I used the preview downloads to make decisions on which CDs to buy, and actually did buy CDs based on the previews.
And this is exactly what the RIAA don't want, they would much prefer you to buy CDs, and then find out that you don't like them... If people can try before they buy, then they have to actually make an effort to produce decent music that people will like.
So music sales have gone down, why is piracy automatically to blame?
Perhaps people consider all the manufactured pop music coming out these days trashy? Perhaps the current state of the economy means people have less disposable income to spend on cds? Perhaps people simply have something better to spend their money on?
Why not? A publicly traded company's only duty is to make money for its shareholders... That duty is not incompatible with the goals of favoritism in other markets... If OnLive comes to dominate its market, while still being utterly dependent on MS, then MS will have huge leverage over them and be able to take the lion share of the profit.
How do they know OnLive don't have a private agreement with MS for licensing? Just because MS make the terms extortionate to everyone else, doesn't mean they can't have a special agreement with OnLive that effectively forces any competitors out of the market. That's what happens when you build a business that depends on a single supplier, they can enter the market themselves or favour your competitor and your utterly screwed.
Your a small niche, locked into a particular piece of proprietary software tied to a particular proprietary machine.
I also occupy a small niche, i require low level wireless manipulation tools that run only on linux with a modified kernel (i guess they could potentially be ported to any other system where you have access to kernel source code)... I could potentially do my work on an openpandora or raspberry pi, but an x86 windows pc or ipad would be useless. Does this make all these devices toys?
Plenty of work also gets done on mainframes, as well as sparc or power based servers, many of which cost millions of dollars. does this mean that your x86 windows based pc is a toy?
The vast majority of home computer users do little more than browsing the web, even reading email is typically done via a web browser these days... These users would get by just fine with a raspberry pi or similar low cost machine.
The vast majority of corporate computer users do little more than word processing and email, again these tasks could be performed by a much cheaper machine running much cheaper software, saving millions of dollars.
There will always be niches that are tied to specialised equipment, and those working in such niches usually get ripped off with much higher prices and tools which are either very dated or wholly inferior.
Give me a few hours with access to a pc and its also possible to make a colossal mess of the business...
Corporate networks are built on the idea that everything inside is trusted, and everything outside is behind a firewall. Once you get on the inside, its easy to rip the whole thing apart. Having the network full of ipads would actually make that more difficult.
It's also easier to prevent an ipad user from getting owned or doing stupid than a windows user. Exploits could exist for either system, but the ipad provides less functionality to be attacked and has a better mechanism for updating third party apps.
Also, if you're going to deploy something like an ipad you should only do so when its the most appropriate tool for the job, and the same applies to a pc... This attitude that a windows based pc is automatically the best tool for any task is stupid. If you assess the actual needs of the users, weighed against security concerns and costs there are many use cases where ipads are actually a good choice.
For example... A salesman who travels to client sites, needs to be able to quickly and easily show brochures and other information to his prospective clients, an ipad is much easier to carry round than a laptop or a big stack of paper brochures and has a bigger screen than a phone. In one case i'm aware of they actually double up as a (rather large) gps in the car, so the salesman can easily find his next client.
A warehouse that dispatches goods, an ipad or similar device can be carried around, it connects to a webserver over wifi which shows the worker the next order, and shows them which part of the warehouse to collect the goods from. He collects the goods, packs them, the warehouse inventory is updated to remove the items and the worker is then given the next job. I've seen some places use specialised hardware for this, but it tends to be more expensive than an ipad while not offering any benefits.
If you were wearing clean sweatpants in good condition i wouldn't care. If you were a wife beater i wouldn't hire you because i wouldn't want people who commit illegal and/or violent activities. Plenty of wife beaters wear suits... If you smelled of rotten turnips i also wouldn't employ you, because the smell would adversely affect others. Your choice of clothes wouldn't.
Not sure what you mean by bedhead hair...
So long as someone is wearing clean clothes in good condition it doesn't really matter wether its a suit, sweatpants, jeans, a poncho or whatever. If clothes don't directly affect the job (eg someone working on a construction site should wear appropriate protective gear) then it shouldn't matter.
It is completely arbitrary to consider someone wearing a suit to be "serious" while someone wearing shorts and t-shirt is somehow "not serious"...
