Add me to the list of folks that have avoided a HL2 buy solely because of Steam. Any game that requires me to log into a central server and register before even allowing me to play single-player won't get my money. Valve has the freedom to do whatever they want, so I'm not going to complain about it, but I sure as hell am not going to reward them financially for it. It's just a game, and my life will go on just fine without it.
Just out of curiosity, how many of us that are refusing to buy have let Valve know our feelings about this? I haven't yet, but I am considering sending them an e-mail addressing the issue.
Reality does not always argue against my point. Reality is that hundreds of people exclusively pirate all of their music, and all of their movies. For them watching movies on their monitor is more than good enough, for them a 128kbps MP3 is more than good enough.
And the reality there is that the majority of those people that are getting *all* of their media via questionable means are probably die-hard cheapskates that wouldn't have bought the legitimate product anyway. So, where again are the content producers losing these vast quantities of money? They've certainly not presented any credible data indicating they've lost money through illicit copying.
Don't get me started on registration either. Registration is used almost exclusively to procure marketing data, and as such my personal information has value. Requiring me to give up something of value after the point of purchase just to use the product is at best unethical - it's a hidden cost just as surely as if there was a window that popped up after installation saying the software wouldn't work unless I PayPal'd $5.00 to the vendor. This is why I refuse to patronize supermarkets with "loyalty card" programs - they're not rewarding customer loyalty, they're penalizing those who refuse to contribute valuable marketing data for a few pennies off at the register. Fuck that.
We have a similar thing here in the United States called "implied warranty of merchantability", which guarantees that the product will perform substantially the function you bought it for. IIRC, most states don't allow the seller to abrogate this warranty, regardless of what the EULA might say, so it's a shame that more people aren't holding software manufacturers' feet to the fire over this kind of thing. I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice, but I'd bet that if Valve had to deal with a load of small-claims actions over this, they'd start putting some effort into a better distribution/authentication method.
For my part, I'm not buying HL2, nor have I pirated it. I'll simply do my part by not supporting this kind of idiocy with my money.
I'd be interested to see how a gaming class action would work... but it might take more than this to make one practical.
I don't see class actions as often being practical - the only people that see any real compensation are the lawyers. When I had the classic "dirty disc" problem with my Thomson-equipped Xbox, I had a lawyer that was willing to add my name to his class-action against Microsoft, but after a lot of effort I was able to get MS to replace my DVD drive at no cost, which is a damn sight more than I would have seen as a result of a class-action.
If the people that have been shafted by Valve are pissed off to the point of taking legal action, they really should do it individually if they want to see anything of consequence come from it.
Tell me about it. Last week I spent three hours in the median at mile marker 112 on I-95 in North Carolina, in large part because it took forever to get hold of AAA without having the call dropped at some point.
There's a lot of talk about 911 not working with VoIP - what about 911 and simple cellular, for crying out loud?
Boy, you got that right. As I see it, AT&T has cost themselves around $600 or so over the last couple of years after they shut down the CDPD service in Central Florida. I understand they want to recycle the analog bandwidth, but they don't seem to understand that I will pay $30/month for unlimited usage 24/7 at 9600 bps, but will not pay the ridiculous metered rates they're charging for GPRS even though it's light-years faster. 9600 bps was fine for e-mail, Usenet, limited web browsing sans graphics, remote telnet/SSH access, etc. A side benefit was the static IP address I got with it, so I could do cool stuff like log travel routes/speeds and such in great detail without having to have a laptop in the car.
and even if you find one that it won't work with directly, iDVD 05 can now create a disk image which you can then burn using whatever software you want
You could do that with iDVD4 as well - until I get 5, I have to export, then burn the image with Toast with my LaCie.
The A380-900 stretch version that will be out in a few years is probably what they're referring to, but that will only fly about 700 passengers, and won't have the range the smaller version does.
Isn't being required to attend court for something you published as a member of the press interference by the government in the freedom of the press?
No, not in the least. If I write an article containing all kinds of rumors and untruths about you, is it not reasonable to expect that you may bring legal action against me, through the aforementioned courts? Apple is suing Nick, not the government. This is a civil action, not a criminal action.
And the idea that a journalist can be ordered to reveal his source of information is against the first ammendment.
