Because this approach is far, far simpler. NVIDIA doesn't sell to end users, they sell chipsets to partners who then manufacture the boards and sell them. NVIDIA prefers this as it greatly reduces their costs, and the partners prefer the current situation as they make a lot of money selling Quadro cards.
Also, these kinds of hacks haven't been very common. But if it was as simple as just installing a different NVIDIA driver, a lot of people would just buy the cheap card and pirate the better drivers.
Although it's true that we have been forced to use x86 for quite a while, and as a result have gotten quite good at using it, that doesn't mean that it is an optimal instruction set. amd64 is an ugly hack, as is PAE, and although they do work, they don't change the fact that x86 was never intended to handle 64-bit spaces.
x86 wasn't intended to handle 32 bit either. But when it made that jump, they actually cleaned things up and made the instruction set nicer. There's a lot less weird limitations on the instruction set in 32 bit mode than 16 bit mode. The jump to 64 bit mode cleaned things up even further and actually makes things rather nice. It's not an ugly hack in any way, it's actually quite elegantly done.
PAE, yeah, that's an ugly hack, but it's really all you can do if people are demanding > 4 GB memory on a 32 bit processor. You could do things nicer if you used segmentation, but most people developed a hatred of it due to the weird way it was implemented on the 8086 and refused to consider it ever since.
And often it won't. Deleting ncb makes the same kind of sense as expecting Ctrl+ScrollLock to make the file search work.:) I did say *sometimes* it would fix it, which implies it won't often.
But deleting the.ncb does make sense, considering that's the data used for IntelliSense. With VC 6, the file would often get corrupted, and deleting it would fix the issues. With newer versions, that's sometimes the issue, but apparently there are other issues as well.
Is Ctrl+ScrollLock supposed to mean something or was that just a stupid comment?
(Visual C++'s IntelliSense just fell over after about 2 hours of using it and never came back, and refused to give any information on any library - not even the standard C++ libraries.)
Visual C++ has a nasty habit of having IntelliSense just randomly break. If you close VC++ and delete the project's.ncb file, it'll regenerate the IntelliSense data and *sometimes* it'll start working again.
Whenever possible, I will use something other than MS Office. Just about anything. So I don't have a ton of experience with it.
But I do remember Word 2000 acting like a normal SDI app. I didn't run into anything weird with it. Excel 2000 however was a weird one - it looked like SDI, but if you clicked the X in the top right corner of the window, it closed all documents. It probably did have the issues you were talking about. I always thought it was weird that Word & Excel had different behavior in the UI.
Office is still an MDI application. It just hides the main window. There's no way to have two Excel spreadsheets next to each other without starting two copies of Excel, for example.
Wouldn't that mean it's *NOT* MDI ?
MDI = Multiple Document Interface, as opposed to SDI, Single Document Interface.
MDI would be multiple document windows in one application window. SDI would be opening multiple application windows.
This may not be the case by you, but it is in New Jersey, so I'll give you a warning just in case.
DO NOT put your original will in your safe deposit box. The will is needed to get access to the safe deposit box. The bank will not let someone in the safe deposit box without the paperwork to prove they are the executor. Getting that paperwork of course requires the original will.
If the original will is in the safe deposit box, you have to go to court and get a court order to allow you access to the safe deposit box.
Just because the game isn't in production any more doesn't mean that it never will be again.
Right. But that also doesn't mean it's abandonware. The obvious example of that is Nintendo. They're constantly finding ways to rerelease their old stuff.
I consider abandonware to be things where either the rights holder no longer exists or has ok'd others doing whatever with it.
Of course not. It's not like there's any data to suggest that people who share lots of files also buy more files.
That's fine and dandy, but you're still just pulling at straws trying to find something to justify your behavior. You're simultaneously trying to argue that there's no reason for you not to copy things instead of buying them at the same time as you're arguing that it doesn't stop you from buying. Those statements are contradictory unless you never have any intentions of buying, which would just make it a rather stupid argument.
Because I'm somehow not entitled to spend my time as I see fit?
First off, if what you want to do is illegal, then no, you're not. But that's not at all what I said. You asked how anyone was harmed by your copying games, and I was giving examples.
Here's the thing. Any transaction between consenting adults is ethical. Period.
That's just flat out not true.
