What is more important, the complete enforcement of copyright, or making money?
If people people copy your stuff far and wide, but still pay for it often enough for it to make a profit, isn't that better than not releasing and not earning any money at all? Because no matter how much piracy there is, there are still people who pay. You shouldn't think about how many will pirate, but about how many will pay.
Not only you missing out on one of the biggest things that makes STEAM so great, bypassing the retailer and downloading straight to your hard drive, but games are generally cheaper on STEAM as well, sometimes even shockingly so.
Steam isn't required for that. There's no reason why a company can't just set up a standard "give your card number, get download link" system. In fact I find such things much easier and convenient.
Throw in a built in community, no need to keep track of CD keys,
Thing is, that assumes I want some sort of relationship with the company. And in most cases not only I don't want it, but I actively want to avoid having one. The model I want for buying games is the same model I have for buying apples: I absolutely don't care if the shop, transport company or farmer involved goes under. I want to buy a game now, and absolutely not give a damn if the company that made it, the retailer, or anybody else involved goes bankrupt tomorrow.
And the solution to not having to keep track of CD keys is not having CD keys to keep track of in the first place.
automatic patching (and now driver updates if you have an AMD/ATI video card)
No way. I utterly hate this concept. This is what allows stunts like Sony removing Linux support, and making it impossible to avoid the update. This is an automatic guarantee I'm not going to buy whatever you're selling.
cloud support for game saves
That's a bug, not a feature. I want my saved games locally, where I can back them up, and where they're not dependent on the company supporting the game.
and pre-loading for day one purchases, and the benefits start outweighing the costs pretty quick.
That is an upside, but not a significant enough one to outweigh the downsides by any measure. And I very rarely buy on day one, as I wait to hear from other people on the various issues, gotchas and DRM.
Keep playing obsolete games from companies that don't exist.
Yes, that's exactly what I do!
It's a fun game. It was fun back then, and it's still fun today. So why wouldn't I want to play it, especially given that it has a set of mechanics I happen to still enjoy?
It goes even more for Creatures, which wasn't replicated by any other company to my knowledge.
Meaning "I want to BitTorrent the games I play, I'm not paying for anything anyway" right? OR are you just a dick that doesn't care if people pirate games? Steam provides a greater service than you're giving them credit for.
If I wanted to torrent stuff, Steam wouldn't stop me. Just google for HalfLife 2 torrents, there are plenty out there. In fact, the torrented version is probably a lot more convenient, since I bet that it installs without activation, questions, creating a steam account or anything of the sort.
No, I don't torrent stuff. I simply don't buy it. I do pay for stuff without DRM instead, which is mostly indie games. Examples: lugaru, world of goo, aquaria, penumbra overture. Also bought starscape but ran into issues with the activation system, which is the thing that made me decide I'll never ever pay for anything that requires it again.
1) Steam only requires activation to their servers, this is one time deal. YES they could go away, but as long as you have that computer you have you can still play the game.
The computer still being around by then is very unlikely. Any computer will be disassembled to pieces, reassigned to server duty or given away in 2-3 years.
2) In giving up the off chance that Steam isn't around in ten years, you get the ability to install the game on any computer now, that you have access to.
I refuse. If I bought it, it damned well work in 10 years. Without that guarantee, I'm not buying. And no, not torrenting either.
3) Lost or broken CD/DVDs are no longer a problem, as long as Steam servers offer the game.
I can backup a non-DRMed game easily. I'll just burn my own CDs if needed, and keep a copy on every hard disk.
You haven't lost or broken the CD? Are still using the ten year old computer?
I'll keep the ISO/installer. The "no DRM" requirement also includes the requirement that the original media is copyable. Without artificial restrictions, there's no reason why I couldn't keep the installer safe for a century. It's just the question of keeping a copy on every computer, and when a computer gets replaced, copying all the data to the new one.
Or you expect me to believe that the game you bought (dubious claim) ten years ago (WIN 98) actually plays on your Win 7 machine, provided you still have the CD for it?
Linux here, but yeah, it does.
Or is it your DOS game works on Linux?
Basically I'm calling bullshit. Name the game that is ten years old, and what computer you use to play it.
Yep. For instance, SCUMM games. Also, I play One Must Fall 2097 sometimes. It came out in 1994. Also Creatures, from 1996.
I play on a Phenom II X4 940 with 8GB RAM, nVidia GTX 260 video card.
