Why do they deserve a patent on features that are obvious when you use an embedded PC to record TV? The ideas weren't hard to implement and anyone who tried to use a PC to record video (they're the obvious device to use, considering availability and price) would have seen the potential for simultaneous playback and record, simply because it would work that way by default...
Store ten files on a drive, and start downloading an eleventh. Now browse the files, including the still-downloading one. Wow. You're now an inventor. Implement some obvious user-interface stuff to prevent viewing (in FF mode) past the end of a file and you're done.
Unfortunately, every other professional given the same set of requirements would have done exactly the same thing.
It's not about the idea. The idea could be old and tired. It's all about the implementation.
I could come up with a patentable way to catch mice, despite thousands of years of mice catching. Or, I could fail to patent a device for destroying alien invaders, because the "device" is a gun, despite the new use.
But, what's the chance that Tivo's method pausing live video was so non-obvious that it deserved a patent, yet another company just happened onto it? Given that the first way I'd go about it involves either a HD with a fast seek time, or dual heads, I can't imagine they'd have put much research time into this and thus it can't really be something a skilled professional working in the field wouldn't have come up with as the first obvious answer.
Ideas aren't protected though. I can see you selling frozen fruit-punch on a stick and duplicate it, provided I figure out for myself how to freeze the punch and make it stay on a stick. Even if your idea is widely thought to be the best idea ever, it's not protected. Your idea on modifying the microwave to send out anti-waves and using a stick made superconductive with some tinfoil and chewing gum, to freeze the punch instantly - that's very likely patentable.
Well then, Mr. Genius, why don't you educate all of us on the finer points of the patent. What keeps it from being either a trivial exercise in caching, or a dual-head HD?
They can throw in a bunch of buzz words, like every patent in the late nineties said "... over a digital network", but the plain fact is that doing two things at once, to two files, is pretty simple. I remember reading files as I was downloading them, in the early 80s. How is this anything other than a video application of the same principle?
A patent on a bloody idea. Pausing live TV. What's involved in that? A storage device with a write head for recording incoming data and an independently targettable read head. Wow. I'm sure glad they patented that, with ninety three claims of course and a bunch of technobabble, but essentially that.
Does anyone remember when there was at least the polite pretense of patents having to describe a new and non-obvious METHOD?
When I covered a bit of patent law in Electronics we were taught that for a patent to not be overturned, you'd need to be able to take reasonably skilled professionals in the industry and state the same problem and requirements. If they could easily independently invent the device described in the patent, the patent was too obvious.
Tivo is just trying to patent their feature list - making it impossible for anyone to create any device which provides the same functions.
Not SCO like. More RAMBUS like - flagrant abuse of the patent system.
You're saying it's not a pump and dump because they can't time the sale of the stock with the press releases? But when you manufacture press releases without any shred of evidence you simply time them with the scheduled stock sales. Pretty fucking obvious.
And yeah, I'm sure McBride wishes his options had all vested, but he'll still end up rich from selling the ones he has.
Now we merely don't sell that kernel anymore and we hope people buy an upgrade to the 2.6.0 line.
But when we EOL 2.6.x we'll actually have technology in it to disable it if you don't upgrade to 2.8.x within six months. And we'll bill you either way, because the only way to keep your Linux apps working is to buy into our new Licensing 6.0 program. But it's cheaper for you, and better. Really. No, we mean it.
But you're missing the point. You're in a pre-DRM world, but once the MPAA and RIAA team up and convince MS that DRM is the wave of the future, you're hooped. Intel's already got a serial number in your CPU and because you don't use open source you can't find out how to disable of spoof it. As such, you're giving a unique identifier to every site you visit, attached to every purchase, or post.
What happens when you can't type in a quote from your favorite book without using l33t sp34k or being charged a quotation fee, despite it being allowed under fair use. See how you feel when you have to repurchase your digital music after a hard-drive crash because backups aren't allowed. Or when your digital camera compares everything in your pictures to a national copyrighted-work signatures database and refuses to let you take a picture of anything copyrighted, or any false positives. What about when a cracker cracks into a database of unique IDs of posters on Slashdot and other databases and correlates your real name (and job, etc) with some political views your boss won't like?
You'll be wishing you had an OS that could be tinkered with, to block CPU-IDs. A digital camera offloader that gave you the benefit of the doubt. Backup software that works at your command - not at the direction of some company. Even if I can't hack the kernel, I want an OS where someone in my position (a user, not a faceless corporation) can. I want something that can be tweaked until it serves me.
You (the generic consumer) aren't expected to ever examine the source, or even know what source is, but it's this freedom that will let you do what you want, when you want, without government/corporate oversite and permission requirements. Without open source, and open standards and protocols, we're powerless.
Ahh gotcha. So it's our fault, personally, if Linux doesn't support every hardware device made. In fact, if it doesn't play DIVX disks from Circuit City it sucks.