Wearing dirty or tatty clothes is different, but so long as clothes are clean and in good condition it shouldn't matter exactly what they are. It should be down to an individual to be an individual, not to wear a fixed uniform. Choice of clothes should be down to individual choice and environmental factors.
Incidentally, in the summer and especially on the subway i see far more people wearing suits and ties with big wet patches under their armpits than people wearing t-shirts.
Well, the further you get from what is clearly as yes/no met type of standard, the more problems you have.
What your really advocating here is a uniform then, with everyone wearing exactly the same...
Why should i waste considerable sums of money on a tailored suit, plus further costs to buy more than one, plus the cost and hassle of dry cleaning (not to mention the toxic chemicals)... When i can just buy normal clothes for a fraction of the price which are perfectly comfortable?
The best part of having a girlfriend is getting *un*dressed... And what you wear when you go out is pretty irrelevant anyway, you don't need to wear a uniform to go the to the opera.
The problem is that anyone is still small minded enough to not take someone seriously simply because they aren't wearing what they perceive to be the correct uniform. These preconceptions need to die a horrible death, someone's clothing has no impact on their ability to do a particular job and people should be free to wear whatever clothing is most comfortable for them. (wearing a suit is horrendously uncomfortable, and wastefully expensive... in the summer when the subways are blisteringly hot you arrive at work all sweaty, and have to spend a fortune in dry cleaning to keep cleaning your suits).
I'm not the original AC, but i also agree with you whole heartedly about suits and ties... I detest wearing a suit and/or tie, and find it utterly ridiculous that people have some kind of perception that someone wearing a suit is somehow going to do their job better than someone who isn't.
In many cases, the opposite is true... Personally i find such clothing extremely uncomfortable, and will be spending more time thinking about how uncomfortable i am and watching the clock so i can get into some more sensible clothes, whereas if i was dressed comfortably i could concentrate more thoroughly on the work at hand. I've also found that people who aren't very good tend to wear a suit to try and hide their deficiencies, while those who are confidant in their abilities don't feel the need to dress in any particular way.
Business cards i think are just obsolete, they served a purpose once but have been superseded by modern technology. Suits and ties never served any useful purpose whatsoever.
The end result of this, will be that people with uninsured and untaxed vehicles (who are by definition already breaking the law) will simply continue breaking the law, by stealing fuel from other vehicles...
How much of that time is spent actually enjoying yourself, vs carrying out repetitive actions necessary to gain credits for use in another part of the game? For instance i played elite for many hours, but a lot of that was spent repetitively travelling back and forth trading so that i could earn enough money to buy a better ship.
I don'y have a problem with paying per month for a service, so long as the client (read: game) for accessing that service is free... I hate the idea of purchasing a game, only to find its actually useless without also subscribing to an online service.
If i'm renting a service, i don't expect to pay a non refundable up front cost... Like Internet connectivity, although i need a router i am free to buy my own or the isp supplies one for free.
If i BUY something , i expect what i bought to be fully functional for as long as i keep it... I can still play Quake and Doom online because i'm free to run my own server, i doubt these games would still be playable today if they depended on a server operated by the publisher.
It is the short sighted sellers more so than the buyers...
If someone has $60 to spend on games, considering the trivial media cost does it really make a difference to you wether they buy 1 game for $60, 2 for $30, 6 for $10 or even 60 for $1 each? Either way you've spent a pittance on media, and you get $60 from the customer.
The customers only have a finite budget, so increased prices will just decrease the number of games they buy, they will not magically buy more games than they have money for.
Similarly, whats better... Selling 1000 games at $6 each, or selling 100 at $60? Both of these instances net you $6000.... But what if instead of 1000 you sold 2000 at $6 because the lower price enabled people to purchase who couldn't have afforded to do so at $60? You now not only have $12000 instead of $6000, but you also have many more people playing your game, telling their friends about it, posting about it online etc.
Also if your game happens to be crap or just not to someone's taste, $6 is a lot easier to write off as a loss than $60... And on the other side of this coin, if you're not sure a game is any good your far more willing to risk $6 than $60.
As someone else pointed out, when Valve sold a game for $2 their profits went up 1700%.. Why? Because at that price far more people were willing to buy, and the extra effort to obtain a pirate copy simply wasn't worth $2.
Indeed, reviews these days are bought and paid for by the games companies so you simply cannot trust them... Publications that review games rely on the goodwill of publishers to provide prerelease copies of games for them to review, but publishers will simply refuse to do this if the publication has published bad reviews, forcing them to purchase the games on the open market after they've been released, by which time all their competitors have already published their reviews months ago.
