For data cabling copper is a poor choice, fibre is a lot better... For electrical cabling, or situations where heat must be conducted (heatsinks etc), copper is a good choice. We need to make sure it's used where appropriate.
Most unix apps will quite happily deal with files that don't have filename extensions. I still have stacks of files from my Amiga days, none of which have extensions, and yet i can still open them fine on linux.
You could have 50 companies trying to sell you power, that's 50 sets of infrastructure, 50 sets of managers, billing staff, call center staff, offices, support staff, shareholders etc...
A single monopoly entity could theoretically provide a better and cheaper service if run correctly. But as always, human nature is corrupt...
A private single monopoly will get greedy and try to wring every last cent out of the customers, and any improvements they make will be designed for greater profits rather than better or cheaper service.
A government controlled single monopoly will become complacent and lazy, there will be no incentive to make any improvements whatsoever, so people won't bother.
If there were a single government entity running the service, but which was not permitted to make a profit (ie it has to break even) while being compelled to improve services as if they were in a highly competitive market, service would be a lot better due to economies of scale.
Privatization is not the answer, running the public utilities in a more competent way is... If a business is inherently unprofitable, no private business will buy into it in any case.
A private business will only buy in to a service if it stands to make money, why can't the government make money by running the service themselves? A business will never take stupid risks, they will always be weighed up carefully and have a good chance of turning a profit, if they don't then the cost is passed on to the customer anyway.
Competition in these cases is actually bad, because it results in duplication of effort and therefore inefficiency. A single entity, run efficiently, can do a better job.
The problem is complacency and laziness, government run utilities don't push people to improve efficiency because there is simply no reward for doing so. If a government department saves money, then they get less money the following year so it makes sense to spend it all, even if you just waste it on frivolous things.
That's the problem tho... Unix puts configuration in/etc, and it's up to the app author to give them sensible names... Windows put it's.ini files all over the place, and the registry doesn't really improve matters because the entries are just all over the registry now.
Text files are a must, comments in the config files are incredibly useful, being able to edit the file with your editor of choice (and not needing to use specialised tools - great for recovery situations) is also a huge advantage.
Not really.. 8 port USB hubs are common, giving you 8 ports, 4 mice, 4 keyboards... Not to mention apple style keyboards where the keyboard itself has a passthrough usb connector for the mouse. People could use a mix of keyboards and control pads depending what they feel comfortable with anyway.
That law seems to refer to unlocking, rather than jailbreaking.
As for the lack of MMS, i never used MMS because it was stupidly expensive (4x the cost of text, per message), on the other hand an iphone would let me email pictures around using the included data usage.
All of these consoles have USB ports, what's stopping them from implementing support for keyboard/mouse? It would make FPS games and some other types of games far more enjoyable.
Some of the review sites like to delete negative user comments too... But there's other ways to gauge how good a game is, comments on thepiratebay for instance won't get censored just because they say a game is lousy, and you can also look at the number of people who have download a game from a torrent site and as you pointed out, the ease of finding a crack if one is required.
Will they refund you if the copy protection is incompatible with your system? Will they provide replacement media when your kids scratch it up because they have to keep putting it in and out of the drive every time they want to play? I know many people who have been in both these situations, they can't return the incompatible game because it's been opened, and they can't get replacement media without buying the whole thing again (and they couldn't burn a backup copy for the kids to scratch up).
DRM harms consumers, and it harms legitimate ones far more than it harms the pirates... And it still inevitably gets cracked anyway. If they spent less time writing these horrendous drm schemes, then those who crack them would also have more time to spend writing other apps.
Actually you have no recourse whatsoever... You did read the license agreement when you installed their games, right?
You have a choice... If you don't want to trust a third party, then your only recourse is to either write everything yourself, or only use open source and thoroughly audit the code yourself.
Those who wrote the nocd crack are not pirates... They are a group of coders who created an enhancement to the original game. There are many useful products out there that *can* be used for piracy, but they also have other legitimate uses too.
