Depending where you live, the publisher may have added an arbitrary delay themselves - ie the game is not released yet where you are... Even with a delayed crack, the crack may become available first in some places.
And the few who will buy because a crack isn't available yet could well be outnumbered by the people who decide not to buy as a result of seeing or reading about the game being unstable and/or causing other stability problems outside of the game (eg some drm schemes come with background processes or drivers which cause problems even when the game in question isn't running).
Instead of wasting so much effort on ever more complex (and thus error prone) DRM schemes, they should retask those developers to actually improve the quality of the games themselves.
What's more annoying is those download sites which force you to download in the browser, rather than giving you a link that you can pass to wget...
I always used to run wget instead of using the browser, back in the days of dialup and netscape 4.x where the browsers would almost always crash long before a large download had completed. But there are also many cases today where downloading with the browser is just horrendously inconvenient, like when im downloading something only to upload it again to a colocated server (where my upstream speed at home is 1/10 of the download).
NT for Alpha actually worked very well, it was considerably faster and more stable than the x86 version.
The problem was a lack of applications... Most windows apps are closed source, and only compiled for x86 which meant you either couldn't run them at all, or you had to run them through emulation which incurred a significant performance hit.
That's why Linux is in much better shape on non x86 architectures than windows, the fact that drivers/apps/etc can easily be recompiled by anyone and in most cases already have been.
Pretty much everything most people would want to do on an x86 linux box, i can also do on an alpha, ppc or arm based linux box... The same is not true with windows.
There are hypervisors for ARM, but most current ARM based servers seem to be geared up towards having lots of small machines rather than a single big machine split into lots of virtual images... It's really PCs vs Mainframes all over again.
It would sell because its marketed as windows, and then customers would be disappointed because it didnt do the same things their desktop windows does. After a short while, it would earn itself a terrible reputation and people would avoid it, and the existing unwanted devices would show up on ebay very cheaply.
On it's own merit, windows rt offers nothing over android or ios, and at $200 the hardware would at best be the same spec as $200 android hardware if windows were given away for free. On the other hand, its unlikely to be free, so the hardware would be inferior to cover the cost and then you also have a much smaller pool of apps than android/ios devices have.
It's usually even easier than that, a lot of these features are already compile time optional (eg./configure --without-xxx), and gentoo at least lets you turn various optional features off when you install things via use flags.
OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility... No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX... No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX... 16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.
16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.
For movies it doesn't really matter, so long as you're downloading the file in order and don't need to seek, you can start playing immediately without waiting for it to finish. It's much worse for software, where you need to download the entire thing up front - and more software than ever is being distributed online these days, even if you obtain it on physical media you will usually get an outdated version which requires downloaded updates.
Pushing everything through the trunk is also inefficient, with a good full duplex connection, local caching and local peering you can get far more efficient use of the trunk... Protocols like bittorrent would work especially well if users were locally peered and had good upstream bandwidth.
Websites will work, but some more bloated sites will load slowly... Really this is the fault of the site designer, but most users won't care about that and just be annoyed by their own slow connection.
A slower connection can be annoying if your waiting for downloads, especially if your trying to play a game which must update itself before it will let you play... The 1mb connection may be enough for gameplay, but it will introduce a significant wait while updating.
Streaming is an annoyance, 1mbps may not be fast enough to stream high def content, but its more than fast enough to download a movie over night for you to watch the following morning.
None of this is critical, but it makes the experience much better.
It's not about sustained throughput so much as ability to finish things quickly and get back to an idle state... With 2mbps i could keep the line maxed out for hours on end, with 100mbps i do the same things but its bursty and the line mostly sits idle. Modern websites get quite bloated these days, especially poorly designed ones, a fast connection improves loading speed quite significantly...
Depending on latency, buffer sizes and tcp window scaling etc, a single connection is usually much slower than multiple connections used by torrents... Depending on the window scaling settings at either end, your machine may only process up to 64kb of data (per tcp connection) before it needs to send an acknowledgement, which can result in very poor performance over high latency and/or long distance links.
Many applications install the startup widget without asking, and often without informing the user at all. It could be solved through the use of a proper package manager and standard package format so that the package manager rather than an arbitrary installer program actually controls the installation and always gives the user the choice.
It's not that unix is magical, but there are several very important differences that make unix systems far less susceptible to these problems than windows...
1, The biggest difference is probably the use of package management on unix vs arbitrary binary installers on windows... with a package manager, every install, update and uninstall is controlled by the same process which keeps track of what got installed and is able to cleanly remove it again, with windows an "installer" is just a binary program that you are trusting to write files all over the place but you have no real idea what its doing or if its working correctly. With the package manager its very easy to identify what package installed any given file etc. If you go outside of the package manager on unix and try to overwrite system packages by hand you can have serious problems too.
2, Transparency - Unix systems are much simpler and better understood, the boot process is usually just a series of scripts for instance, the filesystem is laid out in a mostly logical hierarchy and most configuration is stored in individual human readable text files, its much easier to understand exactly whats going on and much more difficult for poorly written programs to hide performance crippling cruft in unexpected places.