Yeah, okay. Back to reality. If you buy shitty hardware it won't be supported. Going from 9x to 2k/XP broke a ton of parallel-port stuff, and a small percentage of everything else that technically would work but had no drivers.
Good to see that BillG is now eating at a soup kitchen because of this fiasco.
How is Xandros targetting Lindows (for example) users more than Windows users?
I've never seen any cut-throat marketting by an Linux distro. RedHat doesn't trash Suse, Xandros doesn't trash Lindows. They all say "Linux is great, and we think our flavour is the best".
Besides, this whole 'get users to switch' discussion is silly. Not only is Linux perfectly acceptable on the Desktop (I use it full-time for work and home use) but it doesn't have market share goals like Microsoft does. Debian will never have its board voted out at a stockholder's meeting because they aren't pursuing profits agressively enough.
And as for switching, do you know many Windows users? I don't. My mom is a browser and email user. And solitaire - she uses that pretty heavily. I already switched her to Mozilla a year ago because of popup blocking, security, and tabbed browsing. She'd barely notice if I installed KDE under Mandrake. Except of course that she wouldn't need to run a virus scanner and I could do routine maintenance remotely (and securely - which is why I don't do it remotely in Windows.)
She doesn't care about her OS any more than the average drivers cares if they've got a V8 or a straight 6, as long as the car does what they need. Tell them that one type of engine means 1/10th the repair work and they'll drop the troublesome technology.
Why does it need a killer app? It's an incremental upgrade that's no more expensive than the last incremental upgrade? It's pretty much a no-brainer for anyone who buys AMD, it's just as fast in 32bit code and 64bit code can be much faster on the right stuff (audio/video encoding, etc).
It's great that MS is delaying though. All the companies that make 3d modelling and rendering software and haven't already switched to Linux are doing so now. Ditto companies making scientific analysis software and other computationally intensive programs.
In letting Intel talk them into hindering AMD (or just being pathetic at bringing out a new OS version) Microsoft has just shot themselves in the foot.
Why bother reading licenses? They're irrelevant. You bought it, you own it, you can use it. Remember, with software you *own* everything but the copyright. You can do anything you wish with your software, short of copying it. An EULA that attempts to restrict your actions is an invalid after-sale restriction. Similar to being sold a car and then being told you need to buy proprietary tires or they'll reposess your car.
Pre-sale contracts or licenses, the distinction is very blurry, are different. You know the full story before you go in and are expected to abide by your agreement. Legal definately must be involved with the purchase of a site-license or something.
How can you find a single fee that will slow me down - a guy with a tech job who is capable of dropping $1500 on a new camera without blinking, and yet is small enough that anyone could afford it?
If I'm sick I taxi around to the drug store for cough med and back home. On top of $25 for a taxi, $10 to see the doc is nothing. Not the slightest bit of a deterrent. How is this going to stop me from abusing the system, if I was the type to go to the doctor for every sniffle? (And this isn't an age/income thing - I have friends in my rough age/income bracket who see a doctor every few weeks for some little thing.)
The problem is that while SCO does have some valid points, they're also proven liars. Look at the original code samples they showed, the ones in the greek font, which weren't theirs. And pretty much everything else they've said.
To say that SCO has a point because of this is like saying that a psychic who correctly predicted ten things has a "gift" despite the hundreds of things which didn't come true, or the vaugeness of the prediction.
SCO could be right about something, just like a stopped clock is right twice a day, but judging by their record of honesty and careful examination, do you really think it's anything other than dumb luck?
Any code that did get leaked to Linux wouldn't be a trade secret anymore, simply because it's been public so long. They have no legal reason to hide the code, yet they refuse to show a single actual infringing file. There's also evidence of a pump and dump scam - where announcements about the case are "accidently" made at just the right time to bump the stock price before a scheduled sale of stock.
Given that this is yet another showing by SCO that is quickly and easily explained by the Linux people as being non-infringing, and SCO has yet to provide any evidence to the contrary, their claims are on shaky ground.
They don't have a point any more than the monkey that finally typed a shakespearean play would have done so intentionally.
The problem with that kind of payment is that it discourages the lowest classes, single mothers with babies and the disabled, from using the doctors and yet doesn't impact bored old ladies unless they're really really broke.
A visit to the doctor costs much more than $10, if you're abusing the system you'll just abuse it a little slower. If you're struggling to make ends meet the extra $50 in a month from a sick infant may be ruinous.
If a system like this had a sliding scale and let the lowest rung go without any extra fees I'd be more supportive of it. I can easily afford $10 to see the doctor - $25 wouldn't even be ridiculous, and many of my friends could afford more. Those single mothers can't afford much, if anything, extra.
How about $10 to someone making $20k, up to $50 for someone making $100k, and capped at 10x a base payment.
While not perhaps the best idea, it seems to better address the problems while not preventing anyone's access.
