SlySoft put out a well priced tool for ensuring I can actually play any content I purchase, and provide regular updates to fix any problems with it. The annual licensing fees for upgrade (for all purchases from start of 2009) is a bitch, but as a 2008 purchaser that doesn't affect me.
I'm aware it may seem odd buying a Blu-Ray ripping tool if you don't believe stuff should all be open/free, however it is actually sold as (and is fantastic at) a "plays anything" tool.
Hell, I've got an HDCP display which doesn't talk HDCP to my HDCP graphics card, despite me running Vista. Okay, odds on one of the spec sheets lied to me, but it does rather seem like "We won't let you view the Blu-Ray you paid too much for, because we say so".
More like being faced with a few million safes, and deciding that rather than cracking each individually you make a disintegration ray and get it done once and for all.
No, seriously, for some reason my HDCP-enabled graphics card won't talk HDCP to my HDCP-enabled monitor (yes I'm running Vista in this case). I figured I could either spend the rest of my life hacking at the mess, or grab AnyDVD HD and not worry about it any more.
So... yeah, I'll buy them when they work with my hardware.
Well, actually I won't, because so far 90% of the Blu-Ray disks I buy aren't worth the premium. Instead, I'll probably just buy the DVD for cheap in 6 months time and try to remember why I ever cared.
Between you, and a game publisher, I think I know whose numbers on sales I'm more likely to believe.
You may not buy crappy games, because you read reviews first, but I think the message here is fairly clearly that there's enough people who buy games based purely on refractive index of the box cover, to make even the worst movie tie-in sell.
I'm frequently amazed the games industry doesn't just stand up one day and go "Y'know, we talked it out between us, and we've had enough. We're going to all get jobs with fewer hours and better pay in something dull like spreadsheet programming."
So far, all I'm seeing is that their business model makes neither side happy. Game developers, at least starting out, get insane hours for little pay. Games are released at price points that are uncomfortably expensive for most of the target audience. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, to me.
> How can you blindly file lawsuits against people you know nothing about?
How can they not?/. fought for years to make sure the RIAA couldn't find anything out about filesharers, and now people are surprised they know nothing about file sharers apart from IP address?
Absolutely agreed. I've seen too many "Oh, I'll take it out before it goes live/it gets demoed/the boss sees this/no-one will see this" messages pop up infront of an audience before. If you're being paid for the code, you're not being paid to add silly messages to it.
(I recently wanted to strangle the developers of an open source project where they had 'wacky' error messages. Oddly, I wish they had useful error messages, personally, but I'm sure weird Batman references made sense to them when debugging...)
For the same reason you have to get a license before we let you drive a car? You're involved in an activity (connecting a computer to the Internet) which can have consequences for others, and therefore it doesn't seem unreasonable to put some requirements on you of due care about how your computer is used.
Firefox gets criticised for its new warnings because:
1. The old mis-match warnings were just fine unless the user doesn't read warnings, in which case the new ones won't help anyway. 2. They look like errors. They're not errors, they're warnings. 3. Why can't it just present the page as insecure (no padlock) by default?
Okay, but why would I want to? Now, sure, most MMOs suffer from the same issue; if little numbers going up doesn't give you a kick, you're going to get bored quickly. EVE seems worse for this, though. In WoW, I only _think_ I could wander AFK during combat to get coffee, in EVE I actually can. The electronic warfare and jammers and other stuff you get later seemed like it may make things more interesting, but I've never understood why it's expected I sink my time into something dull for a possible future reward.
For systems I'm directly responsible for, we've got three cases. There's desktop systems, which are actually laptops, so they have their own UPS essentially. Servers doing useful work have a UPS. Servers that can die and no-one notices for three weeks (real story) don't.
Unfortunately, I don't make the policy beyond my own research group. I hope they're going to start UPSing the network as they have funds, but it's going to be an ongoing task.
You apparently have an operational budget that probably has an extra zero over ours. We don't even have UPS for the network, which takes the whole lot out for a while every 3-4 months. Having had both the power substation for the cluster of buildings we're in, and the power substation for the network a few hops upstream, catch fire, hopefully they've fixed a lot of the old hardware that was causing those power outages, but...
I suppose if you've got the network, Google stuff makes sense. For us, we'd love a lot of these things in appliance version, but depending on them day to day wouldn't make sense.
I recently measured a bunch of PCs around my house, actually. Distressingly, my Mac Pro takes 40W when "turned off"!
Personally, the desktop PC gets turned off at the wall overnight. The server obviously doesn't, but it was designed top to bottom to be power efficient (and idles at around 30-40W). The laptop is my fast-on system.