Lastly, if you don't want to play the game, because of some "potential" problem, then don't.
Which is exactly what I do.
Neither are computers and games and so on.
True. But maintaining my hardware is my problem. It's also much easier without artifical impediments put in place that have no good reason to be there. Most importantly, I object to paying to people that make things for me unnecessarily complicated. So I give my money to people who aren't so controlling instead.
Yeah, because of one person, who got prereleased game ahead of schedule, you're not going to buy any Steam games because of some nefarious potential problem that may, or may not ever exist.
That's entirely correct. It proves there's a way for steam to decide when you can and can't run the game. Just the fact it's possible at all is so loathsome I will never pay a cent for such a thing.
First off, I have no problems with Steam or Apple or some other DRM that is minimally invasive. It is a fact of life. The key for me is that I don't need to be logged into Steam Servers to play the game, except for the one time activation. Seems reasonable to me.
No, it's not a "fact of life". It's an arbitrary limit imposed by the company which could not be there.
Activation is unreasonable. What if the activation server goes away in 5 years from now? I still play 10 year old games sometimes.
I find it humorous how many people complain about non-existent "potential" problems.
Because those potential problems were demonstrated multiple times to be actual problems. Like the several music services with DRM that went out of business and left people unable to play the music they paid for.
Car Analogy: You should not drive a car because you may be in an accident, which is part of the great big evil conspiracy by the Insurance Companies, Oil Companies, Car Companies to get you to buy new cars, pay money on regular basis etc. After all there is potential for something bad happening.
A car that never crashes is not possible due to the "fact of life" as you put it, that wear exists, humans and roads aren't perfect and so on.
However, DRM is an entirely artificial addition and there's no physical law that says it has to be there.
Yeah, but what you're talking about can't be made by just hiring people with the right profile. The coders you speak of can do that only because most of the required information is in their heads already. For them a good deal of the spec is unnecessary because it can be derived from their past experience.
What this article seems to be talking about is building such a thing from zero, in the interview room. But that's just not going to happen that way. You speak of something that takes years to happen, and that's if you're lucky.
Sometimes, even if you have people with the right skills, knowledge and attitude, it still doesn't work. For instance, there's one guy I know who seems to perpetually be on the wrong wavelength. Even if our skills mesh perfectly, and we like each other fine, every time he opens his mouth, I go: "huh?". He seems to pay attention to different things, give importance to different matters and so on. And as a result, pretty much everything he says seems to be offtopic or going off on a weird tangent to me. It probably works the same the other way as well. Due to that I don't think we could ever be a successful team, because we'd spend a lot of time struggling to understand each other.
In my understanding, an "A-Team" isn't something that gets created by management, it's a group of people who happen to work together so well that they keep sticking together, because it works great for them. I don't think that's something you can build to a formula. At most you can try to find such a group in a large organization.
And of course, they have the most unrealistic requirements for the developer:
"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be? That kind of thing only works for independent coders who already know what they want to do, and community open source projects where nobody tells you what to do, you just do it, and if it's good it gets merged. But that's a very un-business-like development model.
You might want to have a look at the downfall of atheistic communism
That was an imposed system, and with the replacement of religion with leader worship, which amounted to about the same thing in the end. Not the kind of thing I'm interested in.
Its rise was a political event imposed forcefully on a lot of people, and its fall of it was a political and economical issue. People who were pressured to abandon religion of course returned to what they were doing before once the pressure wasn't there anymore. And they coped with it meanwhile by doing the same things in a less obvious way. For instance, christmas celebrations shifted to the new year's eve.
This is not the kind of thing I'm talking about though. I'm talking about a much less forceful abandonment of religion, which happens not because the leader says so, but because people stop caring, and religion becomes unnecessary.
the rise of paganism in europe
For the most part, a non-event, neopaganism amounts to about 0.02% of the world population. It also lacks a strictly defined morality, and as such the members seem to be uninterested in forcing it on the rest of the world. Due to this I don't particularly care about it. If somebody likes dancing naked around a fire or conducting elaborate ceremonies with candles, whatever rolls your boat. My problems with religion only start when they try to legislate their weird morality.
and the rise of christianity in asia.
Where specifically you mean? In Japan for instance it's very minoritary. Also I bet most of that is conversion.
In any case it doesn't concern me a whole lot, because what they do over there doesn't really affect me.
