The developers who developed the game will usually be salaried, paid the same amount whether their game is successful or not.. If the game is a flop they will just move on to writing the next game. If the company flops, they will get a development job somewhere else...
It is the distributor who makes all the profit, and therefore the distribution who is the victim of copyright infringement.
Note that i am not advocating stealing, i never said we should break into the distribution center and steal thousands of copies of the game. Copyright infringement is not stealing.
When distribution companies stop screwing over their paying customers, i might consider being one... In the meantime, i will neither buy games nor contribute to their user base by copying them.
Perhaps if these people weren't doing us wrong (drm schemes that severely hinder the customer, see the article) we'd feel more bad about doing them wrong.
I haven't reinstalled any of my linux systems for years... If you use a distro like gentoo the upgrade process is incremental rather than depending on fixed release versions, so you gradually update things as they come along. At least one of my installs dates from around 2001.
Like many such schemes... The radio in my car requires entering a code every time the battery is disconnected, as the legitimate owner of the car i have forgotten the code and gone to considerable expense to get it recoded... The guy who recoded it didn't take very long, neither i suspect would a thief. So only the legitimate user gets inconvenienced, anyone who steals the radio will have a lot less problem with the "anti theft" mechanism than i have. On the other hand, my radio is obsolete (1995), a nonstandard size, and riveted and bolted into the car so it's not likely to get stolen anyway.
Those hardware related libraries you talk about are in effect drivers... Which convert a changeable interface (hardware) into a fixed interface (the api)... In this case the changeable interface is changed to the underlying linux api instead of directly to a piece of hardware.
Mac drivers are based on CUPS too, what happens if you take the PPD file from the mac drivers?
I have avoided Epson printers for years, having nothing but problems with them (like the stupid top load paper, where the paper stands almost vertical, falls over from the slightest breeze and gets jammed easily), and their linux support is poor to nonexistent.
HP on the other hand produce open source drivers for their printers.. I have an old HP printer/scanner combo for which the latest windows/macos drivers dont work with vista or leopard, but the open drivers still compile on current versions of linux... Infact, it's possible to compile the open drivers on leopard too.
Similarly for me... A few of us at work run a combination of NeoOffice and OpenOffice 3.0 beta, while the rest of the company runs msoffice 2007, 2003 or xp...
Being as our software is free, we can always have the same most up to date version (not that i have ever encountered compatibility issues between OO and Neo), so compatibility between us is perfect... Compatibility with the rest of the company is generally better than the compatibility between different mso versions, sofar noone else has even noticed we're running free software. They will, when the next iteration of the upgrade treadmill comes along and they see how much we need to budget for it.
You'd be surprised, when i worked at a university, where classrooms were always locked or attended by staff, all kinds of things went missing... People would pop off the front blanking plates, reach in and remove the RAM or CPU.
On the other hand, why would anyone want to steal data from a public access computer? It won't have anything worthwhile on it, and if you really want to break it you can usually log in to it.
The idea of "premium cables" makes very little sense with Digital media...
With an analog cable, it can be argued that better cabling results in better output due to less loss or added noise along the cable, and it's very difficult to gauge the point at which perfect reproduction has been achieved (ie it cant get any better)..
With Digital on the other hand, once you have a bit for bit copy with no loss that was transferred at the maximum speed of the devices (ie no retransmits due to dropped/lost packets), then it's by definition perfect and can't get any better. And in terms of audio reproduction, "perfect" isn't required from the cable, it doesn't really matter if packets are dropped and retransmitted so long as they arrive in time, so long as a perfect digital copy is received on the other end. And of course, it's easy to prove that a digital copy is identical to the original.
Sooner or later, even audiophiles will realise this and the companies that make these premium cables will find themselves without a market.
Intel have been pushing to do more in software for a while, with software modems and the like, as it helps them sell faster CPUs...
There are ups and downs to both sides... Doing things in hardware is great and performs better short term, but processing speed can quickly catch up and surpass the dedicated hardware if it's not also kept up to date...
Use the Amiga as an example, when it came out it's dedicated video/sound hardware was great, and helped the Amiga massively outperform other systems using the same processors... But later on, the chipset was a liability... It placed a huge burden on Commodore, who had to try and improve the chipset while not sacrificing compatibility... The updated version, AGA, came out late, still had some crippling limitations (2mb chipram limit for one), was not fully compatible, and wasn't a massive performance improvement.
