Yes, the package manager in a typical linux distribution is extremely useful, and commercial os offerings have a big hole there... i see new linux users all the time trying to download and install things manually, some even think they have to compile the source themselves, who are amazed to see the package manager.
I've seen the "I'm a PC" ads microsoft has been putting out, i particularly like the slogan "Life without walls".. but has anyone considered that there's no need for windows if you don't have any walls?
The article goes to great lengths to point out that console games outsell pc games, while there are more pc users than console users and then blames the difference on piracy...
What they have not taken into account, is that very few people buy computers just to play games...
Of all those millions of video cards sold by ati/nvidia, a significant number will go into office computers that will never run games, a lot of people buy highend computers because they want the best they can afford, and never plan to play games... And don't forget that almost 100% of industries involved in graphics related work these days will be using nvidia or ati cards, this is video work, graphics editing, cad work etc, companies buy highend machines capable of playing games by the thousands, and even people only looking to watch high definition video will be buying higher end video cards.
When it comes to gaming on the pc, it is often a lot of hassle for end users, even if your machine meets the published minimum spec you have no guarantee it will run or run at a playable speed, you could have incompatibility with background apps you have installed, or configuration issues, and drm schemes just increase the chances of things not working right.... pc gaming is a lot of hassle for end users, and so you get a much greater proportion of technically savvy users than you do on consoles.
Buying a pc game is risky, since you have no guarantee it will work, yet you are unlikely to be able to return it for a full refund... Console games on the other hand are guaranteed to work first time with no hassle. Smarter people will try before they buy if there's a risk like that, and the only way to do that is to pirate.
Also, 99% of console users bought the console specifically to play games, the proportion of pc users who did that will be massively lower.
1. Should IP be protected at all? (I expect even many of the pro-piracy group would support some level of IP protection)
yes, but it shouldn't be treated like physical property... it is not physical property and pretending like it is, is just stupid... the protection should be extremely limited with an aim to ensure a producer gets a short term benefit relative to the effort they invested, just like if they were working a normal job.
2. How long should the protection be for (plenty of support here for shorter terms, but how many people are *honestly* saying they feel 0 years is appropriate?
It should definitely be much shorter, especially in the modern world where things become obsolete so quickly... as it stands, lots of software ends up being lost or completely unobtainable because its no longer profitable but also not legal for third parties to distribute... having a shorter term should also serve to stop profiteering, where someone earns a completely disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of work they did, i dont think anyone should have the right to continue profiting from work they did years ago, you lazy arrogant assholes get off your ass and actually earn some money.
7. The games suck. How will I know if I like it before I buy it? Nobody forces you to buy it. Games are not a fundamental human right. Don't get me wrong, I think it's horrendous that companies release crap, buggy games. 100% not relevant to whether it is morally wrong to pirate the game.
If people knew a game sucked beforehand they would never buy it... but how are you meant to find out if a game is lousy without buying it? demos are often very different from the final game (like a demo will have a good level, the full game has 20 more crap levels) and you don't get bad reviews anymore because all the reviewers are bribed or coerced by the big publishers... magazines and websites doing game reviews get the games for free to review, and a good portion of their revenue comes from advertisements... if they publish a good review then the freebies continue, the publishers buy advertisements in publications who give them good reviews and they may get other kickbacks (read: bribes)... but if they print bad reviews, then the advertisements will dry up, the freebies will dry up meaning they have to buy everything they review further increasing their costs, and they stop getting bribes... an unfavorable review can easily kill a game review publication.
Why is copyright necessary? Why can't all information just be distributed without restriction? Copyright falls under the banner of a range of laws controversially referred to as Intellectual Property laws. The aim is to provide intellectual property a similar type of protection as that afforded to physical property. For example, whether you spend your life building houses or writing books, you should be equally entitled to reap the rewards of your labors and have the same sorts of legal protections against people seeking to unfairly benefit from your work without contributing appropriately towards it. It's argued that without protection against such theft, both the builders of houses and the authors of books would have much less incentive to invest their time and money into their respective outputs, particularly because they would stand little chance of earning appropriate income from their work.