3, Lack of third party drivers - on most unix systems, drivers typically ship with the OS, get updated when the OS does and get tested together... Windows systems typically have a random collection of disparate drivers which sometimes don't play well together or with updates to other parts of the system. The other problems mentioned above also apply to drivers as well as userland.
The real problem is that the install and/or uninstall is handled by the program itself, and not by a centralised package manager... So every installer is different, there is no consistency, not always a list of what exactly got installed or where, and no guarantee that the uninstall will actually remove everything. You can also encounter really stupid problems, like the one you describe where you cant uninstall because the uninstall program is damaged. Sometimes you can reinstall over the top and then uninstall, but again due to inconsistency that doesnt always work.
The people complaining do tend to vote for someone other than the main parties, it just doesn't achieve anything. The vast majority don't understand whats going on and dont want to, they believe what they hear on mass media, and those media outlets are controlled by the main parties.
Without power your voice will never be loud enough for the masses to hear it. Without a loud voice, you will never get enough votes and thus no power.
The current system is simply designed to maintain the status quo, while giving the false impression that people have any say in the matter.
Which makes it an excellent dev environment, but terrible for production use... While you want your code to be able to cope with database instability, when that code goes into production you also want to minimise the chances that it will ever have to.
Only you are, if you ever need to wipe your phone and reinstall then you are only able to install the latest version of iOS, unless you've previously jailbroken and cached the previous versions - which isn't officially supported by apple.
I have both ethernet in every room and wifi... Ethernet is quite a bit faster for bulk data transfers, has less latency, is less prone to interference and to increase bandwidth you can lay more cables whereas there is finite wifi spectrum. I also have several devices which don't support wifi, or would require expensive optional hardware to do so. My house has thick walls, so wifi coverage is somewhat weaker in places, and the garage is separate from the house and has virtually no signal at all. I tend to use ethernet for static devices, leaving more bandwidth available for devices that actually move around. I also tend to plug my laptop in to ethernet if i need to do a large transfer.
They may not want to screw with it themselves, but they want and deserve a choice... More choice means more competition, and while there is plenty of competition on the hardware side of things they are pretty screwed when it comes to software. That's why hardware has improved massively and gotten ridiculously cheap, while software is still buggy and continues getting more expensive.
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Depending where you live, the publisher may have added an arbitrary delay themselves - ie the game is not released yet where you are... Even with a delayed crack, the crack may become available first in some places.
And the few who will buy because a crack isn't available yet could well be outnumbered by the people who decide not to buy as a result of seeing or reading about the game being unstable and/or causing other stability problems outside of the game (eg some drm schemes come with background processes or drivers which cause problems even when the game in question isn't running).
Instead of wasting so much effort on ever more complex (and thus error prone) DRM schemes, they should retask those developers to actually improve the quality of the games themselves.
What's more annoying is those download sites which force you to download in the browser, rather than giving you a link that you can pass to wget...
I always used to run wget instead of using the browser, back in the days of dialup and netscape 4.x where the browsers would almost always crash long before a large download had completed. But there are also many cases today where downloading with the browser is just horrendously inconvenient, like when im downloading something only to upload it again to a colocated server (where my upstream speed at home is 1/10 of the download).
It's a perfectly good commit message, look at the actual diff to see what the typo was...
NT for Alpha actually worked very well, it was considerably faster and more stable than the x86 version.
The problem was a lack of applications... Most windows apps are closed source, and only compiled for x86 which meant you either couldn't run them at all, or you had to run them through emulation which incurred a significant performance hit.
That's why Linux is in much better shape on non x86 architectures than windows, the fact that drivers/apps/etc can easily be recompiled by anyone and in most cases already have been.
Pretty much everything most people would want to do on an x86 linux box, i can also do on an alpha, ppc or arm based linux box... The same is not true with windows.
There are hypervisors for ARM, but most current ARM based servers seem to be geared up towards having lots of small machines rather than a single big machine split into lots of virtual images...
It's really PCs vs Mainframes all over again.
It would sell because its marketed as windows, and then customers would be disappointed because it didnt do the same things their desktop windows does. After a short while, it would earn itself a terrible reputation and people would avoid it, and the existing unwanted devices would show up on ebay very cheaply.
On it's own merit, windows rt offers nothing over android or ios, and at $200 the hardware would at best be the same spec as $200 android hardware if windows were given away for free. On the other hand, its unlikely to be free, so the hardware would be inferior to cover the cost and then you also have a much smaller pool of apps than android/ios devices have.
It's usually even easier than that, a lot of these features are already compile time optional (eg ./configure --without-xxx), and gentoo at least lets you turn various optional features off when you install things via use flags.
Much more than 1% now, most mobile/tablet users don't have flash...
OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility...
No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX...
No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX...
16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.
16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.
For movies it doesn't really matter, so long as you're downloading the file in order and don't need to seek, you can start playing immediately without waiting for it to finish.
It's much worse for software, where you need to download the entire thing up front - and more software than ever is being distributed online these days, even if you obtain it on physical media you will usually get an outdated version which requires downloaded updates.