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
I was about to say, it's like complaining that usage of IE 8 is quite low. From my own point of view as a web dev, it's a curio at best. Windows only means it doesn't work on my standard dev platforms, we can't seriously expect users to move to it just because it's faster for a bunch of our pages, that doesn't not really a thought. We made sure all our stuff works okay with it (it did, 'cos we followed the spec) and got on with our lives.
From a non-professional point of view, it lacks AdBlock, and generally doesn't have anything that really makes me want to hop over to it.
Given the cost of EEPROM space, I think the better answer is to double the size. One half is readable, one writable, at any point in time. To update, you write, turn off, flip the jumper across to the other side (or, heck, just use a physical switch) and you're done. Bricking isn't absolutely impossible (you could write a damaged image to one half which wipes the other when it boots), but essentially infeasible.
> In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time.
I can't claim to have been doing an empirical study into high end router prices, but it looks much more like a linear decrease to me.
Secondly, and more importantly, as far as I'm aware 10Gb/s has been as fast as anything goes, for about a decade now. That means that laying new fiber, the bit you just stated was extremely expensive, is about the only way they can actually increase bandwidth.
Dark fibre should help with this at least, but it's hard to know without knowing where the connectivity is in relation to where it's actually needed.
To be honest, I have no idea how the hell they manage it. Even taking into account population density and efficiencies of scale, fundamentally I can't see how they're getting their upstream to the Internet (which is the real money sink) to carry the load at that cost.
Revision control isn't fantastic; right now, I'm not aware of any that can merge changes to an OpenOffice or MS Office document. LaTeX would work, but most people don't know LaTeX. I imagine with XML-based word documents we'll see revision control plugins to merge the underlying XML instead of the binary files that contain them, but last time we looked at this it wasn't there yet.
> Yet the telcos make shitloads of money every month.
So, they're overcharging the average person to balance the extreme? My point is that bandwidth is about the most expensive thing in providing the connection, and personally I think having the cost of Internet access more closely resemble the cost of providing it is a good thing...
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SlySoft put out a well priced tool for ensuring I can actually play any content I purchase, and provide regular updates to fix any problems with it. The annual licensing fees for upgrade (for all purchases from start of 2009) is a bitch, but as a 2008 purchaser that doesn't affect me.
I'm aware it may seem odd buying a Blu-Ray ripping tool if you don't believe stuff should all be open/free, however it is actually sold as (and is fantastic at) a "plays anything" tool.
Hell, I've got an HDCP display which doesn't talk HDCP to my HDCP graphics card, despite me running Vista. Okay, odds on one of the spec sheets lied to me, but it does rather seem like "We won't let you view the Blu-Ray you paid too much for, because we say so".
More like being faced with a few million safes, and deciding that rather than cracking each individually you make a disintegration ray and get it done once and for all.
They won't play for me.
No, seriously, for some reason my HDCP-enabled graphics card won't talk HDCP to my HDCP-enabled monitor (yes I'm running Vista in this case). I figured I could either spend the rest of my life hacking at the mess, or grab AnyDVD HD and not worry about it any more.
So... yeah, I'll buy them when they work with my hardware.
Well, actually I won't, because so far 90% of the Blu-Ray disks I buy aren't worth the premium. Instead, I'll probably just buy the DVD for cheap in 6 months time and try to remember why I ever cared.
Then it's a crime, and they can put you in jail.
There's a reason people hate that law.
Between you, and a game publisher, I think I know whose numbers on sales I'm more likely to believe.
You may not buy crappy games, because you read reviews first, but I think the message here is fairly clearly that there's enough people who buy games based purely on refractive index of the box cover, to make even the worst movie tie-in sell.
I'm frequently amazed the games industry doesn't just stand up one day and go "Y'know, we talked it out between us, and we've had enough. We're going to all get jobs with fewer hours and better pay in something dull like spreadsheet programming."
So far, all I'm seeing is that their business model makes neither side happy. Game developers, at least starting out, get insane hours for little pay. Games are released at price points that are uncomfortably expensive for most of the target audience. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, to me.
> You release the game for £50-60 quid,
Where on earth are you finding £60 games? Even at RRP, they're £50 at most, and if you go to Amazon £30-40 is normal for console games.
> How can you blindly file lawsuits against people you know nothing about?
How can they not? /. fought for years to make sure the RIAA couldn't find anything out about filesharers, and now people are surprised they know nothing about file sharers apart from IP address?
Absolutely agreed. I've seen too many "Oh, I'll take it out before it goes live/it gets demoed/the boss sees this/no-one will see this" messages pop up infront of an audience before. If you're being paid for the code, you're not being paid to add silly messages to it.