"have the same sorts of legal protections" - This i don't have a problem with... The problem is profiteering, when people will produce something once and then produce infinite copies of it for virtually nothing. Someone who builds houses can sell each house they've built once, and then have to go to the same time and effort to build another one. If they stop building houses, they no longer have any houses to sell and stop making any money.
The two things are completely different, and thus should not be afforded the same level of legal protection at all. It sickens me to see greedy people continue deriving revenue from something they did many years ago, and for that matter deriving obscene levels of short term profit.
There should be a cap on the level of profit, after which copyright should lapse... What makes these people so special that they can work for a year or two and then have a life of luxury while the rest of us have to work for 50+ years.
Ofcourse driving up the price serves to increase the obvious cost benefits of piracy...
On the other hand, if it wasn't profitable companies wouldn't make games, only they are greedy and want to make even more profit at any cost... I doubt prices would go down even if the piracy rate dropped to zero, more likely they would go up because people would have no alternative and companies would gouge.
You do go and go look round your house before you buy it right? And you also get a survey by an expert to ensure there's no serious problems you aren't qualified to detect such as subsidence...
Laptops are easier to quantify, because they are based on a collection of known components... Would you buy a laptop without knowing it's specification up front? Based on the spec, you have a reasonable expectation of how the laptop will perform, and if the laptop doesn't match the published spec you have grounds to return it for a refund.
As for holidays, to answer your question it's because the cost to get you there has been sunk, whereas providing a time limited demo of a game costs nothing... And people get screwed with bad holidays, have you ever seen a tv show called "holidays from hell" ?
Also, laptops can always be returned if they don't live up to the advertising, houses can be resold, but games typically cant be returned because you get accused of copying them.
So in short, you do your due diligence with laptops and houses... With games, i advocate for time limited (but feature complete) demos as bowlburner did because it's practical to do so, simply because a game is not used up by giving someone a copy of it, unlike a holiday which would leave the supplier out of pocket.
Just had another thought, many people have demanded compensation for lousy holidays, will anyone get compensation if they buy a game and it's not very good?
Yes, i agree here... I play a small handful of games, and could afford to buy all the ones i play often, but i have pirated a huge number of games... Most of which were complete garbage and got deleted rapidly. I did tell myself i would buy the games i actually liked, but the bean counter in me decided later that i'd be paying for something i already had with no gain for me, and didn't bother.
And yes, demos are lousy and reviews these days are often bought and paid for, and game publishers will punish review sites and magazines who write them bad reviews... But the publishers like it this way, because if they let you actually play the game before you bought it, on average they would lose customers.
I got into piracy because as a child i wasn't terribly well off...
If i saved my weekly allowance, it would take me several months to be able to afford a legit game, and i may be able to get one or two at xmas or a birthday. I started off buying games, quite a few in fact, and i found that a lot didn't live up to the hype, the demos/reviews were often very different from the actual game, like a demo that would include the first level which was quite good, and then the remaining levels were extremely poor and you couldn't save your progress, so you would do the first level, get to the second, die, and have to start again from scratch (the lion king is an example of a game like this)...
So for my stack of 15 or so games, i had 2-3 which were good and got played a lot, and was finding that the newer games performed poorly because my hardware was now out of date... I still had all the advertising hype and peer pressure pushing me to want the new games, but not only could i not afford them but i now couldn't run them adequately either.
So i started pirating games, and spending what little money i had on hardware upgrades. I was better off, i no longer had to be bombarded with commercials for games i couldn't afford to play, which is a very unpleasant feeling for a kid.
I think all the heavy advertising is extremely unpleasant for the poorer kids who cant afford all the latest stuff (not just games, but most things you cant get for free so easily), games are overpriced especially seeing they mostly target kids...
While on the subject, people are always complaining about the level of crime among teenagers and younger kids these days, but is it any wonder why? When i was that age, the average kid would be walking around with maybe $5 worth of stuff not including clothes, hardly a worthwhile target for robbery... Now, kids have ipods, cellphones and all kinds of other valuables for thieves to target.
Only if the file changes in size, but there are way round that like using many small files, or a fixed size disk image... Really depends on the nature of your backup data.
