"the developers of DRM technologies seem to believe that computers are nothing more than personal entertainment systems for consumers"
Worse than that, they seem to have this impression that it's okay to modify my computer to work how they think it should. This isn't even just DRM, I'm getting incredibly fed up with programs which automatically install themselves on the desktop/quick launch bar (the Quicktime player, as an easy example, which I almost solely want to launch by double clicking on a file), and/or auto-run at startup (Creative used to be terrible for this - install soundcard drivers, and suddenly it plays an intro movie on the desktop at login, and you have an application launcher stuck to the top of your screen).
Anything you add to a computer runs this risk. DRM is going to be particularly invasive of the OS, so more likely to cause chaos, but the same problem goes for any software...
Admittadely, I was trying to install onto a Debian installation, but I spent a weekend trying to get MythTV to work with my Hauppauge DVB-T card. In the end, it kinda worked, as long as you didn't want to change channel more than once between reboots. I'm not a professional sys-admin, but I do manage a handful of servers as part of my job, and have nearly a decade of Linux experience, so it's not just me being a newbie...
Personally, have had great success with the EyeTV (Mac) hardware/software combination, but it is horrendously expensive, and obviously not really at all useful if you want to stream video over the network.
So, you're thinking of that ever popular target group, 30-something Linux users with an interest in MMORPGs, but less than two hours a week to play them...
2 hours is absurd. Running a seperate server, time limited to 15-20 hours a week, I can see. Keep in mind, you want to cap it above the number of hours your target audience will want to play - they should never notice the cap. At 15-20, that's still a hell of a lot less than many people spend on a MMORPG. I'd also expect progression to be sped up, on that server...
$60/year for this time-limited service sounds... possible, given the reduced admin requirements.
Constant gold - I'm assuming that's per person (otherwise you have to know the size of your player base before your start, so everyone gets around the right amount). Then you have the fun of, if someone cancels their account, do you put the money from their account back into the economy, or what exactly? Only Star Wars Galaxies has ever successfully had an economy, AFAIK, and that generally went quite badly...
Linux... can't see any company making it a requirement. I can see some writing from scratch for portability, but Linux games have never sold well, I can't see anyone making it a requirement...
Odd, I'd always more looked Mono for being useful when your boss tells you that you have to write something using.Net, and you really want to use Linux...
"using pricing search engines to find low prices."
I have to wonder how far they went to get a low price; I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of web sites that look like they were put together by a 12 year old with attention span issues, and I wouldn't put my credit card anywhere near them, however cheap they were...
In a decade or so of buying online, I've had a CPU that arrived dead (squished, in fact; the packaging AMD had put it and the heatsink in had cracked, and the heatsink had crushed it), a graphics card whose fan died a month after purchase, and a couple of network cables that weren't what I expected because I hadn't read the site carefully enough.
So, I have to suspect, if you're just a little more careful with where you shop online, you shouldn't have experiences quite that bad!
I think the article's idea of a successful launch is highly questionable. The launch did strictly speaking succeed - they launched a console. I've backed up Microsoft on a lot of decisions they made, particularly the global launch, but I think they made mistakes too.
First of all, I'm noticing an incredible lack of interest in the Core version. It's looking to me as if they should never have made a Core version, particularly not at launch. Launching with only the Premium, using the high price to control demand, and possibly releasing the Core later as a cut down version, would probably have worked better. To be honest, by the time users buy a memory card instead of a hard drive, the cost saving is so minimal as not to be worth having.
Secondly, handling of who got a console when has been a major issue, and particularly the mess with who knows how many XBox 360s being bought just for the purpose of being sold at a massive profit on E-Bay. I think a better solution would have been for Microsoft to handle supply of XBox 360s themselves, until demand dropped down; customers would buy online, or by phone, or by post, and be entered into a single, global queue, with orders handled on a strictly first come first served basis. Resistrict orders to one per household, and you've got a launch that's as good as it gets. Of course, this would really irk the retailers, but I think that's less of an issue in this case.
