I wonder how the "barcode" works, exactly. The story doesn't go to any details. Different cell phones display images in different ways, and older models might not be able to display them at all. Resolutions vary wildly. Of course I guess they could just go for the lowest common denominator of image-compatible cell phones, like a 40x40 black and white bitmap. But it's probably an MMS image which kind of limits the audience. Still, a neat idea, beats waiting in line if your phone is up to it.
Not really a gut feeling per se, but a generalisation based on the evidence I can see. Which might be an unwarrented generalisation because the evidence is too limited, as I readily admitted.
As for small vs. large companies, that might well be true. Large companies probably have different priorities and a substantially more complex release process with a large hierarchy a bug has to go through before even being worked on. In a small company, on the other hand, the programmer might well be the person the bug report is sent to in the first place and might start working on a critical bug fix the moment he receives (and has validated) the report, releasing a tentative beta patch the moment he is done. And of course, small companies often work with a much smaller set of customers, where the happiness of a single customer could even be essential to the survival of the company. They also sometimes have more competition than larger vendors, with the obvious extreme example being Microsoft on the OS and office market.
Note that this process is virtually the same in an OSS project of any size; although large OSS projects have other methods of getting a bug to the right programmer, eg. using open bug databases. Note also that the OSS release process is argued (many times in comments to this story) to lead to patches being released too early, too often, breaking systems because they are not tested well enough - and small software vendors could be said to share the same problem. Note further that I explicitly referred to prominent OSS and closed-source project (as opposed to small commercial closed-source companies) in my original post.:)
What exactly do you question? That security problems in (prominent) OSS projects are fixed quickly or that security problems in (prominent) closed-source projects are not?
I won't save you the research - there's a very good chance someone else will, though - but the former appears to be true as far as I can see. Seems that whenever a security hole is reported on Slashdot, there's a pointer to a fix within the story or, at the very least, in a comment to it. Of course, there is the (distinct!) possibility that the bugs reported here are not representative of overall bugs, that is there might be a large number of bugs sitting in various bugzillas that are critical and nobody ever looks at. As for the latter statement, I'm even less certain. Certainly there are often cases reported on Slashdot where a commercial software vendor was not responsive to bug reports and a security advisory was released after a given period with no patch out. However, in this case more so than in the previous, I think there's a good chance that this is not representative of the commercial software world in general. This is due to the general ideology on Slashdot, which isn't exactly impartial. It still might be true, though.
So, in essence: From reading Slashdot you certainly get the impression that security holes in OSS projects, once found, are fixed a lot faster than security holes in commercial closed-source projects. However, due to the nature of Slashdot this should be taken with care, and is obviously not a substitute for an impartial research into the subject. (Which is a difficult thing if it's either paid for by Microsoft or made by OSS proponents...)
32bpp is probably a bit excessive... You certainly don't need an alpha channel, which means a reduction to 24bpp and I'd assume a 16bit color space would be absolutely sufficient for TV-quality, too. PAL comes at 25 fps, a further reduction. I'd assume using some fast lossless compression algorithm would yield more savings. Of course, I'm far from knowledgeable about this topic (only watch the news), just some thoughts.:)
I imagine this will be far worse with a 3D avatar based system, since the selection will be much larger, and it just won't be possible for the average person to make their own (like they currently do with animated GIFs and such).
It's not so hard if you give people the right tools. Check out the avatar building in EVE-Online, EverQuest 2 and The Sims 2 (aka The Sims Bodyshop) for some examples. People don't create the avatars and their faces as such, they just set some parameters. Previously, there were a very limited number of parameters, but The Sims Bodyshop in particular offers more parameters for the appearance of the nose than previous apps hat in total...
I don't mind them reviewing other kinds of hardware, but Tom's Hardware Guide these days posts everything from editorials to Linux advisories and, what's worse, freaking game previews.
Wow. It nearly did, even running Cygwin on Windows XP. Weird stuff.
I entered it in cmd.exe (ie the MS command line interpreter) and nothing happened, it didn't complain about a wrong filename or command, either. Then I entered bash and pasted it, and not much happened either, it indicated that a new background job was started. When I closed bash, though, the computer stalled, the SysInternals task manager crashed (ouch) and mouse movement went sluggish. After a while, an error message came up remarking that Windows was out of virtual memory. I think that's what stopped the command, because at that point the system was back to normal and there was a bunch of error messages in the terminal.
