick. Oh and don't try this on a PSP-3000 or one with the TA088v3 boards because it won't work.
Once you have it flashed, you need to keep updating the CFW (custom firmware) to ensure that you can play the latest games. FIFA 10, Grand Tourismo and others all need 6.x of which there isn't a CFW out there for it, so you're SOL unless you go back to official firmware or use some kind of hack.
In contrast, buy a Nintendo DS, buy a flashcard (there are plenty around, M3 is one common one), buy a microSD card, stick some game files on there, plug it in and away you go.
Indeed, I avoid Sony cameras like the plague for this very reason.
However when I got a PSP, I picked myself a MicroSDHC to Memory Stick Pro Duo converter (something like this although lots of other places do them).
The converter plus an 8GB card already starts to save you money and you don't get stuck with memory in the future that you cannot use elsewhere.
I'm giving up my moderator points here but whilst I agree with you and have my own concerns over why young girls are so easily led down this unnatural path, it's not a case of simply "photoshopping bad skin" any more.
This film by Dove shows the kind of manipulations done on models these days and the difference between the before and after is really quite significant. At the 40 second mark is where it starts to get really ridiculous with the changes.
If, as you say, the evidence is conclusive - then the trial shouldn't last very long, should it?
Surely a slightly better solution would be for the Smartscreen server to import Google's data rather than everyone's version of IE? That way they could insert the results directly into their own database and so there would only be one hit to Google's API (rather than several million), they could vet and filter the data prior to importing (assuming they were mad enough to want to do it) and - best of all - it wouldn't need an update to IE.
Whilst it's a nice idea, I don't think Microsoft will do it. If it was someone else apart from Google (like Yahoo) then there would be a chance - but with Google, I seriously doubt it.
You want a Micro SD to Memory Stick Pro Duo Adapter Converter. It allows you to buy an 8GB MicroSDHC for half the price of the Sony version.
I paid £5 for mine, so you should be able to get one easily for less than $5.
I noticed that someone tagged this article with "bloat".
Ignoring the fact that this is not the proper way to tag an article, they really should read Joel Spolsky's excellent article "Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth".
To quote (emphasis mine):
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words.
What you consider to be bloat, many other people consider to be essential functionality.
This kind of thing happens in technology too.
Unfortunately my Google Fu is failing but I distinctly remember a long time ago the music industry suing manufacturers of CD writers claiming that they facilitated copyright infringement.
Sony, as both a content provider and hardware manufacturer, managed to end being in both camps.
I think Thunderbird is a good example of this. There are plenty of places where the UI is unpolished and poorly presented (the default button layout, the displaying of the message details when editing an email and when managing your contacts are three good examples).
I'm hoping that some of the Firefox UI team eventually get around to Thunderbird as it could do with some TLC.
Many many many years ago I installed Mandrake on a desktop PC with two CD drives (one was a reader and one was a reader/writer). I was installing it from the reader because it was a lot faster.
During the install process, it asked for the second CD. Helpfully it also ejected the CD drive, except that it ejected the reader/writer - the one I wasn't using. So I put CD 2 in there, closed it and it reported that there was a problem with my CD and it couldn't install the operating system and applications.
So I go back to Windows, re-download CD 2, re-burn it and try again. Same problem.
So I re-download from a different mirror, burn and try once more. Same problem.
I'm about to assume that my CD's are all duff when I suddenly have a brainwave. I close the opened CD drive, open my original one and replace the CD. Lo and behold, it worked.
From that day, I could never get over the fact that when asking for the second CD, the installer ejected the tray on the wrong CD-ROM. Not only that, but when it saw that the CD hadn't changed, it reported an error rather than pointing this out and giving me the option to try again.
It took a while before I could look back and laugh.
Unless the Mozilla Foundation (or Opera) will pay Dell/HP/etc to bundled their browser then I'd expect to see IE installed instead.
After all, if the OEM isn't going to get any more money out of bundling a different browser, they might as well save costs on people phoning their helpdesk because they can't get "onto the internet" by including IE.
In short, unless we see some serious money being coughed up - nothing is going to change from what it is now.
Because I can pick any phone I want and change it whenever I want (see first sentence of my comment).
I'm hoping for better PIM tools. I'm currently using an iPhone at work (I can pick any device so I change regularly) and having spent a lot of time with Windows Mobile I'm missing a lot of its basic functionality. For example with the iPhone I cannot:
Now to be fair, I'm probably limited by the fact I use Outlook on the desktop and have no desire to use MS Push (who wants work emails arriving on a weekend?) or send all my data to Google's services - but some of this is pretty basic that even Palm had in when they were king of the world and pushing out black and white V series products.
If they put all that in, then I'd never need to go back to Windows Mobile. Fingers crossed.
Why exactly would an OEM want to do this?
It's not like bundling Firefox with their PC is going to increase their sales or profit. If Opera were going to pay them to bundle their browser, they would have done it by now (as someone has already pointed out, Microsoft doesn't prevent this).
In short, I really cannot see any OEM's bothering to do this - and so nothing will change.