I suppose this may apply more to people who are heavy mobile phone users - to me it's a useful tool for anyone that needs to contact me when they have no idea where I am (home, office, in shops), or need to contact someone and am not near a phone (it's brilliant for co-ordinating meeting up with people), which is about 20 minutes a month of usage...
>..just run an unsecured FTP server that allows anonymous uploads. You put up your favourite music files, and pretty soon you'll have a very nice collection of illegal porn, warez and viruses.
So, that's just like running unpatched Windows, right?:)
"People are going to spend all their time on it eventually,"
My experiences with Internet on mobiles so far has been that it's slow, expensive and awkward to use. If you spend a lot of time on buses or trains I suppose I can understand a desire for mobile Internet access, although using a laptop and data card would seem a much better solution anyway. The only time, ever, that I didn't have easy Internet access, and it was an issue, was a sys-admining problem that I'd have needed ssh to fix, anyway (and the idea of doing sys-admin work on a mobile screen with the standard keypad gives me nightmares).
Here's the thing... I'm much more interested in being able to get these shows on some sort of watch twice DRM. I don't tend to watch TV shows more than once anyway, so outright buying most of them is a waste of money for me. I want the DRM to give me the ability to watch it twice so that if there's a power cut the first time through, or there's something I want to go back and check, it's not an issue, and I don't want to be time limited either (the other alternative here).
In the meantime, I rent DVDs from Amazon.co.uk, getting 6 DVDs/month for around $16. That's $190 for 12 different seasons over the year, give or take a bit...
I think this is a brilliant point. I have an HD LCD TV, and an upscaling DVD player ($100-ish, doing the exchange rate calculation in my head), and it does almost everything I could ask of it. I can see the difference between HD and SD with good source material, but really, how much of the stuff out there is good source material?
DVDs took off like a rocket because they provided a significant leap in quality, a massive reduction in space used, the ability to easily put extras in with your video and random access (if only companies would stop thinking UOP was a good idea, anyway).
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray's only advantages are you can fit more on a single disk, and that the material can be HD. How many people can spot and really care about the difference? Of those, how many are willing to go back and replace DVDs they've probably been buying for the last few years?
I think HD disks will gradually grow in popularity, but we're talking over the new few decades, as people start buying new movies/TV shows in HD formats, rather than another drastic changeover like with DVDs...
Don't get me wrong, it's good to see new games, but I actually quite like the sequel. If I liked the first game, odds on I'll like the second game too, and that's reassuring. Given the amount of enthusiasm/. has managed to display about GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, Doom 3, Quake 4 and MGS 4, I don't think I'm alone in this.
Also, how original does a game have to be? I picked up F.E.A.R. recently, and while it was a lot of fun, the graphics were incredibly similar to Half Life 2, and the gameplay not so far removed either. So, it's technically an original game, but isn't so original in reality. Got Vampire Bloodlines too, and couldn't help but be reminded of Deus Ex by the gameplay.
If you want innovation, go look at whatever Nintendo are doing next, it's always interesting (and I'm likely to be picking up a Revolution if only out of curiousity). Or for the PC, Introversion Software is probably a good bet...
You're mostly paying for speed and reliability - Raptors come with a 3 year warranty, rather than the standard 1 year (although I'm sure they used to come with 5 year - hmmm)...
Seriously, if I want to run a P2P app I would, wait for it, run it under my OS. Firefox is a not an OS (yet, and wasn't the whole point to get away from the "everything but the kitchen sink" problem with Netscape?).
I want my web browser to, y'know, browse the web with. Doing FTP is also nice. I want my OS to run applications under (not, despite what Microsoft would have you believe, browse the web with).
Couldn't we keep this seperation? Please?
Also, even if AllPeers is such an incredible P2P app that everyone in the world will want to use it, people that haven't moved from IE to Firefox yet are probably going to just treat Firefox as a P2P app, and IE as a web browser, IMHO...
It's a decent point, but... of the six Apple laptops my flatmates and I have had:
Two iBooks have died after a little over two years, one with logic board failure (sent back under extended warranty, and the courier lost it!), one with backlight problems.
One G3 Powerbook lasted over three years of heavy usage, before eventually starting to develop "personality". Replaced, and given to a friend, not sure how long it lasted before finally dying.
