Well I've had abysmal experiences with both Apple and Nikon in their customer service/repair. Before you jump to the conclusion, I do not misuse their products at all and I'm very careful with anything expensive I purchase.
See the problem is you see these things as just a game. A lot of flight simmers take their game very seriously and try to make it as real as possible. That's rather hard when your aircraft have dicky arcade names. People spend hundreds of dollars on sim addons, build home cockpits, and go to incredible lengths to make online flying realistic. It's a whole other mindset.
If you'd spent 18 months building a model to release as freeware how would you feel if a large aircraft company that built it many years before said "no that's our copyright". Talk about copyright stifling the creative process.
Ended up getting the credit card company to cover the bill as they doubled the warranty. To do this I had to spend many hours on the phone and a long time writing back and forth to the issuing bank, the wrong insurer the bank referred me to, the correct insurer and Dell (who I had to get to admit in writing that they'd have covered the problem if it had happened under warranty). I had the thing fixed. Took 5 months. I bought another laptop (sadly another Dell because $1000 price difference with the nearest competition including 2 extra years of warranty and the right set of features was hard to ignore) in the meantime.
Defeating DRM is trivial. Both bluray and hd have been bypassed, as has the drm 'protecting' vista. all within the last month or so. Future versions of drm will be cracked just as easily. You can write software that says it defies physics, but in the end
Not all DRM is trivial to beat. Some of it takes time. 10 years ago it wouldn't involve risking jail time to try and defeat it.
Welcome to the soviet states of america? I guess it could happen. But that might just be enough to get some people up in arms (literally).
This is why it's being done slowly. Get people use to the poison one step at a time. Why aren't people "up in arms" over the fact that a person can go to jail for 5 years for backing up a DVD?...only because it's not yet being enforced. So you let the law sit there for 5-10 years and don't enforce it, then you enforce it but only in extreme cases or where you want to make an example. Then once people have accepted that you slowly increase your enforcement and bring in technical measures to make enforcement easier. Then you enact new laws giving search and seizure powers.
well, I'm not american, and for now my country hasn't got *all* the screwed up laws you have...
I'm not American either. I'm an Australian citizen. We've just had similarly draconian laws come into effect thanks to our "free trade" agreement with the US (which we need in order for several of our industries to remain viable). A lot of countries are being coerced into falling into line with American law. Some of course are simply able to refuse (eg. China) but many can't.
No the difference is the DRM isn't built into the OS. It's like the whole Netscape vs IE thing. You have something built into the OS and sooner or later it dominates whether it's better than the competition or not, because it's standard and because it's a no effort install.
You're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about. They're already preventing you from running hobby programs. Device drivers must be signed by MS to work in Vista. The OS will stop running if you try to "tamper" with its activation. There are laws in place NOW that mean it's perfectly valid for law enforcement to throw you in jail for 5 years for a first offence copying a piece of copy protected music, or breaking any DRM. Backing up a piece of software, using a nocd hack, all jailable offences NOW. You don't enact such laws just to occassionally use them. Stricter enforcement is coming, it just requires that people be made use to such crap one small step at a time. Wake up and smell the house burning down around you before you become a crispy critter.
People have a choice of OS like they have a choice of browser. It doesn't matter if Netscape or Firefox is better. IE is going to win. Of those OSes you speak, one is largely considered a geek toy by desktop users and the other is proprietary elitist junk. In 10 years do you think there will be a non-DRM OS choice out there? There's a good chance it will be legislated out of the picture, or completely useless for working with the media of the day because it doesn't support DRM that the whole thing's a joke.
Since when do "they" sell anything that isn't already DRM'd? The last new thing released without encryption was CDs where the physical media was the "DRM" (it was sold as "uncopyable" to the media owners).
CDs are still current. The DRM on DVDs is patheticly easy to beat. The next round of media won't be so easy to back up, copy, trade etc. I wouldn't object to this if they didn't keep trying to re-charge for the same content because a new media comes out, or your PC needs a reformat. I also object to the media companies disallowing reuse of material in an educational and/or non-profit capacity. For example you're not allowed to mix in audio from a CD onto a video you make without getting permission that's both incredibly hard to get and very expensive.
It's pretty much true today. the dmca dissallows circumvention, and dvd/bluray/hd and itunes are encoded/encrypted.... so long as we're talking about the Big Media.
There is still very little enforcement happening, and it's coming. Just wait for a time when your house can be randomly checked for copied media, and if ANY is found (even a backup) they throw your ass into jail for 5 years. Not going to happen? False. It is, slowly, one step at a time.
the tighter they squeeze, the more artists are going to slip through their fingers.
