One of the biggest issues i have with buttons and fonts within interfaces, is how so many of these elements are based on bitmap sizes, and thus look really small on a high resolution screen... An inch should still be an inch, regardless of how many pixels it requires to represent an inch.. Monitors can report their physical size, X11 can use this information (windows still cant, not sure about osx), and yet there are still countless apps and websites that expect a certain dpi or they look wrong.
People write inefficient code.. Client apps that have absolutely no business being on a server make it to "servers" all the time, just look at all the cruft supposed server versions of windows come with.
You let the game publisher know that you will still purchase broken products from them, and take the burden of fixing them upon yourself... That's a lose-lose situation... The publisher knows you will accept DRM and so will keep using it and may make it worse, and you not only paid but also had to seek out and install the crack.
You really should tell the games publishers this, although they are unlikely to care. They still got a sale from you, that's all they care about. You were willing to buy their product despite it being broken, and go to the hassle of fixing it yourself. You give them no incentive to make future versions better.
Could it also be that.. Games, as with many software these days, are terribly broken until the first service pack, and thus people avoid them until there's a patch set out. Also the release of a patch could generate publicity.
Ofcourse, proving anything one way or the other, or even generating any kind of half way meaningful stats is very difficult... Sales and piracy rates are far more likely to be affected by quality, availability, price and marketing of the game.
It's true that once you pirate, they have no reason to think you'll go back to buying games... Once you pirate, you don't go back, because you realize just how many benefits piracy brings you...
No DRM, can make backups of the media, no risk to try a game.. Pirates simply get a better product for a better price, you'd be a fool to go back to an inferior supplier.
Buses are really not the answer. How valuable is your time? The bus will take longer than the car, especially if there isn't a bus going the same way you are meaning you have to use more than one and stand around in the cold/wet waiting for the next one. A car can hold up to 7 people depending on it's size, for the same price, 7 people on a bus requires 7 tickets. Buses are only economical on common busy routes, a bus with very few passengers on board is actually far less efficient than a car. Because of this buses are less frequent outside of core hours, meaning you have to wait longer or may not be able to get where you want at all. Buses are extremely uncomfortable, and the seats are often too small for tall people. Sometimes you may not get a seat at all. There is no air conditioning to keep you cool during summer, and the frequent opening of the doors often makes them very cold in winter. The constant stopping and starting is not good for people who suffer travel sickness. Buses are totally impractical if you are trying to carry heavy goods around, some of us buy non perishable goods in bulk because they're much cheaper, having to use public transport would increase our costs.
Instead of forcing more people onto the already overcrowded buses and trains, it would make far more sense to spread things out so that you don't have millions of people all trying to get to the same place at the same time. Work from home, work different hours, build housing close to places of work, encourage businesses to move out of the center of cities and set up near available housing. If i could find affordable housing within walking/cycling distance of work, i would most definitely live there, and use the car for long journeys and shopping etc.
I do think the standards for food should be higher... As it stands, companies can sell all kinds of crap, which means significant effort if you want to eat well, and when it comes to restaurants or takeaways where the ingredients list isn't immediately obvious you can quite often get screwed with garbage.
Buy condoms and teach them about their use instead... Slow the population growth to more sustainable levels, and reduce the spread of STD's like AIDS... A lot of their problems are simply caused by over population, more kids being born than the land can provide food for.
You'd think, but then you have the cost of materials etc... There are plenty of builders with very little work on right now, but all the olympics work is being done by big contractors run by people with close links to the people in government...
Yeah, but i want HD so i'm waiting for someone to crack the video limitations on ps3 linux, or to make the xbox 360 run linux... My old original xbox works well enough, but it won't play high resolution h.264 videos...
Or you can find a smaller provider who will sell a "slower" service for less money and possibly provide more ancillary services or better support etc. Why pay for an up to 8mb service when your line can only handle 1.5Mb? go for a cheaper 2Mb service.
Also, Tiscali and BT consumer are two of the worst ISPs you could have picked, they are both mass market isps catering to the lowest common denominator. These ISPs will try to pack as many customers onto the smallest connection they can, safe in the knowledge that for every customer they lose there's 10 more who aren't clued up enough to notice. Tiscali for instance, may have 50 "up to 8mb" users connected to a single exchange, which has a 2mb backhaul connection...
Have a look at beunlimited (now o2) or some of the smaller but more highly rated isps on adslguide.org.uk, and avoid the big mass market ones like the plague, they are the mcdonalds of the isp world.
BT are particularly bad here... If you have kit in a commercial datacenter, most carriers will install a distribution router into the DC and connect their customers to it... BT will want to run separate lines into the DC from their local exchange for every customer, insanely inefficient and far more prone to breakage since each customers only has a single line... With the distribution router method it makes sense for the carrier to connect a handful of high speed lines to it, so a single one breaking won't have much effect.