I sell you a car. Tell you it runs fine. I neglect to mention that if you drive the car for more than half an hour at a time it overheats and burns out some parts. Is that a transaction between consenting adults? Yes. Is it ethical? No.
I'm the head of a public company. I misrepresent the status of the company causing the stock price to go up, sell my stock, then announce a "correction" to my prior statements. Did everyone consent to the stock deals? Yes. Is it ethical? No.
Sure, easy enough to demonstrate... assuming I would have bought the files I copied for free. And also assuming that I'm not more likely to spend money on classic games when I get to try them for free first.
Your whole argument here is that there is nothing wrong with just copying the games, and no reason not to do it. You can't expect someone to actually believe you would go out and spend money on the games after you just claimed there was no reason to spend money on them when you could just copy them.
And realistically, the time you spent playing the game you copied is less time for you to play other games, which could mean less sales for other games, thereby harming someone else. It's at least a far more likely scenario to happen than the one you proposed before.
They're not losing any revenue because they're not ethically entitled to stick their noses into my private business in the first place.
And you're not ethically entitled to have other people's work.
I'll definitely agree with you that it's a different story with abandonware, but very few people trying to justify pirating roms make that distinction.
But of course that's a bigger problem than they think. I dunno how they're actually arranged but if 3 corners are hot and one not, plus the fact that it was a bad processor in the first place, these things are gonna fail so fast people are gonna be pissed!
I don't think that's going to be an issue. Remember, Celeron processors are just higher end processors with defective cache (which makes up a large portion of the processor). Disabling cache there doesn't seem to hurt them.
Don't forget graphics cards. The chips on those are massively parallel - the different models in a line are usually the same chip, just with a different number of processing units enabled. Those seem to hold up fine as well.
I don't think it's so much an issue of yield as it is desperation. The small discount for a triple core compared to a quad core would seem to mean there isn't a huge supply of them, they just need to get all the revenue they can get.
Would closing this have helped them keep the boat afloat any longer? They were in a tough position but I hear they had some crazy good online games.
Not really. Sega bled money badly for years. The Dreamcast would've had to be a PS2 level success to save their business model.
The Sega Genesis had it's pile of addons - Sega CD and 32X, each with significant development budgets and little success. The 32X was an interesting story - Sega of Japan didn't tell Sega of America that they were working on a new system, so Sega of America created the 32X. Once that happened, the Japanese branch told the US branch that they were making the Saturn, effectively making the 32X dead on arrival.
The Saturn was the ultimate 2D machine with 3D tacked on as an afterthought at the start of the 3D era. It couldn't really compete with the PlayStation, and Sega effectively gave up when the N64 launched. At that point they bundled the Saturn with it's 3 best games and still failed to sell.
You can also factor in the Game Gear, making 4 consecutive failing platforms before the Dreamcast, making quite a huge financial hole.
Not only that but why blow that CPU power on ray-tracing.
Because the easiest way to increase the power of a computer nowadays is by adding more processor cores. A quad core processor is about as expensive as a mid-range graphics card. A dual processor motherboard and a pair of low end quad core processors is probably about as much money as one high end graphics card.
Flight 93 crashed because the people on board, tried to retake the aircraft, causing the terrorists to crash the plane in the battle, not because someone made a phone call.
The passengers tried to retake the plane because they made phone calls and found out what happened to the other hijacked planes. No one is saying the act of making a phone call lead to the crash, it was the information learned during the call.
Don't get me wrong - when my phone has 4 bars, it's definitely tolerable, but it's nowhere near as good as a landline.
It's like that on all cell phones. Landline phones don't compress the audio, however, they only transmit the audio on certain frequencies, generally limited to around the frequencies human voices are in.
Cellphones use lossy compression optimized for voice. Music gets slaughtered by it by design. Cell phones aren't intended to have great audio quality, they're intended to get good enough quality. With land lines, you can build more wires if you need more capacity. You can't just add more wireless spectrum, so cell phones are designed to minimize the needed bandwidth.
The only difference you could expect between carriers is T-Mobile & AT&T vs the others. T-Mobile and AT&T have a GSM cell network, whereas the other providers use CDMA. I could see a possible difference between the different types of networks, but I don't know enough about them to know if there actually is one.
Chanel doesn't have a monopoly on litle black dresses, but they can charge $4000 for theirs.