And game demos, if they are made available at all, tend to showcase the best aspects of the game. I played a game demo of a platform game years ago which was just the first level and it was great, bought the full game and found that: Subsequent levels were nowhere near as good as the first one... There was no way to save, so if you died you went back to the start. Although the first level was good, playing it over and over again soon got boring... Playing the second level over and over in order to get to the third really bored me to death and i never got any further than that.
Other things to consider...
The cost of producing a game is a one off, the actual per copy cost is trivial (and has actually gone down, you no longer get big boxes, multiple floppies, printed manuals etc and some are distributed online now so not even media costs)... If the games were priced more cheaply, then they would sell more copies and still make the same or more profit... Most people who buy games would simply buy more if the prices were cheaper, and some of those who pirate would switch to buying instead.
Many games are simple remakes of older games, i doubt they cost all that much to make, and yet they are still sold at the same prices as original games... A lot of sports games come out every year, and the only change is an updated list of players and teams - hardly a huge budget activity... Charging full price for such games makes people feel even more ripped off.
Some are just one or more games from an older platform, bundled with an emulator... No original content at all really, and yet still full price.
DRM schemes do nothing to stop serious pirates, who will soon have a crack available... It is paying customers who have to suffer with the various hassles caused by the scheme.
The only other impact is "casual piracy", that is where someone makes a copy for their friends... We used to do this a lot in school, since being schoolkids we simply couldnt afford to purchase all the games, so everyone bought a handful of games and we traded copies among ourselves. Those games which we couldn't copy due to copy protection schemes, we went and bought copyable pirate copies from someone... Had we not been able to copy the games, or acquire pirate copies, we would just have played less games and found other things to do... We simply couldn't afford to buy more games than we did. If the games had been cheaper, we would have bought more for the same money.
Profit and healthcare simply do not belong together... Any system where corporate greed results in deaths and/or suffering is morally bankrupt. Research should be conducted by governments and non profits, the results published in the public domain and then companies can compete to produce the drugs as cheaply as possible.
If Natco can produce a drug for $175 while still turning a profit, and it's hard to believe Bayer would have overheads higher than Natco, infact they are likely much lower due to economies of scale... Charging $5500 for something that must cost under $175 to produce is reprehensible in any case, let alone one where people suffer.
And extortionate prices are not the only negative of for-profit drugs companies... It's also far more profitable to temporarily alleviate the symptoms than to actually cure the underlying problem, so this is what corporate research will be aimed at.
Exactly, I'm no big fan of nuclear but the alternatives are either even worse (dirtier, more damaging, unsustainable etc), or simply not viable at all.
Until such time as viable alternatives become available, they should be working on building more nuclear plants while improving the efficiency and safety of them.
Building nuclear power plants in an area that's prone to natural disasters was never a good plan...
At that point the Amiga user base was so small it's lucky there were usable stacks at all, no way a 3rd party company could make money releasing a free stack and not enough free software enthusiasts to release a decent free stack.
There are plenty of niche platforms with enough open source developers to write basic things like a tcp stack and often a lot more, see bsd, aros, syllable, minix etc.
Commercial development for a niche platform is even worse (which is why it almost never happens), with the customer base being so small there is very limited money in it, which means either ridiculous prices or severe corner cutting to reduce development costs... The end result was that the amiga applications were not only far more expensive than equivalent applications on other platforms, but they were also massively inferior... I refer you to my earlier comment about running netscape under macos emulation on the amiga.
A niche platform simply isn't viable as a commercial concern, the only hope it has for survival or even growth is through being open and free. Had amigaos been open sourced, and ported to hardware that was actually available for purchase it could be pretty successful these days. There are various use cases where it would have been more suitable than linux due to its lower resource requirements and better responsiveness on slower hardware.
Yeah everyone was pretty desperate to keep the platform alive, including the few commercial and shareware devs left. If there were no commercial devs would anyone have released a TCP stack etc for free?
And in doing so drove users away... Considering that free and open source tcp stacks already existed for linux and bsd, and as far as i know the commercial amigaos stacks were ported from bsd in any case... It's extremely likely that a free stack would have been ported (after all, aros has a free stack), and this would then have been available to everyone.