It was an interview with the creator of the Sims, not long before the release of Sims 2.
No. It's referred to as a "brief biography" on Slashdot; it's certainly not an interview.
But even if it had been, it'd still be all right to post this story. If it's of no interest to you, you're free to ignore it - I certainly did. It's not like I read Slashdot Games for the news, they're way to random and old, it's the discussion that's often interesting. And your claim that it's paid advertising is still based on nothing more than your non-standard definition of the word.
Why? IMHO, I think it's simply that there's no mad skillz involved.
Whatever. Maybe they're not "mad skillz", but try telling a friend of mine whose (virtual) wife just died and who can't get his toddler to learn to walk that this is an easy game. I found raising two toddlers and one infant at the same time quite strenuous myself. The Sims can be a quite challenging game if you're willing (or careless enough) to create challenging situations.
The Sims is not considered leet because it did sell a lot of copies, because it appeals to the masses and the masses are per definition non-leet. The Sims is not considered leet because it doesn't try to hide the fact that it's essentially a virtual doll house - although it's really quite similar to most CRPGs (minus the fighting) who do try to hide that fact. Think of it as doll house versus action figures. (Key notion I just got.) Or perhabs rather Lego versus action figures, because like Legos The Sims is just an extremely open and creative game.
[W]hen I can I put my Sims in my SimCity
In a very halk-baked way, you already can. I assume SC4 doesn't support importing The Sims 2 characters, though. What I found very interesting that The Sims 2 actually supports importing SimCity 4 areas. Not the city itself, just the terrain with some streets and bridges, but still. Allows people to make use of SC4's great terraforming engine to create The Sims 2 neighbourhoods. And as for SimPlanet, man I would love to see a Sim Earth remake. I think it was the first Sim * game I played (in English, without knowing a word) and it was awesome. It's really a shame they never made a sequel. I always dreamed of that SimCity in SimNation on SimEarth design you mentioned when I was playing the original SimCity and SimEarth.
That's really just one way to play the game. I agree the game reflects what you say - and why shouldn't it, effectively a better cooking equipment will give you better meals in the real world, all other things being equal. But the game really leaves it up to you to play your character like you want.
Actually, I think the aspirations in The Sims 2 are a nice way to deal with the different way people play this game. There is the materialist aspiration, making a sim happy simply by buying him things. But among others there are also the family aspiration, the romance aspiration and the knowledge aspiration. That last one reflects the way I play my (first) character - max out most if not all skills and reach the top of the career, not because it pays more money, but rather as a goal in itself. I'm now a mad scientist and I guess all that's left is maxing out body, charisma and mechanical, then my character has "won". Note that I have more money than I could spend (due to a job special episode that paid 50,000 credits) and I certainly don't have a TV in every room. And I don't have a seperate dining and living room and kitchen as such...
Huh? That's a totally different story, and it was posted more than a week - ages in Slashdot time - ago. I think there were a lot more stories about Doom 3, and The Sims 2 is just (subjectively) a much better game than that, with (objectively) way more complex gameplay. It's also the successor to the best selling PC game, which alone makes it significant. The notion that this comes close to advertising is ridiculous.
Quality post. You managed to mock the grandparent and general Slashdot sentiment, but in an intelligent way that doesn't hurt anyone, and at the same time transmit valuable information. I know I should leave the moderation to the mods, but I felt it would've been a shame if the humorous side among the Informative moderation the post might get.:)
Read the part on the events of May 17th 2004. This has got to be the coolest troubleshooting situation I've ever heard of. An extract (do read the linked paragraphs for the full story!):
The PC/104 computer was also on the RS-485 bus, and we reasoned that by rewriting the Linux device driver (which we had written in the first place, so we knew what we were doing) we could make the computer impersonate the control panel, and convince the engine that it should keep running. Fortunately, we had a snapshot of the communication traffic between the engine and the control panel from earlier testing in the lab with the manufacturer's MSDOS-based software. But with no hardware available to test our code, we had to modify the driver, send patches over the 2400 baud Iridium link, and rmmod/insmod the driver to try to restart the engine.
