Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest.
It's no really a wonder Android scored the lowest. Google isn't truly a open source company, they only give out source when it suits them and even then they regain most control of it with no discussion or decisions with other non-google developers. Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.
One of the strongest selling point of open source is that you can make a little change or fix yourself if you feel the need to. Since Chronium isn't truly the source code of Chrome you have to give up lots of other things if you want to make that change. For making a small change it would probably be better to disassembly Chrome and make the change in ASM. Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone. It's nice and all that they provide code (even with stripped parts), but there is no practical use for it. Besides, most of their products are closed source just like their competitors. There's a really insightful and interesting post here about Google's practices.
Do they really charge 10$ per vid? Friggin ridiculous... For twice that you'll probably get a blow job.
and AIDS.
You have absolutely zero change of getting AIDS as a receiver end of a blow job. This has been scientifically proven. There is a little risk on the giving part, but it is also insignificant.
I don't know the economics as I haven't been directly involved with that, but it is a very profitable business. Also remember that someone has to pay to produce all that content on free tube sites. Some of it is real amateur video (there's also a lot of paid "amateur" content), but most of it is produced content. That isn't there just for the funs, it's there to attract users to their paid sites. Someone interested in the niche most likely also is a long time customer. When the free tube sites refer a customer, they usually are paid between $50-100 or even more. Usually the convert ratio is 1:1000, that is one paying customer per 1000 visitors for US, less for other countries. With the amount of traffic those sites get, you can figure out if they're making good money or not. And this is only for the free tube sites.
Some people know what they want and are willing to pay for it (or to get more of it), and appreciate the quality. It's like taking a first girl that walks by and shows some interest in you, even if shes ugly and pain in the ass.. Wait, this is slashdot. It's like taking an abandoned, somewhat working car from the street while you could had just bought ferrari.
Yes, all kinds of porn is available without paying for it. But in substantially lesser amounts, in lesser quality and that doesn't offer you exactly what you want. Lets say you're interested to get sex scenes from movies because that turns you on. You could spend lots of time googling for them all, never really finding everything and never having them organized neatly. Or you could just spend some cash and get a subscription where they are all nicely organized, nicely searchable and nicely categorized. Even for those who know how to find it free, it might be about how much they value their time, the effort they have to put into it and the quality of the service they get.
Having worked with the porn industry, it's mostly because cable companies just show that same old pornstar-looking women with silicons doing the same routine over and over again. People are willing to pay for porn but only if it's a niche they really like. This can be japanese, ladyboys, hairy women, old women, celebs and so on.. Yes, you can find these things freely on tube sites on the internet, but if you like something you want to get more of it and then you go find sites offering content that you cannot find for free. But cable companies will never take that in to their content, because they're afraid people will find it weird.
For some reason (or maybe because I've lived in Asia, where traffic is chaotic but everyone seems to get by), I think that a guy making huge profit by selling pirated software is a little bit higher on the list than cops spending their time sitting on road.
And even if you don't, these are different police organizations. Every time when someone pirating something gets arrested there's always someone saying that police should have priorities and should spend time on something else. These are not the same policemen. If they work on other crimes it's not off from from your casual everyday street police.
$14k is not that much in electronics. I own desktop computer, an expensive laptop, big HDTV, 360/PS3/Wii, mobile phone, lots of old stuff lying around.. And it's even easier if theres several persons living in the apartment or you have a family. It's not that far-fetched. In fact if you'd start a business (which this kind of counts, even if it was illegal one), the costs are usually much higher.
Ah, such an over sensationalist title and summary again. It makes it sound like the person was arrested for merely jailbreaking PS3. He was a Pakistani man who was copying and selling those copied games and jailbreaking devices.
Various state of the art computers, circumvention software packages, jailbreak USB devices, PS3 consoles as well as hard-drives were seized during the raid. In addition documentation, fake PS2 games and original PS3 games, believed to be employed as master copies, were also seized.
Information is received about a man who in Parktown Jailbreak software loaded on consoles and games sold stolen.