Not for very long. Religion is at an all-time low, and keeps decreasing. Also true believers are becoming very rare. Lots of people will tell you they believe but don't read the bible, don't go to church, and can't coherently explain what they believe. They're more going with the flow than anything else. In Europe, religion is a highly private matter and you generally don't know who's a believer or not.
Irrational beliefs and "there's something higher" probably will be with us for a very long time, but I think organize religion will shrink dramatically much faster.
I wonder if it's possible to make a hardware HDCP to DVI converter without having to make a custom ASIC. That way there wouldn't be the need to depend on a lone (probably chinese) supplier.
I'm sure more than a few people would be willing to donate for it to be developed.
In that case, I take what you said as an argument against patents. It's clearly a system to benefit the very few (since most people don't hold any patents), and what's more, the rest of the people lose from it. You yourself said it is anti-consumer, which makes it anti-99% of the population.
With such a state of affairs, things would be better if we eliminated them as soon as possible.
Unless you own any patents on which you're earning revenue from either producing something or licensing out the technology you created, then you wouldn't see any evidence that patents do good.
Paraphrased: Unless you own any slaves on which you're earning revenue, you wouldn't see any evidence that slavery does good.
Just because somebody benefits from something doesn't automatically make that a good thing.
Patents were never meant to benefit anyone but the patent owner.
Then I disagree with them on that basis. Society shouldn't grant a monopoly if it's not going to get anything in exchange.
You'll have to be more persuasive. Picture this: I will vote against patents if such an opportunity comes up. You have to convince me that it's actually in my interest to have them. That you happen to benefit from it is good for you, but does absolutely nothing to convince me. So you'll have to explain how you having a patent is going to benefit me. And really, you having a monopoly isn't in my interest. What's in my interest is to have the maximum amount of competition. So try again?
Point is, if some data (especially in the case of small amounts created in some short "missing" period) is worth several times more than a good laptop, and if the primary means of securing it is not making backups (basically continuos ones aren't much of a problem nowadays, even on the road) - you're doing it wrong.
Sure, but there's the ideal case, and there's reality. And no matter how well backed up your data is, you still have to run to a shop and buy another hard disk. And that takes time, and is inconvenient.
Basically, SSDs provide peace of mind. You don't need to worry about clumsily dropping a backpack/suitcase with a laptop to the floor, letting a powered on laptop drop a centimeter on a table due to letting it go a bit too early, pushing it a bit too far and hitting something, or using on a train that's vibrating a lot for some reason. Before SSDs that used to worry me a lot, with a SSD it's not a big deal and just annoying.
It makes the formerly most fragile component more resistant than the laptop itself, so you can handle it like you would anything else, instead of like an antique vase.
Historically, fragile media has been replaced progressively with more and more resistant ones. Parents would freak out if they saw their little kid holding they favourite vinyl disk. CDs will stand to a bit more abuse, DVDs a bit more, BluRay is better still, and flash drives can be made practically indestructible and can go through a washing machine and dryer, and come out fine.
Plus, relying on an SSD which looks undamaged, et al.
It's not a hard disk, there are no moving parts that sort of work but fail later. If you plug it in, and it works, then it will keep working. If you hit it hard enough to make a chip come off (which takes effort), then it won't work at all, but with some luck you can solder it back on. To cause it irreparable damage you pretty much have to smash it with a hammer or give it a good electric shock (which with it being inside is rather unlikely).
Backups are nearly always missing something. Even if you diligently make a full backup every week, that's still probably several days worth of lost data, some of which could be hard to replace if you obtained it from somebody else. And of course you have to spend the time on restoring all that stuff.
Obviously you should have backups in any case, but having the disk survive and be able to get everything back running as soon as you get new hardware is much more convenient. And if you don't smash the laptop you don't need to restore anything at all, which is even better.
His personal life doesn't really interest me. Really if I was in that position I probably also would have thought I was being set up. But whether that's correct or not, I don't think that makes a difference for the service he provides, which is the one thing I'm concerned about.
What do you need to trust him for? He posts what he has. Whether it's true or not is generally confirmed by third parties, like the US government freaking out.
So far I've seen very little evidence of that patents do any good, so I'm in favour of eliminating them all completely. If I have to compromise I'd start with anything relating to software, math and business methods first though.
Because hard disks resist falls much better while not in use. If you drop a disconnected one, it might well survive. But while working they are terribly fragile, and break very easily. I broke one by turning around in a chair and hitting my laptop with the back of it. And no, G sensors don't help with that, because there's no warning like with a fall.