If you don't let auto-update run it requires a lot more clicking, even past just starting the process.
I did an update on a WinXP machine a few days ago and it required three seperate 'I Agree' clicks during the SAME UPGRADE, though there were like twelve patches involved. Then it spun for a minute and asked me some routine question, and finally proceeded to patch. But then I had to reboot before any other patches.
I didn't consume twenty minutes of clicking and reading, but those were twenty minutes (or so) when I had to be available to click buttons. Not a fire-and-forget process.
Yeah, it easier if you let auto-update do it all. But that doesn't strike me as a very good idea. I'll trust my firewall and lack of net-visible services to keep me safe until I get around to patching, more than I'll trust an MS-run auto updater. Hell, I wouldn't even auto-patch my Linux box like that.
You're full of it. Anyone who claims WinXP has never crashed is a Microsoft shill or never uses it.
The first day I installed WinXP on my desktop machine Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser component) died when I double-clicked on a zip file without WinZIP installed. This was before anything could have broken it, I hadn't even connected to the LAN yet, this was simply trying to unpack video drivers off a CD I made.
Sure, the whole OS didn't die, but explorer barfed less than ten minutes after boot. This is a machine that routinely has 45-day uptimes in Linux and that ran Win2k fairly well. (As well, I think, as Win2k can run.)
Then there's the issue with it locking up during installing Age of Mythology. No weird drivers, no weird software, just an Athlon XP, nVidia chipset, graphics, and audio with nVidia drivers, and AoM. Locks, and alt-ctrl-del doesn't work, when it starts reading disk 2. It didn't do that in Win2k. But, yeah, I could still ping it, so I suppose it's kinda still running.
I think it's fair to ask sixty-second questions. Or rather, to ask questions expecting a sixty-second answer, even if that ends up being "That's a complex question, I can't answer it here."
You could ask you doctor relative if a shortness of breath while walking was a "bad thing", or just the cold you had two weeks ago not going away. He can say A, B, or "Go to the clinic and get a checkup."
Ditto with computer stuff. If someone is about to purchase a CD burner and wants a recomendation it takes me longer to explain my fees than it does to simply say "The Lite-On 52x". If they want me to write out the procedure for something that happens to be complex, I explain that it'd take a while and without a computer in front of us it's a problem. If they persist, this is where they are rude - not for asking what they thought could have been a trivial question.
Besides, much of the advice I get asked for is in the form of hobbyists who want to chat up a pro. I install Linux (etc) for a living, so when a friend installs Mandrake to give it a try they chat me up to see what I think of it and what stuff I'd recommend doing. While technically advice, it's more hobbyist chat. Like when photographers chat about lenses and stuff. They don't charge the newbies who are around, even though their opinions are the result of a lifetime of valuable experience and could save the newbie tons of time and money.
DeCSS does have valid uses. How about exercising your perfectly legal right to make backups of your media?
Some of the "backups" may be a violation of civil law, but that's something to handle individually, not something that justifies a flat ban on a useful tool. You don't ban hammers because someone could be killed. You ban the illegal act.
Laws like the DMCA were only enacted because big companies didn't want to bother with having to stop actually copyright violation, they'd rather remove troublesome freedoms.
Much like companies that sue people because of unfavourable product comments in public forums. It's inconvenitent that one of the serfs express an opinion that gets in the way of profits.
GTA has undirected gameplay, but you still can only save the game in certain spots, and at certain times. Can't save in the middle of a mission even though some of them take upwards of half an hour. And while it does save your game it only saves your job status, cash, and cars. Nothing else. The world is so static.
My complaint isn't that some games are limiting. When you play Tetris you don't expect an RTS. My complaint is that designers go out of their way to introduce the concept of save spots, just to enforce their style of play. It's as if a developer made everyone use their controller layout, not including a customize options, because they didn't think anyone should play the game in the "wrong" way.
Artificial limitations. Where they went beyond the style of game issues and put in extra limitations. Like a director not providing chapters on a DVD because they don't like the idea that a viewer would want to skip part-way into the movie, even if (1) it's none of their business and (2) you may have to stop watching in the middle, and want a convenient way to restart.
I found it to be designed to make me walk over the same area twenty or more times. Each time I got given a quest it was on the other side of the main map area. When I travelled in time I got to walk over the same area again, but with a slightly different grass texture and different monsters. I know it was the premise of the game, but it was so abused. Once over each area in each time, sure, but to cross back and forth...
Then there's the issue of needing gold for everything, gold that was best collected by entering and exiting certain areas over and over again while breaking pots, or pulling up flowers. Ugh.
It claimed a hundred hours of gameplay or something, but it was all repeats. Compare to Call of Duty (PC World War 2 game) which I played recently and it's completely different. They only once reused a single map. Much shorter game, but all of it was exploring new things. I'd much rather twelve hours of real gameplay than a hundred of boredom.
