What a terrible world we live in when people blindly follow laws which are supposed to be for the good of everyone and clearly are not.
Are you so used to taking it up the ass from your goverment that you've forgotten the government exists to serve you, the citizens of your country? Yes, they also have a responsibility to cater to the groups of people who employ you, but that argument only holds water to a certain extent. How many people does the RIAA employ? How many people are artists, songwriters, composers, musicians? Most of whom end up bullied into giving up the copyright on their songs to an RIAA label so they can keep a monopoly on all music until the end of time.
Copyright is broken. How many times do you people need to get kicked in the face by the media bullies until you see that something is wrong, and perhaps this is not the way it was meant to be?
Unfortunately that's pretty much all I found. It would be great if someone could come up with some suggestions of non-RIAA CDs, and optimally let you purchase them.
Finally, while I don't really agree, you may also want to read this: Reasons against a full RIAA boycott, suggesting a boycott of just the major 5 labels.
The grammar nazi loses. Eidos can be either singular or plural, depending on whether you live in a culture where (for grammatical purposes) companies are considered singular or plural. In the UK and many other places, a company is plural (it is, after all, a group of people.) The metamorphosis of a company into a single 'entity' is an Americanism.
On a related note, wouldn't "Eido's" be "belonging to Eido" not "more than one Eido"?
For defending their intellectual property rights? A *protocol* is their intellectual property (bnetd)? The Craft suffix is their intellectual property too (FreeCraft)?
In neither of those cases did they really have a leg to stand on. But the small developer communities had no income from their product and therefore couldn't justify spending much money to defend it, much less the amount that would be required to take on Blizzard/Vivendi Universal. So they folded, and Blizzard wins.
Blizzard may have been defending their intellectual property as they saw it, but really they were just stomping on innocent fans.
Not every developer treats their most talented fans that way, and I'm sure that they'll be welcome in the communities fostered by friendlier developers such as Ambrosia Software, Bioware, etc.
I really liked the approach that the earlier (dunno about newer) Wing Commander games took. Rather than worrying about making the game full of traps and difficulty that forces the player to save often, they used a rather extensive tree-based storyline -- it was possible to fail a mission and still complete the game. Heck, it was possible to fail every mission and still complete the game, you would just get a very lackluster ending where the Kilrathi rule the universe and the humans run away with their tail between their legs.:)
While not a magic bullet, I think this approach has a lot to offer, but has very rarely been used since. Even Deus Ex, hailed for its exceptional storyline where what you did made a difference, it was still very linear. You could make small changes and maybe save a few people here and there, but it still didn't offer much incentive in the way of replayability.
While in Wing Commander, it was still possible to 'cheat' the system by saving before every mission, and playing the mission until you 'won', it was not always clear which outcome was a win. And in any case, playing the game that way would clearly be a lot more frustrating than simply playing through and not caring whether you always win, and just do your best. In effect the players who try to 'cheat' the system in Wing Commander are actually punishing themselves with repetition of missions. The casual gamer never has to repeat anything.
Food for thought. I'd like to see more games like this. Even Wing Commander's storyline was fairly primitive. Only two branches per mission. There were no partial wins.
No offense, I am sure your program is very good. But trying to break into a market so heavily dominated by top-notch programs like ACDSee and iPhoto is insanity. Espectially without doing anything significant to differentiate your program. If you plan on continuing your current route, perhaps your next piece of software should be a.zip file manager. Or perhaps a web browser.
In order to take something from scratch and play catchup in a market like that, you need to either significantly out-invest the other guy by bringing a ton of talent onboard and really Doing It Right(tm) -- ACDSee did this to L-View Pro, many years ago -- or your competition has to stumble and lose their direction (see All-Seeing-Eye vs. Gamespy).
Basically, all I'm trying to say here is that the reason you're not successful is because, as you said, there are hundreds of other similar applications. The pirates are not going to buy your software if your software is uncrackable. They will just use a similar program that is crackable. Even if we lived in a perfect world and all the programs were uncrackable, it's unlikely they'd buy your program, they would probably just go without or come up with their own.
I'd suggest you find a niche, somewhere where you see a need that is not being fulfilled, and fulfill it. That's the easy way to be successful. The other way, taking an existing market and making your product stand out, that'll be a severely uphill battle for you. Good luck, whichever you choose, but don't blame your failure on piracy.
