Duh. Copyright infringement is what's being referred to as 'theft' as far as the warez thing goes. Or did you completely forget the basis of the argument you were having?
Nice one. If I can't pirate a game I'm quite happy to rip the security tag off, buy a magazine and stick the game box in the bag before I leave. That's because I recognise that stealing is stealing to a certain extent, and because I have few morals.
Make of that what you will, but I'm honest with myself about it. I've downloaded rips of an awful lot of shitty games and thanked my lucky stars I didn't buy them (thanks to the memories of paying £30+ for appalling NES games back in the day), and I've paid an awful lot of money for games which I consider to be worth my cash, too (Diablo 2 stolen: expansion bought; boxed set bought too, so I have two copies of the expansion - Blizzard deserved the cash).
Almost all the money I have earned, begged or saved since my adolescence has been spent on CDs. Overall the software and music industries are making a hell of a lot of money from me, which isn't an escuse but certainly makes me care less about the insignificant loss of a single CD sale - which may in fact turn out to be two bonus sales if my mates buy it on my recommendation.
But yeah, I still see it as stealing, because it is. I don't care. If they were distributing on a different policy, it wouldn't be stealing, and then I wouldn't be a bad person at all and they wouldn't hate my using their software so much. It's up to them to change, not me.
If you had such high bandwidth bills, what the hell are you posting as an AC for, rather than posting with full links to your software and trying to shame a few people into registering?
And anyway, as stated in the post above, the whole point of shareware is to get rapid distribution and use, even at the risk of people using the software without paying for it as long as they recommend it to their friends and colleagues. Your bandwidth bills are sky-high because your payment model relies on free distribution. If you want to lower your bandwidth bills, don't sell shareware. If you want to recoup them, get a good rating on CNet and strike the right balance between fucntionality and registration-nagging in your product.
It's such a pity that Adobe lost all that money to the Something Awful kids, who would all have legally paid full price for Photoshop if all these pirates hadn't shoved it down their throats. nonsense.
Moore's Law involves the doubling of the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS in an area (transistor density). If you have a single transistir acting as two, you're acting directly in contravention of Moore's Law. As soon as I had the gist of what was going on for this story i knew some idiot would say something about Moore's Law. Might as well have asked how powerful a Beowulf cluster of processors with these chips might be behind China's firewall while using Google to look for Natalie Portman's case mods.
Hell, it's working for XP: XP compatibility mode is for things which don't want to run on NT, but sooner or later anyone programming Win32 apps is going to write from an XP-compatible point of view, and label it as a feature of their product.
For the six seconds this is viewable before it gets tagged flamebait, I think out-of-work Californian IT folk still have it better than those that are getting the BillG cash.
Microsoft, the RIAA and whoever else might be a terrible problem for those on Slashdot but in the Real World they have done quite a bit to make people's lives better.
It's quite rare to expect to have to pay to see an advertisement for something. High-res or not, it's an advert.
Not that it particularly matters to me, because Ep 2 was the worst yet, and the only thing I'm paying for as regards to the next one is my newsgroup access.
I thought the piece was wonderfully satirical. And a damn sight better researched than the sixties fairy tales which have been recited in roughly a third of the replies so far...
Turns out that whenever I'm miles away from a phone line on someone else's PC they only have Acrobat 3 and the document requires 5.:)
Personally I find pdf documents an absolute nightmare to read, and searching, placeholding etc even more of an effort. And for such a great document standard, it sure takes a lot of processing power to do anything (scrolling, loading) quickly, not to mention the fact that its flexibility encourages people do do insane things like embed images in every page. Mmmm, forty page documents that come out at 80 megabytes. Tasty.
I agree with the sentiment that it's ludicrous to do away with a format designed to be portable and stardard, but just because it's portable doesn't mean I actually _like_ it.
Not only that, but IE's 'looking at content' thing that you describe is actually rather handy for tricking pages that don't allow offsite linking (Geocities for instance) into letting you do so.
As for all the insecure ActiveX stuff, I'd rather have 99.9% of pages work / look exactly as they were designed to (including all the diabolical ActiveX stuff that could kill my PC were I so foolish as to follow random links from ICQ messages) than have some degree of childminding from a more secure browser that doesn't look like Joe Webmaster designed it to look.
(Having said that, it's decided today that it can't auto-detect page encoding. This browser window is using Chinese Traditional at the moment. Gah.)