Depends where you are, in the middle of big cities like london you can get a dedicated dark fibre for about 15k/year (less if you commit to 5 years) over which you can run anything you want, so you can throw 10Gb down it if you have to.
A lot of users intentionally buy slower services because they're cheaper, and they wouldn't benefit from the faster services anyway... Also some of the slower services have no usage limits, while the faster services tend to have pretty small bandwidth caps. Using a 512Kb connection you could pull down 150GB/month if you ran it flat out all month, and you don't need to worry about hitting your cap. With an 8Mb connection you will typically get a cap of around 50GB, so a third of the total achievable on a 512K connection. Infact, 8Mb with a 50GB cap is not 8Mb at all, it's actually 170Kb burstable to 8Mb.
That's how it worked for dos and windows, which had success in a business setting thanks to IBM... Prior to that, the home computer market was split between Commodore, Atari, Timex/Sinclair, Apple and a few others...
Prison is a pretty poor punishment, for the reason you pointed out... When you leave prison, depending how long you've been there you may have completely lost touch with the world and suffer the stigma of being an ex-con which will severely hamper any hopes of moving on...
Instead, the only life you know and the only way to make enough money to live is crime... You've spent the last X years in the company of criminals who could have taught you plenty of illegal things, and you're likely to have many new criminal contacts now.
Prison is basically a school for criminals, you weren't a very good criminal when you went in (not very good because you got caught), but after coming out you will have the benefit of pooled criminal knowledge and new criminal contacts.
Not everyone is afraid of dying tho... Consider suicide bombers, who are planning to die... If somehow their plan fails, but they are still convicted of attempting a terrorist bombing, killing them is in effect finishing their job. Keeping them alive would be worse punishment, since they believe that death would make them a martyr.
What about the outrage from arrogant media producers who feel they deserve to continue raking in obscene profits for work they did many years ago?
It cuts both ways you know, if media producers weren't so hostile towards the consumer (long copyright terms, draconian drm, etc etc) then only a small hard core of people would make their own copies.... But it's clearly more profitable to wring massive profits from the poor suckers who will buy, than to lower prices and loosen restrictions but sell more units.
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One of the biggest issues i have with buttons and fonts within interfaces, is how so many of these elements are based on bitmap sizes, and thus look really small on a high resolution screen...
An inch should still be an inch, regardless of how many pixels it requires to represent an inch.. Monitors can report their physical size, X11 can use this information (windows still cant, not sure about osx), and yet there are still countless apps and websites that expect a certain dpi or they look wrong.
People write inefficient code..
Client apps that have absolutely no business being on a server make it to "servers" all the time, just look at all the cruft supposed server versions of windows come with.
You let the game publisher know that you will still purchase broken products from them, and take the burden of fixing them upon yourself...
That's a lose-lose situation... The publisher knows you will accept DRM and so will keep using it and may make it worse, and you not only paid but also had to seek out and install the crack.
You really should tell the games publishers this, although they are unlikely to care.
They still got a sale from you, that's all they care about. You were willing to buy their product despite it being broken, and go to the hassle of fixing it yourself. You give them no incentive to make future versions better.
Could it also be that..
Games, as with many software these days, are terribly broken until the first service pack, and thus people avoid them until there's a patch set out.
Also the release of a patch could generate publicity.
Ofcourse, proving anything one way or the other, or even generating any kind of half way meaningful stats is very difficult... Sales and piracy rates are far more likely to be affected by quality, availability, price and marketing of the game.
It's true that once you pirate, they have no reason to think you'll go back to buying games...
Once you pirate, you don't go back, because you realize just how many benefits piracy brings you...
No DRM, can make backups of the media, no risk to try a game.. Pirates simply get a better product for a better price, you'd be a fool to go back to an inferior supplier.
Buses are really not the answer.
How valuable is your time?
The bus will take longer than the car, especially if there isn't a bus going the same way you are meaning you have to use more than one and stand around in the cold/wet waiting for the next one.
A car can hold up to 7 people depending on it's size, for the same price, 7 people on a bus requires 7 tickets.
Buses are only economical on common busy routes, a bus with very few passengers on board is actually far less efficient than a car. Because of this buses are less frequent outside of core hours, meaning you have to wait longer or may not be able to get where you want at all.
Buses are extremely uncomfortable, and the seats are often too small for tall people. Sometimes you may not get a seat at all. There is no air conditioning to keep you cool during summer, and the frequent opening of the doors often makes them very cold in winter.
The constant stopping and starting is not good for people who suffer travel sickness.
Buses are totally impractical if you are trying to carry heavy goods around, some of us buy non perishable goods in bulk because they're much cheaper, having to use public transport would increase our costs.
Instead of forcing more people onto the already overcrowded buses and trains, it would make far more sense to spread things out so that you don't have millions of people all trying to get to the same place at the same time. Work from home, work different hours, build housing close to places of work, encourage businesses to move out of the center of cities and set up near available housing.
