No fee for publishing, no fee for patches, but a 98% piracy rate on PC makes the $40k to validate a patch sound cheap. The cost might sound high, but at least the majority of the people who are playing console games actually buy the damn things instead of torrenting them. If I were a developer, I'd stick with the platform that isn't being crushed by piracy (hint: the PC ain't it).
The facts may have been on his side, but there's one thing that Sony has that he doesn't -- an endless pool of money and lawyers to make his life hell. Sure, the community thinks they're doing a good job by sending him a buck here or there for his legal defense fund, but it costs more than a couch full of pocket change to pay for a reasonable defense. Unless you suggest that he take a serious (and likely) risk of committing himself to a lifetime of poverty due to a crushing multi-million dollar loss in court (which by that point I doubt anyone in the 'community' would actually stand by him anymore, lest of all give him money), taking the settlement was the smart thing to do. Relatively speaking, those restrictions aren't even that severe; had he let this go to court, he'd be lucky if he could afford a Sony product to hack ever again.
It's easy to play Internet Tough Guy when you're not staring down the barrel of a court summons - I guarantee that all of you would have 'caved' the same way. I know I would have.
The "Windows Compatibility List" is pretty much every piece of hardware everywhere. Vendors would be absolutely stupid to *not* include a Windows driver, since Windows users are something like 85 percent of the market. I guarantee that a Windows user will never have the problem of buying a piece of hardware and finding that there aren't any Windows drivers for it.
Besides, the N900 has an uphill battle ahead of it. It's running an OS that's completely different from any other smartphone out there, and even if American carriers chose to offer it subsidized, I doubt most normal phone buyers here would consider it. Nor am I convinced that MeeGo has a future. With iOS and Android already established players, and Microsoft coming in with Windows 7 Mobile, there's no reason for a non-Nokia phone to consider MeeGo as an alternative. Plus, the name really sucks -- it sounds like a retard talking about his day at school -- "Mee go bathroom all by myself. Yay!". Ugh.
It's not like there's much choice. I guess I could start my own wireless company, but that would be a bit expensive...
Locked down devices suck, but I don't 'deserve' anything coming to me because I choose to use one. Given the choice between a locked down device and none at all, I'll keep living in the 21st century and take the former every time. At least with Android devices, you can usually root them and get some of that functionality back. Not anywhere near perfect, but it's better than nothing.
The effect is subtle on most of those examples, but the last two show a lot of improvement. The second-to-last example is especially good -- some of the glyphs ('A','s','n','a') look thicker and more ragged in the non-bytecode form, but all of them show it to some degree.
These improvements may be subtle, but will make a big difference when reading larger blocks of text, and even more so when the text is printed. Of course, this assumes that the font maker has actually taken the time to embed the additional information. This generally isn't the case for the non-professional fonts that people download from 'free' font sites.
Other than the 16-bit apps, which 64-bit Windows 7 *finally* removed support for, I've had few issues with older programs. I even loaded Might and Magic VI (written in ~1997) and it loaded up and ran without problems -- I didn't even need to use XP compatibility mode.
Microsoft may get a lot of criticism here (much of it rightly deserved), but backwards compatibility is something they've almost always managed to get right. For the last few years I wondered how much pain we'd run into when the 'average' desktop PC finally hit the 4GB RAM barrier and had to move to a 64-bit OS, but Microsoft has managed to make it mostly painless. Of course, backwards compatibility brings bloat, but since many 64-bit users are already over the 4GB barrier, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.
Exactly. If I'm laying on the couch and I want to surf the web, I don't want to have to awkwardly hold a netbook and fight with a tiny trackpad or awkwardly type into it using a keyboard that's too small to use comfortably. On top of that, I have to deal with the performance issues from trying to run Windows on a low end Atom processor, and I still need to be close to a power outlet since the battery life of the average netbook isn't much better than a normal laptop.
I don't own an iPad and I'm not planning to buy one, but I do own a netbook, and it sits around gathering dust -- if I need to use a serious computer, I bring my laptop with me, and if I want to browse the web on my couch, I use my phone. As much as Apple haters like to deny it, there *is* a market for tablets with 'watered down' interfaces like the iPad (or presumably any of the Android tablets that will eventually hit the market).
And if you want to embed a font from one of the major foundries into a piece of software (a video game, for example), you're starting to talk real money. I wanted to use a particular font from one of the major foundries in a project of mine. You can purchase the font for fairly cheap, but the license only allows the use of the font by one person, and limits what kinds of output can be done with it. I requested a quote for embedding a bitmap of the font into my project, and the lowest price they quoted was $2700 - and that was to embed one font, in one font face, at one font size, in a bitmap format only. Embedding the actual font would cost over $20k, plus additional royalties that would need to be negotiated based on the budget of the game and number of copies sold. And all this for a game I intended to release for free.
I don't even think the Open Source community has to step up to this -- if somebody would put together a foundry that makes reasonable fonts, and allows them to be licensed for use in Open Source or low price commercial software products for a fair price (less than $100 would be great), I'd be more than happy to give them my business.
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No fee for publishing, no fee for patches, but a 98% piracy rate on PC makes the $40k to validate a patch sound cheap. The cost might sound high, but at least the majority of the people who are playing console games actually buy the damn things instead of torrenting them. If I were a developer, I'd stick with the platform that isn't being crushed by piracy (hint: the PC ain't it).