This isn't fucking Starwars here. This isn't even about the media per se. This is about enacting and enforcing laws selectively that will give the government and (with the aid of the government) media organisations an incredible amount of power to do an incredible amount of harm. No one should go to jail over backing up a movie or a song. That's fucking insane. We're going back to the days when you send convicts to the colonies for stealing a loaf of bread. Only it's not bread, it's culture.
I'd end this with a "you decide"...for now. In 10 years, when all support for non-DRM encumbered crap is gone, no one will be deciding because you'll be choosing between useless infested OS's. I don't share your optimism.
Now you have an OS capable of receiving files that can't be traded or burnt or played on other computers. As the number of people using such an OS goes up so too does the publisher's ability to choose to only sell in DRM capable form. It's a HUGE deal. Mindbogglingly so. People like yourself just don't get it.
Well just wait till they no longer sell DRM free content. Vista is all about putting the controls in. Over time the screws will be tightened and non-DRM stuff including players and encoders will either be illegal or the content will all be DRM made so you can't engage in your illegal activities. By the way you're probably engaging in stuff that carries a 5 year prison term, and enforcement is going to take time but it's coming. What you've done by installing Vista is given publishers permission and the ability to sell you DRM infested garbage.
Those bits are less useful than the non-DRM version. Therefore the more you download DRM crap the less use the net is, quite literally. Now you're free to do so, but you're also free to stab yourself in the eye - it doesn't mean you should. Also the way most DRM works, the more DRM the greater bandwidth required.
People don't give a shit about connecting computers unless they can do SOMETHING THEY WANT with them. Whether that's watch porn, traffic in digital content, transmit scientific data, talk to distant relatives instantly and cheaply, send their boss a message to say they'll be in sick. Different people want different things but they don't stop once the computers are connected and say ahhh I have the Internet now I'm connected and never have to worry about it again. Connecting the computer is just the pain in the arse they go through so they can do what they need to do. If the net was just about connecting computers for the sake of connecting computers it'd be a small research project at DARPA or some uni that died 25 years ago.
Rubbish. Vista doesn't change anything having to do with the Internet Protocol. You move bits around. You move them around freely.
You use to then be able to use those bits freely. Now you can't courtesy of DRM. The freedom to copy useless bits is not what the net is about.
But if you want to say, "Hey, remember the good old days when I got all my music for free, and only suckers actually paid for it?", well, whatever. More power to you. Just don't expect the guys who make bits for a living to reminisce along with you.
I like the guys who make the original bits (artists). I'd like to give them money so they can keep going. On the other hand the guys that change those bits so I can't play them, try to make me re-buy everything and refuse to properly compensate the artists can go fuck themselves.
If you're going to talk like a clueless angst ridden pre-teen, expect to be talked down to like one.
From the Wikipedia article: "Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work)"
I think if you look at my first post on this topic you'll see that is exactly what I was saying - he was well educated and he simply saw what was there. You might want to actually read what I've written before launching an attack.
He certainly didn't wait until he had this formal education to think about relativity. He'd done most of the ground work years before. The setting was a much less formal one in which he started out with learning difficulties once fascinated by the mathematics largely taught himself and worked hard until he was outdoing his tutors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein "From 1894, following the failure of Hermann Einstein's electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved to Milan and proceeded to Pavia after a few months. Einstein's first scientific work, called "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields", was written contemporaneously for one of his uncles. Albert remained in Munich to finish his schooling, but only completed one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to join his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half before the final examinations, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate.[4] That same year, at age 16, he performed a famous thought experiment by trying to visualize what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. He realized that, according to Maxwell's equations, light waves would obey the principle of relativity: the speed of the light would always be constant, no matter what the velocity of the observer. This conclusion would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity"
There are plenty of biographies on Einstein that go into more detail. I've read a couple.
What you need is rapid development tools and languages. We've moved completely away from Rapid Application Development tools and onto this shitty web paradigm. Without rapid development tools almost no child will put in the effort to see a result worth speaking of. You hit the nail on the head regarding games. If children still had a chance of coding a simple game to a level that could go commercial you'd see much more interest. Who cares if they come with the computer. If your kid can download a ring tone or an mp3 or video, they can download and install an executable. The thing is it would need to be the same technology that the pros use. Therein lies the paradox and the problem. Professional game developers work in teams and are organised by management. Even if a child could get hold of the tools what chance have they got of forming a development team complete with project managers and leadership.
Also as more people entered the field and more was expected from computer engineers some became consultants and decided to make overly complex frameworks to ensure their job security. The pro tools are complete crud in business programming (J2EE and all the satellite technologies built on it are a god damned joke).