If they want to protect their little pet project they're within their rights to under the Mozilla license, they're still releasing it for free (beer).
"protect" ? protect from what? "protect" it from being ported to other platforms like aros? protect it from having bugs fixed by a third party? protect it from being updated when the original devs realise theres no profit in it?
Well duh, that's true of every single limited demo for no-longer available software. Authors could have released free version as abandonware but there's nothing to say they have to. Maybe now we have a huge FOSS scene we're feeling a bit entitled to free software in our old ages?
So now you have the situation where someone who purchases an old amiga for retro uses will not be able to network it. What's the use in that? I have an A4000 with an ethernet card which cannot be used in amigaos, i have to run linux on it which turns it into a linux box thats slower than even the lowest end embedded linux boxes these days.
I prefer focus follows mouse, but it can be turned off. Clicking in a window should not bring that window to the front otherwise having the focus follow mouse becomes useless since any interaction with the window would bring it to the foreground... The window should only come to the foreground if you click in a particular place, or if use a keyboard shortcut or modifier key in combination with a click... In essence, your requirements are the same as mine minus the focus following mouse.
As to hobbies... People generally ease into their hobbies, and increase their expenditure later. If the cost of entry is high, then very few people will take up the hobby at all. This is also why IA64 never took off among the hobbyist community, while linux and bsd based systems on exotic cpus like sparc, alpha and hppa are generally far more active - lowend old hardware can be bought for a pittance, whereas ia64 hardware was extortionate until very recently.
Also the amiga "community" as it were, does not operate like a niche hobbyist platform... They do very little to encourage new users or support existing ones. There really is no money to be made on commercial amiga ventures, and yet they persist in trying anyway.
Windows and MacOS also had no default TCP stack in those days, and yet free stacks were available... Even "demo" versions would function, while demo versions of the amiga stacks would disconnect you after 30 minutes. You also had completely free operating systems such as bsd and early linux versions, which included a tcp stack by default.
Netscape was available for free to non commercial users, IE was available for free too (even for non windows users on macos, solaris and hp-ux)...
Also the "evaluation" versions of netscape were fully functional and did not try to blackmail you into paying by shutting down after 30 minutes. You could buy them on cd or floppy, along with telephone support... An option many people took up because downloading was very time consuming on slow dialups.
It'a also worth noting that netscape and ie were both years ahead of any of the native amigaos browsers, to the extent that a better and cheaper browsing experience could be had by emulating a mac on the amiga and using that for browsing.
Let's also consider irc clients, the biggest windows client mirc is shareware, yet you only get a nag screen on startup and the software is fully functional without registering... the amiga equivalent, amirc, also disconnects you after 30 minutes rendering it completely unusable. it also appears to have several undocumented features allowing other users on irc to remotely check your registration key (a clear invasion of privacy) and possibly do other nefarious things in an attempt to discourage pirate copies.
there was also a highly elitist atmosphere, where anyone suspected of running warez copies of amiga software were often publicly attacked and/or turned away from amiga related sites and irc channels. there were many people who simply could not afford the ridiculous prices charged.
The effect this profiteering and gouging had, was to drive even more users away from the amiga. For the price of a complete set of internet tools on the amiga, it was possible to purchase a perfectly capable x86 system running windows or linux.
Myself at the time, being still at school with no source of income i was simply unable to purchase the software, and became sick of the constant attacks when using pirated copies. I thus had no choice but to install linux on the amiga and use this for quite some time until i was able to afford an x86 based replacement machine. Had it been usable and affordable, i would likely have continued using amigaos for quite some time.
Having recently taken the amiga out of storage to play with, the situation is even more ridiculous... Not only does all this software still enforce the 30 minute timeouts and nag you to purchase it, but you now cannot purchase it even if you wanted to!
And it seems this trend continues, the port of firefox discussed in the article is only going to release the bare minimum of sourcecode required to satisfy the mozilla license, and will withhold everything else. What exactly is this supposed to achieve?
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I used the preview downloads to make decisions on which CDs to buy, and actually did buy CDs based on the previews.
And this is exactly what the RIAA don't want, they would much prefer you to buy CDs, and then find out that you don't like them... If people can try before they buy, then they have to actually make an effort to produce decent music that people will like.
So music sales have gone down, why is piracy automatically to blame?
Perhaps people consider all the manufactured pop music coming out these days trashy?