And to think I get nervous flashing a computers CMOS...
I hadn't really notices this service, and I must say it seems fairly interesting. If the technical realisation is/were good enough, it'd be worth the money to me and basically the first viable legal music story I'd be interested in. The obvious downside of using such subscription service is that once you stop the subscription, you don't have any music left even though you might have paid them for a long time. The same goes if they decide to stop offering the service. But it's still only 10 bucks per month, at that price I could listen to a lot of diverse music using the service and still buy the best 2% of the music I hear for offline usage. That last point is crucial since it's the only way to listen to the music using an MP3 player, which I do a lot.
It'd need to work flawlessly, however. 128 kps would be a minimum, optimally they'd offer everything at bandwidth ranging from 64 kps (when you need the remaining bandwidth for something else) up to 320 kps. The bitrate is irrelevant, of course, if they don't use a quality codec to begin with. But then, there isn't such a large difference between the various modern codecs as there was 4 years ago; at 192+ kps they pretty much all are CD quality. Apart from the bitrate, the server downtime ought to be about zero, too. I listen to music all the time and their service isn't worth anything to me if they'd interrupt that habit (well maybe my ears would be grateful). And last but not least, the catalogue would have to be right, obviously. My taste isn't too exotic, but I'd wager I wouldn't be too happy with what they have to offer. At least they seem to have Orbital.
I'm curious what measures they have taken to prevent anyone from just capturing the audio stream. Obviously, the analogue gap would allow any of their customers to record music they stream and listen to it over and over again without buying the track. And I doubt they're checking wether the sound cards output is set to digital, which would enable people to record without the losses that incur when you record the analogue music. It'd also enable people to put the stremed music on a discman. Furthermore, with some sort of sound card emulation software you could just write the stream to the HD without it even leaving the box, something they really cannot prevent with the current non-TCPA computers. And that's not even mentioning that most cards have a simple option to record whatever's currently on the sound out.
As if the people who release cracks needed to read this on Slashdot - "So that's the way to alter a conditional jump!" I think either the grand-grandparent already knows his protection is easy to defeat and has taken precautions, or he might be taking them now.:)
Note that what grandparent describes would mean cracking the program as opposed to just using a "pirated" serial. The latter is a lot easier since it doesn't even take a cracker to do any work, just a malicious/sloppy user that lets his legit key out. Furthermore, the user who tries to use the Shareware without paying doesn't have to download and run any software, he just has to transmit a couple of characters, which is also easier.
I think the best copy protection is "release early, release often". Apart from the very highest profile Shareware applications, it usually takes some time for a crack to be released. If the software is updated regularily, there never is a crack for the most recent version, or at least not for a long time. Also, I guess it gives more opportunities to update and alter the actual copy protection code, presenting at least a moving target. Of course, developers typically don't want to spend half their time updating the copy protection... but I doubt that much effort is necessary. Note that of course pirates still can get an old version from some download site that hasn't updated yet, but nobody likes having to use an outdated version, especially not the crowd pirates typically belong to, ie computer enthusiasts.
Apart from that, I think the guilt trap works well. The more teary-eyed the better, although I can understand that's not a very pleasent thing to do; after all the pirates are doing the bad thing, why would you want to beg for their money. Easy payment methods are a definite plus, several times I couldn't register something without the credit card I don't own, only once (Escape Velocity for Windows) was it worth enough to me to ask an acquaintance to let me use theirs. PayPal has done a lot to alleviate that problem. And I think a good community also helps, depending on whether this is appropriate for the software - give out "social" benefits for the people who register, like a special forum status. That can't be cracked, and to some people is worth a lot, like the subscriber star, karma bonus and a low id on Slashdot.
Thanks.:) Doesn't look as nice as the Philips and Apple ones, but I guess function over form, so I'll look into it.