Is it now? Where specifically in the First Amendment does it mention anything about journalists protecting sources? The First Amendment proscribes government interference with the freedom of the press - it does not give the press a magic pass to avoid any and all consequences of something they may report. According to your reasoning, if I publish your entire credit and medical history online, I should be able to do so without any fear of repercussions, and furthermore it would be your fault for not protecting your information better. Give me a break.
Um, it's not like Apple is going around telling random employees these trade secrets. I'm quite sure that the Mac Mini motherboard designers knew quite a bit about the product even without Apple explicitly telling them anything about it.
Franklin openly admitted in court they were using lots and lots of copied Apple II code because it wasn't technically feasible to clean-room their own version of Applesoft and other integral parts of the system, and they argued that Apple's code wasn't subject to copyright protection anyway. Franklin didn't have the resources to do things the way Phoenix did with the PC ROM, and create a functionally identical yet original version from the ground up, so it's really not fair comparing Franklin with the early PC clones.
Apple was totally within their rights to sue Franklin, as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals determined.
Already happened, back in March of 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Southern Hemisphere. Sure, it was 100K light years away, but it's still pretty substantial.
About the article: typical bullshit anti-government FUD. Like someone really needs those images. If you really need them, you can afford to pay for them from commercial providers.
Hate to break it to you, but terrorist organizations do tend to be fairly well-funded. I guess it makes some kind of perverse sense that the local al-Qaida cell would be able get the info without too much effort, but Q. Joe Public couldn't.
I agree that's the ultimate solution, but in the meantime, PAYG ensures that their irresponsibility doesn't affect others, and comes with built-in consequences - if you overrun your paid time, you don't get to use the phone again until you pay for more time.
Good intentions are certainly a good thing, but as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with them.
This kid might have good intentions, but he seems to be sadly lacking in the "good judgement" department, and a doctor needs good judgement a hell of a lot more than good intentions, IMHO.
The links seem to indicate that Apple is in fact returning changes back to the KDE folks, just not in the format they want. Many of the posts also allude to there not being sufficient resources in the KHTML group to keep up with Apple's changes. Well, that's really not Apple's fault - it looks like Apple is in fact upholding their end of the bargain. If this isn't a correct interpretation, could someone please clarify?
Saying he's sorry and won't do it again doesn't mitigate the damage Apple has suffered at the hands of this well-meaning idiot. If he's of legal age to engage in a contract, then he's also old enough to read what he's agreeing to, and ignorance is no defense.
Apple was *not* passing out the software "for free" - the seed key he used to obtain the build was not part of his free ADC membership, and was sent to him by another idiot that chose not to honor *his* NDA. He had no legal right to the build to begin with - the ADC memberships that get you pre-release versions of stuff cost a fair bit of money, and he's gone on record as saying that he was trying to find a way to get his hands on Tiger without actually having to pay for it. Once having gotten that, he proceeded to give it to some friends. For him to say that "I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that" paints him either as disingenuous, or someone that just doesn't have a clue. Neither is a particularly good quality to see in someone that wants to be a doctor.
They're not getting into a commodity market, though - the difference here is that we're talking about a low-end Mac. Apple's not trying to make the same low-end Windows-compatible PC that everyone and their dog is. Apple will be the *only* game in town for their machine, and I'm sure that a lot of people have really wanted to own a Mac, but have been put off by the high prices - this will get a lot of those dollars into Apple's pocket instead of Dell's. Getting some low-cost machines out there will also gain them more market share, which will make developers more apt to write for OS X, and will likely result in better sales for the high-end Macs too. With Apple manufacturing the machines, they'll be less vulnerable to a lot of the driver issues and such that plague Windows boxes - I suspect this is the reason Apple has chosen to make their own boxes rather than simply porting OS X to the Intel architecture.
I disagree with the comment about Commodore - I believe Commodore's failure is almost completely due to them being incompetent WRT marketing the Amiga, and the subsequent failure to maintain the Amiga's technical superiority as time went on.
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Add me to the list of folks that have avoided a HL2 buy solely because of Steam. Any game that requires me to log into a central server and register before even allowing me to play single-player won't get my money. Valve has the freedom to do whatever they want, so I'm not going to complain about it, but I sure as hell am not going to reward them financially for it. It's just a game, and my life will go on just fine without it.