I have no idea what Xara is... That said... I run rtorrent on linux (via ssh on a fast server), but i could just as easily run azureus locally, not sure what if anything utorrent offers over these other torrent clients... Windows live messenger is just one of many im clients, if you use several networks like i do then running the official clients is a huge pain, using a single multi protocol client like pidgin is massively easier... If only AOL MS and Yahoo would open up XMPP federation like Google has, then people wouldn't need so many accounts... It's stupid to have several isolated IM networks, imagine if email worked that way?
chroot will achieve a similar effect, for things like unix sockets, fifos and potentially device nodes which are not reachable from inside of the chroot... On unix pretty much everything is a file, so locking down access to files is all you really need to do. It's the simplicity which makes it powerful... On windows you cant just lock down access to files, you have to lock down tons of other things too, and complexity very much gets in the way of security.
2, even the "server" version of windows is still a desktop-class OS... they were comparing 2 versions which are marketed as suitable for use on desktops....
3, yes they should have done graphical benchmarks, but they should have done other non java related graphical benchmarks to determine what difference the drivers made, and chosen a videocard for which driver performance is similar, such as nvidia cards... on the other hand, drivers are a significant part of the overall experience so lousy drivers are a serious problem.
5, perhaps, but testing the most common configuration users will be using is still a perfectly valid and useful benchmark.
Usually means that something else was 1.3 times the speed of the slower one, therefore the slower one was 1.3 times slower than the faster one... It's an incorrect way to say it, but that's usually what people mean.
Driver support for vista is reasonable, if you are using hardware that came with it... Running 64bit vista on older 64bit hardware, or on machines which were shipped with 32bit vista can often be a significant hassle. 64bit xp is just laughable when it comes to driver support, but hardly anyone ever used it... 64bit win2k3/2k8 tends to have better support, since 64bit has been common in the server space for longer, and most servers shipped with windows are designed to run 64bit these days.
Also, why wouldnt high end gaming hardware be tested under 64bit? You can get videocards with 4gb of ram now which would be completely useless on a 32bit windows, arent these cards designed for gaming?
But i would like to see more 64bit benchmarks, especially linux ones, 64bit linux is a lot more mature than 64bit windows and is pretty much a no brainer if you have 64bit hardware.
While there are many factors, comparing the default settings of two systems is perfectly valid, since thats what most people will be using... Only a few people will spend significant efforts tuning the OS, and linux users doing that are more likely to be running gentoo not ubuntu.
1, agreed... were they using the latest versions available for the respective platforms? i don't see why the windows version should be older, and it has an auto update so it should have tried to update itself anyway. 2, i assume they used the desktop version of ubuntu since they mentioned desktop effects, ubuntu server does not have a desktop environment by default. 3, they should really have tried some other kind of video benchmark so as to clarify the differences in the drivers... i always thought intel video had good linux drivers, but maybe not, a fairer test would have used nvidia drivers which perform about the same across platforms, but this does highlight a problem with the intel drivers for linux. 4, agreed, they should use the same disk and reformat it for the second set of benchmarks really... 5, default settings are perfectly reasonable, since they will be what most people use, and it's easy to verify what the default settings are so no need to manually enumerate them.
Strange, windows doesnt come with java by default so they must have explicitly downloaded and installed it, why would they use an old version? Also java has an update process, would this not try to install the latest version? Is the u10 update not available for windows?
Interesting how much quicker Ubuntu is, especially since the sun java should be built off the same codebase...
I was always under the impression that Intel graphics chipsets were well supported by Linux and had faster opengl performance than windows running on the same chipset, at least some games like quake3 seemed considerably quicker on linux when using intel chips, or is it OSX that has lousy intel video drivers?
It would be interesting to add XP into the mix and see if java performs any better on that, also a few other non java video benchmarks would be interesting so we could see how much of the performance is down to the drivers, perhaps try doing the java benchmarks using an nvidia card too?
The netscape codebase was old and crufty, they open sourced it and people pretty much decided to abandon it and start again... I would imagine the ie codebase is in a similarly crufty state.
A lot of management apps for various network devices use java applets... Programs like VNC have a java applet frontend too, which are very useful in virtual machine managers like proxmox... Having to load a fat client ala vmware is a lot more hassle.
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Yes, the package manager in a typical linux distribution is extremely useful, and commercial os offerings have a big hole there... i see new linux users all the time trying to download and install things manually, some even think they have to compile the source themselves, who are amazed to see the package manager.