Actively downloading the banners is a bit daft, given that the usual gripe is that dial-up is slower with banners. A 'background process' (i.e. once all the html is in place and the user is browsing posts) is still hogging bandwidth the average power user could do without.
I don't really see what the fuss is about anyway. Slashdot is one of the very few sites where I actually DO click the ads, on accounts of them being of interest to me often. If ThinkGeek were able to export their more cushy merchandise more often I'm sure they'd make more.
Sega Master System: Superior to the Nintendo Entertainment Center... actually I'm not sure why it failed to seriously compete with Nintendo. I remember wanting one, but Nintendo was the way to go then.
Maybe in the US - in Europe the Master System competed on far more even terms.
I barely consider the SNES to be a Nintendo system - its marketing and licensing was completely sensible, which is very un-Nintendo. Had Nintendo acting the same way over letting people code SNES games as they have for every other Nintendo system, it would never have taken the Megadrive's market share. Kudos to Nintendo for that. Pity they went and forgot ot all for the N64, really.
Actually, the Game Gear is a baclit Master System with an extended palette. Its TV Tuner addon was godlike, and the battery life was still superior to that of the Lynx, which was it only competition in the field for what, ten years?
I have the utmost respect for Sega's technical expertise.
Having said that, the 32X was a fantastic idea, but one released two years too late to have a chance, and suffered from its ludicrous price tag. People knew they weren't getting a new console and had no intention of paying for one.
I've had this argument concerning Moodlogic's mp3-profiling software too. Some people seem to think that the idea that some company with a database is at the other end means that they are going to be hit by a ton of targeted spam.
There are several reasons why this shouldn't be a problem.
1. These look-up schemes have no actual way of getting info back to you. Sure, they can probably take your IP address, but unless one thinks that WMP is going to go snitching to find your email address somewhere in Windows, then the risk of having targeted email is minimal.
2. Taking the above into account, one supposes that the information can be used to build up a statistical analysis of what people are listening to. Get this - you've already bought the CD, so the record shop knows it's sold a copy. Or six copies this week. Or whatever. You're already a statistic.
3. The theory that this is being done to build up a 'profile' on users based on their lookups. This is absurd. Even though Windows Media Player 8 comes with a feature which allows remote sites to uniquely tag every instance of the WMP software (which, by the way, can be easily disabled in the options menus), there is no reason for a profile to be kept if it can't be linked to a solid persona, real name and address, other than to draw correlations between the different music on different people's profiles.
In the case of this big scary DVD tracking thing, it can be safely assumed that Hollywood executives are already aware that 60% of Titanic owners also own Pearl Harbour, etc.
This all assumes that the database end of these lookups actually cares to keep logs. Of course to dismiss this requires a tiny bit of faith in humanity.
replied to this on another message board. I'm going to repeat here what I said there, for the main reason that I referenced this place in the original...
***** Stuff and nonsense. The conclusion you have drawn is wrong; and the article is a typical example of the mainstream press cottoning on years too late and blowing something out of proportion.
WMP is doing nothing more than a CDDB lookup, which is then stored locally. THERE ARE COUNTLESS PROGRAMS WHICH DO THIS; any good audio program or CD ripper does the same.
WMP8 adds a DVD lookup to this, presumably for the purpose of adding a DVD entry to a playlist. I haven't heard of any program which does this before, but it's no more intrusive than the above CDDB lookup.
The information is never sent to Microsoft after it has been collected. The article somehow leaps to this conclusion from the statement that the data is stored locally.
The Washington Post is not the place to go for IT information. Nor are its conclusions to be immediately taken and used as propaganda. While MS are a not-nice company in general, this (10-year-late) online tabloid rant can hardly be taken as an example of their wrongdoings.
This is the kind of thing which tends to get the Linux rabble-rousers on Slashdot worked up, until someone points out the facts of the case. Oh well, false alarm. *****
Turns out I'm a prophet, it seems.
Do carry on; I so love long debates about non-events and factual inaccuracies here.
I wasn't talking about converting to Quicktime, but from it. Because the music industry continues to insist on providing any Enhanced content on CDs using the arcane and evil dual technologies of Flash and Quicktime, I frequently end up removing music vids from said enhanced CDs which are encoded using Sorenson and some esoteric audio compression, and yet still coming out at 80+MB.
In order to store these on my HD I convert them to Divx AVIs, which take up around eighteen MB with the best quality that can be obtained through conversion between lossy formats. Not only can I then put all my vids into one playlist, on one media player, but I can also easily use WMP's double-click fullscreen switch.