The facts may have been on his side, but there's one thing that Sony has that he doesn't -- an endless pool of money and lawyers to make his life hell. Sure, the community thinks they're doing a good job by sending him a buck here or there for his legal defense fund, but it costs more than a couch full of pocket change to pay for a reasonable defense. Unless you suggest that he take a serious (and likely) risk of committing himself to a lifetime of poverty due to a crushing multi-million dollar loss in court (which by that point I doubt anyone in the 'community' would actually stand by him anymore, lest of all give him money), taking the settlement was the smart thing to do. Relatively speaking, those restrictions aren't even that severe; had he let this go to court, he'd be lucky if he could afford a Sony product to hack ever again.
It's easy to play Internet Tough Guy when you're not staring down the barrel of a court summons - I guarantee that all of you would have 'caved' the same way. I know I would have.
Sorry, I only accept beenz. What's the current exchange rate?
The "Windows Compatibility List" is pretty much every piece of hardware everywhere. Vendors would be absolutely stupid to *not* include a Windows driver, since Windows users are something like 85 percent of the market. I guarantee that a Windows user will never have the problem of buying a piece of hardware and finding that there aren't any Windows drivers for it.
Great, I can just see the Facebook updates now:
"My grandma just had a heart attack and fell in the bathroom in GeriatricVille. Can you help me out?"
Maybe European carriers, but not American ones.
Besides, the N900 has an uphill battle ahead of it. It's running an OS that's completely different from any other smartphone out there, and even if American carriers chose to offer it subsidized, I doubt most normal phone buyers here would consider it. Nor am I convinced that MeeGo has a future. With iOS and Android already established players, and Microsoft coming in with Windows 7 Mobile, there's no reason for a non-Nokia phone to consider MeeGo as an alternative. Plus, the name really sucks -- it sounds like a retard talking about his day at school -- "Mee go bathroom all by myself. Yay!". Ugh.
It's not like there's much choice. I guess I could start my own wireless company, but that would be a bit expensive...
Locked down devices suck, but I don't 'deserve' anything coming to me because I choose to use one. Given the choice between a locked down device and none at all, I'll keep living in the 21st century and take the former every time. At least with Android devices, you can usually root them and get some of that functionality back. Not anywhere near perfect, but it's better than nothing.
The effect is subtle on most of those examples, but the last two show a lot of improvement. The second-to-last example is especially good -- some of the glyphs ('A','s','n','a') look thicker and more ragged in the non-bytecode form, but all of them show it to some degree.
These improvements may be subtle, but will make a big difference when reading larger blocks of text, and even more so when the text is printed. Of course, this assumes that the font maker has actually taken the time to embed the additional information. This generally isn't the case for the non-professional fonts that people download from 'free' font sites.
Other than the 16-bit apps, which 64-bit Windows 7 *finally* removed support for, I've had few issues with older programs. I even loaded Might and Magic VI (written in ~1997) and it loaded up and ran without problems -- I didn't even need to use XP compatibility mode.
Microsoft may get a lot of criticism here (much of it rightly deserved), but backwards compatibility is something they've almost always managed to get right. For the last few years I wondered how much pain we'd run into when the 'average' desktop PC finally hit the 4GB RAM barrier and had to move to a 64-bit OS, but Microsoft has managed to make it mostly painless. Of course, backwards compatibility brings bloat, but since many 64-bit users are already over the 4GB barrier, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.
Exactly. If I'm laying on the couch and I want to surf the web, I don't want to have to awkwardly hold a netbook and fight with a tiny trackpad or awkwardly type into it using a keyboard that's too small to use comfortably. On top of that, I have to deal with the performance issues from trying to run Windows on a low end Atom processor, and I still need to be close to a power outlet since the battery life of the average netbook isn't much better than a normal laptop.
I don't own an iPad and I'm not planning to buy one, but I do own a netbook, and it sits around gathering dust -- if I need to use a serious computer, I bring my laptop with me, and if I want to browse the web on my couch, I use my phone. As much as Apple haters like to deny it, there *is* a market for tablets with 'watered down' interfaces like the iPad (or presumably any of the Android tablets that will eventually hit the market).
And if you want to embed a font from one of the major foundries into a piece of software (a video game, for example), you're starting to talk real money. I wanted to use a particular font from one of the major foundries in a project of mine. You can purchase the font for fairly cheap, but the license only allows the use of the font by one person, and limits what kinds of output can be done with it. I requested a quote for embedding a bitmap of the font into my project, and the lowest price they quoted was $2700 - and that was to embed one font, in one font face, at one font size, in a bitmap format only. Embedding the actual font would cost over $20k, plus additional royalties that would need to be negotiated based on the budget of the game and number of copies sold. And all this for a game I intended to release for free.
I don't even think the Open Source community has to step up to this -- if somebody would put together a foundry that makes reasonable fonts, and allows them to be licensed for use in Open Source or low price commercial software products for a fair price (less than $100 would be great), I'd be more than happy to give them my business.
Actually, the Moonies own the Washington Times -- still pretty big, but not nearly as big as the Post.