I always appreciated the "Lemming Nuke-Drilling Co." approach. Two blockers on either sides of the lemming dropper, wait until they're all out, then nuke away and see how deep you can go.
Some executives think it's OK to raise the price of their broadband services when they add worldwide roaming dialup service for when you're away from home. Obviously the executives have a choice as to whether or not to add extra services, but the users who never need the extra services are subject to injury by such an action.
Admittedly a price increase is significantly more opaque to the end user than a lost email, but often that is not the ISP's fault. I've seen several ISPs which very clearly state that they use spam filtering blacklists and such. If you aren't paying attention to this when you sign up, well whose fault is that? It's not the ISP's fault, I'll tell you that much.
Will the buildings automatically power the heaters for the water mains? I doubt it, but it's possible that they would, or the mains don't need heating for some reason. I imagine they need the power to keep just the critical services running, not to actually power the entire city (despite what the article says).
On the other hand, it's important to note that while the backup generators may be able to come online within 7 minutes when they have a battery backup to power them, the situation becomes much more complex when the power is out for them as well. This was a major contributing factor in the recent north-eastern blackout. Generating stations have significant power demands of their own. Starting the diesel engines is not something that can be done by hand, and even if you have that handled with a battery, there is the issue of getting your multiple generators in phase with one another, which is a non-trivial process even when fully powered.
It commonly takes 2 hours or more to cold-start a reasonably sized generating station, probably even moreso in Alaska, as diesel engines are notoriously hard to start in cold weather. And after 2 hours, it'd be getting pretty cold.
It's just a matter of being careful. Well, patching has to be done. But firewall or anti-virus? No, just be careful. I've had anti-virus installed for 2 years, it's never had a hit. Never hit anything before that either.
It really disturbs me how many people just blindly stick 'products' on their computer to make it 'safe'. Safety is something you only get by being careful and taking care of your computer. Software can help, but it has to start with knowledge.
I probably am not being watched. I am not important. Does that mean I should just lay back and ignore the possibility that they are tracking people they feel important?
As Martin Niemller said:
"When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned."
Is that where you want to end up?
What's wrong with capitalism, eh?
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What's wrong with capitalism? Well, plenty, but that doesn't mean it's a decently good system.
However, it is not a magic bullet. It has weaknesses. So we've come up with laws to cover most of them: fraud, theft, intellectual property, collusion, illegal monopolies. All these things are products of our capitalist economy.
In my humble opinion, the RIAA and MPAA seem to have discovered some loophole between 'collusion' and 'illegal monopoly' by alternately shifting blame between the member companies and the associations themselves.
Capitalism is a system, and like any system can be abused. Whenever we stop one type of abuse, someone will discover another. This is what 'trade group associations' are doing, in my opinion. Illegal monopolies and collusion are both harmful to the free market, so there are laws against both. I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that the MPAA and RIAA's obscene lobbying power is also detrimental to the free market.
Unfortunately, they are quite capable of using their obscene lobbying power to protect themselves from such accusations (at least at a governmental level). And it'll take a hell of a lot more than a bunch of people pissing and moaning on Slashdot to get anything to happen about it. As usual, the EFF has the right idea, but they don't have even a tiny fraction of the power of the RIAA, MPAA, or any other major lobbying group (Liquor, Tobacco, Auto manufacturers, etc). Money is power in a capitalist country.
Just my random thoughts. And yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal, thanks.
I could do that too, and had thought of it. (I do Windows Visual C++ development for a living, ugh) Fortunately, I'm quite happy on Mac OS X, and have no need for this, I was just commenting on how it's rather silly. Thanks for the offer, though.:)
Just as long as they're not running it under Windows. Windows is not at all optimized for handling 8 root-level windows, particularly when one wants them to all be 'on top' at once. It quickly becomes frustrating to deal with.
Perhaps an MDI would work better for the Windows port (Hi Photoshop!)
The only "Deep Thought" I know of is a 20+ year old chess program.
Got a real link? (ie, not one located in tin-foil-hat-land, where the NSA can shoot balls of fire from its eyes, and bolts of lightning out of its ass, and crack RC5 in 5 minutes.)