Not to mention the fact that AVi files are a doddle to edit, which means I can splice in a CD-ripped audio track to make up for the horrible fuzz that the Quicktime audio codec has made of the sound.
Of course I'll be pleased as punch if QT6 will make this unnecessary, but I'm not holding high hopes. Quicktime simply isn't that good at any of the stuff it can do, and eye candy makes no difference to me, because I don't look at the frame when i'm judging the painting.
When you're old enough to have a social security number, you might want to work for a living. This may require you to make some money out of things.
Apple makes its money out of selling Macs, not selling MacOS. Seeing as they make all the damn hardware, they don't owe you a damn thing as regards to other ways to use it - I don't see people bitching that the schematics to their microwave firmware aren't open-sourced.
They're kind enough to let you run Linux on it if you want, which is of course what you and your 1337 friends will have to do, assuming you can make enough at McDonalds to buy a Mac.
I have zero desire to see the source to my OS, as long as it works the way I want it to. I get no joy from compiling other people's programs. I will never be submitting patches to Linus Torwalds. This bothers me not one jot.
Alas, you believe that the world owes you a favour and an OS and if it does stump up then it 5uckz. I'm sure the world isn't too bothered.
Wow - I didn't realise AOL had branched into Linux. Or are you surfing slashdot on your Dreamcast?
I use Linux on a daily basis, but my start menu contains fifty or sixty reasons why I'll not be using it on the desktop for the foreseeable future. Aside from the fact that I hate the way that every non-MS browser renders webpages, which is just as important to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh. Copyright infringement is what's being referred to as 'theft' as far as the warez thing goes. Or did you completely forget the basis of the argument you were having?
- Chris
Nice one. If I can't pirate a game I'm quite happy to rip the security tag off, buy a magazine and stick the game box in the bag before I leave. That's because I recognise that stealing is stealing to a certain extent, and because I have few morals.
Make of that what you will, but I'm honest with myself about it. I've downloaded rips of an awful lot of shitty games and thanked my lucky stars I didn't buy them (thanks to the memories of paying £30+ for appalling NES games back in the day), and I've paid an awful lot of money for games which I consider to be worth my cash, too (Diablo 2 stolen: expansion bought; boxed set bought too, so I have two copies of the expansion - Blizzard deserved the cash).
Almost all the money I have earned, begged or saved since my adolescence has been spent on CDs. Overall the software and music industries are making a hell of a lot of money from me, which isn't an escuse but certainly makes me care less about the insignificant loss of a single CD sale - which may in fact turn out to be two bonus sales if my mates buy it on my recommendation.
But yeah, I still see it as stealing, because it is. I don't care. If they were distributing on a different policy, it wouldn't be stealing, and then I wouldn't be a bad person at all and they wouldn't hate my using their software so much. It's up to them to change, not me.
- Chris
If you had such high bandwidth bills, what the hell are you posting as an AC for, rather than posting with full links to your software and trying to shame a few people into registering?
And anyway, as stated in the post above, the whole point of shareware is to get rapid distribution and use, even at the risk of people using the software without paying for it as long as they recommend it to their friends and colleagues. Your bandwidth bills are sky-high because your payment model relies on free distribution. If you want to lower your bandwidth bills, don't sell shareware. If you want to recoup them, get a good rating on CNet and strike the right balance between fucntionality and registration-nagging in your product.
- Chris
It's such a pity that Adobe lost all that money to the Something Awful kids, who would all have legally paid full price for Photoshop if all these pirates hadn't shoved it down their throats. nonsense.
- Chris
Who cares? He's a big boy, no need to be politically correct about it.
- Chris
...catchphrases.
Moore's Law involves the doubling of the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS in an area (transistor density). If you have a single transistir acting as two, you're acting directly in contravention of Moore's Law. As soon as I had the gist of what was going on for this story i knew some idiot would say something about Moore's Law. Might as well have asked how powerful a Beowulf cluster of processors with these chips might be behind China's firewall while using Google to look for Natalie Portman's case mods.
- Chris
is a brilliant suggestion.
Hell, it's working for XP: XP compatibility mode is for things which don't want to run on NT, but sooner or later anyone programming Win32 apps is going to write from an XP-compatible point of view, and label it as a feature of their product.
- Chris
look at the actions of the firm he ran.
For the six seconds this is viewable before it gets tagged flamebait, I think out-of-work Californian IT folk still have it better than those that are getting the BillG cash.