Talk about blowing an opportunity. You could have and should have introduced your son to how difficult it is to make the stuff he likes - let him know that it takes years of dedicated work and that for some people writing a game is a full time job for many years. If you let him go around thinking "grand theft auto" can be written in 2 days by one person he's going to be very disillusioned by any work he gets and find it difficult to hold down any job. Anyway how old is your son??? If he's old enough let him go out and find part time work so he has some understanding of how the world works and what he's up for. A gentle slow introduction and an understanding and appreciation of what work is like is something he'll sorely need to succeed.
This kind of work is not something you take on by looking it up on a general encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. If you're at a point where you can actually make an attempt on such a problem, you're probably already familiar with specialist literature and you more likely than not have heard of the problem long ago and not yet tackled it.
If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.
The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.
Actually, every instructor I've had works in the industry. Not *DID WORK*....but *WORKS*. Classes are at night.
Ahhh getting use to being burnt out and not having any kind of social or family life to speak of early on are you? Should prepare you well for that industry. Good little code Monkey.
This is NOT something to be proud of. It is NOT a good thing. It will not leave you happy and satisfied. If you _HAVE_ to work long hours or study till the early hours of the morning for a short period of time, that's usually doable without too many adverse effects. Try it for too long and trust me from someone who worked and commuted for 12 hours or more a day and then went back home to work on a Masters, it'll leave you isolated and/or with health problems.
I've always found it amazing that certain jobs required working ridiculous hours when you can't be at all efficient and it plays havoc with the rest of your life. I guess I don't mind as much that game developers choose to put up with this, but doctors work equally stupid hours. I'd rather have some code messed up than have my life messed up by a doctor who made a bad diagnosis.
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I know a few politicians I consider sock puppets for other entities. Can we ban them too?
Well I've had abysmal experiences with both Apple and Nikon in their customer service/repair. Before you jump to the conclusion, I do not misuse their products at all and I'm very careful with anything expensive I purchase.
See the problem is you see these things as just a game. A lot of flight simmers take their game very seriously and try to make it as real as possible. That's rather hard when your aircraft have dicky arcade names. People spend hundreds of dollars on sim addons, build home cockpits, and go to incredible lengths to make online flying realistic. It's a whole other mindset.
If you'd spent 18 months building a model to release as freeware how would you feel if a large aircraft company that built it many years before said "no that's our copyright". Talk about copyright stifling the creative process.
Not the first time. I was hit with this problem:
m essage?board.id=cc_faq&message.id=3297 8/i t+over+Inspiron/2100-1005_3-6150328.html
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/436
http://news.com.com/Dell+hit+with+class+action+su
Ended up getting the credit card company to cover the bill as they doubled the warranty. To do this I had to spend many hours on the phone and a long time writing back and forth to the issuing bank, the wrong insurer the bank referred me to, the correct insurer and Dell (who I had to get to admit in writing that they'd have covered the problem if it had happened under warranty). I had the thing fixed. Took 5 months. I bought another laptop (sadly another Dell because $1000 price difference with the nearest competition including 2 extra years of warranty and the right set of features was hard to ignore) in the meantime.
Defeating DRM is trivial. Both bluray and hd have been bypassed, as has the drm 'protecting' vista. all within the last month or so. Future versions of drm will be cracked just as easily. You can write software that says it defies physics, but in the end
Not all DRM is trivial to beat. Some of it takes time. 10 years ago it wouldn't involve risking jail time to try and defeat it.
Welcome to the soviet states of america?
I guess it could happen. But that might just be enough to get some people up in arms (literally).
This is why it's being done slowly. Get people use to the poison one step at a time. Why aren't people "up in arms" over the fact that a person can go to jail for 5 years for backing up a DVD?...only because it's not yet being enforced. So you let the law sit there for 5-10 years and don't enforce it, then you enforce it but only in extreme cases or where you want to make an example. Then once people have accepted that you slowly increase your enforcement and bring in technical measures to make enforcement easier. Then you enact new laws giving search and seizure powers.
well, I'm not american, and for now my country hasn't got *all* the screwed up laws you have...
I'm not American either. I'm an Australian citizen. We've just had similarly draconian laws come into effect thanks to our "free trade" agreement with the US (which we need in order for several of our industries to remain viable). A lot of countries are being coerced into falling into line with American law. Some of course are simply able to refuse (eg. China) but many can't.
No the difference is the DRM isn't built into the OS. It's like the whole Netscape vs IE thing. You have something built into the OS and sooner or later it dominates whether it's better than the competition or not, because it's standard and because it's a no effort install.