If i could find affordable housing within walking/cycling distance of work, i would most definitely live there, and use the car for long journeys and shopping etc.
Those poor very rich people, surrounded on all sides by losers...
And being forced to pay minimum wage for all their staff, what a burden!
I do think the standards for food should be higher...
As it stands, companies can sell all kinds of crap, which means significant effort if you want to eat well, and when it comes to restaurants or takeaways where the ingredients list isn't immediately obvious you can quite often get screwed with garbage.
Buy condoms and teach them about their use instead...
Slow the population growth to more sustainable levels, and reduce the spread of STD's like AIDS...
A lot of their problems are simply caused by over population, more kids being born than the land can provide food for.
It's still cold and wet, just like it was in "summer" months like july.
You'd think, but then you have the cost of materials etc...
There are plenty of builders with very little work on right now, but all the olympics work is being done by big contractors run by people with close links to the people in government...
In other new, one of the first Olympic venues for 2012 games opens today, ahead of schedule and under budget:
Now that is news!
Amusingly, this venue was actually nowhere near london.
Try http://www.geo-uk.net/
There's some others too, but i dont have their names off hand
Interesting, i knew several people who worked for Fujitsu and they never mentioned this, they seemed quite unhappy there (hence why they left).
Yeah, but i want HD so i'm waiting for someone to crack the video limitations on ps3 linux, or to make the xbox 360 run linux...
My old original xbox works well enough, but it won't play high resolution h.264 videos...
Or you can find a smaller provider who will sell a "slower" service for less money and possibly provide more ancillary services or better support etc.
Why pay for an up to 8mb service when your line can only handle 1.5Mb? go for a cheaper 2Mb service.
Also, Tiscali and BT consumer are two of the worst ISPs you could have picked, they are both mass market isps catering to the lowest common denominator. These ISPs will try to pack as many customers onto the smallest connection they can, safe in the knowledge that for every customer they lose there's 10 more who aren't clued up enough to notice. Tiscali for instance, may have 50 "up to 8mb" users connected to a single exchange, which has a 2mb backhaul connection...
Have a look at beunlimited (now o2) or some of the smaller but more highly rated isps on adslguide.org.uk, and avoid the big mass market ones like the plague, they are the mcdonalds of the isp world.
BT are particularly bad here...
If you have kit in a commercial datacenter, most carriers will install a distribution router into the DC and connect their customers to it...
BT will want to run separate lines into the DC from their local exchange for every customer, insanely inefficient and far more prone to breakage since each customers only has a single line... With the distribution router method it makes sense for the carrier to connect a handful of high speed lines to it, so a single one breaking won't have much effect.
Depends where you are, in the middle of big cities like london you can get a dedicated dark fibre for about 15k/year (less if you commit to 5 years) over which you can run anything you want, so you can throw 10Gb down it if you have to.
A lot of users intentionally buy slower services because they're cheaper, and they wouldn't benefit from the faster services anyway...
Also some of the slower services have no usage limits, while the faster services tend to have pretty small bandwidth caps. Using a 512Kb connection you could pull down 150GB/month if you ran it flat out all month, and you don't need to worry about hitting your cap. With an 8Mb connection you will typically get a cap of around 50GB, so a third of the total achievable on a 512K connection.
Infact, 8Mb with a 50GB cap is not 8Mb at all, it's actually 170Kb burstable to 8Mb.
That's how it worked for dos and windows, which had success in a business setting thanks to IBM...
Prior to that, the home computer market was split between Commodore, Atari, Timex/Sinclair, Apple and a few others...
Some of those pirates from Somalia could come and take it over, it would probably be a lot easier to attack than a big oil tanker.
Prison is a pretty poor punishment, for the reason you pointed out...
When you leave prison, depending how long you've been there you may have completely lost touch with the world and suffer the stigma of being an ex-con which will severely hamper any hopes of moving on...
Instead, the only life you know and the only way to make enough money to live is crime...
You've spent the last X years in the company of criminals who could have taught you plenty of illegal things, and you're likely to have many new criminal contacts now.
Prison is basically a school for criminals, you weren't a very good criminal when you went in (not very good because you got caught), but after coming out you will have the benefit of pooled criminal knowledge and new criminal contacts.
Not everyone is afraid of dying tho...
Consider suicide bombers, who are planning to die... If somehow their plan fails, but they are still convicted of attempting a terrorist bombing, killing them is in effect finishing their job. Keeping them alive would be worse punishment, since they believe that death would make them a martyr.
What about the outrage from arrogant media producers who feel they deserve to continue raking in obscene profits for work they did many years ago?
It cuts both ways you know, if media producers weren't so hostile towards the consumer (long copyright terms, draconian drm, etc etc) then only a small hard core of people would make their own copies....
But it's clearly more profitable to wring massive profits from the poor suckers who will buy, than to lower prices and loosen restrictions but sell more units.