I think the open source community of today has the same limited interest in the financial aspects of their work, with the provision that they don't want to share with anyone too greedy to share back. I release the programs that I write (limited as they are) because while I grew up reading other people's programs and I want that same freedom to be available for others. I think my motives are similar to most people in open source.
A program that isn't going to make a lot of money, or isn't written by just you, gets open sourced largely because nobody feels the need to lock it down. Unlike the corporate mentality of locking everything down unless a strong reason is provided to do otherwise.
And no, the library of GPL'd software would be as large today without the anti-hidden code backlash, but it wouldn't need to be. GCC was written to provide a compiler for people because compilers were expensive to buy. If a free compiler was released by the makers of the operating systems nobody would have bothered with GCC.
As for copyright and freedom, I do agree. I prefer having controls on the markets, including copyright, etc. But I don't think that IP laws (as they are today) are helpful. I think they're a perversion of the original intent that serves to enrich the big businesses that pay politicians to extend them in more and more abusive ways.
Some games are written badly. Maybe Halo is one of them... I didn't see a problem on the PC on my modest setup, but then I don't think I turned the resolution over 800x600 so that might be the difference. Still looks better than on a TV though.
And as for style of play; I can see that fighting games, which are not my thing, are a preference thing. That's fine. I have no problem with people liking different styles of games.
What I have a problem with is how console games tend to force a certain style of play where PC games seem to be more open. Probably because they are - user mods and such which don't exist on consoles.
If it's your preference to not save, great. Don't. But a game that doesn't allow saving is written by a ass, plain and simple. It's all about making everyone play the game a certain way, not letting people do what they want.
As an example of a good game, Soldier of Fortune 2 (dunno about #1). It has a hardcore mode where you get a score and have a limited number of savegames. It's for people who want to compare scores and prove something. It's also got another mode with unlimited saves for people who don't want the restrictions. You see, enable the user to make the choice.
You say that there are tons of quake-like games, as if it's a bad thing. Yeah, terrible. So there's choice. They aren't all game-of-the-year, but I don't have to buy all of them so it's not really a problem. There are derivative clones out for all platforms. And hey, if you really love Quake type games, it's a good thing.
The problem with consoles isn't that many games are similar, it's that even though modern consoles don't have the same restrictions as older ones, the designers are still stuck in the 80s. It wouldn't kill them to provide decent save games, yet how many do? In GTA it wouldn't take a ton of ram to keep track of the cars that are behind you, but every time you turn around it places new ones.
And at least the PC has a decent set of controller options. There are a ton of joysticks available for the PC and yet very few people buy them - because for all but a few uses, gamepads are the worst controller. You don't get much choice with a console though. Whatever hand-cramping design was cheapest to make.
Everyone agrees that directors are assholes when they don't provide chapters in a DVD because they want everyone to watch it the way they intended - as if phones don't ring and real life doesn't intrude - so why is it a *feature* when console games enforce a bunch of stupid rules? At least PC games let me do what I want, when I want. If I want to save because I can't play now, I can. If I want to save because I suck at this area and don't want to redo it, I can.
PCs do cost more, but not as much as you make it seem - you don't need the latest GeForce card to play the latest games, unless you insist on 1024x768x32 with anti-aliasing. My GeForce 4 and AMD 2500+ have yet to meet their match, despite being almost the cheapest parts I could find. They also do a lot more. My computer burns and plays CDs and DVDs, holds thousands of MP3s, lets me use the net, displays high-resolution pictures from my digital camera. I can use community-created mods for games, use editors and design my own (something I used to do for Quake 1) and create my own programs, instead of simply being a consumer.
It's not like I pay $800 every few years just to play games. It costs my less than that to stay current and I get a ton more for it.
But that's beside the point. The point is that consoles are all about B&D, you play the game the way it was made, damnit. You don't get to choose the level you want to play, or how you want to play it. You can customize your controls all you want, maybe, as long as you don't want to change controllers. Why do people put up with that kind of crap? I returned Sixth Sense (the movie) because it made me watch trailers every time I started it. Does nobody else care about being forced to use things in the way the manufacturer wants?
Yeah, the eternal cry of a console gamer. "You suck! You'd like it if you didn't suck!"
Yeah sure kid. Maybe I just like playing *new* games, not playing the same bit over until I'm "good" enough by your definition. Maybe I like stopping the game, when I want to stop, and not having reply the last section. Maybe I simply dislike games that tell me how to play, instead of letting me play the way I want.
You can let some game designer dictate how you play your game, I prefer to make my own decisions.
Any game with save points sucks. It's a law. They know the game wouldn't be that hard to play if you didn't have to redo whole sections at a time.
It's a limitation that console kiddies call of feature. Here's a nickle, get yourself a computer capable of playing a real game - you know, one with a hard drive that can actually save your game.