And remote support was just fine on dialup back in the day too...
As screen resolutions get higher, the bandwidth required for screen sharing goes up.
Pushing everything through the trunk is also inefficient, with a good full duplex connection, local caching and local peering you can get far more efficient use of the trunk... Protocols like bittorrent would work especially well if users were locally peered and had good upstream bandwidth.
With video conferencing you can talk to a much cheaper doctor in india or china... If anything it will push the price down.
Websites will work, but some more bloated sites will load slowly... Really this is the fault of the site designer, but most users won't care about that and just be annoyed by their own slow connection.
A slower connection can be annoying if your waiting for downloads, especially if your trying to play a game which must update itself before it will let you play... The 1mb connection may be enough for gameplay, but it will introduce a significant wait while updating.
Streaming is an annoyance, 1mbps may not be fast enough to stream high def content, but its more than fast enough to download a movie over night for you to watch the following morning.
None of this is critical, but it makes the experience much better.
It's not about sustained throughput so much as ability to finish things quickly and get back to an idle state...
With 2mbps i could keep the line maxed out for hours on end, with 100mbps i do the same things but its bursty and the line mostly sits idle.
Modern websites get quite bloated these days, especially poorly designed ones, a fast connection improves loading speed quite significantly...
Depending on latency, buffer sizes and tcp window scaling etc, a single connection is usually much slower than multiple connections used by torrents...
Depending on the window scaling settings at either end, your machine may only process up to 64kb of data (per tcp connection) before it needs to send an acknowledgement, which can result in very poor performance over high latency and/or long distance links.
Many applications install the startup widget without asking, and often without informing the user at all. It could be solved through the use of a proper package manager and standard package format so that the package manager rather than an arbitrary installer program actually controls the installation and always gives the user the choice.
It's not that unix is magical, but there are several very important differences that make unix systems far less susceptible to these problems than windows...
1, The biggest difference is probably the use of package management on unix vs arbitrary binary installers on windows... with a package manager, every install, update and uninstall is controlled by the same process which keeps track of what got installed and is able to cleanly remove it again, with windows an "installer" is just a binary program that you are trusting to write files all over the place but you have no real idea what its doing or if its working correctly. With the package manager its very easy to identify what package installed any given file etc. If you go outside of the package manager on unix and try to overwrite system packages by hand you can have serious problems too.
2, Transparency - Unix systems are much simpler and better understood, the boot process is usually just a series of scripts for instance, the filesystem is laid out in a mostly logical hierarchy and most configuration is stored in individual human readable text files, its much easier to understand exactly whats going on and much more difficult for poorly written programs to hide performance crippling cruft in unexpected places.
3, Lack of third party drivers - on most unix systems, drivers typically ship with the OS, get updated when the OS does and get tested together... Windows systems typically have a random collection of disparate drivers which sometimes don't play well together or with updates to other parts of the system. The other problems mentioned above also apply to drivers as well as userland.
The real problem is that the install and/or uninstall is handled by the program itself, and not by a centralised package manager... So every installer is different, there is no consistency, not always a list of what exactly got installed or where, and no guarantee that the uninstall will actually remove everything.
You can also encounter really stupid problems, like the one you describe where you cant uninstall because the uninstall program is damaged. Sometimes you can reinstall over the top and then uninstall, but again due to inconsistency that doesnt always work.
The people complaining do tend to vote for someone other than the main parties, it just doesn't achieve anything.
The vast majority don't understand whats going on and dont want to, they believe what they hear on mass media, and those media outlets are controlled by the main parties.
Without power your voice will never be loud enough for the masses to hear it.
Without a loud voice, you will never get enough votes and thus no power.
The current system is simply designed to maintain the status quo, while giving the false impression that people have any say in the matter.
Which makes it an excellent dev environment, but terrible for production use...
While you want your code to be able to cope with database instability, when that code goes into production you also want to minimise the chances that it will ever have to.
And it would, if the drivers had been open source instead of closed then they would have been recompiled along with the newer android kernel.
Only you are, if you ever need to wipe your phone and reinstall then you are only able to install the latest version of iOS, unless you've previously jailbroken and cached the previous versions - which isn't officially supported by apple.
I have both ethernet in every room and wifi...
Ethernet is quite a bit faster for bulk data transfers, has less latency, is less prone to interference and to increase bandwidth you can lay more cables whereas there is finite wifi spectrum. I also have several devices which don't support wifi, or would require expensive optional hardware to do so.
My house has thick walls, so wifi coverage is somewhat weaker in places, and the garage is separate from the house and has virtually no signal at all.
I tend to use ethernet for static devices, leaving more bandwidth available for devices that actually move around. I also tend to plug my laptop in to ethernet if i need to do a large transfer.
They may not want to screw with it themselves, but they want and deserve a choice... More choice means more competition, and while there is plenty of competition on the hardware side of things they are pretty screwed when it comes to software. That's why hardware has improved massively and gotten ridiculously cheap, while software is still buggy and continues getting more expensive.