One G4 Powerbook developed memory problems (the slot itself was faulty) a few weeks after purchase, and had to go back.
One G4 Powerbook has just developed memory problems after just under two years of usage. We're going to test if it's the slot or the SO-DIMM tomorrow.
One iBook, bought to replace the one that died from backlight problems, is working fine, despite having water spilt into it!
So, it's not been great, although these systems are moved around and used daily (the Powerbooks are used as desktop replacements, and carried in (cushioned, supplied by Apple, I should point out) backpacks between work and home, so I can't exactly claim life is easy on them! Definitely getting Apple Care on any laptops we buy from here on in.
Oh, we also have a couple of G4 PowerMacs, both almost three years old. The only problem we've had with them is one has a slightly noisy fan that's probably been knocked loose when moving it (both have been moved several times now).
I think this is a great idea. I'm also kinda hoping they'll succeed , mostly because I want to watch from the relatively safety of the UK; not that I'm saying this will bring about the fall of civilisation and/or open a portal to hell, or even just mean no-one will produce IP targetted at a Swedish audience, just that I like the idea of another country finding out how this goes, first.
> Talk about the ultimate terror weapon "country X, give up ________ or our GPS guided weapon will hit elementary school Y", etc., etc.
Because terrorists have had so many problems hitting the right target so far, what with the bombs being delivered by hand most of the time. Hitting a specific target in a built up area for terrorism purposes is also completely nonsense - if you can deliver the weapons in any way, you're going to scare people, irrespective of what you hit. The only advantage to GPS guided weapons is where precision is of high importance, like, say, making sure you hit the military installation near a built up area.
Your right, I feel so much happier knowing that China has to hope its missiles hit the target they're aiming for, rather than something vaguely in the area...
IE7 blogs have already said to webmasters - get the beta, fix your sites, because it will *break* if you just use IE6 rendering as a test. To they already will be breaking IE6 only sites. Sometimes massively.
Really? Excellent. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the corner, gloating over my tested on multiple browsers sites (which are also standards compliant, but experience says that's rarely enough!). Good to see lazy web people will finally have to test their stuff a little better...
Slashdot Mirror
"the developers of DRM technologies seem to believe that computers are nothing more than personal entertainment systems for consumers"
Worse than that, they seem to have this impression that it's okay to modify my computer to work how they think it should. This isn't even just DRM, I'm getting incredibly fed up with programs which automatically install themselves on the desktop/quick launch bar (the Quicktime player, as an easy example, which I almost solely want to launch by double clicking on a file), and/or auto-run at startup (Creative used to be terrible for this - install soundcard drivers, and suddenly it plays an intro movie on the desktop at login, and you have an application launcher stuck to the top of your screen).
</rant>
Anything you add to a computer runs this risk. DRM is going to be particularly invasive of the OS, so more likely to cause chaos, but the same problem goes for any software...
> and stating that your interests include latex...
My first thought was "What's wrong with LaTeX?". That's bad, isn't it...
Admittadely, I was trying to install onto a Debian installation, but I spent a weekend trying to get MythTV to work with my Hauppauge DVB-T card. In the end, it kinda worked, as long as you didn't want to change channel more than once between reboots. I'm not a professional sys-admin, but I do manage a handful of servers as part of my job, and have nearly a decade of Linux experience, so it's not just me being a newbie...
Personally, have had great success with the EyeTV (Mac) hardware/software combination, but it is horrendously expensive, and obviously not really at all useful if you want to stream video over the network.
So, you're thinking of that ever popular target group, 30-something Linux users with an interest in MMORPGs, but less than two hours a week to play them...
2 hours is absurd. Running a seperate server, time limited to 15-20 hours a week, I can see. Keep in mind, you want to cap it above the number of hours your target audience will want to play - they should never notice the cap. At 15-20, that's still a hell of a lot less than many people spend on a MMORPG. I'd also expect progression to be sped up, on that server...
$60/year for this time-limited service sounds... possible, given the reduced admin requirements.