Just out of curiosity, how many of us that are refusing to buy have let Valve know our feelings about this? I haven't yet, but I am considering sending them an e-mail addressing the issue.
Reality does not always argue against my point. Reality is that hundreds of people exclusively pirate all of their music, and all of their movies. For them watching movies on their monitor is more than good enough, for them a 128kbps MP3 is more than good enough.
And the reality there is that the majority of those people that are getting *all* of their media via questionable means are probably die-hard cheapskates that wouldn't have bought the legitimate product anyway. So, where again are the content producers losing these vast quantities of money? They've certainly not presented any credible data indicating they've lost money through illicit copying.
Don't get me started on registration either. Registration is used almost exclusively to procure marketing data, and as such my personal information has value. Requiring me to give up something of value after the point of purchase just to use the product is at best unethical - it's a hidden cost just as surely as if there was a window that popped up after installation saying the software wouldn't work unless I PayPal'd $5.00 to the vendor. This is why I refuse to patronize supermarkets with "loyalty card" programs - they're not rewarding customer loyalty, they're penalizing those who refuse to contribute valuable marketing data for a few pennies off at the register. Fuck that.
We have a similar thing here in the United States called "implied warranty of merchantability", which guarantees that the product will perform substantially the function you bought it for. IIRC, most states don't allow the seller to abrogate this warranty, regardless of what the EULA might say, so it's a shame that more people aren't holding software manufacturers' feet to the fire over this kind of thing. I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice, but I'd bet that if Valve had to deal with a load of small-claims actions over this, they'd start putting some effort into a better distribution/authentication method.
For my part, I'm not buying HL2, nor have I pirated it. I'll simply do my part by not supporting this kind of idiocy with my money.
I'd be interested to see how a gaming class action would work ... but it might take more than this to make one practical.
I don't see class actions as often being practical - the only people that see any real compensation are the lawyers. When I had the classic "dirty disc" problem with my Thomson-equipped Xbox, I had a lawyer that was willing to add my name to his class-action against Microsoft, but after a lot of effort I was able to get MS to replace my DVD drive at no cost, which is a damn sight more than I would have seen as a result of a class-action.
If the people that have been shafted by Valve are pissed off to the point of taking legal action, they really should do it individually if they want to see anything of consequence come from it.
Cool - I haven't read that in a long time, although I have that little gold book around here somewhere. :-) Thanks for the post!
The original crawl did change once, when "Episode IV - A New Hope" was added at the beginning around the time that "Empire" was released.
Tell me about it. Last week I spent three hours in the median at mile marker 112 on I-95 in North Carolina, in large part because it took forever to get hold of AAA without having the call dropped at some point.
There's a lot of talk about 911 not working with VoIP - what about 911 and simple cellular, for crying out loud?
Boy, you got that right. As I see it, AT&T has cost themselves around $600 or so over the last couple of years after they shut down the CDPD service in Central Florida. I understand they want to recycle the analog bandwidth, but they don't seem to understand that I will pay $30/month for unlimited usage 24/7 at 9600 bps, but will not pay the ridiculous metered rates they're charging for GPRS even though it's light-years faster. 9600 bps was fine for e-mail, Usenet, limited web browsing sans graphics, remote telnet/SSH access, etc. A side benefit was the static IP address I got with it, so I could do cool stuff like log travel routes/speeds and such in great detail without having to have a laptop in the car.
And you obviously don't know what a Delta 1010 is.
Plus, the best quality will come from a FireWire breakout box anyway
:-)
I'll put my Delta 1010 up against any FireWire solution...
and even if you find one that it won't work with directly, iDVD 05 can now create a disk image which you can then burn using whatever software you want
You could do that with iDVD4 as well - until I get 5, I have to export, then burn the image with Toast with my LaCie.
The A380-900 stretch version that will be out in a few years is probably what they're referring to, but that will only fly about 700 passengers, and won't have the range the smaller version does.
Isn't being required to attend court for something you published as a member of the press interference by the government in the freedom of the press?
No, not in the least. If I write an article containing all kinds of rumors and untruths about you, is it not reasonable to expect that you may bring legal action against me, through the aforementioned courts? Apple is suing Nick, not the government. This is a civil action, not a criminal action.
Spoken like a true AC....
And the idea that a journalist can be ordered to reveal his source of information is against the first ammendment.