I really don't get why the other manufacturers don't support this, though. I wouldn't call it DRM - I can play MP3s on the players anyway, no matter if I move them using Explorer or some third party application, so why bother enforcing the usage of a 3rd party app? Bah.:|
Unfortunately the iRiver HDD players seemindly are of the larger form factor. I'm really looking something iPod mini sized, like the Philips HDD060-series is. iRiver has smaller-sized devices, but they all seem to be flash based, and the one with my minimum capacity of 1 GB wish is quite expensive, more expensive than a 4 GB iPod mini. I have heard a lot of good things about them, though.
It's a neat idea. In a nutshell, he suggests a Peer to Peer encrypted storage network. You get exactly as much storage room as you are willing to offer yourself for others to use. When you store anything, it's encrypted and automatically spread to other systems.
It doesn't make for a very safe backup, though: What happens if somebody decides to stop the service and just deletes his local storage? You've got no more backup at least for a while, and you might not even know it. And of course, other people have head crashes, too, which would also obliberate your backup at least for the time it takes to recreate it from your own data. Of course, by that time, you might have deleted it yourself, either by accident or knowingly, since you have a backup after all. A viable solution would be to store every file multiple times on different remote servers, although that'd lower the storage capacity you get. It's still the right step, though.
The crucial problem is that the service provider can't really give any guarantees that you will be able to regain your lost data. With three or more independent copies in different locations, it's very unlikely that the backup won't work for some reason, but a backup that's not 100% is not a very useful one, especially in those situations where backups are really crucial.
It's still a neat idea, and to my knowledge has not been done to that degree of sophistication. Of course, as others suggest, nobody is stopping you from inserting encrypted data into Freenet, but that's nowhere near as fast and secure as this could be. And while it's not a true backup, it's better than no backup at all, and most likely enough security for many persons.
The unit though it can be used as a removable HDD will not play mp3s that you simply drag and drop onto the drive.
Eww. That really sucks. And I guess it's unlikely they changed that with the new models, although they finally went ahead and used USB2.0 with those, which is the main reason I didn't get the HDD060. A friend says his iPod can't do that, either, though, is that true?
Unlike Philips HDD060 which is a piece of garbage, it has to be charged for 14 hours out of the box or you risk fucking it's battery, and Philips don't see any need to inform customers of this with a note inside the product. Also it's DRM software is horribly slow.
Care to elaborate? I was going to buy one and now am looking into the successor models HDD050 and HDD065...
Slashdot Mirror
Ohh ... and there is the money and profits issues too.
... Well... okay, money and profits.
Ah, yes... yes, money, profits and women!
I wonder how the "barcode" works, exactly. The story doesn't go to any details. Different cell phones display images in different ways, and older models might not be able to display them at all. Resolutions vary wildly. Of course I guess they could just go for the lowest common denominator of image-compatible cell phones, like a 40x40 black and white bitmap. But it's probably an MMS image which kind of limits the audience. Still, a neat idea, beats waiting in line if your phone is up to it.
Not really a gut feeling per se, but a generalisation based on the evidence I can see. Which might be an unwarrented generalisation because the evidence is too limited, as I readily admitted.
:)
As for small vs. large companies, that might well be true. Large companies probably have different priorities and a substantially more complex release process with a large hierarchy a bug has to go through before even being worked on.
In a small company, on the other hand, the programmer might well be the person the bug report is sent to in the first place and might start working on a critical bug fix the moment he receives (and has validated) the report, releasing a tentative beta patch the moment he is done. And of course, small companies often work with a much smaller set of customers, where the happiness of a single customer could even be essential to the survival of the company. They also sometimes have more competition than larger vendors, with the obvious extreme example being Microsoft on the OS and office market.
Note that this process is virtually the same in an OSS project of any size; although large OSS projects have other methods of getting a bug to the right programmer, eg. using open bug databases. Note also that the OSS release process is argued (many times in comments to this story) to lead to patches being released too early, too often, breaking systems because they are not tested well enough - and small software vendors could be said to share the same problem.
Note further that I explicitly referred to prominent OSS and closed-source project (as opposed to small commercial closed-source companies) in my original post.
What exactly do you question? That security problems in (prominent) OSS projects are fixed quickly or that security problems in (prominent) closed-source projects are not?