And why would your biggest concern be "gee, I hope it won't stop working for the 2.3 seconds it takes to hit the ground, because I'll never get those precious seconds back" rather than "fuck, I dropped my laptop over the balcony!?
The benefit is that at the end of that fall, I can go down, dig up the SSD from the wreckage, and put it in a new laptop. Laptops are cheap, I can get an acceptable one for a few hundred bucks. Data can easily be a lot more valuable than that.
But then you don't get any impressive performance out of it. What does it matter to have the clock ticking at 40GHz, if the simplest operation is going to take 5 clock cycles to complete? The point of more GHz is that it's actually making things go faster, not as a pointless dick measuring contest. Intel already tried that with the P4 and it didn't go anywhere.
Of course maybe you solve this by having 1024 tiny cores. But then you have to deal with that pretty much nothing in existence can take advantage of that. Other than a few things like raytracing, there's not much that parallelizes that easily. You have to contend with Amdahl's law. Does a single core have enough power to assign work to the other 1023?
More evidence that high intelligence is pathological in a species and that nature actually works to suppress the development of intelligence beyond a certain rudimentary level.
I wouldn't say that. It's more like there's a tradeoff: A bigger brain needs more energy to keep it working. If you're doing fine with a small one, there's no selective pressure in favour of a bigger one.
Look how long dinosaurs ruled the Earth without intelligence. Understand how long they had to develop it and did not.
There was no need for it. When you're big and scary, and can crush many smaller lifeforms effortlessly, there's no particular need to become smarter. We need intelligence because we have little else. Our sense of smell is crappy, our strenth is unimpressive, our speed is insufficient. The thing that ensured humans didn't turn into lunch for a bear was that they were able to figure out a way to deal with something that big, strong and scary.
Not only did we develop vast intelligence, but we developed abilities that ANTICIPATED the need for them. Why did we develop the ability to drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour or more while weaving in and out of traffic? Unless you are a cheetah, there is no need for that ability. Yet we as cavemen do that easily every day (at least the nut jobs among us do.) The abilities that humans evolved, evolved long before there was any need for them and they far exceeded the need for mere survival. Evolving the ability to evolve and evolving the ability to anticipate need and change for it ahead of time is not conforming to Darwin's theory of evolution as I know it. Something is not understood. This gene merely illustrates that once again.
Two things. First, have you ever watched Discovery Channel?
We had needs for decent reflexes way before we started driving cars. Before that there were horses, and war, and wild animals. You think you can afford to react slowly when hunting or defending yourself, when all you have is a spear? Every millisecond you wait in front of a predator is a millisecond the predator has to jump at your neck. The environment can change quickly. A millisecond may make the difference between saving yourself and rolling downhill, if you manage to adjust your balance or catch on something in time.
Besides, our reaction speed isn't particularly impresssive. Try catching a fly sometime. Flies sure react quickly, and my cat seems to be significantly more successful than I at catching them.
Second, you have things exactly backwards. The "need" to drive cars is of our own creation. We didn't evolve to drive cars, we created cars and roads with our constraints in mind. Cars, roads, speed limits and braking distances are all made so that humans can deal with them. If our reflexes were twice as slow, we'd still drive cars, except with the rules and limits set to account for that.
Nobody said anything about not paying. What should be done is changing the law to make software unpatentable, and meanwhile developing alternatives like Theora and VP8.
According to Wikipedia, Australia's and New Zealand's. They're also a member of the UN. And that would make for some awful PR as well. If I hear of any such a thing you can bet I'm not buying a single fish from whoever does it.
But nice to know you have such a nice view of the world.
At that speed, the signal will travel about 0.6cm per clock cycle. Even at current clock rates at least one clock cycle will pass while the signal simply travels to the RAM chip on the motherboard, without accounting for any circuitry, just the time spent on the wire.
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Free?
No, it's very much paid for, either by your tuition, or by your taxes (not sure how things work there)
I have a question:
What is more important, the complete enforcement of copyright, or making money?
If people people copy your stuff far and wide, but still pay for it often enough for it to make a profit, isn't that better than not releasing and not earning any money at all? Because no matter how much piracy there is, there are still people who pay. You shouldn't think about how many will pirate, but about how many will pay.