The authors of the crack released their own code as a patch for ubisoft's game, they never claimed they wrote the original game. ubisoft seems to be ripping off this group's nocd crack and claiming it as their own work, i doubt they even credited the original authors in the readme or such. if they released the crack and correctly stated it was written by a third party, then noone would have a problem.
The other issue, lies with the fact that ubisoft clamped down very hard on people who even talk about nocd cracks, and yet here they are distributing one themselves. It's not that they're distributing one, that's actually a good thing, it's the hypocrisy that they used to ban people from their forums for mentioning this very crack.
The author of the crack isn't breaking anyone's copyright... He is providing a third party patch which improves the original product. The original vendor has even acknowledged the improvement by using it themselves. That the crack makes it easier to copy the game is incidental, cd/dvd recorders make it easier to copy games too.
And it's not the car vendor that imposes those rules, it's the government. It's not like ford care how you modify their car... There are plenty of heavily modified cars doing the rounds on race tracks, drag strips etc that wouldn't be legal on the roads.
What about when you buy a boxed piece of software in a store, and nothing about that is printed on the outside of the box? They can't hold you to something that was contained on the inside of the box that you couldn't see prior to sale.
And being able to play without the CD means you can keep the original media locked away, and thus decrease the risks of the media being damaged or lost.
Yes, a small number of people who pirated a given piece of software would have bought it if a pirated copy was not available... But also a small number of people who would have bought the game chose not to (or pirated it instead) because it had a hindering copy protection scheme.
Try AmigaOS loading from a proper hard drive instead of floppy, it takes longer to spin up the drive than it does to boot to workbench. I could get my A4000 to boot in 5 seconds from pressing the power switch.
I wonder what one of those solid state drives would do for it... I have a 32Mb solid state IDE drive somewhere, thats big enough for AmigaOS...
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They are also used as a security feature, since you can feed an array of arguments without needing to sanitise them first.
For data cabling copper is a poor choice, fibre is a lot better...
For electrical cabling, or situations where heat must be conducted (heatsinks etc), copper is a good choice. We need to make sure it's used where appropriate.
Ubuntu wont run with 256mb? Didn't know that...
Sure you can find a lightweight version tho.
Most unix apps will quite happily deal with files that don't have filename extensions. I still have stacks of files from my Amiga days, none of which have extensions, and yet i can still open them fine on linux.
You could have 50 companies trying to sell you power, that's 50 sets of infrastructure, 50 sets of managers, billing staff, call center staff, offices, support staff, shareholders etc...
A single monopoly entity could theoretically provide a better and cheaper service if run correctly. But as always, human nature is corrupt...
A private single monopoly will get greedy and try to wring every last cent out of the customers, and any improvements they make will be designed for greater profits rather than better or cheaper service.
A government controlled single monopoly will become complacent and lazy, there will be no incentive to make any improvements whatsoever, so people won't bother.
If there were a single government entity running the service, but which was not permitted to make a profit (ie it has to break even) while being compelled to improve services as if they were in a highly competitive market, service would be a lot better due to economies of scale.
Privatization is not the answer, running the public utilities in a more competent way is...
If a business is inherently unprofitable, no private business will buy into it in any case.
A private business will only buy in to a service if it stands to make money, why can't the government make money by running the service themselves?
A business will never take stupid risks, they will always be weighed up carefully and have a good chance of turning a profit, if they don't then the cost is passed on to the customer anyway.
Competition in these cases is actually bad, because it results in duplication of effort and therefore inefficiency. A single entity, run efficiently, can do a better job.
The problem is complacency and laziness, government run utilities don't push people to improve efficiency because there is simply no reward for doing so. If a government department saves money, then they get less money the following year so it makes sense to spend it all, even if you just waste it on frivolous things.
That's the problem tho... /etc, and it's up to the app author to give them sensible names... .ini files all over the place, and the registry doesn't really improve matters because the entries are just all over the registry now.
Unix puts configuration in
Windows put it's
Text files are a must, comments in the config files are incredibly useful, being able to edit the file with your editor of choice (and not needing to use specialised tools - great for recovery situations) is also a huge advantage.