If that... not-so-honourable name goes here... gets in as Prime Minister, I'm leaving. As if the Liberal party isn't uselessly mired in trivial issues already, check out some of the amazing stuff that the wonderful Ms. Copps has done for us:
She is some sort of hybrid of fanatical patriotism and rabid neo-hippie 'save the animals, save the children, save everyone from themselves' bullshit. Having her lead the government seems like a ridiculous idea.
I consider her proof that something is in fact wrong with the air in Hamilton. (not only directly, but also in the fact that everyone there keeps re-electing her). Try driving over the Burlington Skyway sometime with your windows down. You'll see what I mean.
If you can't manage to scrape together $40 to invest in your future, or get someone else to do it for you, you aren't talented, sorry. $40 is peanuts. Have one of the band members go get a McJob for a couple days. Jeez.
Hmm, weird, I thought that he had LIED to you in the State of the Union, or at least make a large enough 'honest mistake' that the result has been the deaths of hundreds of american kids for no real reason (and the number of times they've changed their story, "Supporting Terrorists!" "Oppressing the Iraqis!" "Developing WMDs!" "Supporting Terrorists!" "Developing WMDs!" "No, there were no WMDs, but they were Supporting Terrorists!" shows how much they were lying)
I also thought he willingly and knowingly sabotaged the USA's reputation throughout the world, covering it with a tarnish that will be felt for decades at least.
(and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).
Ok, have you actually tried python?
My responses to your responses:
No -- The whitespace is hardly irritating. It makes the code readable and clear. It's beautiful. I thought it would be a pain at first until I realized that "Hey, all python's doing is enforcing (and interpreting) the way I already write my code, and the way that code should generally be written IMHO.
Yes -- And you still think it's irritating whitespace? If you're one of the people who tries to fit too many things onto one line, and don't include whitespace to make it clear what the hell you're doing, those are the sort of people who should be forced to use python.;)
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this company seems to cater exactly to people like you. They're a bit pricy though, by the looks of it, unless you're buying a lot of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
What a terrible world we live in when people blindly follow laws which are supposed to be for the good of everyone and clearly are not.
Are you so used to taking it up the ass from your goverment that you've forgotten the government exists to serve you, the citizens of your country? Yes, they also have a responsibility to cater to the groups of people who employ you, but that argument only holds water to a certain extent. How many people does the RIAA employ? How many people are artists, songwriters, composers, musicians?
Most of whom end up bullied into giving up the copyright on their songs to an RIAA label so they can keep a monopoly on all music until the end of time.
Copyright is broken. How many times do you people need to get kicked in the face by the media bullies until you see that something is wrong, and perhaps this is not the way it was meant to be?
I've looked for an RIAA-free venue as well, and have come up mostly empty, however I will pass along what I did find:
Unfortunately that's pretty much all I found. It would be great if someone could come up with some suggestions of non-RIAA CDs, and optimally let you purchase them.
Finally, while I don't really agree, you may also want to read this: Reasons against a full RIAA boycott, suggesting a boycott of just the major 5 labels.
I wish I had mod points. +1 Insightful.
The grammar nazi loses. Eidos can be either singular or plural, depending on whether you live in a culture where (for grammatical purposes) companies are considered singular or plural. In the UK and many other places, a company is plural (it is, after all, a group of people.) The metamorphosis of a company into a single 'entity' is an Americanism.
On a related note, wouldn't "Eido's" be "belonging to Eido" not "more than one Eido"?
Despite my linux allegiance, I tend to trust people spending the cash more than those trolling the message boards.
That's right, jump on the bandwagon! How's your Enron stock doing?
By the way, I have a bridge that I'd like you to invest in, if you're interested gimme a ring.
For defending their intellectual property rights? A *protocol* is their intellectual property (bnetd)? The Craft suffix is their intellectual property too (FreeCraft)?
In neither of those cases did they really have a leg to stand on. But the small developer communities had no income from their product and therefore couldn't justify spending much money to defend it, much less the amount that would be required to take on Blizzard/Vivendi Universal. So they folded, and Blizzard wins.
Blizzard may have been defending their intellectual property as they saw it, but really they were just stomping on innocent fans.
Not every developer treats their most talented fans that way, and I'm sure that they'll be welcome in the communities fostered by friendlier developers such as Ambrosia Software, Bioware, etc.