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Why do they deserve a patent on features that are obvious when you use an embedded PC to record TV? The ideas weren't hard to implement and anyone who tried to use a PC to record video (they're the obvious device to use, considering availability and price) would have seen the potential for simultaneous playback and record, simply because it would work that way by default...
Store ten files on a drive, and start downloading an eleventh. Now browse the files, including the still-downloading one. Wow. You're now an inventor. Implement some obvious user-interface stuff to prevent viewing (in FF mode) past the end of a file and you're done.
Unfortunately, every other professional given the same set of requirements would have done exactly the same thing.
It's not about the idea. The idea could be old and tired. It's all about the implementation.
I could come up with a patentable way to catch mice, despite thousands of years of mice catching. Or, I could fail to patent a device for destroying alien invaders, because the "device" is a gun, despite the new use.
But, what's the chance that Tivo's method pausing live video was so non-obvious that it deserved a patent, yet another company just happened onto it? Given that the first way I'd go about it involves either a HD with a fast seek time, or dual heads, I can't imagine they'd have put much research time into this and thus it can't really be something a skilled professional working in the field wouldn't have come up with as the first obvious answer.
Ideas aren't protected though. I can see you selling frozen fruit-punch on a stick and duplicate it, provided I figure out for myself how to freeze the punch and make it stay on a stick. Even if your idea is widely thought to be the best idea ever, it's not protected. Your idea on modifying the microwave to send out anti-waves and using a stick made superconductive with some tinfoil and chewing gum, to freeze the punch instantly - that's very likely patentable.
Well then, Mr. Genius, why don't you educate all of us on the finer points of the patent. What keeps it from being either a trivial exercise in caching, or a dual-head HD?
They can throw in a bunch of buzz words, like every patent in the late nineties said "... over a digital network", but the plain fact is that doing two things at once, to two files, is pretty simple. I remember reading files as I was downloading them, in the early 80s. How is this anything other than a video application of the same principle?
A patent on a bloody idea. Pausing live TV. What's involved in that? A storage device with a write head for recording incoming data and an independently targettable read head. Wow. I'm sure glad they patented that, with ninety three claims of course and a bunch of technobabble, but essentially that.
Does anyone remember when there was at least the polite pretense of patents having to describe a new and non-obvious METHOD?
When I covered a bit of patent law in Electronics we were taught that for a patent to not be overturned, you'd need to be able to take reasonably skilled professionals in the industry and state the same problem and requirements. If they could easily independently invent the device described in the patent, the patent was too obvious.
Tivo is just trying to patent their feature list - making it impossible for anyone to create any device which provides the same functions.
Not SCO like. More RAMBUS like - flagrant abuse of the patent system.
You're saying it's not a pump and dump because they can't time the sale of the stock with the press releases? But when you manufacture press releases without any shred of evidence you simply time them with the scheduled stock sales. Pretty fucking obvious.
And yeah, I'm sure McBride wishes his options had all vested, but he'll still end up rich from selling the ones he has.
Now we merely don't sell that kernel anymore and we hope people buy an upgrade to the 2.6.0 line.
But when we EOL 2.6.x we'll actually have technology in it to disable it if you don't upgrade to 2.8.x within six months. And we'll bill you either way, because the only way to keep your Linux apps working is to buy into our new Licensing 6.0 program. But it's cheaper for you, and better. Really. No, we mean it.
But you're missing the point. You're in a pre-DRM world, but once the MPAA and RIAA team up and convince MS that DRM is the wave of the future, you're hooped. Intel's already got a serial number in your CPU and because you don't use open source you can't find out how to disable of spoof it. As such, you're giving a unique identifier to every site you visit, attached to every purchase, or post.
What happens when you can't type in a quote from your favorite book without using l33t sp34k or being charged a quotation fee, despite it being allowed under fair use. See how you feel when you have to repurchase your digital music after a hard-drive crash because backups aren't allowed. Or when your digital camera compares everything in your pictures to a national copyrighted-work signatures database and refuses to let you take a picture of anything copyrighted, or any false positives. What about when a cracker cracks into a database of unique IDs of posters on Slashdot and other databases and correlates your real name (and job, etc) with some political views your boss won't like?
You'll be wishing you had an OS that could be tinkered with, to block CPU-IDs. A digital camera offloader that gave you the benefit of the doubt. Backup software that works at your command - not at the direction of some company. Even if I can't hack the kernel, I want an OS where someone in my position (a user, not a faceless corporation) can. I want something that can be tweaked until it serves me.
You (the generic consumer) aren't expected to ever examine the source, or even know what source is, but it's this freedom that will let you do what you want, when you want, without government/corporate oversite and permission requirements. Without open source, and open standards and protocols, we're powerless.
Ahh gotcha. So it's our fault, personally, if Linux doesn't support every hardware device made. In fact, if it doesn't play DIVX disks from Circuit City it sucks.