Perhaps the current state of the economy means people have less disposable income to spend on cds?
Perhaps people simply have something better to spend their money on?
Why not? A publicly traded company's only duty is to make money for its shareholders... That duty is not incompatible with the goals of favoritism in other markets... If OnLive comes to dominate its market, while still being utterly dependent on MS, then MS will have huge leverage over them and be able to take the lion share of the profit.
How do they know OnLive don't have a private agreement with MS for licensing? Just because MS make the terms extortionate to everyone else, doesn't mean they can't have a special agreement with OnLive that effectively forces any competitors out of the market. That's what happens when you build a business that depends on a single supplier, they can enter the market themselves or favour your competitor and your utterly screwed.
Your a small niche, locked into a particular piece of proprietary software tied to a particular proprietary machine.
I also occupy a small niche, i require low level wireless manipulation tools that run only on linux with a modified kernel (i guess they could potentially be ported to any other system where you have access to kernel source code)...
I could potentially do my work on an openpandora or raspberry pi, but an x86 windows pc or ipad would be useless. Does this make all these devices toys?
Plenty of work also gets done on mainframes, as well as sparc or power based servers, many of which cost millions of dollars. does this mean that your x86 windows based pc is a toy?
The vast majority of home computer users do little more than browsing the web, even reading email is typically done via a web browser these days... These users would get by just fine with a raspberry pi or similar low cost machine.
The vast majority of corporate computer users do little more than word processing and email, again these tasks could be performed by a much cheaper machine running much cheaper software, saving millions of dollars.
There will always be niches that are tied to specialised equipment, and those working in such niches usually get ripped off with much higher prices and tools which are either very dated or wholly inferior.
Give me a few hours with access to a pc and its also possible to make a colossal mess of the business...
Corporate networks are built on the idea that everything inside is trusted, and everything outside is behind a firewall. Once you get on the inside, its easy to rip the whole thing apart. Having the network full of ipads would actually make that more difficult.
It's also easier to prevent an ipad user from getting owned or doing stupid than a windows user. Exploits could exist for either system, but the ipad provides less functionality to be attacked and has a better mechanism for updating third party apps.
Also, if you're going to deploy something like an ipad you should only do so when its the most appropriate tool for the job, and the same applies to a pc... This attitude that a windows based pc is automatically the best tool for any task is stupid. If you assess the actual needs of the users, weighed against security concerns and costs there are many use cases where ipads are actually a good choice.
For example...
A salesman who travels to client sites, needs to be able to quickly and easily show brochures and other information to his prospective clients, an ipad is much easier to carry round than a laptop or a big stack of paper brochures and has a bigger screen than a phone. In one case i'm aware of they actually double up as a (rather large) gps in the car, so the salesman can easily find his next client.
A warehouse that dispatches goods, an ipad or similar device can be carried around, it connects to a webserver over wifi which shows the worker the next order, and shows them which part of the warehouse to collect the goods from. He collects the goods, packs them, the warehouse inventory is updated to remove the items and the worker is then given the next job. I've seen some places use specialised hardware for this, but it tends to be more expensive than an ipad while not offering any benefits.
Exactly, small minded...
If you were wearing clean sweatpants in good condition i wouldn't care.
If you were a wife beater i wouldn't hire you because i wouldn't want people who commit illegal and/or violent activities. Plenty of wife beaters wear suits...
If you smelled of rotten turnips i also wouldn't employ you, because the smell would adversely affect others. Your choice of clothes wouldn't.
Not sure what you mean by bedhead hair...
So long as someone is wearing clean clothes in good condition it doesn't really matter wether its a suit, sweatpants, jeans, a poncho or whatever. If clothes don't directly affect the job (eg someone working on a construction site should wear appropriate protective gear) then it shouldn't matter.
It is completely arbitrary to consider someone wearing a suit to be "serious" while someone wearing shorts and t-shirt is somehow "not serious"...
Wearing dirty or tatty clothes is different, but so long as clothes are clean and in good condition it shouldn't matter exactly what they are. It should be down to an individual to be an individual, not to wear a fixed uniform.
Choice of clothes should be down to individual choice and environmental factors.
Incidentally, in the summer and especially on the subway i see far more people wearing suits and ties with big wet patches under their armpits than people wearing t-shirts.
Well, the further you get from what is clearly as yes/no met type of standard, the more problems you have.