Constant gold - I'm assuming that's per person (otherwise you have to know the size of your player base before your start, so everyone gets around the right amount). Then you have the fun of, if someone cancels their account, do you put the money from their account back into the economy, or what exactly? Only Star Wars Galaxies has ever successfully had an economy, AFAIK, and that generally went quite badly...
Linux... can't see any company making it a requirement. I can see some writing from scratch for portability, but Linux games have never sold well, I can't see anyone making it a requirement...
Odd, I'd always more looked Mono for being useful when your boss tells you that you have to write something using .Net, and you really want to use Linux...
"using pricing search engines to find low prices."
I have to wonder how far they went to get a low price; I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of web sites that look like they were put together by a 12 year old with attention span issues, and I wouldn't put my credit card anywhere near them, however cheap they were...
In a decade or so of buying online, I've had a CPU that arrived dead (squished, in fact; the packaging AMD had put it and the heatsink in had cracked, and the heatsink had crushed it), a graphics card whose fan died a month after purchase, and a couple of network cables that weren't what I expected because I hadn't read the site carefully enough.
So, I have to suspect, if you're just a little more careful with where you shop online, you shouldn't have experiences quite that bad!
I think the article's idea of a successful launch is highly questionable. The launch did strictly speaking succeed - they launched a console. I've backed up Microsoft on a lot of decisions they made, particularly the global launch, but I think they made mistakes too.
First of all, I'm noticing an incredible lack of interest in the Core version. It's looking to me as if they should never have made a Core version, particularly not at launch. Launching with only the Premium, using the high price to control demand, and possibly releasing the Core later as a cut down version, would probably have worked better. To be honest, by the time users buy a memory card instead of a hard drive, the cost saving is so minimal as not to be worth having.
Secondly, handling of who got a console when has been a major issue, and particularly the mess with who knows how many XBox 360s being bought just for the purpose of being sold at a massive profit on E-Bay. I think a better solution would have been for Microsoft to handle supply of XBox 360s themselves, until demand dropped down; customers would buy online, or by phone, or by post, and be entered into a single, global queue, with orders handled on a strictly first come first served basis. Resistrict orders to one per household, and you've got a launch that's as good as it gets. Of course, this would really irk the retailers, but I think that's less of an issue in this case.
Discuss.
I suppose this may apply more to people who are heavy mobile phone users - to me it's a useful tool for anyone that needs to contact me when they have no idea where I am (home, office, in shops), or need to contact someone and am not near a phone (it's brilliant for co-ordinating meeting up with people), which is about 20 minutes a month of usage...
> ..just run an unsecured FTP server that allows anonymous uploads. You put up your favourite music files, and pretty soon you'll have a very nice collection of illegal porn, warez and viruses.
:)
So, that's just like running unpatched Windows, right?
"People are going to spend all their time on it eventually,"
My experiences with Internet on mobiles so far has been that it's slow, expensive and awkward to use. If you spend a lot of time on buses or trains I suppose I can understand a desire for mobile Internet access, although using a laptop and data card would seem a much better solution anyway. The only time, ever, that I didn't have easy Internet access, and it was an issue, was a sys-admining problem that I'd have needed ssh to fix, anyway (and the idea of doing sys-admin work on a mobile screen with the standard keypad gives me nightmares).
Anyone, why would I want this?
Here's the thing... I'm much more interested in being able to get these shows on some sort of watch twice DRM. I don't tend to watch TV shows more than once anyway, so outright buying most of them is a waste of money for me. I want the DRM to give me the ability to watch it twice so that if there's a power cut the first time through, or there's something I want to go back and check, it's not an issue, and I don't want to be time limited either (the other alternative here).
In the meantime, I rent DVDs from Amazon.co.uk, getting 6 DVDs/month for around $16. That's $190 for 12 different seasons over the year, give or take a bit...
I think this is a brilliant point. I have an HD LCD TV, and an upscaling DVD player ($100-ish, doing the exchange rate calculation in my head), and it does almost everything I could ask of it. I can see the difference between HD and SD with good source material, but really, how much of the stuff out there is good source material?