Yeah, okay. Back to reality. If you buy shitty hardware it won't be supported. Going from 9x to 2k/XP broke a ton of parallel-port stuff, and a small percentage of everything else that technically would work but had no drivers.
Good to see that BillG is now eating at a soup kitchen because of this fiasco.
How is Xandros targetting Lindows (for example) users more than Windows users?
I've never seen any cut-throat marketting by an Linux distro. RedHat doesn't trash Suse, Xandros doesn't trash Lindows. They all say "Linux is great, and we think our flavour is the best".
Besides, this whole 'get users to switch' discussion is silly. Not only is Linux perfectly acceptable on the Desktop (I use it full-time for work and home use) but it doesn't have market share goals like Microsoft does. Debian will never have its board voted out at a stockholder's meeting because they aren't pursuing profits agressively enough.
And as for switching, do you know many Windows users? I don't. My mom is a browser and email user. And solitaire - she uses that pretty heavily. I already switched her to Mozilla a year ago because of popup blocking, security, and tabbed browsing. She'd barely notice if I installed KDE under Mandrake. Except of course that she wouldn't need to run a virus scanner and I could do routine maintenance remotely (and securely - which is why I don't do it remotely in Windows.)
She doesn't care about her OS any more than the average drivers cares if they've got a V8 or a straight 6, as long as the car does what they need. Tell them that one type of engine means 1/10th the repair work and they'll drop the troublesome technology.
Why does it need a killer app? It's an incremental upgrade that's no more expensive than the last incremental upgrade? It's pretty much a no-brainer for anyone who buys AMD, it's just as fast in 32bit code and 64bit code can be much faster on the right stuff (audio/video encoding, etc).
It's great that MS is delaying though. All the companies that make 3d modelling and rendering software and haven't already switched to Linux are doing so now. Ditto companies making scientific analysis software and other computationally intensive programs.
In letting Intel talk them into hindering AMD (or just being pathetic at bringing out a new OS version) Microsoft has just shot themselves in the foot.
Why bother reading licenses? They're irrelevant. You bought it, you own it, you can use it. Remember, with software you *own* everything but the copyright. You can do anything you wish with your software, short of copying it. An EULA that attempts to restrict your actions is an invalid after-sale restriction. Similar to being sold a car and then being told you need to buy proprietary tires or they'll reposess your car.
Pre-sale contracts or licenses, the distinction is very blurry, are different. You know the full story before you go in and are expected to abide by your agreement. Legal definately must be involved with the purchase of a site-license or something.
How can you find a single fee that will slow me down - a guy with a tech job who is capable of dropping $1500 on a new camera without blinking, and yet is small enough that anyone could afford it?
If I'm sick I taxi around to the drug store for cough med and back home. On top of $25 for a taxi, $10 to see the doc is nothing. Not the slightest bit of a deterrent. How is this going to stop me from abusing the system, if I was the type to go to the doctor for every sniffle? (And this isn't an age/income thing - I have friends in my rough age/income bracket who see a doctor every few weeks for some little thing.)
The problem is that while SCO does have some valid points, they're also proven liars. Look at the original code samples they showed, the ones in the greek font, which weren't theirs. And pretty much everything else they've said.
To say that SCO has a point because of this is like saying that a psychic who correctly predicted ten things has a "gift" despite the hundreds of things which didn't come true, or the vaugeness of the prediction.
SCO could be right about something, just like a stopped clock is right twice a day, but judging by their record of honesty and careful examination, do you really think it's anything other than dumb luck?
Any code that did get leaked to Linux wouldn't be a trade secret anymore, simply because it's been public so long. They have no legal reason to hide the code, yet they refuse to show a single actual infringing file. There's also evidence of a pump and dump scam - where announcements about the case are "accidently" made at just the right time to bump the stock price before a scheduled sale of stock.
Given that this is yet another showing by SCO that is quickly and easily explained by the Linux people as being non-infringing, and SCO has yet to provide any evidence to the contrary, their claims are on shaky ground.
They don't have a point any more than the monkey that finally typed a shakespearean play would have done so intentionally.
The problem with that kind of payment is that it discourages the lowest classes, single mothers with babies and the disabled, from using the doctors and yet doesn't impact bored old ladies unless they're really really broke.
A visit to the doctor costs much more than $10, if you're abusing the system you'll just abuse it a little slower. If you're struggling to make ends meet the extra $50 in a month from a sick infant may be ruinous.
If a system like this had a sliding scale and let the lowest rung go without any extra fees I'd be more supportive of it. I can easily afford $10 to see the doctor - $25 wouldn't even be ridiculous, and many of my friends could afford more. Those single mothers can't afford much, if anything, extra.
How about $10 to someone making $20k, up to $50 for someone making $100k, and capped at 10x a base payment.
While not perhaps the best idea, it seems to better address the problems while not preventing anyone's access.