On the other hand, the serial controller on the Amiga was software controlled, while on an x86 PC it was typically controlled by a buffered chip like a 16550... The 16550 was limited to 115200bps rates, while the Amiga could theoretically go a lot faster, especially if you upgraded the CPU, but you typically had to disable multitasking to achieve those rates reliably. There were a few file transfer programs that had "high speed" modes at the expense of multitasking.
But standards in hardware are good, the reliance on drivers to provide a compatible middle layer between hardware and software does nothing to help performance or ease of use.
With standard hardware, we can...
Make OS's easier to install (drivers for all standard hardware can easily be included, much less work for the OS authors). Make apps (games) that boot directly without a need for an OS, and derive maximum performance from the hardware without the OS middleware sapping performance.
Itanium may be superior to AMD64... Alpha, MIPS, HPPA and Sparc are superior to x86/amd64 too, but the problem is that people want to run closed source commercial software, which brings up a number of factors:
Existing apps won't run, users need to replace their apps, commercial vendors will typically charge for the new version.
A new architecture has no users yet, and thus no potential market for commercial vendors. (chicken) A new architecture has no commercial software vendors yet, and thus it will not gain users. (egg)
Linux runs quite well on IA64, as do other open source OS's, and virtually every open source app that runs on x86/amd64 linux runs nicely on IA64. The trouble is that the hardware is too expensive and not widely enough available to attract a hobbyist user base either. IA64 really depends on good compiler output to perform well, but not enough of the people developing GCC even have access to IA64 hardware.
Personally, i think HP would have been better off continuing development of the Alpha and convincing Intel to join in... It may still have failed, but would still have done better than IA64 did.
I'm also not sure IA64 has much market share among high end servers either... HP seem to be updating HPPA a lot more than they were planning to, and for customers wanting to run windows or linux they sell a lot more x86/amd64 based systems which are cheaper, generally perform better, have more widespread support and represent less vendor lock-in.
Intel already dominate the gfx market, they just don't offer any high end products (enthusiasts/gamers/highend)... A huge number of low end systems (ie cheaper and greater volume) use Intel onboard video chips, and these systems are heavily used in offices around the world, and by home users who aren't interested in heavy video processing or gaming. These small cheap laptops which are increasingly popular these days tend to use intel video too.
Not sure what this has to do with Linux, AMD are quite good at supporting Linux too... Linux users tend to be more knowledgeable and will likely go for whichever spec turns out to be technically superior.
And the hard drive is welded in? That's where the data is, just take it out and hook it to another machine.
Ohh and breaking BIOS passwords is trivial, virtually all of them have backdoors allowing you to bypass whatever password the user set.
As for not booting from CD, so what? just move the existing HD to a different slot, and put your own HD on the primary slot so it gets booted instead... Same end result as booting from CD.
Ofcourse, there is also evidence that you *can* get something from nothing... All the matter and energy in the universe has to have come from somewhere...
Good idea... Do you want to buy my water powered Yugo? It says "H2O POWER" on it in several places written with spray paint! And just incase you're in any doubt, you can look at all the rust it has... Clear evidence of the presence of water!
If you make it possible to disable or impair the functionality of a device remotely, then that's exactly what people will do... And if you rely on the device responding to the disable command, a market will spring up for people to fix these devices by removing this undesirable functionality.
Apple have been around for a long time, and their market share is still very small. Apple are also not directly competing with microsoft, they sell a bundle of hardware and software together. Plus, much of their market share increases recently have been due to the ability of their hardware to run windows as well as osx, making apple a risk-free choice for a premium system. They also already have a market leading position in another market (mp3 players).
Google already had a market which Microsoft entered... It is Microsoft trying to compete with the established player, and few other companies would have the resources to burn like they are.
Similarly with Sony, Microsoft entered a market already dominated by Sony, and in which both Sony and Nintendo have a very strong presence...
Perhaps i should rephrase my statement to read:
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft in markets they dominate simply isn't viable.
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The developers who developed the game will usually be salaried, paid the same amount whether their game is successful or not.. If the game is a flop they will just move on to writing the next game.
If the company flops, they will get a development job somewhere else...
It is the distributor who makes all the profit, and therefore the distribution who is the victim of copyright infringement.
Note that i am not advocating stealing, i never said we should break into the distribution center and steal thousands of copies of the game. Copyright infringement is not stealing.