What your really advocating here is a uniform then, with everyone wearing exactly the same...
Amusing that some people resort to (anonymously) throwing insults when they have no reasoned arguments left...
Incidentally, i'm not american.
Why should i waste considerable sums of money on a tailored suit, plus further costs to buy more than one, plus the cost and hassle of dry cleaning (not to mention the toxic chemicals)...
When i can just buy normal clothes for a fraction of the price which are perfectly comfortable?
The best part of having a girlfriend is getting *un*dressed... And what you wear when you go out is pretty irrelevant anyway, you don't need to wear a uniform to go the to the opera.
The problem is that anyone is still small minded enough to not take someone seriously simply because they aren't wearing what they perceive to be the correct uniform. These preconceptions need to die a horrible death, someone's clothing has no impact on their ability to do a particular job and people should be free to wear whatever clothing is most comfortable for them.
(wearing a suit is horrendously uncomfortable, and wastefully expensive... in the summer when the subways are blisteringly hot you arrive at work all sweaty, and have to spend a fortune in dry cleaning to keep cleaning your suits).
I'm not the original AC, but i also agree with you whole heartedly about suits and ties... I detest wearing a suit and/or tie, and find it utterly ridiculous that people have some kind of perception that someone wearing a suit is somehow going to do their job better than someone who isn't.
In many cases, the opposite is true... Personally i find such clothing extremely uncomfortable, and will be spending more time thinking about how uncomfortable i am and watching the clock so i can get into some more sensible clothes, whereas if i was dressed comfortably i could concentrate more thoroughly on the work at hand. I've also found that people who aren't very good tend to wear a suit to try and hide their deficiencies, while those who are confidant in their abilities don't feel the need to dress in any particular way.
Business cards i think are just obsolete, they served a purpose once but have been superseded by modern technology. Suits and ties never served any useful purpose whatsoever.
The end result of this, will be that people with uninsured and untaxed vehicles (who are by definition already breaking the law) will simply continue breaking the law, by stealing fuel from other vehicles...
(disclaimer: i have never played starcraft)
How much of that time is spent actually enjoying yourself, vs carrying out repetitive actions necessary to gain credits for use in another part of the game? For instance i played elite for many hours, but a lot of that was spent repetitively travelling back and forth trading so that i could earn enough money to buy a better ship.
I don'y have a problem with paying per month for a service, so long as the client (read: game) for accessing that service is free...
I hate the idea of purchasing a game, only to find its actually useless without also subscribing to an online service.
If i'm renting a service, i don't expect to pay a non refundable up front cost... Like Internet connectivity, although i need a router i am free to buy my own or the isp supplies one for free.
If i BUY something , i expect what i bought to be fully functional for as long as i keep it... I can still play Quake and Doom online because i'm free to run my own server, i doubt these games would still be playable today if they depended on a server operated by the publisher.
It is the short sighted sellers more so than the buyers...
If someone has $60 to spend on games, considering the trivial media cost does it really make a difference to you wether they buy 1 game for $60, 2 for $30, 6 for $10 or even 60 for $1 each? Either way you've spent a pittance on media, and you get $60 from the customer.
The customers only have a finite budget, so increased prices will just decrease the number of games they buy, they will not magically buy more games than they have money for.
Similarly, whats better... Selling 1000 games at $6 each, or selling 100 at $60? Both of these instances net you $6000.... But what if instead of 1000 you sold 2000 at $6 because the lower price enabled people to purchase who couldn't have afforded to do so at $60? You now not only have $12000 instead of $6000, but you also have many more people playing your game, telling their friends about it, posting about it online etc.
Also if your game happens to be crap or just not to someone's taste, $6 is a lot easier to write off as a loss than $60...
And on the other side of this coin, if you're not sure a game is any good your far more willing to risk $6 than $60.
As someone else pointed out, when Valve sold a game for $2 their profits went up 1700%.. Why? Because at that price far more people were willing to buy, and the extra effort to obtain a pirate copy simply wasn't worth $2.
Indeed, reviews these days are bought and paid for by the games companies so you simply cannot trust them... Publications that review games rely on the goodwill of publishers to provide prerelease copies of games for them to review, but publishers will simply refuse to do this if the publication has published bad reviews, forcing them to purchase the games on the open market after they've been released, by which time all their competitors have already published their reviews months ago.