I really liked the approach that the earlier (dunno about newer) Wing Commander games took. Rather than worrying about making the game full of traps and difficulty that forces the player to save often, they used a rather extensive tree-based storyline -- it was possible to fail a mission and still complete the game. Heck, it was possible to fail every mission and still complete the game, you would just get a very lackluster ending where the Kilrathi rule the universe and the humans run away with their tail between their legs. :)
While not a magic bullet, I think this approach has a lot to offer, but has very rarely been used since. Even Deus Ex, hailed for its exceptional storyline where what you did made a difference, it was still very linear. You could make small changes and maybe save a few people here and there, but it still didn't offer much incentive in the way of replayability.
While in Wing Commander, it was still possible to 'cheat' the system by saving before every mission, and playing the mission until you 'won', it was not always clear which outcome was a win. And in any case, playing the game that way would clearly be a lot more frustrating than simply playing through and not caring whether you always win, and just do your best. In effect the players who try to 'cheat' the system in Wing Commander are actually punishing themselves with repetition of missions. The casual gamer never has to repeat anything.
Food for thought. I'd like to see more games like this. Even Wing Commander's storyline was fairly primitive. Only two branches per mission. There were no partial wins.
No offense, I am sure your program is very good. But trying to break into a market so heavily dominated by top-notch programs like ACDSee and iPhoto is insanity. Espectially without doing anything significant to differentiate your program. If you plan on continuing your current route, perhaps your next piece of software should be a .zip file manager. Or perhaps a web browser.
In order to take something from scratch and play catchup in a market like that, you need to either significantly out-invest the other guy by bringing a ton of talent onboard and really Doing It Right(tm) -- ACDSee did this to L-View Pro, many years ago -- or your competition has to stumble and lose their direction (see All-Seeing-Eye vs. Gamespy).
Basically, all I'm trying to say here is that the reason you're not successful is because, as you said, there are hundreds of other similar applications. The pirates are not going to buy your software if your software is uncrackable. They will just use a similar program that is crackable. Even if we lived in a perfect world and all the programs were uncrackable, it's unlikely they'd buy your program, they would probably just go without or come up with their own.
I'd suggest you find a niche, somewhere where you see a need that is not being fulfilled, and fulfill it. That's the easy way to be successful. The other way, taking an existing market and making your product stand out, that'll be a severely uphill battle for you. Good luck, whichever you choose, but don't blame your failure on piracy.
I always appreciated the "Lemming Nuke-Drilling Co." approach. Two blockers on either sides of the lemming dropper, wait until they're all out, then nuke away and see how deep you can go.
Those poor little Lemmings. Oh well.
Consider this assertion:
Some executives think it's OK to raise the price of their broadband services when they add worldwide roaming dialup service for when you're away from home. Obviously the executives have a choice as to whether or not to add extra services, but the users who never need the extra services are subject to injury by such an action.
Admittedly a price increase is significantly more opaque to the end user than a lost email, but often that is not the ISP's fault. I've seen several ISPs which very clearly state that they use spam filtering blacklists and such. If you aren't paying attention to this when you sign up, well whose fault is that? It's not the ISP's fault, I'll tell you that much.
Will the buildings automatically power the heaters for the water mains? I doubt it, but it's possible that they would, or the mains don't need heating for some reason. I imagine they need the power to keep just the critical services running, not to actually power the entire city (despite what the article says).
On the other hand, it's important to note that while the backup generators may be able to come online within 7 minutes when they have a battery backup to power them, the situation becomes much more complex when the power is out for them as well. This was a major contributing factor in the recent north-eastern blackout. Generating stations have significant power demands of their own. Starting the diesel engines is not something that can be done by hand, and even if you have that handled with a battery, there is the issue of getting your multiple generators in phase with one another, which is a non-trivial process even when fully powered.
It commonly takes 2 hours or more to cold-start a reasonably sized generating station, probably even moreso in Alaska, as diesel engines are notoriously hard to start in cold weather. And after 2 hours, it'd be getting pretty cold.
Consider moving to Alberta.
It's just a matter of being careful. Well, patching has to be done. But firewall or anti-virus? No, just be careful. I've had anti-virus installed for 2 years, it's never had a hit. Never hit anything before that either.
It really disturbs me how many people just blindly stick 'products' on their computer to make it 'safe'. Safety is something you only get by being careful and taking care of your computer. Software can help, but it has to start with knowledge.
I probably am not being watched. I am not important. Does that mean I should just lay back and ignore the possibility that they are tracking people they feel important?