I don't think they are releasing the game assets (textures, music, sound etc), only the source code. This was the case with Quake 1 & 2 code at least. If you wanted to improve or change this code, you would still need to own the original game.
A man who actually has a good history and knowledge in information technologies is taken as government CIO. I'd say that's a good thing, especially as he is promoting open government and open platforms. Really freshening actually. But true slashdot style let's get the Microsoft bashing going, not even thinking MS was probably the hottest company to work for 15 years ago. 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!
Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX
Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub
It sure sounds the like most professional system!
The truth is, if you want your job done, you look at the merits of every possible program without considering if it's open source or not. There are good software like Apache that are mostly good for web hosting (unless you have certain requirements). Then there is lots of shit. The same is true for proprietary software tho. But if you want to get something real done, it's just stupid to limit yourself to only open source OR proprietary software. Pick the best tool for the job.
So a great game is broken and has no value because they don't come with manuals anymore? Usually the information that is in manuals is made into the game. And I can see the response "but the manuals were more personal and had artwork, funny stuff and lots of extra material". No, they all didn't. Some of them did, but just as well some game developers spend time to make the tutorial parts or whatever it is that teaches you the game more fun and interesting these days.
As I now buy 100% of my games from either Steam or Good Old Games, I don't exactly want to read the manual on my computer screen. They can just as well integrate it into the game. It's not more unfinished or broken product because of that, that's only in your mind. Hell, you could just as well say that a game is unfinished if it doesn't completely simulate the universe and beyond. There is always something you could add.
Look at those first 3 companies. A little bit large don't you think? All of them could have bought these patents with their pocket change. Why would they team up like this?
And you say Google isn't a large company and doesn't have money? Have you looked at their finances lately?
Yes, all of them could had gone to bidding war with each other. For reason or another they looked at it and thought it was better to share the bidding costs and the patents with each other. They wanted to share them with others. Google wanted them all for themself.
I would pretend I'm being cynical, but this one seems like a no-brainer. There were strings attached to that patent deal, Google knew it, and did the Right Thing,
Seriously, why? Google isn't the same geeky company it was 10 years ago. They do heavy marketing but play the "we're good guys" really well (which is more so worrying). Just because they started as a geeky company (Microsoft, Apple and Oracle all did too) doesn't mean they aren't like just any business now.
So Microsoft, Apple and Oracle wanted Google to join them and jointly bid with them, allowing access to the patents for everyone. Google didn't join, and lost the bidding when they tried to get it all for themselves. Who is the real hostile company here?
Most do fail in that, you're right, but there has been cases where the DRM haven't been broken within a whole year.
However, what is even better for game companies is to make the game only playable online, or integrate so much gameplay online (co-op etc) that it makes no sense to pirate. That is s where it's been heavily went recently and those slashdot users and everyone who rather have single-player experience should support the companies who still make good single player games. Otherwise everything will be online games soon.
What other arguments would you like to see than this study?
Maybe World of Goo is a good example. A great indie game that got great reviews. Still 90% of people pirated it while it didn't even cost that much. Later they even offered pay-what-you-want model, but still the piracy rate is the same. Another indie game also had 90% piracy. It's just the norm, it has nothing to do with how good the game is. People just rather pirate than buy, if they can. I'm not surprised companies are looking for DRM methods, even if just to keep the piracy out for a little bit during the first few weeks so that people who want to play it buy it because they cant pirate it.
As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles.
If the piracy is directly linked to review scores, it means that people just want the games for free and aren't that much interested in trying them out before actually buying them. Such argument would hold more water if it was said that game piracy is linked to overall sales, but here it's saying that the better reviews and comments from people games get, the more they are pirated too. The most sad thing is when people pirate indie games
That wasn't really hidden under a cheat code tho, and wasn't even finished. They were doing it, but decided not to, and then didn't completely remove the assets from the game because they were in use elsewhere, in-less controversial scenes.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Malaysia last year, didn't fingerprint from me at least.
What countries need fingerprints to enter? I've traveled in Asia and pretty much every shithole in earth and have never needed to give my fingerprint.
Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest.
It's no really a wonder Android scored the lowest. Google isn't truly a open source company, they only give out source when it suits them and even then they regain most control of it with no discussion or decisions with other non-google developers. Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.
One of the strongest selling point of open source is that you can make a little change or fix yourself if you feel the need to. Since Chronium isn't truly the source code of Chrome you have to give up lots of other things if you want to make that change. For making a small change it would probably be better to disassembly Chrome and make the change in ASM. Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone. It's nice and all that they provide code (even with stripped parts), but there is no practical use for it. Besides, most of their products are closed source just like their competitors. There's a really insightful and interesting post here about Google's practices.
Do they really charge 10$ per vid? Friggin ridiculous... For twice that you'll probably get a blow job.
and AIDS.
You have absolutely zero change of getting AIDS as a receiver end of a blow job. This has been scientifically proven. There is a little risk on the giving part, but it is also insignificant.
I don't know the economics as I haven't been directly involved with that, but it is a very profitable business. Also remember that someone has to pay to produce all that content on free tube sites. Some of it is real amateur video (there's also a lot of paid "amateur" content), but most of it is produced content. That isn't there just for the funs, it's there to attract users to their paid sites. Someone interested in the niche most likely also is a long time customer. When the free tube sites refer a customer, they usually are paid between $50-100 or even more. Usually the convert ratio is 1:1000, that is one paying customer per 1000 visitors for US, less for other countries. With the amount of traffic those sites get, you can figure out if they're making good money or not. And this is only for the free tube sites.
Some people know what they want and are willing to pay for it (or to get more of it), and appreciate the quality. It's like taking a first girl that walks by and shows some interest in you, even if shes ugly and pain in the ass.. Wait, this is slashdot. It's like taking an abandoned, somewhat working car from the street while you could had just bought ferrari.
Yes, all kinds of porn is available without paying for it. But in substantially lesser amounts, in lesser quality and that doesn't offer you exactly what you want. Lets say you're interested to get sex scenes from movies because that turns you on. You could spend lots of time googling for them all, never really finding everything and never having them organized neatly. Or you could just spend some cash and get a subscription where they are all nicely organized, nicely searchable and nicely categorized. Even for those who know how to find it free, it might be about how much they value their time, the effort they have to put into it and the quality of the service they get.
Having worked with the porn industry, it's mostly because cable companies just show that same old pornstar-looking women with silicons doing the same routine over and over again. People are willing to pay for porn but only if it's a niche they really like. This can be japanese, ladyboys, hairy women, old women, celebs and so on.. Yes, you can find these things freely on tube sites on the internet, but if you like something you want to get more of it and then you go find sites offering content that you cannot find for free. But cable companies will never take that in to their content, because they're afraid people will find it weird.
Yes, because I really want him to read my and other peoples emails. That's such a great idea.
I was just pointing out he wasn't even local. And since when is Pakistan a race?
turn a blind eye to infringement of traffic laws
For some reason (or maybe because I've lived in Asia, where traffic is chaotic but everyone seems to get by), I think that a guy making huge profit by selling pirated software is a little bit higher on the list than cops spending their time sitting on road.
And even if you don't, these are different police organizations. Every time when someone pirating something gets arrested there's always someone saying that police should have priorities and should spend time on something else. These are not the same policemen. If they work on other crimes it's not off from from your casual everyday street police.
$14k is not that much in electronics. I own desktop computer, an expensive laptop, big HDTV, 360/PS3/Wii, mobile phone, lots of old stuff lying around.. And it's even easier if theres several persons living in the apartment or you have a family. It's not that far-fetched. In fact if you'd start a business (which this kind of counts, even if it was illegal one), the costs are usually much higher.
Various state of the art computers, circumvention software packages, jailbreak USB devices, PS3 consoles as well as hard-drives were seized during the raid. In addition documentation, fake PS2 games and original PS3 games, believed to be employed as master copies, were also seized.