When distribution companies stop screwing over their paying customers, i might consider being one... In the meantime, i will neither buy games nor contribute to their user base by copying them.
More of a hassle than downloading and applying a crack...
I think i'll take the cracked version thanks.
And as a bonus, i get to save money too.
But if you can't even use what you hired, what is that?
Perhaps if these people weren't doing us wrong (drm schemes that severely hinder the customer, see the article) we'd feel more bad about doing them wrong.
Yeah, a lot of people waste money on software until they realise it's possible to get better stuff for free.
I haven't reinstalled any of my linux systems for years...
If you use a distro like gentoo the upgrade process is incremental rather than depending on fixed release versions, so you gradually update things as they come along. At least one of my installs dates from around 2001.
Like many such schemes...
The radio in my car requires entering a code every time the battery is disconnected, as the legitimate owner of the car i have forgotten the code and gone to considerable expense to get it recoded...
The guy who recoded it didn't take very long, neither i suspect would a thief. So only the legitimate user gets inconvenienced, anyone who steals the radio will have a lot less problem with the "anti theft" mechanism than i have.
On the other hand, my radio is obsolete (1995), a nonstandard size, and riveted and bolted into the car so it's not likely to get stolen anyway.
Those hardware related libraries you talk about are in effect drivers...
Which convert a changeable interface (hardware) into a fixed interface (the api)... In this case the changeable interface is changed to the underlying linux api instead of directly to a piece of hardware.
Mac drivers are based on CUPS too, what happens if you take the PPD file from the mac drivers?
I have avoided Epson printers for years, having nothing but problems with them (like the stupid top load paper, where the paper stands almost vertical, falls over from the slightest breeze and gets jammed easily), and their linux support is poor to nonexistent.
HP on the other hand produce open source drivers for their printers.. I have an old HP printer/scanner combo for which the latest windows/macos drivers dont work with vista or leopard, but the open drivers still compile on current versions of linux...
Infact, it's possible to compile the open drivers on leopard too.
What does that "groove" feature do?
Similarly for me...
A few of us at work run a combination of NeoOffice and OpenOffice 3.0 beta, while the rest of the company runs msoffice 2007, 2003 or xp...
Being as our software is free, we can always have the same most up to date version (not that i have ever encountered compatibility issues between OO and Neo), so compatibility between us is perfect...
Compatibility with the rest of the company is generally better than the compatibility between different mso versions, sofar noone else has even noticed we're running free software. They will, when the next iteration of the upgrade treadmill comes along and they see how much we need to budget for it.
You'd be surprised, when i worked at a university, where classrooms were always locked or attended by staff, all kinds of things went missing... People would pop off the front blanking plates, reach in and remove the RAM or CPU.
On the other hand, why would anyone want to steal data from a public access computer? It won't have anything worthwhile on it, and if you really want to break it you can usually log in to it.
Better 2 specs than 50...
Look how many different Ethernet, IDE, Video, Wireless drivers etc, you need to have...
The idea of "premium cables" makes very little sense with Digital media...
With an analog cable, it can be argued that better cabling results in better output due to less loss or added noise along the cable, and it's very difficult to gauge the point at which perfect reproduction has been achieved (ie it cant get any better)..
With Digital on the other hand, once you have a bit for bit copy with no loss that was transferred at the maximum speed of the devices (ie no retransmits due to dropped/lost packets), then it's by definition perfect and can't get any better.
And in terms of audio reproduction, "perfect" isn't required from the cable, it doesn't really matter if packets are dropped and retransmitted so long as they arrive in time, so long as a perfect digital copy is received on the other end. And of course, it's easy to prove that a digital copy is identical to the original.
Sooner or later, even audiophiles will realise this and the companies that make these premium cables will find themselves without a market.
Intel have been pushing to do more in software for a while, with software modems and the like, as it helps them sell faster CPUs...
There are ups and downs to both sides... Doing things in hardware is great and performs better short term, but processing speed can quickly catch up and surpass the dedicated hardware if it's not also kept up to date...
Use the Amiga as an example, when it came out it's dedicated video/sound hardware was great, and helped the Amiga massively outperform other systems using the same processors...
But later on, the chipset was a liability... It placed a huge burden on Commodore, who had to try and improve the chipset while not sacrificing compatibility... The updated version, AGA, came out late, still had some crippling limitations (2mb chipram limit for one), was not fully compatible, and wasn't a massive performance improvement.