It would also be good to get the freedom aspect across, how you are not beholden to a single company...
I've seen the "I'm a PC" ads microsoft has been putting out, i particularly like the slogan "Life without walls".. but has anyone considered that there's no need for windows if you don't have any walls?
The article goes to great lengths to point out that console games outsell pc games, while there are more pc users than console users and then blames the difference on piracy...
What they have not taken into account, is that very few people buy computers just to play games...
Of all those millions of video cards sold by ati/nvidia, a significant number will go into office computers that will never run games, a lot of people buy highend computers because they want the best they can afford, and never plan to play games... And don't forget that almost 100% of industries involved in graphics related work these days will be using nvidia or ati cards, this is video work, graphics editing, cad work etc, companies buy highend machines capable of playing games by the thousands, and even people only looking to watch high definition video will be buying higher end video cards.
When it comes to gaming on the pc, it is often a lot of hassle for end users, even if your machine meets the published minimum spec you have no guarantee it will run or run at a playable speed, you could have incompatibility with background apps you have installed, or configuration issues, and drm schemes just increase the chances of things not working right.... pc gaming is a lot of hassle for end users, and so you get a much greater proportion of technically savvy users than you do on consoles.
Buying a pc game is risky, since you have no guarantee it will work, yet you are unlikely to be able to return it for a full refund... Console games on the other hand are guaranteed to work first time with no hassle. Smarter people will try before they buy if there's a risk like that, and the only way to do that is to pirate.
Also, 99% of console users bought the console specifically to play games, the proportion of pc users who did that will be massively lower.
1. Should IP be protected at all? (I expect even many of the pro-piracy group would support some level of IP protection)
yes, but it shouldn't be treated like physical property... it is not physical property and pretending like it is, is just stupid... the protection should be extremely limited with an aim to ensure a producer gets a short term benefit relative to the effort they invested, just like if they were working a normal job.
2. How long should the protection be for (plenty of support here for shorter terms, but how many people are *honestly* saying they feel 0 years is appropriate?
It should definitely be much shorter, especially in the modern world where things become obsolete so quickly... as it stands, lots of software ends up being lost or completely unobtainable because its no longer profitable but also not legal for third parties to distribute... having a shorter term should also serve to stop profiteering, where someone earns a completely disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of work they did, i dont think anyone should have the right to continue profiting from work they did years ago, you lazy arrogant assholes get off your ass and actually earn some money.
7. The games suck. How will I know if I like it before I buy it? Nobody forces you to buy it. Games are not a fundamental human right. Don't get me wrong, I think it's horrendous that companies release crap, buggy games. 100% not relevant to whether it is morally wrong to pirate the game.
If people knew a game sucked beforehand they would never buy it... but how are you meant to find out if a game is lousy without buying it? demos are often very different from the final game (like a demo will have a good level, the full game has 20 more crap levels) and you don't get bad reviews anymore because all the reviewers are bribed or coerced by the big publishers... magazines and websites doing game reviews get the games for free to review, and a good portion of their revenue comes from advertisements... if they publish a good review then the freebies continue, the publishers buy advertisements in publications who give them good reviews and they may get other kickbacks (read: bribes)... but if they print bad reviews, then the advertisements will dry up, the freebies will dry up meaning they have to buy everything they review further increasing their costs, and they stop getting bribes... an unfavorable review can easily kill a game review publication.
Why is copyright necessary? Why can't all information just be distributed without restriction? Copyright falls under the banner of a range of laws controversially referred to as Intellectual Property laws. The aim is to provide intellectual property a similar type of protection as that afforded to physical property. For example, whether you spend your life building houses or writing books, you should be equally entitled to reap the rewards of your labors and have the same sorts of legal protections against people seeking to unfairly benefit from your work without contributing appropriately towards it. It's argued that without protection against such theft, both the builders of houses and the authors of books would have much less incentive to invest their time and money into their respective outputs, particularly because they would stand little chance of earning appropriate income from their work.
"have the same sorts of legal protections" - This i don't have a problem with... The problem is profiteering, when people will produce something once and then produce infinite copies of it for virtually nothing. Someone who builds houses can sell each house they've built once, and then have to go to the same time and effort to build another one. If they stop building houses, they no longer have any houses to sell and stop making any money.