If you don't let auto-update run it requires a lot more clicking, even past just starting the process.
I did an update on a WinXP machine a few days ago and it required three seperate 'I Agree' clicks during the SAME UPGRADE, though there were like twelve patches involved. Then it spun for a minute and asked me some routine question, and finally proceeded to patch. But then I had to reboot before any other patches.
I didn't consume twenty minutes of clicking and reading, but those were twenty minutes (or so) when I had to be available to click buttons. Not a fire-and-forget process.
Yeah, it easier if you let auto-update do it all. But that doesn't strike me as a very good idea. I'll trust my firewall and lack of net-visible services to keep me safe until I get around to patching, more than I'll trust an MS-run auto updater. Hell, I wouldn't even auto-patch my Linux box like that.
You're full of it. Anyone who claims WinXP has never crashed is a Microsoft shill or never uses it.
The first day I installed WinXP on my desktop machine Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser component) died when I double-clicked on a zip file without WinZIP installed. This was before anything could have broken it, I hadn't even connected to the LAN yet, this was simply trying to unpack video drivers off a CD I made.
Sure, the whole OS didn't die, but explorer barfed less than ten minutes after boot. This is a machine that routinely has 45-day uptimes in Linux and that ran Win2k fairly well. (As well, I think, as Win2k can run.)
Then there's the issue with it locking up during installing Age of Mythology. No weird drivers, no weird software, just an Athlon XP, nVidia chipset, graphics, and audio with nVidia drivers, and AoM. Locks, and alt-ctrl-del doesn't work, when it starts reading disk 2. It didn't do that in Win2k. But, yeah, I could still ping it, so I suppose it's kinda still running.
Yeah, that's your super-stable OS.
I think it's fair to ask sixty-second questions. Or rather, to ask questions expecting a sixty-second answer, even if that ends up being "That's a complex question, I can't answer it here."
You could ask you doctor relative if a shortness of breath while walking was a "bad thing", or just the cold you had two weeks ago not going away. He can say A, B, or "Go to the clinic and get a checkup."
Ditto with computer stuff. If someone is about to purchase a CD burner and wants a recomendation it takes me longer to explain my fees than it does to simply say "The Lite-On 52x". If they want me to write out the procedure for something that happens to be complex, I explain that it'd take a while and without a computer in front of us it's a problem. If they persist, this is where they are rude - not for asking what they thought could have been a trivial question.
Besides, much of the advice I get asked for is in the form of hobbyists who want to chat up a pro. I install Linux (etc) for a living, so when a friend installs Mandrake to give it a try they chat me up to see what I think of it and what stuff I'd recommend doing. While technically advice, it's more hobbyist chat. Like when photographers chat about lenses and stuff. They don't charge the newbies who are around, even though their opinions are the result of a lifetime of valuable experience and could save the newbie tons of time and money.
DeCSS does have valid uses. How about exercising your perfectly legal right to make backups of your media?
Some of the "backups" may be a violation of civil law, but that's something to handle individually, not something that justifies a flat ban on a useful tool. You don't ban hammers because someone could be killed. You ban the illegal act.
Laws like the DMCA were only enacted because big companies didn't want to bother with having to stop actually copyright violation, they'd rather remove troublesome freedoms.
Much like companies that sue people because of unfavourable product comments in public forums. It's inconvenitent that one of the serfs express an opinion that gets in the way of profits.
GTA has undirected gameplay, but you still can only save the game in certain spots, and at certain times. Can't save in the middle of a mission even though some of them take upwards of half an hour. And while it does save your game it only saves your job status, cash, and cars. Nothing else. The world is so static.
My complaint isn't that some games are limiting. When you play Tetris you don't expect an RTS. My complaint is that designers go out of their way to introduce the concept of save spots, just to enforce their style of play. It's as if a developer made everyone use their controller layout, not including a customize options, because they didn't think anyone should play the game in the "wrong" way.
Artificial limitations. Where they went beyond the style of game issues and put in extra limitations. Like a director not providing chapters on a DVD because they don't like the idea that a viewer would want to skip part-way into the movie, even if (1) it's none of their business and (2) you may have to stop watching in the middle, and want a convenient way to restart.
I found it to be designed to make me walk over the same area twenty or more times. Each time I got given a quest it was on the other side of the main map area. When I travelled in time I got to walk over the same area again, but with a slightly different grass texture and different monsters. I know it was the premise of the game, but it was so abused. Once over each area in each time, sure, but to cross back and forth...
Then there's the issue of needing gold for everything, gold that was best collected by entering and exiting certain areas over and over again while breaking pots, or pulling up flowers. Ugh.
It claimed a hundred hours of gameplay or something, but it was all repeats. Compare to Call of Duty (PC World War 2 game) which I played recently and it's completely different. They only once reused a single map. Much shorter game, but all of it was exploring new things. I'd much rather twelve hours of real gameplay than a hundred of boredom.