Information is received about a man who in Parktown Jailbreak software loaded on consoles and games sold stolen.
Slashdot at its best.
I don't think they are releasing the game assets (textures, music, sound etc), only the source code. This was the case with Quake 1 & 2 code at least. If you wanted to improve or change this code, you would still need to own the original game.
A man who actually has a good history and knowledge in information technologies is taken as government CIO. I'd say that's a good thing, especially as he is promoting open government and open platforms. Really freshening actually. But true slashdot style let's get the Microsoft bashing going, not even thinking MS was probably the hottest company to work for 15 years ago. 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!
Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX
Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub
It sure sounds the like most professional system!
The truth is, if you want your job done, you look at the merits of every possible program without considering if it's open source or not. There are good software like Apache that are mostly good for web hosting (unless you have certain requirements). Then there is lots of shit. The same is true for proprietary software tho. But if you want to get something real done, it's just stupid to limit yourself to only open source OR proprietary software. Pick the best tool for the job.
So a great game is broken and has no value because they don't come with manuals anymore? Usually the information that is in manuals is made into the game. And I can see the response "but the manuals were more personal and had artwork, funny stuff and lots of extra material". No, they all didn't. Some of them did, but just as well some game developers spend time to make the tutorial parts or whatever it is that teaches you the game more fun and interesting these days.
As I now buy 100% of my games from either Steam or Good Old Games, I don't exactly want to read the manual on my computer screen. They can just as well integrate it into the game. It's not more unfinished or broken product because of that, that's only in your mind. Hell, you could just as well say that a game is unfinished if it doesn't completely simulate the universe and beyond. There is always something you could add.
Look at those first 3 companies. A little bit large don't you think? All of them could have bought these patents with their pocket change. Why would they team up like this?
And you say Google isn't a large company and doesn't have money? Have you looked at their finances lately?
Yes, all of them could had gone to bidding war with each other. For reason or another they looked at it and thought it was better to share the bidding costs and the patents with each other. They wanted to share them with others. Google wanted them all for themself.
I would pretend I'm being cynical, but this one seems like a no-brainer. There were strings attached to that patent deal, Google knew it, and did the Right Thing,
Seriously, why? Google isn't the same geeky company it was 10 years ago. They do heavy marketing but play the "we're good guys" really well (which is more so worrying). Just because they started as a geeky company (Microsoft, Apple and Oracle all did too) doesn't mean they aren't like just any business now.
So Microsoft, Apple and Oracle wanted Google to join them and jointly bid with them, allowing access to the patents for everyone. Google didn't join, and lost the bidding when they tried to get it all for themselves. Who is the real hostile company here?
Most do fail in that, you're right, but there has been cases where the DRM haven't been broken within a whole year.
However, what is even better for game companies is to make the game only playable online, or integrate so much gameplay online (co-op etc) that it makes no sense to pirate. That is s where it's been heavily went recently and those slashdot users and everyone who rather have single-player experience should support the companies who still make good single player games. Otherwise everything will be online games soon.
What other arguments would you like to see than this study?
Maybe World of Goo is a good example. A great indie game that got great reviews. Still 90% of people pirated it while it didn't even cost that much. Later they even offered pay-what-you-want model, but still the piracy rate is the same. Another indie game also had 90% piracy. It's just the norm, it has nothing to do with how good the game is. People just rather pirate than buy, if they can. I'm not surprised companies are looking for DRM methods, even if just to keep the piracy out for a little bit during the first few weeks so that people who want to play it buy it because they cant pirate it.
As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles.
If the piracy is directly linked to review scores, it means that people just want the games for free and aren't that much interested in trying them out before actually buying them. Such argument would hold more water if it was said that game piracy is linked to overall sales, but here it's saying that the better reviews and comments from people games get, the more they are pirated too. The most sad thing is when people pirate indie games
That wasn't really hidden under a cheat code tho, and wasn't even finished. They were doing it, but decided not to, and then didn't completely remove the assets from the game because they were in use elsewhere, in-less controversial scenes.
And what does this tells us about all the slashdot editors!