Steam isn't required for that. There's no reason why a company can't just set up a standard "give your card number, get download link" system. In fact I find such things much easier and convenient.
Thing is, that assumes I want some sort of relationship with the company. And in most cases not only I don't want it, but I actively want to avoid having one. The model I want for buying games is the same model I have for buying apples: I absolutely don't care if the shop, transport company or farmer involved goes under. I want to buy a game now, and absolutely not give a damn if the company that made it, the retailer, or anybody else involved goes bankrupt tomorrow.
And the solution to not having to keep track of CD keys is not having CD keys to keep track of in the first place.
No way. I utterly hate this concept. This is what allows stunts like Sony removing Linux support, and making it impossible to avoid the update. This is an automatic guarantee I'm not going to buy whatever you're selling.
That's a bug, not a feature. I want my saved games locally, where I can back them up, and where they're not dependent on the company supporting the game.
That is an upside, but not a significant enough one to outweigh the downsides by any measure. And I very rarely buy on day one, as I wait to hear from other people on the various issues, gotchas and DRM.
Yes, that's exactly what I do!
It's a fun game. It was fun back then, and it's still fun today. So why wouldn't I want to play it, especially given that it has a set of mechanics I happen to still enjoy?
It goes even more for Creatures, which wasn't replicated by any other company to my knowledge.
If I wanted to torrent stuff, Steam wouldn't stop me. Just google for HalfLife 2 torrents, there are plenty out there. In fact, the torrented version is probably a lot more convenient, since I bet that it installs without activation, questions, creating a steam account or anything of the sort.
No, I don't torrent stuff. I simply don't buy it. I do pay for stuff without DRM instead, which is mostly indie games. Examples: lugaru, world of goo, aquaria, penumbra overture. Also bought starscape but ran into issues with the activation system, which is the thing that made me decide I'll never ever pay for anything that requires it again.
The computer still being around by then is very unlikely. Any computer will be disassembled to pieces, reassigned to server duty or given away in 2-3 years.
I refuse. If I bought it, it damned well work in 10 years. Without that guarantee, I'm not buying. And no, not torrenting either.
I can backup a non-DRMed game easily. I'll just burn my own CDs if needed, and keep a copy on every hard disk.
I'll keep the ISO/installer. The "no DRM" requirement also includes the requirement that the original media is copyable. Without artificial restrictions, there's no reason why I couldn't keep the installer safe for a century. It's just the question of keeping a copy on every computer, and when a computer gets replaced, copying all the data to the new one.
Linux here, but yeah, it does.
Yep. For instance, SCUMM games. Also, I play One Must Fall 2097 sometimes. It came out in 1994. Also Creatures, from 1996.
I play on a Phenom II X4 940 with 8GB RAM, nVidia GTX 260 video card.
Which is exactly what I do.
True. But maintaining my hardware is my problem. It's also much easier without artifical impediments put in place that have no good reason to be there. Most importantly, I object to paying to people that make things for me unnecessarily complicated. So I give my money to people who aren't so controlling instead.
That's entirely correct. It proves there's a way for steam to decide when you can and can't run the game. Just the fact it's possible at all is so loathsome I will never pay a cent for such a thing.
No, it's not a "fact of life". It's an arbitrary limit imposed by the company which could not be there.
Activation is unreasonable. What if the activation server goes away in 5 years from now? I still play 10 year old games sometimes.
Because those potential problems were demonstrated multiple times to be actual problems. Like the several music services with DRM that went out of business and left people unable to play the music they paid for.
A car that never crashes is not possible due to the "fact of life" as you put it, that wear exists, humans and roads aren't perfect and so on.
However, DRM is an entirely artificial addition and there's no physical law that says it has to be there.
Yeah, but what you're talking about can't be made by just hiring people with the right profile. The coders you speak of can do that only because most of the required information is in their heads already. For them a good deal of the spec is unnecessary because it can be derived from their past experience.
What this article seems to be talking about is building such a thing from zero, in the interview room. But that's just not going to happen that way. You speak of something that takes years to happen, and that's if you're lucky.
Sometimes, even if you have people with the right skills, knowledge and attitude, it still doesn't work. For instance, there's one guy I know who seems to perpetually be on the wrong wavelength. Even if our skills mesh perfectly, and we like each other fine, every time he opens his mouth, I go: "huh?". He seems to pay attention to different things, give importance to different matters and so on. And as a result, pretty much everything he says seems to be offtopic or going off on a weird tangent to me. It probably works the same the other way as well. Due to that I don't think we could ever be a successful team, because we'd spend a lot of time struggling to understand each other.