Microsoft, the RIAA and whoever else might be a terrible problem for those on Slashdot but in the Real World they have done quite a bit to make people's lives better.
- Chris
I was under the impression he was well-paid to do this sort of thing.
Also, I tend to find that getting laid simply puts me more at ease with my geekiness, because, well, at least you know you're getting laid.
- Chris
It's quite rare to expect to have to pay to see an advertisement for something. High-res or not, it's an advert.
Not that it particularly matters to me, because Ep 2 was the worst yet, and the only thing I'm paying for as regards to the next one is my newsgroup access.
- Chris
I thought the piece was wonderfully satirical. And a damn sight better researched than the sixties fairy tales which have been recited in roughly a third of the replies so far...
- Chris
but isn't the entire, entire point of trolling to get a reaction like that?
Wow, this is my first post in at least three months! We really need more digital video compression and / or Sealand threads on here I think.
- Chris
Turns out that whenever I'm miles away from a phone line on someone else's PC they only have Acrobat 3 and the document requires 5. :)
Personally I find pdf documents an absolute nightmare to read, and searching, placeholding etc even more of an effort. And for such a great document standard, it sure takes a lot of processing power to do anything (scrolling, loading) quickly, not to mention the fact that its flexibility encourages people do do insane things like embed images in every page. Mmmm, forty page documents that come out at 80 megabytes. Tasty.
I agree with the sentiment that it's ludicrous to do away with a format designed to be portable and stardard, but just because it's portable doesn't mean I actually _like_ it.
- Chris
Not only that, but IE's 'looking at content' thing that you describe is actually rather handy for tricking pages that don't allow offsite linking (Geocities for instance) into letting you do so.
As for all the insecure ActiveX stuff, I'd rather have 99.9% of pages work / look exactly as they were designed to (including all the diabolical ActiveX stuff that could kill my PC were I so foolish as to follow random links from ICQ messages) than have some degree of childminding from a more secure browser that doesn't look like Joe Webmaster designed it to look.
(Having said that, it's decided today that it can't auto-detect page encoding. This browser window is using Chinese Traditional at the moment. Gah.)
- Chris
Actively downloading the banners is a bit daft, given that the usual gripe is that dial-up is slower with banners. A 'background process' (i.e. once all the html is in place and the user is browsing posts) is still hogging bandwidth the average power user could do without.
I don't really see what the fuss is about anyway. Slashdot is one of the very few sites where I actually DO click the ads, on accounts of them being of interest to me often. If ThinkGeek were able to export their more cushy merchandise more often I'm sure they'd make more.
- Chris
Slashdot is one of the extremely rare sites where I actually ever click on the banners. The power of (semi-) targeted ads, I suppose.
- Chris
Sega Master System: Superior to the Nintendo Entertainment Center... actually I'm not sure why it failed to seriously compete with Nintendo. I remember wanting one, but Nintendo was the way to go then.
Maybe in the US - in Europe the Master System competed on far more even terms.
I barely consider the SNES to be a Nintendo system - its marketing and licensing was completely sensible, which is very un-Nintendo. Had Nintendo acting the same way over letting people code SNES games as they have for every other Nintendo system, it would never have taken the Megadrive's market share. Kudos to Nintendo for that. Pity they went and forgot ot all for the N64, really.
- Chris
Actually, the Game Gear is a baclit Master System with an extended palette. Its TV Tuner addon was godlike, and the battery life was still superior to that of the Lynx, which was it only competition in the field for what, ten years?
I have the utmost respect for Sega's technical expertise.
Having said that, the 32X was a fantastic idea, but one released two years too late to have a chance, and suffered from its ludicrous price tag. People knew they weren't getting a new console and had no intention of paying for one.
- Chris
I've had this argument concerning Moodlogic's mp3-profiling software too. Some people seem to think that the idea that some company with a database is at the other end means that they are going to be hit by a ton of targeted spam.
There are several reasons why this shouldn't be a problem.
1. These look-up schemes have no actual way of getting info back to you. Sure, they can probably take your IP address, but unless one thinks that WMP is going to go snitching to find your email address somewhere in Windows, then the risk of having targeted email is minimal.
2. Taking the above into account, one supposes that the information can be used to build up a statistical analysis of what people are listening to. Get this - you've already bought the CD, so the record shop knows it's sold a copy. Or six copies this week. Or whatever. You're already a statistic.