You're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about. They're already preventing you from running hobby programs. Device drivers must be signed by MS to work in Vista. The OS will stop running if you try to "tamper" with its activation. There are laws in place NOW that mean it's perfectly valid for law enforcement to throw you in jail for 5 years for a first offence copying a piece of copy protected music, or breaking any DRM. Backing up a piece of software, using a nocd hack, all jailable offences NOW. You don't enact such laws just to occassionally use them. Stricter enforcement is coming, it just requires that people be made use to such crap one small step at a time. Wake up and smell the house burning down around you before you become a crispy critter.
People have a choice of OS like they have a choice of browser. It doesn't matter if Netscape or Firefox is better. IE is going to win. Of those OSes you speak, one is largely considered a geek toy by desktop users and the other is proprietary elitist junk. In 10 years do you think there will be a non-DRM OS choice out there? There's a good chance it will be legislated out of the picture, or completely useless for working with the media of the day because it doesn't support DRM that the whole thing's a joke.
Since when do "they" sell anything that isn't already DRM'd? The last new thing released without encryption was CDs where the physical media was the "DRM" (it was sold as "uncopyable" to the media owners).
... so long as we're talking about the Big Media.
...for now. In 10 years, when all support for non-DRM encumbered crap is gone, no one will be deciding because you'll be choosing between useless infested OS's. I don't share your optimism.
CDs are still current. The DRM on DVDs is patheticly easy to beat. The next round of media won't be so easy to back up, copy, trade etc. I wouldn't object to this if they didn't keep trying to re-charge for the same content because a new media comes out, or your PC needs a reformat. I also object to the media companies disallowing reuse of material in an educational and/or non-profit capacity. For example you're not allowed to mix in audio from a CD onto a video you make without getting permission that's both incredibly hard to get and very expensive.
It's pretty much true today. the dmca dissallows circumvention, and dvd/bluray/hd and itunes are encoded/encrypted.
There is still very little enforcement happening, and it's coming. Just wait for a time when your house can be randomly checked for copied media, and if ANY is found (even a backup) they throw your ass into jail for 5 years. Not going to happen? False. It is, slowly, one step at a time.
the tighter they squeeze, the more artists are going to slip through their fingers.
This isn't fucking Starwars here. This isn't even about the media per se. This is about enacting and enforcing laws selectively that will give the government and (with the aid of the government) media organisations an incredible amount of power to do an incredible amount of harm. No one should go to jail over backing up a movie or a song. That's fucking insane. We're going back to the days when you send convicts to the colonies for stealing a loaf of bread. Only it's not bread, it's culture.
I'd end this with a "you decide"
Now you have an OS capable of receiving files that can't be traded or burnt or played on other computers. As the number of people using such an OS goes up so too does the publisher's ability to choose to only sell in DRM capable form. It's a HUGE deal. Mindbogglingly so. People like yourself just don't get it.
Well just wait till they no longer sell DRM free content. Vista is all about putting the controls in. Over time the screws will be tightened and non-DRM stuff including players and encoders will either be illegal or the content will all be DRM made so you can't engage in your illegal activities. By the way you're probably engaging in stuff that carries a 5 year prison term, and enforcement is going to take time but it's coming. What you've done by installing Vista is given publishers permission and the ability to sell you DRM infested garbage.
Those bits are less useful than the non-DRM version. Therefore the more you download DRM crap the less use the net is, quite literally. Now you're free to do so, but you're also free to stab yourself in the eye - it doesn't mean you should. Also the way most DRM works, the more DRM the greater bandwidth required.
People don't give a shit about connecting computers unless they can do SOMETHING THEY WANT with them. Whether that's watch porn, traffic in digital content, transmit scientific data, talk to distant relatives instantly and cheaply, send their boss a message to say they'll be in sick. Different people want different things but they don't stop once the computers are connected and say ahhh I have the Internet now I'm connected and never have to worry about it again. Connecting the computer is just the pain in the arse they go through so they can do what they need to do. If the net was just about connecting computers for the sake of connecting computers it'd be a small research project at DARPA or some uni that died 25 years ago.
You might as well go by star sign. Myers-Briggs/Jung personality tests are complete pseudoscientific BS.
http://skepdic.com/myersb.html
Sure, I guess you could take down their entire system if they fired you. That is, if you're okay with never working in the industry again.
It's pretty hard to work in IT from prison. What you honestly think you'd just be fired?
Rubbish. Vista doesn't change anything having to do with the Internet Protocol. You move bits around. You move them around freely.