Sure, but that's not a competitive product. People buying $4,000 dresses aren't shopping around for value, they're looking for something unique/trendy/whatever.
The Gap cannot charge more than $100.
Gap is in a segment of the market where there is competition.
The "value" of something is what it can be sold for, not "what you think it is worth" unless you are the only buyer in the market.
And when their are multiple sellers of something, they will usually try competing with each other on price. Cost to acquire/produce a product sets the boundary on where that competition can go.
Secondly, in the USA (and probably elsewhere) the majority of monopolies are heavily regulated utilities. For example, many power companies are guaranteed a fixed profit (say 10%) in the consumer electric market by the local government, based on their direct operating costs. So their margins are essentially regulated. I will not comment on whether this scheme is good or bad, but that is the way it is.
Power is pretty much the only thing regulated that highly. Phone & cable companies have far more leeway, and it's completely ignoring things like Microsoft and oligopolies.
Things are supposed to work the way you described with the government regulated monopolies, but that's not what actually happens.
The price that Verizon can charge consumers in the marketplace is not related to the price that they paid for the spectrum. It's a competitive consumer marketplace.
Most services Verizon offers aren't really in competitive markets. If they were, their costs would be the largest factor in the prices they charge.
Monopolies and oligopolies are when the price charged for something is independent of the actual cost.
iTunes is only unfair to the artist if the artist is signed to a major label. If the artist puts the songs on iTunes directly, they get 70 cents of the 99. That's rather good, as most stores don't have the volume to negotiate credit card processing fees low enough to offer anywhere near that rate.
Come on, do you know anyone that would actually pay for music today? Someone that uses the Internet? Naa, I didn't think so.
Honestly, I don't know anyone that still does get their music through file sharing unless they have absolutely no extra money. It stopped being convenient years ago. It's not worth dealing with the fake songs, mislabeled stuff, and crappy rips.
Besides, once you get a full time job you tend to value your time higher and your money lower. It also tends to make people appreciate the work put into making the music.
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Because this approach is far, far simpler. NVIDIA doesn't sell to end users, they sell chipsets to partners who then manufacture the boards and sell them. NVIDIA prefers this as it greatly reduces their costs, and the partners prefer the current situation as they make a lot of money selling Quadro cards.
Also, these kinds of hacks haven't been very common. But if it was as simple as just installing a different NVIDIA driver, a lot of people would just buy the cheap card and pirate the better drivers.
Although it's true that we have been forced to use x86 for quite a while, and as a result have gotten quite good at using it, that doesn't mean that it is an optimal instruction set. amd64 is an ugly hack, as is PAE, and although they do work, they don't change the fact that x86 was never intended to handle 64-bit spaces.
x86 wasn't intended to handle 32 bit either. But when it made that jump, they actually cleaned things up and made the instruction set nicer. There's a lot less weird limitations on the instruction set in 32 bit mode than 16 bit mode. The jump to 64 bit mode cleaned things up even further and actually makes things rather nice. It's not an ugly hack in any way, it's actually quite elegantly done.
PAE, yeah, that's an ugly hack, but it's really all you can do if people are demanding > 4 GB memory on a 32 bit processor. You could do things nicer if you used segmentation, but most people developed a hatred of it due to the weird way it was implemented on the 8086 and refused to consider it ever since.
But deleting the
Is Ctrl+ScrollLock supposed to mean something or was that just a stupid comment?
I don't own a next-gen system and have no intention of buying one. From what I have played it seems to be all graphics and very little story line.
... ... ...
Most modern games:
Graphics
Storyline
Gameplay
It's rather disappointing, as a lot of modern games are interactive movies rather than games.
(Visual C++'s IntelliSense just fell over after about 2 hours of using it and never came back, and refused to give any information on any library - not even the standard C++ libraries.)
.ncb file, it'll regenerate the IntelliSense data and *sometimes* it'll start working again.
Visual C++ has a nasty habit of having IntelliSense just randomly break. If you close VC++ and delete the project's
Whenever possible, I will use something other than MS Office. Just about anything. So I don't have a ton of experience with it.
But I do remember Word 2000 acting like a normal SDI app. I didn't run into anything weird with it. Excel 2000 however was a weird one - it looked like SDI, but if you clicked the X in the top right corner of the window, it closed all documents. It probably did have the issues you were talking about. I always thought it was weird that Word & Excel had different behavior in the UI.