And game demos, if they are made available at all, tend to showcase the best aspects of the game. I played a game demo of a platform game years ago which was just the first level and it was great, bought the full game and found that:
Subsequent levels were nowhere near as good as the first one...
There was no way to save, so if you died you went back to the start.
Although the first level was good, playing it over and over again soon got boring... Playing the second level over and over in order to get to the third really bored me to death and i never got any further than that.
Other things to consider...
The cost of producing a game is a one off, the actual per copy cost is trivial (and has actually gone down, you no longer get big boxes, multiple floppies, printed manuals etc and some are distributed online now so not even media costs)... If the games were priced more cheaply, then they would sell more copies and still make the same or more profit... Most people who buy games would simply buy more if the prices were cheaper, and some of those who pirate would switch to buying instead.
Many games are simple remakes of older games, i doubt they cost all that much to make, and yet they are still sold at the same prices as original games... A lot of sports games come out every year, and the only change is an updated list of players and teams - hardly a huge budget activity... Charging full price for such games makes people feel even more ripped off.
Some are just one or more games from an older platform, bundled with an emulator... No original content at all really, and yet still full price.
DRM schemes do nothing to stop serious pirates, who will soon have a crack available... It is paying customers who have to suffer with the various hassles caused by the scheme.
The only other impact is "casual piracy", that is where someone makes a copy for their friends... We used to do this a lot in school, since being schoolkids we simply couldnt afford to purchase all the games, so everyone bought a handful of games and we traded copies among ourselves.
Those games which we couldn't copy due to copy protection schemes, we went and bought copyable pirate copies from someone...
Had we not been able to copy the games, or acquire pirate copies, we would just have played less games and found other things to do... We simply couldn't afford to buy more games than we did. If the games had been cheaper, we would have bought more for the same money.
Profit and healthcare simply do not belong together... Any system where corporate greed results in deaths and/or suffering is morally bankrupt.
Research should be conducted by governments and non profits, the results published in the public domain and then companies can compete to produce the drugs as cheaply as possible.
If Natco can produce a drug for $175 while still turning a profit, and it's hard to believe Bayer would have overheads higher than Natco, infact they are likely much lower due to economies of scale... Charging $5500 for something that must cost under $175 to produce is reprehensible in any case, let alone one where people suffer.
And extortionate prices are not the only negative of for-profit drugs companies... It's also far more profitable to temporarily alleviate the symptoms than to actually cure the underlying problem, so this is what corporate research will be aimed at.
Most disturbing is that 44% actually voted FOR a bill that artificially inflates book prices...
Shutting off all the coal and/or nuclear plants wouldn't be as beneficial as you think...
As you already pointed out, it would pretty much kill the electric car and force people back towards using gas powered cars.
It would result in more power plants of other types to be built.
It would result in the price of fuels other than coal to go up.
The relatively cheaper price of coal would cause more people to burn it on a smaller scale, eg for home fires.
The higher price of fuel and power would push up the prices of virtually everything else...
That would be a good reason to ask that they buy you some laptops, with good long life batteries...
Exactly, I'm no big fan of nuclear but the alternatives are either even worse (dirtier, more damaging, unsustainable etc), or simply not viable at all.
Until such time as viable alternatives become available, they should be working on building more nuclear plants while improving the efficiency and safety of them.
Building nuclear power plants in an area that's prone to natural disasters was never a good plan...
At that point the Amiga user base was so small it's lucky there were usable stacks at all, no way a 3rd party company could make money releasing a free stack and not enough free software enthusiasts to release a decent free stack.
There are plenty of niche platforms with enough open source developers to write basic things like a tcp stack and often a lot more, see bsd, aros, syllable, minix etc.
Commercial development for a niche platform is even worse (which is why it almost never happens), with the customer base being so small there is very limited money in it, which means either ridiculous prices or severe corner cutting to reduce development costs...
The end result was that the amiga applications were not only far more expensive than equivalent applications on other platforms, but they were also massively inferior... I refer you to my earlier comment about running netscape under macos emulation on the amiga.
A niche platform simply isn't viable as a commercial concern, the only hope it has for survival or even growth is through being open and free. Had amigaos been open sourced, and ported to hardware that was actually available for purchase it could be pretty successful these days. There are various use cases where it would have been more suitable than linux due to its lower resource requirements and better responsiveness on slower hardware.