You use to then be able to use those bits freely. Now you can't courtesy of DRM. The freedom to copy useless bits is not what the net is about.
But if you want to say, "Hey, remember the good old days when I got all my music for free, and only suckers actually paid for it?", well, whatever. More power to you. Just don't expect the guys who make bits for a living to reminisce along with you.
I like the guys who make the original bits (artists). I'd like to give them money so they can keep going. On the other hand the guys that change those bits so I can't play them, try to make me re-buy everything and refuse to properly compensate the artists can go fuck themselves.
If you're going to talk like a clueless angst ridden pre-teen, expect to be talked down to like one.
My mistake then. I assumed that since I'd quoted Wikipedia, and the poster was complaining that it was in the Wikipedia article.
From the Wikipedia article:
"Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work)"
Well what are you waiting for? Go correct that Wikipedia article, and cite a couple of references to back up what you're saying.
I think if you look at my first post on this topic you'll see that is exactly what I was saying - he was well educated and he simply saw what was there. You might want to actually read what I've written before launching an attack.
Actually he obtained his doctorate the same year he published his Annus Mirabilis paperso ctorate
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Works_and_d
He certainly didn't wait until he had this formal education to think about relativity. He'd done most of the ground work years before. The setting was a much less formal one in which he started out with learning difficulties once fascinated by the mathematics largely taught himself and worked hard until he was outdoing his tutors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein
"From 1894, following the failure of Hermann Einstein's electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved to Milan and proceeded to Pavia after a few months. Einstein's first scientific work, called "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields", was written contemporaneously for one of his uncles. Albert remained in Munich to finish his schooling, but only completed one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to join his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half before the final examinations, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate.[4] That same year, at age 16, he performed a famous thought experiment by trying to visualize what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. He realized that, according to Maxwell's equations, light waves would obey the principle of relativity: the speed of the light would always be constant, no matter what the velocity of the observer. This conclusion would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity"
There are plenty of biographies on Einstein that go into more detail. I've read a couple.
What you need is rapid development tools and languages. We've moved completely away from Rapid Application Development tools and onto this shitty web paradigm. Without rapid development tools almost no child will put in the effort to see a result worth speaking of. You hit the nail on the head regarding games. If children still had a chance of coding a simple game to a level that could go commercial you'd see much more interest. Who cares if they come with the computer. If your kid can download a ring tone or an mp3 or video, they can download and install an executable. The thing is it would need to be the same technology that the pros use. Therein lies the paradox and the problem. Professional game developers work in teams and are organised by management. Even if a child could get hold of the tools what chance have they got of forming a development team complete with project managers and leadership.
Also as more people entered the field and more was expected from computer engineers some became consultants and decided to make overly complex frameworks to ensure their job security. The pro tools are complete crud in business programming (J2EE and all the satellite technologies built on it are a god damned joke).
Talk about blowing an opportunity. You could have and should have introduced your son to how difficult it is to make the stuff he likes - let him know that it takes years of dedicated work and that for some people writing a game is a full time job for many years. If you let him go around thinking "grand theft auto" can be written in 2 days by one person he's going to be very disillusioned by any work he gets and find it difficult to hold down any job. Anyway how old is your son??? If he's old enough let him go out and find part time work so he has some understanding of how the world works and what he's up for. A gentle slow introduction and an understanding and appreciation of what work is like is something he'll sorely need to succeed.
This kind of work is not something you take on by looking it up on a general encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. If you're at a point where you can actually make an attempt on such a problem, you're probably already familiar with specialist literature and you more likely than not have heard of the problem long ago and not yet tackled it.
This would be a better place to start:
http://arxiv.org/
If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.
The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.
Actually, every instructor I've had works in the industry. Not *DID WORK*....but *WORKS*. Classes are at night.
Ahhh getting use to being burnt out and not having any kind of social or family life to speak of early on are you? Should prepare you well for that industry. Good little code Monkey.
This is NOT something to be proud of. It is NOT a good thing. It will not leave you happy and satisfied. If you _HAVE_ to work long hours or study till the early hours of the morning for a short period of time, that's usually doable without too many adverse effects. Try it for too long and trust me from someone who worked and commuted for 12 hours or more a day and then went back home to work on a Masters, it'll leave you isolated and/or with health problems.
I've always found it amazing that certain jobs required working ridiculous hours when you can't be at all efficient and it plays havoc with the rest of your life. I guess I don't mind as much that game developers choose to put up with this, but doctors work equally stupid hours. I'd rather have some code messed up than have my life messed up by a doctor who made a bad diagnosis.
Certainly helps with those pesky highlanders.
There can be only 1.000001