In my understanding, an "A-Team" isn't something that gets created by management, it's a group of people who happen to work together so well that they keep sticking together, because it works great for them. I don't think that's something you can build to a formula. At most you can try to find such a group in a large organization.
And of course, they have the most unrealistic requirements for the developer:
Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be? That kind of thing only works for independent coders who already know what they want to do, and community open source projects where nobody tells you what to do, you just do it, and if it's good it gets merged. But that's a very un-business-like development model.
That was an imposed system, and with the replacement of religion with leader worship, which amounted to about the same thing in the end. Not the kind of thing I'm interested in.
Its rise was a political event imposed forcefully on a lot of people, and its fall of it was a political and economical issue. People who were pressured to abandon religion of course returned to what they were doing before once the pressure wasn't there anymore. And they coped with it meanwhile by doing the same things in a less obvious way. For instance, christmas celebrations shifted to the new year's eve.
This is not the kind of thing I'm talking about though. I'm talking about a much less forceful abandonment of religion, which happens not because the leader says so, but because people stop caring, and religion becomes unnecessary.
For the most part, a non-event, neopaganism amounts to about 0.02% of the world population. It also lacks a strictly defined morality, and as such the members seem to be uninterested in forcing it on the rest of the world. Due to this I don't particularly care about it. If somebody likes dancing naked around a fire or conducting elaborate ceremonies with candles, whatever rolls your boat. My problems with religion only start when they try to legislate their weird morality.
Where specifically you mean? In Japan for instance it's very minoritary. Also I bet most of that is conversion.
In any case it doesn't concern me a whole lot, because what they do over there doesn't really affect me.
Not for very long. Religion is at an all-time low, and keeps decreasing. Also true believers are becoming very rare. Lots of people will tell you they believe but don't read the bible, don't go to church, and can't coherently explain what they believe. They're more going with the flow than anything else. In Europe, religion is a highly private matter and you generally don't know who's a believer or not.
Irrational beliefs and "there's something higher" probably will be with us for a very long time, but I think organize religion will shrink dramatically much faster.
I wonder if it's possible to make a hardware HDCP to DVI converter without having to make a custom ASIC. That way there wouldn't be the need to depend on a lone (probably chinese) supplier.
I'm sure more than a few people would be willing to donate for it to be developed.
In that case, I take what you said as an argument against patents. It's clearly a system to benefit the very few (since most people don't hold any patents), and what's more, the rest of the people lose from it. You yourself said it is anti-consumer, which makes it anti-99% of the population.
With such a state of affairs, things would be better if we eliminated them as soon as possible.
Paraphrased: Unless you own any slaves on which you're earning revenue, you wouldn't see any evidence that slavery does good.
Just because somebody benefits from something doesn't automatically make that a good thing.
Then I disagree with them on that basis. Society shouldn't grant a monopoly if it's not going to get anything in exchange.
You'll have to be more persuasive. Picture this: I will vote against patents if such an opportunity comes up. You have to convince me that it's actually in my interest to have them. That you happen to benefit from it is good for you, but does absolutely nothing to convince me. So you'll have to explain how you having a patent is going to benefit me. And really, you having a monopoly isn't in my interest. What's in my interest is to have the maximum amount of competition. So try again?
Sure, but there's the ideal case, and there's reality. And no matter how well backed up your data is, you still have to run to a shop and buy another hard disk. And that takes time, and is inconvenient.
Basically, SSDs provide peace of mind. You don't need to worry about clumsily dropping a backpack/suitcase with a laptop to the floor, letting a powered on laptop drop a centimeter on a table due to letting it go a bit too early, pushing it a bit too far and hitting something, or using on a train that's vibrating a lot for some reason. Before SSDs that used to worry me a lot, with a SSD it's not a big deal and just annoying.
It makes the formerly most fragile component more resistant than the laptop itself, so you can handle it like you would anything else, instead of like an antique vase.
Historically, fragile media has been replaced progressively with more and more resistant ones. Parents would freak out if they saw their little kid holding they favourite vinyl disk. CDs will stand to a bit more abuse, DVDs a bit more, BluRay is better still, and flash drives can be made practically indestructible and can go through a washing machine and dryer, and come out fine.