I think the open source community of today has the same limited interest in the financial aspects of their work, with the provision that they don't want to share with anyone too greedy to share back. I release the programs that I write (limited as they are) because while I grew up reading other people's programs and I want that same freedom to be available for others. I think my motives are similar to most people in open source.
A program that isn't going to make a lot of money, or isn't written by just you, gets open sourced largely because nobody feels the need to lock it down. Unlike the corporate mentality of locking everything down unless a strong reason is provided to do otherwise.
And no, the library of GPL'd software would be as large today without the anti-hidden code backlash, but it wouldn't need to be. GCC was written to provide a compiler for people because compilers were expensive to buy. If a free compiler was released by the makers of the operating systems nobody would have bothered with GCC.
As for copyright and freedom, I do agree. I prefer having controls on the markets, including copyright, etc. But I don't think that IP laws (as they are today) are helpful. I think they're a perversion of the original intent that serves to enrich the big businesses that pay politicians to extend them in more and more abusive ways.
Some games are written badly. Maybe Halo is one of them... I didn't see a problem on the PC on my modest setup, but then I don't think I turned the resolution over 800x600 so that might be the difference. Still looks better than on a TV though.
And as for style of play; I can see that fighting games, which are not my thing, are a preference thing. That's fine. I have no problem with people liking different styles of games.
What I have a problem with is how console games tend to force a certain style of play where PC games seem to be more open. Probably because they are - user mods and such which don't exist on consoles.
If it's your preference to not save, great. Don't. But a game that doesn't allow saving is written by a ass, plain and simple. It's all about making everyone play the game a certain way, not letting people do what they want.
As an example of a good game, Soldier of Fortune 2 (dunno about #1). It has a hardcore mode where you get a score and have a limited number of savegames. It's for people who want to compare scores and prove something. It's also got another mode with unlimited saves for people who don't want the restrictions. You see, enable the user to make the choice.
You say that there are tons of quake-like games, as if it's a bad thing. Yeah, terrible. So there's choice. They aren't all game-of-the-year, but I don't have to buy all of them so it's not really a problem. There are derivative clones out for all platforms. And hey, if you really love Quake type games, it's a good thing.
The problem with consoles isn't that many games are similar, it's that even though modern consoles don't have the same restrictions as older ones, the designers are still stuck in the 80s. It wouldn't kill them to provide decent save games, yet how many do? In GTA it wouldn't take a ton of ram to keep track of the cars that are behind you, but every time you turn around it places new ones.
And at least the PC has a decent set of controller options. There are a ton of joysticks available for the PC and yet very few people buy them - because for all but a few uses, gamepads are the worst controller. You don't get much choice with a console though. Whatever hand-cramping design was cheapest to make.
Everyone agrees that directors are assholes when they don't provide chapters in a DVD because they want everyone to watch it the way they intended - as if phones don't ring and real life doesn't intrude - so why is it a *feature* when console games enforce a bunch of stupid rules? At least PC games let me do what I want, when I want. If I want to save because I can't play now, I can. If I want to save because I suck at this area and don't want to redo it, I can.
PCs do cost more, but not as much as you make it seem - you don't need the latest GeForce card to play the latest games, unless you insist on 1024x768x32 with anti-aliasing. My GeForce 4 and AMD 2500+ have yet to meet their match, despite being almost the cheapest parts I could find. They also do a lot more. My computer burns and plays CDs and DVDs, holds thousands of MP3s, lets me use the net, displays high-resolution pictures from my digital camera. I can use community-created mods for games, use editors and design my own (something I used to do for Quake 1) and create my own programs, instead of simply being a consumer.
It's not like I pay $800 every few years just to play games. It costs my less than that to stay current and I get a ton more for it.
But that's beside the point. The point is that consoles are all about B&D, you play the game the way it was made, damnit. You don't get to choose the level you want to play, or how you want to play it. You can customize your controls all you want, maybe, as long as you don't want to change controllers. Why do people put up with that kind of crap? I returned Sixth Sense (the movie) because it made me watch trailers every time I started it. Does nobody else care about being forced to use things in the way the manufacturer wants?
Yeah, the eternal cry of a console gamer. "You suck! You'd like it if you didn't suck!"
Yeah sure kid. Maybe I just like playing *new* games, not playing the same bit over until I'm "good" enough by your definition. Maybe I like stopping the game, when I want to stop, and not having reply the last section. Maybe I simply dislike games that tell me how to play, instead of letting me play the way I want.
You can let some game designer dictate how you play your game, I prefer to make my own decisions.
Crap. Unmitigated crap.
Any game with save points sucks. It's a law. They know the game wouldn't be that hard to play if you didn't have to redo whole sections at a time.
It's a limitation that console kiddies call of feature. Here's a nickle, get yourself a computer capable of playing a real game - you know, one with a hard drive that can actually save your game.