The two things are completely different, and thus should not be afforded the same level of legal protection at all. It sickens me to see greedy people continue deriving revenue from something they did many years ago, and for that matter deriving obscene levels of short term profit.
There should be a cap on the level of profit, after which copyright should lapse... What makes these people so special that they can work for a year or two and then have a life of luxury while the rest of us have to work for 50+ years.
Mod parent up... Greed is the problem.
Ofcourse driving up the price serves to increase the obvious cost benefits of piracy...
On the other hand, if it wasn't profitable companies wouldn't make games, only they are greedy and want to make even more profit at any cost... I doubt prices would go down even if the piracy rate dropped to zero, more likely they would go up because people would have no alternative and companies would gouge.
You do go and go look round your house before you buy it right? And you also get a survey by an expert to ensure there's no serious problems you aren't qualified to detect such as subsidence...
Laptops are easier to quantify, because they are based on a collection of known components... Would you buy a laptop without knowing it's specification up front? Based on the spec, you have a reasonable expectation of how the laptop will perform, and if the laptop doesn't match the published spec you have grounds to return it for a refund.
As for holidays, to answer your question it's because the cost to get you there has been sunk, whereas providing a time limited demo of a game costs nothing... And people get screwed with bad holidays, have you ever seen a tv show called "holidays from hell" ?
Also, laptops can always be returned if they don't live up to the advertising, houses can be resold, but games typically cant be returned because you get accused of copying them.
So in short, you do your due diligence with laptops and houses... With games, i advocate for time limited (but feature complete) demos as bowlburner did because it's practical to do so, simply because a game is not used up by giving someone a copy of it, unlike a holiday which would leave the supplier out of pocket.
Just had another thought, many people have demanded compensation for lousy holidays, will anyone get compensation if they buy a game and it's not very good?
Yes, i agree here...
I play a small handful of games, and could afford to buy all the ones i play often, but i have pirated a huge number of games... Most of which were complete garbage and got deleted rapidly.
I did tell myself i would buy the games i actually liked, but the bean counter in me decided later that i'd be paying for something i already had with no gain for me, and didn't bother.
And yes, demos are lousy and reviews these days are often bought and paid for, and game publishers will punish review sites and magazines who write them bad reviews... But the publishers like it this way, because if they let you actually play the game before you bought it, on average they would lose customers.
I got into piracy because as a child i wasn't terribly well off...
If i saved my weekly allowance, it would take me several months to be able to afford a legit game, and i may be able to get one or two at xmas or a birthday.
I started off buying games, quite a few in fact, and i found that a lot didn't live up to the hype, the demos/reviews were often very different from the actual game, like a demo that would include the first level which was quite good, and then the remaining levels were extremely poor and you couldn't save your progress, so you would do the first level, get to the second, die, and have to start again from scratch (the lion king is an example of a game like this)...
So for my stack of 15 or so games, i had 2-3 which were good and got played a lot, and was finding that the newer games performed poorly because my hardware was now out of date... I still had all the advertising hype and peer pressure pushing me to want the new games, but not only could i not afford them but i now couldn't run them adequately either.
So i started pirating games, and spending what little money i had on hardware upgrades. I was better off, i no longer had to be bombarded with commercials for games i couldn't afford to play, which is a very unpleasant feeling for a kid.
I think all the heavy advertising is extremely unpleasant for the poorer kids who cant afford all the latest stuff (not just games, but most things you cant get for free so easily), games are overpriced especially seeing they mostly target kids...
While on the subject, people are always complaining about the level of crime among teenagers and younger kids these days, but is it any wonder why?
When i was that age, the average kid would be walking around with maybe $5 worth of stuff not including clothes, hardly a worthwhile target for robbery... Now, kids have ipods, cellphones and all kinds of other valuables for thieves to target.
Only if the file changes in size, but there are way round that like using many small files, or a fixed size disk image... Really depends on the nature of your backup data.
I have no idea what Xara is... That said...
I run rtorrent on linux (via ssh on a fast server), but i could just as easily run azureus locally, not sure what if anything utorrent offers over these other torrent clients...