Office is still an MDI application. It just hides the main window. There's no way to have two Excel spreadsheets next to each other without starting two copies of Excel, for example.
Wouldn't that mean it's *NOT* MDI ?
MDI = Multiple Document Interface, as opposed to SDI, Single Document Interface.
MDI would be multiple document windows in one application window. SDI would be opening multiple application windows.
This may not be the case by you, but it is in New Jersey, so I'll give you a warning just in case.
DO NOT put your original will in your safe deposit box. The will is needed to get access to the safe deposit box. The bank will not let someone in the safe deposit box without the paperwork to prove they are the executor. Getting that paperwork of course requires the original will.
If the original will is in the safe deposit box, you have to go to court and get a court order to allow you access to the safe deposit box.
Just because the game isn't in production any more doesn't mean that it never will be again.
Right. But that also doesn't mean it's abandonware. The obvious example of that is Nintendo. They're constantly finding ways to rerelease their old stuff.
I consider abandonware to be things where either the rights holder no longer exists or has ok'd others doing whatever with it.
Of course not. It's not like there's any data to suggest that people who share lots of files also buy more files.
That's fine and dandy, but you're still just pulling at straws trying to find something to justify your behavior. You're simultaneously trying to argue that there's no reason for you not to copy things instead of buying them at the same time as you're arguing that it doesn't stop you from buying. Those statements are contradictory unless you never have any intentions of buying, which would just make it a rather stupid argument.
Because I'm somehow not entitled to spend my time as I see fit?
First off, if what you want to do is illegal, then no, you're not. But that's not at all what I said. You asked how anyone was harmed by your copying games, and I was giving examples.
Here's the thing. Any transaction between consenting adults is ethical. Period.
That's just flat out not true.
I sell you a car. Tell you it runs fine. I neglect to mention that if you drive the car for more than half an hour at a time it overheats and burns out some parts. Is that a transaction between consenting adults? Yes. Is it ethical? No.
I'm the head of a public company. I misrepresent the status of the company causing the stock price to go up, sell my stock, then announce a "correction" to my prior statements. Did everyone consent to the stock deals? Yes. Is it ethical? No.
Sure, easy enough to demonstrate... assuming I would have bought the files I copied for free. And also assuming that I'm not more likely to spend money on classic games when I get to try them for free first.
Your whole argument here is that there is nothing wrong with just copying the games, and no reason not to do it. You can't expect someone to actually believe you would go out and spend money on the games after you just claimed there was no reason to spend money on them when you could just copy them.
And realistically, the time you spent playing the game you copied is less time for you to play other games, which could mean less sales for other games, thereby harming someone else. It's at least a far more likely scenario to happen than the one you proposed before.
They're not losing any revenue because they're not ethically entitled to stick their noses into my private business in the first place.
And you're not ethically entitled to have other people's work.
I'll definitely agree with you that it's a different story with abandonware, but very few people trying to justify pirating roms make that distinction.
and it's obviously not ethically wrong to copy files.
How is it obviously not ethnically wrong?
You're taking something for free that you were supposed to pay for. That obviously is wrong.
But of course that's a bigger problem than they think. I dunno how they're actually arranged but if 3 corners are hot and one not, plus the fact that it was a bad processor in the first place, these things are gonna fail so fast people are gonna be pissed!
I don't think that's going to be an issue. Remember, Celeron processors are just higher end processors with defective cache (which makes up a large portion of the processor). Disabling cache there doesn't seem to hurt them.
Don't forget graphics cards. The chips on those are massively parallel - the different models in a line are usually the same chip, just with a different number of processing units enabled. Those seem to hold up fine as well.
I don't think it's so much an issue of yield as it is desperation. The small discount for a triple core compared to a quad core would seem to mean there isn't a huge supply of them, they just need to get all the revenue they can get.
Would closing this have helped them keep the boat afloat any longer? They were in a tough position but I hear they had some crazy good online games.
Not really. Sega bled money badly for years. The Dreamcast would've had to be a PS2 level success to save their business model.
The Sega Genesis had it's pile of addons - Sega CD and 32X, each with significant development budgets and little success. The 32X was an interesting story - Sega of Japan didn't tell Sega of America that they were working on a new system, so Sega of America created the 32X. Once that happened, the Japanese branch told the US branch that they were making the Saturn, effectively making the 32X dead on arrival.