It's not a hard disk, there are no moving parts that sort of work but fail later. If you plug it in, and it works, then it will keep working. If you hit it hard enough to make a chip come off (which takes effort), then it won't work at all, but with some luck you can solder it back on. To cause it irreparable damage you pretty much have to smash it with a hammer or give it a good electric shock (which with it being inside is rather unlikely).
Backups are nearly always missing something. Even if you diligently make a full backup every week, that's still probably several days worth of lost data, some of which could be hard to replace if you obtained it from somebody else. And of course you have to spend the time on restoring all that stuff.
Obviously you should have backups in any case, but having the disk survive and be able to get everything back running as soon as you get new hardware is much more convenient. And if you don't smash the laptop you don't need to restore anything at all, which is even better.
I was talking about the Iraq war reports.
His personal life doesn't really interest me. Really if I was in that position I probably also would have thought I was being set up. But whether that's correct or not, I don't think that makes a difference for the service he provides, which is the one thing I'm concerned about.
What do you need to trust him for? He posts what he has. Whether it's true or not is generally confirmed by third parties, like the US government freaking out.
So far I've seen very little evidence of that patents do any good, so I'm in favour of eliminating them all completely. If I have to compromise I'd start with anything relating to software, math and business methods first though.
Because hard disks resist falls much better while not in use. If you drop a disconnected one, it might well survive. But while working they are terribly fragile, and break very easily. I broke one by turning around in a chair and hitting my laptop with the back of it. And no, G sensors don't help with that, because there's no warning like with a fall.
The benefit is that at the end of that fall, I can go down, dig up the SSD from the wreckage, and put it in a new laptop. Laptops are cheap, I can get an acceptable one for a few hundred bucks. Data can easily be a lot more valuable than that.
But then you don't get any impressive performance out of it. What does it matter to have the clock ticking at 40GHz, if the simplest operation is going to take 5 clock cycles to complete? The point of more GHz is that it's actually making things go faster, not as a pointless dick measuring contest. Intel already tried that with the P4 and it didn't go anywhere.
Of course maybe you solve this by having 1024 tiny cores. But then you have to deal with that pretty much nothing in existence can take advantage of that. Other than a few things like raytracing, there's not much that parallelizes that easily. You have to contend with Amdahl's law. Does a single core have enough power to assign work to the other 1023?
I wouldn't say that. It's more like there's a tradeoff: A bigger brain needs more energy to keep it working. If you're doing fine with a small one, there's no selective pressure in favour of a bigger one.
There was no need for it. When you're big and scary, and can crush many smaller lifeforms effortlessly, there's no particular need to become smarter. We need intelligence because we have little else. Our sense of smell is crappy, our strenth is unimpressive, our speed is insufficient. The thing that ensured humans didn't turn into lunch for a bear was that they were able to figure out a way to deal with something that big, strong and scary.
Two things. First, have you ever watched Discovery Channel?
We had needs for decent reflexes way before we started driving cars. Before that there were horses, and war, and wild animals. You think you can afford to react slowly when hunting or defending yourself, when all you have is a spear? Every millisecond you wait in front of a predator is a millisecond the predator has to jump at your neck. The environment can change quickly. A millisecond may make the difference between saving yourself and rolling downhill, if you manage to adjust your balance or catch on something in time.
Besides, our reaction speed isn't particularly impresssive. Try catching a fly sometime. Flies sure react quickly, and my cat seems to be significantly more successful than I at catching them.
Second, you have things exactly backwards. The "need" to drive cars is of our own creation. We didn't evolve to drive cars, we created cars and roads with our constraints in mind. Cars, roads, speed limits and braking distances are all made so that humans can deal with them. If our reflexes were twice as slow, we'd still drive cars, except with the rules and limits set to account for that.
Nobody said anything about not paying. What should be done is changing the law to make software unpatentable, and meanwhile developing alternatives like Theora and VP8.
According to Wikipedia, Australia's and New Zealand's. They're also a member of the UN. And that would make for some awful PR as well. If I hear of any such a thing you can bet I'm not buying a single fish from whoever does it.
But nice to know you have such a nice view of the world.
512GB SSDs aren't a "future possibility"
1TB SSDs already exist
That's not practical though.
At that speed, the signal will travel about 0.6cm per clock cycle. Even at current clock rates at least one clock cycle will pass while the signal simply travels to the RAM chip on the motherboard, without accounting for any circuitry, just the time spent on the wire.