Windows live messenger is just one of many im clients, if you use several networks like i do then running the official clients is a huge pain, using a single multi protocol client like pidgin is massively easier... If only AOL MS and Yahoo would open up XMPP federation like Google has, then people wouldn't need so many accounts... It's stupid to have several isolated IM networks, imagine if email worked that way?
chroot will achieve a similar effect, for things like unix sockets, fifos and potentially device nodes which are not reachable from inside of the chroot...
On unix pretty much everything is a file, so locking down access to files is all you really need to do. It's the simplicity which makes it powerful...
On windows you cant just lock down access to files, you have to lock down tons of other things too, and complexity very much gets in the way of security.
2, even the "server" version of windows is still a desktop-class OS... they were comparing 2 versions which are marketed as suitable for use on desktops....
3, yes they should have done graphical benchmarks, but they should have done other non java related graphical benchmarks to determine what difference the drivers made, and chosen a videocard for which driver performance is similar, such as nvidia cards... on the other hand, drivers are a significant part of the overall experience so lousy drivers are a serious problem.
5, perhaps, but testing the most common configuration users will be using is still a perfectly valid and useful benchmark.
Usually means that something else was 1.3 times the speed of the slower one, therefore the slower one was 1.3 times slower than the faster one... It's an incorrect way to say it, but that's usually what people mean.
Kinda like chroot, which unix has had for a long time...
Driver support for vista is reasonable, if you are using hardware that came with it...
Running 64bit vista on older 64bit hardware, or on machines which were shipped with 32bit vista can often be a significant hassle.
64bit xp is just laughable when it comes to driver support, but hardly anyone ever used it...
64bit win2k3/2k8 tends to have better support, since 64bit has been common in the server space for longer, and most servers shipped with windows are designed to run 64bit these days.
Also, why wouldnt high end gaming hardware be tested under 64bit? You can get videocards with 4gb of ram now which would be completely useless on a 32bit windows, arent these cards designed for gaming?
But i would like to see more 64bit benchmarks, especially linux ones, 64bit linux is a lot more mature than 64bit windows and is pretty much a no brainer if you have 64bit hardware.
While there are many factors, comparing the default settings of two systems is perfectly valid, since thats what most people will be using... Only a few people will spend significant efforts tuning the OS, and linux users doing that are more likely to be running gentoo not ubuntu.
1, agreed... were they using the latest versions available for the respective platforms? i don't see why the windows version should be older, and it has an auto update so it should have tried to update itself anyway.
2, i assume they used the desktop version of ubuntu since they mentioned desktop effects, ubuntu server does not have a desktop environment by default.
3, they should really have tried some other kind of video benchmark so as to clarify the differences in the drivers... i always thought intel video had good linux drivers, but maybe not, a fairer test would have used nvidia drivers which perform about the same across platforms, but this does highlight a problem with the intel drivers for linux.
4, agreed, they should use the same disk and reformat it for the second set of benchmarks really...
5, default settings are perfectly reasonable, since they will be what most people use, and it's easy to verify what the default settings are so no need to manually enumerate them.
Strange, windows doesnt come with java by default so they must have explicitly downloaded and installed it, why would they use an old version?
Also java has an update process, would this not try to install the latest version?
Is the u10 update not available for windows?
Interesting how much quicker Ubuntu is, especially since the sun java should be built off the same codebase...
I was always under the impression that Intel graphics chipsets were well supported by Linux and had faster opengl performance than windows running on the same chipset, at least some games like quake3 seemed considerably quicker on linux when using intel chips, or is it OSX that has lousy intel video drivers?
It would be interesting to add XP into the mix and see if java performs any better on that, also a few other non java video benchmarks would be interesting so we could see how much of the performance is down to the drivers, perhaps try doing the java benchmarks using an nvidia card too?
The netscape codebase was old and crufty, they open sourced it and people pretty much decided to abandon it and start again...
I would imagine the ie codebase is in a similarly crufty state.
Twice as long to write, half as long to execute...
Or do you only ever execute your code once?
A lot of management apps for various network devices use java applets...
Programs like VNC have a java applet frontend too, which are very useful in virtual machine managers like proxmox... Having to load a fat client ala vmware is a lot more hassle.