As Martin Niemller said:
"When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned."
Is that where you want to end up?
What's wrong with capitalism? Well, plenty, but that doesn't mean it's a decently good system.
However, it is not a magic bullet. It has weaknesses. So we've come up with laws to cover most of them: fraud, theft, intellectual property, collusion, illegal monopolies. All these things are products of our capitalist economy.
In my humble opinion, the RIAA and MPAA seem to have discovered some loophole between 'collusion' and 'illegal monopoly' by alternately shifting blame between the member companies and the associations themselves.
Capitalism is a system, and like any system can be abused. Whenever we stop one type of abuse, someone will discover another. This is what 'trade group associations' are doing, in my opinion. Illegal monopolies and collusion are both harmful to the free market, so there are laws against both. I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that the MPAA and RIAA's obscene lobbying power is also detrimental to the free market.
Unfortunately, they are quite capable of using their obscene lobbying power to protect themselves from such accusations (at least at a governmental level). And it'll take a hell of a lot more than a bunch of people pissing and moaning on Slashdot to get anything to happen about it. As usual, the EFF has the right idea, but they don't have even a tiny fraction of the power of the RIAA, MPAA, or any other major lobbying group (Liquor, Tobacco, Auto manufacturers, etc). Money is power in a capitalist country.
Just my random thoughts. And yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal, thanks.
I could do that too, and had thought of it. (I do Windows Visual C++ development for a living, ugh) Fortunately, I'm quite happy on Mac OS X, and have no need for this, I was just commenting on how it's rather silly. Thanks for the offer, though. :)
Just as long as they're not running it under Windows. Windows is not at all optimized for handling 8 root-level windows, particularly when one wants them to all be 'on top' at once. It quickly becomes frustrating to deal with.
Perhaps an MDI would work better for the Windows port (Hi Photoshop!)
The only "Deep Thought" I know of is a 20+ year old chess program.
Got a real link? (ie, not one located in tin-foil-hat-land, where the NSA can shoot balls of fire from its eyes, and bolts of lightning out of its ass, and crack RC5 in 5 minutes.)
I am Albertan, and I am still glad the CA will never run the country. The de-Canadian-Alliance-ified PCs are looking rather acceptable though. ;)
If that ... not-so-honourable name goes here ... gets in as Prime Minister, I'm leaving. As if the Liberal party isn't uselessly mired in trivial issues already, check out some of the amazing stuff that the wonderful Ms. Copps has done for us:
She is some sort of hybrid of fanatical patriotism and rabid neo-hippie 'save the animals, save the children, save everyone from themselves' bullshit. Having her lead the government seems like a ridiculous idea.
I consider her proof that something is in fact wrong with the air in Hamilton. (not only directly, but also in the fact that everyone there keeps re-electing her). Try driving over the Burlington Skyway sometime with your windows down. You'll see what I mean.
If you can't manage to scrape together $40 to invest in your future, or get someone else to do it for you, you aren't talented, sorry. $40 is peanuts. Have one of the band members go get a McJob for a couple days. Jeez.
I would like to order some 1024MB PC3200 DDR. Where do I send my $20? :P
Hmm, weird, I thought that he had LIED to you in the State of the Union, or at least make a large enough 'honest mistake' that the result has been the deaths of hundreds of american kids for no real reason (and the number of times they've changed their story, "Supporting Terrorists!" "Oppressing the Iraqis!" "Developing WMDs!" "Supporting Terrorists!" "Developing WMDs!" "No, there were no WMDs, but they were Supporting Terrorists!" shows how much they were lying)
I also thought he willingly and knowingly sabotaged the USA's reputation throughout the world, covering it with a tarnish that will be felt for decades at least.
Apparently I was mistaken.
(and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).
;)
Ok, have you actually tried python?
My responses to your responses:
No -- The whitespace is hardly irritating. It makes the code readable and clear. It's beautiful. I thought it would be a pain at first until I realized that "Hey, all python's doing is enforcing (and interpreting) the way I already write my code, and the way that code should generally be written IMHO.
Yes -- And you still think it's irritating whitespace? If you're one of the people who tries to fit too many things onto one line, and don't include whitespace to make it clear what the hell you're doing, those are the sort of people who should be forced to use python.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this company seems to cater exactly to people like you. They're a bit pricy though, by the looks of it, unless you're buying a lot of stuff.