I won't save you the research - there's a very good chance someone else will, though - but the former appears to be true as far as I can see. Seems that whenever a security hole is reported on Slashdot, there's a pointer to a fix within the story or, at the very least, in a comment to it. Of course, there is the (distinct!) possibility that the bugs reported here are not representative of overall bugs, that is there might be a large number of bugs sitting in various bugzillas that are critical and nobody ever looks at.
As for the latter statement, I'm even less certain. Certainly there are often cases reported on Slashdot where a commercial software vendor was not responsive to bug reports and a security advisory was released after a given period with no patch out. However, in this case more so than in the previous, I think there's a good chance that this is not representative of the commercial software world in general. This is due to the general ideology on Slashdot, which isn't exactly impartial. It still might be true, though.
So, in essence: From reading Slashdot you certainly get the impression that security holes in OSS projects, once found, are fixed a lot faster than security holes in commercial closed-source projects. However, due to the nature of Slashdot this should be taken with care, and is obviously not a substitute for an impartial research into the subject. (Which is a difficult thing if it's either paid for by Microsoft or made by OSS proponents...)
32bpp is probably a bit excessive... You certainly don't need an alpha channel, which means a reduction to 24bpp and I'd assume a 16bit color space would be absolutely sufficient for TV-quality, too. PAL comes at 25 fps, a further reduction. I'd assume using some fast lossless compression algorithm would yield more savings. Of course, I'm far from knowledgeable about this topic (only watch the news), just some thoughts. :)
I imagine this will be far worse with a 3D avatar based system, since the selection will be much larger, and it just won't be possible for the average person to make their own (like they currently do with animated GIFs and such).
It's not so hard if you give people the right tools. Check out the avatar building in EVE-Online, EverQuest 2 and The Sims 2 (aka The Sims Bodyshop) for some examples. People don't create the avatars and their faces as such, they just set some parameters. Previously, there were a very limited number of parameters, but The Sims Bodyshop in particular offers more parameters for the appearance of the nose than previous apps hat in total...
I don't mind them reviewing other kinds of hardware, but Tom's Hardware Guide these days posts everything from editorials to Linux advisories and, what's worse, freaking game previews.
Wow. It nearly did, even running Cygwin on Windows XP. Weird stuff.
I entered it in cmd.exe (ie the MS command line interpreter) and nothing happened, it didn't complain about a wrong filename or command, either. Then I entered bash and pasted it, and not much happened either, it indicated that a new background job was started. When I closed bash, though, the computer stalled, the SysInternals task manager crashed (ouch) and mouse movement went sluggish. After a while, an error message came up remarking that Windows was out of virtual memory. I think that's what stopped the command, because at that point the system was back to normal and there was a bunch of error messages in the terminal.
It was an interview with the creator of the Sims, not long before the release of Sims 2.
No. It's referred to as a "brief biography" on Slashdot; it's certainly not an interview.
But even if it had been, it'd still be all right to post this story. If it's of no interest to you, you're free to ignore it - I certainly did. It's not like I read Slashdot Games for the news, they're way to random and old, it's the discussion that's often interesting. And your claim that it's paid advertising is still based on nothing more than your non-standard definition of the word.
Why? IMHO, I think it's simply that there's no mad skillz involved.
Whatever. Maybe they're not "mad skillz", but try telling a friend of mine whose (virtual) wife just died and who can't get his toddler to learn to walk that this is an easy game. I found raising two toddlers and one infant at the same time quite strenuous myself. The Sims can be a quite challenging game if you're willing (or careless enough) to create challenging situations.
The Sims is not considered leet because it did sell a lot of copies, because it appeals to the masses and the masses are per definition non-leet. The Sims is not considered leet because it doesn't try to hide the fact that it's essentially a virtual doll house - although it's really quite similar to most CRPGs (minus the fighting) who do try to hide that fact. Think of it as doll house versus action figures. (Key notion I just got.) Or perhabs rather Lego versus action figures, because like Legos The Sims is just an extremely open and creative game.
[W]hen I can I put my Sims in my SimCity
In a very halk-baked way, you already can. I assume SC4 doesn't support importing The Sims 2 characters, though. What I found very interesting that The Sims 2 actually supports importing SimCity 4 areas. Not the city itself, just the terrain with some streets and bridges, but still. Allows people to make use of SC4's great terraforming engine to create The Sims 2 neighbourhoods.