On the other hand, the serial controller on the Amiga was software controlled, while on an x86 PC it was typically controlled by a buffered chip like a 16550...
The 16550 was limited to 115200bps rates, while the Amiga could theoretically go a lot faster, especially if you upgraded the CPU, but you typically had to disable multitasking to achieve those rates reliably. There were a few file transfer programs that had "high speed" modes at the expense of multitasking.
Actually..
UHCI and OHCI for USB1...
EHCI for USB2...
AMDUSB3 and INTELUSB3 for USB3?
But standards in hardware are good, the reliance on drivers to provide a compatible middle layer between hardware and software does nothing to help performance or ease of use.
With standard hardware, we can...
Make OS's easier to install (drivers for all standard hardware can easily be included, much less work for the OS authors).
Make apps (games) that boot directly without a need for an OS, and derive maximum performance from the hardware without the OS middleware sapping performance.
Itanium may be superior to AMD64...
Alpha, MIPS, HPPA and Sparc are superior to x86/amd64 too, but the problem is that people want to run closed source commercial software, which brings up a number of factors:
Existing apps won't run, users need to replace their apps, commercial vendors will typically charge for the new version.
A new architecture has no users yet, and thus no potential market for commercial vendors. (chicken)
A new architecture has no commercial software vendors yet, and thus it will not gain users. (egg)
Linux runs quite well on IA64, as do other open source OS's, and virtually every open source app that runs on x86/amd64 linux runs nicely on IA64. The trouble is that the hardware is too expensive and not widely enough available to attract a hobbyist user base either. IA64 really depends on good compiler output to perform well, but not enough of the people developing GCC even have access to IA64 hardware.
Personally, i think HP would have been better off continuing development of the Alpha and convincing Intel to join in... It may still have failed, but would still have done better than IA64 did.
I'm also not sure IA64 has much market share among high end servers either... HP seem to be updating HPPA a lot more than they were planning to, and for customers wanting to run windows or linux they sell a lot more x86/amd64 based systems which are cheaper, generally perform better, have more widespread support and represent less vendor lock-in.
Intel already dominate the gfx market, they just don't offer any high end products (enthusiasts/gamers/highend)... A huge number of low end systems (ie cheaper and greater volume) use Intel onboard video chips, and these systems are heavily used in offices around the world, and by home users who aren't interested in heavy video processing or gaming. These small cheap laptops which are increasingly popular these days tend to use intel video too.
Not sure what this has to do with Linux, AMD are quite good at supporting Linux too... Linux users tend to be more knowledgeable and will likely go for whichever spec turns out to be technically superior.
And the hard drive is welded in? That's where the data is, just take it out and hook it to another machine.
Ohh and breaking BIOS passwords is trivial, virtually all of them have backdoors allowing you to bypass whatever password the user set.
As for not booting from CD, so what? just move the existing HD to a different slot, and put your own HD on the primary slot so it gets booted instead... Same end result as booting from CD.
Ofcourse, there is also evidence that you *can* get something from nothing...
All the matter and energy in the universe has to have come from somewhere...
Good idea...
Do you want to buy my water powered Yugo? It says "H2O POWER" on it in several places written with spray paint!
And just incase you're in any doubt, you can look at all the rust it has... Clear evidence of the presence of water!
If you make it possible to disable or impair the functionality of a device remotely, then that's exactly what people will do...
And if you rely on the device responding to the disable command, a market will spring up for people to fix these devices by removing this undesirable functionality.
Apple have been around for a long time, and their market share is still very small.
Apple are also not directly competing with microsoft, they sell a bundle of hardware and software together.
Plus, much of their market share increases recently have been due to the ability of their hardware to run windows as well as osx, making apple a risk-free choice for a premium system. They also already have a market leading position in another market (mp3 players).
Google already had a market which Microsoft entered... It is Microsoft trying to compete with the established player, and few other companies would have the resources to burn like they are.
Similarly with Sony, Microsoft entered a market already dominated by Sony, and in which both Sony and Nintendo have a very strong presence...
Perhaps i should rephrase my statement to read:
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft in markets they dominate simply isn't viable.
Except...
Microsoft are planning to implement ODF *before* they implement OOXML...
Pretty much everyone else has already implemented ODF...
Why would anyone consider using OOXML?