(I recently wanted to strangle the developers of an open source project where they had 'wacky' error messages. Oddly, I wish they had useful error messages, personally, but I'm sure weird Batman references made sense to them when debugging...)
For the same reason you have to get a license before we let you drive a car? You're involved in an activity (connecting a computer to the Internet) which can have consequences for others, and therefore it doesn't seem unreasonable to put some requirements on you of due care about how your computer is used.
Firefox gets criticised for its new warnings because:
1. The old mis-match warnings were just fine unless the user doesn't read warnings, in which case the new ones won't help anyway.
2. They look like errors. They're not errors, they're warnings.
3. Why can't it just present the page as insecure (no padlock) by default?
> can grind missions for weeks no problem.
Okay, but why would I want to? Now, sure, most MMOs suffer from the same issue; if little numbers going up doesn't give you a kick, you're going to get bored quickly. EVE seems worse for this, though. In WoW, I only _think_ I could wander AFK during combat to get coffee, in EVE I actually can. The electronic warfare and jammers and other stuff you get later seemed like it may make things more interesting, but I've never understood why it's expected I sink my time into something dull for a possible future reward.
For systems I'm directly responsible for, we've got three cases. There's desktop systems, which are actually laptops, so they have their own UPS essentially. Servers doing useful work have a UPS. Servers that can die and no-one notices for three weeks (real story) don't.
Unfortunately, I don't make the policy beyond my own research group. I hope they're going to start UPSing the network as they have funds, but it's going to be an ongoing task.
You apparently have an operational budget that probably has an extra zero over ours. We don't even have UPS for the network, which takes the whole lot out for a while every 3-4 months. Having had both the power substation for the cluster of buildings we're in, and the power substation for the network a few hops upstream, catch fire, hopefully they've fixed a lot of the old hardware that was causing those power outages, but...
I suppose if you've got the network, Google stuff makes sense. For us, we'd love a lot of these things in appliance version, but depending on them day to day wouldn't make sense.
I recently measured a bunch of PCs around my house, actually. Distressingly, my Mac Pro takes 40W when "turned off"!
Personally, the desktop PC gets turned off at the wall overnight. The server obviously doesn't, but it was designed top to bottom to be power efficient (and idles at around 30-40W). The laptop is my fast-on system.
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
I was about to say, it's like complaining that usage of IE 8 is quite low. From my own point of view as a web dev, it's a curio at best. Windows only means it doesn't work on my standard dev platforms, we can't seriously expect users to move to it just because it's faster for a bunch of our pages, that doesn't not really a thought. We made sure all our stuff works okay with it (it did, 'cos we followed the spec) and got on with our lives.
From a non-professional point of view, it lacks AdBlock, and generally doesn't have anything that really makes me want to hop over to it.
> the failure of second life should be an indicator here
Wait, Second Life failed? When did that happen? I was having meetings about it only yesterday!
Given the cost of EEPROM space, I think the better answer is to double the size. One half is readable, one writable, at any point in time. To update, you write, turn off, flip the jumper across to the other side (or, heck, just use a physical switch) and you're done. Bricking isn't absolutely impossible (you could write a damaged image to one half which wipes the other when it boots), but essentially infeasible.
> In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time.
I can't claim to have been doing an empirical study into high end router prices, but it looks much more like a linear decrease to me.
Secondly, and more importantly, as far as I'm aware 10Gb/s has been as fast as anything goes, for about a decade now. That means that laying new fiber, the bit you just stated was extremely expensive, is about the only way they can actually increase bandwidth.
Dark fibre should help with this at least, but it's hard to know without knowing where the connectivity is in relation to where it's actually needed.
> How can you be not paying enough?
To be honest, I have no idea how the hell they manage it. Even taking into account population density and efficiencies of scale, fundamentally I can't see how they're getting their upstream to the Internet (which is the real money sink) to carry the load at that cost.
Revision control isn't fantastic; right now, I'm not aware of any that can merge changes to an OpenOffice or MS Office document. LaTeX would work, but most people don't know LaTeX. I imagine with XML-based word documents we'll see revision control plugins to merge the underlying XML instead of the binary files that contain them, but last time we looked at this it wasn't there yet.
> I don't care that I can't constantly max out my connection, I do care if the ISP lies about it.
YES! An attitude I wholeheartedly agree with.
> I suspect it has to do with how misleading advertising tends to give you more customers in the short term.
Good answer!
> Yet the telcos make shitloads of money every month.
So, they're overcharging the average person to balance the extreme? My point is that bandwidth is about the most expensive thing in providing the connection, and personally I think having the cost of Internet access more closely resemble the cost of providing it is a good thing...