And as for SimPlanet, man I would love to see a Sim Earth remake. I think it was the first Sim * game I played (in English, without knowing a word) and it was awesome. It's really a shame they never made a sequel. I always dreamed of that SimCity in SimNation on SimEarth design you mentioned when I was playing the original SimCity and SimEarth.
That's really just one way to play the game. I agree the game reflects what you say - and why shouldn't it, effectively a better cooking equipment will give you better meals in the real world, all other things being equal. But the game really leaves it up to you to play your character like you want.
Actually, I think the aspirations in The Sims 2 are a nice way to deal with the different way people play this game. There is the materialist aspiration, making a sim happy simply by buying him things. But among others there are also the family aspiration, the romance aspiration and the knowledge aspiration.
That last one reflects the way I play my (first) character - max out most if not all skills and reach the top of the career, not because it pays more money, but rather as a goal in itself. I'm now a mad scientist and I guess all that's left is maxing out body, charisma and mechanical, then my character has "won".
Note that I have more money than I could spend (due to a job special episode that paid 50,000 credits) and I certainly don't have a TV in every room. And I don't have a seperate dining and living room and kitchen as such...
Huh? That's a totally different story, and it was posted more than a week - ages in Slashdot time - ago. I think there were a lot more stories about Doom 3, and The Sims 2 is just (subjectively) a much better game than that, with (objectively) way more complex gameplay. It's also the successor to the best selling PC game, which alone makes it significant. The notion that this comes close to advertising is ridiculous.
Quality post. You managed to mock the grandparent and general Slashdot sentiment, but in an intelligent way that doesn't hurt anyone, and at the same time transmit valuable information. I know I should leave the moderation to the mods, but I felt it would've been a shame if the humorous side among the Informative moderation the post might get. :)
So, well, is there a better authority than SiFi and Wikipedia out there?
Both are irrelevant. The winner is: "digital versatile disk". The Google Hath Spoken.
Ah, I see. Ha ha. ;) Thanks for clearing that up.
I don't get it. I'm not a native speaker, maybe that's why. Care to explain?
I'm not getting that. I'm afrait it must be you. ;)
I hadn't really notices this service, and I must say it seems fairly interesting. If the technical realisation is/were good enough, it'd be worth the money to me and basically the first viable legal music story I'd be interested in.
The obvious downside of using such subscription service is that once you stop the subscription, you don't have any music left even though you might have paid them for a long time. The same goes if they decide to stop offering the service.
But it's still only 10 bucks per month, at that price I could listen to a lot of diverse music using the service and still buy the best 2% of the music I hear for offline usage. That last point is crucial since it's the only way to listen to the music using an MP3 player, which I do a lot.
It'd need to work flawlessly, however. 128 kps would be a minimum, optimally they'd offer everything at bandwidth ranging from 64 kps (when you need the remaining bandwidth for something else) up to 320 kps. The bitrate is irrelevant, of course, if they don't use a quality codec to begin with. But then, there isn't such a large difference between the various modern codecs as there was 4 years ago; at 192+ kps they pretty much all are CD quality.
Apart from the bitrate, the server downtime ought to be about zero, too. I listen to music all the time and their service isn't worth anything to me if they'd interrupt that habit (well maybe my ears would be grateful).
And last but not least, the catalogue would have to be right, obviously. My taste isn't too exotic, but I'd wager I wouldn't be too happy with what they have to offer. At least they seem to have Orbital.
I'm curious what measures they have taken to prevent anyone from just capturing the audio stream. Obviously, the analogue gap would allow any of their customers to record music they stream and listen to it over and over again without buying the track. And I doubt they're checking wether the sound cards output is set to digital, which would enable people to record without the losses that incur when you record the analogue music. It'd also enable people to put the stremed music on a discman. Furthermore, with some sort of sound card emulation software you could just write the stream to the HD without it even leaving the box, something they really cannot prevent with the current non-TCPA computers. And that's not even mentioning that most cards have a simple option to record whatever's currently on the sound out.