DVDs took off like a rocket because they provided a significant leap in quality, a massive reduction in space used, the ability to easily put extras in with your video and random access (if only companies would stop thinking UOP was a good idea, anyway).
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray's only advantages are you can fit more on a single disk, and that the material can be HD. How many people can spot and really care about the difference? Of those, how many are willing to go back and replace DVDs they've probably been buying for the last few years?
I think HD disks will gradually grow in popularity, but we're talking over the new few decades, as people start buying new movies/TV shows in HD formats, rather than another drastic changeover like with DVDs...
Don't get me wrong, it's good to see new games, but I actually quite like the sequel. If I liked the first game, odds on I'll like the second game too, and that's reassuring. Given the amount of enthusiasm /. has managed to display about GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, Doom 3, Quake 4 and MGS 4, I don't think I'm alone in this.
Also, how original does a game have to be? I picked up F.E.A.R. recently, and while it was a lot of fun, the graphics were incredibly similar to Half Life 2, and the gameplay not so far removed either. So, it's technically an original game, but isn't so original in reality. Got Vampire Bloodlines too, and couldn't help but be reminded of Deus Ex by the gameplay.
If you want innovation, go look at whatever Nintendo are doing next, it's always interesting (and I'm likely to be picking up a Revolution if only out of curiousity). Or for the PC, Introversion Software is probably a good bet...
Hey, some of us like integrating our laptops into our daily excerise plan :)
I've got to say, 1Q2008 sounds good. Not to mention, single high-end cards will probably match it for speed sometime in 2007...
You're mostly paying for speed and reliability - Raptors come with a 3 year warranty, rather than the standard 1 year (although I'm sure they used to come with 5 year - hmmm)...
> beating yourself with a whip while trying to dance the tango.
Well, y'know, I have to get my kicks somehow...
Next question?
Seriously, if I want to run a P2P app I would, wait for it, run it under my OS. Firefox is a not an OS (yet, and wasn't the whole point to get away from the "everything but the kitchen sink" problem with Netscape?).
I want my web browser to, y'know, browse the web with. Doing FTP is also nice.
I want my OS to run applications under (not, despite what Microsoft would have you believe, browse the web with).
Couldn't we keep this seperation? Please?
Also, even if AllPeers is such an incredible P2P app that everyone in the world will want to use it, people that haven't moved from IE to Firefox yet are probably going to just treat Firefox as a P2P app, and IE as a web browser, IMHO...
So, it's not been great, although these systems are moved around and used daily (the Powerbooks are used as desktop replacements, and carried in (cushioned, supplied by Apple, I should point out) backpacks between work and home, so I can't exactly claim life is easy on them! Definitely getting Apple Care on any laptops we buy from here on in.
Oh, we also have a couple of G4 PowerMacs, both almost three years old. The only problem we've had with them is one has a slightly noisy fan that's probably been knocked loose when moving it (both have been moved several times now).
I think this is a great idea. I'm also kinda hoping they'll succeed , mostly because I want to watch from the relatively safety of the UK; not that I'm saying this will bring about the fall of civilisation and/or open a portal to hell, or even just mean no-one will produce IP targetted at a Swedish audience, just that I like the idea of another country finding out how this goes, first.
> Talk about the ultimate terror weapon "country X, give up ________ or our GPS guided weapon will hit elementary school Y", etc., etc.
Because terrorists have had so many problems hitting the right target so far, what with the bombs being delivered by hand most of the time. Hitting a specific target in a built up area for terrorism purposes is also completely nonsense - if you can deliver the weapons in any way, you're going to scare people, irrespective of what you hit. The only advantage to GPS guided weapons is where precision is of high importance, like, say, making sure you hit the military installation near a built up area.
Your right, I feel so much happier knowing that China has to hope its missiles hit the target they're aiming for, rather than something vaguely in the area...
</sarcasm>
Well, we kinda were the reason they became extinct...
u re_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo.html?dinos
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treas
Really? Excellent. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the corner, gloating over my tested on multiple browsers sites (which are also standards compliant, but experience says that's rarely enough!). Good to see lazy web people will finally have to test their stuff a little better...