Yeah everyone was pretty desperate to keep the platform alive, including the few commercial and shareware devs left. If there were no commercial devs would anyone have released a TCP stack etc for free?
And in doing so drove users away...
Considering that free and open source tcp stacks already existed for linux and bsd, and as far as i know the commercial amigaos stacks were ported from bsd in any case... It's extremely likely that a free stack would have been ported (after all, aros has a free stack), and this would then have been available to everyone.
If they want to protect their little pet project they're within their rights to under the Mozilla license, they're still releasing it for free (beer).
"protect" ? protect from what? "protect" it from being ported to other platforms like aros? protect it from having bugs fixed by a third party? protect it from being updated when the original devs realise theres no profit in it?
Well duh, that's true of every single limited demo for no-longer available software. Authors could have released free version as abandonware but there's nothing to say they have to. Maybe now we have a huge FOSS scene we're feeling a bit entitled to free software in our old ages?
So now you have the situation where someone who purchases an old amiga for retro uses will not be able to network it. What's the use in that? I have an A4000 with an ethernet card which cannot be used in amigaos, i have to run linux on it which turns it into a linux box thats slower than even the lowest end embedded linux boxes these days.
I prefer focus follows mouse, but it can be turned off. Clicking in a window should not bring that window to the front otherwise having the focus follow mouse becomes useless since any interaction with the window would bring it to the foreground...
The window should only come to the foreground if you click in a particular place, or if use a keyboard shortcut or modifier key in combination with a click... In essence, your requirements are the same as mine minus the focus following mouse.
As to hobbies... People generally ease into their hobbies, and increase their expenditure later. If the cost of entry is high, then very few people will take up the hobby at all. This is also why IA64 never took off among the hobbyist community, while linux and bsd based systems on exotic cpus like sparc, alpha and hppa are generally far more active - lowend old hardware can be bought for a pittance, whereas ia64 hardware was extortionate until very recently.
Also the amiga "community" as it were, does not operate like a niche hobbyist platform... They do very little to encourage new users or support existing ones. There really is no money to be made on commercial amiga ventures, and yet they persist in trying anyway.
Windows and MacOS also had no default TCP stack in those days, and yet free stacks were available... Even "demo" versions would function, while demo versions of the amiga stacks would disconnect you after 30 minutes.
You also had completely free operating systems such as bsd and early linux versions, which included a tcp stack by default.
Netscape was available for free to non commercial users, IE was available for free too (even for non windows users on macos, solaris and hp-ux)...
Also the "evaluation" versions of netscape were fully functional and did not try to blackmail you into paying by shutting down after 30 minutes. You could buy them on cd or floppy, along with telephone support... An option many people took up because downloading was very time consuming on slow dialups.
It'a also worth noting that netscape and ie were both years ahead of any of the native amigaos browsers, to the extent that a better and cheaper browsing experience could be had by emulating a mac on the amiga and using that for browsing.
Let's also consider irc clients, the biggest windows client mirc is shareware, yet you only get a nag screen on startup and the software is fully functional without registering... the amiga equivalent, amirc, also disconnects you after 30 minutes rendering it completely unusable. it also appears to have several undocumented features allowing other users on irc to remotely check your registration key (a clear invasion of privacy) and possibly do other nefarious things in an attempt to discourage pirate copies.
there was also a highly elitist atmosphere, where anyone suspected of running warez copies of amiga software were often publicly attacked and/or turned away from amiga related sites and irc channels. there were many people who simply could not afford the ridiculous prices charged.
The effect this profiteering and gouging had, was to drive even more users away from the amiga. For the price of a complete set of internet tools on the amiga, it was possible to purchase a perfectly capable x86 system running windows or linux.
Myself at the time, being still at school with no source of income i was simply unable to purchase the software, and became sick of the constant attacks when using pirated copies. I thus had no choice but to install linux on the amiga and use this for quite some time until i was able to afford an x86 based replacement machine. Had it been usable and affordable, i would likely have continued using amigaos for quite some time.
Having recently taken the amiga out of storage to play with, the situation is even more ridiculous... Not only does all this software still enforce the 30 minute timeouts and nag you to purchase it, but you now cannot purchase it even if you wanted to!
And it seems this trend continues, the port of firefox discussed in the article is only going to release the bare minimum of sourcecode required to satisfy the mozilla license, and will withhold everything else. What exactly is this supposed to achieve?