Not really..
8 port USB hubs are common, giving you 8 ports, 4 mice, 4 keyboards... Not to mention apple style keyboards where the keyboard itself has a passthrough usb connector for the mouse.
People could use a mix of keyboards and control pads depending what they feel comfortable with anyway.
That law seems to refer to unlocking, rather than jailbreaking.
As for the lack of MMS, i never used MMS because it was stupidly expensive (4x the cost of text, per message), on the other hand an iphone would let me email pictures around using the included data usage.
You also need to consider that the 360 was on sale for a good year or more before the PS3...
All of these consoles have USB ports, what's stopping them from implementing support for keyboard/mouse? It would make FPS games and some other types of games far more enjoyable.
I tend to get bored with a lot of games long before i complete them...
Some of the review sites like to delete negative user comments too...
But there's other ways to gauge how good a game is, comments on thepiratebay for instance won't get censored just because they say a game is lousy, and you can also look at the number of people who have download a game from a torrent site and as you pointed out, the ease of finding a crack if one is required.
Will they refund you if the copy protection is incompatible with your system?
Will they provide replacement media when your kids scratch it up because they have to keep putting it in and out of the drive every time they want to play?
I know many people who have been in both these situations, they can't return the incompatible game because it's been opened, and they can't get replacement media without buying the whole thing again (and they couldn't burn a backup copy for the kids to scratch up).
DRM harms consumers, and it harms legitimate ones far more than it harms the pirates... And it still inevitably gets cracked anyway.
If they spent less time writing these horrendous drm schemes, then those who crack them would also have more time to spend writing other apps.
Actually you have no recourse whatsoever... You did read the license agreement when you installed their games, right?
You have a choice... If you don't want to trust a third party, then your only recourse is to either write everything yourself, or only use open source and thoroughly audit the code yourself.
Those who wrote the nocd crack are not pirates...
They are a group of coders who created an enhancement to the original game.
There are many useful products out there that *can* be used for piracy, but they also have other legitimate uses too.
The authors of the crack released their own code as a patch for ubisoft's game, they never claimed they wrote the original game. ubisoft seems to be ripping off this group's nocd crack and claiming it as their own work, i doubt they even credited the original authors in the readme or such. if they released the crack and correctly stated it was written by a third party, then noone would have a problem.
The other issue, lies with the fact that ubisoft clamped down very hard on people who even talk about nocd cracks, and yet here they are distributing one themselves. It's not that they're distributing one, that's actually a good thing, it's the hypocrisy that they used to ban people from their forums for mentioning this very crack.
The author of the crack isn't breaking anyone's copyright...
He is providing a third party patch which improves the original product. The original vendor has even acknowledged the improvement by using it themselves.
That the crack makes it easier to copy the game is incidental, cd/dvd recorders make it easier to copy games too.
And it's not the car vendor that imposes those rules, it's the government. It's not like ford care how you modify their car...
There are plenty of heavily modified cars doing the rounds on race tracks, drag strips etc that wouldn't be legal on the roads.
Actually you can copy it, you just can't distribute the copies. Installing it onto your hard drive is a form of copying too, btw.
What about when you buy a boxed piece of software in a store, and nothing about that is printed on the outside of the box?
They can't hold you to something that was contained on the inside of the box that you couldn't see prior to sale.
And being able to play without the CD means you can keep the original media locked away, and thus decrease the risks of the media being damaged or lost.
Yes, a small number of people who pirated a given piece of software would have bought it if a pirated copy was not available...
But also a small number of people who would have bought the game chose not to (or pirated it instead) because it had a hindering copy protection scheme.
Try AmigaOS loading from a proper hard drive instead of floppy, it takes longer to spin up the drive than it does to boot to workbench. I could get my A4000 to boot in 5 seconds from pressing the power switch.
I wonder what one of those solid state drives would do for it... I have a 32Mb solid state IDE drive somewhere, thats big enough for AmigaOS...
And BeOS never came close to the speed of AmigaOS on even older hardware.