As if the people who release cracks needed to read this on Slashdot - "So that's the way to alter a conditional jump!" I think either the grand-grandparent already knows his protection is easy to defeat and has taken precautions, or he might be taking them now. :)
Note that what grandparent describes would mean cracking the program as opposed to just using a "pirated" serial. The latter is a lot easier since it doesn't even take a cracker to do any work, just a malicious/sloppy user that lets his legit key out. Furthermore, the user who tries to use the Shareware without paying doesn't have to download and run any software, he just has to transmit a couple of characters, which is also easier.
I think the best copy protection is "release early, release often". Apart from the very highest profile Shareware applications, it usually takes some time for a crack to be released. If the software is updated regularily, there never is a crack for the most recent version, or at least not for a long time. Also, I guess it gives more opportunities to update and alter the actual copy protection code, presenting at least a moving target. Of course, developers typically don't want to spend half their time updating the copy protection... but I doubt that much effort is necessary. Note that of course pirates still can get an old version from some download site that hasn't updated yet, but nobody likes having to use an outdated version, especially not the crowd pirates typically belong to, ie computer enthusiasts.
Apart from that, I think the guilt trap works well. The more teary-eyed the better, although I can understand that's not a very pleasent thing to do; after all the pirates are doing the bad thing, why would you want to beg for their money. Easy payment methods are a definite plus, several times I couldn't register something without the credit card I don't own, only once (Escape Velocity for Windows) was it worth enough to me to ask an acquaintance to let me use theirs. PayPal has done a lot to alleviate that problem. And I think a good community also helps, depending on whether this is appropriate for the software - give out "social" benefits for the people who register, like a special forum status. That can't be cracked, and to some people is worth a lot, like the subscriber star, karma bonus and a low id on Slashdot.
Thanks. :) Doesn't look as nice as the Philips and Apple ones, but I guess function over form, so I'll look into it.
:|
I really don't get why the other manufacturers don't support this, though. I wouldn't call it DRM - I can play MP3s on the players anyway, no matter if I move them using Explorer or some third party application, so why bother enforcing the usage of a 3rd party app? Bah.
Unfortunately the iRiver HDD players seemindly are of the larger form factor. I'm really looking something iPod mini sized, like the Philips HDD060-series is. iRiver has smaller-sized devices, but they all seem to be flash based, and the one with my minimum capacity of 1 GB wish is quite expensive, more expensive than a 4 GB iPod mini. I have heard a lot of good things about them, though.
It's a neat idea. In a nutshell, he suggests a Peer to Peer encrypted storage network. You get exactly as much storage room as you are willing to offer yourself for others to use. When you store anything, it's encrypted and automatically spread to other systems.
It doesn't make for a very safe backup, though: What happens if somebody decides to stop the service and just deletes his local storage? You've got no more backup at least for a while, and you might not even know it. And of course, other people have head crashes, too, which would also obliberate your backup at least for the time it takes to recreate it from your own data. Of course, by that time, you might have deleted it yourself, either by accident or knowingly, since you have a backup after all. A viable solution would be to store every file multiple times on different remote servers, although that'd lower the storage capacity you get. It's still the right step, though.
The crucial problem is that the service provider can't really give any guarantees that you will be able to regain your lost data. With three or more independent copies in different locations, it's very unlikely that the backup won't work for some reason, but a backup that's not 100% is not a very useful one, especially in those situations where backups are really crucial.
It's still a neat idea, and to my knowledge has not been done to that degree of sophistication. Of course, as others suggest, nobody is stopping you from inserting encrypted data into Freenet, but that's nowhere near as fast and secure as this could be. And while it's not a true backup, it's better than no backup at all, and most likely enough security for many persons.
The unit though it can be used as a removable HDD will not play mp3s that you simply drag and drop onto the drive.
Eww. That really sucks. And I guess it's unlikely they changed that with the new models, although they finally went ahead and used USB2.0 with those, which is the main reason I didn't get the HDD060. A friend says his iPod can't do that, either, though, is that true?
Thanks!
Unlike Philips HDD060 which is a piece of garbage, it has to be charged for 14 hours out of the box or you risk fucking it's battery, and Philips don't see any need to inform customers of this with a note inside the product. Also it's DRM software is horribly slow.
Care to elaborate? I was going to buy one and now am looking into the successor models HDD050 and HDD065...