The Saturn was the ultimate 2D machine with 3D tacked on as an afterthought at the start of the 3D era. It couldn't really compete with the PlayStation, and Sega effectively gave up when the N64 launched. At that point they bundled the Saturn with it's 3 best games and still failed to sell.
You can also factor in the Game Gear, making 4 consecutive failing platforms before the Dreamcast, making quite a huge financial hole.
Not only that but why blow that CPU power on ray-tracing.
Because the easiest way to increase the power of a computer nowadays is by adding more processor cores. A quad core processor is about as expensive as a mid-range graphics card. A dual processor motherboard and a pair of low end quad core processors is probably about as much money as one high end graphics card.
Flight 93 crashed because the people on board, tried to retake the aircraft, causing the terrorists to crash the plane in the battle, not because someone made a phone call.
The passengers tried to retake the plane because they made phone calls and found out what happened to the other hijacked planes. No one is saying the act of making a phone call lead to the crash, it was the information learned during the call.
Don't get me wrong - when my phone has 4 bars, it's definitely tolerable, but it's nowhere near as good as a landline.
It's like that on all cell phones. Landline phones don't compress the audio, however, they only transmit the audio on certain frequencies, generally limited to around the frequencies human voices are in.
Cellphones use lossy compression optimized for voice. Music gets slaughtered by it by design. Cell phones aren't intended to have great audio quality, they're intended to get good enough quality. With land lines, you can build more wires if you need more capacity. You can't just add more wireless spectrum, so cell phones are designed to minimize the needed bandwidth.
The only difference you could expect between carriers is T-Mobile & AT&T vs the others. T-Mobile and AT&T have a GSM cell network, whereas the other providers use CDMA. I could see a possible difference between the different types of networks, but I don't know enough about them to know if there actually is one.
Chanel doesn't have a monopoly on litle black dresses, but they can charge $4000 for theirs.
Sure, but that's not a competitive product. People buying $4,000 dresses aren't shopping around for value, they're looking for something unique/trendy/whatever.
The Gap cannot charge more than $100.
Gap is in a segment of the market where there is competition.
The "value" of something is what it can be sold for, not "what you think it is worth" unless you are the only buyer in the market.
And when their are multiple sellers of something, they will usually try competing with each other on price. Cost to acquire/produce a product sets the boundary on where that competition can go.
Secondly, in the USA (and probably elsewhere) the majority of monopolies are heavily regulated utilities. For example, many power companies are guaranteed a fixed profit (say 10%) in the consumer electric market by the local government, based on their direct operating costs. So their margins are essentially regulated. I will not comment on whether this scheme is good or bad, but that is the way it is.
Power is pretty much the only thing regulated that highly. Phone & cable companies have far more leeway, and it's completely ignoring things like Microsoft and oligopolies.
Things are supposed to work the way you described with the government regulated monopolies, but that's not what actually happens.
The price that Verizon can charge consumers in the marketplace is not related to the price that they paid for the spectrum. It's a competitive consumer marketplace.
Most services Verizon offers aren't really in competitive markets. If they were, their costs would be the largest factor in the prices they charge.
Monopolies and oligopolies are when the price charged for something is independent of the actual cost.
Now, if they pushed Verizon to bid higher to win the contract won't they just charge the end users more?
You're talking Verizon. Their pricing never is based on cost, only on what they think they can get away with charging.
My favorite is the random fees on Verizon Wireless bills that go straight to Verizon that get lumped in with the other fees.
iTunes is only unfair to the artist if the artist is signed to a major label. If the artist puts the songs on iTunes directly, they get 70 cents of the 99. That's rather good, as most stores don't have the volume to negotiate credit card processing fees low enough to offer anywhere near that rate.
Come on, do you know anyone that would actually pay for music today? Someone that uses the Internet? Naa, I didn't think so.
Honestly, I don't know anyone that still does get their music through file sharing unless they have absolutely no extra money. It stopped being convenient years ago. It's not worth dealing with the fake songs, mislabeled stuff, and crappy rips.
Besides, once you get a full time job you tend to value your time higher and your money lower. It also tends to make people appreciate the work put into making the music.
I remember the Netscape default background color was gray. White of course was the only other reasonable choice.