Is it now? Where specifically in the First Amendment does it mention anything about journalists protecting sources? The First Amendment proscribes government interference with the freedom of the press - it does not give the press a magic pass to avoid any and all consequences of something they may report. According to your reasoning, if I publish your entire credit and medical history online, I should be able to do so without any fear of repercussions, and furthermore it would be your fault for not protecting your information better. Give me a break.
Um, it's not like Apple is going around telling random employees these trade secrets. I'm quite sure that the Mac Mini motherboard designers knew quite a bit about the product even without Apple explicitly telling them anything about it.
Franklin openly admitted in court they were using lots and lots of copied Apple II code because it wasn't technically feasible to clean-room their own version of Applesoft and other integral parts of the system, and they argued that Apple's code wasn't subject to copyright protection anyway. Franklin didn't have the resources to do things the way Phoenix did with the PC ROM, and create a functionally identical yet original version from the ground up, so it's really not fair comparing Franklin with the early PC clones.
Apple was totally within their rights to sue Franklin, as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals determined.
Already happened, back in March of 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Southern Hemisphere. Sure, it was 100K light years away, but it's still pretty substantial.
About the article: typical bullshit anti-government FUD. Like someone really needs those images. If you really need them, you can afford to pay for them from commercial providers.
Hate to break it to you, but terrorist organizations do tend to be fairly well-funded. I guess it makes some kind of perverse sense that the local al-Qaida cell would be able get the info without too much effort, but Q. Joe Public couldn't.
No, they can be made discretely too - you don't have to send all of your messages at once. :-)
I agree that's the ultimate solution, but in the meantime, PAYG ensures that their irresponsibility doesn't affect others, and comes with built-in consequences - if you overrun your paid time, you don't get to use the phone again until you pay for more time.
Good intentions are certainly a good thing, but as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with them.
This kid might have good intentions, but he seems to be sadly lacking in the "good judgement" department, and a doctor needs good judgement a hell of a lot more than good intentions, IMHO.
The links seem to indicate that Apple is in fact returning changes back to the KDE folks, just not in the format they want. Many of the posts also allude to there not being sufficient resources in the KHTML group to keep up with Apple's changes. Well, that's really not Apple's fault - it looks like Apple is in fact upholding their end of the bargain. If this isn't a correct interpretation, could someone please clarify?
Saying he's sorry and won't do it again doesn't mitigate the damage Apple has suffered at the hands of this well-meaning idiot. If he's of legal age to engage in a contract, then he's also old enough to read what he's agreeing to, and ignorance is no defense.
Apple was *not* passing out the software "for free" - the seed key he used to obtain the build was not part of his free ADC membership, and was sent to him by another idiot that chose not to honor *his* NDA. He had no legal right to the build to begin with - the ADC memberships that get you pre-release versions of stuff cost a fair bit of money, and he's gone on record as saying that he was trying to find a way to get his hands on Tiger without actually having to pay for it. Once having gotten that, he proceeded to give it to some friends. For him to say that "I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that" paints him either as disingenuous, or someone that just doesn't have a clue. Neither is a particularly good quality to see in someone that wants to be a doctor.
They're not getting into a commodity market, though - the difference here is that we're talking about a low-end Mac. Apple's not trying to make the same low-end Windows-compatible PC that everyone and their dog is. Apple will be the *only* game in town for their machine, and I'm sure that a lot of people have really wanted to own a Mac, but have been put off by the high prices - this will get a lot of those dollars into Apple's pocket instead of Dell's. Getting some low-cost machines out there will also gain them more market share, which will make developers more apt to write for OS X, and will likely result in better sales for the high-end Macs too. With Apple manufacturing the machines, they'll be less vulnerable to a lot of the driver issues and such that plague Windows boxes - I suspect this is the reason Apple has chosen to make their own boxes rather than simply porting OS X to the Intel architecture.
I disagree with the comment about Commodore - I believe Commodore's failure is almost completely due to them being incompetent WRT marketing the Amiga, and the subsequent failure to maintain the Amiga's technical superiority as time went on.
In a big living room I doubt it takes sound more than 1 ms to travel across the room
Sound travels about a foot per ms (1100 f/s or thereabouts), so for a good size room you're looking at a pretty substantial delay (20-40 ms).