3. The theory that this is being done to build up a 'profile' on users based on their lookups. This is absurd. Even though Windows Media Player 8 comes with a feature which allows remote sites to uniquely tag every instance of the WMP software (which, by the way, can be easily disabled in the options menus), there is no reason for a profile to be kept if it can't be linked to a solid persona, real name and address, other than to draw correlations between the different music on different people's profiles.
In the case of this big scary DVD tracking thing, it can be safely assumed that Hollywood executives are already aware that 60% of Titanic owners also own Pearl Harbour, etc.
This all assumes that the database end of these lookups actually cares to keep logs. Of course to dismiss this requires a tiny bit of faith in humanity.
- Chris
replied to this on another message board. I'm going to repeat here what I said there, for the main reason that I referenced this place in the original...
*****
Stuff and nonsense. The conclusion you have drawn is wrong; and the article is a typical example of the mainstream press cottoning on years too late and blowing something out of proportion.
WMP is doing nothing more than a CDDB lookup, which is then stored locally. THERE ARE COUNTLESS PROGRAMS WHICH DO THIS; any good audio program or CD ripper does the same.
WMP8 adds a DVD lookup to this, presumably for the purpose of adding a DVD entry to a playlist. I haven't heard of any program which does this before, but it's no more intrusive than the above CDDB lookup.
The information is never sent to Microsoft after it has been collected. The article somehow leaps to this conclusion from the statement that the data is stored locally.
The Washington Post is not the place to go for IT information. Nor are its conclusions to be immediately taken and used as propaganda. While MS are a not-nice company in general, this (10-year-late) online tabloid rant can hardly be taken as an example of their wrongdoings.
This is the kind of thing which tends to get the Linux rabble-rousers on Slashdot worked up, until someone points out the facts of the case. Oh well, false alarm.
*****
Turns out I'm a prophet, it seems.
Do carry on; I so love long debates about non-events and factual inaccuracies here.
- Chris
I wasn't talking about converting to Quicktime, but from it. Because the music industry continues to insist on providing any Enhanced content on CDs using the arcane and evil dual technologies of Flash and Quicktime, I frequently end up removing music vids from said enhanced CDs which are encoded using Sorenson and some esoteric audio compression, and yet still coming out at 80+MB.
In order to store these on my HD I convert them to Divx AVIs, which take up around eighteen MB with the best quality that can be obtained through conversion between lossy formats. Not only can I then put all my vids into one playlist, on one media player, but I can also easily use WMP's double-click fullscreen switch.
Not to mention the fact that AVi files are a doddle to edit, which means I can splice in a CD-ripped audio track to make up for the horrible fuzz that the Quicktime audio codec has made of the sound.
Of course I'll be pleased as punch if QT6 will make this unnecessary, but I'm not holding high hopes. Quicktime simply isn't that good at any of the stuff it can do, and eye candy makes no difference to me, because I don't look at the frame when i'm judging the painting.
- Chris
Insightful? Someone been handing out mod status to the script kidz again?
- Chris
When you're old enough to have a social security number, you might want to work for a living. This may require you to make some money out of things.
Apple makes its money out of selling Macs, not selling MacOS. Seeing as they make all the damn hardware, they don't owe you a damn thing as regards to other ways to use it - I don't see people bitching that the schematics to their microwave firmware aren't open-sourced.
They're kind enough to let you run Linux on it if you want, which is of course what you and your 1337 friends will have to do, assuming you can make enough at McDonalds to buy a Mac.
I have zero desire to see the source to my OS, as long as it works the way I want it to. I get no joy from compiling other people's programs. I will never be submitting patches to Linus Torwalds. This bothers me not one jot.
Alas, you believe that the world owes you a favour and an OS and if it does stump up then it 5uckz. I'm sure the world isn't too bothered.
- Chris
I get my water free, and it runs just fine.
I have many, many choices on my gas and electricity companies. I chose the cheapest, which has worked fine for me.
I have three choices for my phone provider, and five for my mobile phone. I can switch easily.
And the comment about OSes is a bit daft on an Apple thread. I don't see Apple shipping their powerbooks with a shortcut to boot into BeOS either.
- Chris
Wow - I didn't realise AOL had branched into Linux. Or are you surfing slashdot on your Dreamcast?
I use Linux on a daily basis, but my start menu contains fifty or sixty reasons why I'll not be using it on the desktop for the foreseeable future. Aside from the fact that I hate the way that every non-MS browser renders webpages, which is just as important to me.
- Chris